Probably only a coincidence. Telemarketer? I will receive such calls throughout the day.
On November 10, 2007 at 9:14 P.M. I blocked:
http://ad.doubleclick.net/adi/4652.Vendare/B245... (Miami?)
http://view.atdmt.com/iview/msnnkhac001728x90x... (Senator Bob and the Floridians? CUSA?)
I invite people to experience this harassment with me so they can come to their own conclusions about its legality. This is mild in relation to what I have known in the course of writing these essays.
Gore Vidal, United States: Collected Essays 1952-1992 (New York: Random House, 1993), $37.50.
Fred Kaplan, Gore Vidal: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1999).
"The Humanist Interview With Gore Vidal," in The Humanist, January/February, 2010, at p. 22. http://www.thehumanist.org/
Who is Gore Vidal?
During my sophomore year in college I studied one weeknight for a test in a subject that I did not find particularly interesting. "Sociology" was taught by having students memorize long lists of names and complex terms.
This experience was excellent preparation for my law school education which often consisted of professors turning material that was fascinating -- usually in a single lecture -- into the epitome of dullness.
The third floor of the library was empty that night, as usual. I did not attend an "elite" (very expensive) institution. Actual studying in the library was a rare phenomenon and actively discouraged among students for the sensible reason that, if some of us genuinely studied, it might lead professors to expect equally outlandish behavior from the rest of the student body.
I wandered through the ailes of books in the literature section and came across a novel entitled: The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal.
I'd read Vidal's play "Visit to a Small Planet" in high school. I was one of the few students in my English class who caught on right away to the biting political satire in the work. The satire along with the controversial edge was removed from the film version of this play, naturally, which starred Jerry Lewis in a forgettable performance.
I agreed with the author's less than starry-eyed view of human nature and delighted in the sparkling wit found in Vidal's clear and sharp prose.
At about the same time, as a teenager in high school, I also read Tennessee Williams's "The Glass Menagerie."
Williams and Vidal were good friends, alike in some ways and quite different in others, both men were routinely described in Time magazine and in other publications of the period as "sexual outlaws." Worse, their work was said to consist of "fetid swamps" of "illicit sexuality."
This was exactly what I was looking for in life and literature as a horny teenager during the late seventies, a "fetid swamp" of sexuality, licit or illicit. In fact, I am still seeking such a thing as a horny middle-aged guy, but then aren't we all?
I must admit that my life has always been filled with wild and steamy sex -- except that most of it was, and still is, with myself. But then, Oscar Wilde was right to conclude that: "to love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance."
I read most of The Judgment of Paris that night awed by the quality of the writing (Vidal had revised his first novels that were re-issued sporting lurid covers in the early sixties).
I pondered protagonist Philip Warren's dilemma and determined, like him, to choose love over wisdom and power -- as soon as I could find some love that was reciprocated, or at least that involved another person.
My guess is that the youthful Vidal may have made the same choice for love. Later in Vidal's life the temptations of power may have overwhelmed him. Although, after reading his memoirs, I am not so sure.
Parts of Vidal's novel were gloriously over the top, laugh-out-loud funny, sending up everything from American politicians and their wives (the novel first appeared in the early fifties when politics was a male preserve) to tourists and archaic Euro-aristocrats, sexual mores at mid-century, pop-cinema, and the Americanization of the world.
The middle section of The Judgment of Paris, which is set in Egypt, is still my favorite.
Judgment was the book of a young man "on the make" who explodes with literary talent and charm. It was also the first novel of ideas that I read. I was shocked to learn that the novel was not a great success at first, probably it was ahead of its time, and might have gone out of print except for the steady attention of mostly British readers.
We members of the "Vidal cult" (Gore has no objections to being regarded as a "Messiah") will always keep the book alive. Vidal is not alone among writers in his messianic ambitions.
Vidal is fairly unique in American letters in developing an equal talent for polemics and ideas in literary fiction combined with the greatest talent for high comedy among all American novelists, in my judgment, of the second-half of the twentieth century.
