Master Of His Universe

By Bonnie Angelo, Tom Wolfe

His novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, spent 56 weeks on the hard-cover best-seller list, and currently leads the paperback list. He pioneered a kind of journalism that was remarkable for its vivid verisimilitude and its unflinching dissection of characters. In a conversation with New York bureau chief Bonnie Angelo, Wolfe predicts that the nation will seek a new moderation in its ways.

Q. Decades are artificial measures, but that's what we use, and you have a flair for defining them. You called the '60s "the whole crazed, obscene, & uproarious, Mammon-faced, drug-soaked, Mau Mau, lust-oozing '60s." The '70s were "the Me decade," "the sexed-up, doped-up, hedonistic heaven of the boom boom '70s." As we close out the '80s, how do you define the decade?

A. It is the decade of money fever. It's almost impossible for people to be free of the burning itch for money. It's a decade not likely to produce heroic figures.

In a way it's been an extension of normal human behavior, more than the '70s and '60s. Then there was a reluctance among educated people to show their affluence -- it was the time of the debutante in blue jeans who worked in a child-care center.

In the '80s people of affluence returned to the more normal thing: they had it, they showed it. And that radiated throughout society. When I was spending time in the Bronx, I saw young black men wearing chains with what I thought was the peace symbol. I thought, how interesting that these young men, living in such difficult circumstances, would still be concerned about such issues as world peace. And then I came to realize that these weren't peace symbols -- they were the hood ornament from a Mercedes. And they knew everything about a Mercedes, how much it cost, how fast it would go. They knew Mercedes as the car of choice of the drug dealer. Money, greed, reaches all through society.

Q. For 25 years, as a journalist and author, you have been a commentator on life-styles and mores in this country. What's happening to American society?

A. I wouldn't presume to call myself a commentator. That suggests having answers.

Since the 1960s we have had extraordinary freedom in this country, and we are seeing the good and the bad sides of the same coin. We've had tremendous prosperity. In many ways we have fulfilled the dream of the old utopian societies of the mid-19th century. But the other side of the coin of prosperity is money fever and the vanity that is the undoing of all the characters in Bonfire.

But I for one would not want to change this country. When you think about conditions across the long panorama, the poverty -- there's never been anything like this country, no parallel for what money and freedom have brought to Americans.

Q. Yet you seem pessimistic about our society. Is America going the same road as Rome at its height?

A. No. That's what is called the organic fallacy: countries are not plants, they don't have life cycles that mean there is a time to die. There's no . reason we should be on a downward course.

Q. In a speech at Harvard, you were concerned about the fifth freedom -- freedom from religion and ethical standards.

A. After you've had every other freedom -- the four that Roosevelt enunciated -- the last hobble on your freedom is religion. We saw it in the '60s in the hippie movement, when tens of thousands of young people quite purposely emancipated themselves from ordinary rules.

In the '60s Ken Kesey told his merry pranksters, Be what you are. It didn't matter what, as long as it was what they really felt they were. Being what you are was a revolutionary, radical notion then. Now it is pretty much accepted

That's particularly true in sexual issues. The sexual revolution -- such a prim term -- was a tremendous change in the '60s. Now we almost don't include it in discussions of morality. We don't think of it in moral terms.

In many ways this new freedom has been a marvelous experiment, without parallel in history. But part has gone to an excess.

Q. Where do you see excesses?

A. The '80s are wilder than the '60s. Rock music is much wilder. Just think how tame the Beatles' music is today: it's almost Muzak. And the sexual revolution -- in the mid-'60s the idea of a coed dorm, putting those nubile young things and these young men in the season of the rising sap in the same dormitories, on the same floors! Now the coed dorm is like I-95. It's there. It hums. And you don't notice it.

Q. An erosion of standards?

A. Erosion, no. It's been much faster than erosion. There's been a sweeping aside of standards. Every kind of standard.

Q. What does a seer of the American scene expect of the '90s?

A. The '70s were almost over when I called it the Me decade. I don't deal in predictions, but you appeal to my vanity, so I'll talk about it anyway. I think that in the '90s we'll probably see a good bit of relearning, even though it might seem boring. It's in the attitudes of college students now. I sense they are already voluntarily putting the brakes on the sexual revolution -- not screeching to a halt, and not just because of AIDS.

I think there will be a lot of discussion in the '90s about morality. It has already begun. I pick it up in talking to college students. I expect a religious revival. We already see an awakening: the new interest in the Evangelicals, charismatic versions of established religions, and new religious forms such as est and channeling. That fifth freedom excites some and upsets others.

When Nietzsche said that God is dead, he said there would have to be created a new set of values to replace the values of Christianity. God was dead, but guilt was not, and there was no way to absolve it. That, perhaps, is exactly the period we are in. No use saying we are going to return to the dissenting Protestant view of sexual morality at the turn of the century. We won't.

Q. These views have marked you as a conservative.

A. When I'm called a conservative, I now wear that as a badge of honor, because in my world it really just means you are a heretic, you've said something unorthodox. You are supposed to conform to certain intellectual fashions, and if you don't, they say, "That's heterodoxy!"

Q. Reading Bonfire, one felt you were writing about the things going on around us now. Did it give you a jolt to see those things and say, "Hey, that's Chapter 7"?

