The right stuff | 17 May 2018

To some, Tom Wolfe’s death might seem a greater loss for readers on the right wing of American culture and politics, since he viewed himself as a conservative, very much in keeping with his upbringing in the Richmond, Virginia, of the 1930s and 1940s. His gentleman’s manners and soft-spoken demeanour recalled another era — a class-defined and racially segregated world of courtliness and formal collars. Wolfe famously picked on liberal targets throughout his remarkable career: his most savage satires addressed the pretensions of leftish icons from Leonard Bernstein to, most recently, Noam Chomsky.

‘Radical Chic’, his essay about infiltrating Leonard Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers and Upper East Side liberal fashion in the late 1960s, still looms over Manhattan social life all these years later (no New York host or hostess ever wants a Tom Wolfe-type reporter sneaking into their fancy fund-raising party again), and it can still make you laugh out loud, even if you happened to support the Black Panthers. His last book, The Kingdom of Speech, poked fun at Chomsky’s theory of the origins of language, though the celebrated linguist and his followers were not amused in the least.

​As a left-wing liberal, I feel the loss as acutely as anyone, since Wolfe was no conventional right-winger. On the contrary, he was a radical reporter and thinker of the sort we rarely see any more in America, which is becoming hidebound and politically correct, on both the right and the left, to the point of suffocation. In this, he was the most classic of liberals, open-minded, curious and willing to debate any issue. Over the nearly 40 years I knew him, Tom was never an ideologue and thus never dull-minded. He was always the arch opponent of orthodoxy in all its forms.