Norman Mailer has written a novelistic re-telling of the Gospel story in the first person. Reviewers commented that, for Mailer, it was a step down being only the son of God. Consider these reflections which are typical of Vidal's early novels:
"But, being a child or the grandchild of the Romantic Movement, living in a culture still dominated on a vulgar level by the high romantic poets of the nineteenth century, he longed instinctively for the flames, for the one attachment: 'my last and only love,' the love which increased from moment to moment until the lovers strangled for lack of air among those peaks which touch the edge of heaven, close to the consuming sun in whose fire, united at last, they perish to the accompaniment of French horns and frenzied woodwinds, the voice of Isolde, strong and pure, lingering in the vast golden dome of heaven where angels, out of sympathy, deluge the earth below with their pity." (pp. 230-231.)
And again:
"Yet for Philip, for the realist who recognizes the obvious limitations of both flesh and spirit, the hope of a great romantic experience is tempered always with the grim knowledge that nothing is constant and that even though a certain height might, temporarily, be attained, descent from it is inevitable and painful, unless one chooses to perish at the grand moment, a gesture which did not attract Philip. Although the rich dark tragedy at Mayerling had fascinated not only him but others of his generation, as directionless as he, all of them like compass needles gone awry, awaiting the pull of some magnet to set their courses for them, true north no longer the center it had once been." (p. 231.)
There are many other passages in this novel that are equally fine. Vidal's prose always delivers an aesthetic thrill besides the intellectual fireworks.
Unlike some readers who fail to get the point to Vidal, especially by overemphasizing his derisive laughter at shallow understandings of romantic love (see the essay "Love, Love, Love"), or at naive talk of love as a panacea prescribed by the "feel good" therapists of this world ("... use a cucumber!" says Dr. Ruth), it is always clear to me that Vidal possesses great depth of feeling (his emotional wisdom and perceptiveness concerning the arts told me that much) along with a first-rate intellect.
It is the combination of the two -- literary taste and compassion -- that makes Gore Vidal rare, or even unique. I would say the same of Henry James or Charles Dickens, even (this may surprise you) of Jane Austen, whose affinities with Vidal are greater than many people imagine and, to my knowledge, have not been noted by any critic.
Among the novelists who will please you (if you are a Vidaliano), I suggest Barbara Pym, Evelyn Waugh, the much-dreaded Truman Capote, Elaine Dundy, and others, like Alan Holinghurst and Edward St. Aubyn today.
Vidal is not dismissive of human affection and genuine love between people, but he certainly is impatient with those shallow substitutes for the real thing that serve as bandages for people who wish to solve all problems with a word as opposed to acknowledging the need for thought or the reality of a quite expensive emotion. Yes, we die for love. Yet we must not forget that this dying must take place every day:
"Do not wait for the last judgment," Albert Camus writes, "for it takes place every day."
Love her when she's sick, angry, bed-ridden, or wants to be alone, not only when she's all dressed up for the Oscars. Love her even when she is absent, maybe forever, despite overwhelming pain. Love her and make her laugh when she's tired after a long day and in a foul mood.
Readers who love Vidal's wit and elegance will enjoy Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question (New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2010). Jacobson's book is concerned with themes of mortality, loss, and identity -- themes that are prominent in Vidal's works. None of the reviews of Jacobson's novel have seen the long shadow of Derrida ("Circumfession") and postmodernism on the self-aware examination of Jewishness ("Duddy Kravitz" by way of Mordechai Richler). Mordechai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (New York: Ballantine, 1959). (Plagiarists writing a review of Jacobson's book should turn to the Anglo-Canadian "wits.")
It occurs to me that my comment about Vidal's affinities with Jane Austen may have sparked some curiosity. If you care to follow-up on this brilliant observation please compare Ms. Austen's portrait of "Mr. Collins" in Pride and Prejudice with Vidal's depiction of "Marietta" (based on Anais Nin) in his novel, Two Sisters:
In what ways are the portraits similar? Do you detect affection for the objects of satire on the part of their creators? Come to think of it, do you think that God (the ultimate "author") is having a chuckle right now at our expense?
I am pretty sure that Vidal usually does manage to laugh at human foibles, beginning with his own -- though some things are far from comical -- and he always shares that laugh with the rest of us. Vidal's laughter is never cruel or vindictive and is never directed at those less fortunate than himself. Vidal's satire is a weapon aimed at powerful and pompous persons who can always use some humility. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")
Love is no panacea. Love hurts and often costs us a great deal even if we agree that it is, nevertheless, uniquely worthwhile. After all, it is also Vidal who wrote that "two can face the darkness better than one."
