VARI ElY
CRY WOLF
If
the publishers ever reissue
this bright-tincted ephemerid, they
should do so
with
an appendix of
quotations from the reviews, which
surely confirm the author's point
beyond his fondest dreams.
l
Wolfe
of course is a "parajournalist." Be–
sides writing the hippest fop's En–
glish since Oscar Wilde, he is the
finest amateur
sociologist in
the
business. From car customizers, to
surfing teenies, to the New York
art world, the subculture he can't
mimic doesn't exist. Like Wilde, he
does it by relentlessly probing the
surfaces. And in moral America,
this makes some people uneasy.
The book consists of two com–
plementary essays. "Radical Chic,"
a shorter version of which first ap–
peared in
New York Magazine,
takes off from the party given by
Felicia (Mrs. Leonard) Bernstein
in the Bernstein Park Avenue du–
plex,
to
raise bail money for New
York Black Panthers.
It
invites us
to amuse ourselves over some
in–
teresting ironies
in
the soul kissing
of Beautiful People and Raw
Primitives:
For example, does that huge
Black Panther there in the hall–
way ... the one
with
the black
leather coat and the dark glasses
and the absolutely unbelievable
I. RADICAL CHIC & MAU-MAUING
THE FLAK CATCHERS.
By
Tom Wolfe.
Forror. Strous. ond Giroux. $5.50.
Afro, Fuzzy-Wuzzy scale,
in
fact
- is
he, a Black Panther, going
on to
pick
up a Roquefort
cheese morsel rolled
in
crushed
nuts from off the tray, from a
maid
in
uniform, and just pop
it
down the gullet
without
so
much as missing a beat of
Felicia's
perfect Mary Astor
voice .
..
[?]
The essay traces, all too briefly, the
history
of this flirtation and of
analogous fashionable impulses,
under the
generic
nineteenth-cen–
tury label of
nostalgie de la boue,
nostalgia for the mud. In case we
didn't
know, the proneness of the
idle
rich to
associate
themselves
with the life styles of the vital
poor
is
not exactly a new thing
under the sun. As for the particular
issues involved in l'affaire
Bern–
stein, the narrator has no doubts
whatever about the
sincerity
of all
concerned: "One's heart does cry
out -
quite
spontaneously! - upon
hearing how the police have dealt
with the Panthers, dragging an
epileptic like Lee Berry out of his
hospital bed and throwing
him
into
the Tombs." We then hear Lenny
Bernstein, Otto Preminger and
Barbara Walters of the "Today"
show pursuing the Panthers with
some heavy queries about their
program. They sound like a
semi–
nar full of the goodest bright stu–
dents all listening to the
serious–
ness of their own
voices
as they
ask really hard
questions.
But
in
fact, just as things are getting
rather warm,
