In 1987, Hart moved seventy-five miles northwest of Washington to a 135-acre estate in the Virginia horse country and built a Greek Revival mansion featuring double-decked porches with twelve columns each; bought horses for himself, Lindy, and their two sons, Lain and Alexander; stocked the place with tweeds, twills, tack, and bench-made boots; grew a beard like the King of Diamonds’; and rode to the hounds—all the while turning out new work at a prolific rate.
In his last years he began to summon to his estate a cadre of likeminded souls, a handful of artists, poets, and philosophers, a dedicated little derrière-garde (to borrow a term from the composer Stefania de Kenessey), to gird for the battle to take art back from the Modernists. They called themselves the Centerists.
It wasn’t going to be easy to get a new generation of artists to plunge into the fray yodeling, “Onward! To the Center!” Nevertheless, Hart persevered. Since his death certain … signs … have begun, as a sixties song once put it, blowing in the wind: the suddenly serious consideration, by the art world itself, of Norman Rockwell as a Classical artist dealing in American mythology … the “edgy buzz,” to use two nineties words, over a sellout show at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery of six young representational painters known as the “Paint Group,” five of them graduates of America’s only Classical, derrière-garde art school, the New York Academy of Art … the tendency of a generation of serious young collectors, flush with new Wall Street money, to discard the tastes of their elders and to collect “pleasant” and often figurative art instead of the abstract, distorted, or “wounded” art of the Modern tradition … the soaring interest of their elders in the work of the once-ridiculed French “academic” artists Bougereau, Meissonier, and Gérôme and the French “fashion painter” Tissot. The art historian Gregory Hedberg, Hirschl & Adler’s director for European art, says that with metronomic regularity the dawn of each new century has seen a collapse of one reigning taste and the establishment of another. In the
early 1600s the Mannerist giants (for example, El Greco) came down off fashionable walls and the Baroque became all the rage; in the early 1700s, the Baroque giants (Rembrandt) came down and the Rococo went up; in the early 1800s the Rococo giants (Watteau) came down and the Neoclassicists went up; and in the early twentieth century, the modern movement turned the Neoclassical academic giants Bougereau, Meissonier, and Gérôme into joke figures in less than twenty-five years.
And at the dawn of the twenty-first? In the summer of 1985 the author of
The Painted Word
gave a lecture at the Parrish Museum in Southampton, New York, entitled “Picasso: The Bougereau of the Year 2020.” Should such turn out to be the case, Frederick Hart will not have been the first major artist to have died ten minutes before history absolved him and proved him right.
I
n 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.
The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints
that people in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning … the laws of hygiene … by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the
leitmotif
of the twenty-first century in America.
“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School. The story of how the Bauhaus, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s, swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city during the twentieth century is a familiar one, and I won’t retell it. But I should mention the soaring spiritual exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past. By the late 1970s, however, architects themselves were beginning to complain of the dead hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, which leaked from rain and collapsed from snow; the tiny bare beige office cubicles, which made workers feel like component parts; the glass walls, which let in too much heat, too much cold, too much glare, and no air at all. The relearning is now under way in earnest. The architects are busy rummaging about in what the artist Richard Merkin calls the Big Closet. Inside the Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are the abandoned styles of the past. The current favorite rediscoveries: Classical, Georgian, Secession, and Moderne (Art Deco). Relearning on the wing, the architects are off on a binge of eclecticism comparable to the Victorian period’s 125 years ago.
In politics the twentieth century’s great start from zero was one-party
socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation in the West today, it is instructive to read John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
—before turning to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago.
The old strike-hall poster of a Promethean worker in a blue shirt breaking his chains across his mighty chest was in truth the vision of ultimate human freedom the movement believed in at the outset. For intellectuals in the West the painful dawn began with the publication of
The Gulag Archipelago
in 1973. (See above, pp. 101-2.) Solzhenitsyn insisted that the villain behind the Soviet concentration-camp network was not Stalin or Lenin (who invented the term “concentration camp”) or even Marxism. It was instead the Soviets’ peculiarly twentieth-century notion that they could sweep aside not only the old social order but also its religious ethic, which had been millennia in the making (“common decency,” Orwell called it) and reinvent morality … here … now … “at the point of a gun,” in the famous phrase of the Maoists. Well before the sudden breaching of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, the relearning had reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China had begun to wonder how best to convert Communism into something other than, in Bernard Henri-Levy’s memorable phrase, “barbarism with a human face.”
