Steve Sailer writes: In the 1960s Wolfe wrote with great zest and insight about New York and London young women trying to break into or not fall out of cafe society in a manner that marked him out as worthy descendant of Evelyn Waugh.
But then in the late 1960s, he got himself embedded on an aircraft carrier off North Vietnam to write “The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie.” This led to an obsession with masculine bravery that culminated in The Right Stuff in 1979. He seemed to lose some of his interest in female characters and the accompanying rather fey style he had used to successfully depict them in essays like “The Woman Who Has Everything “ and Radical Chic. In the 1970s, Wolfe’s output gets more butch and he seems to be losing interest in writing about women.
If anybody out there is writing Wolfe’s biography, a question I’d be interested in understanding more about is: What were his exercise regimens during different parts of his literary career? And did they have any effect on changes in his literary interests and tastes?
COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* I am working on a Wolfe bio. He is cooperating. But I have yet to ask him about exercise. (Michael Anton)
“In the 1970s, Wolfe’s output gets more butch and he seems to be losing interest in writing about women.”
I would, by the way, dispute this, at least in part. See, for example, the very long essay “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” (1976), which has many insights on women but which I did not have the space in that essay to explore. Also, as I noted, The Right Stuff spends a good deal of time on the astronauts’ wives. Women grow in importance in his novels, with Charlotte being a sustained meditation on modern girlhood and the transition to young womanhood. Womanhood as a theme then recedes a bit in Back to Blood but remains important in the character of Magdalena.
As for the “fey” style of “The Woman Who Has Everything” and “Radical Chic,” I think Wolfe would describe that as his using the “downstage narrator” device. That is, when narrating–as opposed to giving quotes or direct point-of-view interior monologues, but describing the scene in the third person–he sometimes mimics the speech patterns of his subjects. So, for the former, it’s Helene’s voice that he’s aping. For the latter, sometimes it’s Lenny’s, but sometimes–for the stuff about hiring maids and what appetizers to serve and so forth–it’s Felicia’s, or else Amanda Burden’s or someone like that.
He does this from a male perspective in “Last America Hero” (Junior Johnson’s voice), “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” (black street radicals), and “Truest Sport” (the fighter pilots). It’s the same device every time, but the effect is completely different because the voices are so different. I don’t think his style moved from fey to butch. Rather, Wolfe was just being a chameleon and adapting to his writing to his subjects.
* Hypergamy crops up in some very weird places. In the post-bellum South many attractive, young, ex-slave mulatto and octoroon women would shack up with bottom-of-the-heap white males. The men got the advantage of a wife they would otherwise never have had; the women the advantage of children who could cross the color line.
* Right, but my impression is that the sex ratio of downstage narrators shifted slightly away from women as he got older, until I Am Charlotte Simmons in his 70s. This is a little unusual in that you would normally expect the ratio to move the opposite way as a social satirist matures and develops a better grasp of more aspects of humanity. Instead with Wolfe, as he gets older he dials down the number of profiles of a London society girl or a Carnaby Street dolly, like was doing in the 1960s. My vague recollection from studying up on Wolfe to write a long review of The Right Stuff for the Rice Thresher in 1979 was that his time on board the aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War had a major impact on the direction of his career. It kind of liberated his inherent Southern gentleman High Tide of the Confederacy nature to write about masculine courage in The Right Stuff.
But it also, it seems to me, got in the way of his earlier talent for writing about society women. Thus, the female characters in The Bonfire of the Vanities don’t seem as well developed as you would have expected based on the magazine profiles of similar women he was writing 20 years before.
A lot of it is no doubt just opportunity cost: it would have been easy and profitable to continue writing about rich women, and no doubt he would have gotten very, very good at it. But Wolfe chose to invest his time and emotions in writing about pilots and the like, so he chose to miss his window of opportunity to become outstanding at writing about rich ladies.
These kind of choices come up a lot in the careers of literary journalists: do you leave the metropolis in search of fresh material? For example, there was something a bit heroic about Truman Capote leaving Manhattan cafe society to spend long periods in a small town in Kansas to write “In Cold Blood.”
