by Mark Bowden
Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the ultimate task of the novelist was to create an imaginary world that seems real to the reader, but which, of course, is not. Elaine Showalter in the Chronicle of Higher Education, along with Mendelsohn and a few others, made the mistake of taking Wolfe’s description of Dupont Univeristy too literally, and so felt the need to argue that real-life elite schools are better than that. But Wolfe is not Upton Sinclair, exposing the horrors of a meatpacking plant. The novel’s university, like Charlotte, is an exaggeration (the very idea of an Ivy League college having a national championship basketball team is a dizzying leap). Despite all his bluster about Émile Zola and the importance of social realism, at heart Wolfe is not a realist. The New York of Sherman McCoy, the Atlanta of Charlie Croker, and the Dupont University of Charlotte Simmons are caricatures, not faithful portraits. With Dupont University Wolfe projects the nightmarish—take his “rutrutrutrutrut,” for instance—moral consequences of a philosophy that won’t admit the existence of self, much less soul, and imagines one pure, intellectually honest character thrust into that distopia. Poorly executed, a work of extended analogy like this usually comes off as stiff and contrived; I Am Charlotte Simmons is so intricately imagined and carefully reported that it’s no wonder the book is mistaken for social realism. It is indeed scary how close this story comes to the real world.
There are so many delicious moments: the socially ambitious nerd Adam tripping over his own cleverness trying to impress Charlotte with a long riff about “Bad-Ass Rhodies”; Jojo, the jock boyfriend, struggling to explain to a scornful history professor why there are words in his term paper (written for him by Adam) that he cannot define; Wolfe’s precise delineation of the subtle gradations of sarcasm and the now universal Shit and Fuck patois; the uneasy alliance between black and white players on the basketball team, and the role of “Swimmies,” marginally talented players with good grades who help maintain the team’s all-important academic standing. The supposed villain of this imagined world is Buster Roth, the basketball coach, who turns out to be the university’s only admirable grown-up.
Of all the writers in the world, Tom Wolfe is the last to need defending. I imagine him as a schoolboy in immaculate old-fashioned knee pants picking fights on the playground with all the bigger, tougher boys. Beneath that skinny, pale, dandified exterior is a two-fisted brawler and committed self-promoter. In his long career he has rhetorically stuck his thumb in the eye of the New Yorker (a history that lends Updike’s appraisal a tincture of tit for tat), the New Left, hippies, Black Panthers, astronauts, architects, and artists, among many others, but his longest-running battle has been with the fashionable notion of the “serious” literary novel.
His first broadside against it was his famous 1973 essay “New Journalism,” in which he lamented the “otherworldy preciousness” of most modern novels. More and more, he wrote, they seemed to be written not for a general reading public but for other writers. The writers of such books, in their preoccupation with characters’ internal lives, had turned their backs on the real story of their times, Wolfe argued, abandoning the kind of reporting and observation that had distinguished the great novels of the past and effectively ceding the turf to journalists like … him! He didn’t actually place the crown on his own head; the essay was an introduction to the collected works of other “literary” journalists, but Wolfe was already (as he well knew) the bright eminence of that pack, whose work, he proclaimed, had become the “main event” in the literary arts. Then, having planted his own flag on literature’s peak, he abandoned the very form he had championed to start writing novels himself. In a celebrated 1989 essay, he anointed himself point man for “a battalion, a brigade of Zolas” who would sally forth, notebooks and tape recorders in hand, to rescue fiction from its cul-de-sac of self-obsession and restore it to its central role in American life, chronicling the “lurid carnival” of modern existence.
It matters a great deal to someone, I suppose, what kind of fiction commands the peak of Mount Literature. History teaches us that such preferences change only slightly more slowly than hemlines, and many an author celebrated in his lifetime is barely remembered a decade after his last book. Much critical prestige today is accorded writers of “experimental,” or “postmodern,” fiction, who play clever games with language and traditional storytelling forms, and whose works are dazzlingly hard to follow. If simple readability matters, these authors are the most likely candidates for obscurity, even giants like Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, to name just two National Book Award winners whose erudite, dense, fat, recondite works are considered by some to be the towering literary achievements of the late twentieth century. There is a certain rarefied pleasure in tracking the desperate flight of Tyrone Slothrop through the wild triple-canopy jungle of Pynchon’s imagination, but it is work very few readers are ready to perform. A recent essay in Harper’s in defense of such writing, by the author Ben Marcus, set out to describe such an ideal reader:
[His or her] Wernicke’s area [ the portion of the brain presumed to process language] is staffed by an army of jump-suited code-breakers, working a barn-sized space that is strung about the rafters with a mathematically-intricate lattice of rope and steel, and maybe gusseted by a synthetic coil that is stronger and more sensitive than either, like guitar strings made from an unraveled spinal cord, each strand tuned to different tensions.
It goes on. Marcus lost me at code breakers, although I was struck by his momentary indecision—the “maybe”—over whether or not to embellish this bizarre metaphor with his “synthetic coil.” He concludes the long paragraph thus:
My ideal reader would cough up a thimble of fine gray powder at the end of the reading session, and she could use this mineral-rich substance to compost her garden.
