Tom Wolfe’s Novel and Its Reception as a Significant Historical Event

Tom Wolfe’s novel is a historical event. This statement requires explanation. A historical event is not necessarily an important event, meaning something with an ascertainably lasting impact. There are historical events that are significant rather than important (like a small crack on a large smooth surface). Tom Wolfe’s novel may not be important; but it is — more precisely: its writing, publication, and reception are — significant. My purpose in this article is to draw attention to those significances on four levels: the author’s style of writing, his errors, his ideology, and, finally, his book’s reception.

The Bonfire of the Vanities is 659 big pages long. Its plot describes the pride, followed by the fall, of a young Old-American-Rich stockbroker, undone by vicious and dishonest practices of crim­inal law and publicity in New York in the 1980s.

We cannot but be sympathetic to the protagonist, who does not deserve the consequences of his comeuppance. These consequences are, in part, the accidental confections of a despicable English jour­nalist (in the middle of the story), and, from the beginning to the end, the result of the demagoguery of blacks and manipulation by Jews, who, in Wolfe’s view, run most of New York in the 1980s.

Tom Wolfe is a conservative nationalist and a stylistic modernist. There is nothing wrong or even inconsistent in being a conservative nationalist and an innovator, not even in being an innovator of style. There are ample causes in this increasingly ab­surd world of ours for anti-progressive black humor. Think of Pound or Céline. But a closer examina­tion of Wolfe’s style will reveal an inconsistency — or, rather, the superficial quality of its seemingly radical modernity. Wolfe’s device is that of the staccato sentence (staccato = broken), in this book punctuated by 2,343 exclamation points. Céline wrote in much the same style; but while he could sustain it, Wolfe cannot. This is evident the fact that in the most serious pages of Wolfe’s “New” novel his “New Style” is entirely absent. There the author is still very voluble, but the staccato rhythm of his frantic-frenetic prose slows down. Exclama­tion points disappear. Of course every writer is free to change his style in mid-stream. But here one senses that not only the vitality but the very essence of Wolfe’s imagination is wanting. The evidence of this is how in these more thoughtful portions of his book he falls back on repetition. “A sad, sad tor­por set in.” Five lines later: “It was all so sad and heavy, heavy, heavy.” This kind of repetition would be, I think, red-penciled in any decent Freshman English Composition class.

Wolfe seems to need the staccato to cloak the feeble vitality of his imagination. The staccato, with its cascade of ! points, suggests vitality and energy: it is a stylistic device, geared to the frag­mented attention span of the modern reader, whose eyes are used to the rapid flickering of im­ages on screens, and also to the purpose of repre­senting the quick, frantic, and fear-ridden reactions of modern people. We may or may not like a styl­istic device, but if it is a representation of reality we must accept it as such. In Wolfe’s writing, how­ever, the stylistic device is specious, because it does not represent something telling and particular. It is applied randomly and interchangeably throughout Wolfe’s prose.

Repetition, too, may be a stylistic device for emphasis. Yet the undue repetition of a word or phrase or a figure of speech indicates not only the poverty of a writer’s vocabulary but also of his im­agination. Wolfe describes the first fornication of his two protagonists: “King Priapus…now rose from the dead”; but this particular reference to this particular monarch recurs a few lines later, and again and again. Maria Ruskin has “loamy loins,” and “loamy loins” return again and again and again. Again and again, too, Tom Wolfe, the self-proclaimed Anti-Trend Crusader, slips into trendy prose. He seems to like, for instance, the current but fairly senseless computer language word “mode”: “The club facilities…were main­tained, devoutly, in the Brahmin Ascetic or Board­ing School scrubbed mode….”

Wolfe’s few negative critics have noted his ob­sessive habit of describing (and constantly returning to) the labels and prices of the suits and shoes of his characters. They attribute a kind of unneces­sary superficiality to that Wolfe habit of writing. That habit is not only superficial, but absurd. Su­perficiality is not necessarily unreal, while absurd­ity is. Example: the protagonist’s rage at a young Argentinian stockbroker in his office escalates be­cause the Argie’s trousers are held up by red moiré braces. Whereas Rawlie Thorpe, one of Wolfe’s really good guys, “was a great wearer of button-down shirts and Shep Miller suspenders.” (What, pray tell, is a “great wearer”?)

