The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (19 page)

But just as Wolfe was about to start the book, Tom senior was hospitalized with asymptomatic myocardial endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart. In order to help out with his father’s convalescence, Wolfe took a sabbatical from the
Tribune
and moved home to Richmond. Three daily hospital visits left him little time to write, but “there’s something about not having much time that makes you say, ‘I better put the hours in between to good use.’”

The writing process was fraught with indecision, however. Wolfe had
mastered features for magazines, but this was a considerably larger canvas. “I initially had to think of each chapter like a separate article,” he said. “That way, I could work my way through the book without worrying too much about it.” More often than not, Wolfe didn’t start writing until the early evening, churning out pages until two or three in the morning. “At first, I was trying to turn out ten triple-spaced pages a day, or fourteen hundred words,” said Wolfe. “But soon I was experiencing these long sieges where I would produce twenty pages a day, about three thousand words, and I just held steady to that page rate.”

He wrote nine hundred manuscript pages in four months, an astonishing rate even for a fast writer such as Wolfe. Just about everything he had written in the
New York
series was reworked. The prose style was a complete departure, even for a fanciful stylist like Wolfe. He stuck to the narrative he had mapped out: the Pranksters’ bus trip to New York and all of the intriguing detours along the way, including a trip to a Beatles concert, the Hell’s Angels party, and the meeting with Timothy Leary. But the Pranksters didn’t function in conventional narrative time, not with all those drugs, and the book couldn’t work if it was restricted to a linear storyline. So he fractured the story like a Braque painting. Instead of the omnipresent third-person voice, Wolfe shifted point of view, using interior monologues when necessary, thus taking the fictional trope of the unreliable narrator to unprecedented extremes: “Whomever I had as a source, I would try to be inside their skulls.”

Wolfe rearranged his words in nonlinear fashion and used punctuation as a graphic element, like E. E. Cummings on a mescaline bender. He was fond of ellipses, because his subjects talked in elliptical patterns, even thought in them. Punctuation, Wolfe discovered, allowed him to control the pace and timing of a scene, so he could write the way people on hallucinogens actually think. By subverting his language, he was in effect dosing his prose. Everyone’s reality was a subjective construct anyway, according to Kesey—a “movie” only they could see. Wolfe, in essence, was tailoring his style to accommodate Kesey’s. In his recounting of Sandy Lehmann-Haupt’s DMT flashback, Wolfe captures his paranoid, hallucinatory visions:

Wolfe kicked off chapters with poetry:

He stacked words like children’s building blocks:

In describing the rape scene, Wolfe wrote with a spectator’s verisimilitude.

This passage bothered Kesey when he read it in Wolfe’s book. He felt Wolfe was pulling his punches by not naming names and revealing the malefactors. “Certain passages—such as the Hell’s Angels gangbang—would have been stronger if he had used the names of the real people that participated,” Kesey said years later in an interview with Paul Krassner. “Kesey thought that I made a tragic moment look like farce,” said Wolfe.

It was the sole discordant note in the book, the point at which Wolfe’s prose style uneasily intersects with an event that might have benefited from a more restrained approach. It worked far more effectively when Wolfe got into Kesey’s head during an acid trip:

For passages like this, Wolfe would revert to a “controlled trance” (Wolfe’s term). Before writing each chapter, he would review his notes, then close his eyes and try to imagine himself in the mental states of his characters—a process of intellectual “sense memory” that he felt was akin to Method acting. But even that didn’t get him as close to the source as he really wanted to be. Wolfe had been hesitant to drop acid when Kesey urged him to do so at La Honda, but no amount of research could get him close enough to the feeling of an acid trip unless he experienced it first-hand. He traveled to Buffalo, New York, where a friend of his had access to LSD, and dropped 125 milligrams. “I felt like my heart was outside my body with these big veins,” he said. “As I began to calm down, I had the feeling that I had entered into the sheen of this nubby twist carpet—a really wretched carpet, made of Acrilan—and somehow this represented the people of America, in their democratic glory.”

