CONTENTS
Title Page
Introduction by Jay Parini
PART ONE: READING THE WRITERS
Novelists and Critics of the 1940s (1953)
Tarzan Revisited (1963)
The Top Ten Best-Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973 (1973)
French Letters: Theories of the New Novel (1967)
American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction (1974)
Calvino’s Novels (1974)
The Hacks of Academe (1976)
Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self (1976)
Edmund Wilson: This Critic and This Gin and These Shoes (1980)
William Dean Howells (1983)
Dawn Powell: The American Writer (1987)
Montaigne (1992)
Rabbit’s Own Burrow (1996)
PART TWO: READING THE WORLD
Passage to Egypt (1963)
Pornography (1966)
The Holy Family (1967)
Homage to Daniel Shays (1972)
Pink Triangle and Yellow Star (1981)
Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy (1981)
The Second American Revolution (1981)
The National Security State (1988)
Monotheism and Its Discontents (1992)
Black Tuesday (2002)
State of the Union, 2004
About the Author
Also by Gore Vidal
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
By Jay Parini
Gore Vidal is America’s premier man of letters. His twenty-five novels reveal an imagination that can inhabit the past ( Julian, Burr, Lincoln, Creation, Empire) or embody the dizzying present (Myra Breckinridge, Duluth, Live from Golgotha). In The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the earliest American novels to deal frankly with a gay theme, he opened a fresh vein in American fiction. He has written witty plays for Broadway, including Visit to a Small Planet and The Best Man, as well as countless plays for television during its Golden Age. As a screenwriter, he has written or contributed to many scripts, with Suddenly, Last Summer and Ben-Hur among his many credits. His absorbing memoir, Palimpsest, appeared in 1995, with its sequel—Point to Point Navigation—just published. On top of this, his shrewd, elegantly written, and relentlessly brilliant essays must be considered among the finest examples of the genre.
Vidal began writing essays in the late 1940s and has never stopped. These have been gathered at regular intervals in more than a dozen editions, with the most comprehensive collection being United States: Essays 1952–1992. This vast book offers a vast treasury of good reading, but it should have been published with little wheels and a retractable handle. This Selected Essays attempts to whittle down the contents of that volume, adding a sampling of recent work. It shows the range of Vidal’s work in this genre, with subjects ranging from history and autobiography to literature and politics. These are landmark essays, reflecting the author’s insatiable interest in the world as he found it. They represent both a response to his times and, in fact, a consistent effort to change hearts and minds.
At least half of these essays fall into the category of literary criticism, what Vidal has derisively called “book-chat,” while the others meditate on historical or cultural issues. There is almost always an autobiographical thread as well, and whether Vidal is reading a writer’s work or the world at large, he does so from a distinctive perch. A compulsive autodidact, he demonstrates an enviable catholicity of taste and range of association. Nobody else writes like him, as in his essay on the novelists of the 1940s, where he reflects on the foibles of critics past and present: “One could invent a most agreeable game,” he says, “of drawing analogies between the fourth century and today. F. R. Leavis and Saint Jerome are perfectly matched, while John Chrysostom and John Crowe Ransom suggest a possibility. The analogy works amusingly on all levels save one: the church fathers had a Christ to provide them with a primary source of revelation, while our own dogmatists must depend either upon private systems or else upon those proposed by such slender reeds as Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, each, despite his genius, a ritual victim as well as a hero of literary fashion.”
Like all great critics, Vidal makes pronouncements that ring true and, finally, become true. “Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams are, at this moment at least, the three most interesting writers in the United States. Each is engaged in the task of truth-saying (as opposed to saying the truth, which is not possible this side of revelation). Each has gone further into the rich interior of the human drama than any of our immediate predecessors with the possible exception of William Faulkner, whose recent work has unfortunately resembled bad translations from Pindar.” As ever, his choices—the essay appeared in 1953—are astute, astonishingly so. The distinction between “truth-saying” and “saying the truth” is at once provocative and illuminating. The remark about Faulkner, who was fresh from his Nobel Prize, is both challenging and, in retrospect, accurate; it’s also amusing, which is one of the main things one must say about Vidal. He has (like Noel Coward, who coined the phrase) a “talent to amuse.” But he also has a talent to instruct. One repeatedly comes away from his essays knowing more than when one began.
While some of these essays, such as his review of the top ten best-sellers of 1973, are hilarious, there is also a wise knowingness in these pages. For instance, when dismissing Solzhenitsyn’s tedious August 1914, he writes: “I daresay as an expression of one man’s indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society we must honor if not the art the author. Fortunately the Nobel Prize is designed for just such a purpose.” Elsewhere, he says with a typical droll aside: “A peculiarity of American sexual mores is that those men who like to think of themselves as exclusively and triumphantly heterosexual are convinced that the most masculine of all activities is not tending to the sexual needs of women but watching other men play games.” Indeed.
