The 1960’s in the United States was an era in American history that was unbridled by existing societal norms. 1950’s conservatism was masked by a new light that comprised bright colors and war protesting by teenage baby boomers. Everything was changing. Hair grew while clothing shrank. Women turned from long dresses to miniskirts and hot pants, and men experimented with patterns and color in their suits as the 60’s culture unfurled.
But while business men maintained their professional appearance and followed all the rules, one man donned his alabaster jacket and contributed to all of the commotion. Tom Wolfe not only shook things up with his signature white suits, but the young journalist expelled the static template that was journalism before the 1960s.
Along with Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, among others, Wolfe fashioned a new way to delve into the time period in a way that, as he states it, gave “people news they didn’t know was news.”1 By focusing on less prevalent subjects in his articles and writing in less formal structures, Wolfe’s “new journalism” technique captured 1960’s culture in the United States in a realism that other reporting could not.
Wolfe wrote in a decade that was thwarted with the Vietnam War, where history and new culture were unfolding rapidly. Starting with the Bay of Pigs invasion and the construction of the Berlin Wall, then surging through Vietnam, the 1960’s fostered globalization and the press was hot on the wire to report it. With television, journalists were able to bring home a new view of the war, and the press filled the public with such fodder that sparked the cultural revolution of the decade.
But while the press was focusing on the war, Wolfe was focusing on social status in a book called “The Pump House Gang.”2 First published in 1968, “The Pump House Gang” was written in a time that was fleshed out with ideas of war and change. Wolfe, however, chose to instead focus on a variety of lifestyles in that era. Wolfe starts off by introducing a group of surfers from California, the title characters, and moves on to visit Carol Doda, the exotic dancer, Larry Lynch, a participant in the noonday underground scene, and Hugh Hefner, the business mogul behind Playboy clubs and the magazine.
These subjects, along with the other that Wolfe chooses to detail, encompass much of what was going on in the 60’s. Yet, Wolfe does not go on about the specific events that they were involved in as a journalist in this time period would. Instead, he goes to great lengths to describe his subjects and their personalities, detailing every movement and sound. When writing a story on a subject, Wolfe says he can spend anywhere from two hours to four trips with someone to get all essential information.3 He then uses his experience and information to create something that is completely different than any other person would have written.
The crucial element to Wolfe’s “New Journalism” is the subjectivity that emerges from the excessive information gathered by spending time with a subject. While some journalists value objectivity in writing, Wolfe says he values subjectivity because it “enables the writer to get inside the subjective reality—not his own, but of the characters he’s writing about.”4 Wolfe doesn’t use the details of his research to answer the “who, what, when, where and why” of a particular event like a typical journalist in the 1960’s. He spends time with the subject to get into their brains to attack the event from a perspective, a technique that was, and still can be, controversial in non-fiction.
Controversial journalism was not unique in the ‘60’s. Along with this new style of creative nonfiction came advocacy journalism and precision journalism.5 Advocacy journalism was a style that responded to the social turmoil of the decade.6 Advocacy journalists’ main goal was to inform the public about such things as lynching, mobs, and assassinations, but they did so by formally declaring a bias for or against certain issues. While advocacy journalists were successful informants to the public, they only presented one side of the story.
Precision journalists of the time, like advocacy journalists, sought to inform the public but did so by delving deep into the investigation of an issue. They were often more objective than other journalists of the time because they surveyed, interviewed, researched and probed into all sides of the story.7 With such tactics, however, precision journalists did not dive into the perspective of one specific subject as Wolfe did. They presented all fact while resisting emotion. By avoiding the true perspective inside the story, precision journalists lacked the roundedness that new journalism provided.
New journalism, on the other hand, strained the raw emotion from advocacy journalism and added the pure fact from precision journalism. While new journalists strove to create a story that was completely factual, they aimed at a report that read like a novel.8 To do so, they used techniques, such as using dialogue instead of quotations to “give insight into the motivations behind actions instead of simple descriptions of them.”9 Wolfe called these writing styles “techniques of realism.”10 (Critic 65).
Along with writing with his subject’s perspective, Tom Wolfe also strayed from typical journalism of the 1960’s by illustrating his writing with local tongue. To use dialogue instead of quotations, Wolfe tossed in hyphens and exclamation points to make speech more realistic. Techniques like onomatopoeia and inappropriate punctuation were also used to add to the realism. All of the words Wolfe quoted were actually spoken, but they were pieced together to aid in the narration of the piece. Wolfe spelled the words just as they sounded, throwing in capitalizations, ellipses and italics to emphasize certain points. Reading his writing becomes an experience, as if the reader were there with the subject.
