"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote

Just over 40 years ago, a dandified New York reporter named Truman Capote traveled to Kansas to investigate the shotgun murder of a farm family. The result changed journalism forever.

By Amy Standen

Jan 22, 2002 | "In Cold Blood" began, as the story goes, when Truman Capote came across a 300-word article in the back of the New York Times describing the unexplained murder of a family of four in rural Kansas.

"Holcomb, Kan., Nov. 15 [1959] (UPI) -- A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut."

Capote seized on the grisly story and went down to Kansas to turn it into a book. He spent six years researching "In Cold Blood," and claimed to have invented a genre, the nonfiction novel; later, Tom Wolfe and others would include "In Cold Blood" in their own movement, known as New Journalism.

Both inventions are old hat now, and, more than 35 years after its publication, "In Cold Blood's" radicalism is a lot less apparent. But still the book stands out as a masterfully controlled recounting of murder and its aftermath and the people involved.

Gossip-slinging and accusations swirled about Capote in the sensational months after the book's publication in late 1965, all of it a mere harbinger of the even nastier gossip and accusations that would cloud his later life. But there's no hint of that in Capote's best novel. His meticulous, even obsessive reporting allowed his characters to tell the story, and the result is the best true-crime novel you ever couldn't put down.

Herbert Clutter was a successful farmer and community leader, a man known for his fairness, his loyalty to his invalid wife and his aversion to dealing in cash. (That was a fact that, had it been known to his future assailants, might have kept all four Clutters alive.) The family is almost too much of a 1950s fantasy to be believed. Nancy, a straight-A student and award-winning pie-maker, was dating a high school basketball star.

Kenyon, the bookish youngest Clutter, was building a cedar chest to give to his oldest sister, Beverly, on her wedding. They were regular churchgoers, active in the 4-H. As Holcomb residents would later tell detectives, there was no one who didn't like the Clutters.

Their killers came from as different a world as you could find in rural America at the time. Perry Smith's family was broken and violent. He'd lost two siblings to suicide, and a parent to alcoholism. Half-Cherokee, half-Irish, Smith had a "runty" build, thanks to a motorcycle accident that left him with disfigured legs and an addiction to aspirin and glorified daydreams. It was one of those daydreams that sent him out to the Clutter place: Perry's favorite movie was "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and he was certain that if he could only get to Mexico, he'd find treasure of his own there.

Dick Hickock's ambitions were slightly less delusional; he just wanted to take the money and run off somewhere he wouldn't be found. Hickock was also scarred; a car accident had put an unnerving asymmetry into his otherwise handsome face. Hickock's family was poor but relatively stable. He had a penchant for passing bad checks, but the Clutter murders left his family confounded. Where did such an ordinary boy muster up so much evil?



Hickock had learned about the Clutter family from a jail mate, an ex-employee of Herb Clutter's named Floyd Wells. In prison, Wells had casually mentioned how his former boss spent $10,000 a week to keep his farm going, and speculated that there must be a safe somewhere on Clutter's considerable spread. Hickock took this wishful information and recruited Smith, a man he figured to be a natural-born killer. (This, too, was somewhat divorced from reality: Smith bragged about having once killed a man just because he felt like it, but it was a lie.)

After the two got out of prison, they drove 400 miles out to the Clutter ranch, hogtied the family members in separate rooms and demanded to know where the safe was. There was none. Hickock and Smith shot each of the four Clutters in the head and left the ranch with $40, a radio and a pair of binoculars. Two months later, Wells' information led the police to Hickock and Smith as the two pulled into Las Vegas, broke and on the run. Five years after that, both men died on the same night on the gallows of the Kansas state prison. Finally, the story had an ending. Capote could finish his book.

After "In Cold Blood" was published, Capote's friends and detractors (and he had plenty of both) would remark on the parallels between the author and Perry Smith, the more sensitive and guilt-ridden of the two killers. Possibly, Capote felt a physical kinship to Smith: His body, as one of his "swans" would later recount in George Plimpton's "Truman Capote," combined a boyish face and torso with "the legs of a truck driver." More likely he simply understood that what separated him from Smith, more than anything, was luck.

