FT.com
The wit of Oscar Wilde is often more clever than insightful, but when he declared that “one’s first duty in life is to assume a pose”, he may have been on to something: clothes don’t just make the man; they can, if unchanging in style and sufficiently de trop, make him look ageless.
This, at least, is the impression left by Tom Wolfe as he blazes through the culinary empyrean of Café Boulud on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, trailing dash and élan among the stolidly well-heeled and sourly superannuated diners.
The writer who pioneered reporting with the intensity of literature, who gave what resulted the appearance of a movement (the “new journalism”), who chronicled the restless American spirit to the stars (The Right Stuff) and then back down into the gutter (The Bonfire of the Vanities) is, astonishingly, 77; and yet, he is still every bit the “Tom Sawyer drawn by Beardsley”, that Elaine Dundy excitedly sketched for Vogue readers in the 1960s.
Indeed, Wolfe might as well have sprung fully-formed from Richmond, Virginia, in 1930, so well have the aegis of a cream suit and its dandy-grade accoutrements (spats, bold tie, florid pocket square) rendered him an icon: Tom Wolfe! (as Tom Wolfe might exclaim).
Though Dundy told her readers that Wolfe deliberately aimed to give “offence to his viewers” through his wardrobe, the clothes do not wear him in the meretricious way that can make studied flamboyance a trap. He is gracious, strikingly modest and inquisitive to the point of turning an interviewer into an interviewee. His voice is soft, with a mild southern lilt; his comments are wry; his manner is – in the old-fashioned sense of the word – gay; he laughs softly and frequently, and it is impossible to imagine him, even at this senatorial age, pounding a lectern or as a cynic crabbing away in some dive bar.
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