TOM WOLFE AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Although Tom Wolfe was in many ways the poster boy for 'The New Journalism', and appreciations of him focused on his revolutionary writing style, Wolfe's classic journalism, and indeed his fiction, was informed equally by the unlikely fact that he had earned a PhD at Yale University in the then-newish field of American Studies. During the war, Yale's American History department was the prime recruiting source for the OSS, and after the war the American Studies programme, concerned less with history than with American civilization, appears to have been no different for the CIA. Rather than go into academe, Wolfe went to work on the Springfield (Mass) Union, then straight to the Washington Post and reporting from revolutionary Cuba. Connect the dots.

American Studies would appeal to the CIA, who were funding all sorts of arts and literary projects, trying to establish the value of American life. Wolfe's doctoral thesis was on the CPUSA's Depression-era League Of American Writers, and in later years Wolfe would link the sociological concerns of his writing to his study of Max Weber's 'Status Theory', an interesting combination for a writer who was anything but leftish. But it's easy to see its fruits at the heart of a couple of the early pieces that made his name. The most famous are 'Radical Chic', about the conductor Leonard Bernstein's cocktail party for the Black Panthers, and 'Girl Of The Year', about society wild child Baby Jane Holzer. Were you to read only these, you might picture Wolfe, the Southern Dandy dressed in trademark planter couture, solely as a gadfly in the social scene, a reportorial version of Gore Vidal or even Truman Capote.

Where many of the so-called new journalists got involved with the people they wrote about, making the story about themselves as much as their subjects, Wolfe remained apart. Instead, he used his prose style to draw the reader in, as if in place of himself, recreating on the page that feeling of 'being there', as Jerzy Kosinsky would say.

But what gave Wolfe's work its muscle was not socio-economic analysis, nor typographic FLAMBOYANCE!!!,  but the mythic aspect of American literature which he gleaned in his studies: the way the American hero, 'hard, isolate, stoic and a killer' in D.H. Lawrence's words, was self-made, tested as an individual, and fleeing from the encroachments of avaricious society. In Wolfe's eyes, Junior Johnson, the stock-car racer who learned his trade evading Federal agents while carrying his father's bootleg whisky to market, was indeed 'The Last American Hero'.

Although not actually the last. For Wolfe he was the forerunner of Chuck Yeager, the test-pilot with the Right Stuff. Just as Johnson was subsumed by the growth of corporate NASCAR racing, so Yeager gave way to corporate NASA, who insisted on total control of their astronauts.

This vanishing American hero (to use Leslie Fiedler's phrase) recurs in variations even as Wolfe reports on America civilization becoming a more and more bizarre beacon for the rest of the world. I was still in my early teens when I devoured The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965), his first collection. The title story is about two car-customizers, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth and George Barris 'King of the Kustomizers'. As a kid I knew nothing about Baby Jane Holzer, but despite having only slightly more interest in cars, I devoured the pictures of hot rods in Rod & Custom magazine, built plastic models of Big Daddy's cars like the Beatnik Bandit. Wolfe's story is about the way Kustom Kulture in Kalifornia seeks a freedom unavailable in, say, Detroit, or even New York. It's also about the battle between designers, one creating art without thought to functionality, the other building artistic works one could actually drive. It's a theme repeated in Wolfe's 1981 polemic against modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House.

In 1965 I was already listening to the disc jockey Murray the K on 1010 WINS in New York. Wolfe's essay 'The Fifth Beatle' portrayed Murray less as a leader of the nascent counter culture than a frenzied self-promoter, the 'king of the hysterical disc jockies' , though those of us who listened knew the hysterical crown actually belonged to 'Cousin' Brucie Morrow, whom Murray replaced on WINS. Ironically, two decades later, after the publication of Bonfire, first serialised in Rolling Stone, Norman Mailer called Wolfe 'the hardest-working show-off in the literary world', in effect a novelistic Murray the K. The ensuing feud with what Wolfe called 'my Three Stooges', Mailer, John Updike and John Irving concerned the quality of his fiction, which Wolfe self-flatteringly described in terms of the social realism of Zola, Dickens, Balzac and Dreiser. In his riposte to the Stooges, 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast' Wolfe argued writers should be focused on 'the material' of American life, not their own talent. Funnily, the two novelists he cited were Joseph Wambaugh and John LeCarre: early Wambaugh was everything Wolfe may have thought Bonfire to be, and a good counter to Updike, but LeCarre's spies moved in a world very much apart from the billion feet, especially the billion American feet.

