Books: Tom Wolfe and His Electric Wordmobiles

THE PUMP HOUSE GANG (309 pages) and THE ELECTRIC KOOL-AID ACID TEST (416 pages) by Tom Wolfe. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95 each.

The question is not only whether Tom Wolfe can be taken seriously but whether he can be taken at all. He uses a language that explodes with comic-book words like “POW!” and “boing.” His sentences are shot with ellipses, stabbed with exclamation points, or bombarded with long lists of brand names and anatomical terms. He is irritating, but he did develop a new journalistic idiom that has brought relief from standard Middle-High Journalese. His outlook is partly cool, partly hysterical, and just slightly unconventional enough to make it provocative. The need for journalists like Wolfe is clear, and he has become the most talked about, the most imitated, if not the most bewildering journalist of the ’60s. Wolfe’s first collection of articles—The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, written mostly for Esquire and New York magazine—was a carnival of pieces about custom-car styling and demolition derbies, teenage tribal rock music, Las Vegas, and the girl of the year. His reportage on the rages and outrages of modern America’s cultural phenomena was fascinating—and fatiguing.

Ravaging the Retinas. Perhaps the frugging, neon-lit, chromium-plated, plastic, pastel peregrinations of the times demanded a breathless roller-coaster rush of words to re-create the “shockkkkkk” of the real-life experience. But too often, Wolfe, dressed for the role in orange or off-white suits, merely seemed like an action-painter-writer recklessly ravaging the retinas with pastel word-blobs. Was he freaking out at the reader’s expense? Was he in fact a social critic using a comic-strip writer’s approach or a flack for pop cultists? A high priest of the gadgetry gods or the Walter Pater of contemporary esthetics? His two new books, bursting simultaneously like a couple of hot spray cans of Mace, suggest that the answers are all yes.

The Pump House Gang is a sequel to the earlier collection of articles. Wolfe, with characteristic flair, romps through such diverse subjects as Hugh Hefner, Natalie Wood, Marshall McLuhan, the California surfing cult, Carol Doda (the topless go-go girl with silicone-inflated breasts), the pop art collectors Bob and Spike Scull and teenage London society. What he achieves is an impressionistic interpretation of new status symbols and contemporary life styles.

Hip Mythology. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is a kind of nonfiction novel about Ken Kesey, the celebrated author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It is a more serious and successful attempt to proselytize the antic way of freaky esthetics. It may even be considered the New Testament of hip mythology: Wolfe implies a likeness between Kesey and various religious figures—including Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha. In 1964, Kesey forsook the literary world, having already established an LSD cult in La Honda, Calif. Wolfe records the events, carefully drawing religious parallels.

With his apostles—a group of hippies who called themselves the Merry Pranksters—Kesey set out on a manic, sometimes terrifying, sometimes comic trip through and “beyond catastrophe” to the eternal “Edge City.” LSD, Methedrine, DMT and pot were taken like communion wafers in a psyche-bucolic setting of redwood trees. Wolfe describes the scene, which was wired for folk-rock music and painted with luminescent colors:

“Suddenly, a whole bed, an old-fashioned iron bedstead, a mattress, a cover, but all glowing with mad stripes and swirls of orange, red, green, yellow Day-Glo. Then a crazed toy horse in a tree trunk. Then a telephone—a telephone—sitting up on a tree stump, glowing in the greeny deeps with beautiful glowing cords of many colors coming out of it. Then a TV set, only with mad Day-Glo designs painted on the screen. Then into a clearing, a flash of sunlight, and down the slope, here comes Kesey. He has on white Levi’s and a white T-shirt. He walks very erect and his huge muscled arms swing loose. The redwoods soar all around.”

Mass Baptism. Kesey and his apostles then began a pilgrimage which turned into a crusade. It was a trip aboard a 1939 International Harvester schoolbus, also paint-splashed and electronically amplified, from La Honda to New York City and back. The idea was to make converts and generally freak out the American countryside. The nation survived.

Later, Kesey and the hip Pranksters staged a mass baptism, with hundreds of people, some unknowingly, sipping Kool-Aid spiked with LSD. When Kesey was busted by the California police for possessing marijuana, he fled to Mexico. Suffering in the jungle wilderness, he wrestled with the temptations of the devil. Would he keep the faith? Finally, he returned to California to face his crucifixion in the courts. (He spent five months on a penal work farm, has since given up acid, and is now in Oregon writing a novel.)

Wolfe captures it all, the hilarity and the horror. But the trouble with this bacchanalian bible is that none of the characters seem like the live people they were and are. Wolfe never explains the real Kesey but is satisfied with presenting him as a comic-strip guru, prophet of psychedelia, and mind-blown messiah, rolled into one, acid-consuming, cosmic force. Perhaps that is the flaw in much of Wolfe’s writing. In his effort to come to terms with these phenomena, he often distorts more than he reveals. His mixed-media word show, boosted with screaming audio amplification, is well-suited to the hyped-up hallucinatory scenes of the acid generation. But the relentless speed of Wolfe’s electronic wordmobiles some times makes the reader wish for a few rest-stops this side of catastrophe.