{"id":5218,"date":"2024-11-01T10:07:14","date_gmt":"2024-11-01T10:07:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/?p=5218"},"modified":"2024-11-11T11:57:02","modified_gmt":"2024-11-11T11:57:02","slug":"kent-memories-tom-wolfe-comes-to-canterbury","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/2024\/11\/01\/kent-memories-tom-wolfe-comes-to-canterbury\/","title":{"rendered":"Kent Memories: Tom Wolfe comes to Canterbury\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Words by Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

There he stood, silently acknowledging an awestruck audience as his host went through the formalities. In a mid-sixties lecture theatre showing its age and with a VIP dress code more Burton than bespoke, the tweed of the signature white suit positively glowed. Ah, the irony. Unsheathe the Montblanc Meisterst\u00fcck 149 and dust down the Adler Universal 39 \u2013 who better than Tom Wolfe to capture the incongruity of Tom Wolfe in east Kent, far from his mid-Manhattan condo and the holiday home in The Hamptons? The date was Monday 17 October 1983, and the occasion the first of that year\u2019s Eliot Memorial Lectures. Skipping Washington\u2019s weekend premiere of <\/span>The Right Stuff<\/span><\/i>, Wolfe had flown direct to Heathrow, from where he was driven down to the then University of Kent at Canterbury (affectionately known as UKC, its abbreviation far in the future). He would deliver four lectures across four days, and on the Friday fly home to New York.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Except that Tom Wolfe never did write his very own Canterbury tale. What we do have are letters, lecture transcripts and memories (including mine) with which to reconstruct a forgotten episode in the life of someone forever synonymous with the \u2018New Journalism\u2019 of the 1960s. Needless to say, such lazy labelling scarcely acknowledges the versatility of a remarkable writer: from immersive reportage through fierce cultural criticism to decade-defining fiction.\u00a0 Tom Wolfe was also of course a remarkable talker, as he demonstrated night after night in Canterbury \u2013 and therein lay a problem.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Weighed down with awards for journalism (three big prizes inside eighteen months), early-eighties Tom Wolfe was on a roll. Reagan was in the White House, and with Wolfe joined at <\/span>Rolling Stone<\/span><\/i> by iconoclastic writers like PJ O\u2019Rourke sharp-witted conservatism was cool. Published in 1979, Wolfe\u2019s leftfield history of NASA\u2019s Mercury programme, <\/span>The Right Stuff<\/span><\/i>, was his breakthrough book. He gained mass readership, and a level of gravitas previously absent. Critics loved Philip Kaufman\u2019s star-studded adaptation, and although the film lost money its technical brilliance earned it four Oscars in April 1984. In the decade prior to the Academy Awards Wolfe had lauded Chuck Yeager over the disempowered space jocks in <\/span>The Right Stuff<\/span><\/i>, taken on the New York art establishment in <\/span>The Painted Word<\/span><\/i>, shredded Beltway players and power brokers in <\/span>Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine<\/span><\/i>, and excoriated the condition of contemporary buildings in <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i> is out of print and largely forgotten.\u00a0 An all guns blazing attack on twentieth-century architecture\u2019s unreserved embrace of modernist fads, fashions and fundamentals, this is a polemic of two halves \u2013 it\u2019s no surprise to learn that the text first appeared in successive issues of <\/span>Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>The Painted Word<\/span><\/i> had occupied only a single issue, <\/span>Harper\u2019s<\/span><\/i> readers digesting a relentless intellectual assault upon American modern art and its abstruse evangelists. Both books share a common cultural target, and the epicentre of their loathing is the Museum of Modern Art: <\/span>The Painted Word <\/span><\/i>questioned MOMA\u2019s collection policy and <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i> its very existence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The early chapters of <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i> echo<\/span> The Painted Word<\/span><\/i>\u2019s dismissal of the contemporary art world as smug, elitist, metropolitan and indifferent to popular taste: even before Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus acolytes arrived in the United States the nation\u2019s architects were in thrall to an \u2018International Style\u2019 that rendered all buildings box-like, boring and dismissive of ideologically-offensive \u2018bourgeois\u2019 decoration. It\u2019s a ferociously argued polemic but, as befits Tom Wolfe in high dudgeon, every sentence fizzes; yes, there are few laughs, but there\u2019s every reason to keep reading. The same can\u2019t be said for the later chapters, where Wolfe demonstrates the breadth of his research into contemporary architecture\u2019s ceaseless clash of cultures, theories and egos \u2013 he\u2019s read everything, however obtuse or obscure, and sat in on every discussion platform, however tedious and mind-numbing. Page after page of relentlessly waging a culture war forty years ahead of its time surely drove <\/span>Harper\u2019s<\/span><\/i> readers to seek relief in the fashion shoots and society gossip columns.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Not that his publisher was deterred by Wolfe\u2019s textual critique of competing theories or his mocking of modernist excesses far beyond the drawing board (the giants of the <\/span>avant-garde<\/span><\/i>\u2019s greatest triumphs, Wolfe suggested, were too often little more than a blueprint, a half-finished score or an embryonic ballet chart). Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the text in book form at the end of 1981. <\/span>The Painted Word <\/span><\/i>had appeared six years earlier, and like its successor made only modest profits for one of New York\u2019s most august publishers: Tom Wolfe\u2019s royalties came largely from paperback sales, courtesy of Bantam.\u00a0 For publisher Roger Straus his most flamboyant author gave kudos to the company, but he wasn\u2019t a big earner.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Both of Wolfe\u2019s polemics on art and architecture shaped the content of his Canterbury talks. Indeed, anyone familiar with the books might not have returned after the second night.\u00a0 It’s ironic that the idea of Tom Wolfe giving the Eliot Memorial Lectures arose out of his meeting Stephen Bayley. Bayley had ambitions to quit his university post and forge a second career as a design critic and cultural commentator. He first met Wolfe in London at a 1979 RIBA conference and twelve months later interviewed him for <\/span>Little Boxes<\/span><\/i>, a BBC2 <\/span>Horizon<\/span><\/i> documentary on contemporary design.\u00a0 Wolfe championed Bayley\u2019s books, entertaining him whenever he visited New York. The two men had hit it off from the start, not least because they shared a mutual distaste for campus life. In <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i> Wolfe is unsparing in his disparagement of American universities, from Ivy League behemoth to humblest community college: the fiercest criticism is reserved for Yale, its featureless \u2018structures\u2019 exemplifying the worst of mid-century modernism\u2019s \u2018compound\u2019 thinking. On his website Stephen Bayley thanks Terence Conran for \u2018rescuing me from the tedium of provincial academe,\u2019 and over the years he has displayed little affection for British universities and the people who teach in them.\u00a0 This deep scepticism clearly dates from his experience at Kent in the late \u2019seventies teaching history of art \u2013 he scarcely disguised his dislike of UKC and yet he felt warm affection for several colleagues, not least the philosopher Dan Taylor.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The late Dan Taylor was Master of Eliot College, and as such responsible for organising and hosting the Eliot Memorial Lectures; a task he positively relished. Although the early aping of Oxbridge traditions was long gone, Kent in the early \u2019eighties remained a collegiate university. The four original colleges retained their distinctive identities, but the masters (male and female) were no longer marquee signings; the likes of Dan Taylor lacked their predecessors\u2019 academic cachet (Irish historian FSL Lyons had quit Eliot to become Provost of Trinity College Dublin) but they ran a tight ship, enjoying a privileged, relatively stress-free job. One unique privilege for the Master of Eliot was hosting for four or five days each year a leading scholar or well-known writer; which for Dan Taylor encompassed the likes of Asa Briggs, Bernard Williams and Jonathan Miller.