Generation Gaffes

By Paul Gray

MAUVE GLOVES & MADMEN, CLUTTER & VINE

by TOM WOLFE

243 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

When people all about him are keeping their heads, Tom Wolfe can be counted on to lose his. Let him get within earshot of a consensus, an article of faith so obviously true that every right-thinking soul in the country must bow down, and he will ask. What is going on here? Wolfe has been posing the same question ever since he appeared, trailing clouds of asterisks, as the bad boy of '60s journalism. This collection of eleven articles (written between 1967 and 1976) shows that he is steadily getting better at finding unsettling answers.

He is still, to be sure, bedazzled by surfaces: "Fashion, to put it simply, is the code language of status." This is an old Wolfe cry, updated to keep pace with the new scruffiness, or "Funky Chic." He insists that people's choice in clothing -down to the last epaulet or earth shoe -tells more about them than they think or may want known. Hence Wolfe constantly maintains a red alert for apparitions that everyone else has grown accustomed to overnight. He is invariably delighted with "such marvelous figures as the Debutante in Blue Jeans. She was to be found on the fashion pages in every city of any size in the country. There she is in the photograph . . . wearing her blue jeans and her blue work shirt, open to the sternum . . ."

Status Pole. In this mood, Wolfe can delight and instruct. But he omits the possibility that people can dress or act for reasons that have nothing to do with climbing or sliding down the status pole. Altruism, love and compassion seem excluded by his highly stylized determinism. Those who dismiss Wolfe do so at just this point. If he were sent to cover the Crimean War, would he not send back a dispatch describing Florence Nightingale's uniform?

Perhaps. But though he is preoccupied with fashion. Wolfe is remarkably unfashionable. His book is crammed with opinions that could get him banned from liberal cocktail parties for life. For example, he notes that the restrictions imposed by the Johnson Administration on the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong forced Navy pilots to take unreasonable and pointless risks -and needlessly killed hundreds of them. At the height of the Viet Nam protests, amid cries that fascism was at hand. Americans "had, and exercised, the most extraordinary political freedom and civil rights in all history." The sexual revolution ,means that people can copulate "with the same open, free "liberated spirit as dogs in the park or baboons in a tree."

When embroidering such assumptions, Wolfe rarely sounds serious. Anyone who can describe Jimmy Carter's brand of religious faith as "Missionary lecternpounding Amenten-finger C-major chord Sister-Martha-at-the-Yamaha keyboard loblolly pineywoods Baptist" has not succumbed to ideological portentousness. Yet he clearly is serious -not because he is a closet conservative, but because he is an old-fashioned satirist.

Had he been born a contemporary of Mencken's, Wolfe would have railed at the booboisie. As it happened, he arrived on the scene when progressives and liberals had seized the reins of established opinion -and when undreamed-of zaniness was abroad in the land. Stuffiness, traditions of all stripes were panting on the ropes; the mood was full throttle into a brave new world.

At such moments the satirist turns reactionary. That is why Wolfe wiggles his eyebrows when he hears wealthy Easterners proclaim a distaste for fancy living and a love of the underprivileged: "Everybody had sworn off fashion, but somehow nobody moved to Cincinnati to work among the poor." That is why he deflates the comic-strip balloons that people who think they are humane so often utter: "Or as a well-known, full-grown socialite. Amanda Burden, said ... 'The sophistication of the baby blacks has made me rethink my attitudes.' " That is why he mocks the now pieties of the new morality: "Our eyes met, our lips met, our bodies met, and then we were introduced."

To survive, though, satire needs something more than clever carping: an urgent sense of how people should behave if they would only listen to the satirist and stop acting stupidly. It is this sense that still animates Swift's A Modest Proposal, two centuries after its original topicality. The moral certainty that once propped up satire has faded also. Wolfe is too canny to convey any advice except an implicit "knock it off." If he went further, he could easily spend the rest of his days on the chicken-salad circuit, pumping for apple-pie virtues. He would no longer be a purveyor of satire but a target of it.

It is impossible to imagine Wolfe as a road-show Colonel Blimp, a truculent dandy wowing the provinces. He would quickly have them gasping, and not in pleasure. For his audacity is irrepressible. It has brought much wrath down on his head from more conventional journalists, but this book serves as a reminder of how often Wolfe's refusal to be respectful toward any subject has produced both illumination and laughter.

In The Commercial, for instance, Wolfe turns to short fiction to anatomize the current art of race relations. A black baseball player named Willie Hammer has been asked to make a TV commercial for Charlemagne, a new line of men's toiletries. Hammer desperately wants the assignment; it gives him the chance to become a "superstar," instead of just another gifted black athlete. Trouble is, the script calls for him to pronounce Charlemagne as "Charlie Magnet." Hammer must act on nationwide TV as if he cannot read. Before the dilemma is resolved, Wolfe gores a number of oxen: the power of advertising, the skin-deep status of black-white understanding, the venality of big-time professional sports. Easy targets, perhaps, but no one has better aim than Wolfe.

Greasy Skillet. Even critics who refuse to be amused cannot deny what has become obvious over the years: when Wolfe concentrates solely on reporting, he is virtually peerless among contemporary journalists. In The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie, the longest and best piece in this collection, he gives an unforgettably tactile account of combat life on a U.S. aircraft carrier, a "heaving greasy skillet," in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1967. Those who have not been on a carrier with planes approaching may have seen such a scene in movies. Wolfe's description is better: "As the aircraft comes closer and the carrier heaves on into the waves and the plane's speed does not diminish -one experiences a neural alarm he has never in his wildest fears imagined before: This is not an airplane coming toward me, it's a brick, and it is not gliding, it's falling, a fifty-thousand-pound brick, headed not for a stripe on the deck, but for me -and with a horrible smash!"

In its energy, pacing and abundance of detail, this story resembles The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). Wolfe's finest book and the keenest look at the psychedelic '60s yet written. These works suggest that his strongest card may not be satire at all. As entertaining as he is when he stands on the beach and points, Wolfe is most valuable when he journeys inside the whale.

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