Waugh was always looking for some kind of exotic expedition he could mine for articles, travels books, and eventually novels. The two trips to Ethiopia paid off, while the South American won provided the bizarre ending to A Handful of Dust, but Waugh’s trip to Spitsbergen was a total bust.
I think an overlooked aspect of Wolfe is that he’s so acute about the effects of physical differences upon characters’ personalities. In my review of I Am Charlotte Simmons, I asserted you could pretty much guess with some confidence each character’s body fat percentage.
Critic James Wood was extremely peeved in The New Yorker at Wolfe’s book Back to Blood. Novelists aren’t supposed to notice how people look! What kind of characters think about how other characters look? Vulgar characters, that’s who!
Wood wants you to know that he much prefers Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in which the characters sit around at a luxury health clinic thinking Deep Thoughts for 1,000 pages.
Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers” pretty much introduced to American consciousness how huge Samoans are. This was a few years before Samoans started showing up in college football.
* Regarding Bonfire, what happened there is a little complicated by the two versions. Remember that version 1 appeared in Rolling Stone serially first. For that, Wolfe did a lot of original research on the police, the DAs, the courts and so on, but he felt that he knew society well enough that he could draw on his own prior reporting and knowledge.
He made the crucial mistake of making Sherman a writer initially and was so unhappy with that decision that, after the RS version was done, he spent two years re-writing and re-reporting to make Sherman a bond salesman. But in all that time, Wolfe didn’t do any new reporting on society. Hence Judy McCoy and Maria Ruskin are not great characters. Although the two dinner party scenes–and especially the first one–are among the great set-pieces by this greatest writer of set-pieces.
With Man In Full, he’s already implicitly acknowledged the deficiency of Maria and Judy and he made Martha Croker into a much greater character. I think they cut this from my piece, but that’s only the third time he used the famed “New Journalism” interior-point-of-view device for a woman, and the first time in fiction. Even with the earlier stuff about Helene and Baby Jane, he didn’t do that but stuck with downstage narrator. The only two times he had done it prior, IIRC, were “The Life & Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl” and “Me Decade.”
Martha is a fully realized character. Even Serena is better than Judy or Maria (though Elizabeth is more of a McGuffin than a character). Wolfe recycles a bit for Martha–e.g., “The Invisible Wife” from one of those 1970s Harper’s vignettes–but she’s still very three dimensional.
* Before the heart issue, Wolfe had a major crisis of confidence about the book’s setting. Basically, he had all the business action taking place in NYC while Charlie would visit his plantation in South Georgia. After getting about halfway finished, he felt that this wasn’t working and he wanted to set the whole book in Atlanta. But that required moving down there for a while and doing a ton more reporting. So it was a major delay and also forced him to rewrite tons of stuff that had already been written.
Then he had all these subplots, including one on Japan, one on the art world, and one on TV news, that he never was able to work in to his satisfaction. So he completely ditched on the one on Japan. He used part of the art world one, and saved the rest for Back to Blood. And the TV news one he re-wrote into a short story called “Ambush at Fort Bragg.”
I had a clever theory about how the earthquake in MiF was symbolic of the deus ex machine, a tie-in between Greek drama and Greek philosophy (Epictetus). I thought it was rather clever but when I asked him about the meaning and purpose of the earthquake he said “I had to get Conrad out of there!” I think he tried to do too much, wrote himself into cul-de-sacs and corners, and wasn’t able to resolve all of them.
That said, I think the endings of Bonfire and Charlotte are perfect.
* Weak characters is a Wolfe weakness in general, but his characters serve their purpose admirably. For example, a minor but consistent theme throughout his novels is our insecurity over the often startling extent of our ignorance, all of which is rooted in our concern over social status. Maria is perfectly serviceable as a social-climbing pretty young thing who feels humiliated and indignant after a British ‘snob’ shows up her ignorance of who Christopher Marlowe was.
In the same scene Sherman feels some small degree of elation because he has heard of Marlowe. Both characters sense that people of their station probably should know who Marlowe was, so Sherman, although he scarcely knows anything more about Marlowe than Maria, has a social edge on her and consequently experiences that small degree of elation. The really interesting thing is that in Wolfe’s novels, petty though we might call it, we can no more will ourselves not to feel that elation – or that insecurity – than we can will the sun’s rays to not warm our skin; the workings of social status carry on in ruthless disregard of our volition – or our outcries.
