Long in the fang

I've heard it said that meeting writers is often a disappointment; the charm and eloquence that they possess on the page frequently doesn't translate to the physical world. I didn't meet Tom Wolfe this afternoon, but after listening to him talk for an hour, I'm not sure I want to.

I haven't read much of Tom Wolfe's work, but what I have—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and parts of his first collection Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby—I've really liked. I hear The Right Stuff and many of his shorter non-fiction pieces are exceptional. Last spring, I took a course with the non-fiction writer Ron Rosenbaum in which a number of guest writers visited to talk about their craft. When people in the class asked Ron or the guests which current writer they thought was really exceptional, Wolfe was always mentioned first or second. When it came to a writer with chops, someone who could seduce you to keep turning the page, whether that page was about the Bauhaus or the space program, Wolfe was the man.

What a disappointment then, that Wolfe might have been the least seductive speaker I have ever heard. A speech like a piece of writing, needs to keep you interested and involved. Wolfe's delivery was plodding, his organization meandering, and I got the feeling not so much that I was listening to a brilliant and incisive writer as I was to an unprepared, pretentious, and out-of-touch man ramble on about his view of America.

Many of Wolfe's statements rang false as well. His first whopper—one I think I'd read before in the press around I am Charlotte Simmons—was that in American universities fellatio is not considered a sexual act, rather it's akin to kissing. Really? I know the University of Chicago is known as the school where "fun comes to die," but even so, that sounds like the gross overstatement of an isolated old man wagging his finger at "the youth," rather than anything that has to do with the truth.

Tom Wolfe has a very personal relationship with fact and history. He chastised New York and San Francisco intellectuals for forgetting god and the solid values of NASCAR-loving Southern folk. (Wolfe also called stock car racing, "the biggest sport in America." I'm not sure what measure he was using, but I'm pretty sure you'd have to play with the numbers for a while to come up with that conclusion.) He spent five minutes praising America's forgotten ethnic group, the Scotch-Irish, who, according to Wolfe have been the key fighters in every American war from the Revolution to Iraq. He called Thomas Jefferson's campaign against aristocracy, the most important moment in American history.

Responding to a question about racial issues, Wolfe said that America had had an apartheid, but that it had ended shortly after World War II. I'm not sure what he considered the end of that era: Brown v. Board of Ed, maybe? The Civil Rights movement seems a little too late to be considered "shortly after World War II," and regardless, how could a responsible speaker not note that while conditions have improved markedly, a gulf still exists between much of Black America and much of White America.

I knew before the speech that Wolfe was a conservative. What I didn't know was how uncritically he thought about the world. Appearing at the invitation of the US Embassy, Wolfe seemed like a caricature of the worst of the Bush administration's talking points. I'm a pretty unabashed fan of the United States, but if your central worry about the country is that there's too much oral sex on college campuses and that the urban elites are losing their ties to religion, then you're not looking very hard.

Tom Wolfe is famous for being a phenomenal writer and reporter. He implores young writers to get out and see the world, and stop writing self-indulgent works about the miseries of growing up in the suburbs. Yet, I think the America that he sees is a country that exists for only one man. If Wolfe looks at the world anymore, it's just to confirm his simplistic view of it. The intrepid reporter has turned in his pen and paper for a sheltered and lofty existence of white suits and well-earned celebrity. I would be fine with this, the man is 78 after all, if he wasn't so deluded to think that he still had a pulse on what was going on in "the Real America."

I would have been very excited to hear Wolfe talk about his craft, reminisce about Ken Kesey and Chuck Yeager, or wax on about the differences between writing novels and non-fiction. Instead, Wolfe fell into the trap of celebrity in which a famous person becomes an expert on all things, and turns form a sharp thinker into a blowhard.

A few more thoughts: Listening to Wolfe was pretty excruciating, but it paled in comparison to the introductory remarks delivered by the US Ambassador to Argentina, Earl Anthony Wayne. It wasn't anything Wayne said, rather it was the way he said it. Wayne speaks Spanish very, very poorly. It wasn't just his pronunciation. Reading from a prepared statement, it was clear that he didn't grasp the basic fundamentals of the language. Is it possible that in a country of tens of millions of Spanish speakers, the State Department couldn't find an equally qualified person who spoke at least passable Spanish?