I'll miss literary master Tom Wolfe

“Heeeeeee-wack!”

That was the sound of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s circular bed in rotation as described by Tom Wolfe, who died last week at the age of 88.

Wolfe was one of the pioneers who in the 1960s combined fiction and journalism into a new form that was and still is called “the New Journalism.”

He wore ostentatiously white suits, a style he called “neo-pretentious” and wrote like a 12-year-old super-genius, describing the contemporary world with all the energy, imagination and exclamation points an excited child can bring to a story.

Consider his book titles. There was “The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test,” about early hippies and “The Kandy-Colored Tangerine-Flake Streamlined Baby,” about the custom car culture.

Wolfe didn’t just hang around with people and write what he saw. He learned everything about anything he wrote about and wove it into breathless descriptions with dead-on accuracy, like the sound of Hefner’s bed when Hefner was a culture hero — before enlightened perception turned him into a sexist exploiter of women.

With Wolfe, you didn’t get a sweater, you got a loose-knit magenta London Fog alpaca pullover with a crew neck and puffy sleeves.

Wolfe was the right kind of brash, throw-out-the-rules writer to inspire an undergraduate student who chose a journalism major because he lacked the patience to major in English. That was me.

Journalism, the old not the new, became my first career, but when I was an undergraduate with literary ambitions, the New Journalism was an inspiration.

In fact, I wrote a term paper on the New Journalism while it was still new for a professor who energetically denounced it as not “objective.” Needless to say, I did not do well in his class.

I thought the professor had a warped view of objectivity and I still do.

Adding literary techniques to a news story, I thought, added exponentially to the telling.

Successful New Journalism required many times the effort of standard reporting. It brought complex elements to journalistic narration without sacrificing accuracy.

Even good, old journalism has never been completely objective. It’s impossible to produce interesting writing and remain fully objective, as hard as we try.

For completely objective prose, read a scientific study. Unless you’re the same kind of scientist, this writing is impossible to read with enthusiasm.

Tom Wolfe set an extreme example of how to make journalism read like fiction. There were others. Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin entered New Journalism from newspaper writing. Novelists Truman Capote and Norman Mailer approached it from fiction.

Hunter Thompson of “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” fame approached it from another planet.

It took masters to produce it well. I never attained that level of mastery, but on a few occasions, I have tried to apply their example.

I’m going to miss Tom Wolfe, even though his time in the limelight has come and gone.

His example is still one that both literary writers and journalists can aspire to.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

stevenmhansen

@plateautel.net