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« Back to Tom Wolfe and the Derriere Guard main page    Transcript for: Tom Wolfe and the Derriere GuardWATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Our guest today is the distinguished American author and journalist, Tom Wolfe.NARRATOR: For over 40 years, Tom Wolfe has challenged the way Americans look at themselves. From hippies to heroes, his funny and insightful writing has explored the cultural landscape. His unconventional style, mixing literary techniques with factual reporting became known as new journalism. He has written a series of brilliant best-selling novels THINK TANK caught up with Tom Wolfe at the tenth anniversary celebration of the Derriere Guard “Well The Derriere Guard is loose association of like people in various arts, it’s all of us who are at the cutting edge but are doing art that is traditionally based Composer Stefania De Kennesey- the founding member of the Derriere Guard helped bring together artists from a wide range of disciplines. “The idea is to show that what I am doing in music is no just specific to music, the same thing is happening in the visual arts, in architecture- that there are a whole bunch of people in all sorts of fields who are committed to reviving something from the past, even as we move forward. Tom Wolfe was drawn to the group’s critique of hyper modernist art and became an enthusiastic supporter, so much so, that he delivered their first keynote address in 1997 and returned to do it again a decade later. “well, you know, I fell in love with Tom’s writing when I first read From Bauhaus to Our House”, which I think is still one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. But then I also read The Bonfire of the Vanities, which I think is the most brilliant novel ever penned in the twentieth century” After his speech, we sat down with Wolfe to find out about the Derriere Garde, the art establishment and the politics of writing. [MUSIC] WATTENBERG: Tom Wolfe welcome to THINK TANK. We are speaking now immediately after the final session of the tenth anniversary celebration of Derriere Guard, very. Tell us about that and what it stands for. TOM WOLFE: I had never heard of the Derriere Garde and Stefania De Kenessey the composer who started it -- until I got an invitation in the mail and it had this phrase, I just loved it -- everything at that time was -- WATTENBERG: That would be ostensibly the opposite of the Avant Garde. TOM WOLFE: Right. Ten years ago everything was still the Avant Garde, the Avant Garde and here was the Derriere Guard. And, so, just out of curiosity more than anything else, I went to the very first -- very first meeting. Not that this is an ongoing club, but it -- around it -- have been drawn quite a few terrific talents who are simply not seen by the existing art world. I’ll give you an example. Jacob Collins is, certainly in terms of skill, technique, one of the most brilliant artists in the entire country. He is not mentioned by the -- WATTENBERG: You know, THINK TANK did a special called Art under the Radar about this thing and we featured Jacob Collins and we featured Jacob Collins and we featured Frederick Hart the sculptor, I mean, getting into this realist art that is in fact under the radar. TOM WOLFE: You mention Frederick Hart – who did the colossal deep relief called Ex Nihilo. It’s two stories high and -- about two stories in height actually on the west -- on the west wall of the Washington National Cathedral. He -- took him ten years to do this huge huge thing. The swirling chaos before the creation of man is swirling away up here -- men and women had just been created by god. And he was naturally nervous, what was going to be the reception in the art world of this neo classical piece -- essentially neo classical. And there was none. None. When he died I wrote an article about him called the Invisible Artist. Because here he had won -- he had been commissioned to do the -- the most -- the biggest and really the most costly piece of religious art of the Twentieth Century, certainly in this country. No mention whatsoever. If it’s realistic, it’s just something that happens, as if the -- as if you add concrete inside of some existing model and out it comes. It’s -- that’s because of the art world. To them he was simply invisible. WATTENBERG: What happened in terms of the modernist experience particularly in its, in art in architecture in paining in music, in writing, that turned away from what most Americans would call coherence. And that’s the fat one, right down the middle. [Laughter] TOM WOLFE: To understand modernism in all of its forms, I don’t care what art you’re talking about, you have to go back to a statement by a minor French poet who was at the time a great spokesman for the arts, literature -- named Catulle Mendes. And it was about 1886 that -- at a time when realism and followers of Zola and Maupassant -- just riding high. They were the two most popular writers in the world. He