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Host Robert Lipsyte in the Eleventh Hour studio. standing next to three tv screens - Tom Wolfe in one, his book The Bonfires of the Vanities in the other and an article from Harpers about Wolf in the third screen. Lipsyte announces tonight's topic, the major best seller - Bonfires of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.

The Eleventh Hour graphics and show opener.

Lipsyte, still talking about tonight's program, talks about an article in Harper's Magazine where author, Tom Wolfe laid out a literary manifesto for the new social novel, one as controversial as his last, the 1973 New Journalism - reporting enhanced by the techniques of fiction and the new social novel which is fiction enhanced by reporting.

Quoted from the article and overlay Time Square billboards, "the most...obvious idea an American writer could possibly have." "All serious young writers...were dismantling the realistic novel".

Tom Wolfe quotes from Bonfires of the Vanities, scrolling over backdrop of a city skyline

TOM WOLFE INTERVIEW

Tom Wolfe:
And I was reminded after that if they hadn't thought about it, but the subtitle of Thackeray's Vanity Fair is a novel without a hero. And he was writing about a similar period flush times there seemed to be no limit to to wealth and to indulgence

Bill Moyers
Do you really believe as the book portrays that that the rule of law is finished?

Tom Wolfe
No and I didn't intend to to make that point it's a matter of like when I was writing that book was with a spirit of wonderment I was in look at these people look at what they're doing look at that one look at that one. It was only after I finished and read it over that I see that there is a cumulative effect that leads to the kind of conclusion you you mentioned the rule of law hasn't broken down it's in a place a bar like the Bronx is swamped. There's there aren't enough courtrooms to deal with what with with the level of crime and this is a problem all over New York City and I think a lot of major cities so isn't the system of justice it's the it's a that's the sheer volume of of crime and and b the the vanity of certain sorts of figures who as I suppose is natural up to a point look looking out for their for their own political career

Bill Moyers
you said somewhere else that there are principal people in New York people who act out of principle but they don't dominate Why don't they dominate?

Tom Wolfe
I think that's part of that's part of the the other side of a period of great prosperity and you have to keep telling yourself though prosperity you mean look at the history of humanity prosperity is great, it's great, but there's there is hell to pay now and again and part of I think part of that is if you've got this much ambition geared to financial success geared to to fame to the things of the sort it just it exerts a pressure so intense that the self Adnan self, AB negating heroic figures tend to tend to be shoved aside and I think it's, it's, it's well in any is a well known fact in in, in the in the realm of sociology that levels of crime, street crime, personal crime, muggings, that sort of thing go down in bad times. The depression was a rather peaceable time. In terms of street crime, it's when times are good like they are now that the passion to get more is inflamed. There's a motto among the the so called wolf packs, who who come in from off when not only from Brooklyn, but that's most famous from Brooklyn into Manhattan to prey on people pedestrians on the street. The motto is, Manhattan makes Brooklyn takes and that's, you know, that's an awareness of the age we're in. This is these are mostly youngsters and they are saying those people in Manhattan I'm making a lot of money of times of flesh. And it is in

Bill Moyers
let's cross the bridge,

Tom Wolfe
let's cross the bridge. And that's I think that's what that's what goes on rather than any breakdown of, of us of a system or adjusting.

INTERVIEW

Robert Lipsyte:
What do you think, what have you been doing last few years?

Pete Hamill
Well I mean, Tom, Toms genius is the genius of a great cartoonist, I think. And the cartoonist, leaves out context, most of the time he creates great figures, the way Dickens did is in a different kind of cartooning. And to make his points he often exaggerates way beyond that, I think, the great, the great novel of New York has probably been the Daily News for the last 50 years, you know that there is a sense of the place being so complicated, so various, so shifting and changing all the time that the say this is the new york novel is almost impossible. And I don't think Tom has done it either. as brilliant as this achievement is,

Robert Lipsyte
which which somehow I hear Pete say that there can't be a novel of New York or a novel encompassing New York, because that's journalism's function.

John Leonard
Well, it's a function that's been taken over from the, from the 19th century novel. Certainly, it's got gotten more complicated with the class and race problems. And with the sheer size, there isn't any novel of London, contemporary novel of London, or of Tokyo, or of Rome or Paris. They're not being written anymore. Television is taken over part of it, magazines are taken over part of it. Newspapers, of course, have always covered the beat. The problem is you're talking about the realistic novel as he as he as he goes on. I don't think that that Tom Wolfe is a realistic novelist. I like the cartoonist image, but he's a satirist. If he if he had written a realistic novel about the city of New York, the two major opposing facts of that city would would appear the homeless on the one side and the real estate speculators on the other that is omitted. If he'd written a realistic novel about about the criminal justice system in New York, the victim of that justice system would not be a well heeled white elite, because that's not exactly who the victims of this criminal justice system are. If he'd written a realistic novel about New York, the women would not have been Tinker toys in the blacks would not evolve in demagogues. Instead, he has some some wonderful characters to make fun of, like the the English reporter. But what no, right? We all know and and he has some some some wonderful satiric portraits of the social x rays. And he has, what he what he's very good at. Well, I think he's wonderful at it, when it when it cuts across my own philistinism is his philistinism, when he's when he's a philistin on my behalf, such as in the painted word or in his Bauhaus book, I love it. When he's a Philistine about race relations, then he's nothing more than a right wing Andy Warhol

Robert Lipsyte
Gored your ox on this on. Susan, Do you agree with that analysis?