Fortunately for Wolfe, such specious insights didn’t make it into
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. The reviews of the book, which was published in August 1968 on the same day as his second collection of articles,
The Pump House Gang
, were far more enthusiastic than the notices for
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
is an astonishing book,” wrote C. D. B. Bryan in the
New York Times Book Review
. “Wolfe is precisely the right author to chronicle the transformation of Ken Kesey from respected author of ‘And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’
[sic]
to an LSD enthusiast…. Wolfe’s enthusiasm and literary fireworks make it difficult for the reader to remain detached.”
The Nation’s
critic Joel Lieber wrote, “You get excited reading this history. Its words reach as close to the feverishness of the thing itself as possible.”

Such reactions were just the thing Wolfe had been aiming toward—to bring the reader as close to the Prankster experience as he possibly could without becoming an active participant. With his one-two publishing punch, Wolfe had scaled the heights of literary fame, but “I didn’t have enough money to be a celebrity.” His total income before taxes that year was only $17,500.

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD

T
om Wolfe’s dispatches from the West Coast for the
Tribune
and
Esquire
were field reports for a readership that maintained at best a disdainful attitude toward the youthquakes that were rewriting the Social Register, turning class into an easily acquired accoutrement rather than a privilege of birthright. The lifestyle experiments transpiring in Los Angeles and San Francisco as typified by Kesey and the Pranksters were so foreign to the primarily Republican
Trib
readership as to be more suitable for
National Geographic
. Wolfe was doing his level best to introduce West Coast culture to New York, and he did so with the enthusiasm and optimism of the initiate stumbling onto some Edenic glen where new social paradigms were washing away fusty domestic rituals and arrangements that had lain dormant for years.

But not every writer covering the youth movement was as enamored of the tectonic shifts occurring in California, and one in particular would always maintain a detached skepticism that bordered on existential dread. Joan Didion, unlike Wolfe, was a child of the West. She was born in 1934, but her ancestors had migrated to California in the nineteenth century from points east such as Virginia, Arkansas, the Carolinas, and Illinois, places where the failed dreams of financial bounty led to a great migration to where the crops were rumored to grow as tall and hearty as poplar trees. They had endured long, grinding treks by covered wagon across the Oregon Trail and barely survived the Humboldt Sink in Nevada (where the Donner-Reed party met its garish end; Didion’s
great-great-great grandmother Nancy Hardin Cornwall was a Donner party member), settling in California’s Central Valley, whose vast, flat, alluvial plains seemed to hold the promise of eternal prosperity.

As a young child Didion heard the stories of her ancestors and their great struggles to tame this unsettled territory, forging new identities as farmers from the soil of the last undeveloped region in the country. Sacramento, where Didion was raised by a homemaker and an Air Force officer who served on the local draft board and then drifted into local real estate, was an exurb adrift in uneasy suspension from the rest of the state. But by the late forties, it seemed to Didion that the stories she had been told of the crystalline rivers and majestic plains had already been supplanted by the new narrative of unchecked corporate development, the colonization of the city by aerospace firms and other commercial enterprises. This new boomtown development coexisted with the old Sacramento in ways that gave Didion intimations of the impermanence of things in California, the chimerical nature of the great western dream that her ancestors had dreamed.

Even Sacramento became a mirage for Didion as she was jostled from base to base during her father’s tenure in the Air Force. So Didion withdrew deeper into herself, finding solace in the novels of Hemingway, Conrad, and James. “I tended to perceive the world in terms of things read about it,” she recalled in 1979.

She wrote her first story at the age of five. “I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl,” Didion recalled, “but I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn’t realize then that it’s the same impulse. It’s make-believe. It’s performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone.” In high school, Didion worked as a stringer for the
Sacramento Union
, saving up enough money to buy herself an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter; she taught herself how to put sentences together by typing passages from her favorite books.