Norman Mailer was mistaken to suggest that Vidal "lacks the wound" that might give to his sharp mind the profundity for the deepest insights. Read Vidal's memoirs. The wound is there. It has to do with the loss of the great romantic love of his life to the stupidity and horror of war which may explain his life-long opposition to stupidity and horror in politics, to the pointless loss and suffering caused by pointless wars, like Vietnam and Iraq, or Afghanistan and who knows how many other "secret" military adventures of the U.S. governement. ("George Santayana and the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics.")
Christopher Hitchens, who is another of our best essayists, is insightful in his discussion of Vidal's passion and genius. I met Hitchens, briefly, suggesting that he should write his own political novel, after mentioning Vidal. (I have also met Vidal at a book signing and we entered into a long and meaningful conversation and exchange.) Hitchens smiled and said that he had "thought of it, but ..."
I understood the unspoken remainder of the sentence: " ... when considering the work of someone like Vidal, I don't know if I have much to add."
The answer, Chris, is that you certainly do have a lot to contribute and to say, especially these days. Hitchens is one of the few people influenced by Vidal, immersed in literature, currently at work in American political journalism. I would certainly buy Chris's novel on the first day that it appears. See Christopher Hitchens, "After Time," in Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 83. Vidal has said of "The Hitch":
"I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delphino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens."
Despite a recent falling out over the Iraq issue my guess is that Vidal recognizes literary talent when he sees it, and Hitchens has it, superlatively.
Vidal's losses and experiences also explain his opposition to social injustice and abuse wherever it occurs. Vidal's highly poignant essay "Police Brutality" may be cited in support of this interpretation of his commitment to the cause of powerless people, including the struggle for civil rights, of which Vidal was an early and quiet supporter.
Gore is and has always been a brave man, who is politically engaged and on the barricades, also deeply patriotic. Although Vidal may hate to admit this, he is on the side of the powerless and excluded in his own society.
Vidal is a literary Muhammad Ali who "shook up the world."
Despite the accusations of the envious and rumors started by political enemies, Vidal is not and never has been a racist nor an anti-Semite. To live with the tragedy and pain of a great loss of love in one's emotional life -- I can relate to this! -- when it is the result of war is one thing, but to have to endure separation from a lover (or the suffering of loved-ones) as a result of human stupidity, malice, or envy, can only be infuriating and a spur to action. One must become harder than steel and fearless in the struggle against what opposes love, in any form, and in opposition to what separates lovers.
Some of us realize, usually too late, that our lives are about very few passionate relationships, often a single relationship with a person we have known not very well, or only intermittently, and that everything else, including other relationships and activities that we pursue -- money, fame, and life's other trinkets -- pales by comparison.
To be deprived of that one person (or those very few persons) who makes (or make) everything else comprehensible and tolerable, is like the loss of all light on a distant planet. It means that all things wither, atrophy and die in a cold and bleak landscape. To find oneself in such a landscape, being required to live on for the sake of others whom one also loves, is to reach for the consolations of art while growing accustomed to suffering. "Whither thou goest ..."
Beneath the humor and wit in Vidal's prose one perceives great suffering and practical intelligence. Most surprisingly, the reader also finds compassion and an insistence on justice, with great tenderness felt for those less fortunate than himself.
It angers Vidal that so much money is wasted or stolen by governments when people are denied health care and education. I concur. Somehow, Vidal's pain has not become hatred. This alone is an achievement of heroic proportions. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead.")
It boggles the mind that a small group of Right-wing lunatics headed by some "Cubanoids" from Miami is seeking to undermine Mr. Obama's efforts to rescue the national economy and restore America's image in the world. For an elected official to ignore executive foreign policy decisions and formulate a "personal" strategy that involves embracing a fascist takeover of a Latin American government that overthrows a duly-elected Constitutional leader is dangerous for America.
