Wolfe interview

[Begin Tape 1, Side 2]
Wolfe: He also lived right there on the campus in a house that he owned until recently.
He sold it to Washington and Lee since I was on the board, so seven or eight years ago,
maybe, or less.
Warren: It seems that many of the faculty were right there. Was there socializing with
the faculty?
Wolfe: Oh, sure. Not in the sense of—I don't remember faculty members who invited
students just on a purely social basis, but often, many times you were invited to faculty
homes in the company of other students, and that was terrific. You really would get to
know some of these people, and Marshall was like that.

         There was another teacher, George Foster, also lived right there on the campus.
He taught creative—
Warren: I don't know that name. Who was he?
Wolfe: He was in the English department. I forget what his scholarly areas were, but he
had the one creative writing course, and he was also a very warm teacher who enjoyed
being around students. There are a lot of teachers who do not enjoy being around
students, but that's not true generally at Washington and Lee, which makes a huge
difference.

         I don't know whether this is the talk of mine that you heard on tape or not, but if
it is, I don't want to repeat myself. In my junior year, I took his creative writing course
and we met at the Dutch Inn, which is still there, I believe, and we had a little room in

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the Dutch Inn. There were about ten of us, as I recall, in that class. Another student in
that class was William Hoffman. Does that name ring any bells?
Warren: No.
Wolfe: He was a veteran who had graduated from Hampden-Sydney, and he had
another year on his G.I. Bill. He had been through about five years of combat in the
Second World War, so he had everything you could get in terms of the G.I. Bill. He had
another year, and he decided to come to Washington and Lee to spend a year there, and
he was a writer, an aspiring writer, so he was also in this. We had to write continually,
which is really the best part of a creative writing course, anyway, as a vehicle to force
you to write. We would read our stories aloud. You didn't have Xerox machines in
those days, and we would read our stories aloud, and they would be criticized by the
other students and by George Foster. Those were wonderful sessions.

         Bill Hoffman was by far the best writer in the class. He wrote some short stories
about the Second World War that I can remember to this day, which he developed into
a book that was quite successful, called The Trumpet Unblown, a novel that was highly
praised in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, everybody. I really think the atmosphere
could not have existed any place other than someplace like Washington and Lee, where
instead of having God knows how many people in a creative writing course, as would
be true at a large university, you had a small group. You constantly heard each other's
work and you had somebody like George Foster, with whom you could talk not only
during that class, but you'd see him on campus and you might be at his house.

         I think there's a lot of reaction now against the big university, where there are big
names who are little more than that to the students. There are academic stars who give
a big lecture and that's the last you see of them. Washington and Lee's teacher-student
ratio is very low. They stand eleven to one now, and it was probably about like that at
that time also, which is a tremendous advantage. Also you did a lot of writing, not just
in something like a creative writing course, but there were just constant papers. I think

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teachers can put up with a lot of writing if there's not so many students. Anyway, that
was all very valuable for anybody who wants to write.

         I'm trying to think. There was one other person in that course. I just blanked out
on him, who also became a published writer, a novelist, and that's three out of ten,
that's batting three hundred. It's a very high average as far as creative writing courses.
Extraordinary, actually.
Warren: Pretty amazing, really.
Wolfe: That small community and the closeness to the faculty, small classes, is really
the ideal setup, I think.
Warren: Were there other people in the English department who were important for
you?
Wolfe: Not like Foster, Fishwick, and Dean Leyburn.
Warren: I understand that there were just certain people who were giants, and people
practically genuflect when they say their names. I just think it's a wonderful legacy for a
school to have.
Wolfe: Well, there probably are, but if you're talking about academic giants, I
particularly remember Leyburn. I'm sure there were many others. Just as a great teacher
and then budding academic star, who went on to write, he'd already written several
books, I think, Marshall Fishwick. He's written many, many books.
Warren: How about on the social scene? There wouldn't have been a mock convention
when you went there, right?
Wolfe: There was one. Yeah, in '48.
Warren: It was '44 there wasn't one during the war, of course.
Wolfe: Yeah, because I remember going to it.
Warren: Did you get involved?
Wolfe: No, not at all. Politics bored me then and politics bores me now. It has always
bored me as a writer, and that's because this country is so stable.

