James Wolcott

James Wolcott’s books include a memoir of New York in the 1970s, Lucking Out, and an essay collection, Critical Mass.

Bow. Wow: Gore Vidal

James Wolcott, 3 February 2000

‘I love dead, hate living,’ intones Boris Karloff’s monster in Bride of Frankenstein. He’s not alone. ‘I prefer my subjects dead,’ Fred Kaplan confesses in the prelude to his ambitious biography of Gore Vidal. Kaplan, a professor of English in New York whose taxidermies include Henry James, Dickens and Carlyle (they hardly get deader than Carlyle), understands that it’s much easier to get the paperwork done if you don’t have the living-breathing item second-guessing you at every turn or trying to use you as a ventriloquist’s dummy. It’s also easier getting friends, former lovers, fellow writers and disgruntled airline attendants to open up once so-and-so is out of the picture. (No one wanted to cross Lillian Hellman while she was still alive and smoking.)‘

Skating Charm: Kenneth Tynan

James Wolcott, 13 December 2001

Kenneth Tynan smoked like a maestro, an aficionado of his own smooth technique. As the stripper sings in Gypsy, ‘Ya gotta have a gimmick,’ and photograph after photograph shows Tynan squiring a cigarette between the tips of his middle and ring fingers (his trademark), each puff drawing attention to the languid elegance of his long, slender, concert-pianist hands. Cigarettes were...

Hoogah-Boogah: Rick Moody

James Wolcott, 19 September 2002

The Black Veil is a study of depression as self-destructive ordeal, ancestral legacy and literary quest. Like a madly quaint Victorian production, ivy seems to sprout from the chock-a-block prose that threatens to turn each paragraph into university brick face.

Where Norman Mailer set out to bend the future with his telepathic powers and the Beats sought to hot-wire the American psyche (at the risk of frying their own circuits), Updike wrote as if he were doing fine draftsmanship under a cone of light, honouring creation and the American plenty. He was the ideal son of a platonic union between John Cheever and J.D. Salinger, with Nabokov attending the christening as fairy godfather. Apparent lack of inner struggle and purring efficiency made it possible to take him for granted. ‘No one has ever sat around worrying about Updike, the way one apparently worried about Wolfe and Fitzgerald and Hemingway, as if they were all soloing the Atlantic with each book, to see whether he’s lost his touch or his nerve or his fastball,’ Wilfrid Sheed wrote in Essays in Disguise. ‘We know damn well he’ll have his touch this time and next: we just want to see whether we like what he’s done with it.’

I adore your moustache: Styron’s Letters

James Wolcott, 24 January 2013

The novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos were among the last hurrahs of the postwar literary era dominated by heap big novelists now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males, whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway.

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