We can also shift from elation to anxiety with alarming swiftness. Sherman has barely had time to bask in his Marlowe triumph when Maria relates the story of the flight she just took, when she was sitting next to the ‘Brit’ and flipping through a catalogue of ‘Reiner Fetting,’ a designer whose show she had just attended in ‘Milano.’ Sherman is bothered by Maria’s use of the Italian rather than English name for the city, not least, we’re told, because he has no idea of who Reiner Fetting is – it’s Sherman’s turn to find himself on unfamiliar turf – but we may also speculate whether Sherman’s annoyance isn’t compounded by the knowledge that an Italian artist has recently gifted Maria one of his paintings, to her obvious delight and to Sherman’s unease. (Sherman thought the painting trash, but it ” gave off the sanctimonious odor of serious art” and, said Maria, the painter had been featured in the NYT, so he felt forced to supply a considered opinion on it, but all he found himself capable of was contriving something about its “directness.”)
Not all us can hope to be art critics, of course, but we can sometimes find ourselves unexpectedly woefully ignorant. In Charlotte Simmons Jojo is left reeling after being unable to comply with his professor’s impromptu request to define – or even pronounce – certain words used in the term paper he has fraudulently submitted as his own work. Whatever elation we as readers might feel at the expense of the oafish jock dissipates when a still hot and bothered Jojo demands that his tutor, Adam, who wrote the paper, define those same words himself. Surprisingly, Adam is able to do so at once. Whether we find that plausible or not, I’m sure we know of someone in our lives whom we suspect would be able to do it with Adam’s aplomb, and that suspicion may produce disquiet about our own abilities.
* I naturally tend toward the mesomorphic physique, so I used to jog a lot to balance it out when I was in my 20s. With an American diet weightlifting just made me beefy and thick. Wolfe is totally on the mark about the psychological effect of different exercise regimes. Weightlifting makes you bigger, more confident and gives you a more “imposing” attitude (I wouldn’t call it aggressive — it’s more like a subtly menacing self-assuredness). Jogging makes you a little more flighty and skittish.
This might be saying a bit too much here, but hey, what do I care:
Once, after I’d been weightlifting a lot, doing squats and deadlifts and such and was up to around a fairly lean 220 lbs at my 6’1″, I attracted the attention of a black neighbor who invited me over on some pretext. I walked in and he (yes, he was a gay, although I didn’t know it when I walked in his apartment) locked the door behind us. Turned out the guy was an ex-con, and he wanted to get it on. So he whipped out a crack pipe, took a hit and then tried to get all cozy with me, and when I objected he gave me a “hard” look like he was going to get what he wanted no matter what I thought of it. Frankly, objectively speaking, it should have been a terrifying situation. However, In the subsequent adrenaline rush, and probably the crack cocaine contact high, I immediately noticed his scarred and thick knuckles (indicates fighting experience), and thought to myself in a rational, calm manner “OK, I’ve got to grab this guy because he knows how to box, and I’m probably stronger than he is, so I can toss him clean out the window if it comes to that.” It was kind of an insane way to think, but he saw me thinking it and backed off. He even opened the door when I commanded him to do so. This is the mentality you get when you’re pumping iron. That’s why inmates lift whenever they can. It works.
However, it’s telling that boxers train with both weightlifting and jogging, because being too confident and “set” in the ring could get you surprised in a bad way, even if you’re aerobically in great shape.
Devlin, BTW, is a real gem. The guy is totally independent, low-profile and sharp as a knife. I wish I could read more from him. Tom Wolfe has been more honest than most about sex reality, but that isn’t saying all that much since the 70s or so. When I watch old films from the 1950s such as The Third Man I’m shocked by how honest and realistic the portrayal of female nature is compared to today. Wolfe never makes it quite so blunt as that excellent film. I feel that having grown up mostly in the 1980s I was robbed of a decent cultural education, and I’ve paid for it dearly. Although, as Devlin has suggested, perhaps it’s best for young men not to know too much about women. I probably wouldn’t have my several beautiful kids if I’d been such a cynic. But then if it weren’t for the sexual revolution they’d probably all be living with me full-time.