The differences between journalism styles during the 1960’s become apparent when two articles on the same subject, one by Wolfe and one by another journalist of that time, are compared. Specifically, an article on Hugh Hefner published in the New York Times in 1964 and the chapter titled “King of the Status Dropouts” in Wolfe’s “The Pump House Gang” illustrate the different realities portrayed by Wolfe and other writers.
In “The Pump House Gang,” Wolfe dedicates an entire chapter to Hugh Hefner. The journalist describes the genius behind the Playboy empire as a recluse, starting off the chapter titled “King of the Status Dropouts” by explaining that Hefner “Doesn’t go out, doesn’t see the light of day, doesn’t put his hide out in God’s own unconditioned Chicago air for months on end; years.”11 He continues by composing and illustration of Hefner as 150 pounds, like the “tender-tympany green heart of an artichoke.” Within the first paragraph, Wolfe also rambles off nearly twenty adjectives that describe of the room in which Hefner sits upon meeting the journalist. The list not only describes the room, but it also reflects the loneliness of the business mogul.
The list of words is beyond the journalistic style of other writers in the 1960’s such as Peter Bart, who also wrote an expose on Hefner, published in The New York Times in 1964. Bart’s article focuses entirely on Hefner, but it uses a different style from Wolfe. Bart, like Wolfe, uses the first paragraph to describe Hefner’s physical appearance, calling him “a gaunt and rather somber young man of 37 who in the last 10 years has built an imposing if unorthodox empire.”12 Both paragraphs focus on the same subject, yet Bart’s does so with one complete sentence, avoiding journalistic faux paus of that time.
Wolfe, on the other hand, uses exclamation points and sentence fragments all in the first paragraph of his chapter. He flowers his text with similes and active description that create the obscure realism in Wolfe’s writing. When describing the way that Hefner moves, Wolfe uses the word “heeewack,” but Bart does not touch on Hefner’s movement at all.13 Wolfe even describes the sound of the rotating bed in Hefner’s residence with “…rrr…rrr…rrr…”14
While it seems that Wolfe’s focus in his chapter is the specific description of Hefner’s nimble and isolated persona, Bart chooses to focus mainly on the subjects accomplishments. He outlines the setbacks that Hefner encountered up until that point in his business career and describes the mogul’s current success and future goals. Bart uses direct quotes from the subject in a way that feels censored, unlike Wolfe’s dramatic wordplay.
The New York Times writer also underplays Hefner’s personal life and isolationism, yet touches on it briefly by saying Hefner was “by nature a remote man—friends and family describe him as a ‘loner’” and states that Hefner spends most of his time working on his magazine.15 This is nearly the only similarity between the two writers, but Bart so severely downplays his seclusion when compared to Wolfe. The reader feels informed after reading Bart’s article, yet they feel as if they have met Hefner himself upon finishing the chapter in “The Pump House Gang.”
Though it may be appealing for a reader to sense such realism in Wolfe’s writing, writers of that time criticized Wolfe for the techniques he used in gathering information. Journalists in the 1960’s were writing down quotes while Wolfe was taking in masses of details, making sure to get exact dialogue. He then would take the dialogue and rearrange it in order to tell a more effective story. Some journalists called this method deceitful.16 Alan Trachtenberg from The Partisan Review wrote that Wolfe’s apparent spontaneity was actual the result of “most arch manipulation and manufacture,” claiming that the resulting illusion is a “calculated product that disguises what it is we are actually reading.”17
It would be easy for Wolfe to lose credibility from peers such as Trachtenberg after two of his articles in 1965 were found to be completely false. Wolfe wrote articles for the Herald-Tribune that criticized the New Yorker, questioning the magazine’s editorial behavior.18 When people confronted Wolfe about the “stupefyingly false” reporting, Wolfe just laughed about it. 19 Other journalists who wrote on NASA’s space program said that Wolfe’s account in “The Right Stuff” also included “outright lies.”20
It is this false reporting that would categorize Wolfe’s new journalism into fiction over non-fiction. Wolfe, however, deems it necessary to use this technique when creating a piece of non-fiction. He defends his style by saying, “what I try to do is re-create a scene from a triple point of view: the subject’s point of view, my own, and that of the other people watching.”21
The collaboration of three perspectives requires manipulation of order to make a story logically flow. He claims that his technique is similar to how people write their autobiographies. The new journalist says that readers put trust into the writer of an autobiography to recall his life stories factually and therefore should do the same with non-fiction writers.22 According to Wolfe, accurate information is crucial because falsities could lead to lost trust, which could ultimately lead to the destruction of non-fiction as a genre.
