Wolfe's editors read over his ping-pong language, his "be-here-now!" style and decided not to reassign the piece. They figured all Wolfe's work needed was a little editing before publishing. They ended up simply striking the greeting to the editor at the beginning of the memo and published the story otherwise unchanged.
"He's the greatest journalist in America in my mind in terms of his ability to report and write and to think--to come up with insights," says Felker, Wolfe's editor at the Herald-Tribune at the time his freelance Esquire piece introduced a new brand of journalism.
Hone and sharpen, play around with the possibilities--that was how Wolfe spent the greater part of the mid- and late sixties, trying almost every literary trick to discover how far one can go--and still be a journalist. Then the books came, books which reflected Wolfe's earlier essays and his knowledge about every and anything.
"He's a great reader of things that other people don't read," Esquire's Eisenberg says, adding that Wolfe periodically peruses a variety of trade journals. "As a result, he knows many arcane things."
Shade-pulls, that's what Eisenberg associates with Wolfe's writing. In a piece written for Esquire's 50th Anniversary issue about a Silicon Valley mogul, Wolfe returned to his subject's hometown of Grinnell, Iowa. "Wolfe wrote very vividly about the streets of Grinnell, right down to the little details, the shade-pulls," Eisenberg says. "I was amazed he knew so much about the shade-pulls."
The Esquire editor adds that he asked Wolfe how closely he had investigated the little tugs at the ends of shades, and Wolfe said that he had not really looked at them, but he just remembered them when it came time to write. He thought they would be a nice touch, and so he used them in the piece again and again, until they were a recurring refrain in the article, Eisenberg says.
"One of Wolfe's great gifts is that he is able to seize on details that other writers are not able to see. His eye is not only sharp to such details, but then fanciful and clever to the detail," Eisenberg says. "Most writers would probably not notice it and notice it in a witty way."
Such devotion to meticulous detail does not mix well with deadlines. Felker recalls, Wolfe "takes a lot more time [to write than other writers]. He endlessly rewrites, keeps rewriting, and as he rewrites, it deepens his insights. He sometimes pushed his deadlines to the limits."
The Southerner in Wolfe manifests itself in other ways and meshes well with the savvy New York mores he acquired in later life. While his writing seems the epitome of Northeast cynicism and satire--leading Harvard's Leland to compare Wolfe to an H.L. Mencken of the 1980s--in person, he has a luxurious style unique to South and to Southerners. "He is a wonderful companion and is a kind of a modern-day embodiment of a Virginia gentleman," Felker says. "He has very courtly manners combined with modern-day sensitivities."
His token white suit--according to New York magazine, he has seven of them--embodies the Southern gentleman in Wolfe, as well as his inherent contradictions. While many point to his representative outfit as indicative of his elitist attitudes, he says he wears the white suit as a mockery of the life he leads.
He told New York magazine in March, "When you start off with the idea that you're going to write, you think of yourself as some kind of rebel. Then you get to New York and you see there is as much conformism within the literary world as there is in the military world or business world. The rebel in a free country is the rebel within the status group.[Clothes] are a way of treating the literary-status world as cavalierly as I or any other writer would treat the outside world."
Forget the suit, though; forget the Southampton and Upper East Side homes; forget all inklings that a conformation has taken place in Wolfe since the time he pulled an all-nighter to complete a memo for Esquire. The Novel is the proof that Wolfe--fiction or non-fiction--has not lost much of his original punch. As he wrote in the introduction to New Journalism, "A writer needs at least enough ego to believe that what he is doing as a writer is as important as what anyone he is writing about is doing and that therefore he shouldn't compromise his own work."