His survey of the French New Novel is a classic, introducing American readers to a range of recent French writers, including Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Vidal explores the philosophic origins of the New Novel with an easy knowledge of the field: utterly unpedantic yet deeply learned (and therefore a model from which academics could learn a thing or two). And there is, always, that nonprofessorial wisdom: “The portentous theorizings of the New Novelists are of no more use to us than the self-conscious avant-gardism of those who are forever trying to figure out what the next ‘really serious’ thing will be when it is plain that there is not going to be a next serious thing in the novel. Our lovely vulgar 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.”
Vidal is often scathing about academics, as in “The Hacks of Academe.” “Professor Halperin has not an easy way with our rich language,” he writes of one such. The essay is side-splittingly funny and dismissive. Vidal, as a critic once observed, pisses from a great height, and that loftiness may well dizzy the uninitiated reader. But the height is necessary for the sort of thing he does here. It’s a delight to be lifted so high, so easily, by an eagle of our time. He scans the world of letters with his large, hooded eyes, and the shadow of his wingspan leaves a distinct mark on the earth below.
Vidal’s reading spreads wide, as in “American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction,” where he takes on several esteemed American writers of the Sixties and early Sevent
ies, including Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Grace Paley, William Gass, and Thomas Pynchon. His iconoclastic reading of these writers seems, in retrospect, amazingly astute. “The meager rattling prose of all these writers, excepting Gass, depresses me,” he concludes, seeing these novelists as products of the academy, without a real audience. He would, for himself, prefer to have voluntary readers, not students with an assignment.
When Vidal takes on an assignment himself, however, he makes a splendid student. One could not hope for a better introduction to William Dean Howells, Edmund Wilson, Dawn Powell, Italo Calvino, or Montaigne. These essays are peerless examples of exposition. In the case of Powell and Calvino, he was—in effect—introducing these writers to a wide audience. His yeoman’s work in the field of criticism has, I think, been underestimated, in part because it’s so fiercely unacademic, even anti-academic. There is not a trace of jargon anywhere, unless held up for derision. Clarity and common sense reign. Vidal’s intelligence, with its intense wattage, shines brightly everywhere, and when the beam narrows onto a passage, the passage glows. This is illuminating criticism, quite literally. When Vidal takes on a writer who disappoints him, as in the withering essay on Updike called “Rabbit’s Own Burrow,” he does so more in sorrow than anger. “Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer,” he says, “I now find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we have the money, the credentials, and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that passes all understanding.”
The essay on Tennessee Williams ranks among the best things Vidal has written. An excursion in autobiography, it arose from the author’s close personal knowledge of the playwright. He met Williams in Rome in 1948, when Vidal had just published The City and the Pillar. Williams had recently scored a huge hit on Broadway with A Streetcar Named Desire. The friendship prospered, and this essay describes the arc of their relations. The playwright himself is summoned vividly into being, his conversation recalled verbatim, and poignant moments caught in the Vidalian shimmer. At the core of the essay lies an acute understanding of what made Williams a major playwright. He observes, for example, that Williams is “not the sort of writer who sees words on the page; rather he hears them in his head and when he is plugged into the right character, the wrong word never sounds.”
On matters of sexual politics, and politics in general, Vidal is equally astute. His groundbreaking essay on intolerance called “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” appeared in 1981. “Like it or not,” he writes, “Jews and homosexualists are in the same fragile boat, and one would have to be pretty obtuse not to see the common danger.” His essay assails the “shrill fag-baiting of Joseph Epstein, Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Kazin, and the Hilton Kramer Hotel.” In “Pornography,” another seminal essay, he skewers those who regard homosexuality as a “pernicious sickness,” as a writer in Time had recently done. With a keen sense of history, he reminds us that “in the great world of pre-Christian cities, it never occurred to anyone that a homosexual act was less ‘natural’ than a heterosexual one. It was simply a matter of taste.” Here, as elsewhere, Vidal argues that “we are bisexual,” all of us. “Opportunity and habit incline us toward this or that sexual object. Since additional children are no longer needed, it is impossible to say that some acts are ‘right’ and others ‘wrong.’” Radical common sense permeates these essays, and they are worth rereading carefully.
Vidal is always willing—even eager—to call a pothole in the road a pothole. He says exactly what he sees, however unpopular, willing to risk offense, as in “The Holy Family,” his ironic look at the Kennedy clan. A skeptical tone pervades his historical essays and makes his writing on the past both amusing and informative. In one example included here, he gleefully dissects the macho presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, whom he calls “an American sissy.” He can be a passionate advocate of a point of view as well, as in “Homage to Daniel Shays,” where he takes on the American tax system, as did the eponymous rebel to whom this essay is dedicated. Shays remains a relatively unknown figure, though he created a good deal of mayhem in 1786, when he led a revolt of small farmers who hated the disproportionate taxes they had been asked to bear. Their fledgling government was still paying off the Revolutionary War, and the regressive tax system of the time proved intolerable. Whole farms had to be sold to pay taxes, and families fell into abysmal debt. Shays and his men, calling themselves the Regulators, forced important changes, and Vidal would do the same. “Why do we allow our governors to take so much of our money and spend it in ways that not only fail to benefit us but do great damage to others as we prosecute undeclared wars?” he wonders. “The taxpayers’ revolt has begun.”