In addition to clothes and shoes, one must de­scribe other things about one’s protagonist, includ­ing his physiognomy. There is, oddly, not much about that in the nearly 700 pages, despite Wolfe’s obsession with physicality and its appearances. But there is one item, one phrase about Sherman Mc­Coy, that recurs again and again, perhaps more than 50 times throughout the book. This is McCoy’s chin. It is a strong chin (the obverse of that of Jews whose “wavy red beard…hide a receding chin” — page 232). It is an “aristocratic chin.” Wolfe em­ploys that imprecise and silly phrase again and again. McCoy’s father has an “aristocratic chin”; his son has a “budding aristocratic chin.” But what is the main mark of that chin, according to Wolfe? It is the “Yale chin.” That tag recurs over and over again, at least 30 times throughout the book. There is something wrong here. A person’s bone structure may be the result of a particular heredity (“the party was given by someone of good blood and good bone” — page 331). But surely (unless that chin is the outcome of plastic surgery performed in the Yale University hospitabpthere is no such thing as a Yale chin. There may be such a thing as a Yale windbreaker or an Oxford accent or a Harvard book-bag or a Cambridge gait, but a Yale chin? There are further investments of this meaning (e.g., “his Yale Chin charm”). Elsewhere McCoy speaks “from the eminence of his chin.” On yet another occasion, McCoy “lifted his Yale chin against the tide.” Even a garage attendant is invested with Wolfe’s mental mania (allow me this double enten­dre, “mentum” in Latin meaning “chin”): “You think I am your inferior, you Wall Street Wasp with the Yale chin, but I will show you.” Oddly, Wolfe is here attempting to describe what a parking attendant thinks; yet the terms of thought are Wolfe’s. (It is as if a chitty girl writing for Vogue were to describe a bag lady’s thoughts: “You think I am your inferior, you woman in the Chanel suit and the Hermes scarf, but I will show you.”) Wolfe does this sort of thing more than once.

Many years ago, in the beginning of his public career, Tom Wolfe declared that he was a new kind of journalist. Later, in 1973, he wrote that he had “grand ideas” about the New Journalism, that it would lead to a new kind of precise reportage that would replace the novel, that the techniques of the New Journalism would bring the writer “closer to the absolute involvement of the reader that Henry James and James Joyce dreamed of and never achieved.” I think Wolfe was quite wrong about the dreams of James and Joyce, but that is not the point. The point is that Wolfe has repeatedly de­clared that the novel is either dying or dead, and that the task of a good and thoughtful writer now is to observe and record people and scenes with a new kind of journalistic precision, instead of in­venting characters and plots. Well, this has been what such very different writers in New York as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote have tried to do (let me add, not very successfully). The writer as walking sociologist, as cultural anthropologist, as amateur psychologist — that is hardly different from what Balzac or Trollope or James did. There remains, however, one crucial desideratum. The writer must know what (and whom) he is writing about. Some time ago Wolfe announced that, yes, he was going to write a novel, the New York novel of our times. In one way — contrary to his earlier view against the need of inventing plots — he succeeded, because his plot is interesting; we are rooting for his hero till the end, which is why the book is a “good read” (an unattractive term, but let that go). But for a book, with its aim (or, rather, pretension) of giving us a social panorama, the plot alone will not suffice. Now, Wolfe suggests that he is a precise and detailed observer of certain people — of their behavior and speech and minds. But his detailed description of his protagonist is not only wanting because it is shallow (the chin syndrome; the repe­titions of “aristocratic,” etc.). It is especially want­ing because of Wolfe’s many errors in those very details about which, as he (and his critics) tells us, he is so accurate and knowledgeable.

The Bonfire of the Vanities pullulates with errors of fact — of facts upon which Wolfe’s entire “panoramic knowledge” is supposed to rest. Here are some examples: Wolfe describes the palatial apartment houses on upper Park Avenue, where there are “German-Jewish financiers who have fi­nally made it into the same buildings.” “Finally” is all wrong; the New York German-Jewish upper class began to move into those Park Avenue buildings 50 or 60 years ago. (It was the rising descendants of Russian Jews who followed some of them a genera­tion later.) On page 332 (in that “good bone and good blood” paragraph) Wolfe equates Park Ave­nue in New York with Beacon Hill in Boston and Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. But very few, if any, Philadelphia patricians have ever lived in an apartment house on Rittenhouse Square; and the fine townhouses in Rittenhouse Square were al­most gone more than a quarter-century ago, the last proprietor of the last of them having died in 1986.

