Last week, for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote an appreciation of Tom Wolfe, who died on May 14 at the age of 88. In it I talked a bit about Wolfe’s infectious and amazingly original voice as a writer, especially in his journalism of the 1960s and ‘70s. He revived or introduced into mainstream prose style the use of italics, ellipses, exclamation points, apostrophe (or direct address), the historical present tense, onomatopoeia, kooky spelling (his first book was called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby), and repeated capitalized portentous phrases (“the Right Stuff,” “the Me Decade,” “Masters of the Universe”). More generally, his stuff had a verve and playfulness and wit that rammed a virtual alarm clock in the ear of what he once called the country’s “somnambulistic totem newspapers.” I noted:
His style was pretty much the opposite of Ernest Hemingway’s, but the two men — who both were reporters in their youth — were the most influential American stylists of the 20th century. Every journalist with literary ambitions who came of age from the late 1960s through the ’80s either imitated Wolfe, imitated his imitators or had to make the deliberate decision to reject the Wolfean approach and find another way.
Take it from me; I was one of them.
Since writing that essay, I’ve thought some more about Wolfe’s style, especially about where it came from. That’s not meant to downplay his originality -- but innovations always have some ancestor or ancestors, however indirect. (Or do they? Correct me if you have in mind a pure original.) And I’ve been musing on some of Tom Wolfe’s literary forebears. With one exception, the ones on my mind all come from fiction -- not surprising, considering that Wolfe championed journalism as a literary form.
John Updike’s Rabbit, Run was published to a great deal of attention in 1960, just as Wolfe was embarking on his experimentation and innovation; it was one of the few novels to that point ever to have been composed in the present tense. (Now the device is a commonplace.) Wolfe surely noted it, and also had to have been intimately familiar with the work of J.D. Salinger, a near-Hemingway-level influence on young American writers in the ‘50s. Salinger was very big on italics, especially in dialogue, where he characteristically applied them to just one syllable of a word. An exchange from “A Perfect Day for Bananafish":
“Muriel. My word of honor. Dr. Sivetski said Seymour may completely lose contr--"
“I just got here, Mother. This is the first vacation I’ve had in years, and I’m not going to just pack everything and leave.”
The one nonliterary influence I’ll mention is advertising, which was probably the main bastion of enthusiasm in 1950s and early-'60s America; its characteristic utterance was the shout, juiced with real or implied exclamation points and italics. Raid Kills Bugs Dead! and all that. Mainstream culture had nothing but disdain for it. Like his contemporaries Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in painting and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in architecture, Wolfe ironically appropriated a debased discourse and used it for his own devices. Come to think of it, the Right Stuff and other Wolfean catchphrases may also have been influenced by Madison Avenue, which loves a good slogan.
Moving on, here’s the opening to the 1964 piece “The Girl of the Year":
Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter face brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras flailing leather blue jeans stretch pants stretch jeans honeydew bottoms éclair shanks elf boots ballerinas Knight slippers, hundreds of them, these flaming little buds, bobbing and screaming, rocketing around inside the Academy of Music Theatre underneath that vast, old, moldering, cherub dome up there — aren’t they super-marvelous!
Now tell me that Wolfe could have come up with that sentence if James Joyce -- the most original literary stylist of the century? -- hadn’t written Ulysses.
Finally, here’s another passage from “The Girl of the Year,” which was a profile of “It Girl” Baby Jane Holzer:
That girl on the aisle, Baby Jane, is a fabulous girl. She comprehends what the Rolling Stones mean. Any columnist in New York could tell them who she is … a celebrity of New York’s new era of Wog Hip … Baby Jane Holzer. Jane Holzer in Vogue, Jane Holzer in Life, Jane Holzer in Andy Warhol’s underground movies, Jane Holzer in the world of High Camp, Jane Holzer at the rock and roll, Jane Holzer is … well, how can you put it into words? Jane Holzer is This Year’s Girl, at least, the New Celebrity, none of your old idea of sexpots, prima donnas, romantic tragediennes, she is the girl who knows … The Stones. ...
In the deliberate repetition (the Greeks’ word for it was anaphora), in the rhetorical question, in the laser-eyed view of money and its baleful effects, in the long sentences and the voice dripping with irony, I spy the influence of the master of such set pieces, Charles Dickens. From Our Mutual Friend:
Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly married as was lawfully compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather, he would have come home in matting from the Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him, French polished to the crown of his head.
So: Tom Wolfe, the great original, had his influences. And he chose them well.
