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By Root 1114 0

classes in this country the people who grow up to try [Wolfe writes in his Introduction] the people who grow up to control visual and printed communication media are all plugged into what is, when one gets down to it, an ancient, aristocratic aesthetic. Stock car racing, custom cars—and for that matter the jerk, the monkey, rock music—still seem beneath serious consideration, still the preserve of ratty people with ratty hair and dermatitis and corroded thoracic boxes and so forth. Yet all these rancid people [one assumes “ratty”, “rancid”, etc., are rhetorical irony but one can’t be sure; with Wolfe for the defense you don’t need a D.A.] are creating new styles all the time and changing the whole life of the country in ways nobody even seems to record, much less analyze.

The publisher’s handout puts it more frankly: “Tom Wolfe describes his beat as ‘the status life of our time.’ As he sees it, U.S. taste is being shaped by what were once its subcultures, largely teenage...He zeroes in on the new, exotic forms of status-seeking of a young, dynamic social class, ‘vulgar’ and ‘common’ to the Establishment, that has emerged since the war and that expresses the ordinary American’s sense of form and beauty.” No wonder the book is selling. In addition to appealing to our adult masochisms, it also promises a new sociology of taste. The post-war “culture boom” has greatly increased the number of Americans who are educated, in the formal sense they have gone through college, without increasing proportionately the number who know or care much about culture. There is, therefore, a large and growing public that feels it really should Take An Interest and is looking for guidance as to what is, currently, The Real Thing. The old Kitsch was directed to the masses but the reader of Edna Ferber or even Will Durant would be put off, if only by its title, by The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, which is Kitsch addressed to what might be called a class-mass audience, smaller and, educationally, on a higher level but otherwise not so different from the old one.

I don’t think they will get their money’s worth, for their arbiter elegantiarum is as uncertain as they are, his only firm value being old-bad, new-good. Not enough. It forces him to abstract “style” so aseptically from all other contexts that it becomes ambiguous even as a guide to taste. Writing of those kandy-kolored automotive aberrations, he drops names desperately—Miró, Picasso, Cellini, the Easter Island statues, “If Brancusi is any good, then this thing belongs on a pedestal”—but his actual description of them and of their creators runs the other way. “Jane Holzer—and the Baby Jane syndrome—there’s nothing freakish about it,” he protests. “Baby Jane is the hyper-version of a whole new style of life in America. I think she is a very profound symbol. But hers is not the super-hyper-version. The super-hyper-version is Las Vegas.” Rodomontade, whistling in the dark. He doesn’t explain why Baby Jane is not freakish nor why she is a profound symbol of the new American style nor why Las Vegas is a super-hyper-profounder one, and his articles on her, and on Las Vegas (“the Versailles of America”) lead me to opposite conclusions, which he often seems to share as a reporter if not as an ideologue. His most extreme effort is his praise of Bernarr Macfadden’s New York Daily Graphic: “Everybody was outraged and called it ‘gutter journalism’ and ‘The Daily Pornographic.’ But by god the whole thing had style...Even in the realm of the bogus, the Graphic went after bogosity with a kind of Left Bank sense of rebellious discovery. Those cosmographs, boy! Those confession yarns!” But the “cosmographs” were merely faked news photos, the confessions dreary fabrications, and that dear old Graphic in fact was gutter journalism in which no kind of rebellion, Left or Right Bank, was involved. Wolfe’s term for its subtle quality is “the aesthetique du schlock”—Schlock being Yiddish for ersatz or phony—and it applies to his other discoveries in “the new American style.” O, they’re tenting