Although Irving might be said to be the most self-consciously Dickensian of Wolfe's Stooges, and Updike the most obvious opposite of what Wolfe wanted to do, the feud with Mailer is paradoxical, if not in their fictions (though Mailer's mythic takes in, say, An American Dream or Why Are We In Vietnam? are as full of American Studies as Wolfe, and former originally was serialised in Esquire!) then in their non-fiction. We think of the New Journalism as being defined not only by flamboyant writing like Wolfe's, and by less flamboyant long-form, and by the insertion of the writer into the story, which was very much not Wolfe's MO. It was however, Mailer's, or did you miss the point of Advertisements For Myself? He did it in the third person (something he learned reading Henry Adams at Harvard, probably in American Studies!). Wolfe himself credited Gay Talese's 'Joe Louis At 50' as opening his eyes, while some of the new journalists, say, Jimmy Breslin, were working in the style of great columnists--bringing the freedom of the column to their reporting. The point is that, in non-fiction, this was very much a shared enterprise, without the back-biting. But when we entered into the realms of fiction, all bets were off. Could Wolfe have dug back into his own past and written anything like Mailer's vast novel about the OSS and early CIA, Harlot's Ghost (whose promised part II never appeared)? To do so might have required Wolfe's own presence; Mailer, in this case, was playing the observer.

But his critics felt the difference between Wolfe's material and his 'talent'. It goes back to Wolfe's writing his way out of the diffidence of being an observer. Perhaps there is his own element of class involved. His family had money; if he were not in the CIA he might possibly have been supported by them. In Bonfire he captured the sense of the greed-driven Eighties perfectly, his involvement with the characters almost matched the ones about which he'd reported. But that was because they were the Ivy League elite, the ones who had once gone into the CIA, and cover jobs in journalism, but now were busy being a different kind of Masters Of The Universe, by moving money and living large. But after Bonfire, away from the types he knew well, his three later novels revealed the limits of observation as opposed to creation, most famously in I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), in which Wolfe very much wasn't his black woman from a poor background who attends an elite university. He was expanding an observation about an issue in society into a framework he was unable to fill convincingly.

Wolfe's most famous book remains The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), chronicling his travels across America on an LSD-fuelled trip with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, including Neal Cassady and the Grateful Dead, a journey that also spawned parts of Hunter Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels. Kesey of course is best-remembered today for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1962) a moving novel about an issue of sorts, but more tellingly a daringly-constructed and written study of an individual hero's battle with society. That was also, more obviously, the theme of Kesey's now-neglected second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion (1964), the tale of the Stamper logging family's battle against unionzed loggers in Oregon. Although it is very much rooted in realism, the characters often speak in first-person monologues, like a new journalist's patter. I think of Paul Newman, as Hank Stamper in the final scene of the film adaptation, riding down the river like Huck Finn, straight out of your American studies class, flipping a middle finger at the world.

Wolfe of course remained aloof from the merriest of the Pranksters' pranking. But it's hard not to think that in Kesey and his rebellion against the norms of Sixties society, and his return from the West to the East on his bus, Wolfe saw his most crucial themes laid out for him, in one psychedelic, tie-dyed pattern. That he could never reproduce this in his fiction should not come as a surprise. After all, after the Magic Bus, neither could Kesey.

