“They’re calling it an archive,” Tom Wolfe points out. “It makes me feel very important.” Wolfe is standing next to an exhibit of his papers at the New York Public Library. In 2013, the library paid just over two million dollars for a hundred and ninety boxes of notebooks, manuscripts, and letters that belonged to Wolfe, a handful of which are on display in the pop-up exhibit “Becoming the Man in the White Suit,” which runs through Sunday, March 1st.
Up close, the suit appears ever so slightly yellowed around the buttons and the cuffs, like a newspaper clipping. Wolfe, who turns eighty-four on March 2nd, talks slowly but walks briskly. He pauses over various objects before offering exclamations of recognition and tentative identifications. “I don’t remember that at all,” he says, peering at one item. He takes in an old sketch, done in bold black pen, peppered with the words “Tom Wolfe” in various scripts. He points out a particularly tidy version as the one most like his current “serious signature.” Later, approached by a young man whose face flushes when they shake hands, Wolfe gives a fully calligraphic version of his autograph, with a large, vigorous swirl underneath, like a hurricane viewed from above and a bit to the side.
The stories that Wolfe tells about his career are well crafted by now, and some have become journalistic legend, but he delivers them as if for the first time. His first magazine assignment, for instance, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” (Wolfe says the title quickly and effortlessly, like one long, krazy word.) He was in his thirties, “too old to have gone through this,” and he “had total writer’s block.”* His editors finally told him to send his notes, “ ‘and we’ll give them to a real writer’—they didn’t say ‘real’—‘to put into proper form.’ And with a very heavy heart, I said O.K. and I sat down to write out the notes.” Within a couple of hours, he says, he thought, “Hey, I can make something out of this.” The anecdote comes to mind after he sees a picture of himself in 1965, striking the confident pose of a dandy and holding a copy of his first essay collection. He credits the fallout of his piece “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”—a high-kicking takedown of The New Yorker under William Shawn—for sending the book to the best-seller list; “an unanticipated dividend,” he calls it.
A draft of a Phil Spector profile recalls his editors’ initial disbelief at that one: they thought the story too far-fetched to publish, until “they checked it out with Phil and he authenticated all of it.” A handwritten page of his most recent book, the 2012 novel “Back to Blood,” is marked with colored lines and has a few big blocks of text blacked out as if by a C.I.A. censor. “I have never gotten the hang of computers,” he says. “There’s all these steps you go through—you don’t just slip in the paper. You go to ‘TEXT’—no, no, you go to something with a ‘W,’ and finally you get to the page.” A letter from John Glenn sits next to a book of notes that Wolfe took while reporting “The Right Stuff.” He leans in to decipher his penmanship but can make out only a few words: “synergistically to attain, uh, astronaut status.” He straightens up and groans. “The things you go through to write a book.”
Wolfe is currently working on his next book, a history of the theory of evolution from the nineteenth century to the present. He calls the big bang “the nuttiest theory I’ve ever heard” and invokes the Spanish Inquisition when discussing how academics have cast out proponents of intelligent design for “not believing in evolution the right way.” Writing has not gotten easier over the years, he says. “It’s always, to me, very hard. And the only thing that sustains me is the fact that I did it before, and there must be some way I can do it this time.”
Nearly all those previous successes are documented in the hundred and ninety boxes; he hardly ever threw anything away. But Wolfe says that he had nothing like this—the archive—in mind. He likes looking back at old notes, reliving his reporting and writing, though he shrugs off the suggestion that visitors might learn something about him from the notes, “unless they like some of the sketches.”
Hunter S. Thompson once said of Wolfe that “the people who seem to fascinate him as a writer are so weird they make him nervous.” Wolfe doesn’t so much reject this idea as seem baffled by it. He didn’t enjoy being around the Hells Angels, he admits, but Ken Kesey and his Pranksters, on the other hand, were nothing but interesting. While reporting “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” he says, he saw a man in the throes of a drug-fuelled religious experience sit in the middle of a street in San Francisco in the lotus position and yell, “I’m in the pudding, and I’ve met the manager!” Wolfe throws his arms to the sides and tosses his head back as he recounts the scene, revealing a finely turned pair of cuffs and Tiffany-blue suspenders beneath his suit.
* A previous version of this post misstated Wolfe's age at the time he wrote “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