Capote, like Smith, had been born to absent, unreliable parents. Both had suicide and alcoholism in the family. Both were desperate for acceptance, but they also had ironclad estimations of their own importance -- Perry, in his words, was "special"; Capote, in his own, "a genius." Were it not for his mother's second marriage and his own considerable charms and angelic good looks (and his keen ability to ingratiate himself to his benefactors), Capote might have ended up as alone and desperate as Smith did. Like Smith, Capote knew exactly what he wanted to be, and he constructed himself accordingly. Capote's ambitions were realized; Smith's weren't.

Another claim, this one circulated by one of the detectives Capote interviewed in Kansas, had Capote involved in a sexual affair with Smith, carried out during Capote's visits to the penitentiary. That one's pretty dubious, but Capote's sympathies are clear, and his ear for Smith, and for all the disappointments of Smith's life, are part of what make the book work so well. Through Capote, we hear of Smith's studious attempts at self-improvement, his handwritten vocabulary lists full of words like "ostensibly" and "depredate."

We hear how the elementary school dropout taught himself beautiful handwriting, and an appreciation of Thoreau. This is where Capote's journalism -- not his writing, but his reporting -- comes alive: when we hear Perry Smith remembering what it was like to be reunited with his itinerant, absent father, "like when the ball hits the bat really solid. Di Maggio."



Capote knew how gut-clenchingly suspenseful dialogue could be. "In Cold Blood" recounts the scene at the Clutter house twice: first in a quote that spans six pages, delivered by Nancy and Kenyon Clutter's English teacher, Larry Hendricks, one of the first people to find the bodies.

Then, 200 pages later, from Smith's taped confession, another quote spanning several pages, broken only by the interrogator's questions. In both of these crucial chapters, Capote restrains himself to only the barest of observations, as in this part, just as Smith begins to describe the first of the murders: "Perry frowns, rubs his knees with his manacled hands. 'Let me think a minute. Because along in here, things begin to get a little complicated. I remember. Yes, yes.'" You brace yourself for what comes next.

Of course, keeping that degree of aloofness meant that Capote had to leave a lot out of the story -- for instance, the awe and resentment the residents of the small Kansas town of Holcomb felt at the appearance of a high-flying reporter. Capote was smart to bring his childhood friend Harper Lee with him to help gain the confidence of the locals. But that didn't make them like him any more when "In Cold Blood" came out.

It wasn't until Plimpton did his own Kansas reporting for his biography of Capote that we hear Harold Nye, a Kansas Bureau of Information agent, describe visiting Capote and Lee in their hotel room and finding Capote lounging around in a "pink negligee, silk with lace." Quite possibly this is made up, but it goes to show how dramatic the culture shock was for everyone involved, and how it was all the more remarkable, then, that Capote came out of Kansas with so much story to tell.

Capote was a good listener. It's what earned him the confidence of the society ladies in Greenwich, Conn., and Manhattan, and it's what made him a good reporter. His accounts of Smith's small, paradoxical kindnesses to the doomed Clutters, like when he places a pillow under Kenyon's head before putting a gun to his temple, are a hundred times more effective in describing the tumult of emotions in a criminal's mind than an expert's analysis could ever have been.

Smith's divided conscience, what allows him to stop Hickock from raping Nancy Clutter, then go on to kill her anyway, and then, later, his infamous recollection of that night, "I really admired Mr. Clutter, right up until the moment I slit his throat," could be no starker from any mouth but Smith's own.

Today, it's hard to imagine what journalism was like before Capote and the others started looking closely at "ordinary" people, before they began making an earnest effort to, as Wolfe puts it, "deliver this felt sense of the quality of life at a particular time and place." At the time, though, a lot of other people in the literary world were dubious. New Yorker critic Renata Adler snottily summed up New Journalism as "zippy prose about inconsequential people," and it's a charge that most New Journalists, and Capote certainly, wouldn't have gone too far out of their way to deny. The lives of "inconsequential people," especially those caught in consequential events, have been fascinating readers for years -- both before Capote and the New Journalists and after.

