Tom Wolfe, Sage of Status Anxiety

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The New Yorker:

A great magazine writer is a writer who sells magazines. Tom Wolfe sold magazines. People bought magazines on the newsstand in order to read the pieces in them written by Tom Wolfe.

Behind every great magazine writer is a great magazine editor, and the editor behind Wolfe was Clay Felker.

. . . .

Felker and Wolfe believed that what New York City is all about, what every New Yorker is obsessed with, is status, and status, or status anxiety, is the theme of most of Wolfe’s writing. Wolfe’s own famous sartorial look, the three-piece white suit, was really a disguise. He called it “neo-pretentious,” but who was he pretending to be? No one wears three-piece white suits in New York City. The suit made him socially unplaceable. It was an escape from the problem of status.

Felker and Wolfe also understood that the people who like to read magazine stories about status are the people who are insecure about their status. Flush economic times produce people like this, people who worry that their money is not buying them standing, and those times in New York—the nineteen-sixties and the nineteen-eighties—were the best times for Felker and Wolfe’s kind of journalism.

Wolfe was a satirist. Politically, satire is a conservative genre. Satire is highbrow populism. (Hence Wolfe’s diatribes against modernist art and architecture.) Satire is premised on the belief that, no matter how much liberal enlightenment you introduce into human affairs, people will still sort themselves into some kind of pecking order, in which all the little birds are trying to get in with the big bird at the head of the line.

Satire also associates aspiration with fatuousness and newness with faddishness, and Wolfe was skilled at making those reductions. He was predictable and he was mean, but he was also (in the beginning, anyway, until he assumed the role of a cultural warrior) funny, and he was not vicious. This may be because he was so maniacally focussed on surfaces—dress, manners, styles of speech—that he left the person underneath relatively unscathed.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

3 thoughts on “Tom Wolfe, Sage of Status Anxiety”

  1. I loved his style in clothes. I always planned that if I started making big money with the books, that I would make public appearances wearing a Mark Twain style suit or appearing in Wolfe’s clothing. HA!

  2. PG, Thanks for reminding me of Tom Wolfe. Bought The Right Stuff. Loved the movie. Loved the first chapter.

    I met General Yeager. I was in awe. Another time, he flew over my hanggliding site in his Delco ultralight. Got curious and circled it. Many of the old hats (major and above) in my unit had stories to tell about the General. He was a living legend. Wanna be like Chuck.

Comments are closed.