Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [133]
It is hard to say just what Wolfe thinks of Charlotte, or of the real people he writes about. He melts into them so topologically that he seems to be celebrating them, and yet there is a peculiar and rather unpleasant ambivalence, as in his piece on Mrs. Leonard (“Baby Jane”) Holzer, a rich young matron with lots of blonde hair whom he says he made “The Girl of the Year,” that is, last year, there’s another one now. I’m willing to grant his claim, but his piece seems to alternate between building up Baby Jane and tearing her down, damning with loud praise, assenting with not-so-civil leer. As for his readers, flattered though they may be to be taken so intimately into his confidence, made free of the creative kitchen so to speak, they are in the same ambiguous position. “Bangs manes bouffants beehives Beatle caps butter faces brush-on lashes decal eyes puffy sweaters French thrust bras” one article begins, continuing for six more unpunctuated lines of similar arcana and if you don’t dig them you’re dead, baby. Every boost a knock.
But there is one value Tom Wolfe asserts clearly, constantly, obsessively: old he bad, new he good. Although he is pushing thirty-five, or perhaps because of it, he carries the American teenager’s contempt for adults to burlesque extremes. His forty-seven-page ode to Junior Johnson, “The Last American Hero,” ends: “up with the automobile into their America, and the hell with the arteriosclerotic old boys trying to hold onto the whole pot with their arms of cotton seersucker. Junior!” He contrasts his teenage tycoon, Phil Spector, with “the arteriosclerotic, larded adults, infarcted vultures...one meets in the music business.” Even Baby Jane—Baby! Junior!—loses her cool when she thinks of all those...adults: “Now she looks worried, as if the world could be such a simple and exhilarating place if there weren’t so many old and arteriosclerotic people around to muck it up.”
Those ten-thousand-plus purchasers of Wolfe’s book are probably almost all adults, arteriosclerotic or not—I wonder what his blood pressure is—since there are so many of them still around mucking it up and also in a financial position to lay $5.50 on the line. So it’s not a literal business of age—Junior and Baby Jane aren’t exactly teenagers. Maybe more like how you feel sort of—“in” (new) or “out” (old)? I think the vogue of Tom Wolfe may be explained by two kultur-neuroses common among adult, educated Americans today: a masochistic deference to the Young, who are also, by definition, new and so in; and a guilt-feeling about class—maybe they don’t deserve their status, maybe they aren’t so cultivated—that makes them feel insecure when a verbal young—well, youngish—type like Wolfe assures them the “proles,” the young proles that is, have created a cultural style which they either had been uncultivated enough to think vulgar or, worse, hadn’t even noticed. Especially when his spiel is on the highest level—Wolfe is no Cholly Knickerbocker, he’s even more impressive than Vance Packard—full of hard words like “ischium” and “panopticon” and heady concepts like “charisma” (“the [automobile] manufacturers may well be on their way to routinizing the charisma, as Max Weber used to say”) and off-hand references to “high-status sports cars of the Apollonian sort” as against, you understand, “the Dionysian custom kind.” Or: “The people who end up in Hollywood are mostly Dionysian sorts and they feel alien and resentful when they are confronted with the Anglo-European ethos. They’re a little slow to note the differences between topside and sneakers, but they appreciate Cuban sunglasses.” A passage like that can shake the confidence of the most arrogant Ivy League WASP. Or this:
The educated