The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  No. 3. Victims of Inflation

  So I go to the place and I tell the guy I want four of those captain’s swivel seats for my van, in leather, to go with the lounge banquette underneath the thermo bay in back, and you know what he tells me? One-half down, 20 percent interest on the balance for two years on a five-year payout basis with a $750 balloon payment at the end!”

  “I hear you. This dude who’s giving my wife flying lessons, he says he’s gonna start charging $35 an hour. I told him he can fly that one right up the freaking pipe!”

  The Modern Churchman

  He was a socially acceptable but obscure minister to the Tassel Loafer & Tennis Lesson Set until the day in 1975 when he announced that he was a pederast. He not only announced it, he enunciated his theory that the sexual life of the child was an essential part of, not an obstacle to, the spiritual life of the child, and that anyone who doubted that God had created a link of sexual attraction between generations was an upland Tennessee aborigine. Half of his congregation walked out, but the other half was stimulated by the television coverage. The diocesan governors had long been troubled by declining church membership and felt that here, at last, was a Modern Churchman who could Reach the Urban Young People. Emboldened by a measure of fame and official support, he enunciated the theory that terrorists were God’s Holy Beasts, arguing that Jesus had entered the temple with a flog or cat-o’-nine-tails, according to which Renaissance painting one looked at, to drive the moneychangers out and that the Mexican artist David Alfaro Siqueiros had once led a machine-gun raid on the home of Leon Trotsky. He was a great supporter of the arts, and in his home, an old carriage house redone in nail patterns by Ronaldo Clutter, the interior designer, the painting frame had replaced the cross as a religious symbol. When he held a Holy Roller Disco Night in the sanctuary and urged the recitation of the prayer book “in tongues,” he was featured in the Religion sections of both Time and Newsweek, and his elevation to bishop was said to be imminent.

  Primitive Cultures

  Professor Nkhrani Emu

  Chairman, Department of Anthropology

  University of Chembuezi

  Babuelu, Chembuezi

  Most Esteemed Professor:

  As you know, dear Sir, our research team is approaching the end of its field study of “The Sexual Mores of the Americans.” I hereby request, most respectfully, that we be granted an extension of the term of our project and a renewal of funding for this work. It is impossible for anyone in a society such as ours to envision from afar the bizarre sexual customs, practices and rituals to be observed among the American people.

  In the republic’s largest city, New York, the most prestigious form of entertainment takes place in theaters that have been converted to dance halls. Hundreds of young males may be seen dancing with one another to flashing lights and recorded music in a homoerotic frenzy, while prominent citizens, including politicians, lawyers, financiers, and upper-class matrons, as well as every sort of well-known figure in the arts, most of them heterosexual, look on, apparently greatly stimulated by the atmosphere. This is described in the native press as “disco fever.”

  In fact, the mores that have grown up among the Americans concerning homosexuality are apt to be most baffling to the investigator first arriving from a society such as ours. In the United States it is the homosexual male who takes on the appearance that in our society is associated with heterosexual masculinity. Which is to say, he wears his hair short in a style known as the crew cut or butch cut; he wears the simple leather jacket, sleeveless shirt, crew sweater, or steel-toed boot of the day laborer, truck driver, soldier, or sailor; and, if he exercises, he builds up the musculature of his upper arms and chest. The heterosexual male, by contrast, wears long hair, soft open-throated shirts that resemble a woman’s blouse, necklaces, gold wristwatches, shapeless casual jackets of a sort worn also by women; and if he exercises, he goes in for a feminine form of running called jogging.

  The most popular periodicals in America consist of photographs of young women with gaping pudenda and text of a purportedly serious nature, such as interviews with presidents of the republic (!). These are known as “one-hand magazines.”

