Woman, 22, Kidnapped, Gang-Raped In Moving Car For 2 Hours Near Delhi The incident took place around 7 pm in Faridabad when a few men in a sports utility vehicle forcibly pulled her into the.

August 18, 1968

By C. D. B. BRYAN

om Wolfe's first book, 'The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby' was a success when it was published in 1965, not so much because of what he said about publicity-seeking social climbers, stock-car racing drivers, teen-recording entrepreneurs and lonely divorcee mothers intimidated by the 'Nanny Mafia,' but how he said it. Wolfe's style of journalism was something new, entirely his own, as young and exuberant and frenzied as the period he was depicting.

He intimately knew and wrote about what was happening--not just now, but NOW!, with an explosion of asterisks, exclamation points, italics and puppyish enthusiasm. So what if occasionally he seemed almost to parody himself? When Wolfe was good, he was very, very good. . .but when he was bad he took on The New Yorker in a two-part article for Clay Felker's New York Sunday magazine supplement of The Herald-Tribune. And, oh God, the arteriosclerotic old boys, as Wolfe would call them, slapped his wrists right up to his epiglottis--not so much because his New Yorker article was filled with gross inaccuracies (which it was), but because he had been rude (which he had been).

Now, Tom Wolfe has published two books the same day. Two books:::::----heeeeeewack----The same day!!!!! Too-o-o-o-o-o-o freaking MUCH!

'The Pump House Gang,' like 'The Kandy-Kolored etcetera,' is a collection of short, intimately subjective pieces about publicity-seeking social climbers, California surfing entrepreneurs, motorcycle racers, lonely London socialites and Eastern businessmen intimidated by the Not Our Class, Dear, Mafia. Wolfe's style is a little more subdued. He is a little older, and a lot more compassionate. There is still a lingering rhetorical 'so what?' that one asks oneself after reading some of the pieces, simply because, no matter how fresh a treatment an unrefreshing subject is given, one still remains bored. Teen-age California surfers are bores, really. Playboy's Hugh Hefner is a bore, really. The New York Hilton is a bore, really. Actress Natalie Wood is a--well, her taste in art is a bore, really. And yet, Tom Wolfe manages somehow to imbue them all with a semblance of life, no matter how depressing they may seem.

The best piece in this collection is 'Bob and Spike,' Wolfe's portrait of Robert and Ethel Scull. Superficially, it is a devastating caricature of New York society and its art world; actually, Wolfe has written a perceptive (and, at times, quite moving) story about two people in love with each other and Society. Wolfe, in his introduction, compared Hefner to Fitzgerald's Gatsby. Scull (a taxicab fleet owner cum Pop Art taste and Aristotelian ambitions) would have seemed the more striking comparison. Although Wolfe points out that others might snigger at the Sculls' social aspirations, he does not. With a great deal of compassion he has skillfully drawn the portrait of an absolutely contemporary New York couple. So what if they're not entirely likable? They have moxie and style--and one ultimately feels the same sort of affection for them that one feels, say, for the New York Mets.

Unfortunately, however, 'The Pump House Gang' isn't really much more than a remake, a 'Son of Kandy-Kolored.' It's good enough, but not in the same league as 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,' which is why I suppose he had it published on the same day, almost as if he, himself, looked upon it as a throwaway.

'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' is an astonishing book. It is to the hippie movement what Norman Mailer's 'The Armies of the Night' was to the Vietnam protest movement. Mailer was precisely the right author to capture the essence of those two days last October, when students, academic liberals, the intellectual New Left, the militants and nonmilitants and the marching mothers confronted the American Nazis, the Federal marshals and the United States Army on the steps of the Pentagon. Wolfe is precisely the right author to chronicle the transformation of Ken Kesey from respected author of 'And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' to an LSD enthusiast, to the messianic leader of a mystical band of Merry Pranksters, to a fugitive from the F.B.I., California police and Mexican Federales.