The great American contribution to the twentieth century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt backlit plastic sign: TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON ENCOUNTER SESSIONS INSIDE. Up until 1985 pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the 7-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight stories high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside. In 1985 the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought
into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the
World Book Encyclopedia
and the Modern Library Classics, one now finds the cassettes:
Sally’s Alley; Young and Hung; Yo! Rambette!; Latin Teacher: She Sucks, She Has Sucked, She Will Have Sucked
. In the fall of 1987, a twenty-five-year-old Long Island church secretary named Jessica Hahn provoked a tittering flurry in the tabloid press when the news broke that she had posed nude for
Playboy
magazine. Her punishment? A triumphal tour of the nation’s television talk and variety shows. As far as I was concerned, the high point came when a ten-year-old girl, a student at a private school, wearing a buttercup blouse, a cardigan sweater, and her school uniform skirt, approached her outside a television studio with a stack of
Playboy
magazines featuring the church secretary with breasts bare and thighs ajar and asked her to autograph them. With the school’s blessing, she intended to take the signed copies back to the campus and hold a public auction. The proceeds would go to the poor.
But in the sexual revolution, too, a painful dawn broke in the 1980s, and the relearning, in the form of prophylaxis, began. All may be summed up in a single term requiring no amplification: AIDS.
The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not so much as the end point of the twentieth century as the theme of the twenty-first. There is no law of history that says a new century must start ten or twenty years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way. The nineteenth century began with the American and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth. The twentieth century began with the formulation of Marxism, Freudianism, and Modernism in the late nineteenth. And the twenty-first began with the Great Relearning—in the form of the destruction of the Berlin Wall in a single day, dramatizing the utter failure of the most momentous start-from-zero of all.
The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word. It is already clear that the
large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite: the cities of the year 2000 are already beginning to look more like the cities of 1900 than the cities of 1980. From the South Bronx in New York to Southeast in Atlanta, no longer is public housing (“the projects”) built to look like commercial towers. The new look: the twee ground-hugging suburban garden villas of London’s Hampstead Heath. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental atmosphere. People of our craven new world, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with awe upon the century just ended. They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself—but also the capacity to escape to the stars on spaceships if it blew—and to jigger with his own genes. But above all, they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean brass, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, godlike extremes. They will look back in awe … without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their Neo-Louis bergères, idly twirling information about on the Internet, killing time like Victorian matrons doing their crocheting, knitting, tatting, needlepoint, and quilting, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover.
I
can tell you, taking eleven years to write one book is a killer financially, a blow to the base of the skull mentally and physically, hell for your family, a slovenly imposition upon all concerned—in short, an inexcusable performance verging on shameful. Nevertheless, that was how long it took me to write one book, a novel called
A Man in Full
. Eleven years. My children grew up thinking that was all I did: write, and never finish, a book called
A Man in Full
.
Why did it take me so long? Not having access to Dr. Freud’s emergency night-line number, I won’t try to get into matters I don’t understand. I will only mention one thing I know cost me years. I committed the sin of hubris. I was going to cram the world into that novel,
all
of it.
Off I went to Japan on the most expensive trip of my life, because this book was going to embrace the entire globe. I returned with only two bits of information that I think might add to my fellow Americans’ knowledge of the Far East. First, living in a house with shoji screens for walls is even more beautiful than looking at one in a coffee-table book,
but you can hear everything.
Everything
. Second, never try to treat two Japanese businessmen to three hours of whiskey and small talk in a Tokyo hostess bar, the updated version of the geisha house, with only $900 in your pocket. When the check comes, you will be, by American standards, horribly embarrassed and, by Japanese standards, terminally humiliated.
Tenninally.
This book was also going to tell you everything you could possibly want to know about the American art world, from the still-booming (it was 1988 when I started out) art market at the top to the life of all the wretched, squirming, wriggling, desperate unknown artists at the bottom. I spent months—
months!
—in the lower depths. It seems that all the art schools, from the Rhode Island School of Design on the East Coast to the California Institute of the Arts on the West Coast, tell their students, quite accurately, that first they must catch on with a gallery in New York. After that, they can go be artists anywhere they want; but unless they first get their tickets punched in New York, their careers will go nowhere. So they come pouring into New York’s nether reaches literally by the tens of thousands, succeeding mainly in driving up each other’s rents in filthy, airless, treeless, grassless, rotting old sweatshop districts with names like SoHo, NoHo, Dumbo, TriBeCa, and Wevar, the only slums in the world inhabited chiefly by young white people with masters of fine arts degrees. Interesting … and completely irrelevant to the story of
A Man in Full.
The book was also going to go behind the TV screen and lay bare the world of television news; and in due course I developed a plot twist in which a network magazine show would undertake an elaborate sting operation in order to trap three soldiers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, who are suspects in a murder case. So now I spent another eternity busying myself with network-news practices in New York and Army life at Fort Bragg and on the gaudy strip outside it, Bragg Boulevard. Eventually I did get something out of all this effort, a novella called
Ambush at Fort Bragg
that may be found elsewhere in these pages (175-245). But what did it have to do with
A Man in Full,
whose action takes place in Georgia and California? Nothing.
