Writer Tom Wolfe returned to the Yale campus on Oct. 11 to kick off the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences' Tercentennial Lecture Series "In the Company of Scholars," which features distinguished alumni of the school.
A native of Richmond, Virginia, Wolfe earned his B.A. in English at Washington and Lee University and his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale (1957).
Wolfe is author of two novels, "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and "A Man in Full," and nine nonfiction books, including "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test," "The Right Stuff" and "From Bauhaus to Our House." He is credited with coining "The Me Decade," "radical chic," "good old boy," and other phrases that capture the zeitgeist.
"A Man in Full" is currently being adapted for television by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies, who teaches in Yale's Departments of English and Theater Studies.
Wolfe's newest book, "Hooking Up," a collection of short fiction and essays, will be available at the end of October from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wolfe talked about his Yale years, among other topics, with the Yale Bulletin & Calendar. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation.
What brought you to the Yale Graduate School?
I always wanted to write. That was my ambition from way back, but I thought I'd better have something to hold body and soul together, and so I decided upon teaching. At Washington and Lee, where I was an undergraduate, a young professor had just arrived, named Marshall Fishwick. He had just come out of the Yale American Studies Program and to this day, he is the most magnetic teacher I've ever had in my life. He's still teaching, incidentally, at Virginia Tech. He's probably no more than seven years older than I am (which is getting up there), and he's still a fabulous teacher. In one year, just two semesters, he condensed the American Studies Program at Yale.
It was so exciting that I said, "Well, that's what I'll do. If I can get into Yale, I'll go there and do American Studies."
And with his help, I got in, and I was here for five years. Which, incidentally, is way too long to be in graduate school. I finished my degree with the idea that I was going to teach and write. But I finished my dissertation in September, at the end of my fifth year. It was too late to look for a job teaching. Also, I had been on campuses for too long ... nine years. I took a job on a newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, with the idea that after a year, I would, in due course, apply for a job in teaching. But I kind of enjoyed the first year, so I stayed with it.
In what way did graduate education, in general, and American Studies, in particular, have an impact on your life?
A graduate education: I really cannot imagine having gone into a writing career without it. It was crucial.
I think there's an enormous difference between undergraduate and graduate education, no matter where you go to school. You are compelled to think conceptually in graduate school. When I was here, the cry in the air, for American Studies, anyway, was "Insights and analogies": That was the key to everything. Well, that's just another way to say, "Think conceptually."
The ways that graduate school paid off in journalism were amazing. So many of the things that you write for a newspaper are not breaking news stories -- fires and arrests and things of that sort. They are stories that need, what in the newspaper parlance is called an angle, to write. An angle: that's a concept they're talking about.
What aspect of American Studies has been most important to you?
Sociology was a required component of American Studies when I was here. I had majored in English, and I arrived here with a typical liberal arts disdain for the social sciences. I very reluctantly took sociology, and became a complete convert.
The discovery of sociology and of the concept of status -- an approach that I consider fundamental to any subject involving human beings, and most animals, as far as that goes -- was central. I would not have written, for better or for worse, my nonfiction, even the novels the way I've written them, had it not been for that interest in status.
Not to pat myself on the back, but when I did "The Right Stuff" -- a book about the astronauts and the early rocket pilots -- the key to that book, and to any positive response that it got, was that it was not a book about space or about astronauts, per se. It was a book about the status structure of the military flying fraternity and the psychology that emanates from that status structure. The whole idea of looking for status structure in a field like flying comes out of my American Studies days.
I still regard sociology -- although it's not regarded in academia that way -- as the monarch of all the sciences.
Dean Susan Hockfield has called graduate education " the engine of human progress, both material and spiritual." Do you agree?
I think it's certainly true. Practically, it's very unlikely any longer that any idea that fundamentally changes human life is going to come out of an undergraduate education. These things now come out of graduate school, and I wouldn't confine that to the sciences either. It's true also of what comes out of the humanities.
What do you remember about your days at Yale?
What I remember more than anything physical, was the atmosphere. As an undergraduate, we had a sort of "show me" attitude. If you didn't understand something, you'd raise your hand in class and, in effect, say, "What's that supposed to mean?" It was expected that the teacher would stop and explain the obvious to you. In graduate school, you immediately picked up the fact that if you didn't understand something, you kept your mouth shut, ran to Sterling Memorial Library, and you read about it.
The emphasis on academics was complete. The emphasis on self discipline was complete.
Where did you live?
My first year, I did not live on campus. I lived in a rooming house on Chapel Street with a house full of medical students, plus a few German lawyers, who, as they put it, had been brought here to be democratized. It wasn't that long after the Second World War (I came here in 1951). I got to know the medical students quite well, and to this day, because of that association with the medical students, I'm always throwing medical terms into what I write.
After my first year, I lived in the Hall of Graduate Studies.
What about the academic life?
I found it very rigorous. Being a graduate student in those days was a pretty severe and tedious life.
