Tom Wolfe and William Shawn Hooking Up

My new obsession started in 2004, or at least, it was set in motion then- I was at Ocean State Job Lot looking at their discount books (they have hardcovers for $2 or $3) and in the same section they had books on CD. There weren't many audiobooks there but one looked good: "Hooking Up" by Tom Wolfe. All I knew was "Bonfire of the Vanities" and the white suit, and I had read "The Right Stuff" recently and liked it. Hooking Up was a 6 CD set and it was $2 or $3 so I got it and started listening in my car right away.


The "Hooking Up" CD set is a collection of essays- some read by Wolfe, others by Ron Rifkin- and I was surprised by how interesting they were. Made me wish I had a long car trip to make. There are two essays that I like especially: "Two Young Men Who Went West" (the two young men are Josiah Grinnell, the founder of Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa in the 1900s and a later resident of Grinell, Robert Noyce who went on to found Intel) and "My Three Stooges" (the stooges are Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving).



"My Three Stooges" (read by Wolfe; the essays that he reads come across better) was about an event that I didn't hear about at the time but wish I had- though I do remember seeing Wolfe on the cover of Time. "My Three Stooges" tells the story of how Wolfe's second novel "A Man In Full" came out in 1997 or 1998, was well-received (by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek) well publisized (Vanity Fair and that Time cover story), and sold huge amounts of copies (a shitload of books were sold) and not long afterwards Norman Mailer and John Updike reviewed the "A Man In Full" and said that it wasn't real literature, it was entertainment; and Wolfe wasn't a novelist, he was just a reporter. John Irving came out against Wolfe later in a TV interview.


The details of the story are interesting and fun to read and it gets better as Wolfe talks about realistic, fact- based novels vs. literary novels that are abstract and not connected to life in America (or anywhere else). I'm going on too long here and I haven't even gotten to my obsession. Here it comes. The audiobook, I found out years later, doesn't have everything that's in the book "Hooking Up". The book, which I bought before Christmas, also has a novella called "Ambush At Fort Bragg" about a network news show going after three soldiers that they suspect murdered a fellow soldier. The novella had originally been published in Rolling Stone and was meant to be a part of "A Man In Full" but didn't end up fitting in with the rest of the story. But that's not even the good part. At the end of the book the re-print a two-part article that Wolfe wrote for The New York tribune, a parody of The New Yorker and profile of its editor William Shawn.



In the article he says that Shawn, in an effort to keep the magazine exactly as it was under the control of its founder and original editor Harold Ross, has made The New Yorker dull and boring. Wolfe also tells stories about William Shawn and his quiet, cautious manner and says that the main reason that Shawn is so guarded is because he believes that he was an intended target of Leopold and Loeb who considered kidnapping him but instead killed a younger classmate, Bobby Franks. Wolfe's editor sent an advance copy to William Shawn and Shawn wrote to the Tribune's owner to try to convince him to withhold the article. The editor leaked the letter and it all turned into a big news story in Time and Newsweek. So, both parts of the article are re-printed in Hooking Up, plus there are two (too-) short essays- one setting the scene of how the idea for the article came about and how it was researched and written, and another at the end telling about the outcry from various New Yorker writers, including a telegram from JD Salinger.



Anyway, I just got my computer working again so I spent last night looking up info on The New Yorker, William Shawn, Harold Ross, and Lillian Ross (William Shawn's mistress and author of a book about their 40 year affair "Here But Not Here"). The funny thing is, usually, unless there's an essay from David Sedaris inside, I don't even read The New Yorker.