"In this little room full of people he was suffering the pangs of men whose egos lose their virginity..."

"... as happens when they overhear for the first time a beautiful woman’s undiluted, full-strength opinion of their masculine selves."

That's my second-to-last quote from "The Bonfire of the Vanities," which some of you have been reading along with me.

The "he" is the prosecutor Kramer, and the woman is Maria, whose recorded voice he's hearing. She calls him "a pompous little bastard" and "a creep."

I like the idea of an ego losing its virginity. And then there's the notion that a woman's opinion can rape a man's ego. Is the male ego so weak or is the undiluted, full-strength opinion of a beautiful woman exceedingly strong?

"What does a rat look like when he’s listening to himself being a rat in a room full of people who know he’s a rat..."?

I have another passage from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (for those of you who've been reading along with me). This is  97% of the way through the book, the main character Sherman McCoy is listening as a tape he made is played in the judge's chambers. The point of view shifts, in the end of the first paragraph, from Sherman to the prosecutor (Kramer):

In this sad moldering little room were seven other men, seven other organisms, hundreds of pounds of tissue and bone, breathing, pumping blood, burning calories, processing nutrients, filtering out contaminants and toxins, transmitting neural impulses, seven warm grisly unpleasant animals rooting about, for pay, in the entirely public cavity he used to think of as his soul. Kramer was dying to look at McCoy, but decided to be cool and professional.

What does a rat look like when he’s listening to himself being a rat in a room full of people who know he’s a rat—going wired to see his girlfriend? Unconsciously, but profoundly, Kramer was relieved. Sherman McCoy, this Wasp, this Wall Street aristocrat, this socialite, this Yale man, was as much a rat as any of the drug dealers he had wired up to go rat out their species. No, McCoy was more of a rat. One doper didn’t expect much from another. But in these upper reaches, upon these pinnacles of propriety and moralism, up in this stratosphere ruled by the pale thin-lipped Wasps, honor, presumably, was not a word to be trifled with. Yet backed to the wall, they turned rat just as quickly as any lowlife....

I was, obviously, interested in the rat. But it was especially intriguing to begin with the idea that Sherman wasn't an animal at all but a place, an "entirely public cavity he used to think of as his soul," and all the other people were animals rooting around in that place. As "warm grisly unpleasant animals," I guess they were rats, from Sherman's perspective. Then we shift to Kramer's perspective, and he's seeing Sherman as the rat (and thinking about other rats he has known).

Really, everyone is seen as a rat here, but no one sees himself as a rat. Kramer sees himself as above ratdom, while Sherman sees himself as nothing at all. Both men — projecting rattiness onto others — protect their own interests.

"Do you remember when we used to live in the Village, the way I used to go off to work... The way I used to give you the raised left fist when I left the apartment, the Black Power salute?"

I revealed that I've finished Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," which some of you have been reading along with me, and maybe you've finished it too. I have a few more quotes I want to serve up, first this bit from 94% of the way through the book (which is something that connects to the ending). Here, Sherman McCoy makes a desperate attempt to reconnect with his wife, Judy:

“Do you remember when we used to live in the Village, the way I used to go off to work?”

“The way you used to go off to work?”

“When I first started working for Pierce & Pierce? The way I used to give you the raised left fist when I left the apartment, the Black Power salute?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“You remember why?”

“I guess so.”

“It was supposed to say that yes, I was going to work on Wall Street, but my heart and soul would never belong to it. I would use it and rebel and break with it. You remember all that?”

Judy said nothing.

“I know it didn’t work out that way,” he went on, “but I remember what a lovely feeling it was. Don’t you?”

In the very end of the book, the Epilogue, we get a fictional article in The New York Times, telling us what's happened to McCoy in the year since the events we've been reading about, and here we see a recurrence of the Black Power salute:

Mrs. McCoy and her daughter reportedly have moved to the Midwest, but Mrs. McCoy was in the spectator section of the courtroom yesterday, apparently unrecognized by the noisy group of demonstrators, black and white, who occupied most of the seats. At one point, Mr. McCoy looked toward his wife, smiled slightly, and raised his left hand in a clenched-fist salute. The meaning of this gesture was unclear. Mrs. McCoy refused to speak to reporters.

