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| Original dust jacket cover of The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979. |
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| Tom Wolfe, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 1980. His look seems to be saying, "Yes, I am the Tom Wolfe!" |
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| The Mercury 7 astronauts, 1960. |
Tom Wolfe, writing in his classic book The Right Stuff about the Mercury 7 astronauts, the first American
men in space, gets directly to the heart of what made these men tick. Most of
the Mercury 7 astronauts were military test pilots, and being a military test
pilot is about the hardest damned thing there is. It is the apex of singular
macho pride. Those pilots are pushing the envelope of those planes every single
day! And they are doing it by themselves! Sure, there's a whole crowd of
support people on the ground, but up there, in the wild blue yonder, you are it! There's just you, and your
judgement, your daring, your reflexes, your instincts, your STUFF, responsible
for that plane. And if you have the right stuff, you'll bring that plane back
safely. If you don’t have the right stuff, well, there’s a 23% chance you’ll
die in an accident.
What exactly is “the right stuff”? Wolfe never gives the reader
a brief definition, but it’s a combination of several things, all adding up to
a cool unflappability in the face of possible death.
Wolfe writes of “the right stuff,” “Perhaps because it could
not be talked about, the subject began to take on superstitious and even
mystical outlines. A man either had it or he didn’t! There was no such thing as
having most of it. Moreover, it could
blow at any seam.” (p.21)
There were numerous pitfalls along the way for anyone who
wanted to make a career out of being a military pilot. Early in the book, Wolfe
describes how the status of pilots was assessed in terms of the right stuff:
“Nor was there a test to
show whether or not a pilot had this righteous quality. There was, instead, a
seemingly infinite series of tests. A career in flying was like climbing one of
those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and
ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was
to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the
elected and anointed ones who had the
right stuff and could move higher and higher and even-ultimately, God
willing, one day-that you might be able to join that special few at the very
top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very
Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.” (P.17-8)
Wolfe returns to the image of the ziggurat numerous times
throughout the book, and it’s a perfect metaphor that lingers with the reader.
The Right Stuff introduces
us to the world of American test pilots after World War II, and to one of the
most colorful characters in the book, Chuck Yeager, perhaps the ne plus ultra of the right stuff. Yeager
was cool and laconic, and never seemed to feel the pressure of his job, even during
his successful attempt to break the sound barrier in 1947 in the Bell X-1.
Wolfe vividly describes the California desert around Muroc
Field, now known as Edwards Air Force Base, where much of the testing of the
1940’s and 1950’s happened. Wolfe writes of the landscape: “Other than
sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant
world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a
dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua
trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic
nightmare.” (p.36)
Yeager basically disappears from the book once the Mercury 7
astronauts were chosen, and The Right
Stuff focuses on the sometimes complicated relationship the seven men had
with each other. One of my favorite parts in the whole book was Wolfe’s
description of astronauts Gus Grissom and Deke Slayton:
“As soon as Gus arrived at the Cape, he would put on clothes
that were Low Rent even by Cocoa Beach standards. Gus and Deke both wore these
outfits. You could see them tooling around the Strip in Cocoa Beach in their
Ban-Lon shirts and baggy pants. The atmosphere was casual at Cocoa Beach, but
Gus and Deke knew how to squeeze casual until it screamed for mercy. They
reminded you, in a way, of those fellows whom everyone growing up in America
had seen at one time or another, those fellows from the neighborhood who wear
sport shirts designed in weird blooms and streaks of tubercular blue and
runny-egg yellow hanging out over pants the color of a fifteen-cent cigar, with
balloon seats and pleats and narrow cuffs that stop three or four inches above
the ground, the better to reveal their olive-green GI socks and black bulb-toed
bluchers, as they head off to the Republic Auto Parts store for a set of
shock-absorber pads so they can prop up the 1953 Hudson Hornet on some
cinderblocks and spend Saturday and Sunday underneath it beefing up the
suspension.” (P.132-3)
I love that description. It’s so wonderfully vivid. You can
see Gus and Deke very clearly in your mind. It’s passages like this that make
Tom Wolfe such a great writer. It’s a passage that you would never read in a
more “scholarly” book about the Mercury space program, but because it’s a more
unorthodox way of writing, and more similar to a description that you would
read in a novel, Wolfe gets you closer to the truth of what Gus and Deke were
probably like.
The long sections of the book where Wolfe re-creates the
astronaut's flights are amazing. It gets as close as we can to being inside
their heads during those moments. And it seems to prove that picking astronauts
from test pilots was the right thing to do, despite the quibbles of some climbing
the ziggurat who squawked that the astronauts weren’t even really pilots
because they weren’t in full control of the capsule! They were just passengers,
there to enjoy the view! Sure some of the Mercury flights were relatively easy,
but some were not-Gordon Cooper's flight especially. You needed someone who
knew how to handle that pressure and make the right decisions in real time.
Someone who had, yes, the right stuff!
John Glenn is one of the most vivid figures in the book, as
he quickly became the chief media spokesperson for the Mercury 7 astronauts.
