"So fucken slick," says Nick Carroll.
Depending on your love of literature you may, or may not, know, or care, that Tom Wolfe has died, aged eighty-eight.
That name mean anything?
If you’re a fan of the better surf writers, Nick Carroll and so on, you owe a little something to the father of New Journalism, a style of writing that brought the writer, and the dramatic techniques favoured by the novelist, into straight journalism. Its arrival was as exciting as colour television.
Years back, when I got my first job at Surfing Life, I figured I better learn how to write (I’d cribbed stories out of old Tracks magazines and presented ’em as samples of my work) and I’d remembered Nick had listed his favourite writers: Hunter ST, Earn Hemingway, Ev Waugh, John Steinbeck and…Tom Wolfe.
Over the course of the year, I read most of their books. Hunter for gonz, Hemingway for muscular writing, Waugh for satire, Steinbeck for storytelling and Tom Wolfe for reporting.
And exclamation marks. Want to know the source of our exclamation marks? Blame Tom Wolfe! Of course! (And the use of “Of course!”)
And, in case you didn’t know, Tom Wolfe got into a little surf writing himself. In 1968 he wrote an essay called The Pump House Gang (which was included in a book of essays of the same name) where he wrote about a gang of La Jolla surfers.
An excerpt:
The [surfers] are not exactly off in a world of their own, they are and they aren’t. What it is, they float right through the real world, but it can’t touch them. They do these things, like the time they went to Malibu, and there was this party in some guy’s apartment, and there wasn’t enough legal parking space for everybody, and so somebody went out and painted the red curbs white and everybody parked. Then the cops came. Everybody ran out. At [a party] in Manhattan Beach . . . somebody decided to put a hole through one wall, and everybody else decided to see if they could make it bigger. Everybody was stoned out of their hulking gourds, and it got to be about 3:30 a.m. and everybody decided to go see the riots. These were the riots in Watts. The Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union were all saying, WATTS NO-MAN’S LAND, but naturally nobody believed that. Watts was a blast, and the Pump House gang was immune to the trembling gourd panic rattles of the LA Times.
According to the Encyclopedia of Surfing, after the story came out La Jolla locals spray-painted “Tom Wolfe is a dork” across the cement beachfront pump house structure that gives the story its title.
Surfer magazine later called “The Pump House Gang” a “bit of low-rent pop sociology,” but acknowledged that the Windansea surfers, who once dressed up as Nazi storm troopers and goose-stepped down to the beach for a laugh, were in fact viewed as “savages” by the rest of California surf society.
Earlier today, I asked Nick Carroll, whose early work used many of Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism techniques and whose influence across surf writing is without equal, why he was so into Wolfe.
“I just got excited by that whole genre of magazine writing of the 1960s, it felt a bit musical to me in a way, like an injection of flow and energy and emotion into the culture and how it was being observed. Like it was putting new things at centre stage. Above all it felt American to me, like it was describing a bigger and more viscerally entertaining world. So much lively curiosity!
hunter s thompson is a shit writer, so is hemingway. all the writing on this website is also and most of the comments are even worse. sorry not sorry it needed to be said hopefully this commented doesn’t get deleted. i read on here in recent days that a guy that scored a surfing magazine front page cover at teahupo’o had never surfed in his life and made a 10 foot barrel on his first try and this was considered one of the better surf journalists. let that tickle your balls. on the subject of journalism anyone who praises journalism or journalists is an absolute fucking moron that needs to be mentioned as well i wish people would get it through their brains that journalism is entertainment the only reason journalism exists is to make money it has nothing to do with providing accurate information.
Tom Wolf was a storyteller not a journalist he would probably cringe at that title. I hate the attitude of most of the writers on here i’m only reading this because i’m bored.