A. Philip Roth said that we live in an age in which the imagination of the novelist is helpless before what he knows he will read in tomorrow's newspaper. And it's true! No one can dream up the things that pop up in the papers every day.

At one point I was a little worried about having my main character, Sherman McCoy, losing $6 million for his firm in about 15 minutes. I thought, "Well, this is fiction. I'll go ahead and do it." My typewriter had hardly stopped moving before I picked up the New York Times, and there on Page One was an account of a young investment banker, about the same age as my character, 38, who lost $250 million for his firm in a week. I felt like Alice in Wonderland, running as hard as I can to stay in the same place.

Q. Bonfire has received great critical acclaim, but critics have also called it cynical, racist, elitist.

A. That's nonsense. I throw the challenge to them: if you think it is false, go out and do what I did. Go beyond the cocoon of your apartment and taxicab and take a look. Take notes. Then let's compare notes. I'll bet your picture of New York is not very different from mine.

What they are really saying is that I have violated a certain etiquette in literary circles that says you shouldn't be altogether frank about these matters of ethnic and racial hostility. But if you raise the issue, a certain formula is to be followed: you must introduce a character, preferably from the streets, who is enlightened and shows everyone the error of his ways, so that by the time the story is over, everyone's heading off wiser. There has to be a moral resolution. Unfortunately, life isn't like that. I felt that if you are going to try to write a novel about New York, you cannot play falsely with the issue of ethnic and racial hostility. You can't invent implausible morality tales and make it all go away in some fictitious fashion.

Q. How did you tackle the task to get the texture, the sound of every layer of New York?

A. I'm a journalist at heart; even as a novelist, I'm first of all a journalist. I think all novels should be journalism to start, and if you can ascend from that plateau to some marvelous altitude, terrific. I really don't think it's possible to understand the individual without understanding the society.

Q. Bonfire portrays New York at its worst, a city consumed by greed and corruption.

A. I never thought of it as a bleak picture. My feeling was wonderment -- this amazing carnival was spread out before me. I really love New York. It attracts ambitious people, not just at the top. Think of all the Asians who have come here and have the newspaper stands and candy stores and grocery shops. New York is the city of ambition.

Q. Americans seem obsessed by the quest for status, and certainly the characters in Bonfire are, which suggests that you are.

A. Status is an influence at every level. We resist the notion that it matters, but it's true. You can't escape it. You see it in restaurants -- not just in New York. People seem willing to pay any amount to be seen at this week's restaurant of the century. It's all part of what I call plutography: depicting the acts of the rich. They not only want to be seen at this week's restaurant of the century, they want to be embraced by the owner. But status isn't only to do with the rich. Status is fundamental, an inescapable part of human life.

Q. In your books you pay meticulous attention to what people wear, as signals of status.

A. Clothing is a wonderful doorway that most easily leads you to the heart of an individual; it's the way they reveal themselves.

Q. Some critics say you judge a man by the shoes he wears.

A. I take some solace in knowing that Balzac was criticized the same way -- he was obsessed with furniture. Details are of no use unless they lead you to an understanding of the heart. It's no mystery; it has to do with the whole subject of status.

Q. What would you say about a character who wears a handsomely cut vanilla- colored suit on a winter day in New York, with a lilac tie and matching striped shirt with a collar seven stripes high, and shoes custom-designed to appear to have white spats?

A. I was afraid you might mention that. I suppose I might say, "Here's somebody who's trying to call attention to himself." But I leave that to others to interpret. It's always hard to describe yourself.

Q. Does it bother you to be called a "dandy"?

A. Not at all. Writers, whether they want to admit it or not, are in the business of calling attention to themselves. My own taste is counter-bohemian.

My white suits came about by accident. I had a white suit made that was too hot for summer, so I wore it in December. I found that it really irritated people -- I had hit upon this harmless form of aggression!

Q. Is America becoming too homogenized? Is individualism in danger of being lost?

A. No. I think this is a very wild country. Ever since the '60s there has been a moving off dead-center. I see a lack of inhibition. Look at international travelers. I used to think in terms of Adolphe Menjou in his cloak, arriving on a ship, with 42 pieces of luggage. Now the international traveler comes into Kennedy airport in a summer football sweatshirt and running shorts, and his wife is wearing shorts and a T shirt and high heels. And they are flying first-class.

Q. Did you always want to be a writer?

A. I decided at five or six that I wanted to be a writer. My father was an agronomist and the editor of a magazine called Southern Planter, in Richmond. I always thought of him as a writer. And I wanted to write.

Q. When you were a small child, there was another famous Southern writer named Thomas Wolfe. Was that a subliminal influence?

A. I love his books. As a child I couldn't understand, since his name was the same, why we weren't related. He was a maximalist, and that's what I admire. Somebody once told him to take out all that was not necessary. And he said, "No. I'm a putter-inner." And that's what I am, a putter-inner.

Q. Critics compare you with Dickens, Balzac, Zola. Pretty good company.

A. They were my models. Particularly Zola. It's the idea of the novelist putting the individual in the setting of society at large and realizing the pressure society exerts on the individual. This is something that has been lost over the past 40 years in the American novel.

Q. An assessment of yourself as a writer?

A. I am just the chronicler. My passion is to discover, and to write about it.