from _The Westsider_, 11-22-79
Tom Wolfe, one of the most original stylists in American writing today,
burst spectacularly on the literary horizon in 1965 with _The Kandy
Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby_, a collection of articles about
contemporary American life written as nonfiction.
Wolfe's adoption of stream of consciousness, his unorthodox use of italics
and exclamation marks, his repetition of letters, and his effectiveness in
inventing hip phrases with nonsense words and classical references, helped
establish an entirely new literary form -- the nonfiction short story.
His reputation was cemented by such books as _The Electric Kool-Aid
Acid Test_, _The Pump House Gang_ and _The Painted Word_, a lengthy
essay on modern art. Wolfe sometimes illustrates his work with pen-and
ink drawings.
His latest book, _The Right Stuff_, deals with the age of rockets, the early
astronauts and the world of military flying. Published in September 1979,
it is a critical and commercial success that has already hit the best-seller
list.
A tall, slender 48-year-old transplanted Southerner with a rich baritone
voice, Wolfe speaks softly, chooses his word carefully, and exhibits a
kind of schoolboy bashfulness when discussing his own work. A New
Yorker since 1962, he lives on the Upper East Side with his wife Sheila,
the art director of _Harper's_ magazine. On the day of our interview,
Wolfe is wearing his customary one-button, swallow-tailed, yellow pin
stripe suit, which he describes as "early Duke of Windsor."
Q: What made you decide to write this book?
A: Back in 1972, Rolling Stone asked me to go down to the Cape and
cover Apollo 17. That was the last mission to the moon. ... Somewhat to
my surprise, I really became quite interested in the whole business of
what's the makeup of someone who's willing to sit on top of a rocket and
let you light the candle? And I ended up writing four stories for _Rolling
Stone_ in about a month. And I thought if I spent a couple of months in
expanding them, I'd have a book. Well, it's now 1979 and here we are."
(He laughs.) It was so difficult that I put it aside every opportunity I had.
I wrote three other books in the meantime, to avoid working on it.
I ended up being more interested in the fraternity of flying than in space
exploration. I found the reactions of people and flying conditions much
more fascinating. So the book is really about the right stuff -- the code of
bravery that the pilots live by, and the mystical belief about what it takes
to be a hot fighter jock, as the expression goes. I became interested in
people like Chuck Yeager, who broke the sound barrier back in 1947.
When the seven Mercury astronauts were chosen, they were not the seven
hottest test pilots in America, although they were presented as such at the
time. The arrival of the astronauts as a type completely upset the
competitive hierarchy of flying.
Flying has a competitive structure that's as hotly contested as the world
of show business. And the egos are just as big -- in fact, in a way, they're
bigger. . ... It's hard to top surgeons for sheer ego. I think surgeons are
the most egotistical people on the face of the earth, but pilots usually
make the playoffs: they're in there.
Q: Speaking of your other books: how do you manage to know all the
hip phrases of the day? Do you spend a lot of time with teenagers?
A: At one time, people thought I was some sort of medium who hung
around with children to pick up what young people were thinking and
doing. Well, that interested me very much in the '60s, when suddenly
young people were doing extraordinary things -- things they had never
done, which really boiled down to living lives that they controlled,
sometimes in a communal way, going with their own styles, rather than
imitating that of their elders. So it was fascinating. I made a point of
learning about it.
Sometimes now I turn on the radio and I don't recognize a single song on
the charts. Right now I have no idea what any of the top 20 singles are.
And I have the feeling that it's probably not worth finding out, because
we're now in a phase where we're just filling in the spaces of what was
introduced by rock and the Beatles and the Grateful Dead and so on.
There's nothing very new, I don't think. Maybe I'm wrong.
Q: How do you choose your clothes?
A: Right now I'm in the phase of pretentiousness. During the late '60s
I had a lot of fun by making mild departures in style -- wearing white
suits instead of blue suits, things like that. That was very shocking and
unusual in 1963. Suddenly things reached a point beyond which it really
wasn't worth going, as far as I was concerned, when Jerry Rubin and
Abbie Hoffman appeared on the _Dick Cavett Show_ in body paint.
There's one direction in which clothes can go that still annoys the hell out
of people, and that's pretentiousness. If you wear double-breasted
waistcoats, which I rather like, that annoys people. Spats more than annoy
people: they infuriate people. Try it sometime if you don't believe me.
They think that this is an affront. It stirs up all sorts of resentment. We're
in a period now in which the picture of the East Side really is of the man
living in the $525,000 co-op, leaving the building at night, both clothed
in turtleneck sweaters with pieces of barbed wire and jeans, going past a
doorman who is dressed like an Austrian Army colonel from 1870.
