No Return

When he’s done with a subject, he rarely returns.

I was reminded of Ulysses S. Grant’s reluctance to retrace his steps, or as he put it in his Memoirs: ``One of my superstitions had always been when I started to go anywhere, or to do anything, not to turn back, or stop until the thing intended was accomplished.’’

Tom never seeks to get the original 564-page dissertation published, in either pre- or post-acceptance form. Which is too bad, because – and I trust I am one of the few people to have read it – it’s very good, written in an un-academic style, accessible and understandable. It’s witty and relatively fast-paced and treats a subject that is virtually unknown: How the Communist Party came to dominate American literature during the Great Depression by infiltrating relatively small but dominant cliques of writers in New York City and, later, Hollywood.

The Communist Party found the key to the rational manipulation of writers, Tom writes. They crave the approval of their peers. The Party mobilizes American literary prestige, in the service of the Soviet Union.

The dropping of the dissertation as a literary property seems to set a pattern. And that is: Tom rarely returns to a subject once he’s given it the full treatment. Oh, he’ll flog a book when he needs to, when it is required. And he repeats words and phrases routinely. But he rarely writes about the same subject twice, except for the general topics of writers and writing, and art. And a few of his early newspaper stories contain just the seeds of what will turn into larger Wolfean productions. But otherwise, once Tom has finished with a subject, he’s finished with it.

For example, I once try to get him to tell me what he thinks Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of The Bonfire of the Vanities, ``would be doing today.’’ This is an assignment, and probably on the 10^th anniversary of Bonfire’s publication. To my surprise, Tom won’t have it. He tells me what he’s working on now. But Sherman? It’s as if Sherman’s dead and buried. It’s not as though he knows and won’t tell me. He really doesn’t know, or hasn’t thought about it, or worked it out, and doesn’t care.

And this is a bit of a funny thing. Because writers are invested. Working on one article or book builds up a vast ammo dump of material that goes unused, and it’s only natural for them to dredge up a topic again and again, because you never want to waste such hard-won stuff, do you? Some writers even specialize in one topic, are associated with it to the exclusion of all else. Think of H.L. Mencken on the American language, or, better yet, Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson.

And of course writers also build up an entire network of sources for each article, let alone book. Those sources, so eager to describe what they’re doing and why – what Tom calls ``information compulsion’’ -- also like to stay in touch. They think, some of them, that they’ve made a pen-pal. Tom’s files are filled with letters from surfers, Merry Pranksters, astronauts, fighter pilots, court reporters, socialites, all anxious to keep him updated, long after he’s written about their favorite topic. They genuinely like the man; perhaps some think, not unreasonably, that they’ll get another turn in the spotlight.

One of the Pranksters later describes just this phenomenon in a handwritten note many years later, accompanying her marriage announcement: She asks if this is another drop in the great Bucket of No Answer.

I haven’t been able to track the writer down, but she says that, according to Ken Kesey, Tom never talks to any one again after he’s written about them. Kesey is apparently disappointed, since he also sincerely likes Tom.

The note is a little wistful. It also seems not entirely accurate, judging from the volume of regular correspondence in Tom’s papers.

Another turn in the spotlight? Not from Tom. He doesn’t really go over the same ground twice. While writing Bonfire in serial form for Rolling Stone magazine, he despairs at the deadlines, and wonders at one point why he doesn’t write a sequel to The Right Stuff instead. But that seems to be the one and only time he ever mentions such a thing as a sequel.