Monday, March 14, 2016

The 100 best nonfiction books / No 7 / The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)

The 100 best nonfiction books

No 7

The Right Stuff

by Tom Wolfe

(1979)

The author raised reportage to dazzling new levels in his quest to discover what makes a man fly to the moon

Robert McCrum
Mon 15 Mar 2016

ewspapers and magazines often provide an indispensable patronage for writers. The Right Stuff is one of several great books in this list that derive from the interaction of high journalism and a higher literary ambition. In 1972, Rolling Stone commissioned its star reporter to cover the launch of Nasa’s final Apollo moonshot, one of many moments that marked the end of the 60s.

Tom Wolfe responded with what he later described as just “some ordinary curiosity”. What was it, he wondered, that would make a man “willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?”

Wolfe decided, he says rather disingenuously, “on the simplest approach possible. I would ask a few astronauts and find out. So I asked a few in December of 1972 when they gathered at Cape Canaveral to watch the last mission to the moon, Apollo 17.”

Tom Wolfe... his account of Nasa’s final Apollo moonshot
became his best book in any genre.
Photograph: Mark Seliger/AP

The upshot was a four-part piece entitled “Post-Orbital Remorse”, which appeared in Rolling Stone during 1973. There was, however, an afterlife to Wolfe’s “ordinary curiosity”. He had stumbled on a “psychological mystery” – the motivation of the men involved, and his fascination with his own response. “I discovered quickly enough,” he wrote later, “that none of them, no matter how talkative otherwise, was about to answer the question, or even linger for more than a few seconds on the subject at the heart of it, which is to say, courage.”

And so, with his unfailing instinct for a good story, Wolfe spent the rest of the 70s in “a rich and fabulous terrain that, in a literary sense, had remained as dark as the far side of the moon for more than half a century: military flying and the modern American officer corps”. Wolfe’s account of “one of the most extraordinary and most secret dramas of the 20th century”, became The Right Stuff, his best book in any genre.

A classic of reportage, The Right Stuff is both a showcase of Wolfe’s remarkable gifts, as well as a book of its time. Below the waterline, it was also, as Michael Lewis has identified in a brilliant Vanity Fair profile, all about Wolfe. Lewis notes that: “Wolfe took an interest in the moon landing, but less in the mission than in the men. The early astronauts had some traits in common, he noticed. They tended to be born oldest sons, in the mid-1920s, named after their fathers, and raised in small towns, in intact Anglo-Saxon Protestant families. More than half of them had ‘Jr’ after their names. In other words, they were just like him. What was it about this upbringing, he wondered, that produced these men? It was another way of asking: What strange sociological process explains me?”

And because, in addition to “courage”, “test pilots” etc, The Right Stuff is all about Wolfe, it exhibits its author’s lifelong – and, let’s face it, southern – quarrel with the New York literary establishment. The Thomas Wolfe Jr, born in 1931, who had grown up in Richmond, Virginia, during the second world war, revered those “adventurous young men who sought glory in war” and who had become fighter pilots. As a young reporter in 60s Manhattan, he found himself an outsider. Towards the record of these pilots’ self-sacrifice and heroism, “the drama and psychology of flying high-performance aircraft in battle”, Wolfe observes, with some dismay, “the literary world remained oblivious”.

On my reading, The Right Stuff becomes a triple whammy and Wolfe’s home run. It’s both an exploration of courage and a meditation on its author’s background, as well as being a coded rebuke to the Manhattan literati who, in their devotion to the values of the New Yorker (Wolfe’s bete noir) and also Partisan Review, perceived military men as “brutes and philistines”. Meanwhile, the Vietnam war was in full, horrendous progress and navy pilots were dying. It was this heroism that Wolfe wanted to salute. “The Right Stuff,” he wrote later, “became the story of why men were willing – willing? – delighted! – to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterised as the age of the anti-hero.”

Tom Wolfe ‘repressed his most rococo stylistic flourishes’ with The Right Stuff.
Photograph by Jack Robinson

The unintended consequence of writing about laconic, iron-jawed heroes was that Wolfe repressed his most rococo stylistic flourishes. Gone (mostly) were Wolfe’s whirlwind literary arpeggios; gone was the extravagant interior monologue of, for example, his essay Radical Chic, with famous passages such as: “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts. Very tasty. Very subtle. It’s the way the dry sackiness of the nuts tiptoes up against the dour savour of the cheese that is so nice, so subtle. Wonder what the Black Panthers eat here on the hors d’oeuvre trail? Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way, and asparagus tips in mayonnaise dabs, and meatballs petites au Coq Hardi, all of which are at this very moment being offered to them on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons…”

More sober, more subtle, and more respectful, in The Right Stuff Wolfe dedicates himself to probing the hearts and minds of the first Americans in space – Yeager, Conrad, Grissom, Glenn – those heroes who rocketed heavenwards to take on the Russians in the deep blue night of weightlessness, to pioneer another new frontier, and to thrill the American people.

Wolfe, meanwhile, remained a child of his times. He could never give up his dream of writing A Novel. “It’s hard to explain,” he writes in The New Journalism, “what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, the 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever. It belonged in the glossary... somewhere between Narcissism and Obsessional Neuroses.” After The Right Stuffmade him a heap of money, a fully self-sufficient Tom Wolfe was going to scale the north face of Parnassus if it killed him. And when Rolling Stone (which commissioned him as if he were Dickens) came calling again, we got... The Bonfire of the Vanities. But that’s a whole other story.

A signature sentence

“When the final news came, there would be a ring at the door – a wife in this situation finds herself staring at the front door as if she no longer owns it or controls it – and outside the door would be a man... come to inform her that unfortunately something has happened out there, and her husband’s body now lies incinerated in the swamps or the pines or the palmetto grass, “burned beyond recognition”, which anyone who has been around an air base for very long realised was an artful euphemism to describe a human body that now looked like an enormous fowl that has burned up in a stove, burned a blackish brown all over, greasy and blistered, fried, in a word, with not only the entire face and all the hair and the ears burned off, not to mention all the clothing, but also the hands and feet, with what remains of the arms and legs bent at the knees and elbows and burned into absolutely rigid angles, burned a greasy blackish brown like the bursting body itself, so that this husband, father, officer, gentleman, this ornamentum of some mother’s eye, His Majesty the Baby of just 20-odd years back, has been reduced to a charred hulk with wings and shanks sticking out of it.”