PARTISAN REVIEW
539
he even paints an Exit sign over it by dwelling on the girl's protests,
though one seems to detect some contempt for those who need to use it.
Wolfe's implicit drama of generational conflict is a drama of
opposing styles in an affluent society which organizes itself upon conflicts
of taste rather than of class and "interests" in the older sense. His
America has succeeded in raising incomes and cheapening goods to
the point where every man, from Hugh Hefner to the merest ranch–
houser, has the power to create his own material kingdom with himself
as absolute monarch and sole arbiter of taste, the "status sphere"
(or "statusphere," or "statussphere" - Wolfe keeps changing the spelling)
as do-it-yourself Versailles. The teen-age Hair Boys at Harvey'S Drive–
In dress and coif themselves into charismatic roles like seventeenth-century
courtiers, a car-customizer in his garage is a modern Tiepolo, Phil
Spector the rock record magnate is at twenty-three the Cellini (or
Chesterfield, or Jefferson or Rossetti) of teen-age America. Instant
Max Weber is less intrusive in Wolfe's later writing, but he's always
alert to the symbolism of role-playing in the subcultures he describes,
and the
~ord
"Sociology" on the back cover of the paperback edition
of
The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby
is
a fair enough
guide to the drugstore book buyer.
The jokes lurking in his own roles are perfectly evident to Wolfe,
and he's well aware that others see the world differently. In the preface
to
The
Pump
House
Gang he bemusedly describes his participation in
a symposium (at Princeton, of course) on
The Style of the Sixties,
where
the other panelists, earnest types like Ginsberg and GUnter Grass, kept
talking about political oppression, police statism, war, poverty, alienation.
" 'What are you talking about?' I said. 'We're in the middle of a ...
Happiness Explosion!'" Like McLuhan, whom he has written well
about, Wolfe dismisses politics and social issues as one of the old games
of square intellectuals, to him invariably objects of scorn and pity. He
describes with glee the Pump House surfers visiting the Watts riots
"stoned out of their hulking gourds":
Watts was a blast, and the Pump House gang was immune to the
trembling gourd panic rattles of the L.A.
Times
black pan-thuhs.
1
Immune! ... Artie and John had a tape-recorder and decided
they were going to make a record called "Random Sounds from
the Watts Riots." They drove right into Watts ... and there was
1 Uninitiated readers will need to know that in Pump House speech "black
panther" meant "middle-aged white square," the point being that such
often
wear
black
shoes. One
wonders if it
still
means that, even on
the
beach
at
La
Jolla.
