Masque of the Red Death

I have taken to rereading Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

It seemed to be the thing to do in a time when we've elected a New York real estate mogul, one who sees himself as a Master of the Universe, as president, a time when we seem to reflexively treat the stock market as the economy (it isn't), a time when politics seem to exist only at the extreme fringes, and so on. In that way, I haven't been disappointed.

As an aside (my real point is upcoming), I wanted to look at Wolfe's writing. For those who don't remember (or weren't alive yet), the novel was written in monthly installments published in Rolling Stone magazine. Wolfe, always able to cause conversation, had decided that the great novels describing society and its times had died in the era since Thackeray, Zola, and Dickens. "Wolfe crashed into a literary scene that had grown timid, self-absorbed and, yes, dull," a Washington Post profile said in 2018. "Our brilliant young writers, he claimed, were afraid to capture the dazzling variety and absurd clashes of real life."

I had read it after it came out in book form and thought it good, with some reservations. I could see where Wolfe the wordsmith would become fascinated with an image or phrase, circling around and repeating it, then dropping it later as he did next month's installment. The same seemed true of characters, like the Ed Koch-like mayor of New York, who opens the book and then fades from view as the protagonist, bond trader Sherman McCoy takes center stage. But I would be a fool not to respect and admire (and occasionally imitate) the immortal talents and style of Wolfe, and I was searching for learning from a master.

Wolfe hits his stride a few chapters in, but I just finished reading one that seemed so to speak to today: Chapter 15, "The Masque of the Red Death," a 30-page description of McCoy's agonizing night at a posh social event among the elite of New York's social and business scene. On the way home, McCoy's socially conscious wife is unusually upbeat and chatty. Wolfe describes her evaluation of the party: "With a pretense of amused detachment, she burbled about the shrewdness with which Inez had chosen her celebrity all-stars: three titles (Baron Hochswald, Lord Gutt, and Lord Buffing), one ranking politician with a cosmopolitan cachet (Jacques Prudhomme), two designers (Ronald Vine and Barbara Cornagglia), three V.I.F.'s -- 'V.I.F.'s?' asked Sherman -- 'Very Important Fags,' said Judy, 'that's what everybody calls them' ..." and so on.

One of those V.I.F.'s, also a title, Lord Buffing, is an English poet who another guest tells McCoy is not just gay, but suffering from AIDs, the plague of the 1980s. In its day, more mysterious than COVID-19 ever was if not as contagious, it held the terror that leprosy carried in its time. No one knew what it was or how it was transmitted.

Buffing interrupts the party with a short speech when he is recognized by the host, and instead of a short, humorous thanks, he digresses into a meditation on Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," a story about a Prince Prospero hosting a hedonistic two-year party behind locked palace doors to avoid a plague, only to be struck down in the most indulgent room by a mysterious guest dressed as Death.

"So Poe was kind enough to write the ending for us more than a hundred years ago," the ailing poet says to the silenced room. "Knowing that, who can possibly write all the sunnier passages that should come before? Not I, not I. The sickness -- the nausea -- the pitiless pain -- have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain -- with the fever called 'Living' -- those were among the last words he wrote ... No ... I cannot be the epic poet you deserve. I am too old and far too tired, too weary of the fever called 'Living,' and I value your company too much, your company and the whirl, the whirl, the whirl."

The jolly, self-indulgent crowd is brought down with a thump, silent after an evening of being a "noisy hive." "The intruder the [hosting] Bavardages dreaded most, silence, now commanded the room."

Before First World Problems became a hashtag (or there were hashtags), the ailing poet challenged the Prosperos of New York, locked in their penthouse palaces, safely buffered by the income disparities between them and those living in the Bronx. Wolfe is setting up the fall of the mighty McCoy at the hands of those he thinks beneath him, but he's also looking at that lurking monster, AIDs, still dangerously misunderstood before a certain Dr. Fauci led the effort to identify the virus that causes it and bring treatments.

The parallels and echoes to our time are hard to miss.

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

--Karl Marx