This is just silly. There will always be readers who enjoy “code breaking,” but I suspect great fiction is and will always be about language, story, characters, and serious ideas, and will remain stubbornly coherent.
Wolfe scores for me in every category, most notably language. My own Wernicke’s area has long thrilled to the surprising and inventive turns of Wolfe’s narration. It is a voice so distinctive that it has launched a thousand bad imitations, and is the vibrant core of everything Wolfe writes. His exuberant experiments in punctuation are easy to ridicule, but they are not just pointless pyrotechnics; they are an effort to harness on the page the velocity of his rhetoric, which runs at full throttle in a continual state of intellectual astonishment. He began his career as a social scientist, and he has remained, first and foremost, a man the opposite of dumbstruck by the hilarious pageant of American life, whether revealing the vapid meanderings that pass for serious thought on a bus full of tripping hippies or demonstrating how the U.S. space program faithfully reenacted—in modern times, on a massive scale—the ancient tribal ritual of single combat. One cannot imagine a Wolfe story without that voice, any more than one can convey the humor in Tom Jones without the voice of Fielding, or Tristram Shandy without that of Laurence Sterne.
In his Harper’s essay, Marcus describes the visceral pleasure—Nabokov called it a “tingle” in his spine—of language that stretches normal constraints and combines in a new and interesting way. Complex prose need not be obtuse. At its best, it takes us to startling new places, whether inside the head of operatively conditioned chimpanzee number sixty-one hurtling into orbit in The Right Stuff.
He didn’t panic for a moment. He had been through this same sensation many times on the centrifuge. As long as he just took it and didn’t struggle, they wouldn’t zap all those goddamned blue volts into the soles of his feet. There were a lot worse things in this world than g-forces…. The usual shit was flowing. The main thing was to keep ahead of those blue volts to the feet…. He started pushing the buttons and throwing the switched like the greatest electric Wurlitzer organist who ever lived, never missing a signal.
or describing basketball star Jojo coughing up something a bit more substantial than
a “fine gray powder” (and much better compost material):
Jojo swelled up his chest, lifted his head upward as high as it would go, and snuffed, scouring his sinuses, nasal pathways, and lungs so furiously it was as if he wanted to suck the bench, the girl, the entire Buster Bowl and half of southeastern Pennsylvania up into his nostrils. He grimaced until his neck widened, striated by muscles, tendons, and veins, swelled up his chest to the last milliliter of its capacity—and spat. The girl stared at the edge of the court where it landed, a prodigious, runny, yellowy pus-laced gob of phlegm.
So what makes fiction great? What is the standard? Is time a fair judge of quality? Are all the books that have endured for a long time great, and those forgotten less so, or is the process more random? In his put-down of Wolfe, Updike didn’t explain the difference between “entertainment” and “literature,” other than to suggest that the dapper former journalist’s writing was not “exquisite.” The word means “carefully done or elaborately made,” “very beautiful or lovely in a carefully wrought way,” “highly sensitive; keenly discriminating; fastidious.” To me, books that are merely entertaining would be like those of, say, Michael Crichton, Elmore Leonard, and J. K. Rowling, which are an absolute delight, but which melt in the mouth like cotton candy. I don’t mean that as a put-down; I love cotton candy, and it’s hard to write an entertaining book, and it’s worth noting that Fielding himself described his masterpiece, Tom Jones, as an “entertainment.”
So how does one judge? The put-down invites a comparison between Wolfe’s writing and Updike’s own. I admire Updike’s books, although I have read only a small portion of his prodigious output. Among those I have, the Rabbit series in particular, Couples, and Villages are intensely realistic, and capture better than anyone the texture of American suburban life and the subtle transactions of emotional and sexual need in modern relationships. But his books run together in my mind. They all have a similar feel, and as engrossing and exquisitely written as they are, I find I have a hard time remembering them afterward. In the long run, fiction that endures is, by definition, memorable.
By that standard, my money is on Wolfe.
Abraham Lincoln Is an Idiot
Published as “‘Idiot,’ ‘Yahoo,’ ‘Original Gorilla’: How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day,” Atlantic, June 2013
By nearly any measure—personal, political, even literary—Abraham Lincoln set a standard of success that few in history can match. Did anyone notice?
Sure, we revere Lincoln today, but in his lifetime the bile poured on him from every quarter makes today’s Internet vitriol seem dainty. His ancestry was routinely impugned, his lack of formal learning ridiculed, his appearance maligned, and his morality assailed. We take for granted, of course, the scornful outpouring from Confederate states; no action Lincoln took short of capitulation would ever quiet his southern critics. But vituperation wasn’t limited to enemies of the Union. The north was ever at his heels. No matter what Lincoln did, it was never enough for one political faction, and too much for another. Yes, his sure-footed leadership during this country’s most difficult days was accompanied by a fair measure of praise, but also by a steady stream of abuse—in editorials, speeches, journals, and private letters—from those on his own side, those dedicated to the very causes he so ably championed. George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and diarist, wrote that Lincoln was “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.” Henry Ward Beecher, the Connecticut preacher and abolitionist, often ridiculed Lincoln in his Congregational newspaper, the Independent, rebuking him for his lack of refinement and calling him “an unshapely man.” Other northern newspapers openly called for his assassination long before John Wilkes Booth actually pulled the trigger. He was called a coward, “an idiot,” and “the original gorilla” by none other than the commanding general of his armies, George McClellan.