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Warren: It needs a good revolution. [Laughter]
Wolfe: This country is so stable. You know, we think we get a left-wing president, we
think we get a right-wing president, and all it is is a railroad train going down the track
with shouting on either side of the tracks, and trying to push the train, and they can't
even rock it. If you think about Roosevelt on the one hand, you can't imagine how left-
wing he was perceived as being, and Ronald Reagan on the right. You know this term
that's used now, there's no such thing as "right" anymore, there's only the "far right" and
the "extreme right." The "right" disappeared; there's only the "far right." Well, Reagan
was considered one step from Hitler to all of my friends in New York, believe me, in the
journalistic and literary world. They thought he had a black mustache under his nose.
And look back on it and think of how middle of the road his actual regime, what he
actually did, was, and, for that matter, what did Roosevelt do? He didn't lead us under
some red banner, shrieking down the streets. Given the crisis that he faced, it was, for
the most part, pretty sensible Band-aid stuff. I'd get a big argument on that.

         But this country is like a 108-inch sofa, and you just can't move it. You kind of
want to move it, you know, it's in the wrong place, but it's just too much of an effort. It's
so boring to write about it. I mean, how can anybody get excited about this election
coming up in '96? Plenty of people do, but I cannot get excited about it, particularly
since now we're the only super power in the world. It doesn't matter who you put in the
White House, it really doesn't.

         Oh, well, don't let get off on that.
Warren: I'd love to, but we are supposed to talk about Washington and Lee. How about
things like Fancy Dress? Did you go to Fancy Dress?
Wolfe: I never went to Fancy Dress. I get requests from the students who are involved
in it, for reminiscences. I never went to one. I avoided as much as possible Fancy Dress,
football rallies. I hated football rallies.
Warren: And they were big then, right? That was the time of big-time football.

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Wolfe: Yes, and here's the part of the wisdom of James G. Leyburn. Washington and
Lee embarked upon subsidized football, not just football, also subsidized wrestling
team, and that was rather more interesting, but subsidized football, even if you have the
money to do it, is a dreadful mistake at a place like Washington and Lee, because you
end up, wherever you have subsidized football, with a mercenary army on your
campus, people who have come to your campus not because they have any interest in
anything that your school might stand for or because they might be part of any social
heritage. Why was I at Washington and Lee? Because I was a Virginian and more or
less in the social swim of Washington and Lee. But there are just mercenaries. At a place
the size of Washington and Lee, they stand out, too.
Warren: Tell me what you mean by that.
Wolfe: Well, they tend to go around in clumps together, and why shouldn't they? I
mean, that's their fraternity, really, is sports, and it's true at every place you have
subsidized athletics. I don't know exactly where they were quartered at Washington
and Lee, but often such students room together, they eat together, they socialize
together, and it's very natural. There's no reason why they shouldn't. But they are so
often like a mercenary army in that they're looking to play professional football or
whatever the sport may be. That's why they're there.

         And it is a very bad thing for a place like Washington and Lee, and I think Dean
Leyburn recognized this. It's something he inherited. There wasn't much he could—but
as soon as the first opportunity arose—now, you'd have to check this out with
somebody else, because I wasn't that close to the administration at that point—he was
the one who said, "Enough," and it was the best thing Washington and Lee ever did.
Subsidized sports, even in the biggest university, are a dreadful mistake, just an awful
mistake, and we're playing that game out now.

         There was still something known as amateur sports when I was at Washington
and Lee, and there's a very sound theory behind amateurism. Sports are a charade for

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war. They've always been that, and the idea is to put young men—and it has nothing to
do with the women, I'm sorry, it's just the truth—is to put young men through a
simulation of the combat of war in a harmless, or relatively harmless, way, and to
simulate combat and perhaps learn something about the teamwork of war. The greatest
fighter is always going to be the amateur, the one who fights for honor, the home,
hearth, blood, and honor, and that's why there was such a premium put on amateurism,
that and a little bit of social snobbery about that, too, that you're an aristocrat above
being paid, but mainly it's the idea that the amateur fighter is the great fighter, because
the amateur will fight even if the game is lost, as was proved in many, many wars.

         It's interesting that every adulteration of that with professionalism leads to the
instincts of the mercenary. What is the mercenary? The mercenary is in it for money,
and he expects pillage and rape as his reward, and that's one of the natural results of
professionalization of the charade of combat in sports. That's my opinion. I'm really so
happy that Washington and Lee—still, there are always pressures to get back into the
professionalization of college sports.
Warren: That shift happened out of professional big league football in 1954. Were you
aware of that as it was happening? Once you left Washington and Lee, I know you
have in recent years maintained an interest. Did you maintain an interest? Did you
come to alumni reunions all through the years?
Wolfe: No, I really didn't. I would somehow follow what was going on, but I really
didn't. I went off to Yale, then I went off to Springfield, Massachusetts, to work on a
newspaper, and although even when I was in Washington, working for the Washington
Post, I was not involved in—somehow I kept in touch.
Warren: When were you on the board?
Wolfe: '84. I think my first meeting was the fall of 1984.
Warren: So you were involved in the coeducation decision.

