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"... as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty...."

I hope you're with me, 84% of the way into Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities." Here's a snippet from conversation at a party Sherman McCoy attends after his ignominious arrest. What's amusing for the reader is that the snooty arty guests who wanted nothing to do with him at an earlier party, now find him quite fascinating. My selection begins with dialogue from a novelist, emptily named Nunnally Voyd:

"I must tell you, I’ve thought about you more than once over the past few days. Welcome to the legion of the damned…now that you’ve been properly devoured by the fruit flies.... The press. I’m amused by all the soul-searching these…insects do. 'Are we too aggressive, too cold-blooded, too heartless?'—as if the press were a rapacious beast, a tiger. I think they’d like to be thought of as bloodthirsty. That’s what I call praise by faint damnation. They’ve got the wrong animal. In fact, they’re fruit flies. Once they get the scent, they hover, they swarm. If you swing your hand at them, they don’t bite it, they dart for cover, and as soon as your head is turned, they’re back again. They’re fruit flies. But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that."

Despite the fact that this grand literatus was using his predicament as a pedestal upon which to place this entomological conceit, this set piece that came out a bit shopworn in the delivery, Sherman was grateful. In some way Voyd was, indeed, a brother, a fellow legionnaire. He seemed to recall—he had never paid much attention to literary gossip—that Voyd had been stigmatized as homosexual or bisexual. There had been some sort of highly publicized squabble…How very unjust! How dare these…insects pester this man who, while perhaps a bit affected, had such largeness of spirit, such sensitivity to the human condition? What if he was…gay? The very word gay popped into Sherman’s head spontaneously. (Yes, it is true. A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.)

I'll give you 6 thoughts...

1. Sherman finds himself suddenly using the word "gay" — it's the mid-80s — and when he does that he realizes he's become a liberal..

2. I think Tom Wolfe invented the adage "A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested." It's a twist on the old adage, "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." Looking to see how old that adage is, I find — on one of those famous-quotes sites — "If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested," and that's attributed to Tom Wolfe! They're just misquoting "Bonfire," where the new adage appears and the reader is supposed to recognize the twist on the old adage. The misquote spells out what Wolfe trusts you to get. (Or am I wrong? Maybe on some other occasion Tom Wolfe said it the pedestrian way. I like to think he did not.)

3. This passage caught my attention because it had animals — insects and, also (fleetingly), a tiger. Nunnally Voyd, the character, was trying to get attention, and it worked on me. The mere arrival of insects is interesting, novels being so relentlessly about people people people. Wolfe — he's named after an animal — must see into The Voyd and know his tricks and tendencies. Voyd loves expounding within a metaphor and indulges himself into the face of the suffering McCoy.

4. McCoy is needy, so he enjoys the performance even as he knows what's awful about it — the "set piece" is "shopworn." At the earlier party, his problem was that, as a financier, he was just boring to the arty people. Now, as a criminal, he excites them, and he responds by feeling a sense of brotherhood — fellow feeling for a man he has really has nothing in common with. But as an outsider to the larger society, McCoy is interesting to the artists, who get energy from him, now that he's — if you believe the insect press — a near-murderer.

5. Is the press like fruit flies? Voyd wields his conceit with the novelist's confidence. And Wolfe writes of the novelist's confidence with his own novel confidence. Wolfe's confidence is sublimely secure because he uses a character to spout ideas that are interesting but might be wrong. In fact, the wrongness of the idea might be the point of having Voyd express them. The press is killing McCoy.

6. Did Wolfe intend for us to think about the Sartre play, "The Flies"? I don't know, but Wolfe said this in a 1988 interview: "You know, Sartre was famous for the statement, in the play, No Exit, 'Hell is other people.' To which Claude Levi-Strauss said, 'No. Hell is ourselves.' And the inferno that I try to present in The Bonfire of the Vanities is internal...."

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