The Great Apostle of the Surface: Aaron Haspel’s Eulogy to Tom Wolfe (1930-2018)
“Tom Wolfe died on a Monday. He probably spent Sunday writing or reporting, as he had done, steadily, for sixty years. After his last book, The Kingdom of Speech, was published two years ago, when Wolfe was 85, he noted in interviews that he had another five or six planned. It's a shame that he didn't get round to them, because Wolfe, though somewhat diminished, remained a joy to read until the end.
He had about thirty-five years at the top of his game, from his first book of journalism, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (1965), through his second novel, A Man in Full (1998), a more persuasive brief for Stoicism than Seneca ever managed. It became fashionable to sneer at Wolfe. It was bad enough that he was rich and famous, but then he jumped himself up and began writing novels, infringing on literary turf. On top of that he wrote manifestos laughing at the belletrists for their mopey navel-gazing. It all got to be too much to take. An oh-so-literary novelist friend of mine once repeated to me the canard that The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) is ‘mere journalism.’ In fact, as I informed him, it is prophecy. The race-hustling Reverend Bacon appears before anyone knew who Al Sharpton was, and the search for the Great White Defendant (the DA, Abe Weiss, is known to his office as ‘Ahab’) continues earnestly to this day.
For the reader new to Wolfe, if any such remain, I suggest the following sequence: Radical Chic, The Right Stuff, ‘The Big League Complex’ (from Kandy-Kolored), ‘The Mid-Atlantic Man’ (from The Pump House Gang), ‘The Intelligent Coed’s Guide to America’ and ‘The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening’ (from Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine), The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Painted Word. Then sample as you see fit.
Wolfe, like his hero Balzac, was the great apostle of surface. I will conclude with a passage of surface-philosophy—it happens to be from Bonfire—that will make Wolfe’s vast influence on me obvious: ‘The Bororo Indians, a primitive tribe who live along the Vermelho River in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, believe that there is no such thing as a private self. The Bororos regard the mind as an open cavity, like a cave or a tunnel or an arcade, if you will, in which the entire village dwells and the jungle grows. In 1969 Jose M.R. Delgado, the eminent Spanish brain physiologist, pronounced the Bororos correct. For nearly three millennia, Western philosophers had viewed the self as something unique, something encased inside each person’s skull, so to speak. This inner self had to deal with and learn from the outside world, of course, and it might prove incompetent in doing so. Nevertheless, at the core of one’s self there was presumed to be something irreducible and inviolate. Not so, said Delgado. ‘Each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment.’ The important word was ‘transitory,’ and he was talking not about years but about hours. He cited experiments in which healthy college students lying on beds in well-lit but soundproofed chambers, wearing gloves to reduce the sense of touch and translucent goggles to block out specific sights, began to hallucinate within hours. Without the entire village, the whole jungle, occupying the cavity, they had no minds left. He cited no investigations of the opposite case, however. He did not discuss what happens when one’s self—or what one takes to be one’s self—is not a mere cavity open to the outside world but has suddenly become an amusement park to which everybody, todo el mundo, tout le monde, comes scampering, skipping, and screaming, nerves a-tingle, loins aflame, ready for anything, all you’ve got, laughs, tears, moans, giddy thrills, gasps, horrors, whatever, the gorier the merrier. Which is to say, he told us nothing of the mind of a person at the center of a scandal in the last quarter of the twentieth century.’”—Aaron Haspel