Q: Do you do a lot of drawing?
A: I have a regular feature in _Harper's_. I do one large drawing each
month, with a caption.
Q: What's your artistic background?
A: I never was trained in art. I worked for a commercial artist a number
of summers when I was in high school. And I learned anatomy from
drawing boxers in _Ring_ magazine. It was the only way I could think of
to learn anatomy.
I've had two gallery shows of drawings. ... And I'll have a book of
drawings coming out next year. I find myself very vain about my
drawing. I guess I don't feel as sure of myself as I do in writing;
therefore I'm always straining to get people's reactions to what I've
drawn.
What I do mostly is caricature. I try not to make them too cartoony. This
is a period that absolutely cries out for good caricature. Part of it is that
the great caricaturists used to be people who were determined to be fine
artists. Every artist, whether he was good or bad, learned anatomy very
thoroughly. He learned how to render landscapes, buildings, and learned
something about costume. So the ones who didn't make it as easel painters
might turn to doing caricature, and some of them were spectacular.
We all grow up thinking we're in an era of progress, because we have had
so much technological progress. But it simply doesn't work that way in
art and literature. We're living in an era -- to use Mencken's phrase -- of
the "Sahara of the beaux arts."
I wrote about that in _The Painted Word_. In fact, I'm doing a sequel to
that now. It will be an article for _Harper's_ magazine. I'm moving into
the areas of architecture and serious music and dance. It's very enjoyable
to work on a subject like that after a long haul of writing about astronauts
-- essentially because it's easier.
Q: What do you like to watch on TV?
A: To be honest, my two favorite shows are _Mannix_ -- which, alas,
is no longer except in reruns -- and the _Johnny Carson Show_. I just
think he's terrific. It was such a common currency among those in the
general category of intellectuals to like the _Dick Cavett Show_ and not
the _Johnny Carson Show_. And that is so much the party line that it
takes awhile to dawn on you that Carson is really extremely funny. Dick
Cavett, he has a lot of talent, but when it comes to wit, and even in
handling the language, he's simply not in Carson's league.
There are a whole bunch of shows, I must say, in which I simply don't
know who these people are. A lot of general-circulation magazines today
are really television magazines. _People_ magazine is a television
magazine. Look at these people. Who are they? Who are Mindy and
Mork? I mean, I've never seen the show. And yet, they're obviously
extremely well-known.
These magazines now, in an era in which general circulation magazines
are in trouble, have hit upon this idea: all these people that are watching
television will have the thrill of recognition if we write about the people
they've seen on television. So _Sports Illustrated_ will tend to give you
a kind of a rehash of the game of the week or the fight that everyone saw
on television. It's kind of funny. At first, television was always
cannibalizing the printed word for material, and now it's suddenly turning
around.
Q: Do you have any other major projects coming up?
A: For years I've been telling myself that I was going to try a _Vanity
Fair_ type of novel about New York, and I think I should probably try to
make myself tackle that next. I've debated whether to make it fiction or
nonfiction. My fiction writing has been confined to one short story that I
did for _Esquire_. And I was surprised that it was harder than I thought
to write fiction. I thought that I could sit down on a Sunday afternoon and
knock out a short story, because you could make things up.
Another thing I'd like to try is a movie script. I've done one -- a series of
vignettes about life in Los Angeles. ... But many talented writers just go
bananas in trying to write for the movies. Because they're not in charge
of what they're doing. All that a good director can do is keep from
ruining the script. He cannot turn a bad script into a good movie. He can
turn a good script into a bad movie. And often, I think, it happens,
because the director is given a power that he simply should not have.
Q: Do you feel a lot of pressure on yourself when you sit down at the
typewriter, as being one of the trend-setters in American writing today?
A: It was terrible after my first book came out, and I suddenly got a lot
of publicity I never dreamed I'd get. I was still working with the _Herald
Tribune_ as a general assignment reporter at the city desk. And I suddenly
was made aware by publicity that there was something called the Tom
Wolfe style. And this can really do terrible things to you. I wrote a whole
series of just dreadful article because the first phase I went through was:
"Well, I'll be damned. I have the Tom Wolfe style, I guess I'd better use
it." And so I started writing these self-parodies. The second phase was:
"I've got to stop this. It's self-destructive." And I would write something
and a bell would go off and I'd say, "That's Tom Wolfe style. Now is
that good the way I've used it there, or it is bad the way I've used it?"
And this became very troublesome.