This was written during the Vietnam War, which Vidal tirelessly protested in many venues. With Dr. Benjamin Spock, he co-chaired the People’s Party. He was a fixture on American television talk shows, decrying the prosecution of this illegal and immoral war. (Not surprisingly, Vidal has been equally vehement against George W. Bush and the Iraq War, which he has opposed vocally in fierce political essays and, of course, on talk shows—one of his favorite venues.) What Vidal brought to the table in the Sixties and early Seventies was a deeply meditated sense of history and a visceral understanding of politics, which he acquired in Washington, D.C., where he grew up in the Thirties in the large home on Rock Creek Park owned by his grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore, a major figure in Democratic politics.
Vidal spent a good deal of time on the floor of the U.S. Senate with his grandfather, seeing firsthand how the democratic process in the United States actually worked (or didn’t). His own father, Eugene Vidal, was a member of the Roosevelt administration, in charge of air commerce during the earliest years of the airline industry. Vidal himself ran (unsuccessfully) for both the House and the Senate, and he has campaigned for many others. Perhaps his most successful political role was that of the aging senator in the film Bob Roberts—one of many parts he has played in the movies. In any case, Vidal comes by his political interests honestly, and when he writes about the political life, he does so with the passion and knowledge of an insider.
“The Second American Revolution” was the title essay of a collection that appeared in 1982, two years into the era of Ronald Reagan, whom Vidal called “our acting President.” “The people of the United States,” he writes, “are deeply displeased with their government as it now malfunctions.” Vidal does not accept the myth that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were a group of world-class geniuses who gathered in Philadelphia to create an eternal and sacrosanct document, which must never be altered. According to Vidal, the Founding Fathers “feared monarchy and democracy,” inventing a system of checks and balances that would “keep the people and their passions away from government and the would-be dictator hedged ’round with prohibitions.” Quite sensibly, he calls for rethinking this ancient document, revising its contents in the direction of greater democracy. He would put further limits on executive power, as the presidency has increasingly over recent decades allowed the President to behave like an elected monarch.
In “The National Security State,” Vidal takes on the military-industrial complex, as Eisenhower once dubbed the lethal combination of government, military, and the weapons industry that still consumes a large portion of the annual budget of the United States. He notes here the vast mobilization that began soon after the end of the Second World War, with the National Security Act of 1947. In essence, the United States committed itself to perpetual war, hurling immense quantities of cash and energy into the creation of lethal weaponry and a standing army as powerful as anything before it in human history. It was important to have an enemy, and one could hardly imagine anything better than godless Communism, which represented everything that the American republic wasn’t. For three decades, it presented a fierce and Hydra-headed enemy that made it “necessary” for the U.S. government to order large quantities of tanks, planes, warships, and bombs. Vidal argues for lifting the “imperial burden?
?? and taking back the country, our country, as he calls it.
Always the iconoclast, Vidal has a particular distaste for piety in its American manifestations. “From the beginning,” he writes in “Monotheism and Its Discontents,” “sky-godders have always exerted great pressure in our secular republic.” Sky-godders are Jews and Christians: nomadic people of the desert, who discerned the presence of an omnipotent God in the endless undivided blue overhead. The monotheists are different from more primitive polytheists, who live in jungles, where many gods flash their smiles and frowns. Vidal retains a lofty detachment through much of this essay, but he can barely control his rage when he writes about the Christian evangelicals who “feel it necessary to convert everyone on earth,” who have forced “their superstitions and hatreds upon all of us through the civil law and through general prohibitions.” Vidal himself declares “an all-out war on the monotheists.”
A true son of the Enlightenment, Vidal prizes tolerance. He would normally say “live and let live,” allowing the monotheists to practice their faiths as they see fit. But they won’t let him be, he argues. “They have a divine mission to take away our rights as private citizens.” And so they forbid abortion, gambling, homosexuality, and so forth: all things that Vidal would leave to the individual. Like his hero, Tom Paine, Vidal subscribes to the “religion of humanity,” he says, arguing that the time has come to “re-establish a representative government firmly based upon the Bill of Rights.”
It should be noticed that Vidal is conservative in many respects, asking only for liberty in the eighteenth-century sense of that term. He stands behind individual choice, the limitation of executive power, and the preservation of the environment. Like his grandfather, he dislikes the drive for empire (which he has analyzed in his later novels, such as Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age). He would return us, if possible, to the pure republicanism of early America. When Ronald Reagan asked to get the government “off our backs,” Vidal countered that we should get them “off our fronts” as well. He supports the freedom to worship as one pleases, as long as one does not try to stop others from worshiping in a different way. He frequently points out the obvious truth that the American government has only one political party, the party of business, which has two wings, Republican and Democrat. In writing like this, he is very much in a tradition of American dissent that reaches back to Tom Paine and moves through such figures as Thoreau, Randolph Bourne, and others. But Vidal retains his Enlightenment perch, wry and ready to flash his wit, to unmask what is pretentious or foolish or self-serving. If his temper has grown short in recent times, one can hardly blame him, as in many ways his worst nightmares have come true under the regime of George W. Bush.