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Tom Wolfe is one of the best writers working today. He is also one of the most eccentric.
He is as famous for his wardrobe as for his prose style. His clothes closet is filled with bespoke white suits with exaggerated lapels, fancy hats, and broad ties. He is a dandy in the manner of Max Beerbohm. But the elegant Max himself, one of the great Edwardian stylists, wouldn’t quite know what to make of Mr. Wolfe’s prose style, which is, in itself, a unique creation—a forest of bristling exclamation marks, emphatic capital letters and onomatopoeic sound effects.
Mr. Wolfe is one of the leading lights of what is called “The New Journalism,” which uses the techniques of fiction in nonfiction articles and books. His titles alone are small works of art, like “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.” He can celebrate, as in “The Right Stuff,” about our early astronauts; and he can witheringly ridicule, as in “Radical Chic.” He brought his journalistic flair into fiction with “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and “A Man in Full.” He is a controversialist, a battler, equally adept with bludgeon and rapier.
He skewered modern art with his book “The Painted Word,” and modern architecture with “From Bauhaus to Our House.”
In his latest book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” (Little, Brown and Company, 185 pages, $26) the dual objects of his scorn are the theory of evolution and the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. They seem an oddly joined pair of subjects, at first. Mr. Wolfe has no religious reasons to doubt evolution. He holds no brief for religion at all. He doubts because evolution is “a messy guess—baggy, boggy, soggy and leaking all over the place.” The story of Darwin’s struggle is as fascinating as a novel. Darwin was reluctant to promote the theory, which he privately believed, because he thought he would be laughed out of the scientific community. But Darwin is approached by another scientist, the self-taught Alfred Russell Wallace, who proposed the same theory of natural selection that Darwin had concluded to be true. Wallace, who lacked Darwin’s eminence, wrote to Darwin to see if Darwin could arrange for publication of his own paper on the subject. Darwin realized that if he didn’t act he would become a footnote to Wallace’s achievement and not the other way around. So Darwin arranged for the publication of his own study of the subject in the same journal with Wallace, giving his own work greater prominence. Darwin treated Wallace like a protégé, in Mr. Wolfe’s phrase, “Pat, pat, patting him on his head, head, head.”
For Darwin evolution was the theory that solved everything. In fact, it is hard today to imagine that evolution might not be taken seriously. To deny it is to deny the validity of science. But there was a stumbling block. The stumbling block was speech. For Darwin speech evolved. How did it evolve and what did it evolve from? We don’t know. But Noam Chomsky, the widely respected scholar of linguistics, posits that we are born with a Universal Grammar in our brain, an organ within an organ. That all languages partake of this basic structure and evolve in their different ways from this “language organ.” As Mr. Wolfe summarizes it, “Language was not something you learned. You were born with a built-in ‘language organ.’ It is functioning the moment you come into the world, just the way your heart and your kidneys are already pumping and filtering and excreting away.” Who’s to say? Not I.
Mr. Chomsky is as well known for his political stance as he is for his scholarship. It is a posture that is completely at odds with Mr. Wolfe’s own conservatism.
Linguistics is probably one of the most boring subjects in the world. Yet Tom Wolfe makes it fascinating, more often than not, hilarious in his own inimitable way, and a joy to read about.
on Jan 20, 2017