१ मार्च, २०१९

"... as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty...."

I hope you're with me, 84% of the way into Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." Here's a snippet from conversation at a party Sherman McCoy attends after his ignominious arrest. What's amusing for the reader is that the snooty arty guests, who wanted nothing to do with him at an earlier party, now find him quite fascinating. My selection begins with dialogue from a novelist — emptily named Nunnally Voyd:
"I must tell you, I’ve thought about you more than once over the past few days. Welcome to the legion of the damned…now that you’ve been properly devoured by the fruit flies.... The press. I’m amused by all the soul-searching these…insects do. 'Are we too aggressive, too cold-blooded, too heartless?'—as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty. That’s what I call praise by faint damnation. They’ve got the wrong animal. In fact, they’re fruit flies. Once they get the scent, they hover, they swarm. If you swing your hand at them, they don’t bite it, they dart for cover, and as soon as your head is turned, they’re back again. They’re fruit flies. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that."

Despite the fact that this grand literatus was using his predicament as a pedestal upon which to place this entomological conceit, this set piece that came out a bit shopworn in the delivery, Sherman was grateful. In some way Voyd was, indeed, a brother, a fellow legionnaire. He seemed to recall—he had never paid much attention to literary gossip—that Voyd had been stigmatized as homosexual or bisexual. There had been some sort of highly publicized squabble…How very unjust! How dare these…insects pester this man who, while perhaps a bit affected, had such largeness of spirit, such sensitivity to the human condition? What if he was…gay? The very word gay popped into Sherman’s head spontaneously. (Yes, it is true. A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.)
I'll give you 6 thoughts...

1. Sherman finds himself suddenly using the word "gay" — it's the mid-80s — and he realizes he's become a liberal.

2. I think Tom Wolfe invented the adage "A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested." It's a twist on the old adage, "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." Looking to see how old that adage is, I find — on one of those famous-quotes sites — "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested," and that's attributed to Tom Wolfe! They're just misquoting "Bonfire," where the new adage appears and the reader is supposed to recognize the twist on the old adage. The misquote spells out what Wolfe trusts you to get. (Or am I wrong? Maybe on some other occasion Tom Wolfe said it the pedestrian way. I like to think he did not.)

3. This passage caught my attention because it had animals — insects and, also (fleetingly), a tiger. Nunnally Voyd, the character, was trying to get attention, and it worked on me. The mere arrival of insects is interesting, novels being so relentlessly about people people people. Wolfe — he's named after an animal — must see into The Voyd and know his tricks and tendencies. Voyd loves expounding within a metaphor and indulges himself into the face of the suffering McCoy.

4. McCoy is needy, so he enjoys the performance even as he knows what's awful about it — the "set piece" is "shopworn." At the earlier party, his problem was that, as a financier, he was just boring to the arty people. Now, as a criminal, he excites them, and he responds by feeling a sense of brotherhood — fellow feeling for a man he has really has nothing in common with. But as an outsider to the larger society, McCoy is interesting to the artists, who get energy from him, now that he's — if you believe the insect press — a near-murderer.

5. Is the press like fruit flies? Voyd wields his conceit with the novelist's confidence. And Wolfe writes of the novelist's confidence with his own novelist confidence. Wolfe's confidence is sublimely secure because he uses a character to spout ideas that are interesting but might be wrong. In fact, the wrongness of the idea might be the point of having Voyd express them. The press is killing McCoy.

6. Did Wolfe intend for us to think about the Sartre play, "The Flies"? I don't know, but Wolfe said this in a 1988 interview: "You know, Sartre was famous for the statement, in the play, No Exit, 'Hell is other people.' To which Claude Levi-Strauss said, 'No. Hell is ourselves.' And the inferno that I try to present in The Bonfire of the Vanities is internal...."

६० टिप्पण्या:

Henry म्हणाले...

Nunnally Voyd LOL.

Henry म्हणाले...

Nunnally Void is a character in The Pilgrim's Progress that got edited out.

MadisonMan म्हणाले...

I'm trying to read the book, but its prose style just doesn't work for me.

traditionalguy म्हणाले...

Poor Sherman. He is becoming The Fly, half human and half insect. Which will win after the bonfire has burned out? I pull for the Man. The insects have won too many of late.

Lucid-Ideas म्हणाले...


苛政猛于虎!

A very ancient (2500 yrs old) Chinese phrase that roughly translates as Tyrannical Government is More Fearsome Than a Tiger!

