How Tom Wolfe — the author of ‘The Right Stuff,’ ‘Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers’ and other classics — turned sociology into art.
THERE ARE CERTAIN WRITERS you should never read before you yourself sit down to write, like P.G. Wodehouse and Tom Wolfe. For if you do, you will not be able to get their voices and rhythms out of your head, and you will have to confront the absolute certainty that you can’t pull off what they did. In Wolfe’s case you’ll find that you can’t quite replicate the raw energy of his prose: the fun; the snap, crackle, pop; the fuzzy effusions of new sociological categories — masters of the universe, social X-rays.
And then there’s his sheer audacity. His essay “Radical Chic” — about a cocktail party the conductor Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, threw for the Black Panthers in 1970 — begins with Bernstein waking up in the middle of the night in a state of wild alarm. He had mentioned having a bad dream in an interview somewhere, and Wolfe took that little autobiographical morsel and spun it into a grand tour through the inside of Bernstein’s brain. Any responsible journalist can report, “Bernstein had a nightmare,” but Wolfe has the guts to take a flight of fancy and describe the nightmare from the inside, with its moments of narcissistic grandiosity and its descent into degrading humiliation.
Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.
He was drawn to times and places where the status rules were shifting. His book “The Right Stuff,” about the U.S. space program, takes place at such a moment. Before, the combat pilots were the tippy-top alpha males in the world of flight, but then along came the astronauts to knock them off their perch. In “Radical Chic,” you can catch glimpses of the old blue-blood Protestant elite — the Astors, the Whitneys, the Rockefellers. But this is 1970. A new crowd is beginning to displace them: the Bernsteins, Barbara Walters. The members of this rising elite have often made their money in culture and the media, and include the formerly unthinkables — Catholics, Jews, Black people.
The old aristocrats had it so easy, those stately bankers in the J.P. Morgan mold. They may have been frequently bewildered about why the masses didn’t like them, but their own place in the social aristocracy was secure. It was right there in their bloodlines — the generations of grandees stretching back centuries. The status rules were simple. All you had to do was live like an English earl and collect European culture by the boatload, and you could cruise through Manhattan amid the sound of others bowing and scraping.
The members of the new cultural elite could never be so secure. Their status — their very reason for being — was based on their own superior sensibility. They lived by their wits and their public attitudes. These mediaage aristocrats had to excel at tasks that members of the beau monde have always excelled at — being rich, thin and well connected; keeping the duplexes adorned with the design trends. But they had to do so much more. They had to be morally avant-garde, able to articulate the luxury opinions du jour. They had to perform all these inversions — rising to the social stratosphere by ostentatiously demonstrating their solidarity with the oppressed, assuring their place atop the structures of power by striking radical poses and pretending to support tearing those structures down. Wolfe was there at the dawn of 20th-century one-downmanship, when you could rise to the social stratosphere by donning peasant and revolutionary garb.
Some people think “Radical Chic” is simply about race relations. It’s not. His essay “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” deals with this issue more squarely in its study of the bureaucratic tangle at the center of the chillingly named Office of Economic Opportunity in San Francisco, where white fears around political correctness collide with entrenched poverty in the city’s Black, Chicano, Filipino and Samoan communities. The program is supposed to help create opportunity for disadvantaged groups but ends up becoming a farce in which jobs and money are manipulated from harassed and clueless office workers. “Radical Chic” is about status codes and narcissism. The Black Panthers in the essay are treated by the white characters as luxury goods, beings who bring a frisson of righteous danger to the safe tranquillity of the Upper East Side.
Wolfe would later say that he learned about that evening at the Bernsteins’ when he was visiting the offices of Harper’s Magazine. He wandered into David Halberstam’s office (Halberstam wasn’t there), and noticed on his desk a handwritten invitation from Mrs. Leonard Bernstein to attend a soiree with the Black Panthers. He saw immediately what the members of the beau monde were too oblivious to see: that if you told the people in Queens or Topeka that the rich white residents of the Upper East Side were throwing parties for the Panthers, they would fall all over themselves laughing. He called the R.S.V.P. number, gave his own name and said he’d be happy to attend. At the party he sat quietly in a chair, his notebook prominently displayed, taking it all down in shorthand. A New York Times reporter was also there, allowed to record the festivities. The Bernsteins were being so noble! Who could possibly ridicule them for it?
Wolfe captures all the little challenges that afflict the new elite. Of course you can’t have Black servants at a Panther party, but where do you find white servants? Sideburns are symbols that you’re on board with the revolution, but how low should you wear them? Should they go down to the “intertragic notch,” that spot near the lower rim of the ear, or should you flaunt full mutton chops, with all their countercultural glory? And what do you call Black people, anyway? Wolfe has his characters wondering. This was the moment when the notion that the word “Negro” was offensive was beginning to penetrate even these patrician circles. With your fellow militant-by-invitation elites, you say “Black,” but what happens when you’re talking to your white servants? If you use that word, they’ll think you’re just one of those limousine liberals.
Wolfe recognizes the climax of a cultural moment when he sees it. It comes when an uptown art gallery owner in a tuxedo, pregaming before a private party at the Met, rises in full revolutionary fervor and cries out, “Who do you call to give a party?”
Any college lampooner could make fun of this stuff. But Wolfe goes several levels deeper. There’s a lot of doubletrack thinking going on here, he writes. The partygoers really do care for those who are oppressed. Racial injustice really is one of the core themes of American history. It’s just that these people want to care in a way that makes them look gorgeous. Wolfe is asking a question that decades later would be at the heart of Instagram activism: How much of all this is about caring for the oppressed, and how much is about the image of you caring for the oppressed?
Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance. He
Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him.
was a provocateur, not an advocate. He came to examine fashions, not legislate morality. His writing rests upon a quiet self-confidence. As a young man, he came up from the South to graduate school at Yale and found that all those Northeastern preppies looked down on Southerners. He could have tried to conform to his new milieu, but he became even more his idiosyncratic Southern self. Then he came to New York, and there, too, he could have lost himself in all the glamour, in the if-you-can-makeit-here-you-can-make-it-anywhere ambition. He sipped from the cup of that ambition, but mostly he stationed himself where writers are supposed to station themselves, off to the side, observing, never quite belonging. It’s lonely there, but it allowed him a peek at what was emerging: The new coastal elites had made themselves insufferable to working-class Americans, and sooner or later there would be hell to pay.
Wolfe satirized the upper crust, but he had empathy, fellow feeling and sometimes admiration. He labored to accurately get inside their heads. What made him humane was that his sensibility was ultimately literary; his goal was to simply depict modern life, to describe people in their foibles and follies, to capture the way their sad and sometimes wonderful longings tortured, drove and uplifted them. Wolfe pulled off an astounding trick, turning sociology into art.