Heresies: The Kandy Kolor, Tangerine Flake, Streamlined Novel

If I were asked to pick (which I wasn’t) the most important literary event of the 1960’s, I would be tempted to say it was the arrival of Tom Wolfe in the American literary marketplace.

I come to this view a bit reluctantly. My first exposure to Wolfe occurred sometime in 1964 when he was writing for New York, at that time a Sunday supplement to the Herald Tribune. This dude was a walking gimmick, that’s all there was to it. From his limp Veronica Lake hair-do all the way to his rattatat periods and exclamation points, he was an obvious fraud, a gaudy rip-off artist who even had the arrogance to trade on the name of a dead American novelist—one of my early heroes no less. This was the final straw, the unforgiveable affront. Let him have his white suits, his Lucius Beebe walking sticks, his interminable punctuation marks. But, to go rummaging among the ruins of a fallen giant of American fiction for instant recognition? This was too much. The man had no sense of decency.

And that was not all. Most struggling writers of my generation (and earlier) grew up on a steady diet of fiction, virtually unrelieved by any other kind of writing. The novel was creative writing, creative writing was the novel, period. All else—journalism, essays, criticism, you name it—belonged to contenders in the literary championship stakes—Norman Mailer, William Styron, Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, a few others— but none that had quite scaled the heights of the giants who came before them. It was our goal, those of us who are somewhere between thirty and forty today, to surpass Mailer and Styron and ascend to the highest rungs of the ladder.

Then Tom Wolfe came along and said, substantially, that one need not be a novelist to do this. More than that, he started to make the claim that the novel was actually declining in importance while non-fiction (that drab catch-all field no one wanted to be caught dead writing in) was assuming new dimensions and would soon emerge as the dominant literary art form.

No one took Wolfe too seriously back in the middle sixties. No one wanted to. Our whole lives, the sum total of our training as apprentice authors, was geared to producing the Great American Novel (as though a few had not been written already). Now Wolfe was telling us to change directions. He was injecting new rules into the ballgame—at halftime no less. It wasn’t fair. He was simply being self-indulgent, trying to insinuate himself, a journalist, into the creative writing sweepstakes. Most of us, myself included, continued to mold ourselves according to the Hemingway image, growing beards and knocking about the world, translating our experiences into hard glittering novels that would out-Hemingway the master. (Clifford Irving, half a generation ahead of me, carried the romance all the way to a sun-soaked finca off the coast of Spain).

Then something happened which caused some of us to pause a moment (only a moment, mind you) and take another look at what was going on. In 1965, Truman Capote, a leading American novelist for Christ’s sake, published In Cold Blood and called it a non-fiction novel. Non Fiction! There was that term again assuming the stature of literature. Was this a temporary aberration? Had Capote sold out for the sake of capitalizing on a passing fad—and making a bundle while he was at it? Or was this for real? Was something new and exciting happening in American literature which was destined to make a lasting impact? For those of us still trying to get published, these were more than just academic questions.

In 1967, another major American novelist (at least as far as the literary mafia was concerned) wrote a book called Armies of the Night and subtitled it, “The Novel as History, History as a Novel.” First Capote, now Mailer. This was getting serious. Articles debating the status of the novel began to appear all over the place. Is the novel dead or not? Who cared whether or not God was dead? This was the novel we were talking about. There was no question now that something big was happening. The literature of the late 1960’s was definitely taking a new form.

By 1970, people like Wolfe, Gay Talese, Garry Wills, Jack Newfield, Pete Hamill, Jimmy Breslin, Mailer and Capote the journalists were beginning to be discussed more frequently than William Styron, J.D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Mailer and Capote the novelists, and other literary heroes of the late 1950’s. Like it or not, a new kind of book was being written, a non-fiction book that had all the excitement, all the style, all the literary finesse and dramatic impact of the traditional novel. Some people were calling this book New Journalism, others the non-fiction novel, personalized journalism or novelized reportage. No matter. It was the best non-fiction writing ever produced for the simple reason that our best writers were pumping their energies into it instead of into the traditional novel. Even established novelists had become turncoats.

(I’m not arguing here that this style of non-fiction writing was invented during the 1960’s; merely that Tom Wolfe was the first one to see its potential as literature, and that largely because of his efforts more and more of it is being written today than ever before.)

What has happened so far in the field of non-fiction is only the beginning. Wolfe pointed out this potential to us and got us started in a different direction, much as Gertrude Stein opened the door to a new generation of novelists in the 1920’s. Just as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck were primarily the children of Stein, so the current crop of American writers (including the “new” Capote and Mailer who will deny it to the bitter end) is largely the product of Tom Wolfe’s breakthroughs of the early 1960’s.

It is worthwhile mentioning here that Wolfe never claimed the novel is in its final days as a literary art form. He never fell into the Novel is Dead School, as did Seymour Krim and a few others who were in a snit because they could never write a decent novel to begin with. Wolfe’s position all along has been that contemporary novelists had failed to grapple directly with the changing American social scene of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, and this neglect created a vacuum which was promptly filled by journalists and other non-fiction writers. While novelists were experimenting with anti-heroes and the anti-novel during the past decade (and losing the reading public with these efforts), non-fiction writers entered the breach and stole the ballgame away from them. Wolfe maintains even today that the novel will be with us for a long time, though it has already been reduced to a secondary status behind the new non-fiction which continues to grow in importance.

I think Wolfe is right in this, but I would carry his argument a step further. It is my own contention that the fiction/non-fiction dichotomy will eventually synthesize into a totally different category which will be both fiction and non-fiction at the same time. Today we have Wolfean non-fiction which utilizes novelistic techniques—that is, scenes, dialogue, characterization and narrative to give it the dramatic appeal of the novel. I would say that my second book, It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, fits into the latter category. It is substantially a factual tale told primarily in the style of a novel.

However, my third book, Here Comes Immortality, goes a step further. Here I have actually blended non-fiction and fiction, which is different from the mere use of novelistic techniques in a non-fiction book. As I see it, Here Comes Immortality pushes Wolfean non-fiction into a new dimension; at least, I have never heard Wolfe talk about this next stage at all. What I have attempted to do is present the factual case for life extension to the reader, then dramatize it in the form of a speculative fantasy about the future—all in the same book. What such a category should be labeled I have no idea at this point. I don’t object to the term non-fiction novel. Perhaps someone can come up with something better.

Despite the fact that so many of us have taken our lead from Tom Wolfe (and many more undoubtedly will through the 1970’s), he is one of the most criticized writers in American today. He has been denounced as a counterrevolutionary by New York Review of Books (interestingly, Hemingway was criticized in the 1930’s for failing to get actively involved in the Communist Party; he always maintained that ideology was no substitute for art), and our literary mandarins insist on perpetuating the myth that Norman Mailer is the “Champ” of American writers—the same Mailer who rescued a foundering reputation as a Novelist-Who-Couldn’t-Deliver-The Big-One by turning to Wolfean non-fiction.

But exactly!

Wolfe has taken lately to tooting his own horn in the pages of New York and Esquire. Fair enough. So far I haven’t seen anyone else, not even his old buddies Breslin et al., rise to do battle on his behalf. (Breslin is now busy trying to fulfill his earlier ambition to become a novelist, if you please—though not very successfully, judging by his first.)

Anyway, let me lift my own voice in praise of Tom Wolfe. Hosanna! Without his influence I don’t know whether my own work would be quite the same as it is today. It’s hard to say. But Wolfe did manage to get something different started. He’s entitled to his due.