Just what in hell is Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine supposed to mean, anyway?
It's not even catchy. Now, Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers, that was a pretty opaque title, too, but at least you didn't have to read it off the page to say it properly.
It took a while for Wolfe to become accepted, but when he was, journalism was never the same. Wolfe seemed to change a lot, too. He traipsed off more and more into the ether as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and a more tolerant cultural attitude prevailed. That is the overall subject of the various essays which constitute Mauve Gloves etc.
Remember how the 1970s got labelled the "Me Decade?" Ever wonder where it came from? It actually was Wolfe who coined the term, in an essay that is part of this collection: "The Me Decade And The Third Great Awakening." I know, again with the long title. This time it's one I can explain more easily. The "Me Decade" part, obviously, refers to the narcissism of the era Wolfe is writing about, a decade where self-realization trumps all. "The Third Great Awakening" is something a sociologist would likely get, a reference to the two prior Great Awakenings of early American history, to which Wolfe is drawing a parallel. Those great awakenings were about God, this one is about Mammon and the self.
The essay begins with a woman taking an EST (Erhard Seminars Training) course and spends a good five pages on an internal monologue involving her bad case of hemorrhoids. For Wolfe, the anxiety of the age can be boiled down to the swollen veins in this lady's butt, a metaphor he keeps returning to in a variety of minutely descriptive ways.
"In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970's, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade," Wolfe writes.
Well, at least he thinks so. The essay doesn't so much advance any big idea as much as it jumps around, from the migration of the elderly to these things called "retirement villages and "leisure developments" which Wolfe likens to geriatric communes, to "lemon sessions" where girls at boarding schools rip into each other's perceived flaws. One page he's explaining how women's liberation can be summed up in a hair-dye slogan, the next how Wolfe knows at least two couples who broke up because they felt "the need to communicate."
Did any of this come together? I don't think so, but what do I know? This is the essay that coined the term "Me Decade"! It must be good!
It's not even catchy. Now, Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers, that was a pretty opaque title, too, but at least you didn't have to read it off the page to say it properly.
Wolfe began the 1970s as one of the principal architects of something called "The New Journalism," which sought to free feature writing from the shackles of Who-What-Where-When-Why & How. This was a style of writing that pushed attitude and subjectivity to give you a deeper sense of some event or personality than a straight news story could. Wolfe was very good at it, too, running with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and presenting the counterculture to mainstream America in a way that pulled no punches and bent a few minds.
It took a while for Wolfe to become accepted, but when he was, journalism was never the same. Wolfe seemed to change a lot, too. He traipsed off more and more into the ether as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s and a more tolerant cultural attitude prevailed. That is the overall subject of the various essays which constitute Mauve Gloves etc.
Remember how the 1970s got labelled the "Me Decade?" Ever wonder where it came from? It actually was Wolfe who coined the term, in an essay that is part of this collection: "The Me Decade And The Third Great Awakening." I know, again with the long title. This time it's one I can explain more easily. The "Me Decade" part, obviously, refers to the narcissism of the era Wolfe is writing about, a decade where self-realization trumps all. "The Third Great Awakening" is something a sociologist would likely get, a reference to the two prior Great Awakenings of early American history, to which Wolfe is drawing a parallel. Those great awakenings were about God, this one is about Mammon and the self.
The essay begins with a woman taking an EST (Erhard Seminars Training) course and spends a good five pages on an internal monologue involving her bad case of hemorrhoids. For Wolfe, the anxiety of the age can be boiled down to the swollen veins in this lady's butt, a metaphor he keeps returning to in a variety of minutely descriptive ways.
"In her experience lies the explanation of certain grand puzzles of the 1970's, a period that will come to be known as the Me Decade," Wolfe writes.
Well, at least he thinks so. The essay doesn't so much advance any big idea as much as it jumps around, from the migration of the elderly to these things called "retirement villages and "leisure developments" which Wolfe likens to geriatric communes, to "lemon sessions" where girls at boarding schools rip into each other's perceived flaws. One page he's explaining how women's liberation can be summed up in a hair-dye slogan, the next how Wolfe knows at least two couples who broke up because they felt "the need to communicate."
