In Chic's Clothing

Pop writing! Op writing! Endless, streaming sentences with lots of dots . . . stretching . . . them out, and plenty of italics and exclamation points break ing them up, and anatomical words like glutei maximi, and funny-paper words like Pow! and crazy brand names and run-on lists of things -- all cascading out of the . . . hottest . . . Royal Supermatic Floating Shift typewriter around.

That's Tom Wolfe's prose.

Not the Look Homeward, Angel Tom Wolfe, not by fifty gallons of corn pone, but a well-mannered young fellow from Richmond, with long brown hair floating down both sides of a pale, round face that looks more like 24 than 34. This is a Wolfe in chic's clothing: off-white suit, lemon-colored tie, brown-and-white pin-stripe shirt with French cuffs, wine-colored silk handkerchief puffing out of the jacket pocket--when he gets dressed up, in short, he looks like a well-polished Pierce-Arrow.

This is the Tom Wolfe who for the past year and a half has been writing breathless, semi-surrealistic articles for Esquire and the New York Herald Tribune's Sunday magazine, New York. A collection of these pieces comes out this week as a $5.50 book called The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. On the dust jacket the publishers tout Wolfe as quite a conversation piece: people "have been talking happily about him, singing his praises, debating about their favorite pieces, planning branches of The New Tom Wolfe Fan Club." Well, people have been talking unhappily about him, too, lampooning his literary mannerisms and planning branches of the Let's Punch Tom Wolfe in His Southern Snoot Club. But even readers who dis like Wolfe's flamboyant, exaggerated style and who feel that he has less than a firm regard for facts agree that there are few other writers today who have so mordant a sense of the ridiculous or such deadly sharpshooting aim.

Whimsicalities & Sound Effects. His youthful ambition was to use that aim to put a sharp-breaking curve over the plate. He was a pitcher for Washington and Lee University, played two seasons of semi-pro ball, and hoped to be a full-fledged professional. "I had a great screwball," he claims. "But one day they told me I would never make it, so I went to Yale and took a Ph.D. in something called American Studies."

After spending four months trying to break into journalism in Manhattan, Wolfe landed a $55-a-week reporter's job on the Springfield (Mass.) Union, moved on to the Washington Post, then went to work for the Trib.

On a story for Esquire on the teenage fad of customizing cars, he found himself unable to write a word. Editor Byron Dobell told him to type out his notes; somebody else would be assigned to write them up. Wolfe began typing the notes as a letter to Editor Dobell, which went on all night and added up to 49 pages. This, word for word, was The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, and from then on Wolfe tried to write his pieces as though he were writing a letter to one man, putting down all the irrelevant digressions and self-indulgent whimsicalities and sound effects that popped into his head. "Of course that's easier said than done nowadays," Wolfe admits. "The thing I try to avoid, though, is selfconsciously writing in a set style. I try to keep it spontaneous."

Flipped Wigs. The spontaneity sometimes sounds a little studied--especially in his leads, which have a tendency to come on like a psychedelic one-man band. The beginning of his piece on Las Vegas, for example, consists of the word "hernia" repeated no fewer than 57 times. And if the 25 pages that follow jump and shimmer at times in their observations and their writing, they also suffer from prose that has a tendency to clot and baroque scrollwork similes that have a familiar look.

Not included in the book is Wolfe's most widely discussed article--a cruel, 11,000-word evisceration of The New Yorker. That piece set literary jowls aquiver from Morningside Heights to Greenwich Village, and threw New Yorker staffers into a spate of semi-public wig flippings that are still going on--notably in a bitter rebuttal that Writer Dwight Macdonald is preparing for the biweekly New York Review of Books.

The best of Wolfe's reporting in Kandy-Kolored might well be required reading in courses with names like American Studies: his examination of Stock-Car Racer Junior Johnson as the American Hero, for example; his portrait of a beautiful, rich, frustrated Manhattan divorcee; his hilarious put-down of New York and New Yorkers called The Big League Complex.

Reporter Wolfe, in fact, rather fancies himself a sociological trail blazer who is hacking his way through the subculture pop worlds that he feels are molding the U.S. scene. But he ought to know that sociologists don't get printed as much as guys who go pop! BANG . . . stretching ... on a flaky, floating Supermatic.

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