  It is the custom throughout the native schools of America to give sex education in the classroom to children by the age of thirteen. The children are taught that sexual intercourse is natural, beautiful, and the highest expression of human love. They are also taught that sexual energy is one of a person’s most powerful and creative forces, that it will find expression in some form, that it should not be denied. Yet the Americans are at the same time baffled by the fact that the number of pregnancies out of wedlock among schoolgirls rises continually. In this the Americans are somewhat like the Kombanda tribesmen of our country, who, ignorant of the causal relation of activities separated by time, believe that pregnancy is caused by the sun shining on the bare midsections of females of a certain age. The administrators of the American schools remain bewildered, saying that in the sex-education classes females are given pamphlets clearly outlining birth-control procedures. At the same time, their own records show that only a fraction of American secondary-school graduates can read.

  So, most revered Sir, we beseech your support in obtaining for us the resources to complete our work. You will recall, Sir, pointing out to us the importance of Diedrich’s discovery of the Luloras, the tribe that made its women climb trees and remain there throughout their menstrual periods. Well, Sir—in all humility!—we are convinced that through our work here we have uncovered a yet more primitive layer in the anthropology of human sexual evolution.

  Your worshipful student and friend,

  Pottho Mboti

  New York City

  United States of America

  The Invisible Wife

  The Invisible Wife arrived at the party with Her Husband, but Her Husband was soon vectored off into another room by one of his great manswarm of chums, who began pouring an apparently delicious story down his ear.

  The Invisible Wife had gone to the trouble of getting a sideswept multi-chignon hairdo and a Rue St. Honoré Chloe dress with enormous padded shoulders surmounted by piles of beading sewn on as thick as the topping on a peach melba precisely in order to cease being invisible. But from the moment the social current swept her into the path of Her Husband’s business friend Earl, her intracranial alarm system warned her that it would happen, nonetheless.

  After all, she had only been introduced to Earl four times in the past, at four different parties, and this time Her Husband was in another room.

  “Hello, Earl,” she said clearly and brightly, looking him straight in the eyes.

  Earl’s lips spread across his face in a great polyurethaned smile. But his eyes were pure panic. They contracted into two little round balls, like a pair of Gift Shop Lucite knickknacks. “Mayday!” they said. “Code Blue! I’ve met this woman somewhere, but who inna namea Christ is she?”

  “Ohh!” he said. “Ahh! Howya doin’! Yes!—”

  The little Lucite balls were bouncing all over her, over her hairdo, chignon by chignon, over her blazing shoulders, her dress, her Charles Jourdan shoes, searching for a clue.

  “How’re the children!” he exclaimed finally, taking a desperate chance.

  This was the deepest wound of all for the Invisible Wife. The man had just passed his eyes over $1650 worth of Franco-American chic and decided that the main thing about her was … she looked matronly.

  How’re the children … “They’ve got Legionnaire’s disease,” she wanted to say, because she knew these people didn’t listen to the Invisible Wife. But she went ahead and did the usual.

  “Oh, they’re fine,” she said.

  “That’s great!” Earl said. “That’s great!” He kept saying “That’s great” and looking straight through her, frantically trying to devise some way to remove himself from her presence before somebody he knew approached and he was faced with the impossible task of introducing her.

  At d
inner the Invisible Wife sat next to a man who was an investment counselor with an evident interest in convertible debentures. Convertible debentures! An adrenal surge of hope rose in the Invisible Wife. Somewhere down Memory Lane she had actually picked up a conversational nugget concerning convertible debentures. This nugget had to do with an extraordinary mathematician from MIT named Edward O. Thorp who, using computers, had devised an extrinsic formula for beating the stock market by playing convertible debentures. So she introduced her conversational nugget—Edward O. Thorp and the Convertible Debentures—into the conversation. She dropped it in, just so, ever so lightly; for, being a veteran of dinners like this, she knew that a woman can ask questions, introduce topics, interject the occasional bon mot, even deliver a punch line now and again, but she is not to launch into disquisitions or actually tell long stories herself.

  “Edward O. Thorp!” the Investment Counselor said. “Oh my God!” —and the Invisible Wife was pleased to see that this topic absolutely delighted the Investment Counselor. He launched into an anecdote that lit up his irises like a pair of bed-lamp high-intensity bulbs. There is nothing that a man hungers for more at dinner than to dominate the conversation in his sector of the table.

