Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Tom Wolfe
Thanks to Tina Jones, a lovely and talented actress and the House Manager of The John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, I recently had the pleasure of being invited to a short play (A Night With the Wolfe) at the legendary arts, entertainment and education center located in East Hampton New York.
As taken from the play’s billing, Wolfe was known affectionately as the “Man in the White Suit.” He was the winner of a National Book Award for The Right Stuff and National Book Award Finalist for his first novel Bonfire of the Vanities. But he was more than a writer. Wolfe was a massive cultural figure, who changed journalism in America as a founder of “new journalism”, who changed the conversation around popular figures like Ken Kesey and his “Merry Pranksters” of the ’60s, Astronauts, and George W Bush. Wolfe introduced several phrases into the American vernacular, including “statusphere”, “radical chic”, “right stuff”, and “the me decade”.
The script of the play was expertly written by Erika Rundle. It included excerpts from his novels, short works, articles, and interviews – all told convincingly through four talented performers (Joanna Feuer, Paul Hecht, Quinn Jackson, and Nate Janis) costumed in Wolfe’s iconic white suit.  Beautifully directed by Jackson Gay, the show moved at a fast pace, but gave enough emotional and intellectual room for the audience to take in the enormity of Wolfe’s accomplishments, and more his struggle to find a new “voice” that matched his literary interest as well as the times he lived. What he was looking for was a way to blend reality and fiction, and by doing so, to find a deeper truth in a story, the people involved, and the subject at hand.
As a writer, I was inspired by Wolfe’s diligence, his difficulties, and his resilience as he pounded away on his typewriter day and night in search of that voice. It reminded me of the time I learned that Van Gogh, upon forensic study of his paintings, had often done hundreds of brush strokes to get the final right brush stroke for one brush stroke. Meaning, he worked like heck, painstaking, deliberate, thoughtful work, to achieve his final vision. He certainly had genius, much like Wolfe, but he also had the ability to endure the agony of creation, something seldom considered as an attribute of artists who succeed. George Orwell also had it, saying once that his greatest gift was to be able to “sit with painful truths.”
The other thing I took from the night was the enormity of Wolfe’s curiosity. It was a key to his writing, to his ability to connect to the reader. They were caught up in his passion, because he was passionate. His curiosity was transposed onto the reader.
It is a wonderful trait for anyone, writer or not, to be that interested in people, to give them time to tell their story, to learn their nuances, their hopes and dreams, insecurities and triumphs. Very often, Wolfe would set out for one story, but in doing so, fueled by his curiosity and nose for the “buried” truth, would discover another. It was that way with The Right Stuff, when a book started about the first Astronauts, became more about Chuck Yeager, a pilot who broke the speed barrier and was the true apex aviator of the time, and not the men in rockets who were being touted by the press for this honor.
In the end, I left the show impressed, but also sad that Wolfe is no longer with us. I just have this great desire for him to write about the recent “flight” of Jeff Bezos and the Amazon crew into space. I wonder what he might find truly real about this story – the story behind the story. I have an idea it would not make the celebrated billionaire “rocket man” happy.
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White House Photo by Susan Sterner., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