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Its dining hall window offering a spectacular view of Canterbury and the cathedral, Eliot College was \u2013 and is \u2013 an impressive architectural presence. The quality of build belies the speed with which UKC\u2019s inaugural college was constructed: two years from foundation stone to receiving its first students in September 1965. Nine months earlier the death of TS Eliot had prompted the University\u2019s founding fathers to approach his widow for what today would be labelled naming rights. Valerie Eliot gave her permission for \u2018Eliot College\u2019, and for a high-profile annual series of lectures to commemorate her husband. TS Eliot was synonymous with Faber & Faber, and the company happily agreed to sponsor \u2013 and to publish \u2013 the \u2018Eliot Memorial Lectures\u2019. Faber\u2019s influence was obvious in the choice of speakers, from W.H. Auden in 1967 through to Tom Paulin in 1996, the year the original format ended. Auden\u2019s lectures appeared as <\/span>Secondary Worlds<\/span><\/i>, with a dedication to Mrs Eliot, but Faber\u2019s involvement was based more on goodwill than any commercial consideration. The exception to the rule was the fourth speaker in the series, George Steiner, whose much publicised reflections on the Holocaust ensured healthy sales for <\/span>In Bluebeard\u2019s Castle: Some Notes Towards The Redefinition of Culture<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, publication was never <\/span>de rigueur<\/span><\/i>. Success setting <\/span>The Waste Land<\/span><\/i> to music made Anthony Burgess seem an ideal choice in 1980.\u00a0 He gave a bravura performance at the piano, but what proved perfect for Radio 3 was deemed inappropriate as a book. Valerie Eliot found the first lecture\u2019s damning reappraisal of Eliot\u2019s poetry deeply offensive: she stormed out of the Cornwallis Lecture Theatre and went straight back to London. However, she was back the following year and in 1982, before being guest of honour at a symposium in May 1983 to mark the lecture series\u2019 fifteenth birthday: <\/span>Remembering Mr Eliot<\/span><\/i> saw Stephen Spender lead a galaxy of Faber authors in praise of \u2018Old Possum\u2019.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Faber & Faber \u2013 in the form of chairman Matthew Evans and senior editor Robert McCrum \u2013 shared the University\u2019s wish to attract high profile, low maintenance speakers.\u00a0 All parties were eager to avoid another Burgess-type scandal, so Dan Taylor couldn\u2019t believe his luck when Tom Wolfe said yes to Stephen Bayley\u2019s suggestion that he deliver the Eliot Memorial Lectures.\u00a0 Yes, Wolfe dressed flamboyantly and clearly had a sharp tongue, but he gave every impression that he would play by the rules.\u00a0 Crucially, he could bring in large numbers at a time when the recruitment of big names was flagging (Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh\/Anthony Bloom was a heavyweight theologian, but it\u2019s hard to believe the 1982 lectures drew large audiences).\u00a0 An exchange of correspondence across the first half of 1980 saw Taylor brief Wolfe and, with help from Bayley in the Big Apple, secure his presence in Canterbury three years hence.\u00a0 Wolfe told Taylor that he saw the lectures \u2018as a wonderful opportunity for me to try to pull together in some systematic fashion many thoughts that I have struggled with over the past twenty years about literature & life & times,\u2019 and then promptly forgot about them.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the autumn of 1982 Taylor reminded Wolfe that they were due to meet the following year, and after some effort secured agreement on mid-October. However, it took Roger Straus, the President of Farar, Straus & Giroux, to spell out what this commitment involved. This was at a dinner with Wolfe and his wife in November 1982, after which Straus confided to Robert McCrum that their respective publishing houses needed to act quickly if they hoped for a book akin to <\/span>The Painted Word<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Not that Wolfe was in any way hostile to the idea: \u2018He is a long way from finishing his new work, a novel, and I know that this interim book would please him\u2026as a small money-producing machine.\u2019\u00a0 Suffering from writer\u2019s block, Wolfe was in fact a very long way from finishing what would become <\/span>The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/span><\/i>, so a nice little earner requiring minimal effort would help sustain a high-end lifestyle he could scarcely afford.\u00a0 Furthermore, he was getting an all-expenses paid trip to England, and a \u00a3500 fee. Urged on by McCrum, Dan Taylor reminded Wolf exactly what was required, and of the need for a series title and a title for each of the four lectures.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Taylor, by now experienced in handling big egos, was a master of the polite reminder.\u00a0 Finally, in late June he secured the necessary information, with Wolfe confiding his hope that \u2018the titles don\u2019t sound too severe.\u00a0 I am having a good time preparing the talks, and I hope they will appeal to, if not let, sporting blood.\u2019\u00a0 The overall title was \u2018The Social Psychology of the Arts\u2019, with a rider to the lecture list noting that \u2018The words \u2018Art\u2019 \u2018Artists\u2019 etc in these titles refer also to Literature.\u2019\u00a0 Wolfe had insisted on booking his own flights, but all other arrangements were out of his hands: Faber would chauffeur him to and from Heathrow, and he would be staying on campus in the Master\u2019s flat; dinner would be at High Table (in reality a private dining room) or courtesy of Canterbury\u2019s celebrity chef Michael Waterfield (\u2018a good cook and a very civilised man\u2019). Although Faber & Faber were footing the bill, Taylor never copied McCrum or series administrator Andrew Franklin into his correspondence with Wolfe; in a pre-email era why would he?<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

There was no chance of Tom Wolfe idling away his free time with a visit to Becket\u2019s tomb or tea in the Butter Market. Between them Dan Taylor and the Faber publicity team filled his days with faculty lunches, an open session with students and a succession of interviews. The <\/span>Sunday Times<\/span><\/i> and the <\/span>Sunday Telegraph<\/span><\/i> lined up to profile Wolfe, as did the UK edition of <\/span>Vogue<\/span><\/i> \u2013 Lord Snowdon was scheduled to join Lucy Hughes-Hallett for a photo shoot and an interview. The University\u2019s guest list of town and gown dignitaries looked positively Pooterish when combined with the Faber publicists\u2019 power list of early \u2019eighties movers and shakers. In practice few residents of Hampstead and Islington drove down the M2 to hear Tom Wolfe, and those that did were only present for the first lecture and the reception. Turn out was respectable for the second lecture but it was obvious that many present the previous evening had returned to London. Front row seats were full again on the Wednesday night with Matthew Evans hosting FS & G\u2019s Roger Straus and literary agent Deborah Rogers \u2013 they, their partners and Wolfe were then whisked away by Dan Taylor to eat at Michael Waterfield\u2019s riverside restaurant.\u00a0 Andrew Franklin ensured a decent audience for the last night but one notable absentee was Robert McCrum, the maestro of proceedings being away in Australia. An initial healthy representation from the city council and the Cathedral had melted away across the week but not university staff, or indeed students.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dan Taylor\u2019s short, sparky introduction signalled why students would keep coming back \u2013 OK so he wears a three-piece suit, but Tom Wolfe has a direct line into \u2018unrecognized subcultures of American life with their associated art and artefacts, objects of worship, ritual dances, totems and symbols. And what sub-cultures! Gamblers and Builders of Las Vegas, Abstract Artists and their patrons. Hot Rodders, Demolition Derbiests, Custom Car Creators, the brief but poignant coalescence of New York chic and the Black Panthers.\u2019 Wolfe\u2019s capacity to surf and strafe the <\/span>zeitgeist<\/span><\/i>, the power of his personality and even his mode of dress pulled listeners back night after night. He looked great, but he didn\u2019t sound great.\u00a0 The conversational style of delivery and the Virginia man of letters voice worked well at the outset, but by the second lecture he was struggling with laryngitis; so much so that Taylor intended cancelling the event until at the last moment Wolfe croaked the show must go on. Delivery as much as content may explain why the BBC never broadcast the lectures on Radio 3. Tom Sutcliffe, then a young radio producer, had acquired permission from both Faber and UKC to record Wolfe. Today a familiar voice on Radio 4, Sutcliffe has no recollection of visiting Canterbury, and the recordings that do exist are clearly in-house and of poor quality.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The BBC did receive a copy of the lecture transcripts; according to Taylor successive typists struggled to interpret \u2013 or rather misinterpret \u2013 Wolfe\u2019s multiple cultural references, but by Christmas the job was done (this was clearly a thankless task and poorly rewarded, but it\u2019s hard not to smile at so much unintentional humour). The first lecture, on \u2018The Natural History of the Contemporary Artist\u2019, generated a lot of laughs, not least because the speaker was strikingly different from so many of his sober, sombre predecessors (having said that, were series veterans comparing him with Jonathan Miller, a performer rare in combining wit and gravitas?). Not for the last time Wolfe leaned heavily on <\/span>The Painted Word<\/span><\/i>, riffing for long stretches at a time on the cultural geography of Soho, the gurus and gallery fixers of downtown New York, and the vacuity of tyro artists desperate for recognition.\u00a0 His remarks were strikingly combative, not least his dismissal of Robert Hughes and John Russell.\u00a0 This was a clever observer of absurdity working an audience, and my recollection is that it worked; but on paper his remarks read like a jaundiced middle-aged man sounding off. Dan Taylor had promised us that, \u2018Sometimes he is critical, even sharp; more often he celebrates varieties of life and art and their uncelebrated exponents.\u00a0 Always he is witty, elegant, accurate and generous.\u2019 Well, witty yes \u2013 and on balance elegant and accurate \u2013 but generous most definitely not.\u00a0 The same could be said for the three lectures that followed.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Taylor and the laryngitis-stricken Wolfe each apologised for the brevity of \u2018The Social Position of Artistic Styles\u2019, but as it transpired the second lecture wasn\u2019t that much shorter than the first.\u00a0 Here it transpired was a restatement of the \u2018New Journalism\u2019 manifesto. Thus Wolfe began in biographical mode recalling how awful he found living with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, but how necessary it had been if immersive reporting was to keep alive the four great devices of realism \u2013 \u2018scene by scene construction, extended realistic dialogue, the notion of status details, and the use of point of view\u2019 \u2013 at a time when modernism and experimentalism had destroyed the fiction of Dickens and Somerset Maugham (one of Wolfe\u2019s unfashionable heroes): \u2018these devices which were stumbled upon and invented by people like Richardson and Fielding in the 18<\/span>th<\/span> century were an invention to jog human memory in ways that caused the individual to relive experiences and I for one cannot understand how any writer once having tapped that power could ever voluntarily abandon it.\u2019 In railing against a metropolitan elite that consciously set out to destroy Dickens\u2019s credibility as a \u2018writer of the people\u2019, and in bizarrely insisting that the Oxbridge tutorial was to blame for a plethora of young British essayists but a dearth of young British novelists, Wolfe demonstrated his ignorance of the contemporary literary scene this side of the Atlantic, and his readiness to wage culture wars in a fashion all too familiar today.\u00a0 Once more we saw the combative tone, as in the <\/span>NYRB<\/span><\/i>\u2019s founders stocking the paper \u2018like a trout pond with British writers\u2026Very soon the <\/span>New York Review of Books<\/span><\/i> became known as the London Review of Bores,\u2019 its editor Bob Silvers cultivating \u2018the best mid-Atlantic accent\u2026it almost reaches the Welsh coast.\u2019\u00a0 Yes we all laughed, but on paper few gags stand the test of time.\u00a0 With hindsight, however, we can see Wolfe working out the ideas that shaped <\/span>The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/span><\/i> \u2013 if any Victorian author deserved a name check it was surely the Trollope of <\/span>The Way We Were<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On Wednesday night, with his voice partially restored and special guests filling row A, Wolfe confided to his audience that \u2018The Political D\u00e9cor of the Artist\u2019 was a subject \u2018particularly close to my heart.\u2019\u00a0 A veritable <\/span>tour de force<\/span><\/i> which took in everyone from Antonio Gramsci to Eldridge Cleaver, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to AJP Taylor, the lecture lambasted ideologically naive fellow travellers stranded by Stalinism and their Cold War successors: the misguided liberals of \u2018radical chic\u2019 who deliberately ignored the community activism taking place all around them.\u00a0 This was a bravura performance, and yet in written form the over long riffs and digressions highlight a now familiar absence of focus and intellectual coherence.\u00a0 There was a heavy dependence on <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i>, but fashionable architects got off lightly as Wolfe had bigger fish to fry. Easy targets ranged from French cultural theory (\u2018mannerist Marxism\u2019) to Italian cinema (at lavish coke-fuelled premiere parties Armani-suited directors declared their new films\u2019 working-class credentials); the likes of the newly disgraced Anthony Blunt or the <\/span>Nation<\/span><\/i>\u2019s editor Victor Navaski wore the \u2018amulet of proletarianism\u2019 while avoiding any contact with actual workers. Wolfe\u2019s heroes were few and far between \u2013 step forward Alexander Solzhenitsyn and, surprisingly, Susan Sontag.\u00a0 In conclusion he declared Pol Pot to be \u2018perhaps the most rational leader of the 20th century,\u2019 because he had uncompromisingly carried out a blueprint for revolutionary terror learnt in Paris decades earlier.\u00a0 With his audience either in shock or asleep Wolfe ended with a contrived joke that conflated punk rock and <\/span>The Communist Manifesto<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Cue long applause, but no standing ovation.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018The Social Uses of Contemporary Art\u2019 (why \u2018Art has become the religion of the educated classes in the West\u2019) was a lecture too far. Wolfe should have quit the night before while he was still ahead. Many of the hard-core faithful present on the last night would have read <\/span>The Painted Word<\/span><\/i> and\/or <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i>, and therefore been familiar with much of what Wolfe had to say. To be fair he saved one or two great stories until the end, most memorably his recollection of the woman listening to the exhibition commentary on her Walkman who halfway through MOMA\u2019s Picasso retrospective loudly protested, \u2018But <\/span>this<\/span><\/i> isn\u2019t his Blue Period!\u2019. For all the sardonic observations on Manhattan cultural malarkey Wolfe did have some interesting things to say. He explained for a non-American audience the East Coast \u2018hierarchy of museum giving\u2019, and he described how the Vietnam War Memorial\u2019s designers ignored vets\u2019 suggestions for an easily traceable listing of dead comrades. But what of today\u2019s controversies, as seen by Wolfe four decades back? Would, for example, contemporary environmentalists hail his attack on Exxon sponsorship of PBS TV as a prescient recognition of \u2018greenwashing\u2019? The \u2018Black Lives Matter\u2019 movement would surely be appalled by Wolfe\u2019s defence of statue building as a means of uniting communities, not least in his native Richmond: amid huge controversy the Virginia state capital\u2019s statue of Robert E. Lee was removed from its plinth in September 2021; had he still been alive Wolfe would surely have insisted the Lee Monument remain in place. Tom Wolfe and cancel culture was a collision only narrowly avoided \u2013 he died in 2018. Back in October 1983, the lecture\u2019s final fifteen minutes constituted a rehash of the conclusion in <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i> (in summation, \u2018Western culture is in a severe crisis of its own making, believe me!\u2019), but the closing remarks were gracious, stylish and clear evidence of how Wolfe could work a room, even one as big as Cornwallis \u2013 no one escaped his gratitude, not least Dan and Matilda Taylor.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The following afternoon Dan and Matilda waved goodbye to their guest; three hours later Wolfe was in Terminal 3 awaiting Flight BA195 to JFK.\u00a0 It\u2019s clear from subsequent correspondence that Dan and Tom had got on really well.\u00a0 Taylor was warm in his appreciation of Wolfe\u2019s overall performance: \u2018You gave everybody a lot to think about and a great deal of pleasure and this place certainly needs stimulation [!!].\u2019\u00a0 The two men would go on to swap news about families, health issues and the weather.\u00a0 Wolfe by early 1984 had received transcripts and cassette recordings, but not his fee.\u00a0 Mortified at the University\u2019s failure to reimburse his new friend, and with sterling worth less against the dollar than in October, Taylor secured an immediate payment at the previous autumn\u2019s rate of exchange.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Taylor had already passed on to Faber & Faber Wolfe\u2019s claim for a single flight from Washington to London and a single flight home to New York. Dan confided to Tom that \u2018Matthew Evans went a little pale when he heard you had arrived by Concorde but it will be good experience for him.\u2019 Faber\u2019s chairman was more than \u2018a little pale\u2019 when asked to sign off a claim for $3,988 [\u00a32,624 \u2013 \u00a311,100 today].\u00a0 Wolfe\u2019s effrontery would enter company legend, not least as it was already clear there could be no book.\u00a0 The lectures would have to be drastically edited, and rewritten to avoid replicating much of <\/span>The Painted Word<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>From Bauhaus to Our House<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0 Focused on writing the <\/span>magnum opus<\/span><\/i>, Wolfe wasn\u2019t interested in turning his random notes into a readable, marketable text \u2013 he wasn\u2019t that short of money (the catalogue guide to Wolfe\u2019s papers in New York Public Library confirms that only late in life did he start to write out lectures).\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dan Taylor hosted one more speaker before his second term as college master ended. The lecture series carried on, with Seamus Heaney delivering a memorable performance in 1986 (the lectures were published in Heaney\u2019s second prose collection, <\/span>The Government of The Tongue<\/span><\/i>). Yet year by year the Kent campus was losing its distinctive collegiate identity.\u00a0 Students and lecturers \u2013 by now concentrated in departments \u2013 no longer strongly identified with their respective colleges.\u00a0 With Faber\u2019s interest flagging, and Valerie Eliot well into her seventies, the Eliot Memorial Lectures had less significance for younger academics.\u00a0 Unwanted controversy surrounding the choice of Tom Paulin for the 1996 lectures saw all parties agree that the series had run its course. Henceforth the T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture was a one-off occasion and no longer a fixed event in the university calendar; publicity for speakers such as Marina Warner (2017) and Kamila Shamsie (2022) listed distinguished predecessors such as Heaney and Edward Said, but with no mention of Tom Wolfe.\u00a0 A Google search provides no evidence of a connection between Wolfe and the Eliot Memorial Lectures, nor does the NYPL\u2019s on-line archival guide.\u00a0 However, a close reading of <\/span>The Bonfire of the Vanities<\/span><\/i> reveals the University of Kent to be expat journalist Peter Fallow\u2019s <\/span>alma mater<\/span><\/i> (had the original text been serialised in <\/span>The New Yorker<\/span><\/i> and not <\/span>Rolling Stone<\/span><\/i> an assiduous fact-checker would have pointed out the unlikelihood of a sixteen year-old Fallow attending university, let alone one yet to open).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Viewing the Michael Lewis\/Richard Dewey documentary <\/span>Radical Wolfe<\/span><\/i> it\u2019s hard to imagine their smart, smooth, hugely photogenic, metropolitan dandy hunkering down in east Kent for a fall break (one can safely assume Wolfe had never heard of UKC until he met Stephen Bayley: what was it, Kent State\u2019s year abroad annexe?).\u00a0 There is something surreal about Tom Wolfe \u2013 the polite Southern wordsmith masking a master of the character assassination \u2013 taking afternoon tea in the Master\u2019s flat, touring the Templeman Library and quietly bemoaning British standards of dry cleaning.\u00a0 It\u2019s striking that he never wrote about the experience \u2013 it\u2019s hard to imagine Joan Didion passing up such a glorious opportunity to anatomize provincial English academia.\u00a0 Most likely Wolfe needed to prioritise the novel, but perhaps he shrank from satirising such generous and appreciative hosts.\u00a0 Making a few bucks out of Faber & Faber was one thing, but poking fun at Dan, his family and his colleagues was cheap and unworthy.\u00a0 Wolfe\u2019s default target was the elite liberal with his or her supposedly warped social conscience, but this wasn\u2019t the Columbia Steps or Harvard Yard. The Master of Eliot College embodied a conservative institution, the members of which were doing their best to educate and to support young people at an impressionable age.\u00a0 This might have been a deeply patronising view of the Eliot Senior Common Room, let alone their students, but I suspect it explains why Wolfe wandered around campus with a permanently wry smile on his face \u2013 \u2018I\u2019m hanging out with the little guys and, hey you know what, it\u2019s fun!\u2019.\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Thank you to Stephen Bayley, Robert McCrum, Tom Sutcliffe, Henry Claridge and Beth Astridge, University Archivist at the University of Kent.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Adrian Smith is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Words by Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. There he stood, silently acknowledging an awestruck audience as his host … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80151,"featured_media":5219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5218"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/80151"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5218"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5234,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5218\/revisions\/5234"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/development\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}