Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [135]
There are two kinds of appropriate subjects for parajournalism. The kind Tom Wolfe exploits in the present book is the world of the “celebs”: prizefighters, gamblers, movie and stage “personalities,” racing drivers, pop singers and their disc jockeys like Murray the K (“The Fifth Beatle”), impresarios like Phil Spector (“The First Tycoon of Teen”) entrepreneurs like Robert Harrison (whose Confidential magazine, the classic old one (1952–1958) you understand, Wolfe salutes as “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world,” adding: “Confidential was beautiful. This may be a hard idea to put across...but the fact is the man is an aesthete, the original aesthete du schlock,” who as a teenage employee of the Graphic received the stigmata direct from Bernarr Macfadden) and pop-art-cum-society figures like Andy Warhol, Huntington Hartford (an anti-pop popper), and Mrs. Leonard Holzer.[1] The other kind of suitable game for the parajournalist—though not Tom Wolfe’s pigeon—is the Little Man (or Woman) who gets into trouble with the law; or who is interestingly poor or old or ill or, best, all three; or who has some other Little problem like delinquent children or a close relative who has been murdered for which they can count on Jimmy Breslin’s heavy-breathing sympathy and prose.
Both celebs and uncelebs offer the same advantage: inaccuracy will have no serious consequences. The little people are unknown to the reader and, if they think they have been misrepresented, are in no position to do anything about it, nor, even if such a daring idea occurred to them, to object to the invasion of their privacy. The celebs are eager to have their privacy invaded, welcoming the attentions of the press for reasons of profession or of vanity. While the reader knows a great deal, too much, about them, this is not real knowledge because they are, in their public aspect, not real. They are not persons but personae (“artificial characters in a play or novel”—or in parajournalistic reportage) which have been manufactured for public consumption with their enthusiastic cooperation. Notions of truth or accuracy are irrelevant in such a context of collusive fabrication on both sides; all that matters to anybody—subject, writer, reader—is that it be a good story. To complain of Wolfe’s Pindaric ode to Junior Johnson that his hero couldn’t be all that heroic is like objecting to Tarzan as unbelievable.
But of late Tom Wolfe has attempted more solid, resistant subjects. As his colleague, Mr. Breslin, might put it, he’s been fighting above his weight. There was that front-page review of Norman Mailer’s An American Dream in the Sunday Tribune’s Book Week (which Richard Kluger edits in a more substantial and, to me, interesting way than Clay Felker’s set-’em-up-in the-other-alley technique with New York). As the French say, the most beautiful parajournalist cannot give any more than he has, and the only way Wolfe could explicate his low estimation of the novel was to jeer at the author’s private life and personality—or rather his persona, this being the aspect of people Wolfe is at home with—followed by some satirical excursions on tangential matters like the ludicrous discrepancy between Mailer and Dostoevsky and the even more laughable crepancy between Mailer and James M. Cain. C’est amusant mais ce n’est pas la critique. Not that I disagree with his low estimate of An American Dream. Mr. Kluger asked me to review it and I declined for lack of time. If I had accepted, I should also have slated it but I don’t think I would have thought of going into Mailer’s personality and private life if only because there is so much in the printed text to criticise. But Tom Wolfe doesn’t seem to be much of a reader.
A week or two later, he took on a subject of much greater mass and resistance; The New Yorker, with which he grappled in the April 11th and 18th issues of Clay Felker’s New York. The perfect target for two young(ish) men on the make with a new magazine competing for the same kind of readers and advertisers.