I really liked I am Charlotte Simmons. Wolfe took me to places that I have never been yet kept the familiar aspects of life plus some gritty stuff like fucking and pubic grooming.
if you’re looking for a poolside read, something to go with margaritas and nachos, tom wolfe may be unbeatable. Definitely The Right Stuff is a tremendous book. But if you’re looking for real insight, (or real people), for a true sense of place and connection…look elsewhere.
Bonfire of the Vanities deserves a place in the 80s pop culture canon (along with the original Rambo film “First Blood”, The Big Chill, Wall Street and The Breakfast Club) but that doesn’t make it a good novel.
As for his 60s writing on the counterculture, the man was clueless as fuck. totally out of touch with what the kids were really feeling and getting into. What Didion was able to feel and convey in The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Wolfe was only able to sneer, making easy jokes for martini-swilling swells at new york parties.
Maybe Warshaw can confirm — any truth to the story that Wolfe first showed up at Malibu and the crew there threw dog shit at him in his ridiculous white planter’s white suit?
Your opinion is retarded and you should change it. The 60’s were easy to make fun of because people were getting high and high people are retarded, the only critical element was that it was unpopular to say anything that could be considered negative about those people. Anyone trying to make a bigger statement about drug use is also shockingly stupid and Didion was just stringing together arbitrary nouns.
Wolf was a great writer because he was a normal straight male and excelled at an artistic endeavour which was considered something that was not possible for a normal guy.
how fucken old are you?
The 60’s drug taking was a means to the end of looking at the world in Altered states . surfers were taking LSD and were surfing outside reefs , dreaming up new designs , creating music .
Having lived through this period to say someone ‘s opinion is retarded , FFS have a good look at yourself …..so for someone to be great, they need to be a normal straight male …….name one Musician from the 60’s 70’ who wasn’t on something , and I will show you decades of eccentric genius’s who were off their heads!
“John Maynard Keynes said the people who are successful are the people with animal spirits who refuse to acknowledge the risks they are taking in the same way that the healthy young man ignores the possibility of death,” Wolfe told the Observer in 2008, when asked about his work ethic. “I’m not a young man, and I do have a pulse, but when it comes to mortality, mostly I choose to ignore the subject.”
I have a hypothetical question for John. (Seeing as he can’t answer)
Define success for me please ?
I’m a dumb cunt
Tom – Im in agreement with you.
Not trained in anything and very poorly educated (my fault entirely) i was drawn to Wolfe at a quite young age , did not quite get it for years and years , most likely still dont , but i did relate to the pump house gang for some reason it really grabbed me , more so than Hunter T , but followed closely by PJ O’Rouke.
I’ve recently discovered John McPhee and I think he’s a fucking marvel at making the ordinary sound extraordinary. If you can do that I reckon you can do anything.
Oh hell yes to McPhee.
Oh yes indeed.
McPhee is the master. No question.
Yeah, he writes about these dry, obtuse subjects and you’re enraptured.
I have only read a Man In Full by Wolfe. Obama has to have drawn some inspo from the Roger White character. Still waiting for stoicism to take off only a matter of time……
His skewering of the modern art world in The Painted Word is a masterpiece. Do read.
A man in full wasn’t bad. Wasn’t good, but wasn’t bad.
When I was in high school I had a teacher who loved, and I mean LOVED, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. I didn’t love it as much, but it took me down a fun path with Ken Kesey etc. That’s the fun of books – you never know where one will lead you.
“Above all it felt American to me, like it was describing a bigger and more viscerally entertaining world.” That might just be the nicest thing I think I’ve ever read from you about my beloved home America. Cheers.
Thanks to the internet – every bastards got a voice now. Including me !
And you and you …
Can’t write an in-depth article – it’s too long for them.
Quick analysis like “sound bites” seems to be all most can handle.
This I blame on years of good old network television and their impact driven style of news presentation.
Reading is fucken near dead. But therein lies the challenge.
Can you write well enough to hold your target audiences attention ?
Shit, most millennials couldn’t sign their name if you didn’t hand them a keyboard.
lol, true dat