Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [131]
Right out of Fitzgerald, except he would have made a better job of describing Mr. Burton’s wife.
But the king of the cats is, of course, Tom Wolfe, an Esquire alumnus who writes mostly for the Trib’s Sunday magazine, New York, which is edited by a former Esquire editor, Clay Felker, with whom his writer-editor relationship is practically symbiotic. Wolfe is thirty-four, has a Ph.D. from Yale in “American Studies,” was a reporter first on the Springfield Republican, then on the Washington Post, and, after several years of writing mild, old-fashioned parajournalism for Esquire, raised, or lowered, the genre to a new level. This happened when, after covering a Hot Rod & Custom Car show at the New York Coliseum and writing a conventional, poking-mild-fun article about it (what he calls a “totem story”), he got Esquire to send him out to California where the Brancusis of hot-rod custom, or kustom, car design are concentrated. He returned full of inchoate excitements that he found himself unable to express freely in the usual condescending “totem” story because he was inhibited by “the big amoeba god of Anglo-European sophistication that gets you in the East.” At the ultra-last deadline, Byron Dobell, Felker’s successor at Esquire, asked him just to type out his notes and send them over for somebody else to write up. What happened was a stylistic breakthrough: “I just started recording it all [at 8 PM] and inside of a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that something was beginning to happen.” By 6:15 next morning he had a forty-nine page memo, typed straight along no revisions at five pages an hour, which he delivered to Dobell, who struck out the initial “Dear Byron” and ran it as was.
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby is a collection of twenty-four articles written by Wolfe in the fifteen months after his stylistic breakthrough. It is amusing if one reads it the way it was written, hastily and loosely, skipping paragraphs, or pages, when the jazzed-up style and the mock-sociological pronouncements become oppressive. Since elaboration rather than development is Wolfe’s forte, anything you miss will be repeated later, with bells on. He writes about topics like Las Vegas, Cassius Clay, Baby Jane Holzer, demolition car derbies, a pop record entrepreneur named Phil Spector, and a stock-car racing driver named Junior Johnson. A good read, as the English say. The fifth and last section, “Love and Hate, New York Style,” is more than that. He is a good observer, with an eye for the city’s style, and he would do very well as a writer of light pieces for, say, The New Yorker. “Putting Daddy On” and “The Woman Who Has Everything” are parajournalism at its best, making no pretense at factuality but sketching with humor and poignancy urban dilemmas one recognizes as real. “The Voices of Village Square” and “The Big League Complex” are shrewd and funny social comments—not the bogus-inflated kind he makes in his more ambitious pieces. Even better was “Therapy and Corned Beef While You Wait,” which was in the advance galleys but doesn’t appear in the book. Doubtless for space reasons, but why is it always the best parts they can’t find room for?
A nice little book, one might say, might go to five thousand with luck. One would be wrong. The Kandy-Kolored (etc.) is in its fourth printing, a month after publication, has sold over ten thousand and is still going strong. The reviews helped. Except for Wallace Markfield in the Tribune’s Sunday Book Week, and Conrad Knickerbocker’s penetrating analysis in Life, they have been “selling” reviews. That Terry Southern should find it “a groove and a gas” and Seymour Krim “supercontemporary” is expectable, but less so other reactions: “...might well be required reading in courses like American studies” (Time); “He knows all the stuff that Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., knows, keeps picking up brand-new, ultra-contemporary stuff that nobody else knows, and arrives