'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' is a celebration of psychedelia, of all its sounds and costumes, colors and fantasies. Wolfe, like Mailer, participates instead of merely reporting. Wolfe, like Mailer, makes no pretense of being objective. And it is Wolfe's involvement, as it was Mailer's involvement, that makes his book so successful, just as (inexorably) such involvement created some flaws. At times, Wolfe seems to be as indiscriminate an observer as a wide-angle camera panning back and forth across crowded rooms. At times, he dollies in for closeups of characters or incidents whose significance is never determined. And at other times he piles elaboration upon elaboration until reality is buried under illusions of evaluation.

It is Wolfe's enthusiasm and literary fireworks that make it difficult for the reader to remain detached. He does not hesitate to tell us what to think, how to react, even what to wear as he wings us along with Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters in a brightly painted, Ampex-loaded cross-country bus. Or on a weekend romp with the Hell's Angels. Or at a successful taking-over and turning-on of a Unitarian church convention. Or into the unintended debacle Kesey's Pranksters made of a protest rally, before they went into hiding in Mexico. Wolfe has written a marvelous book about a man I suspect is not so marvelous; and my reservations about his book stem from my feeling that some of Kesey's dazzle-dust still lingers in Wolfe's eyes.

Kesey's Commandment was that one must go beyond LSD, 'graduate from acid,' as he proclaimed over and over again. But Kesey never seemed able to, and never will be able to until he can graduate from his awesome sense of self-importance. Krishna arjun star plus serial wiki. Kesey never was advanced as far as another and younger apprentice mystic, Franny Glass, who 11 years ago was 'sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else's.' Kesey comes across in this book as a man inordinately aware of his own heroic potential. (So did Mailer, in 'Armies of the Night,' but he had a sense of humor about himself which one sorely misses in Kesey.)

Wolfe wrote in his Author's Note, 'For all the Pranksters, as I have attempted to show, the events described in this book were both a group adventure and a personal exploration. Many achieved great insight on both levels.' We-e-e-e-ll, I'm not so convinced about that. I would have liked to find in the book some evidence of their attempts to articulate those great insights, the new knowledge they gained of themselves which they didn't have before. I accept that they achieved more self-confidence, but insights. . .? What happens often with LSD (and what, I suspect, happened with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters) is that one dominant member of the group provides or insinuates or directs all of the insights and, of course, they are his. The others accept them, absorb them as if by osmosis, digest them, but these insights don't-really-have-any-meaning. One must go beyond acid. God is Love. Yes, well. . . .

Throughout 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,' Wolfe refers to dropping acid as the experience'; and no matter what one says pro or con LSD, it is a profound experience. And this, I think, is why Wolfe's book is so significant: it accurately and absolutely depicts the change that has occurred in the ethics of the American young, whose contemporary morality is based upon esthetic rather than social values. If it's beautiful, do it. The Protestant Ethic (work is the way to salvation and wordly achievement a sign of God's favor, to which one adds a pinch of forsake pleasure now for deeper and greater satisfaction later) is being replaced by the fundamental value of the immediate, direct experience, the Pleasure Now principle.

Drugs do provided the immediate, direct experience, the Instant Profundity, witness Kesey and his Merry Pranksters; but one finds it difficult to accept Kesey as a leader, mystic or otherwise, after he permitted the Electric Kool-Aid to be served at the Watts Acid Test, where many people drank it unaware the Kool-Aid was heavily laced with LSD. That's playing God with people's minds and nobody, nobody has the right to do that. If there ever was an opportunity for Wolfe to draw some objective conclusions about Kesey, that was the moment Wolfe chose not to. He never looked back, but instead continued to describe the activities of the band of Merry Pranksters as if to suggest it was all in good fun. A lot of the book is good fun. It is an astonishing, enlightening, at times baffling, and explosively funny book.

'The Pump House Gang' is illustrated adequately by the author; 'The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' is not illustrated. Instead, Wolfe has slipped in some of his poetry. Slipped in. Which reveals how his style has been influenced by

Influenced by.
Edgar Allan Poe and Rudyard Kipling and a host of anonymous limerick authors.
Poe. Kipling:::::
Huhhhhhhhhhnnnnnhhh Ulalume. Gunga Din. The Tomb.
BRANGGGGGGGGGGGG. . . . .
E-e-e-e-e-eEE!
About that poetry: Nevermore.

Mr. Bryan teaches at the Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa. He is the author of a novel, 'P. S. Wilkinson.'