One of Lincoln’s lasting achievements was to end American slavery. Yet here’s how he was seen by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the famous abolitionist, in a letter she wrote to Wendell Phillips in 1864, a year after Lincoln had freed the slaves in rebel states and only months before he would engineer the Thirteenth Amendment: calling Lincoln “Dishonest Abe,” she “deplored the ‘incapacity and rottenness’ of his administration, and pledged that if he ‘is reelected I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.’” Stanton eventually had a change of heart, and lamented her work against Lincoln, but not all prominent abolitionists did—even after victory over slavery was complete, and even after he was killed. In the days after Lincoln’s assassination, William Lloyd Garrison called the murder “providential,” because it meant Vice President Andrew Johnson would assume leadership.
Lincoln masterfully led the north through the Civil War. He held firm in his refusal to acknowledge secession; maneuvered the Confederate president Jefferson Davis into starting the war; played a delicate political game to keep border states from joining the rebellion; and drew up a grand military strategy that, when he found the right generals, won the war. Yet he was denounced for his leadership throughout. In a monumental and meticulous two-volume study of the sixteenth president, Lincoln: A Life (2008), Michael Burlingame, a professor of Lincoln studies at the University of Illinois, presents Lincoln’s actions and speeches not as they have come to be remembered, through the fine lens of our gratitude and admiration, but as they were received in his day. (All of the examples in this essay are drawn from Burlingame’s book, which should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in Lincoln.) Early on, after a series of setbacks for Union troops and the mulish inaction of General McClellan, members of Lincoln’s own Republican Party reviled him as, in the words of Michigan senator Zachariah Chandler, “timid, vacillating, & inefficient.” A Republican newspaper editor in Wisconsin wrote, “The president and the cabinet, as a whole, are not equal to the occasion.” Ohio Republican William M. Dickson wrote in 1862 that Lincoln “is universally admitted a failure, has no will, no courage, no executive capacity … and his spirit necessarily infuses itself downwards through all departments.”
Charles Sumner, a Republican senator from Massachusetts to whom Lincoln often turned for advice, opposed his renomination in 1864. “There is a strong feeling among those who have seen Mr. Lincoln, in the way of business, that he lacks practical talent for his important place. It is thought there should be more readiness, and more capacity, for government.” William P. Fessenden, the Maine Republican, called Lincoln “weak as water.”
As anyone struggles to do well; to be honest, wise, eloquent, and kind; to be dignified without being aloof; to be humble without being a pushover, who affords a better example than Lincoln? And yet as he looked and listened to the way his efforts were received, how could he not despair?
His wife said that the constant attacks on him caused him “great pain.” At one point, after reading one of Henry Ward Beecher’s salvos, Lincoln reportedly exclaimed, “I would rather be dead than, as President, thus abused in the house of my friends.” Lincoln would often respond to the flood of naysayers with a weary wave of his hand, and say, “Let us speak no more of these things.”
Democracy is rowdy, and political abuse its currency, so perhaps the ill-treatment of even Lincoln’s unerring judgment is to be expected. But how do we explain the scorn for his prose?
No American president has uttered more immortal words than Lincoln. We are moved by the power and lyricism of his speeches a century and a half later—not just by their hard, clear reasoning, but by their beauty. It is hard to imagine anyone hearing without admiration, for instance, this sublime passage from the first Inaugural Address: “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angel
s of our nature.” Yet this speech was characterized by an editorial writer in the Jersey City American Standard as, “involved, coarse, colloquial, devoid of ease and grace, and bristling with obscurities and outrages against the simplest rules of syntax.”
As for the Gettysburg Address—one of the most powerful speeches in human history, one that many American school-children can now recite by heart (Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth …), and a statement of national purpose that for some rivals the importance of the Declaration of Independence—the local newspaper in Gettysburg reported, “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” The London Times correspondent wrote, “Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn’t be easy to produce.”
And the Second Inaugural Address—With malice toward none, with charity for all—the third pillar in Lincoln’s now undisputed reputation for eloquence, inscribed in limestone at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington? A. B. Bradford, who was a pastor in Pennsylvania and a member of one of the oldest European families in America, wrote, “One of the most awkwardly expressed documents I ever read … When he knew it would be read by millions of people all over the world, why under the heavens did he not make it a little more creditable to American scholarship?” The New York Herald described it as “a little speech of glittering generalities used only to fill the program.” The Chicago Times, a powerful voice in Lincoln’s home state: “We did not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln could produce a paper so slip-shod, so loose-jointed, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, sentiment, and grasp.”