RADICAL CHIC AND MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS by Torn Wolfe. 153 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.95.
What Tom Wolfe has done−with a touch of malice and more than a pinch of cheek−is create an appallingly funny, cool, small, deflative two-scene social drama about America's biggest, hottest and most perplexing problem, the confrontation between Black Rage and White Guilt.
Scene 1 (large portions of it originally printed in a June issue of New York magazine) centers on that now famous money-raising party for the Black Panthers given in Conductor Leonard Bernstein's Manhattan apartment last January. For the occasion (TIME, Jan. 26), Wolfe coined the phrase "radical chic." He thus described the tendency among bright blooded, moneyed or otherwise distinguished New Yorkers−lately grown weary of plodding, via media middle-class institutions like the Heart Ball, the U.J.A. and the N.A.A.C.P.−to take up extreme, exotic, earthy and more titillating causes. To hear Wolfe tell it, radical chic lays some deliciously agonizing stresses upon the Beautiful People. How do you dress, for instance−funky or fashionable? And what does a hostess giving a Panther party do about Claude and Maude, her normally indispensable Negro couple?
Ragging the rich is an old, though declining" sport. If Wolfe merely ran on like that, he might be dismissed as a frivolous type who has done little more than shoot fish in a brandy snifter. Happily, the gathering−and with it Tom Wolfe's look-homeward-recording-angel prose−Soon begins to reflect depths of confusion and true social comedy. There is a remarkable moment when Panther Defense Minister Don Cox talks of police harassment, evoking the Reichstag fire (blacks now, Jews next is the thought), then reads the Declaration of Independence to justify talk about Revolution Now. Eventually Bernstein and Guests Otto Preminger and TV Reporter Barbara Walters, somewhat apologetically and with few results, try to pin down the Panthers about what they really have in mind for the future beyond ghetto breakfasts and the high cost of bail.
Few scenes could better reveal the painfully comic convulsions that beset oldfashioned, dead-serious liberalism in the age of the ripoff, the put-on, and the total acceptance of verbal overkill. Wolfe's Leonard Bernstein is neither a freak nor a fool. Following the sound old American principle of defending civil liberties, wherever threatened, he winds up with the Panthers in his drawing room. Where bail was concerned, their legal rights certainly were threatened. But how is a good Jewish liberal to take a group that cheerfully talks about destroying his society and is, at the very least, linked to gang shakedowns of Jewish merchants in the ghetto and black nationalist propaganda against Israel?