Vulture - Oct 22, 2012 - By Boris Kachka
Amid the artful clutter of his apartment fourteen stories above East 79th Street, Tom Wolfe is just another bright, eccentric antique. Behind him are mauve hydrangeas and a mauve poster for Princeps cigars, which bring out the violet in his papery eyelids and veined hands and set off the white (of course!) of his fitted linen suit. Dark blue is today’s underplumage—navy shirt with white stripes, navy dots on white tie, white dots on navy socks, and the usual two-tone shoes.
“Kipling is today such an underrated poet—in my humble opinion,” Wolfe says, with that slightly southern softness so unlike his writing. He’s trying to explain what Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and later turned into a hymn, is doing in the brain of a muscle-bound Cuban-American cop in Wolfe’s panoramic Miami joyride of a fourth novel, Back to Blood.
“Kipling is today such an underrated poet—in my humble opinion,” Wolfe says, with that slightly southern softness so unlike his writing. He’s trying to explain what Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional,” written for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee and later turned into a hymn, is doing in the brain of a muscle-bound Cuban-American cop in Wolfe’s panoramic Miami joyride of a fourth novel, Back to Blood.
But … he can’t! So instead … Tom Wolfe sings!! “God of our fathers known of old, Lord of our far-flung battle line”—wavering, reinflating—“Be-neath whose awful hand we hold! Dominion over palm and pine”—words drawn out, then lopped off with a throat snuffle—“Lord God of hosts, be with us yet”—crisply!—“Lest we forget!—and then it—achem, unhughugh—goes down into a register I can’t hit.” He tries a faux-bass tremolo: “Lest weyeyeee forgeeet.”
“Kipling’s saying we’ve forgotten what the real qualities of life are,” Wolfe continues, without a break for applause. “We’re so wrapped up in all the things we have.” Wolfe sang it gleefully as a morning prayer in his Episcopalian high school in Richmond, Virginia, seduced by its imperial bombast rather than its warning against hubris. “It was a great way to start the day.” As for how it ended up inside the head of Officer Nestor Camacho, gazing upon a Haitian-American 21-year-old in a Miami ghetto, Wolfe draws a blank. “I may have dropped it in from Mars. It probably shouldn’t be in there.”
Wolfe often jokes about his alien origins. Whether chronicling acid-droppers, chic radicals, art-world charlatans, macho astronauts, or Wall Street Masters of the Universe, he has always impersonated a character all his own: a reporter who begs for answers but never pleads for acceptance. As he’s said, “It is much more effective to arrive at any situation as a man from Mars than to try to fit in.”
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