We are identified with people killing their peacefully protesting citizens and discarding the rule of law in Honduras because some minor American politicians have chosen to embrace these thugs. Compare Gore Vidal's Bright Green, Dark Red with Elizabeth Malkin, "State Forces Are Accused Of Abuses In Honduras," The New York Times, October 6, 2009, p. A4. (Vidal lived in Guatemala and is one of the best "Latin American novelists" of the so-called post-war "boom.")
Vidal tends to write his novels in pairs dividing them neatly into "inventions" and "meditations." Examples: Messiah and Live From Golgotha (meditations on the theme of religion and Christianity in particular) and Kalki (invention of a possible end of the world, death, and exploration of the theme of universal cycles in Hindu mythology); Myra Breckinridge/Myron (inventions, constituting a single masterpiece on the theme of the plasticity of identity in a media age which provides examples of the transformations of language resulting from such new and bizarre circumstances).
Vidal's historical novels are the best examples of the genre by an American author. The Judgment of Paris is best thought of as an invention despite being a picaresque novel. This is because of the delight in imagination and brilliance in the prose that reveals a genius becoming aware of himself through the full maturing of his talent. Vidal's Philip Warren is "Lazarillo de Tormes" in the twentieth century as an American traveler and student.
Run and purchase one or more copies of any or ALL OF VIDAL'S BOOKS. You will laugh out loud as you read them and you will learn a great deal. You will also be moved by the beauty of the prose that you discover which will take your breath away. For instance, here is the first paragraph of Messiah:
"I envy those chroniclers who assert with reckless but sincere abandon: 'I was there. I saw it happen. It happened thus.' Now I too, in every sense, was there, yet I cannot trust myself to identify with any accuracy the various events of my own life, no matter how vividly they may seem to survive in recollection ... if only because we are all, I think, betrayed by those eyes of memory which are as mutable and particular as the ones with which we regard the material world, the vision altering, as it so often does, from near in youth to far in age. And that I am by a devious and unexpected route arrived at a great old age is to me a source of some complacency, even on those bleak occasions when I find myself attending inadvertently the body's dissolution, a process as imperceptible yet sure as one of those faint, persistent winds which shift the dunes of sand in that desert of dry Libya which burns, white and desolate, beyond the mountains I see from the window of my room, a window facing, aptly enough, the West where all the kings lie buried in their pride." (p. 1.)
I quickly read all of Vidal essays, nearly all of his novels (the last two works in the American cycle have yet to be read by me), all of his published short stories and plays, and I have seen all of the films which he has written. My favorites are "The Best Man" and "Suddenly Last Summer."
I have read the books written under pseudonyms, including the Edgar Best mysteries, which are hysterical. There is no doubt in my mind that Vidal is one of the best American writers of our times. He is now also a world writer who is much admired in Latin America ("A great man of letters" was the judgment of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who also said, bluntly, Gore Vidal "is a genius.")
Vidal is also studied in Eastern Europe and Asia, as well as in the countries of the former Soviet Union. He should be. He's great.
Do not assume that Vidal's lack of solemnity means that he is anything less than highly serious about art and advocacy. Like George Bernard Shaw, Vidal has figured out that by "sugar-coating" the pill of his philosophical and political advice the reader is more likely to swallow it. The clever reader who disagrees with the Master on a particular issue -- a rare occurrence for me -- can always lick off the sugar and spit out the pill.
Vidal is great fun too, and I mean fun to read or listen to in conversation. Do not underestimate the importance of pleasure in literature. Very different writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Luis Stevenson, Steven King, even Leo Tolstoy are all fun to read -- so is Shakespeare, by the way. Vidal is in good company. Besides, it is only those who are read "for" fun, who will be read at all, at least voluntarily, in the future.
Unless future generations are made up entirely of illiterates, a distinct possibility, or of lawyers and politicians (which may be a redundancy!), Vidal and Mailer, Updike and Roth, Bellow and Jong, Sontag and Morrison, Franzen and Baldwin, Styron and Foster Wallace, Garcia Marquez and Fuentes will probably be among those who are read, as will Steven King and (for me) Richard Matheson, Raymond Chandler, Donald E. Westlake, John Banville. They will be read by the few who continue to read. Do not allow the snobs in universities to convince you otherwise. I am sure that the first duty of the writer is to engage the interest of the reader, a lesson learned from Vidal. All of these writers do that "seducing" of the reader. My heavily "footnoted" essay on Foster Wallace is coming up.