said, no one wants to write like them any more. Today one writes for a charming aristocracy. To be a member of the charming aristocracy, you have to appreciate things that the great mass of your fellow citizens are unable to appreciate. So, if -- usually these ideas came from Europe. So if Le Corbusier the great French architect says a house should be a machine for living -- why it should be, I don’t know. Because anybody who hasn’t worked around machines does not want to be on a machine But that was -- that statement which has confounded most people made it great for the charming aristocracy. Because only they understood what he was talking about. Only they understood cubism or fauvism, all of the other isms that it comes from -- from France. WATTENBERG: What is the universal or somewhat universal concept of beauty? That’s an easy one. TOM WOLFE: [Laughs] I don’t think there is one. I always -- I don’t know who -- the Roman who said it -- but de gustabus non es dispotandem. There’s no use arguing over -- WATTENBERG: I’m sorry. TOM WOLFE: There’s no use arguing over taste. And art doesn’t mean beauty. Art means anything you set aside in a way that -- and ask people to look at it by itself -- is art. That’s why it’s perfectly okay to have the famous urinal signed by R. Mutt It’s a art if you take it out of the bathroom, put it in an art gallery as -- I think that’s the only definition of art that -- WATTENBERG: Is art an attempt to understand life, is that what the artist is trying to grope with. TOM WOLFE: I don’t -- I don’t think the artist is trying to understand life. In my experience the artist is trying to be famous and doesn’t really care -- he’s very happy if somebody like Marshall McCluhan says that he’s the early warning system for mankind. But I think that’s -- it’s so hard being an artist in the first place. WATTENBERG: Is that why you write, to be famous, or to get a message across or to create enjoyment and understanding. I mean, what do you -- [speaking over each other] WATTENBERG: Some of us think you’re one of the great novelists of our time. TOM WOLFE: Oh, well, I’ll go along with that. [speaking over each other] WATTENBERG: Not a lot, but there are a few. TOM WOLFE: [Laughs] I had that question sprung on me once. I had given a talk at a college about something else entirely and the first question in the question period was why do you write. Well, now, if you and I were talking, I would say, I have to think about that. And I will come back tomorrow and let you know. But you feel on the spot when you are up on the stage. So, I free associated and I found myself repeating part of the Presbyterian catechism which I hadn’t taken since I don’t know how many years. And I said, well, I think of the Presbyterian catechism -- the first question is who created heaven and earth. And the answer is god. The second question is one of the most interesting in all of religion, why did he do it? And the answer is for his own glory. Now, that’s what came up when I free associated and that may be the most honest reason. As far as the task of the writer -- I feel is to simply to discover, I totally disagree with Orwell -- who I admire. Orwell said, I never wrote a decent word that wasn’t motivated by a deep political feeling. I have never written a decent word that was dominated by -- and people always talk about me as this right wing writer. And then I say, what’s my agenda. What is political about I am Charlotte Simmons. What’s political about A Man In Full, what’s political about The Right Stuff or the Bonfire of the Vanities, or Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. WATTENBERG: [speaking over each other] Well, some of your readers like me think we know that -- the answer to that, that it is a -- it is a rebuttal of some of the crazy leftism that has gotten into our arts. If I have to explain it to you, Tom, I’ll do it, but that’s a -- TOM WOLFE: Well, I can’t stand the fact that party lines are created all the time in the arts. And in the days of communism, that’s -- they used talk about the party line. Well, this is not the days of communism. But there’s still a party line and I just can’t resist trying to pop the bubbles. It’s really irresistible, that’s why -- WATTENBERG: But in our society bubble popping is a political art and has political meaning to it. TOM WOLFE: Well, not in the terms of who’s going to win elections. [speaking over each other] TOM WOLFE: Right -- for example -- you know our planet is in trouble. I call that verbal warming. [Laughter] And you’re not supposed to say that. WATTENBERG: you were one of the originators of what is called the new journalism which was sort of fact and evocation together. Where is it now -- is that the right definition of it. Do you practice it, who else is good at it. TOM WOLFE: New journalism as I understood it was using the techniques that had hitherto had been confined to fiction such as telling a story, scene by scene, instead of having the usual historical narration we find in