Susan Brownmiller
I agree that Tom Wolfe was not writing social realism and Bonfire of the Vanities he was writing, I would say forest, but I think it's brilliant. And I also have to admit that that book encouraged me when I said about to write Waverly Place. I thought, man, he really is doing it. He's tackling the city. And I'm going to try to and I would never criticize Tom Wolfe, although it's so easy to see through him and these manifestos. It's such a marvelous tradition. Usually it's European, not American, where you say, this year we are doing and I am leading the way no one is following and I am here and why aren't you following? So that's the way he promotes himself and it's okay with me.

Robert Lipsyte
We're talking about Tom Wolfe enough. Susan, let's talk about you. Yeah. in in in doing Waverly Place as a novel you were in a sense saying that journalism cannot get at the Joel Steinberg Hedda Nussbaum, Lisa Steinberg story.

Susan Brownmiller
I believed in my heart, and I believe it till this day, that there was no way to do the Steinberg, Nussbaum story as nonfiction, basically, because you couldn't get to Hedda or Joel. And if you did, they wouldn't tell you the truth. So I set about to imagine it. Imagine what life was like for them. And once having committed myself to the idea of a novel, which was scary for me, you know, I didn't know if I had the skills to get to the last page. I then discovered the joy of writing about the city, particularly Greenwich Village, because this was a village case and I live in the village and I've lived in the village for over two decades,

Robert Lipsyte
Pete has said that the great novel of New York is written by the Daily News. Do you think that journalism does fail in and that the novel must take over?

Pete Hamill
I think journalism fails because of what Susan is saying that there's only a certain amount that's knowable, according to the conventions of journalism that you can't get inside a character in journalism, you shouldn't even try. I mean, a lot of the preposterous manifesto wising about new journalism 15 years ago was idiotic. I mean, nobody could tell me that an article in New York magazine was better than Proust or had superseded it. It was preposterous, but It was a way to say, look, we invented the wheel again, you know, in the in the novel, you can go beyond everything, which is why so many journalists from Dickens, Zola to Balzac, to Hemingway to less list is endless, have always also written novels. Dostoyevski reads a crime story in a newspaper and ends up making crime and punishment. The crime, the Daily News version of crime and punishment would be 8 paragraphs. That doesn't mean that the subject matter of journalism is not worthy of being examined in deeper and more compassionate, more intimate ways. In the novel

Robert Lipsyte
I'm sure wolfe would agree with that aspect of it. But he also felt that his novel reported on an accurate and truthful which I separate, a vision of the city.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES:
Pete Hamill
depends on the kind of novel you're writing to. Bob you know Tom Wolfe is writing a novel about universities he probably hang around a modern language course. He doesn't choose to write that I think if you choose if you choose that that's the subject matter. As Zola decided I want to write a coal mine I better go visit a coal mine You can go look at that. In Breslin's novel table money, which is also an achievement for my money on the same level as bonfire the vanities, totally different kind of novel would call that a cartoon. No, I didn't. But it's filled with reporting because I know Jimmy went down into the tunnels with the sand hogs and all that it's not like, you know, somehow nobody reported anything for 50 years. And then Tom arrived. I mean, there was certainly reporting going on in the in the novel of the last but he's talking and reacting against a specific kind of novel Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, those kind of guys who write it who start with a rarefied idea of language, I think and can be brilliant at it

Robert Lipsyte
we understand that but I mean, he's also disregarding 20 years. I mean, there, there has been realistic novels, as john pointed out

John Leonard 21:22
realistic novels, but also there's their their their kinds of reporting, too. There's there's the reporting of contemporary reality. There's the reporting of this guy's there is the reporting that also takes into account the history that led to this to this situation. There is is reporting in the, in the, in the in the realm of all the art that has led up to to what a thing looks like, there is I think we haven't unlike what I what I read in Harper's, I think we're having to be living through a quite brilliant period in American fiction writing. And you can't tell me that see that somebody like Toni Morrison, or Cynthia Ozick doesn't know an enormous amount hasn't done a lot of reporting. I mean, Cynthia Ozick writes about Miami, and puts it together with the Holocaust and puts it together with New York, and it comes out short, but it comes out. Truce

Robert Lipsyte
None of these none of these people are claiming that they necessarily got it right. They got it right through their own prism. But they didn't get it right. Tom would have us believe that he got it right. Did he get it Right. You don't think you think you got it Right?

Pete Hamill
I think what Susan just said was he got part of right

Susan Brownmiller
He got Park Avenue Wall Street and a little bit of the South Bronx from an outsider's perspective. But he got that. And he got a little bit of the Harlem stuff, right? The short audience. But I tell you, if john Dos Passos was sitting here with us, he'd say, Come on nothings match Manhattan transfer. And I think that's true.

Robert Lipsyte
And you say, got it. Right. Got it. Right. In terms of the same kind of visual images we see on the local news, or got it right.

John Leonard
We wouldn't be here talking about it, arguing about it, if it weren't much better than that. It I was going to say also that I think that that, that that Wolfe by moving in as many circles as he managed to manage to move in, also points out a problem that young writers have, who don't simply don't have the leisure to cover New York and in that way, a reporter can cover New York, as almost bound to in charge to cover New York, a detective if you want to use him as a as a figure in a novel also has the right to move up and down. But a young writer today could hardly afford to live in New York, much less show up at the fancy parties on which you report so brilliantly with the social x rays, you don't have that access. And you can't dream up an alter ego to perform for you convincingly as since you don't have that access. I think he's aware he's been he's been wondering

Robert Lipsyte
Do you think you need to read Bonfire of the Vanities to understand New York?

John Leonard
That's very interesting question.

Robert Lipsyte
I'll let you think about for a moment. Why is Pete the same one?

Host Lipsyte thanks guests and encourages audience viewers questions and comments.

Lipstyte announces the show and introduces himself. Show ends.

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