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Wolfe: Well, I was not there for the vote. The vote was in the spring, as I recall,
something like that.
Warren: There was a special meeting in June.
Wolfe: And I came on the board, I was sworn in in the fall meeting, so—
Warren: I'm really sorry. I'd love to have your perspective on that.
Wolfe: I never considered single-sex education as a tradition at Washington and Lee. It
was a given. When I was in college, the exception was the coed. People would talk
about a coed, a woman who was in college with males. That was something somewhat
unusual. Even the University of Virginia at that time was split into two campuses. They
weren't even close to each other. The female part of the University of Virginia was Mary
Washington College all the way across the state. For that matter, all the Ivy League
colleges were all male. It was just true everywhere. It all began to change in the late
sixties and during the seventies. There were other places that were coed, obviously, but
I didn't think of it as a tradition; it's just the way things were. So as far as I could see,
that wasn't much of an issue. I considered getting rid of conventional dress a bigger and
more drastic change than bringing in women.
Warren: Were you aware of that as it happened?
Wolfe: Yes. I remember seeing some pictures, photographs of the campus. What has
happened to the place? By this time, I really was indulging my own tastes in dress,
even while working on newspapers. I had no other minor vices, so I was getting clothes
made and all this sort of thing. I really hated to see Washington and Lee lose that classy
look that it had always had. There used to be fabulous tweeds at Washington and Lee,
some of the greatest tweed jackets you'll ever see in your life, many of which would
have looked better if the students had also worn chocolate brown Barcelino hats, but
that was too much to ask for.
Warren: What do you think now when you go back and see all the women there? It's
fine with you? Is having women on campus an acceptable thing?

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Wolfe: It seems to me it's turned out marvelous, and I was on the board as coeducation
began and progressed. Clearly, Washington and Lee has attracted a superior—what's
the word—cohort of—that's not the right word—superior group of women. And what's
amazing is how little disruption of the atmosphere of Washington and Lee has occurred
as a result. It certainly seems to have done wonders academically in that not only were
there women who were very bright and who score very highly on the SATs and all
those tests, but it also seemed to attract a better male student in terms of academic
qualification.

         Incidentally, has anyone—I'm sure they have, but I'll just ask anyway—brought
up the fact of how many business leaders are Washington and Lee graduates?
Warren: Please talk about it.
Wolfe: I was going to ask you if you could know exactly how that has come about. It
was quite striking. I think Washington and Lee ranks, as I remember, just below Yale
and ahead of Harvard in the percentage of graduates who become CEOs of Fortune 500
companies.
Warren: I hadn't heard that. Is that true?
Wolfe: It is. This was published in Forbes not long ago. I really don't know exactly why
it's true either. Of course, there is a business school at Washington and Lee. I don't
know whether that has to do with it or not. I really do not—I'm more curious than
anything else. It is quite striking.
Warren: Were you aware of that when you were in school? Were there a lot of people
who were aimed toward business?
Wolfe: Oh, there were. A lot of them were people whose parents were very highly
placed—I'm sure that's still true—and who would recognize at a very early age their
son's business acumen and make them vice presidents at the age of twenty-four or
twenty-five. [Laughter] But it's really quite something.

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         I gave a party here, at Washington and Lee's request, for some people in New
York who were very highly placed in business. I don't have—I could find the list
somewhere of all those people, and it was quite amazing. Then I read this piece in
Forbes.
Warren: I'll have to track that down.
Wolfe: It's worth looking at.
Warren: I feel like we've gotten some wonderful material here. Is there any way you'd
like to sum things up or any topics that we haven't talked about?
Wolfe: Another thing, in terms of athletics, which interests me a lot, it was a place
where it was very easy for somebody to be a walk-on athlete as long as the sport was
not subsidized. My passion was baseball, and I was on the Washington and Lee baseball
team, had a very undistinguished career, but it was something I loved, very
undistinguished, but I was on the team. I just walked out there and tried out. I'm not
sure I would have even attempted that anywhere else, and this was pretty big-time
baseball. Washington and Lee was in the Southern Conference at that time, and that
was a very fast league. Washington and Lee was in Southern Conference in all sports.
Warren: I haven't heard anyone talk about baseball. Tell me more about it.
Wolfe: That was big-time college sports. That's another of the great advantages of a
place. It's not just that it's small, but there is a real sense of community, and I don't
know where else you'd ever find it. It must be somewhere else. You would know the
name of practically everybody on the campus. You may not really know them
personally, but you know their names. The greeting custom—what was that?
Warren: The speaking tradition.
Wolfe: Speaking tradition came very naturally. You'd try to describe it to somebody
outside of Washington and Lee and it sounds artificial and forced.
Warren: I've been trying it here in New York over the last twenty-four hours, and it
works.