magazine pieces or books. WATTENBERG: But it’s not who, what, when, where, how, it’s layers. TOM WOLFE: Well, and also the careful notation of status details. To me that is the most important to spot in any situation you’re writing about. What is the status line up, what are the rankings within the group. That’s why my book The Right Stuff about the Mercury -- seven Mercury astronauts -- is not a book about space. It’s about this hierarchy that I knew nothing about when I approached the subject, this pyramid of accomplishment that they won’t even name -- I’m talking about the pilots now, they were all military pilots. It’s a code and I had to give it a name, so I called it the code of the right stuff. I love -- when I do reporting, I love to find something that -- including a whole concept that I knew nothing about. I started work on the astronauts because the first seven had turned out in a Psychiatrist’s study of them -- were all first sons, they were all white protestants, they were all from small towns and they were all from stable families. Now, except for the small town, I grew up in Richmond, that was me. So, I said I must have something that I haven’t tapped yet that enables these people to do what they do. So, I just started studying them. It turned out that none of those things was a meaningful factor, none at all. The whole officer corps at that time, practically the whole officer corps was white and protestant. If you look back -- they were born -- all born about the same time I was, during the depression. The birth rate had dropped to below two. So if you were a son at all you had two chances out of three of being a first son. And as for the stable families, they really weren’t -- it turned out later they were papered over They were not that -- they were not all that -- and the small towns they were born -- most of them sons of military people and they happened to be born in some out of the way place because some state had shrewdly sold it to the Federal Government as an airfield. So -- but that’s the kind of thing I love, when I talk about discovery. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you for books -- for a thumbnail reaction to some of the people. Let’s confine it to writers and what you think of them over the span of your -- you mentioned in your talk tonight John Steinbeck. TOM WOLFE: Steinbeck was far more experimental than he was credited with being at the time. If you look at the Grapes of Wrath, which was his great monumental work, published in 1939, we were following the Joad family, Ma Joad, Tom Joad and it’s a well-known story, the Okies as they head for California. But in between the chapters he has one of the most famous -- is a turtle crossing the highway. And this turtle gets hit again and again by automobiles, but it draws itself into its shell and keeps going. You finally realize he’s talking about the Okies. They’re going to keep going. They’re not going to give up. And there are just many many of these -- WATTENBERG: It’s very interesting when you track the socio demographics of the Okies and the Arkies that came to Los Angeles and they lived in the white hillbilly slums and their kids are already going to junior college. And their grandkids are absolutely indistinguishable from the rest of America. It really is a story of great upward mobility in America and that same kind of resilience. TOM WOLFE: I never really thought about it that way. I think you’re absolutely right. The writer, Ken Kesey’s, father was one of them and Kesey became -- went to writers school at Stanford, became one of the great American writers of the post World War 2 period. WATTENBERG: Let’s go on, Steinbeck -- Norman Mailer. TOM WOLFE: Mailer -- WATTENBERG: You got to be honest, Tom. TOM WOLFE: Okay. Mailer cannot write novels. I’m sorry to have to say that. He has no ear for anyone other than himself. Just look at the dialog. The one exception to this is a so-called novel called the Executioner’s Song, which has wonderful dialog. How did he change? Well, he didn’t’ change. A man named Lawrence Shiller, a photographer, knocked on his door one day and he says, I have all this material, tapes of Gary Gilmore the killer who was the center of a highly publicized case. And people who knew him -- and I need a writer. I’m not a writer, but I need a writer. So Mailer agreed to do this. He never went to see Gary Gilmore, who was alive at that time, in prison, and could be visited. He just took this material -- all the dialog is written -- and he won a Pulitzer Prize. You would think that he would have learned a lesson from this and would have gone out either himself, doing what Lawrence Shiller -- have Shiller go out again. WATTENBERG: Moving on, William Faulkner. TOM WOLFE: Faulkner was the greatest American novelist I ever read. Drawing you into a spell in which you’re in a -- somehow you’re in a different emotional state and he has created it. I have to tell you, I was browsing in a bookstore and I saw this paperback with an