I absolutely think it needs updating...Fake News Media is More Fearsome Than a Tiger!

A Conservative is a liberal that's been attacked by the tiger.

A Liberal is a conservative that's has yet to be attacked by the tiger.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

I so liked the term "grand literatus" that I had to look up the coinage "glitterati" to see if it was available when Wolfe wrote Bonfire. Merriam-Webster gives its first citation in 1940.

Laslo Spatula म्हणाले...

Do you think Wolfe was being sly by having the author with the theory of 'fruit' flies be "that Voyd had been stigmatized as homosexual or bisexual"?

I'm serious with this question.

It WAS the 80s, and 'fruit' was still -- I believe -- a derogatory term for gays.

Perhaps Wolfe is layering latent associations: the journalists are not 'tigers' -- i.e., straight 'manly men' -- they are fruit flies: buzzing, able to be shooed away from conflict only to return to buzz again -- you know: bitchy.

Is he providing this subtext from the point of view of the fictional author, or himself? Which is Althouse's point Five: "Wolfe's confidence is sublimely secure because he uses a character to spout ideas that are interesting but might be wrong."

The Onion Layers of the Vanities.

I am Laslo.

Henry म्हणाले...

Perhaps Wolfe is layering latent associations: the journalists are not 'tigers' -- i.e., straight 'manly men' -- they are fruit flies: buzzing, able to be shooed away from conflict only to return to buzz again -- you know: bitchy.

Fruit flies aren't made out of fruit. They're attracted to fruit.

Lurker21 म्हणाले...

"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality" may go back to Irving Kristol. In 1983 Kristol wrote "[A neoconservative is] a liberal who has been mugged by reality. A neoliberal is a liberal who got mugged by reality but has not pressed charges." But the original quote may be his as well, the "neo" having worn away with much usage.

You can also find the later quote, "A liberal is a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet," attributed to Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo, who may or may not have been clever enough to say it, so maybe it was only a matter of time before Tom Wolfe came along with his own version. What a neocon who has been mugged by reality becomes is easy to see in Kristol's son, but harder to define.

I can also find "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested" attributed to Thomas Wolfe (American short story writer and novelist, 1900-1938). Such a famous writer in his day. And people actually read and loved his interminable books. And now? And what will become of the other Tom Wolfe in 80 years?

narciso म्हणाले...

Well that's not entirely true, they aren't looking at reverend bacon's circus, for instance.

Henry म्हणाले...

A Conservative is a liberal that's been attacked by the tiger.

A Liberal is a conservative that's has yet to be attacked by the tiger.


A Liberal is a conservative that has had to shoot an elephant.

Carter Wood म्हणाले...

On topic, the Final Jeopardy Answer last night was: "A chapter of 'The Jungle Book' has this double-talk title, echoing the opening line of a Brit’s poem some 100 years prior."

tcrosse म्हणाले...

A liberal is a mug.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

Fruit flies aren't made out of fruit. They're attracted to fruit.

They like a banana.


mccullough म्हणाले...

The Bonfire of the Vanities has a lot of allusions to the Great Gatsby.

McCoy is a bonds salesman like Nick Carraway. His girlfriend hits someone with his car but he is blamed for it like Gatsby.

Compare and contrast the social parties in Bonfire with Gatsby.

Fernandinande म्हणाले...

I'm trying to read the book, but its prose style just doesn't work for me.

Same here, though I enjoyed it in the past. Now large portions of it seem very tedious and I keep skimming and skipping...like not reading to the end of the excerpts posted here.

nob490 म्हणाले...

Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

My dad told us kids this one when we were little. I thought everyone knew this. Said it to some folks at work and they looked at me like I had three heads.

narciso म्हणाले...

I've made that allusion in the past, there is also a more recent tale called the gold coast by demille.

gspencer म्हणाले...

That second party with the frosty Dame Judy was simply a shortened version of TW's "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's" (1970).

PM म्हणाले...

Maria?

traditionalguy म्हणाले...
ही टिप्पणी लेखकाना हलविली आहे.
traditionalguy म्हणाले...

Yes. Bonfire and Great Gatsby are very close. The protagonists in both want to live an elite rich man's life but neither has the killer instincts needed to pull it off. Is being too human a character flaw? Should they both be replaced with AI Androids.

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

I was looking for "insect politics" tag.

Big Mike म्हणाले...

as if the press were a rapacious beast

“as if”???. Make it “mindless rapacious beast” to describe 21st century “journalism.”

Big Mike म्हणाले...

@Carter Wood, What is Tiger! Tiger!?