A Wasp lawyer says to McCoy: “The criminal lawyers aren’t exactly the bout en train.” That made me sit up and wonder, and I went to my large French dictionary which lists more than 20 usages of bout, but among them bout en train is not. Wolfe has a man saying that 1934 was “the greatest year there ever was for Armagnac”; but Armagnacs, like cognacs, are rated by their respective ages, not by their vintages. (The man also says he paid $1,200 for the bottle: but a 50-year-old Ar­magnac can be bought for $120 in France, and at most for $180 in New York.) Wolfe makes refer­ence to “an eighty-thousand dollar Duncan Phyfe piano”; there is no such thing. The McCoy’s sump­tuous apartment in New York: “It was the sort of [Wasp] apartment the mere thought of which ig­nited flames of greed and covetousness under peo­ple all over New York and, for that matter, all over the world.” This is farfetched. Wolfe’s notion that the men and women of the Wasp upper class in New York don’t vote in local elections because then they cannot vote Republican is wrong, too. Sometimes he even can’t get the spelling right: U-class Wasp mothers and their children say “Mum­my,” not “Mommy.”

Yes, this is nitpicking: and in a discussion of some other book by some other author such stickling would be unnecessary, and perhaps unwarrant­ed. But in Wolfe’s case we must keep in mind how, according to him and to just about every one of his reviewers, the accurate rendering of such details is his unique achievement, his forte.

And now to a more serious matter. Wolfe is a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Yet, after having lived in New York for 30 years and evidently being acquainted with some of the rich people there, Wolfe seems not to understand the kind of Wasp he picked as his protagonist. Here is a typical sentence (as Sherman McCoy walks his little daughter to the school bus): “As they crossed Park Avenue, he had a mental picture of what an ideal pair they made…himself, with his noble head, his Yale chin, his big frame, and his $1,800 British suit…he visualized the admiring stares, the envious stares, of the driv­ers, the pedestrians, of one and all.” Is this how a “better-class” (or old-family) Wasp thinks? There is, God knows, plenty that is wrong with the way McCoy types think (or do not think). But this unceasing mental obsession with their exterior impact is not all that typical of them. To the contrary: a certain self-effacement, the avoidance of show, is a must of old-Wasp manners — sometimes to the ex­tent of their unwillingness to think. I know of at least two Eastern American prep schools whose motto is the ancient Latin Esse quam videri, “to be more than to seem.” That they, and their alumni, do not always live up to the motto is beside the point. The point is that, in Wolfe’s mind, every­thing depends on how people seem. This appears, among other things, when Sherman McCoy is made to philosophize: “Your self…is other people, all the people you’re tied to, and it’s only a thread.” So this is the Wolfe motto: Videri quam esse: to seem, to seem, to seem.

These, then, are examples from the work of a man who insists on the accuracy of his observa­tions. That insistence is represented by yet another — unattractive — stylistic device. There are hun­dreds of instances where Wolfe chooses to mimic the accents of certain people — especially Jewish accents, sometimes picking out not a phrase but the pronunciation of a single word (e.g., “kehpehsity” for “capacity”). We know that the shifting of prose to dialect seldom works well, because it slows down reading: the eye must stop as one at­tempts to re-mouth the words, trying to echo them in one’s ears. But in this instance it is not only Wolfe’s stylistic device that is troubling. It is more disturbing to contemplate his apparent purpose in presenting these vulgar and ugly mispronunciations of American English.