I cannot begin to do justice to Vidal's influence on my writing and thinking within the space limitations of an Internet essay. The most important lesson to be learned from his writings is to appreciate the freedom that we possess as human beings -- freedom to define ourselves, sexually and in every other way, even if we happen to be boringly ordinary. ("The Galatea Scenario and the Mind/Body Problem" and "Master and Commander.")
Vidal's ideas fit some existentialist and pragmatist themes in twentieth century thought and place him, like me, among the freedom-loving democratic socialists along with academic philosophers, such as Cornel West, Richard Rorty and Noam Chomsky as well as many others. In other words, we are two of the good guys. And Vidal is great in a literary bar fight. You definitely want him on your side.
Vidal wrote the first literary novel published in the United States by a mainstream publisher about openly homosexual characters who were otherwise "normal" young men, The City and the Pillar. Although I am not homosexual (feel free to call me what you like), the liberating aspect of Vidal's work for me was the sense that a strong sexual drive and desire was a normal aspect of myself to celebrate and not a source of shame despite the grim lessons of my Catholic schooling.
Gore Vidal is, and has always been, the most free person in American public life, even at a time -- well before the sixties' cultural revolution -- when this was not an easy thing to be and when the price that he paid for his freedom was ridicule and a lack of respectful attention to his work. Freedom is also part of what I see and admire in Erica Jong's and James Baldwin's writings and personalities. For Vidal, "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are adjectives alluding to activities and not nouns describing rigid categories of persons. ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay.")
Vidal was born October 3, 1925 in West Point, New York. Within a year Vidal's family moved to Washington, D.C., where his father was an influential early advocate for the flight industry. Vidal's grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served in the U.S. Senate. His grandfather's blindness meant that that the young Vidal read to him for hours, everything from the Congressional Record to Shakespeare, making the boy a voluntary reader and writer early in life.
After divorcing Vidal's father, his mother (Nina) married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jacqueline Bouvier's stepfather. Hence, the much noted connection to the Kennedy clan as well as to the Gores. Vidal is a well-established member of America's "ruling class," political division. And yes, there is such a thing. He attended Philips Exeter Academy at Andover, but skipped Harvard after service in the Second World War when he took up the pen.
Neither Vidal nor the world has yet recovered from all that has since emerged in his writings.
"I do not know what I really think about a subject," Vidal says, "until I have written about it."
The two emotional relationships that must be understood by any prospective biographer (or critic) are Vidal's union of many decades with Howard Austen -- who happened to be a Jew -- and his intense and tragically brief relationship with Jimmy Trimble, who was killed at Iwo Jima, a relationship and loss described with unforgettable lyricism in Palimpsest.
It is the presence of Mr. Trimble and his memory in Vidal's life, before and after Iwo Jima, which is crucial to understanding both Vidal's persona and his literary work. I urge those interested in the literature of courtly romance to study The Search for the King.
The second volume of Vidal's memoir chronicles the illness and death of Mr. Austen. I was reminded of Vidal's famous metaphor borrowed from Shakespeare -- "Time is a thief." That thief has now taken Vidal's closest partnerships and loves along with much of what he defends about America in this dark age for civil liberties.
You are witnessing at this blog sanctioned criminality and censorship that would have been unthinkable in America only twenty years ago.
Vidal's struggle against depression is intense. Mine too.
Vidal seems to have felt that he was a subject of "secret" monitoring by intelligence agencies in the U.S. Given his presence on Mr. Nixon's enemies list and controversial views it is difficult to doubt Vidal's sincerity on this matter especially during America's post-9/11 paranoia phase. Vidal was not much-liked by Republicans who tend to cluster in police and intelligence agencies to say nothing of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. Perhaps this tendency towards fascism among our boys and girls in blue explains why officials are ignoring me.