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Wolfe: People like it. You're right. They like it in New York. People like it anywhere,
but it really works. And you were expected to speak to people, even if you just spoke to
them ten minutes before, and it's great. It really does increase the sense of community.
So this went into everything. There was this feeling of community in the classes you
took, as I was trying to describe the way you'd feel close to these teachers that you had,
the daily social life on the campus, and even something like sports. You were not an
alien if you just decided to walk in from out of the sky onto the—
Warren: What position did you play?
Wolfe: I was a pitcher. I now wish I had tried out for the infield, because I think I was
probably a better hitter than a pitcher, but I was a pitcher. At that time I had the
American male disease, which is the abnormal and inflamed desire to become a sports
star, and if I could have become one, I don't think I'd ever have written a word. If I
could have played Major League baseball, who cares about writing?

         My class prophesy in the Southern Collegian, which was—does that still exist? I
don't think so.
Warren: No, no, the Southern Collegian died. It died a sorry death.
Wolfe: One has to call the so-called humor magazine. My class prediction was that I
would be a great left-hander for the New York Yankees after graduation. The humor
there was that I was right-handed. [Laughter] That was a pretty humorous class
prediction, I thought.
Warren: [Laughter] That's great. I like that. That's great.
Wolfe: But when all is said and done, I think it is the sense of community, and for all of
my misgivings about fraternities and all of that, it's all part of it. It's so unusual, because
it isn't just community of students having their own social life, but it also has to do with
faculty, it has to do with sports. It really has to do with everything on the campus.

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Warren: I did go to Fancy Dress this year, and I was so struck by that sense of
community of the students and the faculty and the administration, all having a grand
time partying together. I don't think that happens many places.
Wolfe: I think it's one reason that a lot of outstanding faculty who are wooed by larger
institutions will stay there. For example, right now Washington and Lee has one of the
great neuroscience centers in the country, and that's the hottest area of academic life in
America right now. There's nothing approaching it, and that's the future intellectual
battlefield of America, is the neurosciences. The American—what do they call it—
Society of Neurosciences is one of the fastest growing professional associations of any
sort in the whole country, and Washington and Lee, with this tiny psychology
department, is at the forefront of that.

         You know, young philosophers are, in droves, getting into neuroscience. It's
partly the lure of nihilism. The neuroscience, underneath, has a very depressing
message—I love this subject—which is that the fix is in. We're all wired a certain way.
The great figure in it right now is Edward O. Wilson, at Harvard, who says that every
human being is born an exposed negative, like the negative in a camera, and you can
develop it well, he says, or you can develop it poorly, but no matter how you develop
it, you're only going to get what's on the negative. And so many parents now think this
is true, and that's why people pay attention to rather nonsensical concepts such as
attention deficit disorder. The same child who supposedly has this disorder and can't
learn in school will watch Nintendo for four and five hours at a stretch. This is not
attention deficit. It's a deficit, but most such children need a camp counselor to kick
them in the slats.
Warren: Yes, I agree with you on that.
Wolfe: You mentioned the Southern Collegian. Were you involved with publications?
Wolfe: Oh, yes, I should mention that. This is another great thing about being—maybe
I would have been involved wherever I was, but I wonder. My passion was sports, as

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you can see, so I was the sports editor of the Southern Collegian. I was the sports editor
of the Ring-tum Phi. I think that's a great name for a newspaper.
Warren: Do you know what the heritage of it is?
Wolfe: No. I'm sure it was a joke on the fraternities. There was another thing, it was in
a song talking about college life, "Somebody's a member of Delta Handa Polka." So
there are a lot of these plays on words, and I think Ring-tum Phi is the same kind of
thing, probably.

