Cache of Letters

In the summer 1950 edition of the Washington & Lee literary magazine, Shenandoah, Volume 1, Number 2, there is a story by T.K. Wolfe, Jr. entitled ``The Ace of Spades Is Black.’’ It’s about a man and a woman on a bus going through the mountains, and told through rapidly shifting points of view, now his, now hers, a technique the author later employs in almost all of his ``New Journalism.’’ Tom has taken that bus many times to and from Richmond.

The story appears, and – according to a story in the Los Angeles Times to coincide with the publication of I Am Charlotte Simmons, decades later -- he gets a fan letter from a girl at Sweet Briar, asking, ``How on Earth did you know what I was thinking?’’

The letter is from Carol Mark LeVarn, a sophomore at the nearby women’s college in Lynchburg. She is a farmer’s daughter from Vermont on a scholarship, ``the poor kid among a lot of very wealthy women,’’ one of her daughters, Meghan McCabe, later recounts. ``She used to say that some of the girls brought their horses to Sweetbriar. She said, `I have a horse too. It is just tied to a plow.’ ‘’

Tom and Toni, as she is called, begin corresponding in 1951. And then he is off to Yale to attend graduate school.

In 2015, LeVarn, now Carol LeVarn McCabe, leaves her cache of 16 of Wolfe’s letters, with glosses, to the New York Public Library. To her daughters, she leaves a brief memoir of the relationship, which lasted more than a decade, most of the latter part of it conducted chiefly via correspondence.

I’m not allowed to quote the letters here, but they are a fact. Perhaps I can characterize the batch, because the letters do a good job of predicting certain aspects of the career. The first thing noteworthy about them is how completely Tom adopts the voice of a somewhat manic Holden Caulfield. The second is what a profound hold Max Weber’s theory of status-seeking has on him. The first defines style, the second, Tom’s entire theme.

Catcher In the Rye appears in 1951, remember. As Tom explains in the documentary, Salinger, in 2013, ``there had not been a voice like that.’’ It is confidential, familiar, jokey, intimate and profane, and he adopts it in some correspondence and, later, in his journalism in The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, and Esquire, most notably in ``The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby,’’ which in the Tom Wolfe Origin Story is the beginning of his role in the New Journalism.

As for the status-seeking, Tom has to take four subjects at Yale: American history, American literature, economics, and sociology, he tells David A. Price on the Nieman Storyboard in 2016. He holds the last in lowest esteem, but it rises swiftly to what he refers to as the king of subjects. He reads Weber’s essay, ``Class, Status, and Party,’’ and remembers: ``Weber’s theory of status was something new. It replaced the idea of class systems. When Marx wrote about classes, he was really thinking about England. He was sitting there in the British library with England’s classes all around him. But it never has been a good way to look at the United States.’’

The American is a status-seeking animal, in Tom’s reading of Weber. After a certain level of survival is attained, after you can feed yourself, basically, life is all a competition for status. Those who don’t have it, want it. Those who have it, want more of it, and regularly check their rankings in the pecking order. This theory of status determining all, as I say, becomes Tom’s theme.

Everything revolves around status. At St. Christopher’s and at Washington & Lee, of course, Tom has status, even if he’s not especially conscious of it. He is one of the smartest students, he gets some of the best grades, he Makes The Team, he writes for the paper.

None of these obtain at Yale. Tom has no status, and he is, it seems, keenly aware of it. He is an anonymous graduate student. He studies, reads, writes papers with such titles as ``Social Realism in American Painting 1926-1939’’ and ``Status-Seeking in the Bureaucracy Situation.’’ Graduate students in the humanities are invisible, and such invisibility is inevitable until he produces his doctoral dissertation in, oh, four or five years.

LeVarn, an aspiring journalist, spends a month during the summer of 1953 as a ``guest editor’’ at Mademoiselle magazine, in a group that famously includes Sylvia Plath. Plath later features an unflattering portrait of LeVarn as the character ``Doreen,’’ with her ``bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff round her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles, hard and polished and just about indestructible,’’ in The Bell Jar.

Just one letter from Carol LeVarn McCabe appears to exist in Tom’s papers, one she sent in 1968 after the publication of The Pump House Gang and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She writes: ``It has been so long that it is very hard to say anything to you, and in fact I have refrained because of being overcome with shyness from even saying congratulations about any of this STATUS you got.’’ She adds, in a hand-written PS: ``I don’t seem to have said it yet. My God I am delighted with and for you.’’

In donating the cache of letters to the New York Public Library, McCabe writes, ``I believe that these letters may be useful to future Wolfe biographers as an early indication of the drive which, combined with Tom’s sharp eye for the telling detail, gleeful deployment of language, outsized frame of reference and skill at assembly, led to his success as a chronicler of American life in the late 20^th century.’’

Next stop: New Haven. Yale is the key.