Lucking Out - James Wolcott [8]
By contrast, the phantasmal histrionics of Hunter S. Thompson in Rolling Stone never commandeered my cadet allegiance because I always found them something of a masquerade, a grown man with a cigarette holder playing outlaw dandy for his fan club. The jeweled brocade of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism bedazzled, popcorn kernels of laughter exploding alongside the typographical fireworks, but his tours de force were such feats of mind reading and magicianship that they and he didn’t seem quite human. I wasn’t into baroque caricature then, when the brick-hard reality of the sixties seemed berserk enough, and Wolfe’s dandyism wasn’t something I could relate to—in his author’s photos he looked like a painted flat posed in front of another painted flat. But each issue of the Voice was a barrage of articulate gabble, crackling with radio static and overlapping quarrels (like the gangster families in The Godfather, the Voice convulsed into feuds every few years to purge the bad blood and begin a fresh cycle of animosities), hitting you from an ambush trap of different angles while sticking to the actuality of what was happening, offering the cinema-screen field of view. Voice writers could be as egotistical as anybody else who packed words into snowballs for a precarious living, but it wasn’t a high-buffed, cachet-seeking, English-majory-brunette, every-comma-hung-like-candy-canes-on-a-Christmas-tree exercise in fine craft and delectation. Voice writers tended to be more direct, shooting their sentences from shoulder level. You were always aware of the hard surfaces and clashing forces off of which everything caromed—the noun-verb combination punches that had traveled from Hemingway to Jimmy Cannon to Pete Hamill—and you could almost hear the mousy scribble of quotes scratched into their reporters’ notebooks that would yield the killer payoff, the fatal clincher. So to be accepted into the Voice was to be initiated into a fight club where you either fit in or were flushed out. Or so I fancied, never doubting I’d make the cut if given a chance. Such confidence I had, a healthy by-product of not knowing any better.
To return to the office where Mailer’s photograph silently roared: The questions Wolf asked were basic and general, mild probes befitting an informal interview with a noncandidate for a nonexistent job. I wonder if he thought I was a rough diamond or a raw carrot. From my end, I thought—truthfully, I’m not sure what I thought, or if I was even thinking from inside the swirl of expectations I had spun out of the daydreams of glory that owed less to literature than to Hollywood films such as Youngblood Hawke, where the barefoot, bare-chested author straight from the provinces landed Suzanne Pleshette as his editor (“Shall I call you Youngy or Bloody?” is the line Gore Vidal cherishes), and TV’s The Waltons, where John-Boy and typewriter longed to sprout the heavenly wings of Look Homeward, Angel. But if I had envisioned that Wolf would be so impressed that I had quit college and left