When I did this book, _The Right Stuff_, I decided I really was going to
try to tailor my language to the mental atmosphere of pilots, and somehow
make my tone what I have elsewhere called the downstage voice. You're
writing in the third person about other people, but your own writing style
takes on their tone. So I think the result is a book that seems different in
style, and is sort of an experiment for me.
********
WESTSIDER PINCHAS ZUKERMAN
Violinist and conductor
10-13-79
"Travel is not fun anymore," sighs world-renowned violinist, violist and
conductor Pinchas Zukerman. "It used to be. Now there are all the checks
and securities at airports, and the hotel standards have gone down. The
old-style luxury hotel is gone. Now it's a businessman's Ramada Inn, kind
of hit-and-run hotel. But you learn to live with it."
Since making his American debut with the New York Philharmonic under
Leonard Bernstein 11 years ago, he has been a soloist with every major
orchestra in Europe, and acted as both conductor and soloist for most of
the leading orchestras in America. His schedule of 120 concerts a year is
solidly booked until 1982, and he has a discography of several dozen
recordings on four labels. For personal credits, Pinchas -- or "Pinky," as
he prefers to be called -- has lived on the West Side for 17 years, been
married to Eugenia Zukerman for 12 of those years. They have two
daughters, one of whom is a skilled pianist.
The _New York Times_ has called him "one of the world's leading
violinists," the _London Times_ has said he is "absolutely without peer,"
and the _Washington Post_ has labeled him "the most versatile of all
major musicians." Born in Israel, the son of Polish survivors of
Auschwitz, he was invited to perform at the White House last year for
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem
Begin. "I want to tell Sadat he should set up a recording studio inside the
pyramids," he joked before the event. This year, Pinky's greatest honor
was his appointment as music director of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra,
the only full-time chamber orchestra in America.
But the most astonishing thing about this burly, muscular man who speaks
nostalgically of the "old days," may be his age. He's 31.
"I think I had as normal a childhood as one could expect from a talented
boy that had to work," he muses in his living room overlooking the
Hudson River. Serious one moment, clownish the next, he frequently
punctuates his remarks with loud belly laughter. Pinky's sense of humor
is one of the things that endears him to his close friend, violinist Itzhak
Perlman, who lives six floors above. They were born three years apart,
grew up a few miles from each other, and both came to New York with
the help of violinist Isaac Stern to study at Juilliard.
The pair sometimes travel together for concerts, and according to Eugenia
Zukerman, "they do things like imitate apes at airports." Eugenia herself
is an extraordinary woman. Besides being a wife and mother, she is a
flutist with an international music career of her own, frequently appearing
in recitals with her husband. In addition, she is a highly talented writer
who has written free-lance articles for many leading publications, and now
devotes three or four hours a day to her first novel.
On October 19 at 10 p.m., and for the next three Friday evenings,
Channel 13 will present a series called _Here to Make Music_, which
documents Pinchas Zukerman's musical collaborations with Perlman,
Stern and others. Zukerman's life story is told through the use of
recordings he made before the age of 10, old photographs and candid
interviews, producing a portrait that is often fascinating.
"I think music on TV is getting definitely better in America. They're
ahead of the game at the BBC and in Europe, but they're quickly catching
up here," he notes. "Sometimes they overcompensate with pictures for the
sake of making a so-called 'interesting' show for the guy sitting with his
slippers in the living room, drinking a glass of beer. They're afraid to
leave the camera on the same musician for three minutes. That's why
you've got this flute playing, and you see this horn player picking his
nose."
When I ask Pinky about critics, the color rises in his cheeks. "Don't get
me on critics," he warns, before launching into an unrestrained diatribe.
"First of all, they're not critics as far as I'm concerned. They should be
reporters. But they never report what goes on in the concert hall. The
public stood up and clapped for 10 minutes. Say it, damn it! Don't say
that bar 56 was not right in the Beethoven G Major Sonata. Who cares?
It's so stupid!
"I'm a great fiddle player. They all say that. Fine. It's understood, it's
granted. It's there. Okay. So instead of criticizing my fiddle playing, they
say I'm becoming aloof, and this and that. ... One week they tear me to
shreds for my conducting. The next week I get these rave reviews. Now,
how can one person be that different in one week? What do they think,
that I'm a duet?"
Asked how much time he spends practicing, Pinky replies: "As much as
I need to. I don't think about time. You either live music or you don't. ...
Music is an unending art form which demands your complete attention and
perfection at all times. What a wonderful thing to be able to say -- I'll be
able to say it in maybe 15 or 20 years -- that I have gone through all of
Schubert's works. What an incredible achievement that is! I can tell you,
it's a lot more satisfying than flying an airplane."
-- THE END --