University of Virginia Library

Tom Wolfe's 'Radical Chic'

Poo-Pooing The Mau-Mauers (ZONK)

By Rob Buford
Cavalier Daily Staff Writer

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
By Tom Wolfe
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 153 pp. $5.95.

Hard to say what hurts more: Torrents of
manic abuse from the Left ("Wolfe... that
racist dog!") or gleaming adulation from
William F. Buckley ("Wolfe... America's
most skillful writer"). One guesses neither gets
too far under Tom Wolfe's non-skin.

The hard fact remains (and this hurts) that
Buckley may be absolutely right — for the wrong reasons. Many of us, who cherish
Wolfe's earlier efforts in the new journalism
(esp. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) as just
as essential to growing up in America as
Ovaltine and French fries, somehow must
grapple with Monarchist Buckley's praise.
And, more importantly, with the new book
itself.

* * * * * *

Although it might have been easy to plead for
more time to consider the question, Radical Chic has
been out of the bag since last Summer, when parts
appeared in New York, thus no one can say he
couldn't see it coming.

It all grew out of a party-meeting held by
Leonard and Felicla Bernstein a year ago in their
Park Avenue 13-room duplex. This last of a series of
such gatherings was aimed at publicizing among New
York Society the very real plight of the Black
Panthers. Fund raising, too, was a goal of what
became Radical Chic.

Radical Chic, Wolfe says, "invariably favors
radicals who seem primitive, exotic, and romantic,
such as the grape workers... the Panthers, with
their leather pieces, Afros, shades, and shoot-outs;
and the Red Indians..." As for the Bernstein fiasco,
the chicness is undeniable, but the presence of
Oakland Field Marshall Don Cox, his fellow Panthers
and several of "their women" could hardly render
radical a group including Otto Preminger, Barbara
Walters and a confusion of well-intentioned liberals.

Mass Freak-Out

White Guilt up against the wall of Black Power
offered itself as a neat, self-contained description of
the whole matter of Radical Chic, given the curiosity
of a simpleton. Later, the New York Times
summoned its maximum of editorial chagrin: Good
God! Panthers wined and dined, perhaps toasted!,
right out in the open, on old Park Avenue! Delirium
Tremendum!

The Bernsteins turned out most shocked of all,
convinced of a plot against them when Felicia's
hand-delivered letter of reply to the Times failed to
appear soon enough.

Wolfe's account is most notable for its arbitrary
humor - the cutting, merciless, defoliating humor of
dainty hors d'oeuvre (served by stand-in white

servants) and puffed mints bouncing off walls of
pathos. Few question the skill of the Humorist.
Some critics, however, demand something else.
Wolfe, they argue, must take on the responsibility of
Involved Social Critic.

Key here is Involved. While
moral consciousness and the new
Journalism have yet to reach any
solid relationship, and may never
do so, one thing is certain: Tom
Wolfe is apolitical(Consciousness)
and nothing so far suggests he will
change on that score.

Wizard -vs- Self

His provisional objectivity,
qualified (as with any artist) by his
choice of subject, attests to his
journalist's sense. Wolfe's tendency
to exercise near-supernatural
omniscience at times runs against
certain sensibilities. (So-and-So was
mulling over such-and-such in his
head when X occurred.) In exactly
such hazy zones lies the wordy
(paradoxically wordless) magic
Wolfe practices — Wolfe the Wizard,
forever refusing to materialize
satisfactorily for those clamoring to
glimpse Wolfe the Self. Radical
Chic emerges by far the nearest
Wolfe has ever been to eliminating
(suppressing? Concealing?) his own
ego, rather, even his human
presence in the scenes he draws
with such incredible literary
presence. If the magic falls
somewhere between the Man and
the Author, then its territory is
expanding.

Analogous to this, at least in
intent, is Mailer's renunciation of
ego in starting Of A Fire On The
Moon: the difference being that
Mailer must become Aquarius,
clearly a new Mailer, whereas
Wolfe's shift appears almost total,
his self almost not at all. The result
must be overwhelming confusion
for anyone speculating on his
political inclinations, moral
convictions or personal values.