God knows it took me long enough to do the reporting on matters that
did
turn out to bear directly upon
A Man in Full
: Southern plantation life today, commercial real estate development, banking and bankruptcy, the modern working class, prison life, Asian immigrants, black professional and political life in Atlanta, Atlanta’s social structure, manners, and mores, plus those of the 7-Eleven Land east of Oakland, California. I went to see the Santa Rita jail in Alameda County, California; duet apartments in Pittsburg, California; Sikhs and Eritreans in Oakland; and Vietnamese in Oakland and in Chamblee, Georgia, which is an old, erstwhile-rural town just east of Atlanta now swollen with Asian and Mexican immigrants. My Vietnamese did all right, but my Sikhs made it into only four paragraphs in the entire book; my Eritreans, only one.
I emphasize these reporting stints for a reason beyond trying to explain why the novel took me so long. In 1973, while I was still exclusively a writer of nonfiction, fourteen years before I published my first novel, I wrote an essay on what was known back then as “the New Journalism.” In it, I said that the American novel was in bad shape, languishing from an otherworldly preciousness, but that there was “a tremendous future for a sort of novel that will be called the journalistic novel or perhaps documentary novel,” a novel “of intense social realism based upon the same painstaking reporting that goes into the New Journalism.”
In 1987 I published my first novel,
The Bonfire of the Vanities,
with the hope of proving my point. Did I? Only others can answer that question. All I can say is that I was sufficiently emboldened by the novel’s reception to write an essay for
Harper’s
entitled “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast.” I argued that by now the American novel had deteriorated into a “weak, pale, tabescent” condition so grave, its very survival depended on somehow sending “a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas”—I had already identified Zola as the giant of the journalistic or documentary novel—“out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, Hogstomping Baroque country of ours to reclaim it as a literary property.” Since that was precisely what I had done in “documenting” (Zola’s
term) and then writing
The Bonfire of the Vanities,
I shouldn’t have been surprised when some people found my words self-serving. Nevertheless, that was what I believed, and, in any case, I was already deep into the reporting for what I hoped would be another novel of Zolaesque realism,
A Man in Full.
As the years went by—two, four, five, eight, ten, and, finally, eleven—the suspense intensified. Not, I hasten to add, in the world outside, which seems to be able to successfully contain its excitement, if any, in such matters, but in me; the suspense down in my solar plexus, I assure you, was terrific. The years had been mounting, and given my own preaching about realism or “naturalism” (another of Zola’s terms), so had the stakes. My publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, upped them a bit more by announcing a first printing of 1.2 million for my new book when it finally came out in November 1998.
My first inkling of how
A Man in Full
might be received by critics came when
Vanity Fair
assigned the writer David Kamp to do a story on The Man Who Spent Eleven Years Writing One Book and got hold of a Xeroxed copy of most of the 2,300-page manuscript. Kamp’s lead went:
“He strides through the vestibule, a lean, courtly figure resplendent in—
“
No, no no!
No scene setting! To the chase: is the book any good?
“Relax, it is. The 11-year wait since
The Bonfire of the Vanities
was worrisome, but the new one, which is called
A Man in Full
, works quickly to allay fears that Tom Wolfe had only one decent novel in him … Lovely to have you back, sir.”
So I relaxed, for the first time in weeks. What ensued was all that a man who had just spent eleven years writing one book could dare hope for.
Before I continue with this story—and it is a story with a plot—and the plot soon thickens—please let me assure you of one thing: I realize as clearly as anyone else how unseemly it is for a writer to be anything but insouciant about book reviews, publicity, and sales figures. Rimbaud
set the bar for insouciance about as high as it is ever likely to go when, in his early thirties, finding himself hailed by critics as the most important poet in France, he replied, “
Merde pour la poésie
.” But Arnold Bennett, the British novelist, author of a wildly successful book,
The Old Wives’ Tale
(1908), wasn’t half bad, either, when he said, “I don’t read my reviews, I measure them.” So please believe me when I say I am only going into these crass matters—reviews, publicity, sales—in the case of
A Man in Full
because they are essential to understanding our story.
First, the reviews. Every publication that people immediately check to gauge a new book’s success or failure was generous with praise, more generous, to tell the truth, than I could have ever hoped, starting with gauge number one, the all-important
New York Times Book Review.
