The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution (49 page)
Authors: Marc Weingarten
Tags: #Language Arts & Disciplines, #Literary, #Journalism, #Fiction, #Mailer; Norman - Criticism and Interpretation, #American, #Literary Criticism, #Wolfe; Tom - Criticism and Interpretation, #Didion; Joan - Criticism and Interpretation, #Biography & Autobiography, #American Prose Literature - 20th Century - History and Criticism, #General, #Capote; Truman - Criticism and Interpretation, #Reportage Literature; American - History and Criticism, #Journalism - United States - History - 20th Century
BOOK: The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, Capote, and the New Journalism Revolution
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4. TOM WOLFE ON ACID
| | “he appeared in a white-on-white”: Elaine Dundy, “Tom Wolfe … But Exactly, Yes!” Vogue , April 15, 1966. |
| | “wild and ironic”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), 4. |
| | “Once an athlete so valued”: Ibid., 5. |
| | “thick wrists and forearms”: Ibid., 7 |
| | “Despite the skepticism I brought here”: Ibid., 27 |
| | “only in poor old Formica”: Ibid., 31. |
| | “Their faces were painted in Art Nouveau swirls”: Ibid., 391. |
| | “The first part”: Tom Wolfe, “The Author’s Story,” New York Times Book Review , August 18, 1968. |
| | “So far nobody in or out of the medical profession”: Wolfe, “Super-Hud Plays the Game of POWER,” New York World-Journal Tribune , February 5, 1967 300 |
| Page 110 | “I owe the National Observer in Washington”: Letter from Thompson to Wolfe, in Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman: The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume 1 (New York: Villard, 1997), 524. |
| | “several hours of eating”: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 220. |
| | Certain vibrations of the bus: Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , 110. |
| | A very Christmas card: Ibid., 55. |
| | Miles, Miles, Miles: Ibid., 47. |
| | [S]ome blonde from out of town: Ibid., 176. |
| | “Certain passages—such as the Hell’s Angels gangbang”: From an interview sent to the author from Paul Krassner, used with Krassner’s permission. |
| | “The ceiling is moving”: Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , 40. |
| | Wolfe would revert to a“controlled trance”;“I felt like my heart”: Toby Thompson, “The Evolution of Dandy Tom,” Vanity Fair , October 1987 |
5. THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
| | Biographical background on Joan Didion is taken from Joan Didion, Where I Was From (New York: Random House, 2003) and Michiko Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California,” New York Times , June 10, 1979. |
| | “I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl”: Linda Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion,” Paris Review , Fall-Winter 1978. |
| | “Nothing was irrevocable … the shining and perishable dream itself”: Joan Didion, “Goodbye to All That,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 229-30. |
| | “the way the rivers crested”: Didion, Where I Was From , 157. |
| | “paralyzed by the conviction that the world”: Kakutani, “Joan Didion: Staking Out California.” |
| | “Most of my sentences drift off, don’t end”: Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction.” |
| | “So they had come … to see Arthwell”: Joan Didion, “How Can I Tell Them There’s Nothing Left?” Saturday Evening Post , May 7, 1966. |
| | “adolescents drifted from city to torn city”: Didion, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem , 84. |
| | “Debbie is buffing her fingernails”: Ibid., 92. |
| | “wearing a reefer coat”: Ibid., 127 |
| | “Every day I would go into [Allene Talmey]’s office”: Kuehl, “The Art of Fiction.” |
| | “Hathaway removed the cigar from his mouth”: Joan Didion, “John Wayne: A Love Song,” Slouching Towards Bethlehem , 34-35. |
| | “Joan Didion is one of the least celebrated and most talented writers”: Dan Wakefield, “Places, People and Personalities,” New York Times Book Review , July 21, 1968. |
6. MADRAS OUTLAW
| | “Wolfe’s problem”: Hunter S. Thompson, “Jacket Copy for Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream,” The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (New York: Rolling Stone Press/Summit Books, 1979), 108. |
| Page 125 | “I’ve always felt like a Southerner”: E. Jean Carroll, Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson (New York: Dutton, 1993), 25. |
| | “I had a keen apetite for adventure”: Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 10. |
| | “Turn back the Pages of history”: Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Volume 1) (New York: Villard, 1997), 5. |
| | “In short, we both know”: Ibid., 10. |
| | “no one is hanging over me”: Ibid., 16. |
| | “The whole thing”: Ibid., 39. |
| | “rebel and superior attitude”: Ibid., 59. |
| | “If this path leads up”: Ibid., 76. |
| | “Do you realize that sunlight”: Ibid., 112. |
| | “Goddammit, Hills”: Ibid., 168. |
| | “It was not so much the money”: Ibid., 272. |
| | “I am going to write massive tomes from South America”: Ibid., 312. |
| | “As it turned out”: Hunter S. Thompson, “A Footloose American in a Smuggler’s Den,” The Great Shark Hunt , 347. |
| | “I tried driving a cab”: Craig Vetter, “The Playboy Interview: Hunter S. Thompson,” Playboy , November 1974. |
| | “To my mind”: Thompson, Proud Highway , 489. |
| | “quietly hysterical for five hours”: Ibid., 494. |
| | “The difference between the Hell’s Angels”: Hunter S. Thompson, “Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders,” The Nation , May 17, 1965. |
| | “The moral here”: Thompson, Proud Highway , 529. |