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

@Yancy

I considered it, but it doesn’t fit.

Earnest Prole म्हणाले...

Wolfe was criticized for recycling his bon mots in various formats.

MD Greene म्हणाले...

Bonfire was a great success, but at heart Tom Wolfe was most interested in social trends and excesses. His fiction consisted of putting characters in situations where they could react in ways that illustrated the nuttiness he saw around him.

I recently came upon what may have been his last book, The Kingdom of Speech, a nonfiction piece about how mankind developed the critical ability to distinguish present, past and future. Speech also enabled the brain to grapple with abstraction, theory, critical thought, math, science and everything else that distinguishes us from other animals.

With his usual glee, Wolfe skewers the elitism and sloppiness of Darwin and Chomsky -- both posited that human speech was absolutely a result of human evolution, but neither brought the goods.

Short and fun, the book deserves more attention than it has received.

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

Ernest Prole,

When I first read the novel (1987-88), I had never read anything else Tom Wolfe had written except for The Right Stuff, which I had read around 1980-81. I noticed the recycling as I read more of his earlier non-fiction with the rise of the internet during the late 90s up to present day. Yes, he definitely borrowed heavily from himself for Bonfire.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

The Painted Word is worth a read. It was not well received in some circles.

Fernandinande म्हणाले...

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

Dunno anyone who fits that description, but I know two people who were liberals until they were arrested in fake #metoo-style episodes.

Tank म्हणाले...

Got nothing to add, but I love these Bonfire posts and many of the comments too.

tim maguire म्हणाले...

I find it a bit dismaying that you track your progess by percentage, rather than by page number. I may slowly accept ebooks, but I will never like them

I thought that was a great scene—suddenly, he’s oh so interesting. For a little while. Then, when the media storm passes, they forget about him.

I never particularly liked that attempt at a reverse aphorism, “a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.” In the usual way of things, a person is liberal while young and gets more conservative with age. They have been mugged by reality. The reverse—conservative to liberal—is far rarer and tends to happen in mentally unbalanced people like David Brock, people who have neither heart nor head.

dgstock म्हणाले...

Nunnally Voyd. Snicker. Wolfe is as good with cutting monikers as Thomas Pynchon.

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

Fernandistein wrote...

"'A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested'

Dunno anyone who fits that description, but I know two people who were liberals until they were arrested in fake #metoo-style episodes.
"

A possible example?

narciso म्हणाले...

No pynchon went for plain weird, vineland was perhaps the apotheosis whereas Wolfe was more dickensian (dunning and sponget, pierce and pierce)

Yancey Ward म्हणाले...

Fernandistein wrote...

"'A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested'

Dunno anyone who fits that description, but I know two people who were liberals until they were arrested in fake #metoo-style episodes.
"

A possible example?

Earnest Prole म्हणाले...

One word: Flit.

n.n म्हणाले...
ही टिप्पणी लेखकाना हलविली आहे.
n.n म्हणाले...

Happy and carefree, maybe. They seem quite stilted. Perhaps they are transitioning.

A liberal is a conservative is a classical liberal who has progressed and lost his principles. Hate love's abortion.

Carter Wood म्हणाले...

Big Mike said...
@Carter Wood, What is Tiger! Tiger!?


And none of The Jeopardy superstars playing got it!

I only knew it because the Blake poem introduces Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination," the greatest SF book of the '50s.

Fernandinande म्हणाले...

A possible example?

No, as far as I can see nobody got arrested there. But in both the cases I'm thinking of, the process was the punishment.

Andrew म्हणाले...

I had an outbreak of fruit flies in my apartment a few months ago. It had never happened to me before. I cleaned the kitchen and made sure there was nothing for them to feed on, but the fruit flies remained.

I learned that there was a very simple way to catch and kill fruit flies. You buy a plastic container of miscellaneous fruit from the grocery store. You open it and eat what you like, but leave at least a few pieces of melon or cantaloupe or whatever in the bottom of the container. Then you cover it with plastic wrap. You poke a few small holes in the wrap covering the fruit. Then you let it sit there on your kitchen counter. As the fruit ferments, the flies are attracted to the smell. They can fit through the holes, but can't find their way out. And so they die. I was surprised at how quickly this worked, not only catching them but killing them. It was as if they gave up on life the moment they realized they couldn't get out. This method was completely effective. There were no fruit flies left.

My guess is that Trump has laid out a trap for the fruit fly journalists. It's called "Russia collusion." While it is taking them a long time to die, the fact is that there is no escape. It won't be long before their deception and corruption is exposed for all to see.