LORENZO WILL BE THERE FOR YOU: ON THE ROCKS at the Hampstead Theatre

Only a few moments into On The Rocks, as DH Lawrence and Frieda von Richtofen are engaged in a dish-smashing brawl, I passed a note to my wife asking 'Was Frieda Jewish?' It got a cheap laugh from her, but the question hung over my enjoyment of the play, because what could have been a deeply felt study into questions of artistic desire and romantic desire, or love, friendship and domination, instead stooped at any opportunity to grab even cheaper laughs, and they didn't grow out of the story but were rather stale jokes (Frieda: 'what would Freud say of this?' Lawrence: 'Fuck Freud' Frieda: 'I would but he's in Vienna'--would Frieda have fucked Freud, given the chance? Would she have even said that?) that didn't fit the characters or the settings. It was as if the playwright, Amy Rosenthal, were channelling her father Jack's best work in hopes of reaching a familiar friendly audience.

The immediate inspiration for my question, however, was Tracy-Ann Olberman's struggle trying to play Frieda with a German accent, which in moments of stress or intended humour was straight-forward Yiddish, switching, when 1917 Hun was needed, to the 'Allo-Allo' phrasebook, and finally, in the really serious moments, to unaccented English, like Eleanor Bron in Women In Love. Meanwhile Ed Stoppard's DH Lawrence has an accent that sprints all across the north of England, and similarly settles into more received English whenever things get serious, like Alan Bates in Women In Love. Behind the beard I kept seeing Robin Williams. Yet it wasn't until Katharine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry arrived on stage to complete the quartet that I realised what was happening. The Famous Four from Literature were being used for a higher purpose.

That being to benefit children of famous theatre people, Amy and Ed, who must have said, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland used to in those MGM musicals, 'let's put on a show and all our friends will come!' And the show they're putting on, ostensibly about great people, and big themes, is really little more than a Hampstead BBC version of Friends--or maybe a literary This Life, another version of Friends done by the daughter of famous writers--we could call it Our Friends In The Southwest, and wait for Egg, if not Feebs, to come strolling down the Cornish coast.

After all, what does your average NW3 theatre audience know about DH Lawrence? Big beard, pacifist, German battleaxe wife, Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling naked, northern accent? They're all here, that and very little more. It's easy to take Nick Caldecott's tweedy schoolboy Murry and play with the closet homosexuality often seen in Lawrence, make him wrestle nude with DH in case the audience misses the point, but the crucial issue with Lawrence to Anthony Burgess was less sex than dominance, and that is something Rosenthal seems to miss. The famous encounter with the police over the packet of salt happens off-stage, and it's Frieda, not Lawrence, who is victimised and spars with them. It serves to emphasise Lawrence as Frieda's child, which is probably a good point as far as it goes, but when it goes any farther, when it should be looking at Lawrence's need to dominate her sexually and Murry in some proto-sexual way, the play covers its eyes.

Not that Caldecott and Stoppard are bad in their roles; it's that their performances seem aimed at the level of a university, if not neighbourhood, production. Which could be a telling comment about Lawrence and Murry from Rosenthal and cast, but somehow I doubt it. In fairness, it was billed as a comedy, and the poster showed four young people jumping off a cliff, like a freeze-frame from the opening of a TV show. So I guess we were warned.

Mansfield, as played by Charlotte Emmerson, remains an enigma. What drew Lawrence to her, or her to him? Attraction, respect, inspiration? We never find out. We find out very little about her at all, although in fairness to accents she does Mansfield's educated Kiwi well, at least according to my wife, who herself is one of those. Similarly, her relationship with Murry is portrayed as deeply unfulfilled for both of them: Murry wants no physical affection, Mansfield wants nothing but to be working again. What are they doing there? What are we doing there?

Clare Lizzimore directs the simple set as if dying for a few Feydeau moments, and you would have thought Rosenthal would have been pleased to provide them. It's all very earnest, when it's not trying to get boffo laffs, but this is a story which has become more interesting over time, as more material has become available, not more comical. And it deserved better than DH as Ross plus Joey, Murry as Chandler, Frieda as von Rachel and Katharine Mansfield as Monica plus Phoebe.