By Philip Kennicott
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 11, 2006; C01
Tom Wolfe's trademark white suit continues to fascinate. Is it a uniform? A fashion tic? A status symbol? Or is it, as one critic has suggested, a way for this most celebrated collector of American language, lore and anecdote to hide in plain sight?
Naturally, he wore white last night, when he collected another status marker in his illustrious career -- the honor of giving the 35th annual Jefferson Lecture, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He spoke at the Warner Theatre, preceded by the pomp of a military color guard and brass band, and the pompousness of NEH head Bruce Cole (whose dogmatic public statements on art and literature are increasingly embarrassing) celebrating Wolfe's "gift for demolishing pretension in all its guises."
It was a performance filled with funny asides, some amusing stories and a vague sense of direction. But the white suit seemed an effort to communicate something else: It is the mark of a man who has mucked about in the ugliest filth of humanity and come out, in the end, spotless. That's his pose, his self-conceit. He has been, as he says, the "secretary" of the American vernacular, the recorder of our hypocrisies and delusions and mores, and he has stayed above it all, untarnished.
Except, of course, he hasn't. If last night's speech is any indication, Tom Wolfe has come out of the muck with the biggest stain of all. He's a misanthrope. He loves stories that show man at his worst. He gravitates toward them; he tells them charmingly, as if holding a platter of manure in his hands while walking through a garden party. But a writer is defined not just by his attention to detail -- and last night, as always, he was a master of wry observation -- but by the stories he seeks out. And Wolfe, it seems, has sought out the stories that confirm a very bleak worldview.
He called his speech "The Human Beast," borrowing the title from the French writer Emile Zola, who he has often claimed is his idol. "The greatest novelist who ever lived," he said last night.
The human beast is guided by social inclinations, by the desire for status and the fear of humiliation. With the arrival of Darwin, whose theories supposedly shatter the belief of intellectuals in God, the human beast gets even more bestial. Nothing can contain him. His appetites and urges come to the fore, social restraint is thrown off, and he emerges as . . . a college student. A frat boy, a libidinous cheerleader, or, later in life, intellectuals or Wall Street types, who pursue selfish ends with comical narcissism, hubris and self-deception.
The irony, Wolfe suggested, is that it is speech, a great evolutionary leap forward, that also gives us religion, the thing that not only contains the human beast but also proves the degree to which it is our social world, our culture, that really defines us. And so Darwin, who lays out the mechanics of evolution, which reveals the importance of religion, also gets credit for unchaining the human beast, which leads to things such as cop killing, untrammeled sex, hippies, bohemians, preening intellectuals and all the other easy targets that get skewered like fish in a barrel in a Tom Wolfe novel.
That, at least, is the argument he seemed to want to make. But it was all very confused, filled with large claims that were left unproven or unconnected.
"Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech," he said, which seems dubious from any number of angles.
He admires Darwin, or the impact of Darwin, but tried to argue with what he called "neo-Darwinists" in the field of neuroscience who supposedly believe in a rigorously deterministic world. Which is a straw man. He feinted in the direction of giving love to religion -- never a bad gesture in today's Washington -- but left no indication of whether he himself believes, and plenty of indication that he lives more in Nietzsche's world (where religion is a rather pathetic crutch for lesser beings) than the world of fundamentalism or NASCAR drivers who pray before each race (which he clearly admires).
But this is a strategy, isn't it? The misanthrope is guided by one big idea, that man is beastly. Darwin may be entirely correct, and God may be dead. But Wolfe doesn't need to have a stand on either of these propositions, because all he really needs is: material.
So he told stories. A drug dealer in New York was humiliated by a cop who threatened to arrest him for a small crime (drinking outside a bar). So later, when he was in prison, the drug dealer had one of his posse kill a cop -- any cop would do -- to regain his dignity. This, Wolfe argued, demonstrates the intense power of status and humiliation to guide the human beast. Curious, how so many of Wolfe's anecdotes come out of urban, hip-hop culture.
And he quoted lyrics, including this one from a pop group: "You and me, baby, we ain't nothing but mammals/So let's do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel."
It was a very odd speech, rambling and anecdotal. But if you sorted through it, Wolfe emerges more as a man with a list of enemies, with intellectuals at the top and youth running a close second, than a dispassionate observer of American life -- as he and so many of his enthusiasts claim. These enemies are essentially the same ones that the powers at the NEH love to rail against -- Cole has become a self-parody when it comes to academics, artists he considers too abstract, and the stupidity of American youth -- so the choice of Wolfe to deliver the speech made a certain sense.
Except for one thing. Wolfe doesn't seem to believe any of the boilerplate NEH talk about drawing out the best in American cultural and intellectual life, passing on the noble legacy, the glory of democracy and all the rest of that blah, blah, blah. He really does believe in the Human Beast, and it's the only animal he's ever really looked for in the menagerie of American life.