Over the years I’ve come off well in the
Times
now and then, and I’ve taken my drubbings, but this round, I must say, went my way. The reviewer, Michael Lewis, wrote: “The novel contains passages as powerful and as beautiful as anything written—not merely by a contemporary American novelist but by
any
American novelist”; and he added: “The book is as funny as anything Wolfe has ever written; at the same time it is also deeply, strangely affecting.” In
The Wall Street Journal
Andrew Ferguson called it “a masterpiece” and “a greater achievement than ‘Bonfire’: richer, deeper, more touching and more humane.” In
Newsweek
Malcolm Jones said: “Right now, no writer—reporter or novelist—is getting it [the Zeitgeist] on paper better than Tom Wolfe.” In the daily
New York Times
, Michiko Kakutani didn’t care for the book’s ending, but in light of what she had to say about the rest of
A Man in Full,
I certainly couldn’t complain. The
pièce de résistance,
however, was a long review and profile by the highly respected Paul Gray in
Time
, not to mention my picture, which was on the magazine’s cover. “No summary of
A Man in Full,”
wrote Gray, “can do justice to the novel’s ethical nuances and hell-bent pacing, its social sweep and intricate interweaving of private and public responsibilities, its electric sense of conveying current events and its knowing portraits of people actually doing their jobs. Who, besides Wolfe, would have thought that
banking and real estate transactions could be the stuff of gripping fiction?”
On second thought, I have to mention that cover of
Time
, after all. Honestly, I do blush easily, and I pledge you my word that I go into the following only because it is essential to understanding what other people were about to do. In any field in the United States, the news that So-and-so “made the cover of
Time”
has always had a unique ring to it; and over the preceding two decades the picture of a novelist on the cover of
Time
had become a rarity. But there I was, not only on the cover, but on the cover wearing a white double-breasted suit and vest and a white homburg and holding a pair of white kid gloves in one hand and a white walking stick in the other. The headline said in big letters: TOM WOLFE WRITES AGAIN. Beneath, in smaller letters, it said: “The novelist with the white stuff is back with
A Man in Full
. More than a million copies, before anyone has read a word!” Not only that, for the first time in its history
Time
printed its logo, the famous TIME, in white against a white background, with only a gray undershading to let you know the four letters were even there. The entire cover, graphics and all, became an overture to “the novelist with the white stuff.” I didn’t realize it at that moment, but this was premonition music, as they say in cinema circles, for what was about to occur.
And sales? This is the most embarrassing subject of all for me to be talking about, and I do apologize, but I have no choice; as we are about to see,
others
insisted on bringing it up. Sales of
A Man in Full
skyrocketed from the moment it reached the stores.
The Wall Street Journal
ran a feature on the book’s depiction of the city of Atlanta with the headline “Tom Wolfe Burns Down Atlanta,” and former Atlanta mayor Sam Massell announced he was withdrawing an invitation to me to speak before a business group, the Buckhead Coalition. So I didn’t know what to expect when I reached Atlanta on my book tour the following week. They were waiting for me—in lines at the bookstores. My first night in town, at the Borders bookstore in Buckhead, I signed books for 2,300 people in four hours. Borders is a vast place, but the line spilled out onto the sidewalk on Lenox Road. The book sold so rapidly, it
didn’t have to climb its way up the
New York Times
bestseller list. It jumped on at number one and stayed at number one for ten weeks, throughout the Christmas season and well beyond. It sold in hardcover like a paperback bestseller, at a rate three to four times that of the usual number-one bestselling hardcover. Not only did the huge first printing sell out, but so did seven subsequent editions of 25,000 each.
It’s uncomfortable being compelled to sum things up so baldly, but here, in as few words as possible, is what we have: a critically acclaimed novel selling at an astonishing clip in a blaze of publicity. The scene is now set for the extraordinary thing that happened next. I have searched, and I can come up with nothing else like it in all the annals of American literature. Three big-name American novelists, heavy with age and literary prestige—John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving—rose up to denounce
A Man in Full
. Three famous old novelists rousing themselves from their niches in literary history to declare a particular new novel anathema—if anything even remotely comparable had ever occurred before, it had certainly escaped my attention.
John Updike, who was sixty-six, went on for four pages in
The New Yorker
before concluding with considerable solemnity that
A Man in Full
was not to be taken as literature but as “entertainment,” not even—he continued, as if to make sure his readers understood the crucial distinction between a pleasant experience and the higher things—not even “literature in a modest aspirant form.” Furthermore, its author was not a novelist but a “journalist.” Henry James, said Updike, has taught us that literature must be “exquisite,” and this journalist, Wolfe, had “failed to be exquisite.” Norman Mailer, who was seventy-five, went on for six pages in
The New York Review of Books
—six pages in a newspaper-size journal dense with print—to reach the verdict that
A Man in Full
was not to be taken as literature but as a “Mega-bestseller.” Furthermore, its author was not a novelist but a “journalist” who “no longer belongs to us (if indeed he ever did!)” but has moved away and now “lives in the King Kong Kingdom of the Mega-bestsellers.”