* Long distance running lowers testosterone (at least 30 miles a week). Strength training raises testosterone. Man is not a horse. He was never meant to run marathons. He was meant to lift rocks, use his whole strength to kill an enemy in a hand-to-hand fight, and hurl projectiles at his foes. Be the man you were supposed to be and lift.
Seriously. I used to run marathons. I was depressed, I would gain weight, I had no aggression, and I couldn’t focus on anything. Now I just lift. It’s a world of difference. Turns out I never was an effete, passive dweeb. That was just a lack of T.
* F Roger Devlin is the shit. His work, particularly this one linked below is posted as canonical writing all over websites in the manosphere. He explains your marriage better than anyone else. And while I could have gotten links from all over the place to the article, I picked this one from dontmarry.com from the list of stuff that site thinks you should read “if’n” you get the bug to get married (disclosure. I am married and probably because of Roger Devlin but that is a very long story. But when I first started conversing with with my wife, I called her “Pollyandra” and rubbed the Devlin Writing in her face. )
Rotating Polyandry—and its Enforcers
https://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/rotating.pdf
The essence of the writing is a review of a book “Women’s Infidelity-Living in Limbo” by Michelle Langley. The author had noticed that for nothing she started hating her husband and becoming attracted to other men. She did 1000 interviews with other woman and found this pattern of polyandry, meaning multiple men, typically in serial relationships.
The pattern is thus, woman meets man, is attracted to man, mates with man, has child with man, aaaaaaannnnnnnnddd, after 4 years, that’s right, 4 years after, she suddenly finds herself attracted to other men.
So at first she figures, especially since All Women Are Like That, that there is nothing wrong with her, she is an angelic woman, and women never cheat, that’s what men do. So then if there is nothing wrong with her and she wants to get nailed by other men…
Then there is something wrong with that loser husband that fate has imposed on her. (Sound familiar)
Women go a couple of directions. They can act on this attraction and screw around. Some leave only to start the whole cycle over.
Often they don’t leave the husband but stay and have the affair. Many reported the sense of anger at coming back to their husbands after a tryst and expressing anger at him. Yes, coming back home after a business trip, walking around the house inspecting as if wearing a white glove, finding fault with everything, ripping the skin off of him for the crime of being the husband. If the paramour dumps them then the women “experienced extreme grief, became deeply depressed and expressed tremendous anger toward their husbands.” (towards their husbands!!).
Others may not act on the attraction but do act on the loss of attraction to the husband especially when ovulating. Some begin to pick pick pick at him, to rip the skin off of him, to push him, to even bait him into domestic violence in hope he’ll leave her.
Consider this bit from the essay linked above “A Woman in Full”:
“Consider the 1965 essay “The Woman Who Has Everything.” Helene is a rich young divorcée of 25. (Today she would be closer to 40. At 25 our metro-gals haven’t even begun to think about, much less actually married, their “starter husband.”) Helene has divorced Kurt because…well, for no discernable reason, although full custody of her son and “a great deal of alimony” no doubt helped smooth the passage.”
Polyandry.
The interesting thing to me is what is happening right now with this “Female Viagra” pill, flibanserin controversy. The FDA recently approved it. I wrote about this in 2013 when the FDA had rejected it. The pill claims to solve “low female libido”. The original writeup said it targeted women who literally had no sexual thoughts during the day as compared to men who typically have them all the time. In a doctor’s review after the 2013 rejection it was written “It is ineffective in solving a problem that does not exist.”
And feminists went crazy. Those men have viagra. It’s sexist that the FDA won’t approve a drug that will work for women. The pharma company Sprout bought the rights to the drug from the developer after the 2013 FDA rejection. And there formed this “group”, actually a network of 24 nonprofit and for-profit groups and companies that have come together to advocate for drugs addressing female sexual dysfunction. And these non-profits are getting paid by the “profits” for participation this “grass roots” campaign to approve this drug to help women with “Low Sexual Libido”.