At least, that is what I hope.

Henry म्हणाले...

Well phrased question -- they used "echoed" rather than "quoted."

Tyger Tyger!

Big Mike म्हणाले...

@Carter Wood, I used DuckDuckGo. [blush]

Char Char Binks, Esq. म्हणाले...

Voyd was just trying to cheer up Sherman, at least temporarily. The press can be fruit flies one day, and tigers the next, just as the arty jet set can ignore you, befriend you, and then abandon you, according to their needs. Radical chic, at least in the form Wolfe wrote about in "Radical Chic", was short-lived, and couldn't survive the essay's publication, just as support for Sherman by the Beautiful People -- SPOILER ALERT -- couldn't last.

narciso म्हणाले...

Um Leonard peltier, mumia Abu Jamal, those are just two one considers as manifestations of radical chic.

Char Char Binks, Esq. म्हणाले...

Um okay.

Stephen Baraban म्हणाले...

I can't find a reference on the Internet, but I seem to remember that in the late 60s there was a saying that a Radical was a Liberal who had been beaten by the police. I'd imagine that the later, similar statements have this as their origin.

RobinGoodfellow म्हणाले...

Blogger tcrosse said...
“Fruit flies aren't made out of fruit. They're attracted to fruit.”

They like a banana.


Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"I can also find "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested" attributed to Thomas Wolfe (American short story writer and novelist, 1900-1938). Such a famous writer in his day...."

A mistaken attribution, of course.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

I've read these Tom Wolfe books, in approximately this order:

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
The Painted Word
From Bauhaus to Our House
I Am Charlotte Simmons
Hooking Up
Radical Chic and Mau-mauing the Flak Catchers
The Kingdom of Speech
Bonfire of the Vanities

I've read various articles, notably "The Me Decade" (when it came out in 1976).

Rick म्हणाले...

A mistaken attribution,

"Half of what's on the internet is fake, the other half is made up" - Abraham Lincoln.

tcrosse म्हणाले...

I tried reading Back to Blood recently, but I seem to have lost my taste for Wolfe's breathless, onomatopoetic style.

Bob Smith म्हणाले...

Tom Wolfe. The darling of the New York glitterati until he wrote “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers” . Kinda like Sinatra, who went from being “The greatest pop singer that ever lived” to “a has been who can’t carry a tune” when he endorsed Ronald Regan.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"I find it a bit dismaying that you track your progess by percentage, rather than by page number...."

Page number will only work if you have the same edition. My edition is Kindle, so the alternative is the "Kindle location" which is less helpful if you're trying to find it in the book.

Ann Althouse म्हणाले...

"I'm trying to read the book, but its prose style just doesn't work for me."

From the contemporaneous NYT review of "Bonfire": "Mr. Wolfe writes in such a way as to make us read him quickly. Very quickly. (Indeed, if one lingers over the pages the sensation is something like hearing a 78 r.p.m. record played at 33 1/3. One perceives the structure, but misses the essence.)"

I mixed reading in Kindle and listening to the audiobook — sometimes both at the same time. The reader on the audiobook gives a real performance, with different voices for all the characters. It's very lively. It might work better nonvisually.

I just read the old NYT review and the reviewer really disliked all the efforts at depicting accents (with spelling distortions), but there's one plot point that depends on the convergence of a Southern white accent and a NYC black accent (the pronunciation of "Sherman").

F म्हणाले...

I'm working on the "editing phase" of my third novel and I like your comment that novels are "people, people, people". So true. I'll see if I can't put a few more animals metaphors in , to add some interest. What amazes me is that Wolfe wrote this novel twice. First, in a series of episodes published in Rolling Stone. Second, as a finalized novel some two years later. He had courage, that much is certain.

Clark म्हणाले...

I am really enjoying the audiobook. The performance of the reader ("with different voices for all the characters") is amazing. I forget sometime that it is one reader doing all of these voices. I am hearing things that I would miss if I were reading it silently myself. Listening, I am able to appreciate the music of the prose: the repetitions, the alliteration. I am laughing out loud, often. What a comedy—even when it is dark, which is most of the time.

Earnest Prole म्हणाले...

The darling of the New York glitterati until he wrote “Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers”

You have no precious idea what you’re talking about. In April 1965 Wolfe wrote his takedown of New Yorker editor William Shawn, “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” Wolfe would never be the darling of New York (nor anyplace other's) glitterati ever again.