Anyone who is seriously exercised by the be­havior of certain races or classes — in Wolfe’s case by his evident view of the savagery of blacks and the arrogance of Jews in New York — has the right to express his concerns by writing about such mat­ters: at considerable risk, of course, to his recep­tion and reputation. But the seriousness of Wolfe’s concerns is compromised not only by the relentless effort at funniness in his writing; it is corrupted by his apparent malice. And yet it would be a mistake to label The Bonfire of the Vanities a racist novel. Wolfe’s view of the world is not so much racial or social as it is ideological. The Bonfire of the Vani­ties is an ideological novel. This, despite its author’s assertions, makes it entirely different from (and stylistically inferior to) novels of society like, say, Balzac’s portraiture of Paris or Thackeray’s of Lon­don; but it is different, too, from political novels such as, say, Solzhenitsyn’s, where that writer’s somber condemnation of a tyrannical regime is meant to underline the main story, which consists of the conditions of human life and thought in a prison. In Tom Wolfe’s portrait of New York in the 1980s the reverse is true. The main story is an illus­tration of this author’s coherent ideology.

Coherent: but not consistent. Tom Wolfe sets himself up an as Old American and a Defender of Old Values. That would amount to a philosophy: but his inconsistency and his shallowness reveal that his philosophy (as also Ronald Reagan’s) does not amount to more than an ideology. The ideolo­gy of Tom Wolfe is his American nationalism. A distinction is in order here, the distinction which separates the flag-waving radical from the true con­servative, the nationalist from the patriot, and which separates Wolfe from most other American writers of Southern origin. He comes from Virginia, but there is nothing identifiably Virginian or Southern in his ideology or his style. He has been living in New York for many years now.

In his many articles and books he has exposed the fraudulent hypocrisies and pretenses of radical chic, of leftist slogans and ideas, of fads in clothing and behavior, and of “modern” art together with the thoughtless acceptance and corrupt commer­cialization of it. Conversely, in The Right Stuff he extolled the courage and manliness of American fighter pilots. In The Bonfire of the Vanities he la­ments — sort of — the decline in influence of an old American class to which he suggests that he, too, belongs. Yet there is something wanting in his defense of old values (as happens, too, with many of our “conservatives” nowadays).

In all of Wolfe’s writing there is not the slight­est trace of any interest in or respect for religion; with all his anti-trendiness and anti-modernism he shows no interest in any tradition. His heroes in his only “positive” book, The Right Stuff, are not merely fighter pilots but sexual athletes whose successful adulteries and carnal conquests he approves; in The Bonfire of the Vanities, too, he has no re­spect for — indeed, he is sarcastically contemptuous of — marital fidelity. He satirizes certain immoral­ities: but his standards and values are wholly amor­al.

Wolfe’s Americanist xenophobia appears throughout The Bonfire of the Vanities, too, where, next to blacks and Jews, the third despicable cate­gory is Europeans. When McCoy is looking for a criminal lawyer and hears the name of the firm Dershkin, Bellavita, Fischbein and Schlosse, “the torrent of syllables was like a bad smell.” He is de­risive and contemptuous of McCoy’s wife, describ­ing her in very different terms from his mistress (the one with the “loamy loins”) who wears a blouse and shoes whose “price alone would have paid for the clothes on the backs of any twenty women on the floor.” Wolfe briefly describes Mrs. McCoy’s family. Her father was a professor in Wisconsin “in his rotting tweeds, whose one claim to fame was a rather mealy-mouthed attack…on his fellow Wisconsinite, Senator Joseph McCarthy…in 1955.” Wolfe the ideologue is showing through.

Several years ago in writing about the Ameri­can ideological stasis, I noted that liberals had be­come senile, while conservatives were immature. (In normal times the reverse would be true.) There is an unappealing juvenility throughout Tom Wolfe’s work: in his writing style, his ideology, his obsession with externals, and his inability to dis­tinguish character from appearance, and manners from fashions. At the end of The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe’s brutal immaturity comes to a peak at the denouement, when the erstwhile hesitant and confused McCoy, trapped in the execrably cor­rupt labyrinth of the criminal justice system in New York, on his way out of the courtroom, sud­denly strikes out and knocks down a screaming black. “Into The Solar Plexus” is the title of Wolfe’s last chapter, the climax of Wolfe’s novel, and the epitome of Wolfe’s standard of justice and norm for the proper behavior of a virile American male. The Marines Have Landed. Or (in the terminology of Star Wars, beloved and repeated by Ronald Rea­gan): The Force Is With Us.