A few thoughts:

"... 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...."

"... the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself..."

Time to roll out another passage from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities," which some of you are reading along with me. Here's a little something from 66% of the way through the book, in a scene where our main character Sherman McCoy is revealing his impending arrest to his father:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

"People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side."

For the new installment of the "Bonfire" project — where we're reading passages from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" — I offer this, from Kindle Location 4,662:

“But you don’t live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what’s in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side, from this side to the other side. You don’t know what that’s like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren’t any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family’s. Well, I didn’t grow up that way. We were always staggering back and forth across the line, like a buncha drunks, and so I know and it doesn’t frighten me. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everybody’s an animal—the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody.”

Our main character Sherman is getting lectured by his mistress and accidental partner in crime Maria.

"... a fresh human turd — yes, a turd! — her own, one hoped..."

For the new installment of the "Bonfire" project — where we're reading passages from Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" — I offer this, from Kindle Location 3222:

Nick Stopping said he had dinner the other night at the home of Stropp, the investment banker, on Park Avenue, and Stropp’s four-year-old daughter, by his second wife, came into the dining room pulling a toy wagon, upon which was a fresh human turd — yes, a turd! — her own, one hoped, and she circled the table three times, and neither Stropp nor his wife did a thing but shake their heads and smile. This required no extended comment, since the Yanks’ treacly indulgence of their children was well known, and Fallow ordered another vodka Southside and toasted the absent Asher Herzfeld, and they ordered drinks all around.

That's from the point of view of Peter Fallow, a British journalist who works in NYC, writing for a trashy tabloid, and who disapproves of "Yanks." It's a running joke that Fallow orders a "vodka Southside" because of Asher Herzfeld, a rich American, who, according to Kindle location 3195, "had always driven the waiters and the bartenders crazy by ordering the noxious American drink, the vodka Southside, which was made with mint, and then complaining that the mint wasn’t fresh."

I'm intrigued by the issue of freshness — first in the mint that the rich American insisted upon and then in the turd that the American child gave a ride in her wagon. The Brits feel superior, but do they care about freshness? I'm looking up recipes for the vodka Southside, and it's quite clear that fresh mint is crucial. And as for the child, well, the turd was fresh too.

The turd was also "human." It's funny to regard the turd as human. I'm inclined to say that "human turd" is jocose and not a proper usage of "human." As for "turd," the word, I was just opining 2 days ago that "turd" is an uglier word than "shit." I hope you'll believe me that it's just by chance that I'm wheeling "turd" around again, so that makes it  fresh turd.

It's interesting to see, so close to "turd," the idea of "treacly indulgence" of children. Not only does the turd circle the table where people are eating, but "treacle" is a food. "Treacle" is syrup, literally, and figuratively, it's "Something sweet or clogging; esp. complimentary laudation, blandishment." The earliest figurative usage, according to the OED, comes from a 1771 novel that I've read, "Humphry Clinker" by Tobias Smollett: "He began to sweeten the natural acidity of his discourse with the treacle of compliment and commendation." It's just by chance that I'm blandishing the name Smollett.



Smollett doesn't look too fresh in that painting, and it was done when he was 45! I don't know what he thought of the Americans. He died the same year "Humphry Clinker" was published, 5 years before the revolution that shook off those censorious Brits.

"... interpretation! — a frisky wild animal..."

Some of you are reading Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" along with me. In the "Bonfire" project, here on the blog, I select a few consecutive sentences as I go along and offer them up for discussion. Please concentrate on the text. It's fine to bring in the context of the book, but give a spoiler alert if you're going beyond the chapter under discussion.

So let me give you this, from Kindle Location 1624:

Do you tell the police that Mrs. Arthur Ruskin of Fifth Avenue and Mr. Sherman McCoy of Park Avenue happened to be having a nocturnal tête-à-tête when they missed the Manhattan off-ramp from the Triborough Bridge and got into a little scrape in the Bronx? He ran that through his mind. Well, he could just tell Judy—no, there was no way he could just tell Judy about a little ride with a woman named Maria. But if they—if Maria had hit the boy, then it was better to grit his teeth and just tell what happened. Which was what? Well…two boys had tried to rob them. They blocked the roadway. They approached him. They said…A little shock went through his solar plexus. Yo! You need some help? That was all the big one had said. He hadn’t produced a weapon. Neither of them had made a threatening gesture until after he had thrown the tire. Could it be—now, wait a minute. That’s crazy. What else were they doing out on a ramp to an expressway beside a blockade, in the dark—except to—Maria would back up his interpretation—interpretation!—a frisky wild animal—all of a sudden he realized that he barely knew her.