This shows the nonsense of women, how far removed they are from the reality of their own sexuality and the trap that they have built themselves. They refused to address the dimorphism of human sexuality and their need for masculine males. They have no libido because they are not attracted to their partner. They have gone through the 4 years and come out the other side. I would be many of these “Low Libido” women are probably HB4-5, and are repulsed by the man that wants them. Hypergamy. Others are in relationships with men that play the Dr Phil rules for marriage and have become Low T males as function of their relationship with their wives and their roles at non-physical work.
I you have a “Low Libido” woman here’s what you do.
First you immediately begin to lift weights, heavy weight. It is the thing that comes up first when googling for “Building Testosterone”.
And second you deploy Dread.
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/dread/
The first better describes the whats and hows of dread game; the second describes the “whys”, the psychology of it.
And read the Devlin essay linked above. It will explain your wife’s behavior to you, or even better, it will explain your ex-wives behavior.
This is an obscure little paper about Animal Polyandry. Don’t get hung up on some idea of polygamy when thinking of polyandry. This isn’t some woman living with more than one men. This is better though of as “Mr Right Now and what can he do for me.” Polyandry, after researching it, to me is the natural sexual order of women. Devlin writes about the effect of serial polyandry, what the reality of modern marriage is serial polyandry. This paper describes the benefits of it to the female.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/mbe/pdf/03_Hosken.pdf
The only male defense against it is Dread.
* …hypergamy if allowed to run riot generally encourages men to take short cuts to Alpha: ever greater doses of violence. Ever wonder WHY Black neighborhoods have much greater amounts of violence than White, Asian, even Mexican neighborhoods? Or why during Segregation Black violence was still higher than White neighborhoods but much lower than today?
Black women don’t need to self-moderate (or have it done for them) hypergamy to select a provider who will stick with them and their kids for a lifetime. Thus, selection for thugs and thuggish behavior. Read Jill Leovy’s account of murder in South Central (“Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America”) and you will see an astonishing amount of the murders are committed simply to increase the status and thus chance of sex for the perpetrator.
Anti-colonialists and Black Nationalists both made the point that no society can be stable with great masses of people outside any interest and ownership. Female hypergamy unrestrained means a few Big Men monopolizing all the women and every other man a serf/slave/peasant. A female paradise to be sure, but one marked by violence at every turn since the quickest way and often only way for men on the bottom to have sex and children is a bloody peasant revolt, pillage, plunder, etc. Mohammedism is a good example of that — Mohammed took the tribes of Arabia, disunited, and united them in killing other men and taking their women as sex slaves.
The Western Way of Life has been to leave women mostly free, but also responsible. If a woman chose badly because some bad boy made her tingle down there but said bad boy ended up on the gallows, her children would starve and so would she. She might have resentfully chosen instead some dutiful “boring” but nice man who would only work himself to death providing for her and children, hating every minute. But that society moved ever forwards into more peace and greater prosperity.
And there is another critical aspect. The Western Way of War, as noted by Victor Davis Hanson, has been shock infantry battles often lasting hours or even a day, sometimes more. [Much longer in modern wars.] This means a premium on not slaves in battle, but free men fighting on their own account in slaughter as what amounts to one long harvest. Initiative, resilience, staying in line with one’s fellows not being a “warrior” prone to heady advances and panicked retreats mattered most. Men with their own wives secure will fight like that; men simply drone slaves turn and run at the first opportunity.
But hey, wars have been abolished forever along with violence because Obama! or something.
* “I’m not sure how women wanting to upgrade their men is a bad thing”
It hinges on whether they are open to short term relationships. If a girl takes the attitude that she will have sex with the most desirable man who is willing to sleep with her, regardless of long-term commitment, what will normally happen is that she will have a series of short term relationships in her twenties and early 30s until men lose interest in her.
All along the way, she will complain that “men only want one thing” and fruitlessly read Cosmo articles on “how to get your man to commit.” Ultimately she will wonder “why are there no good men left?”
Why is this? It’s the simple mathematics of hypergamy. If 80% of girls want the top 5% of men, most of the girls will get laid (there are plenty of men happy to oblige them), but it’s not mathematically possible for even a majority of those girls to end up married to the man who was willing to have sex with them.
On the other hand, if girls hold out for marriage, it’s not a big deal but at the same time it’s much more difficult in such a situation for anyone to “marry up.” Not without polygamy. Again, it’s just the mathematics of the situation.
