Why Tom Wolfe Used Harper's as a Platform to Sell His Novel is a Mystery

Why Tom Wolfe Used Harper’s as a Platform to Sell His Novel is a Mystery, but It Worked None-the-less While His Cry for a Return to Social Realism in Writing was Roundly Booed and Hissed and Generally Dismissed in 1989

But never enough about me, thought Barbie®, wondering why the hippies 

never wrote the great city novel of the 60’s.

Sitting in her white linen suit at the bar, 

like some bad boy had just knocked her 

Silly with a gin Rickey disguised As Trollopian kool-aid, 

or at least Brahman Nectar gone sour, bartender saying he’d get 

her the house special but they were out of house 

and out of special and could she just abide with a speck

Of the death of the social if not the real?

Barbie® bangs her spectatored blue pump 

against the bar, her neo-traditional plasticene fist 

(poised to hold martini, cigarette or a black panther’s 

Paw) pounding out a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm:

     Do I quote

     This dream crazy

     Stuff suspend

     Disbelief lament

     A formal point a la mode

     Of affairs dank and shady

     I grip reality

     Like the old curiosity

     And hold this dirt

     To be, true:

     Love me, love

     Me love me!

All this balderdash about myth and fable

(or was it juice about filth and Mable?)

has this reporter’s eye a-twitch and fedora a-spin,

Gets the gin-lines popping and turns

a bow-tie one-eighty.  It’s a bad time for Ken – 

With his revisionist dreams of cookies and cupboards, his cakes,

His wheel-barrows, his history eating the cold plums because, 

just because they were on the verge of spoilage – 

to amble up to the bar, his shouldered sweater knotted 

at his navel, sliding just so from his Bakelite® chest,

order a Manhattan, smooth, and ask if anyone else has noticed

the appreciable decline in the standards and criterion of western art,

nee civilization.

There’s that manifesto moment, destiny shitting in the time-space toilet,

when you blink, when you think a muumuu will no longer do 

and no matter what might else you try

you can’t out-funny life.

So, define the wild unbridled cry of the real, report 

it as you see it, spin the bottle of temerity, murder, mayhem,

tenacity and hope, it lands square in the jaw of the wrestled

beast (some call it “material”).

Pin.  Free.  Repeat.

Barbie® wants to be forgiven for her love,

that radical spurt of programmatic chic

that curls her hair and straightens her toes.

She might cite Hauser but not Spengler,

as big a bore as Trilling but not Tanner:

go figger.  Or fish.  It will all wash under, 

these things mainly do, soon enough.

We are glazed already, uncaring 

of the outcome.  Ken’s problem is with coping 

and any bad terrapin will tell you that’s Oedipal, 

his bon vivant bonhomie knock-off a haze

already of saturation and overkill.

He’ll make his pitch for dementia,

but will remember in the morning

to forget the lessons of the night,

and won’t count on the returnative 

powers of medication or the hours that memory

will restore.  It will all be reported as fact on the evening

news and where that line – fact, reportage, news – will be drawn

is the stalk and haunt of the billion-footed beast

we call Barbie®.

If you love her, you stay; if you don’t, what matter the 

pre-evented figures of tomorrow anyway?  Any fool

will tell ya, fool me once Et cetera.

His case plied, Ken, Zorro-style, announces his fear, 

with grave demeanor, and swishes out into a streetlamp, hugged 

like glimpses hug the eye of the beholder.  

He’s got a switch and hook when he legs

it up the street, agape on forgetting his history.

Barbie® flips him off, medicinally, with her remote 

martini, and counts the crushed cigarette butts on the bar.

She thinks she could tell a story about each of the butts, 

about each moment spent smoking them, about each finger 

that held them, a story that would be more telling and truer

than anything he could or did ever produce.  She doesn’t

miss him now and she never will, she promises herself, 

never.

She starts to count, “One,” and stops:  she doesn’t know

what comes after, or before, but there’s her, and her one,

repeated, a count for every layer of infinite self-defense, 

Love me, love

Me love me!

© 2012 – Mark A. Douglas – All Rights Reserved