Most recently, it's what drove so many people each day to the Portraits of Grief section in the New York Times. And it's part of the reason we continue to try to make sense of the psychology of crime -- even crime on such a horrific scale as the Sept. 11 attacks. And as for "zippy prose," as Wolfe pointed out in "The New Journalism," one need only try to imagine its opposite.

Source: http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/masterpiece/2002/01/22/cold_blood/index2.html

The Armies of the Night

by Norman Mailer
Novel 1968
approx. 135,000 words,
386 pages

"New journalism" is old hat now

If you've heard that the highlight of 1967 was the Summer of Love, check out The Armies of the Night to discover that summer was followed by the Autumn of Confrontation. At least in the United States. The growing protest against the Vietnam War was joining with the "Make Love Not War" counterculture and swelling into a movement that would soon engulf all America and much the rest of the western world. In October 1967 a massive demonstration marched on the Pentagon in Washington. Norman Mailer was there and was arrested, and wrote this very subjective account of his experience.

The book is subtitled somewhat pretentiously History as a Novel, The Novel as History, signalling this is a new art form. Or just another example of the "New Journalism" of the day giving itself airs.

When you read this work today, it seems quite dated. To wit, Mailer's observation of how the New Left (everything was "new" then, it seems) took its esthetic from revolutionary Cuba. His descriptions of forgotten literary and political figures involved in the protests. Even Mailer's kaleidoscopic collision of insights into the war machine, the tactics of protest and the psyche of America seem somewhat overheated and naive now. But others were impressed at the time, as the book won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1968.

Armies of the Night really is two accounts of the same event — one subjective as narrated by a participant and one more objective, based on third-party reports.

But if this is a "novel" it does have one intriguing central character, namely Mailer. As usual, the author places himself front and centre. We keep reading, especially the subjective first half, because we enjoy seeing everything from his eyes. We even enjoy the side trips into Mailer's own peccadilloes that have little to do with the protest movement he is supposedly reporting on. Critics may complain the writer is verbose and self-obsessed, but it is this main character with his avalanche of observations who makes it work at all.

Many other books were published during that period, written by members of the "flower power" generation, but they are virtually unreadable today. As part of an older generation, who nevertheless sympathized with the cause, Mailer had both the objectivity and the passion to create one of the more interesting portraits of that time.

Whether Armies of the Night will endure as a work of art though is doubtful. Read it for a glimpse of the thinking of that time. [source: http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/books/Armies.html ]

The 6th annual Northeast Media Literacy Conference

Start: 2008-04-11 00:00
End: 2008-04-11 12:00
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5

Courtesy of the NEMLC:
The 6th annual

Northeast Media Literacy Conference

April 11, 2008

University of Connecticut, Storrs

The New Media Literacies for Today’s
Plugged-In Generation!

Whether you are a teacher, parent, counselor, or others who work directly or indirectly with young people, the upcoming 6th annual Northeast Media Literacy Conference should be of great and timely interest.

The Conference on April 11, 2008 again features an unusually diverse group of innovative leaders and topics in the study of the mass media and its great impact upon today’s young people and their thinking, priorities, decisions, actions, and their values.

For our 6th annual conference, we are focusing on some of the new media literacies and their needs and realities in light of today’s rapidly changing technologies and their impact upon and growing involvement by our children and youth.

Featured are two outstanding, innovative leaders as keynote speakers, providing up-to-date, fresh approaches and perspectives to the growing media literacy field:

Dr. Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist and digital enthnographer from Kansas State University, recently uploaded a short video to YouTube called Web 2.0, the Machine is Using Us. The video dramatically demonstrates how the Web is changing how we communicate and how fast. This production quickly became the most viewed video on YouTube, watched by over 3 million people. He is also author of a new film, A Vision of Students Today, and a timely blog, Digital Ethnography. Wesch is a true activist for media literacy. He teaches teachers how to use the Web, because, he believes, students are good at being entertained by technology, but they're not particularly good at using it to locate, identify, and sort valuable information.

Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired – What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, has great insight into how being a teen today is very different from what it used to be and what teens are really doing on the Internet and with technology today, including such timely activities as social networking, blogging, and cyberbullying.
What are LiveJournal, Xanga, Facebook, and MySpace and how have they become so much a key part of young people’s lives? Why is it critically important for parents, teachers, and other adults to be knowledgeable about and better understand these expanding, ever-present media forms? Goodstein examines the threats of today’s technology to young people, but also provides “fresh insights into the positive ways young people use the wired world in their lives.”

In addition, the full day’s conference program includes twenty timely workshops based on key media literacy related areas – The Role of Today’s Advancing Technology, Mass Media’s Depiction of Today’s Culture and Values, Philosophy and Theory, Standards and Curriculum, Classroom Activities, Research and Evaluation, Teacher Education, and Media Production.

Please mark your calendar - Friday, April 11, 2008.

Proposals for Workshops will be accepted until December 15, 2007. (A proposal will be considered after this date only if there is room in the program and the topic will add balance and/or diversity to the workshop offerings.)

Access the Proposal Form at our conference website at http://medialiteracy.education.uconn.edu

Check our website periodically for conference updates.

We hope you will join us!

Dr. Thomas B. Goodkind, Conference Coordinator
Northeast Media Literacy Conference 2008
Neag School of Education
University of Connecticut 2033
Storrs, Conn. 06269
t.goodkind@uconn.edu
tbgoodkind@snet.net
860-486-0290 office
860-974-1814

2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism

Start: 2008-03-14 13:30
End: 2008-03-16 13:00
Timezone: Etc/GMT-5
From the Nieman site:

The 2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism will continue to explore the dimensions of literary journalism:

• How to gather rich material through deep reporting.
• How to structure fluent accounts.
• How to flesh out stories with flesh-and-blood characters.

But, given the changes in the way that stories are being told online as well as in print, we will incorporate a new focus on multimedia storytelling, adding journalists from the creative edge of radio, documentary, and the Web to our renowned all-star cast of writers and editors.

The Nieman Narrative Conference is open to all writers wishing to sharpen their reporting skills, write with flair and learn from experts in the field, including award-winning journalists, authors, and broadcasters.
To explore the many ways in which journalists report stories today, we are adding new workshops on multimedia storytelling.

Keynote speakers include:

John Hockenberry: Emmy and Peabody Award-winning journalist and commentator known for his work on Dateline NBC and NPR’s "The Infinite Mind."

Dana Priest and Anne Hull: Washington Post investigative journalists who exposed the mistreatment of Iraq War veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Sherry Turkle: Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and a clinical psychologist who researches and writes on people’s relationship with technology.

Sam Pollard: Film director, producer and editor recognized for his work on Eyes on the Prize, and his collaboration with filmmaker Spike Lee on Mo’ Better Blues, Girl 6, Crooklyn, Clockers and When the Levees Broke.

Other presenters include returning favorites Roy Peter Clark and Adam Hochschild and new speakers Elizabeth Farnsworth, Mark Leibovich, Russell Contreras, and Peggy Orenstein. Details and Registration

Narrative Journalism

Generations ago, narrative journalism was the rule in reporting and not the exception. Stories (sometimes rather subjectively reported and quite long by today's standards) in magazines and newspapers led the reader through a gripping tale told entirely from the view and experiences of the author. However, times have definitely changed.

Today, narrative journalism is not commonly used by most mainstream media outlets. In fact, many journalists stick with very basic formulas or utilize the "inverted pyramid" style of reporting in an effort to keep their writing concise and easy to edit. Some may even be unfamiliar with the technique, having never learned it throughout their careers as "beat" reporters.

Yet there is still room for narrative journalism in today's global marketplace where the Internet is available 24-hours a day, and authors eager to test their competence using a new technique may truly enjoy writing a news report that reads much more like a story than a series of objectively written paragraphs.

A Little About Narrative Journalism
The narrative journalism style requires that the author put him - or herself into the article; thus, the piece may be written from a first-person perspective. However, it may also be told from a third-person viewpoint but with subjective nuances in the text.

Of course, it's tricky to write a true narrative if you're accustomed to sticking to "just the facts" and not adding any extraneous adjectives or adverbs to the mix, let alone personal opinions. You really have to let yourself "loose"; in fact, you may want to seek out some articles in the narrative journalism style to give you hints. (The New Yorker magazine is an excellent resource for narrative journalism examples.)

Some Narrative Journalism Concerns
One of the biggest worries editors and publishers have about narrative journalism is that because it's a blend of facts and feelings, problems can occur. Recently, many authors have been nabbed for stating mistruths in their pieces. Though some of the journalists accused of making up details were in fact guilty, others claimed to have simply misinterpreted situations. Because narrative journalism makes fact-checking challenging, it is still considered taboo in most news rooms.

Thus, if you're planning on trying out narrative journalism, talk to your editor first (if applicable.) Find out if he or she has any concerns regarding the technique, and try to hash out a plan so you'll both be comfortable with the outcome. That way, you won't be nailed when you turn in an assignment that isn't acceptable to your editor or his or her publication.

Gearing up to be a Narrative Journalist
Again, this art form hasn't been lost; it's simply been "on holiday" for a while. If you want to be one of the few journalists known for writing exceptional stories in a narrative journalism style, you'll need to practice.

A good way is to take an existing story from a newspaper and re-write it from a narrative viewpoint. At first, this exercise might feel awkward, especially if you're accustomed to working with "inverted pyramids". However, after some time, you'll begin to understand how to put together a narrative piece that is provocative and, above all else, truthful.

A second method of learning more about narrative journalism is to actively seek out stories written using the technique. Contrast them with other nonfiction articles you've read (or written).

Enjoy yourself as you learn this craft; after all, educating yourself in the various methods of writing will only make you a stronger, more well-rounded journalist.

Source: www.explorewriting.co.uk

The Man in White

When American culture seems to go haywire, Tom Wolfe is usually there to tell us about it.

love Tom Wolfe. Maybe too much. Whenever some big bizarro thing happens in what he calls ''the lurid carnival actually taking place in the mightiest country on earth in the year 2000,'' I want him to give it his electric Kool-Aid acid test. I want the man in the white suit to do his usual exhaustive reporting, turn the labels inside out and the hypocrites upside down, skewer the puffed-up phonies and pruned-down lemon tarts, and tell me what's what in one of those jittering, dazzling riffs of his.

I am dying to know, as the Time Warner-AOL merger careers along, how he would satirize the fascinating Henry James collision of the old print world and the new dot-com world, the anxious wriggling food chain of Bob Pittman, Steve Case, Gerald Levin and Ted Turner. How would he limn all these awful dinner parties where Old Media kisses up to New Media, with Old Media desperately trying to be more casual by casting off its tie, and more hip by droning on in tiresome digibabble? What would Wolfe make of the dread synergy, the bumper-car game of Disney values and ABC values and Leonardo DiCaprio's star turn as ABC White House correspondent? And how gleefully the Wolfe-man could have carved up the chundering, blundering parade of House Torquemadas in the risible and overblown impeachment scandal, and the bevy of leech women, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp.

When Wolfe wrote ''The Bonfire of the Vanities'' in the mid-1980's as a column for Rolling Stone, he had a hard time getting in front of his satire. He couldn't mock the masters of the universe as fast as they could make mockeries of themselves on the front page. By the time we got to the Molière bedroom farce of Clinton and Lewinsky, America had grown so wacky and gossipy and shameless and solipsistic and materialistic, satire was simply redundant. ''Saturday Night Live'' struggles weekly to parody pols like George W. Bush. But how can you write mordant material better than W.'s own, like his irritated response to Gail Sheehy's claim in Vanity Fair that he is dyslexic: ''The woman who knew that I had dyslexia -- I never interviewed her.''



Jacques Lowe/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Tom Wolfe
# Related Articles Featured Author: Tom Wolfe
Unfortunately, ''Hooking Up'' has hardly any new Wolfe, and even the new tidbits feel reheated, being mostly arguments about why he was right about this or that, and iterations of his exhortations to wade out into the human beast and report. The title piece, published in The Tatler last year, is a millennial survey, Wolfe crying wolf about our monetary and sexual excesses. The tone is oddly unpleasant, churlish and stuffy, and the info not particularly fresh.

''In the year 2000,'' he writes, ''it was standard practice for the successful chief executive officer of a corporation to shuck his wife of two to three decades' standing for the simple reason that her subcutaneous packing was deteriorating, her shoulders and upper back were thickening like a shot-putter's -- in short, she was no longer sexy.'' Actually, that has been standard practice for a few decades now. And Wolfe already spent a lot of pages in his 1998 best seller, ''A Man in Full,'' obsessing on first wives with thick backs getting discarded. That stuff about subcutaneous packing gives me the creeps.

He has a few paragraphs on teenagers hooking up, as in getting down, and then concludes that ''the continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men.'' That is another big ''Duh.''

His vintage pieces include the saga of the guys who invented the Internet (Al Gore is not included, for some reason), the Ayn Rand-like struggle of the late sculptor Frederick Hart and ''Tiny Mummies!,'' Wolfe's hilarious 1965 slam dance on the mummified New Yorker, in which William Shawn is presented as his own Mini-Me, or ''mini-momaniac,'' turning Harold Ross's witty, vibrant magazine into an eccentric and pretentious glass menagerie. (Long after Wolfe's piece, it turned out that the amber atmosphere nurtured by Mr. Shawn -- always whispered, reverentially -- bred some writers so Olympian that they no longer felt required to observe the niceties of nonfiction in nonfiction writing.) ''Humility has come to be a very important thing here,'' Wolfe wrote, ''and lately The New Yorker has settled upon small people, small physically, that is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy, thatchy, humble style of dress they had in college. After the age of 40, one is encouraged, by tacit example, to switch to hard-finished worsteds.''

Even after the cascade of bitter and nostalgic books written about the magazine by Shawn protégés, Wolfe's sendup is still a scaldingly funny, perceptive portrait of the weirdo Whisper Zone, horsehair-stuffing days of Shawn. Fury over the piece, which ran in New York, The Herald Tribune's magazine, reached from Walter Lippmann to President Johnson's aide Richard Goodwin to J. D. Salinger, who burst out of his reclusiveness to send a furious telegram to Jock Whitney, The Trib's owner and publisher, but Wolfe weathered it because he was lucky enough to work for an editor whom I was once lucky enough to work for at The Washington Star -- James Bellows, a newspaperman with verve and bravery in equal measures, who always backed up his reporters and who loved nothing better than to do a joyous rain dance in a hail of criticism.

In an afterword written for this book, Wolfe speculates that New Yorker acolytes freaked out at his piece because he said how close Shawn was to his star writer, Lillian Ross. In her 1998 memoir, ''Here but Not Here,'' Ross wrote about her 40-year affair with Shawn and described in rapturous detail the sexual charms and sensual tastes of the Little One we had presumed to be so ascetic. (He lusted for Whoopi Goldberg, Madonna and fat, busty women, ''the fatter the better.'')

BOOK EXCERPT
"By the year 2000, the term 'working class' had fallen into disuse in the United States, and 'proletariat' was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky."

-- from the first chapter of 'Hooking Up'
Wolfe calls Ross's offering ''embarrassing,'' and says it never occurred to him, back in '65, that the relationship was more than editor-protégée. ''If someone had come to me back then and shown me chapter and verse of their 'affair' -- I wouldn't have believed it,'' he writes. ''I'm sorry, but they weren't affair material.''

''Hooking Up'' has only one previously unpublished essay, ''My Three Stooges.'' Not since Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman have we had such an amusing literary catfight as the one that began when John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving trashed ''A Man in Full.'' Wolfe bites back, calling Updike and Mailer ''two old piles of bones,'' ''two old codgers'' and ''exhausted carcasses.'' ''I was 68,'' he writes, venomously, recalling the Grumpy Old Men spleenfest that his book sparked. ''I knew how it must have drained them. . . . In interviews Updike was already complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two canes, one for each rusted-out hip.''

He says his three attackers were ''encapsulated in their neurasthenia,'' and had ''wasted their careers by not engaging the life around them,'' by ''turning their backs on the rich material of an amazing country at a fabulous moment in history.''

IN defending his own brand of reported novels, which he says are in the tradition of Dickens, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Balzac and Zola, Wolfe -- who probably could have predicted the new rage for ''Survivor''-style reality programming -- offers this polemic: ''Instead of striding out with a Dionysian yea-saying, as Nietzsche would have put it, into the raw, raucous, lust-soaked rout that throbs with amped-up octophonic tympanum all around them, our old lions had withdrawn, retreated, shielding their eyes against the light, and turned inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice, i.e., 'the literary world,' or such wholly ghostly stuff as the presumed thoughts of Jesus.''

''The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence but of anorexia,'' he declares. ''It needs . . . food. . . . It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with a ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye.'' I'm not sure we should be aiming to achieve the artistry of moviemakers, since Hollywood can barely seem to turn out any movies anyone wants to see. But I agree with the general pulse-of-the-beast idea. And any time Tom Wolfe wants to take a fresh bite of our lurid carnival, I'll be there.

Maureen Dowd is an Op-Ed page columnist for The Times.

Source: http://partners.nytimes.com

Reply to Tom Wolfe

The Chronicle of Higher Education

To the Editor:

It seems that Tom Wolfe is a victim of identity theft.

Someone using his name published a letter ("Tom Wolfe Replies to Robert S. Boynton on 'The New New Journalism,'" The Chronicle Review, April 15) responding to an article I wrote ("Drilling Into the Bedrock of Ordinary Experience," The Chronicle Review, March 4). In short, "Tom Wolfe" wrote a parody, deftly employing some of the signature stylistic flourishes of the real Tom Wolfe: hysterical narration, outlandish hyperbole, deliberate misreading, false rhetorical questions, baseless hypotheticals, etc. In fact, "Tom Wolfe" did such a good job that he had me going for a while. Until, that is, I realized that "Wolfe" had made so many errors that the letter couldn't possibly have been crafted by the famously fastidious writer.

The first clue to this deception is that in his search for anything that might discredit my argument, "Tom Wolfe" distorts the meaning of the last line of a long paragraph introducing a few of the writers I discuss in my book, The New New Journalism. He reads the line "Michael Lewis --Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (W.W. Norton, 2003) --chronicles big business" to mean that I am identifying Lewis's most recent book, rather than its author, with the subject of "big business."(Moneyball is, however, a book about the business of a game, the business of baseball -- and Lewis is a writer who has, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the baseball diamond, chronicled the world of American business.) Whoever this "Wolfe" is, his reading skills are abysmal. It isn't an enormous error, but poor "Tom Wolfe" prattles on about it for four paragraphs, slipping in an obvious parody of the real Wolfe's style -- "gibber-gibber ape-shrieking" -- so dated and awkward that it couldn't possibly have been written by him.

It gets worse. "Tom Wolfe" continues in this vein, screeching about the way "he" uses Weber's notion of "status," when it would be clear to any reader -- even the addled, fictional graduate student "Wolfe" employs as a rhetorical device -- that it is not Tom Wolfe's definition of status I take issue with, but the way he employs it in his work. Of course, status can mean "the entire range of ways in which human beings rank one another," as he puts it, but my point is that Wolfe (and here I mean the real Tom Wolfe) tends to focus his considerable reporting skills only on the status details of those who are wealthy and white (ethnic minorities and the poor are usually relegated to caricatures).

Finally, "Tom Wolfe" makes an elementary factual error when he questions my statement that Wolfe considers "ethnic and ideological subcultures" to be "terra incognita" -- an assertion I drew directly from a 1974 interview with the real Tom Wolfe ("I've completely relished this terra incognita, these subcultures, these areas of life that nobody wanted to write about," Conversations With Tom Wolfe, Page 39). For reasons known only to him, "Wolfe" then launches into a free-associating discussion of neuroscience ("Whose hookah has the elf been smoking?"). Perhaps a CAT scan is in order.

And on it goes. Anyway, as you can see from the above, there is little danger that any student of Wolfe’s would mistake the letter for his work. Tom Wolfe couldn’t possibly have written such an unworthy epistle. Could he?

Sincerely,

Robert S. Boynton New York University

Source: www.newnewjournalism.com