  The Invisible Wife soon noticed, however, that when the man sitting on the other side of her turned their way to listen in, the Investment Counselor looked right past her and directed the entire story into the man’s face. Not only that, when this man was distracted for a moment by the woman on his other side, the Investment Counselor stopped talking, as if his switch had been turned off. He stopped in mid-sentence, and his eyes clouded up, and he just waited, with his mouth open.

  After all, why waste a terrific yarn on an Invisible Wife?

  Artistic Vision

  Artists from Cincinnati and Cleveland, hot off the Carey airport bus, line up in Soho looking for the obligatory loft.

  THE APACHE DANCE

  *

  People don’t read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the tepid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:

  I noticed something!

  Yet another clam-broth-colored current had begun to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf Stream … a review, it was, by the Times’s dean of the arts, Hilton Kramer, of an exhibition at Yale University of “Seven Realists,” seven realistic painters … when I was jerked alert by the following:

  “Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial—the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

  Now, you may say, My God, man! You woke up over that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell in the sea of words?

  But I knew what I was looking at. I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

  From The Painted Word, pp. 3-23 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975). First published in Harper’s, April 1975.

  What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, “to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.” I read it again. It didn’t say “something helpful” or “enriching” or even “extremely valuable.” No, the word was crucial.

  In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.

  Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshots, and Murine agonies fell away!

  All these years, along with countless kindred souls, I am certain, I had made my way into the galleries of Upper Madison and Lower SoHo and the Art Gildo Midway of Fifty-seventh Street, and into the museums, into the Modern, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, the Bastard Bauhaus, the New Brutalist, and the Fountainhead Baroque, into the lowliest storefront churches and grandest Robber Baronial temples of Modernism. All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses, Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now drawing back, now moving closer—waiting, waiting, forever waiting for … it … for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde) knew to be there—waiting for something to radiate directly from the paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well—how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974 I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

  Like most sudden revelations, this one left me dizzy. How could such a thing be? How could Modern Art be literary? As every art-history student is told, the Modern movement began about 1900 with a complete rejection of the literary nature of academic art, meaning the sort of realistic art which originated in the Renaissance and which the various national academies still held up as the last word.

  Literary became a code word for all that seemed hopelessly retrograde about realistic art. It probably referred originally to the way nineteenth-century painters liked to paint scenes straight from literature, such as Sir John Everett Millais’s rendition of Hamlet’s intended, Ophelia, floating dead (on her back) with a bouquet of wildflowers in her death grip. In time, literary came to refer to realistic painting in general. The idea was that half the power of a realistic painting comes not from the artist but from the sentiments the viewer hauls along to it, like so much mental baggage. According to this theory, the museum-going public’s love of, say, Jean François Millet’s The Sower has little to do with Millet’s talent and everything to do with people’s sentimental notions about The Sturdy Yeoman. They make up a little story about him.

  What was the opposite of literary painting? Why, l’art pour l’art, form for the sake of form, color for the sake of color. In Europe before 1914, artists invented Modern styles with fanatic energy—Fauvism, Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Orphism, Suprematism, Vorticism —but everybody shared the same premise: henceforth, one doesn’t paint “about anything, my dear aunt,” to borrow a line from a famous Punch cartoon. One just paints. Art should no longer be a mirror held up to man or nature. A painting should compel the viewer to see it for what it is: a certain arrangement of colors and forms on a canvas.

  Artists pitched in to help make theory. They loved it, in fact. Georges Braque, the painter for whose work the word Cubism was coined, was a great formulator of precepts:

  “The painter thinks in forms and colors. The aim is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact but to constitute a pictorial fact.”

  Today this notion, this protest—which it was when Braque said it —has become a piece of orthodoxy. Artists repeat it endlessly, with conviction. As the Minimal Art movement came into its own in 1966, Frank S
tella was saying it again:

  “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object … What you see is what you see.”

  Such emphasis, such certainty! What a head of steam—what patriotism an idea can build up in three-quarters of a century! In any event, so began Modern Art and so began the modern art of Art Theory. Braque, like Frank Stella, loved theory; but for Braque, who was a Montmartre bohou of the primitive sort, art came first. You can be sure the poor fellow never dreamed that during his own lifetime that order would be reversed.