Vidal's books have now sold in excess of thirty million copies worldwide. By comparison, my self-published essay received a grand total of 540 "hits" in a year. I have no idea how many hits my books have received now. Thousands? Many thousands it seems. Hackers are obstructing my access to "Lulu." Also, my second book, deliberately, will not be distributed to book sellers by government censors. It's all part of the N.J. government censorship and disruption of my life. I am getting used to the bullshit. For example, several "errors" were inserted in this text after I posted the essay earlier today. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")
I have already posted the equivalent of a book of short stories and three additional volumes of essays. I will begin work on a novel on my birthday this year. I will finish that book by next year at the same date. I hope. How (or whether) I will manage to publish these works I cannot say. I am encouraged by the discovery that this essay was less damaged than I expected it to be.
In a long life that has been filled with literary success Vidal has known absolutely everyone in Hollywood -- where he wrote for the movies and the dollars ("just the dollars," he says), sharing a house with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward -- and in New York, where his plays were successful for years on Broadway, in the literary world, and in Europe, where Fellini persuaded him to appear "as himself" (how else?) in the film, "Roma." He has lived in Ravello, Italy; Beverly Hills, California; Edgewater, New York and traveled everywhere.
It is Gore Vidal -- never Truman Capote -- who knows and has always known everybody and all the best gossip.
Vidal is not revealing the contents of his journals "until after [his] death or the second coming of Christ, whichever arrives first." That question (as to which would come first) has been answered with Gore Vidal's death, but we have yet to see his diaries published.
If it is true that every writer selects his predecessors then Vidal's are easy to spot: In the American tradition, one sees the influence of everyone from Mark Twain to Henry James and Edith Wharton, from Henry Adams to John Horne Burns; among the Europeans, setting aside the ancients, a line of ancestry can be traced from Samuel Johnson's elegant barbs and Jonathan Swift's mad inventiveness, from Lord Chesterfield's cool Enlightenment skepticism to the barbed witticisms of Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw.
Vidal's friendships and rivalries with Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr. (who appears, very thinly disguised, as "William De La Touche Clancy" in Burr), also surface -- often surreptitiously -- in his work.
Vidal cannot be bought and he cannot be intimidated. As he once said, "the only 'thing' that I have ever done is my own." He is (and he would smile at this phrase!) "the patron saint of controversialists." In 1969, he said to an interviewer from Playboy:
"I think of myself as cheerful, even on the attack, and though I am not gregarious nor anxious to be loved, I have quite enough company out there on the edge of things. For me, the only danger is a tendency to drift towards the center -- which means that at some point, I must make my get away, whether it be from the White House or from literary respectability. At one time or another, I've had a number of fine conventional careers within my grasp: the popular theater, Congress, television performer. But once each of these exercises had served my purpose -- or perhaps once I had got the range of it -- I always found some way of getting out. I'm not a courtier, I'm a critic -- something most people who find power exciting find difficult to understand. At the time of my break with the Kennedys, Arthur Schlessinger told my sister that he feared I had a death wish. To which I answered, 'I have a life wish -- and I can't live vicariously.' But most people are like Arthur. They want to belong -- in his case, to be a Kennedy; it is a touching, even a sweet instinct -- but not for me. I can only breathe outside."
Vidal's literary mastery and novelistic technique, knowledge of history and world culture, political acumen and independence as a controversialist make him America's finest essayist. He is the undefeated world champion, in Norman Mailer's terms, of the essay form and one of our best literary critics in the twentieth century, besides his genius as a novelist.
Perhaps this recognition of genius was the source of Mailer's hostility to Vidal. Vidal is the best writing teacher anyone can have. Study his work and you will be a better writer. ("Dormi Bene Gore Vidal" and "Book Chats and 'Chits.'")
I will focus here on only one of his essays. Given some discussions of French literary theory and philosophy that I have engaged in recently it seems most fitting to focus on "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel."
If you accept no other literary advice that I offer please believe this: You should own the collected essays of Gore Vidal, a copy of the Bible, a complete edition of the plays of William Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, and the great documents of the United States of America. If you are forced to choose between these books do not give up Vidal's essays without a fight.
Vidal's Literary Theory.
There are essays by Vidal that are light, amusing explorations of distinctions in literary quality, i.e., "The Top Ten Bestsellers," others are more political and polemical, for instance, the "State of the Union" speeches that Vidal delivered in different parts of the country during the seventies and eighties. There are also more personal or autobiographical essays; "West Point" is one such essay.