         Then the people on the English faculty, plus Marshall Fishwick, decided to start a
literary magazine called Shenandoah. What they really had in mind was a Kenyon Review.
The Kenyon Review had tremendous literary status at that time, because this was the era
of the new criticism. You didn't need a huge research facility to come up with a major
literary magazine. It was the era of reading of the text and so on. So the English faculty
started it, but they realized quite accurately that it had a better chance of being
launched if students were involved, so they created a troika editorship, and I was one of
the three. I can somehow dredge up the other two names if I work on it. I don't know
why I can't remember.

         I published two of my own stories in Shenandoah. The first one was about sports,
and then another one which was about a boy and a girl who are sitting on a bus from
Richmond to Lexington. I used to go back and forth to Richmond on the bus, a
Greyhound bus. And they become interested in each other. And that was great fun.

         Later it became gradually less and less of a student publication. Bill Hoffman,
incidentally, if you ever look—I don't know how much farther you want to go into all
these things, but if you look back at Shenandoah, there are some outstanding stories by
William Hoffman in Shenandoah. Fairly soon it became like Kenyon Review in that it was
no longer a student publication, it was a national literary journal.
Warren: Was that okay with you?

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Wolfe: I think it was a mistake, personally, but I'm prejudiced because I enjoyed my
student involvement, but there are other literary magazines must have come and gone.
There's one, I don't know if it's still going or not, it was founded fairly recently, Ariel.
Warren: It's still going.
Wolfe: I think Joey Dies [phonetic] started that.
Warren: I don't know. I see it on campus.
Wolfe: But Shenandoah became quite a highly respected magazine, outlasted the Kenyon
Review by a lot, and the Antioch Review and all those things.
Warren: So Shenandoah was going at the same time as the Southern Collegian?
Wolfe: Yes.
Warren: By that time, Southern Collegian was just a humor magazine. And I shouldn't
say "just" a humor magazine.
Wolfe: No, it was just a humor magazine. [Laughter] There were other things in it, but
that was its purpose. That's an old college tradition.
Warren: The Southern Collegian changed a lot through the years. I've been looking at a
lot of the early issues, and through the years it changes. It's quite a different publication.
Wolfe: I didn't follow it, so I don't know what happened with that. Of course, now
there's the Spectator and there's another magazine of opinion, isn't there, a liberal
magazine? I should know. I think there is.
Warren: There's Spectator, there's the Trident.
Wolfe: No, the Trident is like a newspaper.
Warren: It's the second newspaper.
Wolfe: Which I think is great. The more competition in journalism, the better. I think
there's also a liberal magazine, if I'm not mistaken. That's a good development. That
sort of thing wouldn't have happened anywhere when I was in college. Almost nothing
took place outside of the official orbit at any university I'm aware of. I figure the more,
the merrier.

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Warren: So do you feel that that experience you had working on the Ring-tum Phi
helped lead you into the career you went into journalism for?
Wolfe: Oh, sure. It gave you a taste of it, meeting deadlines and writing [unclear].
Warren: You just loved those deadlines, huh?
Wolfe: But it was really pretty easy to get into those things if you wanted to do it,
which is another good thing about Washington and Lee. I sense among parents that I
know here in New York that there's more and more a reaction against the big
universities and that increasingly people are looking for the sort of thing that
Washington and Lee offers, and Washington and Lee's conservatism has been a great
blessing in a lot of areas. For example, the look of the campus, it remains a stunning
campus that has resisted the fads. Harvard is almost comical now. The campus looks
like you have one of each of this year's style of the century.
Warren: Same way at Princeton.
Wolfe: There also is a lot of that at Yale, not as much as at Harvard. There remains, I
think, much more a sense of civility at Washington and Lee than at most places.
Warren: Would you encourage your daughter to go?
Wolfe: I would certainly encourage her. She's, as I say, I may have mentioned, a
sophomore in high school, and she hasn't expressed any inclination in terms of
specific—I would love, if she would like to, I would love for her to.
Warren: Has she been there? Has she seen the campus?
Wolfe: She has been there. She loves horses, loves riding horses, and I've taken her—
Warren: Good area for that.
Wolfe: I've taken her over to the Horse Center and we've seen some shows over there. I
have a feeling she would like that scale of college life.
Warren: Well, it's a big tradition of generation after generation going to Washington
and Lee.

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Wolfe: That's true, and now in those pictures they take each spring, the fathers and the
daughters, as well as the sons.
Warren: I think those pictures are so charming. I'm sure they'll get old with me after a
while, but I think they're very charming.

         We're at the end of the tape, and I just really want to thank you.
Wolfe: You're certainly welcome.
Warren: It's been delightful. I'm glad we got into the Shenandoah. That was good.
[End of interview]

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