There is a lively interview with Tom Wolfe by Carole Iannone in the current issue of Academic Questions. In it he manages to take down a half-dozen groups in contemporary society without a shred of fear or equivocation. To journalists who take too high a moral ground, he says that “reporting is the easiest thing in the world, because there are no techniques to learn. There is an attitude. And that attitude is: ‘You have some information. I desperately need that information — and I deserve it!’ That’s the attitude. It gives you the willpower to go up to strangers and ask questions and demand answers you have no right to.”
On writers and the survival of literature, Wolfe mutters, “The novel is sinking into its kneecaps.” Why? “I blame it on these master-of-fine-arts programs. Writers, important writers, used to come from all kinds of backgrounds. In the 1930s they went to great lengths to stress their proletarian origins. The cover of one of Faulkner’s novels boasts that he is a former dishwasher and a former shoe clerk at Saks Fifth Avenue. These were terrible exaggerations, but it’s true that if you lumped together all of Hemingway’s, Fitzgerald’s, and Steinbeck’s college educations you would barely reach spring break in the freshman year.” It’s worth adding here that Wolfe has a Ph.D. in American studies, his dissertation covering the League of American Writers, a Communist front organization in the 30s.
Wolfe’s judgment of academe falls heavily on the tribal behaviors he finds there. He recalls the Larry Summers episode as an “unbelievable” case of fervor and cowardice. As the affair unfolded, what struck many observers wasn’t the rally of detractors, the organized indignation. It was, instead, Summers’s response. He apologized over and over again — seven times, publicly? — believing that an open self-humiliation would mollify the crowd. A bit more experience with academic rites that touch certain topics might have warned him that an apology wouldn’t work.
Wolfe provides Summers with a different script:
“All he had to say was, ‘I cannot … believe … what I am now witnessing … members of the Harvard faculty taking a grossly anti-intellectual stance, violating their implicit vow to cherish the free exchange of ideas, going mad because a hypothesis that has been openly discussed for almost half a century offends some ideological passion of the moment, acting like the most benighted of Puritans from three centuries ago ransacking all that is decent and rational in search of witches, causing this great university to become the laughingstock of the academic world here and abroad, sacrificing your very integrity in the name of some smelly little orthodoxy, as Orwell called beliefs like the ones you profess. I’m more than disappointed in you. I’m ashamed of you. Is that really how you see your mission here? If so, you should resign … now! … forthwith! … and take to the streets under your own names, not Harvard’s, and forbear being so small-minded and egotistical as to try to drag Harvard down to your level. Ladies, gentlemen … kindly display your ignorance … on these hallowed premises … while holding aloft the flags, the standards, of this university. Be honest with yourselves, even if you can’t be honest with Harvard. Look … think … and see … what you have become.’ That would have taken care of the whole thing.”
I don’t know if Wolfe is right in that last sentence, but things couldn’t have worked out much worse for Summers.
