Tom Wolfe

This essay appeared in Esquire magazine in 1972. In it Tom Wolfe examines the development of New Journalism, writing in which journalists and authors use the tools of fiction in their reporting and nonfiction.

The similarity between the early days of the novel and the early days of the New Journalism is not merely coincidental. In both cases we are watching the same process. We are watching a group of writers coming along, working in a genre regarded as Lower Class (the novel before the 1850’s, slick-magazine journalism before the 1960’s), who discover the joys of detailed realism and its strange powers. Many of them seem to be in love with realism for its own sake; and never mind the “sacred callings” of literature. They seem to be saying: “Hey! Come here! This is the way people are living now—just the way I’m going to show you! It may astound you, disgust you, delight you or arouse your contempt or make you laugh… . Nevertheless, this is what it’s like! It’s all right here! You won’t be bored! Take a look!”

As I hardly have to tell you, that is not exactly the way serious novelists regard the task of the novel today. In this decade, the Seventies, The Novel will be celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of its canonization as the spiritual genre. Novelists today keep using words like “myth,” “fable” and “magic.” That state of mind known as “the sacred office of the novelist” had originated in Europe in the 1870’s and didn’t take hold in the American literary world until after the Second World War. But it soon made up for lost time. What kind of novel should a sacred officer write? In 1948 Lionel Trilling presented the theory that the novel of social realism (which had flourished in America throughout the 1930’s) was finished because the freight train of history had passed it by. The argument was that such novels were a product of the rise of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century at the height of capitalism. But now bourgeois society was breaking up, fragmenting. A novelist could no longer portray a part of that society and hope to capture the Zeitgeist; all he would be left with was one of the broken pieces. The only hope was a new kind of novel (his candidate was the novel of ideas). This theory caught on among young novelists with an astonishing grip. Whole careers were altered. All those writers hanging out in the literary pubs in New York such as the White Horse Tavern rushed off to write every kind of novel you could imagine, so long as it wasn’t the so-called “big novel” of manners and society. The next thing one knew, they were into novels of ideas, Freudian novels, surrealistic novels (“black comedy”), Kafkaesque novels and, more recently, the catatonic novel or novel of immobility, the sort that begins: “In order to get started, he went to live alone on an island and shot himself.” (Opening line of a Robert Coover short story.)

As a result, by the Sixties, about the time I came to New York, the most serious, ambitious and, presumably, talented novelists had abandoned the richest terrain of the novel: namely, society, the social tableau, manners and morals, the whole business of “the way we live now,” in Trollope’s phrase. There is no novelist who will be remembered as the novelist who captured the Sixties in America, or even in New York, in the sense that Thackeray was the chronicler of London in the 1840’s and Balzac was the chronicler of Paris and all of France after the fall of the Empire. Balzac prided himself on being “the secretary of French society.” Most serious American novelists would rather cut their wrists than be known as “the secretary of American society,” and not merely because of ideological considerations. With fable, myth and the sacred office to think about—who wants such a menial role?

That was marvelous for journalists—I can tell you that. The Sixties was one of the most extraordinary decades in American history in terms of manners and morals. Manners and morals were the History of the Sixties. A hundred years from now when historians write about the 1960’s in America (always assuming, to paraphrase Céline, that the Chinese will still give a damn about American history), they won’t write about it as the decade of the war in Vietnam or of space exploration or of political assassinations…but as the decade when manners and morals, styles of living, attitudes toward the world changed the country more crucially than any political events…all the changes that were labeled, however clumsily, with such tags as “the generation gap,” “the counter culture,” “black consciousness,” “sexual permissiveness,” “the death of God,”…the abandonment of proprieties, pieties, decorums connoted by “go-go funds,” “fast money,” swinger groovy hippie drop-out pop Beatles Andy Baby Jane Bernie Huey Eldridge LSD marathon encounter stone underground rip-off… . This whole side of American life that gushed forth when postwar American affluence finally blew the lid off—all this novelists simply turned away from, gave up by default. That left a huge gap in American letters, a gap big enough to drive an ungainly Reo rig like the New Journalism through.

5

When I reached New York in the early Sixties, I couldn’t believe the scene I saw spread out before me. New York was pandemonium with a big grin on. Among people with money—and they seemed to be multiplying like shad—it was the wildest, looniest time since the 1920’s…a universe of creamy forty-five-year-old fashionable fatties with walnut-shell eyes out on the giblet slab wearing the hip-huggers and the minis and the Little Egypt eyes and the sideburns and the boots and the bells and the love beads, doing the Watusi and the Funky Broadway and jiggling and grinning and sweating and sweating and grinning and jiggling until the onset of dawn or saline depletion, whichever came first… . It was a hulking carnival. But what really amazed me was that as a writer I had it practically all to myself. As fast as I could possibly do it, I was turning out articles on this amazing spectacle that I saw bubbling and screaming right there in front of my wondering eyes—New York!—and all the while I just knew that some enterprising novelist was going to come along and do this whole marvelous scene with one gigantic daring bold stroke. It was so ready, so ripe—beckoning…but it never happened. To my great amazement New York simply remained the journalist’s bonanza. For that matter, novelists seemed to shy away from the life of the great cities altogether. The thought of tackling such a subject seemed to terrify them, confuse them, make them doubt their own powers. And besides, it would have meant tackling social realism as well.

To my even greater amazement I had the same experience when I came upon 1960’s California. This was the very incubator of new styles of living, and these styles were right there for all to see, ricocheting off every eyeball—and again a few amazed journalists working in the new form had it all to themselves, even the psychedelic movement, whose waves are still felt in every part of the country, in every grammar school even, like the intergalactic pulse. I wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and then waited for the novels that I was sure would come pouring out of the psychedelic experience…but they never came forth, either. I learned later that publishers had been waiting, too. They had been practically crying for novels by the new writers who must be out there somewhere, the new writers who would do the big novels of the hippie life or campus life or radical movements or the war in Vietnam or dope or sex or black militancy or encounter groups or the whole whirlpool all at once. They waited, and all they got was the Prince of Alienation…sailing off to Lonesome Island on his Tarot boat with his back turned and his Timeless cape on, reeking of camphor balls.

Amazing, as I say. If nothing else had done it, that would have. The—New Journalists—Parajournalists—had the whole crazed obscene uproarious Mammon-faced drug-soaked mau-mau; lust oozing Sixties in America all to themselves.

(1972)