542
THOMAS R. EDWARDS
conservative because their own nonphysical lives, and the associated
fears of sexual inadequacy, make the prole world seem personally
menacing. But the point
is
scored without convincing one that it ade–
quately explains why the Hell's Angels are such troubling objects of
thought. Surely they mean more than our adolescent nightmares of
impotence.
Wolfe's theory of styles insists that "high styles come from low
places," which is to say that there's a vitality in the "low" world that
we hunger for but (poor geldings!) can't embrace without proving our
absurdity:
Once it was power that created high style. But now high styles
come from low places, from people who have no power, who slink
away from it, in fact, who are marginal, who carve out worlds for
themselves in the nether depths, in tainted "undergrounds." The
Rolling Stones, like rock and roll itself and the twist - they come
out of the netherworld of modern teen-age life, out of what was
for years the marginal outcast corner of the world of art,
photography, populated by poor boys, pretenders. . . . Teen-agers,
bahas, camp culturati, photographers - they have won by default,
because, after all, they
do
create styles. And now the Other Society
goes to them for styles, like the decadenti of another age going
down to the wharves in Rio to find those raw-vital devils, damn
their potent hides, those proles, doing the Tango. Yes! Oh my God,
those raw-vital proles!
This is an early attempt, from
The Kandy-Kolored
(etc.)
Baby,
and
it doesn't quite work; high styles have been coming from low places a
lot longer than Wolfe admits (see Huizinga on the vogue of pastoral
in late medieval court circles, for example), and of course low styles
come from high places too. Wolfe's instances here- the Rolling Stones
and so forth - may come from marginal places, but it seems hard
to
believe that their arts are very expressive of those origins; surely they're
much more expressive of how someone apprehended and used styles and
methods that were already part of a thoroughly commercialized cultural
ambience, a "business" that already existed and was hungry for new
twists on old styles. Wolfe punishes the ''Other Society" by doing exactly
what he scorns it for doing, sentimentalizing the "netherworlds" below it.
In Kesey Wolfe found a better object for his sociology. Kesey is
no prol::- but the son of a prosperous Oregon businessman, an athletic
college boy who adopted Low Rent styles as (in some part) a weapon
against his peers, and most of the Pranksters were middle-class drop-outs
rather than authentically marginal people. (Their jokes were often
pretty literary, their myths founded on snippets from survey courses in
