Tom Wolfe, in an interview with The Guardian, notes the tendency of the American left to label its critics reactionary, regardless of their actual beliefs:

"If I have been judged to be right wing," he says, "I think this is because of the things I have mocked. It started with Radical Chic [published in 1970, about a fundraising party for the Black Panthers organised by Leonard Bernstein]. I was denounced because people thought I had jeopardised all progressive causes. But my impulse was not political, it was simply the absurdity of the occasion. Then I wrote The Painted Word, about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. Then came The Right Stuff [his account of America's first astronauts], after which my relative enthusiasm for Nasa was another sign of perfidy."

He is "proud", he says, "that I do not think any political motivation can be detected in my long books. My idol is Emile Zola. He was a man of the left, so people expected of him a kind of Les Miserables, in which the underdogs are always noble people. But he went out, and found a lot of ambitious, drunk, slothful and mean people out there. Zola simply could not - and was not interested in - telling a lie. You can call it honesty, or you can call it ego, but there it is. There is no motivation higher than being a good writer."

There's another good piece on Wolfe in yesterday's New York Times.

Thanks to Maurice Black for the Guardian link.

Poor embattled Tom Wolfe! As he sits in his luxurious Manhatten home, before his grand piano, he is clearly a political martyr, the victim of a vast left-wing conspiracy.

We would never want to call a writer conservative who dons a white linen Southern Colonel suit and complains about the sexual libertinism of college students. Confederate chic!

Still, his new novel sounds radical. You mean, top colleges admit atheletes without the intellectual abilities to succeed? And the students have sex? O shame! Next you'll be telling me that young ladies wear skirts that don't cover their legs and young men dance in a hip-shaking fashion like . . . like . . . black people!

There but for the grace of Tom Wolfe go I! He'll protect us from the hormonal barbarians at the gate!

Has he never heard of *Less Than Zero*?

The *Guardian* interview is great, though. His example of "out of touch" lefties comes from an elite dinner he attended. Could it be that the man who reads NYC publishing dinners as political synedoches for the whole US is, well, out of touch himself? Somehow, half the country votes to the left; how then can all liberals be part of this Tina-Brown-blue-state cultural elite?

There's nothing worse than a Southern-emigre Manhatten populist. You know that mofo is selling snake-oil.