Digby Ricci THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION by Gore Vidal (Knopf)
One hates to bow to conventional wisdom, but Gore Vidal really is a far better essayist than he is a novelist. In his essays, the erudition is elegantly startling, but never obtrusive, and the much-vaunted “mordant wit” is a rapier, not a bludgeon. Thus, Susan Sontag’s “,oral seriousness is considerably enhanced by a perfect absence of humour”, and Irving Howe’s mind, “though hardly of the first quality, is certainly good by American academic standards”.
The novels, alas, are altogether different. There are, I believe, four very impressive works: Myra Breckinridge, that genuinely scathing satire on critical, literary, and erotic excesses; Kalki, a chillingly funny, apocalyptic reworking of the Ramavana; and 1876, a brilliant indictment of the corruption of the Grant administration. The others, whether “historical” or “inventions”, are pontificating and knowingly “comic”.
The Smithsonian Institution is almost as bad as Vidal’s sophomoric Live from Golgotha. Everything in the novel is parodic, but no less unsuccessful for that. Its protagonist, “T”, with his grass-green eyes and golden body hair, is mock-Mills & Boon, but still a maddening clich. His sexual encounters with the lively Squaw, who proves to be Mrs Grover Cleveland, are mock-soft-core porn (he “aimed blindly through moist thickets to full, blissful bullhood”), but still tedious.
“T”‘s scientific genius – he can visualise quantum physics – enables Vidal to gibe at our age’s excessive veneration for science and its gods (including Albert Einstein and the “lean, sharp-faced” Dr Robert Oppenheimer), but the gibes are not good enough to excuse the reams of putative authentication. Not since Stanislaw Lem’s turgid Solaris has so much rebarbative pseudo-science clogged the pages of a novel.
Presented as living dummies (no, I shall not bore you by describing how the process works), historical characters litter the novel, and litter is right, for they are mere detritus for Vidal’s torrent of vitriol to sweep away. The torrent, alas, follows a drearily predictable course: Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a slick warmonger; Theodore Roosevelt is all militaristic braggadocio; and the most sanctified figure of all, “honest Abe” Lincoln himself, becomes, unfunnily, a brain- damaged megalomaniac, smothered in the “rich sorghum” of Carl Sandburg’s hagiography.
Often claiming to be America’s “current biographer”, Vidal does not seem to know the difference between biography and poison-pen mail. One does not have to be Newt Gingrich to find offensively simplistic Vidal’s presentation of World War II (here, transformed by “T”‘s intervention along the time-loops, into a straightforward United States/ Japanese conflict) as a purely imperialistic venture “provoked” by a gung-ho US.
The military historian, John Keegan, once denounced the fascist apologist, David Irving, for his failure to “invest the Second World War with moral content”. Vidal’s glib America-baiting has the same impact. The elder statesman of American letters puts himself in rather odd company.
Trite, mean-spirited, only occasionally witty (I enjoyed the transformation of General Douglas MacArthur into an American Lord Haw Haw established in Tokyo), Vidal seems to have become what he most detests: a narrow-minded preacher – but in a red-flag cassock. He is, Heaven help us, Christopher Hitchens with a silver rinse. How low can you go?