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Show Acting Alone Page 4Q2 for. Tom Wolfe seemed to have the intellect, but had sunk into an early - or, rather, considering his background, belated - bourgeois complacency that made him tend these days to fasten the talons of his righteous indignation on esthetics and manners rather than on politics and morality. And before this Norman Mailer monster could grunt twenty pages into a dictaphone, he would probably himself pull some stunt even more nauseatingly newsworthy than the Elder's own, overshadowing all these months of effort and carefully conceived planning with a single act of, say, accessory to murder, a stabbing in Greenwich Village, for example. Relative fame, of course, was no consideration. That, along with rave reviews and national literary awards, can be bought in a matter of minutes these days. Egolessness and ideological malleability in the author himself cannot be bought, and certainly can't be induced without a certain robotization of libido which, of course, would be fatal to the perniciousness of the writing itself. Simply by virtue of his being a member of the Narcotics and Licentiousness Generation, that loose clumping of arrested adolescents whose grey cells have been largely fried away and whose souls have been set adrift by a complete removal of any ethical standards whatever, the Edwine youngster could be relied upon to have a very slight degree of ego and ideology. And the extra expenditures required to buy Sammy the eyes and ears and hearts and souls and pocketbooks of America's reading public (in other words, to ransom them from "Garp" Irving, who evidently came by them in a similar fashion) would be more than justified by the practical conveniences of working with a "new author." As Elder Cicerone's strident young associate known as the political theorist pointed out, an established writer would be too difficult to discreetly disappear |