Tom Wolfe - Writer and Republican??

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article on writer Tom Wolfe, a favorite of mine (I loved The Right Stuff and have read several other of his books). Wolfe is an old-fashioned writer, but is having to yield to modern technology:

Tom Wolfe turned out the manuscript of his last novel on a manual typewriter and "quite a bit of it by hand," he adds, "only because I had badly injured a finger and couldn't do the typing." It will probably be one of the last major books--if not the last--to be so composed, since Mr. Wolfe too has made concessions to high technology. "I'm now using a computer," he says, "because keeping a typewriter is pretty hard. It really is like owning a buggy. You have to have all these parts made, or else cannibalized from somewhere, and you have to have your ribbons re-inked. That tells you it's time to move on."

Mr. Wolfe says he has "no theoretical bias against any of it," but still, he seems to find our relentless digital pitch rather cretinous. "Using the Internet is the modern form of knitting," he continues. "It's something to do with idle hands. When you knitted, though, you actually had something to show for it at the end. Thomas Jefferson used to answer all his mail from the day before as soon as he got up at dawn. In his position, think of the number of emails he'd have had. He never would have been Thomas Jefferson if he'd been scrupulous about answering all these things. I think email is a wonderful time-waster. It's peerless. Here it is," he concludes, "you can establish contact--useless contact--with innumerable human beings."

In this article, he reveals some news which shocked his friends and associates - he voted for Bush!

Mr. Wolfe offers a personal incident as evidence of "what a fashion liberalism is." A reporter for the New York Times called him up to ask why George W. Bush was apparently a great fan of the "Charlotte Simmons" book. "I just assumed it was the dazzling quality of the writing," he says. In the course of the reporting, however, it came out that Mr. Wolfe had voted for the Bush ticket. "The reaction among the people I move among was really interesting. It was as if I had raised my hand and said, 'Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you, I'm a child molester.'" For the sheer hilarity, he took to wearing an American flag pin, "and it was as if I was holding up a cross to werewolves."

George Bush's appeal, for Mr. Wolfe, was owing to his "great decisiveness and willingness to fight." But as to "this business of my having done the unthinkable and voted for George Bush, I would say, now look, I voted for George Bush but so did 62,040,609 other Americans. Now what does that make them? Of course, they want to say--'Fools like you!' . . . But then they catch themselves, 'Wait a minute, I can't go around saying that the majority of the American people are fools, idiots, bumblers, hicks.' So they just kind of dodge that question. And so many of them are so caught up in this kind of metropolitan intellectual atmosphere that they simply don't go across the Hudson River. They literally do not set foot in the United States. We live in New York in one of the two parenthesis states.

The interviewer asked Wolfe about his personal philosophy, and he had an interesting answer:

I asked a personal question, and Mr. Wolfe has no obligation to obey the laws of our celebrity culture. But while his reply was a hoot, it was also nonresponsive and, in its way, representative of the man--a brilliant exterior concealing darker, unknowable corridors. Straining out the comic extravagance and the reportage, Mr. Wolfe's reading of the world seems at bottom rather grim. If, as he argues, we can't escape or define our age's moral tone, if status pours the foundation for our innermost lives--well, what's the point? What's there to admire, or aspire to? What is it that Tom Wolfe believes in?

"I'm very democratic," he says after a time. "I think I'm the most democratic writer whom I know personally, though I don't know all writers of course." Silence. "I also believe in the United States. I think this is the greatest nation that ever existed, still is. It's really the only really democratic country in the world. Find me one country, just one country in the entire world that would let a foreign people--different culture, different language, and in many cases different color than the majority of the native stock--take over politically an entire metropolitan area in less than one generation. I'm talking about the Cubans in Miami . . ."

Mr. Wolfe has a habit of using experience and anecdote to gird an argument or shade a meaning, and he carries on like this for some time. Then, abruptly: "I really love this country. I just marvel at how good it is, and obviously it's the simple principle of freedom. . . . Intellectually this is the system where people tend to experiment more and their experiments are indulged. Whatever we're doing I think we've done it extremely, extremely, extremely well." Silence. "These are terrible things to be saying if you want to have any standing in the intellectual world."

Well. There is certainly something admirably American about Tom Wolfe--in the preoccupation with the varieties of experience; in his self-created literary persona, the Mark Twain or Ben Franklin of the 20th century. And also, especially, in his exceptionalism. If there is atavism about him, it is not a retreat from the American scene but a risk-all affirmation of its richness and possibilities. What's the point, he's asking, if you're not going all out?

Finally, for the diehard NASCAR fans, Wolfe gave the sport its first major national publicity when back in the mid-60's he wrote a magazine article on Junior Johnson and the rapidly growing phenomenon that was and is NASCAR. I read it for the first time yesterday and it was a fascinating window on the earlier days of the sport. You can read it here.

Also for the NASCAR Fans, this billboard from dribbleglass.com: