Reporting Live From Edge City: The Dynamic “Statuspheres” of Tom Wolfe’s America by Josiah Kilduff A Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Approved April 2014 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Simon Ortiz, Chair Lee Gutkind Sarah Amira de la Garza ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY May 2014 ABSTRACT During the 1960s, American youth were coming of age in a post-war period marked by an unprecedented availability of both money and leisure time. These conditions afforded young people new opportunities for exploring fresh ways of thinking and living, beyond the traditional norms of their parents' generation. Tom Wolfe recognized that a revolution was taking place, in terms of manners and morals, spearheaded by this latest generation. He built a career for himself reporting on the diverse groups that were developing on the periphery of the mainstream society and the various ways they were creating social spaces, what he termed "statuspheres," for themselves, in which to live by their own terms. Using the techniques of the New Journalism—"immersion" reporting that incorporated literary devices traditionally reserved for writers of fiction—Wolfe crafted creative non-fiction pieces that attempted not only to offer a glimpse into the lives of these fringe groups, but also to place the reader within their subjective experiences. This thesis positions Wolfe as a sort of liminal trickster figure, who is able to bridge the gap between disparate worlds, both physical and figurative. Analyzing several of Wolfe's works from the time period, it works to demonstrate the almost magical way in which Wolfe infiltrates various radical, counterculture and otherwise "fringe" groups, while borrowing freely from elements across lines of literary genre, in order to make his subjects' experiences come alive on the page. This work attempts to shed light on his special ability to occupy multiple spaces and perspectives simultaneously, to offer the reader a multidimensional look into the lives of cultural outsiders and the impact that they had and continue to have on the overarching discussion of the American Experience. i Ultimately, this paper argues that by exposing these various outlying facets of American culture to the mainstream readership, Wolfe acts as a catalyst to reincorporate these fringe elements within the larger conversation of what it means to be American, thereby spurring a greater cultural awareness and an expansion of the collective American consciousness. ii DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this thesis to my wonderful and patient wife Celeste, who graciously lent me her ear and skilled editing hand, and put up with me through countless rants, late nights and moments of exasperation during the course of this project. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my expert committee for taking an interest in my project. Each of them has been an indispensable source of information, inspiration and encouragement through this process. It has been a great privilege to work with such an all-star cast of internationally renowned writers and scholars. Their dedication to the project made this thesis possible. Additionally, I would like to thank Sean Loiselle, whose love for literature served to fuel my own, and Dr. Clint Penick, who turned me on to writers of the New Journalism in the first place. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION .................. ................................................................................... 1 2 A NOTE ON STYLE ............... ............................................................................... 11 3 A WOLFE IN A WHITE SUIT .............................................................................. 19 4 WOLFE AS TRICKSTER FIGURE ...................................................................... 25 5 "PARA-JOURNALISM" FOR A COUNTER-CULTURE ................................... 29 6 CHRONICLING THE COUNTERCULTURE: THE KEN KESEY SHOW ....... 34 7 RADICALISM AND THE "RADICAL CHIC" .................................................... 63 8 CONCLUSION ................... .................................................................................... 85 v INTRODUCTION By the time Tom Wolfe’s manifesto The New Journalism was published in 1973, he (and several others) had been engaged in the reporting techniques by which he characterized the movement for nearly a decade. However, he was the first to attempt to define just what New Journalism was, and to offer a defense of the methods that defined its unique literary approach to journalism. The new literary style of journalism, Wolfe explains, began to take shape in the early 1960s, developed by a small group of feature writers working primarily for New York magazines and Sunday supplements. According to Wolfe, it was during this time that “a curious new notion, just hot enough to inflame the ego, had begun to intrude into the tiny confines of the feature statusphere. It was in the nature of a discovery. This discovery, modest at first, humble, in fact, deferential, you might say, was that it just might be possible to write journalism that would...read like a novel” (New Journalism 9). Traditional reporting, Wolfe was all too aware, was bland, often little more than a simple regurgitation of the facts of a given event. “The archetypical newspaper columnist,” Wolfe wrote, “was [Walter] Lippman. For 35 years Lippman seemed to do nothing more than ingest the Times every morning, turn it over in his ponderous cud for a few days, and then methodically egest it in the form of a drop of mush on the foreheads of several hundred thousand readers of other newspapers in the days thereafter” (12). For years, journalistic writing had abided by the unwritten law of understatement. “Most non- fiction writers,” Wolfe explains, “without knowing it, wrote in a century-old British tradition in which it was understood that the narrator shall assume a calm, cultivated and, in fact, genteel voice” (17). Frankly, traditional reporting was a bore. It lacked the 1 charm, the eloquent style, the lasting appeal, the ability to captivate the reader, which a good novel possessed. This was because the traditional journalist had been equipped with a very limited set of tools and had been taught that these were all that were available to him—that those tools which the novelist had at his disposal to create worlds and to draw his audience into them, were off limits to the journalist. Naturally, the realization that this aging law had in fact become antiquated and need not continue to be observed was a huge revelation for those few who were able to overcome the fear of breaking rank, overlook the consequences of such a move and embrace the possibilities that might come with this new form of journalism that delivered the facts, but did so with the fullness and esthetic eloquence of a novel. The new style, Wolfe states, took advantage of four key devices: “scene-by-scene construction, dialogue, point of view and the detailing of status life” (48). The first involved “telling the story by moving from scene to scene and resorting as little as possible to sheer historical narrative. Hence the sometimes extraordinary feats of reporting that the new journalists undertook: so that they could actually witness the scenes in other people’s lives as they took place” (31). The second device dealt with the gathering of enough dialogue to be able to show, not tell: to capture the essence of a character and recreate a given scene allowing his subject’s words—his verbal encounters with the others—to convey the action of the story. This meant that the journalist had not only to meticulously observe the subject as he conducted his daily affairs, but also to interview others about their interactions with him, read correspondence between he and his friends, family, business associates and enemies, watch video footage of him, listen to voice recordings—anything he could get his hands on, so that he might recreate not only 2 what was said, but how it was said, how it felt to be in the room as it was spoken. Using point of view the way a novelist could required even greater skill and commitment to the story and the characters it focused on. In several of his best stories, Wolfe uses point of view to effectively tell the story, as a novelist might, from the vantage point of a sort of third consciousness (telling the story neither from the “I” that is Tom Wolfe, nor the mind of his characters), or even more impressively, from within the mind of his subject, as in “The First Tycoon of Teen,” his piece on Phil Spector. In order to pull this off, the journalist had to go even deeper, beyond simply observing his subject, to interviewing him extensively about what he was thinking during a given event or conversation. Finally, and most importantly, the New Journalist interested himself (or herself) in the details of the subject’s ‘status life’: “everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving toward children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic [of a person’s status life] details that might exist within a scene” (32). In other words, “status life” is indicative of “the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be” (32). In an American society that had outgrown the Gilded Age, and was in a time of unprecedented prosperity, Wolfe was interested in how people were using the unique opportunities that this prosperity afforded them to remake themselves and establish their places within any of the new and various social hierarchies (“statuspheres”) taking root within the fabric of society, or even to create new ones of their own. 3 In order to effectively use these devices to push their new brand of journalism beyond the boundaries of their journalistic contemporaries, writers of the New Journalism had to immerse themselves in the worlds of their subjects.