Wonderment

Wrong... Tom Wolfe lives and
writes for what must be termed
wonderment, his instinct for a good
story, his art which allows, no,
forces us to laugh briefly and
completely at that great
unlaughable (yes, unutterable)
reality.

Wolfe's inducement of laughter
at liberal foibles or radical dogma
or even abject misery could never
have passed without offending its
subjects and their partisan
sympathizers. Of them, the
super-serious will find nothing of
value and must go on condemning
the writer for his refusal to take up
a banner, no matter how just the
cause.

* * * * * *

"Who is this Wolfe, anyway?"
they demand.

"Some racist dog from
Richmond," comes the answer, in
itself knowledgeable for its
awareness that this Wolfe had
nothing to do with Look
Homeward Angel, but ignorant for
its failure to grasp the facts: that
this Wolfe neither writes of angels,
nor, often, looks homeward. As
such he is not likely to be actively
political, Partisan? Good God! He
could be dangerous.

"Virginia?"

To digress, Wolfe is, in fact,
from Richmond, Virginia. At St.
Christopher's he edited the school
paper in the late forties, and at
Washington and Lee his chief
ambition was to become a
professional baseball player.

That ended soon and a
doctorate from Yale in American
Studies took its place. Newspaper
reporting, pieces published in
Esquire and The Kandy-Kolored
Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
(1965), followed by the Acid Test
and The Pump House Gang (1968)
led, among other places, to a speech
at the old school in Richmond two
years ago.

He talked about Junior Johnson.
Racing Car Johnson from North
Carolina, about whom major parts
of K-K T-F Streamline Baby were
written. After the speech we
learned (who but Wolfe could be so
positive?) that Ken Kesey was then,
maybe at that moment, exploring
the pyramids for Nasser.

"Egypt?!" . . . "Ken Kesey??!!"

Who???

"Who IS this Wolfe?" This Wolfe
who tended to stop traffic by his
relatively freaky appearance (far
out clothes, longish hair, Panama
hat) in Richmond-wise straighter
days in the Capital of the
Confederacy.

This Wolfe, who one can picture
perfectly bestowing the
Southernest of charms on an old
lady, who is, by the way, loving it:
and this not twenty minutes after
deplaning from a flight from
California, where, several hours
previously, the (same?) Wolfe had
been conversing with, Good God!,
Hell's Angels, Black Panthers,
Martians!! Who is this Wolfe?

* * * * * *

Man-Making the Flak Catchers is
about the welfare system in San
Francisco. It is, perhaps, more
depressing than Radical Chic, which
owes to the realization that the
"game" depicted represents a larger
evil and is more destructive for
those involved.

Massah lays money on the first
black leader to appear with a bag of
weapons he took off his boys last
night. Basic flaws of the welfare
system, conceptual and practical,
become absurd for their
obviousness, any escape short of
cosmic laughter comes by way of
condemning Wolfe's motives.

The "racist dog" dares to
compare balding Afro-wearers to
"that super-Tom on the Uncle Ben
Rice box, or Bozo the Clown." Not
since Mailer described his last
WASP has such an ethnic slur been
countenanced! From the sanctums
comes the old cry, indignantly:
"This Wolfe goes too far!"

The suggestion that Wolfe is
blaming the blacks for welfare
corruption, or that he says they, in
fact, are responsible for the
national schizophrenia we call
uptightness is absurd. More than
misinterpretation, it involves a
mode of attack which is mainly
political, not literary. If accepted,
this bias would threaten art which
refuses to propagandize and
dedicate itself to The Cause.

Non deliberate Wolfe

Wolfe's refusal to be Auden's
"deliberate man" in a sociopolitical
context, his elusive and invisible
elements, his aloof, penetrating wit,
which proves so unsettling to his
detractors — his very magic — all of
these defy logic and rationality and
persuasion.

In a rational world, "ordered"
maybe by Mumford's Pentagon of
Power, or perhaps the concrete
Corporate State Reich warns of,
one suspects Tom Wolfe (a man
quite "able at times to cry") would
be playing sandlot baseball with the
children.