Not Quite the Real Stuff

Also: Alexis de Tocqueville in full, Flannery O’Connor’s wild mind, the surprising success of UnHerd, and more.

Still from Radical Wolfe (2023). Source: IMDB.

I watched the new Tom Wolfe documentary, Radical Wolfe, on my flight back to Virginia from New York City yesterday (where I was for First Things’s annual poetry reading and the Erasmus Lecture). The production and pacing were excellent—lots of great photos and interview clips of Wolfe, excellent anecdotes, insightful personal details. If you like Wolfe, you’ll probably like the documentary.

But it largely failed to explain what made Wolfe tick and why he wrote the way he did. The documentary is based on Michael Lewis’s 2015 article “How Tom Wolfe Became . . . Tom Wolfe,” in which Lewis states that Wolfe wrote the way he did because he was a conservative southern man who disliked Connecticut and New York liberals:

He has left home and found, on the East Coast, the perpetual revolt of High Culture against God, Country, and Tradition. He happens to have landed in a time and place in which art—like the economy that supports it—is essentially patricidal. It’s all about tearing up and replacing what came before. The young Tom Wolfe is intellectually equipped to join some fashionable creative movement and set himself in opposition to God, Country, and Tradition; emotionally, not so much. He doesn’t use his new experience of East Coast sophisticates to distance himself from his southern conservative upbringing; instead he uses his upbringing to distance himself from the new experience.

Of course, this explains very little at all. It’s even worse in the documentary, which suggests that Wolfe felt out of place at Yale and so decided to turn on his classmates. His critique of liberal elites is presented in purely personal terms, as if Wolfe’s mocking of liberal sacred cows was simply a kind of score-settling. It was much more than that, of course, though you wouldn’t know it from watching Radical Wolfe.

The documentary also spends a fair amount of time wondering if Wolfe was too mean, which was bizarre. At one point, Jamal Joseph, a former member of the Black Panther Party, complains that Wolfe’s essay “Radical Chic,” which skewered Leonard Bernstein’s fundraiser for the Panthers, made it harder to raise money for the “good work” that the Panthers were doing—you know, like torturing and murdering of one of its own party members in 1969, and its public advocacy of violence against the U.S. government. Joseph states that the Bernstein family felt betrayed by Wolfe. This is presented straight up by director Richard Dewey.

Gay Talese provides lots of good commentary, but why Dewey decided he to interview Emily Witt of the New Yorker for the film is beyond me. She has nothing interesting to say. Christopher Buckley is given a few seconds. No other conservative thinker or writer (if even Buckley can be considered conservative) is interviewed. Oddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd, as Wolfe might put it.

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In other news, artists and art institutions who have failed to denounce Hamas have become targets of cancelation. The irony is that many of these same people and institutions were quick to call for others to be canceled for failing to support Black Lives Matter. In Compact, Nina Power writes: “Are those artists who are now losing money and representation for failing to condemn Hamas able to understand that the free speech they desire is the same free speech desired by all the others they previously canceled? It would be easy—and somewhat gratifying—to point out their hypocrisy. But there is a real opportunity here to reject cynicism and careerism and, instead, to insist that while we may disagree, we don’t have to destroy each other. Institutions and individuals don’t have to take a political stand (but nor should they be punished for doing so).”

I review Evelyn McDonnell’s terrible Joan Didion book for the Washington Free Beacon: “It’s hard to imagine a book more at odds with Didion’s practice, as McDonnell herself notes, of avoiding ‘the pat answer or obvious noun.’”