Richmond

Tom Wolfe is born on March 2, 1930, in Richmond, Virginia. Or was he? In my interview, I list his birthdate as 1931. When William F. Buckley, Jr., first interviews Tom Wolfe on his public television show ``Firing Line,’’ in 1970, he confidently pronounces his guest’s birth year as 1931. The first version of the New York Times obituary in 2018, later corrected, says he was born in 1931.

I blame Who’s Who in America, which in the days before the Internet used to be the standard first source for all American journalists. It was deemed to be authoritative. On the other hand, I also blame Tom, who apparently never bothers to correct them. Year after year, they send him his entry to be updated. And he updates it, adding publications and awards and honors and other such things.

But he never seems to correct that one, salient fact that leads off the entry. I only give all this a second thought after reading a profile of Tom’s first magazine editor, Clay Felker, in a 1977 Time magazine profile: ``Felker does not add to his credibility by listing his birth date in Who’s Who as Oct. 2, 1928, when he was actually born on Oct. 2, 1925.’’

Ah-ha.

Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. was born on March 2, 1930. I saw it on his bicycle registration.

That Time profile of Felker also quotes one ex-protégé saying, ``Clay told me that you should always live beyond your means so that people will think you’re doing well.’’

Tom is born in the ex-capital of the Confederacy in the Jim Crow South, which has lost the war between the states but won the Reconstruction. He grows up in a segregated society, attends the whites-only Ginter Park elementary school, and then the all-male whites-only St. Christopher’s, and then the all-male whites-only Washington & Lee University. His dealings with people of color are decidedly limited. To the extent he sees or thinks about them at all, they are his servants. He certainly never feels threatened by them or fears them or hates them. His is a remarkably homogenous, white, Anglo-Saxon world. And as a first-born male, he is at the apex.

Asked long after by his daughter about what he values, he answers without hesitation, ``Politeness and manners,’’ according to a story she wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Tom comes to know, or suspect, or appreciate, that lack of drama in the family dynamic is relatively unusual.

``My parents knew exactly how life should be conducted,’’ he tells The New York Times in 1981. ``They had confidence in the choices they were making and they made us feel that we should have confidence, too. To this day I can’t stand to see parents wrestling over the macaroni of their lives in front of a child. My parents must have had tough decisions to make, but I was never called on to bear witness to their anxiety.’’

In one of the earliest interviews of the supposed young-man-in-a-hurry for Vogue in 1966, author Elaine Dundy asks him about his childhood. He responds: ``I was lucky, I guess, in my family in that they had a very firm idea of roles: Father, Mother, Child. Nothing was ever allowed to bog down into those morass-like personal hangups. And there was no rebellion.’’

One of the usual raps against White Anglo-Saxon Protestants for much of the 20^th century, when they are in the ascendant, is that they are reserved, cold, and distant.

Well, not the Wolfe family. Tommy apparently proceeds into the world secure and confident of his family’s love, if the dozens of letters both to and from his parents and sister in his papers are any indication. I can’t quote them here, but they are a fact.

In the course of a profile in 1990, Tom says, ``I never felt like an outsider in any way’’ (italics mine). He is always popular, always gets good grades (as we shall see), always makes the team, and in college, the varsity team. So this is Tom’s world view.

In the outside world, a great Depression crushes the country and world war brews. On the domestic front, the only place that counts for a child, a happy peace reigns.

Lucky in his choice of parents, Tom also wins the genetic sweepstakes. He is slender, grows to a full six feet (with an enviable 34 and a half-inch waist and a 7 3/8 hat-size), and enjoys what might be termed agreeable features. He has dark blue eyes fringed with pale eyelashes, and he speaks in a low, soft voice. Good chin, firm handshake.

This all adds up to a very good package for a journalist: Tom is polite and nonthreatening, and people enjoy the attention of pretty people.

Tom’s parents are both descended from long lines of Virginia natives. His father is an agronomist with a doctorate from Cornell. Tom’s earliest memory of him is as editor of The Southern Planter, a farm journal, which he ran from 1927 to 1934. His mother, Helen Perkins Hughes Wolfe, attended Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, which was part of Columbia. So what we have here is a pair of extremely intelligent, deliberative, rational people, which probably goes a long way toward explaining the comity on the home front.

They certainly didn’t rush into things. Tom’s father was born in 1893, his mother in 1897, and they married in 1923 while they were both working for the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg. They moved to Richmond in 1927 when Dr. Wolfe takes the job with The Southern Planter. Tom arrives in 1930. His sister, Helen, is born in 1935.

In 1934, Dr. Wolfe joins the Southern States Cooperative, an agricultural supply organization, as an executive. Tom always describes his family as comfortable, not rich. Not too long after Tom is born, Dr. Wolfe buys a wood-frame house out on Gloucester Road, 3307 Gloucester Road, in a development that is just underway called Sherwood Park.

Tom’s first memory, or at least the first he writes about, is being read to as a baby, so this would have been while his parents still live in an apartment over on Confederate Avenue. He recounts the tale in the Yale alumni magazine’s Summer 2003 issue. The editors asked alumni writers what one book made a difference in their writing lives.

``I was . . . galvanized . . . by a writer who never rated so much as a footnote to American literary history: Dixie Willson,’’ Tom writes.

Dixie Willson is the sister of Meredith Willson, who goes on to fame as author of the musical, ``The Music Man.’’