So this is supposed to be a great book about New York, the latest in a long tradition of, say, Edith Wharton and Henry James. The jacket of The Bonfire of the Vanities reads: “It is a big, pan­oramic story of the metropolis — the kind of fic­tion strangely absent from our literature in the sec­ond half of this century — that reinforces Tom Wolfe’s reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America.” It is, of course, possi­ble that a great novel about New York can no long­er be written, because fact has become stranger than fiction.

That our conservatives — so-called — would cheer Wolfe on was, alas, predictable. No matter what they assert about being defenders of tradition (and of religion; and of Western civilization), most of our conservatives — a motley crowd nowadays — are united only by their hate for their opponents. (This is no laughing matter since, as Chesterton once said, it is hate that unites people — or at least brings them together — not love, the latter being, by its very nature, individual.) I was not in the least surprised that Christopher Buckley praised The Bonfire of the Vanities to high heaven in The Wall Street Journal, though I was rather surprised that George Will wrote of the novel as “Victorian, even Dickensian…in its capacity to convey and pro­voke indignation” — which suggests that when it comes to literature mere Will will not do. That The American Spectator would exalt Wolfe as the great­est of American writers was expectable. So was the lead review in National Review by Richard Vigilan­te, called “The Truth About Tom Wolfe.” Wolfe, wrote Vigilante (whose name may be telling), is “saving American literature.” “No one has portray­ed New York society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton….” Vigilante’s summation reads: “Wolfe is the most contagious force the good guys have. Things are looking up.”

I think that for the Konservatives this is so. They, and Wolfe, will continue to command atten­tion; they will continue filling the vacuum of Amer­ican thought that the bankruptcy of American ide­ological liberalism has brought about. That collapse is an ugly sight, because it involves the collapse not merely of ideas, but of character, as the vacuum is being filled by the poisonous exhalations of oppor­tunism and fear.

To New York the new Dark Ages have come, with the decline of urban civilization and the rise of all kinds of epidemics, physical and spiritual; with the collapsing standards of security, perma­nence, and discourse. A new Dark Ages: because this time the barbarians are not approaching the ramparts, they are inside the city. The conservative defenders of “order” are inside, too; but, in a sense, worse than the barbarians, because they ought to know better. There is a certain similarity to what befell Europe half a century ago. Nazism was, among other things, a reaction against com­munism; the Nazis fought against communism; they defended countries against communism. But the Nazis were not really defenders of old tradi­tions and standards and religion. If the defense of the West against communism meant going along with Hitler, then there was not much hope for the West, and if the defense of Old America means go­ing along with the Wolfe pack (or even with some of the Buckley crowd), then there is not much left of it that is now worth defending.

There is not a single black man or woman or child in this book who is not a loathsome criminal or a cheat or a fraud. (It would be interesting to read a review of The Bonfire of the Vanities writ­ten by a black; I have not seen one.) It is interest­ing that Wolfe’s apparent malice seems to be direct­ed at Jews even more than at blacks. While he has at least one black speak in polished English phrases and accents, not one Jew does. There is not one Jewish man or woman in this book who is not vul­gar and ugly. This phenomenon of ugliness is of great importance here, because of Wolfe’s extraord­inary emphasis on physicality, on physical appear­ance. This is even true of Judge Kovitsky, who (at the very end of the novel) turns out to be the only one of dozens of Jewish characters who is not alto­gether loathsome; but vulgar and ugly Kovitsky is too (he first appears in a scene when he spits a yel­low-oyster gob of slime at the grating of a police van of yelling prisoners). I find it at least possible that Wolfe brought in this single redeeming New York Jew — ugly and vulgar, but at least not despicable — because of his opportunism: but I will not attrib­ute motives to a writer. Rather, I am concerned with acts, in this case acts of expression, acts of writing, which constitute evidence that may indi­cate something about intentions. I have very sel­dom read such injurious descriptions of Jews as those in Tom Wolfe’s Big American Novel. And here I am comparing The Bonfire of the Vanities to the often vicious publications of the Nazis in Germany and of their sympathizers in other European countries, including the rabid anti-Jewish prose and rhetoric of Der Stürmer, directed by Juli­us Streicher — a man and a publication that even some of the leading Nazis in Hitler’s court shunned, as Streicher himself was shunned by the other de­fendants at Nuremberg — and who was hanged from the gallows simply and squarely because of the record of his anti-Semitic publications. Wheth­er a fanatical anti-Semitic writer or editor is a “war criminal” is a moot point, and whether Tom Wolfe is an anti-Semite is another one. That is not for me to decide, and I am inclined to think that, given the complicated nature of anti-Semitism, he may not even be one, certainly not in the Nazi sense. My point is simply this: a writer should be respons­ible for what and how he writes.