I remember days on end in my cubicle in the Yale Library. It was very gloomy up in the stacks. The ceiling had little circular florescent bulbs that are known in New York as "the landlord's halo." Each graduate student was assigned a cubicle, and you had a cantilevered metal desktop, two cantilevered metal shelves for your books, a gooseneck lamp, and this sort of leper's window beside you, through which you could catch a glimpse of the outdoors. At the same time, when you're 22, 23, you're young, full of the rising sap, and here you are in this confined, gloomy place, poring over and writing papers that tended to be rather technical and detailed. The personal and the intellectual sides were so different.
It sounds pretty grim.
Well, at the same time, what you were getting intellectually was something absolutely irreplaceable.
At that time, only graduate students could roam the stacks at will. Undergraduates couldn't. When I think of the things that I came upon, I guess you'd say serendipitously, in the stacks!
I look back on it as a wonderful time in my life. Something that can occur only when you're young and in a university setting. You never have the time in all the rest of your life, probably, to just roam among the stored memory of a civilization the way you can at that age and in that time.
What I brought away, in terms of an education, was just gold.
When you set about writing a book, what's your method?
Even for a novel, I will first read everything I can get my hands on, and frankly, just having been to graduate school makes that kind of research so much easier. Once you've done the reading, then you can do the reporting.
I use a computer, mainly as a typewriter. If I'm taking notes, it's all by hand. I now write on a computer, but I wrote "A Man in Full" on a typewriter.
Frankly, in terms of productivity and quality, it obviously doesn't matter what you use. The most prolific writers of high quality lived in the 19th century, and they used pen and ink. They didn't even have ball points, so it's not a matter of machine.
I don't start the writing until I've done the research and have the notes, and at least a plan of what I'm going to write.
Once I've done that, I write on a quota basis. I try to make myself do 10 triple-spaced pages a day, which is about 12-, 13-, 14-hundred words. I even do that on the word processor. That comes from newspaper days, really.
Do you go back and revise what you write?
As much time as they'll give me, I'll edit and rewrite. There are very few writers -- Jack Kerouac, apparently, really did just almost free associate. Nah, I'll bet he was more canny than that.
I think it's a wonderful artifice to write something that sounds spontaneous, because writing is very artificial. You're taking sounds, you're converting them to symbols on the page in a way that you hope will sound euphonious or compelling when reconverted into sound inside someone's brain. That's a very artificial process.
Among your own books, do you have a favorite?
Yes. It would be "A Man in Full." As a matter of fact, if you don't like the last thing you did best, you're in serious trouble.
The next speaker in the Graduate School series "In the Company of Scholars" will be graphic designer and political scientist Edward Tufte on Nov. 15. Other speakers will be Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David M. Kennedy, President of the University of Toronto Robert Birgeneau, and economist Janet Yellen.
-- By Gila Reinstein
Further insights into the life and times of Tom Wolfe
While at Yale, alumnus author Tom Wolfe was bombarded with questions both during his formal talk and informal conversations. Here's a sampling of what the Yale Bulletin & Calendar learned:
Where does Tom Wolfe get those white suits?
He has them tailor-made in New York.
How old is he?
Wolfe was born in 1931 and is 69 years old.
Does he have a family?
Yes. He married late, in 1978. He and his wife, Sheila, have two children. Alexandra is 20 years old and a student at Duke. Tommy is 15, and in high school.
What was his doctoral dissertation about?
It was a study of a 1930s Communist front organization called the League of American Writers. According to Wolfe, "The subject of this dissertation was only incidentally politics and literature. In my hands, writers such as E. Hemingway and J. Dos Passos came across like remote figures from Sumerian history. My approach was entirely sociological ... My dissertation ... was supremely -- to the point of terminally -- boring to read."
Who was the Maggie of his talk titled "Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks"?
Maggie was a young woman from New Haven, who was hired to shelve books in the Sterling Memorial Library. In the 1950s, people did not wear sneakers except for sports, and Wolfe recalls that Maggie shuffled about the stacks in bedroom slippers, so as not to disturb the concentration of those doing research.
Wolfe admitted that he spent a lot of time sitting in his assigned cubicle in the library stacks, staring out a window at the buds bursting open on the trees and fantasizing about Maggie.
What was Wolfe's reaction to HGS today?
He was impressed with the beauty of the courtyard and the neo-gothic details of the common room. He recalled the etched glass windows from his own student days, but then the ceiling was obscured by soot from the fireplaces and cigarettes. People smoked constantly, he recalled. Following the 1997 renovations, the common room ceiling now shows a colorful series of emblems representing all branches of human learning -- or, at any rate, those that existed in 1930, when the building was constructed.
What has he been working on since "A Man in Full"?
Wolfe's newest book will be available at the end of October. Called "Hooking Up," it is a collection of short fiction and essays. The title essay is about romantic and sexual relationships among young people today.
Is he working on a book right now?
Of course. He is researching an as-yet-untitled novel about contemporary college life. For his research, he began at Stanford and has traveled around to many campuses, chiefly those with powerhouse football and basketball teams.
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