Big Bad Wolfe

TOM WOLFE IS BACK--in this month's issue of Harper's, with a piece on the phony radicalism of the American intellectual. It's too bad, because when he was on the same case a few years back, with a tremendously telling satire of Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panthers, Wolfe convinced everyone that Lennie and his East Side pals were counterfeit radicals and really, assholes. Now that Wolfe writes from his own vantage point, purely, without the benefit of foils like those partygoers, he comes off as a strangely fashionable reactionary and, why mince words?, an asshole in his own right.

This is a wonderful little bicentennial piece: America has no real poverty (forget about inner cities and blue collar unemployment above ten per cent), has never practiced anything so crude as "genocide" (forget what intellectuals who must run every newspaper and news service in America told you about Viet Nam), and is in the midst of a "Happiness Explosion," at least for the ordinary Joe and Jill.

Of course, Wolfe isn't able to carry this through without inconsistencies and almost constant maiming of facts. At certain points in the piece the American intellectual is a moron, a pretentious ape who stores but cannot read back issues of The New York Review of Books. The kind of person who furnishes his house in the built-for-children way that is the mark of the consumption-oriented hipster: stark white walls, huge plants and Coltrane records. At other times the same group is unbelievably activist, traveling the country and spreading its poison about this great land on every Midwest college campus with ersatz buildings and naive kids of our American yeomanry. The Intellectual is lazy and active, stupid and unbelievably cunning, lying and truthful--anything, so long as the image backs up the pseudoconspiracy Wolfe offers for his place on Reagan's National Council on the Arts come January.

Wolfe is also convinced, as every right-wing commentator on the Left has been since about 1920, that some recent event has uttcrly discredited socialism. So he picks out the Solzhenitsyn and related cases as evidence that socialism itself, and not Stalinism, created the world's "bone heap... grisly beyond belief." He catalogues the Western literary community's boycott of Solzhenitsyn and seems to be aghast at the idea that lifelong leftists would not collapse like toy boats at the salvos of Solzhenitsyn, a Russian Orthodox dogmatic and rightist. What mindlessness. I guess Wolfe called the piece "The Intelligent Co-ed's Guide to America" because in his tough-minded telling of the facts and courageous exposure of cant he believes himself the new Bernard Shaw.

Only one thing remains from earlier efforts like "The Painted Word" and the Bernstein piece and book: Wolfe's style is still o.k., best when he's deflating small pretensions, like the lecture-circuit crowd and the feel of universities where the biggest issue is too few parking spaces. Similarly, his story of a 1965 debate at Princeton on "the style of the Sixties" paints a picture of Ivy League elitism and the worthlessness of that burnt-out dope, Paul Krassner, in the old style. Wolfe's former tone was something akin to deflating everyone's act: all the world were fakers and he covered it as reporter and participant. Now Wolfe's tone is me and the silent majority (though stupid) are right and you suck, not nearly as appealing for a guy who used to be thought of, by people like me, as a potential Jonathan Swift reincarnate.

In the same issue of Harper's there lies a piece as gentle, kind and honest as Wolfe's right-wing medicine man's act is none of those things. I mean Joseph Epstein's article on confessions of an upper-middle class sports fanatic, wherein the editor of The American Scholar says there is no sense in which one loves sports through motives of slumming--you know, identifying with the workers' leisure time pursuits--vicarious violence, metaphysical truths, or returns to adolescence. Some of us are maniacs about the Chicago White Sox, Cincinnati Bengals or the St. Louis Cardinals of 1967 because these blessed people, athletes, don't allow for bullshit: the participant is viewed by a full stadium and the people in their living rooms, he either comes through with men on base or he doesn't, either makes the necessary magnificent backhand on grass or doesn't Language is too often used as a smokescreen for banality or as with pieces like Tom Wolfe's, excuses for grand meanness and superiority. Action seems more honest and the supreme action in these days of American political quiescence--the action which we can all see and understand, unlike politics--is sports.

Thank God for it. I read Epstein's piece after reading through Roger Angell's The Summer Game, the most evocative book about baseball ever written. Maybe writing about sports is the last thing talented men can do if they want to be considerate of human foibles and balanced in the estimation of their subjects. Too much else, because it is supposed to be so important, now reflects the bad temper of the prematurely senile: pomposity of writing and a failure of common honesty make for boring polemics on the most "weighty" of topics. Truth springs from generosity, and guys like Epstein and Angell, speaking of the hustling Pete Roses and Jerry Sloans of sports or the demise of the Polo Grounds, are the most generous of men.