Yale

Mark the date: May 19, 1956. It is the most consequential day in the history of American journalism since Jan. 13, 1899, when August Mencken departs this earth, freeing his son Henry from the cigar factory to pursue his newspaper dreams.

On that date, Tom receives a letter from his adviser, David M. Potter, chairman of the Department of American Studies, concerning his doctoral dissertation, The League of American Writers: Communist Organization Activity Among American Writers 1929-1942.

The dissertation is, according to Tom’s preface, ``an account of how the Communist Party of the United States created, controlled, and manipulated a `front’ organization known as the League of American Writers. In a more general way, it is an account of Communist organizational activity from 1928 through 1942 among America’s fifteen thousand professional writers.’’

Tom sifts through House Special Committee on Un-American Activities hearings, interviews critic Malcolm Cowley, novelist James T. Farrell and poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, among others, and consults speeches, memoirs, newspapers and magazines. He interviews the writers, he says, for a minimum of three hours apiece.

Chairman Potter has bad news. In a three-page hand-written letter, he tells Tom:

``I am personally acutely sorry to have to write you this letter but I want to inform you in advance that all of your readers reports have come in, and two have reported adversely, while the third has accompanied his recommendation for acceptance with such criticism that his report cannot be expected to have much value in offsetting the other two.’’ He continues, ``I am sorry to say I anticipate that the thesis will not be recommended for the degree.’’

His readers think Tom writes ``very skillfully,’’ organizes well, and has ``an excellent case that the literati were indeed manipulated by the communists. In operative terms this means that your severest critics would hope for you to rewrite the thesis, and would be prepared to accept it in rewritten form,’’ according to Potter.

The readers’ reports are brutal.

``This work displays originality and very energetic research. But it exaggerates the importance of `status competition’ somewhat, and is full of errors or misstatements,’’ says one. It is ``more tendentious than scholarly.’’

Tom ``has written a piece of polemical journalism, in which he offers too many assertions that are not supported by evidence,’’ says another.

``Superior as a piece of journalism, inferior and unacceptable as a work of scholarship.’’

``Spot-checking of references to the speeches given at the Second Writers’ Congress shows evidence of some distortion in paraphrase, inaccuracy of quotations, and incorrect or misleading citations, such as to occasion distrust of his use of evidence elsewhere in the dissertation.’’

And: ``Mr. Wolfe has brought together a synthesis of evidence which have made a most valuable contribution (and still could) had he not yielded to polemics and a manner quite unsuited to the requirements of a scholarly dissertation. That he has a book which certain publishers would accept as it stands, I do not doubt; but that it fulfills the final requirement for a doctoral degree, I cannot believe.’’

On May 31, Tom hears from Assistant Dean Alan D. Ferguson that his name has been withdrawn from the list of students who may stand for the Ph.D. degree in June 1956. ``I would point out to you that should you be able to revise your dissertation and to re-submit it prior to the beginning day of the next school year, 17 September 1956, and have it accepted by the Committee on Degrees, no further charge would be levied against you beyond the graduation fee. Should you, however, need time beyond this date then you would be subject to the usual charges of the Graduate School for each year in which you registered.’’

Tom rewrites his dissertation and earns his doctorate in 1957. In his resume, he says that he is ``preparing a popular version of this study for publication.’’

I have some thoughts about that, but first, the failure of the dissertation is the traumatic event in Tom’s otherwise charmed life to this point. It must be a crushing blow for a young man who is already getting a little unhinged by his lack of status and who seems eager to turn the page. Most importantly, this failure also wipes out whatever academic ambitions Tom may harbor.

He has apparently been re-thinking his choice of occupation for some time.

It’s too bad that the corps of interviewers who will match wits with Tom in coming years never question him about graduate school. Because he has lots of thoughts on the matter. His only published comment is a single paragraph in his introduction to the 1973 anthology, The New Journalism, which was originally published in February of 1972 in New York magazine.

``I’m not sure I can give you the remotest idea of what graduate school is like,’’ he writes. Half of the people he knew at graduate school considered writing a novel about it; so did he. ``But the subject always defeated them. It defied literary exploitation. Such a novel would be a study of frustration, but a form of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it.’’

He then attempts it anyway, in a madcap 73-word sentence encompassing the director Michelangelo Antonioni, Saul Bellow’s novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet, and George McGovern explaining his philosophy of government.

And that’s it.

In fact, however, Tom has a lot to say about graduate school and its denizens, and it is contained in the form of a memoir. That single paragraph is actually preceded by hundreds of pages describing Tom’s graduate and immediate post-graduate school life. Like all of Tom’s manuscripts, this little memoir shows up as four or five rough type-written drafts, run-throughs, where he begins all over again, carrying on for four or five or a dozen or 20 or 30 pages, with careful corrections in hand. These are further supplemented by page after page of manuscript, both in pen and pencil. There are easily, as I say, a couple of hundred pages of this. It’s certainly unlike anything Tom, notoriously dismissive of memoir and autobiography, ever writes again. It would have to be edited and pieced-together, sure, but would make a nice little book, say a limited edition printed on extra-special paper.

I don’t have permission to quote from it here, but the whole thing is tucked away in the Tom Wolfe Papers at the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division, in boxes 118 and 119, which are nominally devoted to The New Journalism anthology.

This is probably my biggest discovery in the Tom Wolfe Papers. It even eclipses the day in 1990 when I came across a headline in an 1897 edition of The Daily Bond Buyer about ``Municipal Bond Insurance,’’ which as we all know made its debut in 1971.

At Yale, Tom seems adrift, even lonely. He regards many of his fellow graduate students as eccentrics and even neurotics. Yet he perseveres. Hanging out in the stacks of the Sterling Memorial Library, he becomes an even more voracious reader, and discovers the Serapion Brothers, a group of Russian writers from the 1920s; he likes their experiments in punctuation, which he later says influence his own.

He also spends a lot of time at the gym working out, which serves him well. After he rewrites the dissertation, Tom spends three months in New Haven as a truck loader in an office equipment warehouse. He also ponders writing a novel about graduate school, to be entitled, Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks [Yes, a play on the Stephen Crane title, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets].

In a career path well-marked with roads not taken, this is perhaps Tom’s most momentous exit: Departing academia and embracing journalism. He will spend the rest of his life in opposition to the academy and especially its embrace of Theory above all else.

And yet. Let’s not overstate the ignominy of Tom’s departure from New Haven. He will return, again and again and again, the first time as senior class dinner speaker in 1967. He speaks at three Master’s Teas and returns for book-signings and various events at which he is usually the featured talent. In 2002, a student writes in the Yale Daily News: ``I don’t want as a Class Day speaker someone who already makes regular appearances at Yale. This includes current faculty. And Tom Wolfe GRD `57 and Sam Waterston `62 are strictly prohibited – those guys just won’t leave us alone.’’

[And thank you to a former colleague of mine at Bloomberg News, Jordan Fitzgerald, for invaluable assistance in navigating the newspaper’s website and archives].

In 2000, Tom is one of the featured speakers in the university’s Tercentennial Lecture Series, the title being ``Maggie, a Girl of the Stacks: Confessions of a Yale Graduate Student.’’ Interviewed in the Yale Daily News, he says he has ``great fondness for Yale,’’ saying it ``made all the difference in the world’’ to his career.