Still, some critics shame Wolfe for such attention to mundane detail. Emile Capouya from the Saturday Review in 1965 wrote that Wolfe’s focused mannerisms made his writing less effective. He said, “The notion that every fact, activity, mannerism, detail of costume is significant, is a vulgar error.”23 Capouya’s view as a fellow journalist in that time period illustrates the difference of journalism in the 1960’s and new journalism. While some found all-encompassing detail to add to the realism, others like Capouya found this to be a waste of time and altogether uninteresting.
The differences between Wolfe and other journalists in the ‘60’s were vast, but Wolfe still fell into the category of new journalism in the 1960’s. There were other new journalists in this time period that were capturing the attention of the baby boomers, yet Wolfe separated himself even further from the rest by distinguishing himself from new journalists like Truman Capote, Hunter Thompson, and Norman Mailer. Thompson used the character, “Duke” to play his part in his stories, while Mailer inserted himself directly into the story of “The Armies of the Night” in 1967.24, 25 (CNN 1,2).
Wolfe, on the other hand, avoided emphasizing himself into the story when others injected themselves directly into the narrative.26 With Wolfe out of the mental picture, the reader falls into a realistic voyeurism, as if they were the ones observing the scene from across a table.
Though Wolfe was sometimes criticized by his peers and readers for his “new” way of writing, the redeeming qualities are what make him still popular today. Starting with “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,” and after publishing “The Pump House Gang” and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” on the same day, Wolfe is still in the public eye. His most recent book, “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” a novel, was published in 2004, and his flashy white suits still make him recognizable to not only the baby boomers, but to their children as well.27
In the midst of the Vietnam War and a frenzy of motivated television reporters, Wolfe still stood out as a popular journalist of the 1960’s. His uncharacteristic writing techniques brought realism to the decade without detailing specific events, while other reporters of that time could not inform their audience with as much entertainment or flair. These differences become ever more obvious when comparing a Wolfe article to any other journalist of that time’s writing on the same subject. Though Wolfe has been criticized throughout the years for these questionable methods and apparent fact errors, he still captured the decade in a way that rocketed Wolfe to the forefront of creative non-fiction.
Notes:
1. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, editor, Conversations with Tom Wolfe (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), 9.
2. Doug Shomette, editor, The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992), 15
3. Prenshaw, Conversations with Tom Wolfe, 13.
4. ibid., 45.
5. Yale-New Havens Teachers Institute, “The Revolution in Journalism with an Emphasis on the 1960’s and 1970’s.” Yale University. http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1983/4/83.04.05.x.html (accessed April 10 , 2008).
6. Grassroots Editor, “Who was Gene Cervi?” Missouri Southern State University. http://www.mssu.edu/iswne/grpdfs/summer00.pdf (accessed April 10, 2008).
7. Yale-New Havens Teachers Institute, “The Revolution in Journalism with an Emphasis on the 1960’s and 1970’s.” Yale University. http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1983/4/83.04.05.x.html (accessed April 10 , 2008).
8. Shomette, The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe, 65.
9. ibid., 65.
10. ibid., 65.
11. Tom Wolfe, The Pump House Gang (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 49.
12. Peter Bart, “Playboy of the Magazine World,” New York Times, May 7, 1964, Advertising section.
13. Wolfe, The Pump House Gang, 52.
14. ibid., 61.
15. Bart, “Playboy of the Magazine World.”
16. Shomette, The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe, 71.
17. ibid., 71.
18. ibid., 128.
19. ibid., 128-129.
20. ibid., 129.
21. Prenshaw, Conversations with Tom Wolfe, 10.
22. ibid., 163.
23. Shomette, The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe, 8.
24. CNN Entertainment, “Literary Lion Norman Mailer Dies.” Todd Leopold. “http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/11/10/mailer.obit/index.html. (accessed April 14, 2008).
25. CNN Entertainment, “Hunter S. Thompson dead at 67.” http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/books/02/21/thompson.obit. (accessed April 14, 2008).
26. Shomette, The Critical Response to Tom Wolfe, 71.
27. Tom Wolfe, “About Tom Wolfe.” Bio. http://www.tomwolfe.com/bio.html (accessed April 14, 2008).
skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A compilation of some articles/papers I've written. Just to store them. :)