To me, the most interesting part is "interpretation!—a frisky wild animal." And I've got to admit that I am not positive that interpretation is the frisky wild animal. Maybe Maria is the frisky wild animal.

It reminds me of the problem I had with the last "Bonfire" passage I discussed. Remember? Sherman was "holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself," and at first glance, it seemed to be the "violently lurching animal" (his dachshund) that was "staring, bug-eyed," and it was only when I got to "talking to himself" that I knew it was Sherman staring bug-eyed.

I do think a writer should be more careful. Wolfe seems to assume the reader will follow the wild pathways he intends to lay down. It's exciting and should be fast, but when multiple pathways open up, we're slowed down, or we just get sloppy and hurtle along. That's what Wolfe wants from us, isn't it? But like Maria behind the wheel of Sherman's Mercedes, we should watch where we're going or we're going to get in trouble.

But I like to think that interpretation is the frisky wild animal. And Wolfe's prose is a frisky wild animal (and a violently lurching animal). Look what's going on in that sentence. We're in McCoy's mind, and he's been going over his story as he might recount it to the police or to his wife (Judy), and he sees what his problem is. The sentence begins with an attempt to fill in what was missing — how the 2 black youths were going to attack him — and he knows that's an interpretation he wants to impose to serve his interests, so he shifts to thinking about how he could get away with that, and he locks onto Maria. She'll back him up. It's all interpretation. With interpretation you can do... what you want, but what about that other person. She could back him up, but he doesn't know that she will. And the sentence ends with his realization that this woman — his lover — is someone he barely knows.

Sad for Sherman! But that's what you get when you cheat on your wife who's not sexy to you anymore because she is so familiar. You get someone you don't know, and the liberty you took is a horrible entanglement, all bound up with someone you never learned you could trust. 

"It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers."

From Kindle location 320 in Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities," this is the second entry in The "Bonfire" Project, where we talk about one short passage of continuous text:

All at once Sherman was aware of a figure approaching him on the sidewalk, in the wet black shadows of the town houses and the trees. Even from fifty feet away, in the darkness, he could tell. It was that deep worry that lives in the base of the skull of every resident of Park Avenue south of Ninety-sixth Street—a black youth, tall, rangy, wearing white sneakers. Now he was forty feet away, thirty-five. Sherman stared at him. Well, let him come! I’m not budging! It’s my territory! I’m not giving way for any street punks!

The black youth suddenly made a ninety-degree turn and cut straight across the street to the sidewalk on the other side. The feeble yellow of a sodium-vapor streetlight reflected for an instant on his face as he checked Sherman out.

He had crossed over! What a stroke of luck!

Not once did it dawn on Sherman McCoy that what the boy had seen was a thirty-eight-year-old white man, soaking wet, dressed in some sort of military-looking raincoat full of straps and buckles, holding a violently lurching animal in his arms, staring, bug-eyed, and talking to himself.

This is sort of like the old "Gatsby" project, but, for reasons previously discussed, it can't be just one sentence out of context, examined purely as a sentence. I'm giving you more text and permission to use what you know from the rest of the reading — I know some of you are reading along with me — but you need to concentrate on what's going on in the chosen text.

A few thoughts of mine:

"Who in the name of God would bring a half-eaten eight-ounce jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise to a public meeting?"

A few days ago, I was talking about a problem that Kamala Harris has as she runs for President:

She's too much of a prosecutor to win the love of a minority group Democrats need to turn out if they're going to beat Mr. Criminal Justice Reform Donald Trump.

Shouting Thomas started off a comment with...

The job of a prosecutor is to put black guys in jail, as noted in "Bonfire of the Vanities."...

I said:

Thanks for reminding me of that book, which I've been meaning to read.