The striking thing, in Wolfe’s case, is the fa­vorable and respectful treatment his book has been receiving from much of the liberal press. When a book such as this one receives serious, extensive, and, I repeat, respectful attention from the chief liberal newspapers and journals in New York, there is something ominous going on. That The Bonfire of the Vanities, with its odious descriptions of New York Jews, should receive such a positive reception in New York (where the slightest suggestion of anti-Semitism will not only compromise a writer’s rep­utation but may even affect the publishability of his works) is significant. There can be only two plausible explanations for this. One is opportun­ism; the other is fear. The opportunism, in this case, is yet another manifestation of Conservative Chic — the phenomenon which, for example, ac­counts for the now standard critical celebration of Bill Buckley’s spy novels. There may be an element of irony in the circumstance that Tom Wolfe, who coined the phrase Radical Chic*, has become such an eminent and successful beneficiary of Conserva­tive Chic 20 years later. That is: to dismiss Tom Wolfe means not to Be With It. That kind of literary or cultural opportunism is, of course, nothing new.

But there is, I believe, another — ideologically suffused — element involved here. Fear and oppor­tunism are two inclinations that are often connect­ed, since opportunism is often prompted by fear. In 1910 the great and lonely French Catholic poet and visionary, Charles Peguy, wrote in Notre Patrie about modern Paris: “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” In “post­modern” New York it will never be know what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently — well, at least neo-conservative.

In the daily New York Times Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, its standard reviewer and an erst­while liberal, praised The Bonfire of the Vanities unstintingly. The lead review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review was very respectful; in the Christmas number, Wolfe’s novel was one of the Editors’ Choices, one of the eight “Best Books of The Year.” But two “mixed reviews,” in The New Yorker and in The New York Review of Books, are telling too. In the first, Terence Rafferty, feeling compelled to balance a negative judgment with repeated noddings of respect, made this erroneous distinction: while Wolfe’s insights may be superficial, “Wolfe’s precision is impressive,” each character “a perfectly matched composite.” Rafferty went on: this novel is “composed entirely of meticulous observation and perfectly worked-out illustrations of theories of the relationships among classes…. It has everything that intelligent research [and] precision tooling…can give a nar­rative…a sensational display of craftsmanship.” What Rafferty did get right is that the novel’s re­ception has been “so euphoric.” The review in The New York Review of Books was short; the review­er, a pale academic, argued mostly with George Will, saying that, no, Wolfe’s novel is not really Dickensian. Even Levine’s caricature on the same page was not really successful.

Yes, liberals (and some Jews) are afraid of Wolfe, who, whatever the power of his intellect, has enough good animal instinct to smell that fear. He knew he could get away with this book, and he did. His book’s objects of attack are barbarism and vulgarity; what he — and, alas, so many other peo­ple — did not and do not know is how the publica­tion and reception of this book represent a small but significant triumph of that same barbarism and vul­garity. It is not only that the barbarians and the vulgarians are here, within the gates. It is that their allegiance is coveted and their approval is sought. This is not only applicable, as Wolfe puts it, to black demagogues in Harlem. With regard to the re­spectful reviewers sweating cold, it is also applica­ble to Tom Wolfe and his cheering “conservative” partisans.

* The fraudulent character of the phenomenon of Radical Chic (as well as of Conservative Chic) may be seen from the following: The peak of Radical Chic in New York, the wel­coming of Black Panthers and “revolutionaries” in certain places of the Upper East Side and Central Park West, occur­red at the same time when, for the first time in the city’s history, the fear of the presence of black criminality had penetrated those very same portions of New York. Thus Conservative Chic reaches its peak at the very time when the last vestiges of truly conservative behavior and tradi­tional manners are vanishing from the American scene.