interesting looking cover. There was two convicts in a row boat and it was called The Old Man, referring actually to the Mississippi River. And I had read this thing and I went into my English teacher -- I was in high school -- and I said, I’ve just discovered this writer. Oh, my god you won’t believe this. He’s written this novel about these two convicts who escaped from jail during a flood and one of them wants to go back in jail. The other one wants to run for it. I mean -- and it’s just -- and the teacher said, you mean, William Faulkner. I said yeah, that’s his name. WATTENBERG: A lot of us were assigned that reading and had a lot of difficulty getting through some of it. It gets pretty dense, I thought. TOM WOLFE: No, he can -- I think some of his -- really unnecessarily difficult. But he seems to pull it out at the last minute -- WATTENBERG: [speaking over] One more and then let’s go on. Herman Wouk. TOM WOLFE: the interesting thing is he is a writer who is not identified as a liberal or anybody on the left. If anything he’s identified with the right. Right and left in literature really doesn’t mean a lot. But that’s the way -- WATTENBERG: [speaking over] I once wrote a piece saying he was an early neo conservative and Jonathan Yardley at The Washington Post jumped out of his skin. But, you know, in terms of the Caine Mutiny court martial and Marjorie Morningstar, these are neo conservative books in terms of defense and in terms of traditional values. TOM WOLFE: You’ll see how much the mood of the literary world changed from before the first World War to the second World War. If you look at the prominent novels that came out after the second World War, these were very cynical novels. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and The Dead seems to be -- to prove mainly that the America officer class are fascists if you really read that closely. even Wouk, although there’s a wonderful speech at the end by the lawyer who is defending these two officers who are accused of mutiny -- the lesson was that these two officers who were on trial were bad people. It wasn’t -- this was not the Charge of the Light Brigade -- WATTENBERG: But those bad people were those new class type of intellectuals and the good guys were the heartland kind of people. I mean, Queeg was no great intellect, but he did the job. Is there anything that we haven’t covered that you would like to issue a grand pronouncement about. TOM WOLFE: Well, I -- let’s see, I have no announcements today. But I would stress this one thing. And you open yourself up to grandiloquence here -- I think the fundamental motive of every person is to live by an set of values, which if written in stone, as the saying goes, would not make not you, yourself, but your group the supreme group on earth. Intellectuals do this every day. We’re up here at the top of a mountain and look at all those smarmy politicians, presidents, kings, how vulgar they are. But also good old boys from the south will do the same thing. My brother-in-law happened to be present in 1943 when -- you know a general store -- and here were three good old boys -- too old to go into the armed forces, they were talking about the war. And one of them says, you know, this whole war -- the whole problem here is this man called Hitler. I don’t know why we just don’t go over there and shoot him. And his friends says, well, I’m sure it’s not that easy. I don’t know how you can just go over there and shoot him. He says, look, you get me over there in a boat, I’ll shoot him. How are you going to do that? He says, well, I’ll go to the front door and I’ll ring the bell. He said, he’s not going to come to the front door, are you crazy, the whole place has probably got a big wall around. He said, okay I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll wait until it’s dark, I’ll go around to the wall and back, I’ll climb over it and I’ll hide behind a tree with my rifle. And in the morning when he comes out in the yard to pee, I’m going to shoot him. [Laughter] This was actually part of a value system. These were Scotch/Irish people. They loved guns and guns mean a lot to them. And they hate officials and they hate all the layers of bureaucracy, the government can’t get anything done right, you have to do it yourself. That was a perfect example of -- you just got to go over there and do it yourself. WATTENBERG: All right, Tom Wolfe, thank you so much for joining us on THINK TANK. Most enlightening conversation. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. We think it makes for a better program. For THINK TANK, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at THINK TANK depend on your views to make our program better. Please send your questions and comments to: Grace Creek Media, 7950 Jones Branch Rd, McLean VA, 22108. Or email us at THINK TANK at PBS.ORG. To learn more about THINK TANK, visit PBS on line at PBS.ORG. And please let us know where you watch THINK TANK. 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