I have selected "French Letters: Theories of the New Novel" for my focus because that essay illustrates Vidal's talents as a "serious" critic who manages to beguile and charm the reader into following along while getting him or her to absorb some pretty heavy theory along the way.
I have tried to do the same "seducing of the reader" in a number of essays and short stories dramatizing complex ideas, for example, in "Metaphor is Mystery" and "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." ("What you will ...")
I should note that Vidal's "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star" may be the most important essay written by an American in the twentieth century that is on the same level with Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" or James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time." Vidal begins on a wistful and sad note:
"To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of 'fact.' But then, Americans have never been enthusiastic readers. According to Dr. Gallup, only five percent of our population can be regarded as habitual readers." (p. 89.)
The number of serious readers of quality literature is now closer to one percent of the population, if that many. Vidal is led to some dismaying conclusions:
"... the novel as currently practiced does not appeal to the intellectuals any more than it does to the large public, and it may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age that Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed 'post-Guttenberg.' Whether or not the Professor's engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college [December, 1967] is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today's student often experiences difficulty in reading and writing." (p. 90.) ("America's Nursery School Campus" and "Why Jane can't read.")
Things have degenerated substantially since Vidal's essay appeared as demonstrated by some recent published complaints by Jonathan Franzen and the criticisms of many others.
Most people no longer read serious literature for pleasure, not even the supposedly "educated" among us. A recent contestant on the television program "Beauty and the Geek" explained that: "1942 is when Columbus sailed the ocean blue." (Vidal would ask: Was she the "beauty" or the "geek"?)
In a nation in which more than 50% of the population will not read a single book during their adult lifetimes perhaps this sort of remark is not surprising.
Vidal suggests that part of the problem is the decline in educational standards. Also, the attempt to turn literature into something like nuclear physics, requiring experts with their own technical jargon commenting on the arcane discipline for the general public, is just not very helpful. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
The tendency to "theorizing in a literary mode" is termed by Vidal "the French virus" and traced to the post-war generation of French intellectuals:
"Since the Second World War, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, among others, have attempted to change not only the form of the novel, but the relationship between book and reader ..." (p. 91.)
These were the teachers of our teachers, that is, of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other post-structuralists. No longer the master of the text, the writer becomes a sort of doorman or -woman, inviting the reader to "enter" the literary premises and reshape its reality to his or her liking, deciding what a text means, if anything, and what parts of it or what writing is "good" and why. None of this is very surprising:
"The proof that human life can be as perfectly meaningless in the scale of human society as it is in eternity stunned a generation, and the shock of this knowledge, more than anything else (certainly more than the discoveries of the mental therapists or the new techniques of industrial automation), caused a dislocation of human values which in turn made something like the New Novel inevitable." (pp. 93-94.)
For these literary theorists, Adorno's question lingers in the air: "How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?"
My response is: How can one not write poetry after Auschwitz? ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
Literature is the only way to try to come to terms, publicly, with our reactions to such events. Rather than accepting their destinies as "powerless" humanists wielding only fragile and clumsy weapons -- like pens and paper in the pre-computer age -- writers, unwisely, sought to don the mantle of science so as to steal some of its power:
"... we are living (one might even say that we are trapped) in the age of science. Miss Sarraute particularly delights in using quasi-scientific references." (pp. 96-97.)
The result is collections of essays in literary theory featuring graphs, charts and formulas, theories of language and literature suggesting that authors, then readers, then language itself, have all "disappeared" as demonstrated by a particular formula, or deconstructive technique, thus confirming the darkest fears of our antihumanistic age in which genius too can be isolated under a microscope, perhaps, and masterpieces -- like nuclear explosions -- produced on demand, for a small fee, by "experts" in white lab coats. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" then "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
"For it is obvious that both [Nathalie Sarraute] and Robbe-Grillet see themselves in white smocks working out new formulas for a new fiction. Underlying all their theories is the assumption that if scientists can break the atom with an equation, a dedicated writer ought to be able to find a new form in which to redefine the 'unchanging human heart'[.] Since the old formulas have lost their efficacy, the novel, if it is to survive, must become something new; and so, to create that something new, they believe that writers must resort to calculated invention and bold experiment." (p. 97.)