Elsewhere, things that make you go hmm accumulate. "The Intelligent Coed's Guide To America" is a similarly wild mess of subjective opinions, which eventually centers on mocking how the New Left of the late 1960s saw Gestapo tactics everywhere in Lyndon Johnson's America. It's briefly amusing when Wolfe describes the carnage when he blurts out at a fashionably-radical college conference: "My God, what are you talking about? We're in the middle of a...Happiness Explosion," but Wolfe doesn't really explain what he means, other than America is a land of such pleasures we are all free to ogle sexy college girls in tight jeans. It goes on too long.
There are a couple of short stories, one of which, "Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine," provides the book's title. It's a rambling piece about a Manhattan writer dealing with his catering bills and fighting off the realization he has never had it so good. The title, by the way, refers to a couple of establishments whose bills he has yet to pay, one a caterer called "Mauve Gloves & Madmen," the other a florist called "Clutter & Vine."
If you don't get the point of naming your book after that, you're just not Tom Wolfe.
The essays mostly focus on social observations, on issues such as the white desire to dress more like black people do ("Funky Chic"), a more casual view of violence since the Kennedy Assassination ("Pornoviolence"), and the joy of hostage-taking for kidnapper and hostage alike ("The Perfect Crime"). These are all eyebrow-raising subjects, to be sure, but Wolfe doesn't really get at anything interesting so much as express himself in zooming, freaky, scatological, interjective, punctuation-punishing ways that remind you what a unique stylist he is. You really notice the style when there's no substance to interfere with the experience.
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| Tom Wolfe in 1966, just about the time he started writing the essays collected in Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. He cut quite the figure even before he went all-in on the Colonel Sanders suits. Image from theguardian.com. |
This book, which collects articles Wolfe wrote between 1967 and 1976, apparently in whole or in part for Harper's, New York, Esquire, The Critic, New West, and Rolling Stone, gives you the impression of something a very brilliant man dashed off a few hours before deadline. That's especially true for the worst piece here, "The Street Fighters," which apparently was inspired when Wolfe got into a tiff about a cab and decided it would make a good essay, about the lost art of city brawling.
"There's not one tiger in a hundred in New York who is in condition to have a street fight," he says, noting how out-of-shape everyone is, apparently including himself as he discovers when he starts to mix it up with a middle-aged businessman.
The second-worst piece is a brief essay illustrated with a series of grotesque caricatures called "The Man Who Always Peaked Too Soon," which manages to overstay its welcome in just five pages. I wondered how Wolfe chose his illustrator, a cartoonist given to drawing faces as fun-house skulls and bodies as spindly contortionists or walrus-gutted fleshpots, and then discovered it was Wolfe himself. It was less a surprise to discover this after reading the rest of Mauve Gloves, etc.
Two good pieces offer some compensation for people like me who love Wolfe in his other books and don't like to think we've been kidding ourselves. "The Truest Sport: Jousting With Sam & Charlie," is as stylistically self-indulgent as nearly any piece in this book, with a long opening where you have no idea where you are or who is involved. Then you realize you are on an aircraft carrier, the U. S. S. Coral Sea, with two pilots about to go on a reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam.
The echoes of Wolfe's next book, The Right Stuff, are hard to miss, but "The Truest Sport" shines from its own light detailing the stress and curious comforts associated with combat in Jet Age. Wolfe's discombobulating prose serves a valuable function here, like combat itself coming at you from many directions and not allowing you much opportunity to relax.
"It was the daily routine of risking one's hide while operating a hurtling piece of machinery that separated military flying from all other forms of soldiering and sailoring known to history," Wolfe writes.
The other piece, my favorite in the collection, "Honks And Wonks," examines how preppies and lower-middle-class mobiles from the other boroughs interact in Manhattan circa the mid-1970s. It starts off by showing us how the latter group attempt to shed their giveaway accents and exchange "da's" for "the's." It's probably guilty of some exaggeration, but it's funny and well-observed, and makes for a thoroughly enjoyable read.
That's mostly what I found missing from the rest of Mauve Gloves. Wolfe can write, but he's his own worst enemy here.
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