Glenn was always amiable, and while some of the other astronauts looked askance
at his goody two-shoes attitude, Tom Wolfe rather enjoyed Glenn. Wolfe said of
Glenn in a 1981 interview: “It’s very rare to see a man in our day-outside the
Church-who is a moral zealot and who doesn’t hide the fact; who constantly
announces what he believes in and the moral standards he expects people to
follow. To me that’s much rarer and more colorful than the Joe Namath-rake figure
who is much more standard these days.” (Conversations
with Tom Wolfe, p.164)
After Glenn’s successful flight in 1962, in which he became
the first American to orbit the earth, President John F. Kennedy’s father, old
Joe Kennedy himself, broke down in tears when he met Glenn. Wolfe wrote, “That
was what the sight of John Glenn did to Americans at that time. It primed them
for the tears. And those tears ran like a river all over America. It was an
extraordinary thing, being the sort of mortal who brought tears to other men’s
eyes.” (p.282)
From a historical perspective, more than thirty five years
after The Right Stuff was published,
Wolfe was right to focus a lot of attention on Glenn, as he became the biggest
hero from the early space program. Thanks to Glenn’s four terms in the United
States Senate, along with his return to space in 1998, his celebrity among the
average American far outstrips that of Alan Shepard, who beat out Glenn for the
honor of commanding the first Mercury flight in 1961.
The Right Stuff was
an instant hit among both critics and the public. In the same 1981 interview
quoted above, Wolfe was asked about the feedback he got from the astronauts
about the book. Wolfe replied, “I’ve had varied reactions. Some of them really
seemed to like it, or at least to have said that it’s accurate, which means
more to me than whether or not they really liked it. Alan Shepard, I know,
doesn’t like it because every time he’s asked he says, ‘I haven’t read it and
I’m not going to.’” (Conversations with
Tom Wolfe, p.164)
Wolfe admitted that The
Right Stuff was a difficult book to write, and it had a long gestation
period. Wolfe had first gotten intrigued by the astronauts at the very end of
the Apollo program, as he wrote about Apollo 17, the last mission to the moon
in December of 1972, for Rolling Stone magazine.
Wolfe quickly knew the material could be expanded to a book, as he said in a
1973 interview with Publishers Weekly, “the
title will probably be The Right Stuff,”
and “The reigning fantasy is that it will be ready by fall.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.31) That
obviously didn’t happen, as Wolfe admitted in 1979, “I would do almost anything
at times to avoid working on it…which may be the reason I published three other
books during that period.” (Conversations
with Tom Wolfe, p.107)
One of those other books was the essay collection Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter &
Vine, published in 1976, which I reviewed here. A highlight of Mauve Gloves was the article “The Truest
Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie,” about fighter pilots in Vietnam. Wolfe
comes close to naming “the right stuff” in this passage: “Within the fraternity
of men who did this sort of thing day in and day out-within the flying
fraternity, that is-mankind appeared to be sheerly divided into those who have
it and those who don’t-although just what it
was…was never explained.” (Mauve
Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, p.45)
Wolfe humorously discussed his problems finishing The Right Stuff in a 1981 interview with
Joshua Gilder, published in Saturday Review: “I even got to the point where I wore
clothes in which I couldn’t go out into the street. Such as khaki pants; you
know, I think it’s demeaning. I can’t go out into the street in khaki pants or
jeans.” Gilder then asks the natural follow up question: “You own a pair of
jeans?” Wolfe answers, “I have one pair of ‘Double X’ Levis, which I bought in
La Porte, Texas, in a place that I was told was an authentic Texas cowboy
store, just before I started working on The
Right Stuff. I’ve had them on, but I’ve never worn them below the third
floor. So I put on a pair of khaki pants and a turtleneck sweater, a heavy
sweater.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.161)
In another 1981 interview, which was not published until
1983, Wolfe discussed the structural challenges of The Right Stuff. “The book was extremely difficult to write. There
was no central character, no protagonist…The problem of giving the book a
narrative structure, some sort of drive and suspense, was quite tough.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.182) Wolfe
is right about the book not having a central character. If Chuck Yeager had
been chosen to be an astronaut, it would have been easy-he clearly would have
been the central figure. As it is, Yeager looms large in the beginning of the
book, and then disappears once the astronauts for the Mercury program are selected,
at which point John Glenn becomes the central figure in the narrative.
In that same interview, Wolfe was asked if he was pleased
with the reception of the book. He said, “I felt that it was my best book. I
very consciously tried to make the style fit the particular world I was writing
about, mainly the world of military pilots. To have had a prose as wound up as
the prose of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test would have been a stylistic mistake.” (Conversations with Tom Wolfe, p.181)
Tom Wolfe devotees shouldn’t worry about the prose style
being too laid back, there are still plenty of exclamation points, and some pet
Wolfe phrases reappear throughout the book, as people are “packed in shank to
flank,” (p.85) and the reader is told to “deny it, if you wish!” (p.303) However,
no one in The Right Stuff is described
as arteriosclerotic, which was a pet word of Wolfe’s in his first book, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline
Baby.
The Right Stuff feels
like a perfect book for its time. Wolfe’s portrait of the Mercury 7 astronauts as
genuine American heroes resonated just as America ended the bewildering decade
of the 1970’s, in which she had seen her power and might slip, and moved into
the more patriotic 1980’s, led by Ronald Reagan, who loved stories about
American heroism. I wonder if Ronnie ever read The Right Stuff? Well, he probably saw the movie.
Tom Wolfe is at his very best throughout The Right Stuff, and it’s one of the
best books of his long career.
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