Tom continues, ``Dixie Willson wrote, and Maginel Wright Barney [Frank Lloyd Wright’s sister] illustrated, a book called Honey Bear in 1923. My mother used to read it to me at bedtime long before I knew one letter of the alphabet from another. Over and over she read it to me. I was small, but like many people my age I had already mastered the art of having things my way. I had memorized the entire poem in the passive sense that I could tell whenever Mother skipped a passage in the vain hope of getting the 110^th or 232^nd reading over with a little sooner. Oh, no-ho-ho . . . there was no fooling His Majesty the Baby. He wanted it all. He couldn’t get enough of it.’’

Tom said he loved the pictures, but ``Honey Bear’s main attraction was Dixie Willson’s rollicking and rolling rhythm: anapestic quadrameter with spondees at regular intervals.’’ He quotes the narrative poem at length and observes, ``One has to read it aloud in order to be there.’’

He continues: ``The Willson beat made me think writing must be not only magical but fun. It isn’t, particularly, but Honey Bear was fun, and I resolved then and there, lying illiterate on a little pillow in a tiny bed, to be a writer.’’ He says he includes little homages to the style of Honey Bear in all of his books.

Writing is fun: It isn’t, particularly. And we can see this in his papers. For Tom, writing is rewriting, and marking up pages and galleys in pencil, and starting all over again, so you can see numerous duplicate typescripts, examples of what editors sometimes used to advise: ``Run this through the typewriter again.’’ In his papers, there are hundreds of pages of culls from his articles and books, as he searches for the right point of view, the right tone, the right beginning, polishing, polishing, polishing.

He knows, in the cradle, that this is something he wants to do. Perhaps. But I’m not surprised. Again and again, Tom conceives an idea and then lets it marinate, as it were – usually for years, even for decades. His is what we might term a ruminative style.

The only other earliest memories of Tommy as a baby are told by others. He always credits his mother with teaching him how to draw, and she recalls not long before her death a day when he was so intent on finishing a piece of artwork that he crawls out of the crib to complete it. And not long after The Bonfire of the Vanities becomes a best-seller, a former babysitter writes, reminding him of how when he visited the family farm in the Shenandoah Valley during the summer, his aunt would hire a neighbor-girl to play with him, and she is the neighbor-girl, and she remembers that all he wanted to do was to sit on the porch and draw. She reminds him, too, that ``Annie Mae’’ always made him his favorite lunch: a peanut butter and jelly and mayonnaise sandwich.

His own memories of his boyhood home are no less honeyed. In 1991, a writer and public relations consultant named Ken Storey buys the house and then writes Tom about it, enclosing a photo. Some time later, Tom writes back.

``I can scarcely tell you what a pleasure it was to see that picture of 3307 Gloucester Road,’’ he writes in a three-and-half page single-spaced typed letter that was reprinted in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. ``To this day I dream about that house’’ – and nothing but pleasant dreams, he adds.

He describes a childhood almost Rockwellian, riding his bicycle around the neighborhood, playing baseball, football and basketball in the abundant open spaces, listening at night to the distant and ``very romantic’’ sounds of the railroad. The house has a coal furnace and, at least in the beginning, an ice-box. ``The arrival of our first electric refrigerator – in the late 1930s, I suppose – was quite an event.’’ Vendors drive their horse-drawn wagons through the streets, hawking vegetables.

As the thirties wear on, he says, there are more and more children to play with. ``I remember the neighborhood as absolute paradise for children. This may be the Old Oaken Bucket delusion, but that’s the way I remember it.’’

This is the era of free-range children (and it continues basically into the 1970s). But keep in mind that this is a relatively recent development. Those who don’t have to work on a farm, where informal child labor continues for decades, are pretty much left to their own devices, when school isn’t in session. Helicopter parenting is decades in the future. You are told to go out and play, and that’s what you do. The world Wolfe describes is one where children are allowed to walk to the nearby State Fair at age nine or 10 with a handful of nickels and told only to be back for supper. They would participate in ``death-defying rafter walks’’ in new construction sites over their parent’s prohibitions. ``Why no one was hurt in doing this I will never know,’’ he writes to Ken Storey.

And he observes, ``There wasn’t even a hint of the sort of terrors that people feel regarding their children today.’’

His parents are avid gardeners, and he recalls the ``absolutely fresh’’ vegetables and chicken of his youth. His father plants a large vegetable garden in a nearby vacant lot. When Tom is old enough, he cuts the front and back lawns with a rotary mower. A good work-out, he calls it.

This is Tom’s world. Now, what does this relatively privileged background mean for him as a writer? A lot, I think. He has no reason to feel insecure about anything. He doesn’t carry a lot of baggage. He sees the world unfiltered. I have a feeling that this is what makes him such a keen, detached observer of human behavior and a master at describing the surface world we can see. He doesn’t get in his own way. His early style is full of wonder, and non-judgmental in a way that a writer with more scar tissue perhaps can’t be.

And yet this is very unlike so many others who practice the writers trade, is it not? Tales of nightmarish familial dysfunction seem almost a prerequisite to picking up a pencil, especially on the fiction side. After piecing together the details of Tom’s early life, I almost want to begin: No sexual or religious angst! No endlessly bickering, explosively arguing, alcoholic, abusive, insane, suffocating parents! No deficient, drug- or gambling-addicted siblings! No ethnic inferiority complexes! No secret obsessive-compulsive shame!

And at night when he says his prayers, he thanks God because he lives in the best country in the world, in the best state in the world, in the best city in the world, as he tells the New York Times in 1998.