| | “For reasons that were never made clear”: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 47. |
| | “I overslept”: Ibid., 106. |
| | “grouped around a gray pickup”: Ibid., 107. |
| | “When I went on runs with them”: Vetter, “The Playboy Interview.” |
| | “like being caught in a bad surf”: Thompson, Hell’s Angels , 135. |
| | “I was so firmly identified”: Ibid., 137. |
| | “was convinced that he’d died”: Ibid., 226. |
| | “When I grabbed the guy”: Vetter, “The Playboy Interview.” |
| | “using the dome of the rearview mirror”: Ibid. |
| | Review excerpts: Richard M. Elman, The New Republic , February 25, 1967; Leo Litwak, New York Times , January 29, 1967. |
| | “There is not much argument about basic facts”: Thompson, Hell’s Angels , 34. |
| | “Into first gear”: Ibid., 262. |
| | “The best of the Angels”: Thompson, Proud Highway , 618. |
7. INTO THE ABYSS
| | “The existential heroes”: Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 236. |
| | “We have to confront them”: William Prochnau, Once upon a Distant War: David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett—Young War Correspondents and Their Early Vietnam Battles (New York: Vintage, 1996), 11. |
| | “You couldn’t believe anybody”: Ibid., 22. |
| Page 148 | “Of course I’d read that [George Goodman story]”: All John Sack quotes, as well as the back story of M , are taken from transcripts of a series of 1993 interviews conducted by Carol Polsgrove; the quotes are used with Polsgrove’s permission. |
| | “This week’s Time”: Letter from John Sack to Harold Hayes, October 25, 1965, WFA. |
| | “combat with all of its wild inanities”: Ibid. |
| | “Jesus Christ”: Letter from Harold Hayes to Sack, October 28, 1965, WFA. |
| | “These would be the only expenses”: Sack to Hayes, November 5, 1965, WFA. |
| | “stiff IBM cards”: John Sack, M (London: Corgi/Avon, 1986), 24. |
| | “the purist for whose sensibilities”: Ibid., 57. |
| | “Peoples, all of your khaki shirts”: Ibid., 58. |
| | “the Vietnamese in the village”: Ibid., 108. |
| | “to kill, wound, or capture”: Ibid., 123. |
| | “In actual fact”: Ibid., 166. |
| | “A cavalry sergeant”: Ibid., 168. |
| | “Rotarians”: Michael Herr, “Fort Dix: The New Army Game,” Holiday , April 1966. |
| | “Send any and all pictures”: Telegram from Hayes to Sack, June 16, 1966, WFA. |
| | “You don’t understand your story”: Polsgrove interview transcript. |
| | “One, two, three”: Sack, M , 11. |
| | “[T]he Marines had fought”: Richard Tregaskis, Guadalcanal Diary (New York: Popular Library, 1962), 78. |
| | “Burn, burn, burn”: Sack, M , 134. |
| | “ Charlie tries to creep up on me”: Ibid., 183. |
| | M reviews: Publishers Weekly , unsigned;“Two Sides of Our Side,” Neil Sheehan, The New York Times , May 14, 1967; Leonard Kriegal, The Nation , October 23, 1967. |
8. HELL SUCKS
| | “higher journalism,” “the best kind of journalism,” “extended vignettes”: Carol Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, But Didn’t We Have Fun? Esquire in the Sixties (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 172. |
| | “I don’t have a journalist’s instincts”: Eric James Schroeder, Vietnam, We’ve All Been There: Interviews with American Writers (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), 33. |
| | “Conventional journalism”: Michael Herr, “The War Correspondent: A Reappraisal,” Esquire , April 1970. |
| | “As an overwhelming, unavoidable fact”: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty , 172. |
| | “This lapse of four months”: Cable from Herr to Hayes, November 15, 1967, WFA. |
| | “I was twenty-seven years old”: Schroeder, Vietnam , 34. |
| | “Tet changed everything here”: Letter from Herr to Hayes, February 5, 1968, WFA. |
| | “passed through so many decimated towns and cities”: Ibid. |
| | “Where we have not been smug”: Ibid. |
| Page 165 | “There are two Vietnams”: Letter from Herr to Hayes, May 4, 1968, WFA. |
| | “$3,000 a month digs”: Ibid. |
| | “For all the talk”: Schroeder, Vietnam , 38. |
| | “We know that for years now”: Michael Herr, “Hell Sucks,” Esquire , August 1968. |
| | “made this an entirely different war”: Ibid. |
| | “It stayed cold for the next ten days”: Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1991), 68. |
| | “The eyes are ice-blue”: Herr, “Hell Sucks.” |
| | “I think the [television] coverage”: Schroeder, Vietnam , 38. |
| | “extraordinarily perceptive”: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty , 176. |
| | “He’s fiction”: Letter from Herr to Hayes, May 18, 1968, WFA. |
| | Shortly after“Hell Sucks” was published: Polsgrove, It Wasn’t Pretty , 47 |
| | “If all the barbed wire”: Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage, 1991), 123. |
| | Herr witnessed some savage scenes: Ibid., 152. |
| | “My ties to New York were as slight”: Ibid., 101. |
| | centrifugal instinct: Garry Wills, Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1983), xi. |
| | “You jus’ another dumb Grunt”: Herr, “Khesanh,” Esquire , September 1969. |
| | “I say to myself”: Schroeder, Vietnam , 43. |
| | “Everything … happened”: Ibid., 44. |
| | “massive collapse”: Ibid., 35. |
| | “Sometimes I was crazy in a very public way”: Ibid., 40. |
| | “I had trouble adjusting to the seventies”: Thomas B. Morgan, “Reporters of the Lost War,” Esquire , July 1984. |
| | “This is already a long time ago”: Herr, “High on War,” manuscript, Bentley Historical Library Archives, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. |
| | “Quite simply”: C. D. B. Bryan, “The Different War,” New York Times , November 20, 1977. |
| | “because I didn’t want to become”: Morgan, “Reporters of the Lost War.” |
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