Vidal commented to an interviewer in 1974:
"All of the arts [philosophy?] reflect this state of mind, this waiting for the end. A kind of interior deterioration is taking place, a drive on the part of almost every artist to blow up his own art form, sometimes in the interest of novelty ... to explode it, to shit on it."
And again:
"A lot of this comes from the dreadful effect of science on the humanist tradition. In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. [But not quickly enough?] New formulas -- just like the scientist. But that isn't science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road." ("Is Humanism Still Possible?")
Did Vidal arrive at John Barth country before the good "postmodernist" professor? (See Vidal's essay on "The Hacks of Academe.")
Vidal now shifts gears in this great essay and strikes out on behalf of the humanists:
"It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise." (p. 98.)
This sort of belief and the attempt to be a scientist or at least "scientific" in understanding the literary mysteries -- let alone the depths of the soul -- is lethal to the artist-creator and maybe to the critic or therapist. ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
Writers, literary artists, even philosophers and psychologists cannot be scientists. Their concern is not so much with facts, but with truths about the human condition. It is to decide what the facts mean by interpreting them for us:
"Meanwhile, [for the New Novelists or writer-scientists,] only that which is verifiable is to be taken seriously; emotive meaning must yield to cognitive meaning. Since the opacity of human character has so far defeated all objective attempts at illumination, [emphasis added] the New Novelists prefer, as much as possible, to replace the human with objects closely observed and simple gestures noted but not explained." (p. 107.)
You cannot create great literature if love, for instance, is reduced to what one recent "scientific" psychobabbler described as a "defense mechanism." Romeo turns to Juliet and says: "What we feel is really only a 'defense mechanism' curable with some Prozac and a little therapy."
Perhaps a little "aversion therapy" or other behaviorist conditioning associated with Juliet's picture can lead Romeo to throw up whenever he thinks of her liberating him from this "dependency relation" for a productive life in the wonderful world of accounting. No doubt Dr. Phil would approve of such tactics.
All of this scientific reductivism when transported to the realm of human relations, which is the primal source of literature, is nonsense and yields nothing in terms of literary quality. Vidal explains:
"Since human behavior is notoriously irrational and mysterious, it can be demonstrated only in the most impressionistic and unscientific way; it yields few secrets to objective analysis." (p. 107.)
What Vidal did not bother to explain is that this is how it must be if we are to remain, as I believe that we are, free persons, doomed or privileged to construct our meanings in and through our deepest relationships, ourselves, through telling one another about them in stories -- written stories meant to defeat time and death like Crusoe's footprints in the sand as the tide rolls in.
Even if literature is at an end Vidal invites us to continue to read and write, as an act of defiance maybe, or as a final doomed assertion of our humanity. For Vidal, the literary "act" is a Pascalian gesture of hubristic rebellion:
"Even as the universe destroys man," Blaise Pascal writes, "he will remain superior to it -- because he will be aware of his fate and the universe will be oblivious to its victory." (See my dedication to "Master and Commander.")
Vidal takes his leave of the reader with a brave admonition together with scorn and defiance of the antihumanists and scientific reductivists:
"Our lovely and most human art is at an end, if not the end. Yet that is no reason not to want to practice it, or even to read it. In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps in silence or with new words." (p. 110.)
It was with these caveats in mind that I began to write. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
"Someone to laugh at the squares with ..."
In his portrait of Tennessee Williams Vidal noted that America's greatest playwright once spoke, wistfully, of finding "someone to laugh at the squares with" which was a way of asking for love. This request is not difficult to find in Williams's wonderful plays.
Vidal provides exactly that love and solidarity for readers as I suspect that he did for Williams. Vidal is "someone to laugh at the squares with"; to chuckle with over the banalities of "therapists" and the pomposities of politicians; to stand with against the evils of corruption, greed, and oppression as well as sadism. This is the hydra-headed monster fought by every generation of writers and readers, artists and thinkers, or just good men and women.
Gore Vidal has been with me in adversity and struggle for several decades now. And he always will be. Vidal can be with you, too. At the worst of times, in my moments of rage and frustration and bitter despair, I recall his words and smile a little while remaining hopeful, always hopeful:
"If we survive," Vidal writes, "we may yet be civilized, and that is something to work for."
