Tom Wolfe speaks his mind
In an exclusive NUVO interview, the Father of New Journalism discusses his career
By Steve Hammer
NUVO Newsweekly

Whether you know him as the Father of New Journalism, the author of The Right Stuff or the man who gave the world The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe is certainly one of America's greatest living writers.

Wolfe gave an exclusive phone interview to NUVO's Steve Hammer, in which he discussed the birth of the New Journalism, his first meeting with Hunter S. Thompson and his love for architecture.

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.


At what point did your fascination with architecture begin?

Well, it really started when I wrote a book about contemporary painting, really a sociology of contemporary painting. And after that I began getting letters from people saying, "You ought to look at architecture; what's going on in architecture?" So, I decided to do that. My interest in architecture is really not aesthetic. I'm not a critic. I really don't care, personally, what these buildings look like. But I am interested in what I think of as the sociology of art, and in intellectual history and how certain styles come about and how they catch on and, some of the competition for status within the arts.

Architecture right now is in an interesting situation, because the architectural profession is really in a state of depression, due to the fact that so little building has gone on since the '80s. The architectural firms that had 50, 100, 200 employees, have been decimated. Students coming out of the architectural schools in many cases find that they have no place to go.


Are you plugged into the Internet and other online services?

My apartment looks like a computer theme park now -- thanks to my children, not to me, I must say. They are not online. As far as I can tell, most of the online services are kind of what I call a virtual Haight-Ashbury. You've heard of Haight-Ashbury, I hope? The users are kind of virtual hippies, in the sense they're discovering a wonderful community and they feel high, and at they same time feel that they are ascending to a plateau that mankind has never visited before, through communication with computers. They feel they're defining an era of pure bliss. In that sense, they're living in a virtual Haight-Ashbury.


What did you think of the 1990s Grateful Dead scene?

Well, that was the one group that somehow managed to keep alive through all these decades that Haight-Ashbury feeling. When I first met them, they had a house in Haight-Ashbury, at a very pretty site up on a hill. And I was interested in them because they were very close to Ken Kesey and his group, the Merry Pranksters. As you probably know, they used to play at these Acid Tests with Kesey. Other groups that were part of that hippie or psychedelic scene, if they were good, they tended to become mainstream, or much more mainstream than the Grateful Dead. And -- I have not been to a Grateful Dead concert, but I'm always told that each concert was like Woodstock all over again. You could go to Woodstock every night, if you wanted to follow the Grateful Dead, follow them on tour.


What were your own experiences with drugs in the Sixties? It's hard to tell from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test what your own involvement was in that scene.

I never took drugs at all. I wouldn't touch them. I was always the man from Mars who was arriving on this planet, on planet Earth.


Did the scene disgust or appall you?

No. I was a journalist. I was reporting on a new scene. All of the Sixties were like that, really, one new experience after another. Had I become a part of all of the worlds that I covered at that time, there wouldn't have been much left of me by 1970. I never approached any of them with the idea of liking or disliking it, I felt more like Cortéz or somebody discovering them, discovering new lands. It was very exciting, and in terms of journalism and writing, it was pure gold. After all, the Sixties had ways of living that have shaped the rest of the century.


Did or do you ever socialize much with the other so-called New Journalists -- Thompson and Mailer and so on?

No. You know, one thing that always disappointed me about New York was that there was never that kind of opportunity, that scene where writers communicated with each other.


Did you ever meet Thompson?

Meeting writers has always kind of disappointed me because they're nothing like what you expected them to be. But Thompson definitely is what he appears to be.

When I was writing The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he helped me out by giving me a tape of a meeting Ken Kesey had with the Hell's Angels. Very gracious of him, actually... [So we had lunch in New York] and on the way in the cab, we passed by a marine supply store. And he said, "Stop the cab. I need to go in there for a minute." He came out carrying a small plastic bag. And I was curious, but I thought it was better not to ask him what was in the bag.

But during lunch, you know, curiosity got the best of me and so I asked him, "Uh, Hunter, what's in the bag?" And he said, "I have something in this bag that will clear out this room in five seconds." And he opened the bag and it was one of those marine horns, the kind that carries across 30 miles of water. And he presses it, and it lets out the most ear-shattering sound imaginable. It didn't clear out the restaurant, but everybody just froze in their tracks. I have this mental picture of the bartender in the middle of mixing a drink, just frozen.

[Hunter] definitely comes as advertised.


Is there a writer whom you would select as carrying the mantle of the New Journalism movement?

I don't know if I could pick the king for you, but the New Journalism was something that was actually very new when it started. Incidentally, all movements labeled as "new" are doomed. They die very quickly. What was new about it was the utilization of techniques in journalism that had previously been used only in fiction. Today, the techniques are very much known by writers for newspapers, and in magazine work. And they just go ahead and use them and you can pick up, let's say, Rolling Stone, or for that matter, almost any magazine that allows good writing in its pages, and you'll find examples of it. It's just not talked about anymore. Which I think is a good thing.

I regretted in many ways publishing the book The New Journalism, because in effect it set down a bunch of rules and standards by which non-fiction could be practiced. In a way that undercuts what made it so fresh and original. There were no rules for non-fiction when the New Journalism began. There was a great deal of spontaneity and there was never the sense that it was something to live up to. That was the charm.

Once you have standards and rules, it ceases to be as much fun.


What is your take on the state of journalism today?

Very little news actually gets reported these days. In most parts of the country, it's shaken down into one daily newspaper. And that hurts because you're not going to send two people out to cover an event in hopes of inspiring competition and improving the coverage.

There's probably less news reported today than there was 75 years ago because of the decline in the number of daily newspapers in each region. I think that's the unfortunate part of it.


Do you deal much with writer's block? Is there a regimen you follow?

I try to write 10 pages a day. That's triple-spaced, so that's 1,200 to 1,500 words. I think that's a good goal to set for yourself. Writer's block is fear. The fear that you can't do something you said you would. There's one other kind of writer's block, and that's the discovery that what you set out to do isn't worth the effort. That's a different kind of block, when you find out it isn't worth the time you're putting into it.


What's your next project?

I have a novel that I'm trying to finish now. One of the lead characters is a young man who works in a warehouse in California. There's a little bit about the art world. And banking. There's a lot of banking in it. The book is set in the 1990s, but I think it's a mistake for any writer to think he's defining a decade. I certainly didn't set out to write The Bonfire of the Vanities to define the 1980s. I'm trying to explore, as best I can, the worlds in which these characters exist. That's all really I can do to report on these worlds.