won’t bore
He’s a man of contradictions – style and good manners coexisting with arrogance and a talent to annoy. He’s romantically attached to the land of his birth, yet remains one of its fiercest critics. Roy Hattersley on the Unquiet American
Gore Vidal is the most elegant, erudite and eclectic writer of his generation – a stylist who would never descend to the vulgar alliteration with which this sentence begins.
Yet both his many admirers and his even more numerous critics react to the mention of his name not by recalling a novel, essay or film script, but with a description of what can only be called a performance. Admittedly, the memorable moments are all literary – they are built around apparently spontaneous aphorisms. But as every stand- up comic will agree, the way he tells ’em makes all the difference.
It was a late-night argument on the law and morality that established him in the minds and memories of British television viewers who had never read a word he wrote. Vidal’s opponent – Sir Cyril Osborne, a Tory MP with hardline views on family values – demanded a straight answer to a straight question: “Do you or do you not believe in corporal punishment?” Vidal replied: “Only between consenting adults.”
The reply provoked delight and outrage in almost equal measure and was, therefore, a paradigm of Vidal’s whole relationship with the world.
Ned Sherrin – producer, 30 years ago, of That Was the Week That Was – recalls a programme in which Richard Adams, author of Watership Down, told Vidal that his work was meretricious. “I beg your pardon,” said Vidal. “Meretricious,” Adams repeated. “Meretricious.” Vidal smiled – like many handsome men he smiles a lot. Then he replied: “Meretricious to you and a happy New Year.” It is the sort of vacuous retort which is meant, by its vacuity, to be offensively dismissive. And it never fails.
Normal Mailer was so annoyed by the style of Vidal’s literary criticism that he hit him over the head with a glass tumbler. “Ah,” said Vidal without rubbing his scalp, “Mailer is, as usual, lost for words.” Vidal is encouraged in that sort of behaviour by the knowledge that even some victims of his arrogance enjoy the experience – at least if they are the sort of people who find speed of thought and respect for language irresistible.
He has a rare talent for combining good manners with ruthless frankness. “Gore,” Melvyn Bragg says, “always takes you head on. He never patronises anybody. He assumes that we have all read as much as he has and that we will argue with him on his own terms.” He adds that Vidal is, in consequence, “immensely attractive” to people who admire intellectual rough-and- tumble. The implication is clear. Gentler souls with a more tepid view of life find him intolerable.
Vidal accepts without question that he has a talent to annoy and attributes it to an arcane cause. “It’s all because I talk in complete sentences and this is hateful to most people. There are a lot of people who can but won’t because it sounds arrogant. So they say `Isn’t he arrogant?’ and it’s simply because he said, `Yes, I do think it is a nice afternoon, but I do believe it’s going to rain.'”
The complete sentences are normally used to express more controversial opinions. When a journalist inquired whether his first sexual experience was heterosexual or homosexual, he replied: “I was too polite to ask.” Vidal is quick and therefore infuriates the slow. His defence is that such comments “increase the joy of nations”.
Whether or not his style of speech adds to the offence of his outr opinions, it is certainly distinctive. There is no trace of the stammer he says he lost in his teens, but the Southern drawl is still audible beneath the clean-cut vowel sounds of Exeter – a college which its alumni claim, with some justification, is socially superior to Andover or Groton. Vidal was the child of a constantly broken marriage and was largely brought up by his maternal grandfather, “the head of a Mississippi household, even though he represented Oklahoma in the Senate”. Old Senator Gore was blind. “When he discovered a grandchild who had a passion for reading, I became his favourite. But after several hours of reading away at the Congressional Record, I used to get bored. I was the only child who understood bimetalism by the time I was seven … So I started reading Roman stuff because I liked it.”
His father, Eugene, was a United States Army pilot in World War I who taught aeronautics at West Point Military Academy (where his son was born) before starting up three civil airlines – each of which failed. Then he briefly became President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of aviation. Eugene and Nina Vidal were the handsomest (and almost the poorest) couple in Washington society. Both had innumerable affairs.
Young Gore, in his grandfather’s care, spent most of his time among the books – “him at his desk, me sitting on the floor”. But the library was running out of stories. “There was so much banking and currency that there was very little of what I liked. I liked narratives and the best way of getting to a narrative was to write one.”
So the literary career began – together with the other defining features of Vidal’s life and work. It was during his schooldays in Washington that he met Jimmy Trimble – a young man who was subsequently killed while serving with the US Marines at Iwo Jima in 1944 . In Palimpsest, Vidal’s memoirs, he speculates on the hateful possibility that “something had happened” between Trimble and his stepfather. Vidal wrote: “I had always thought that I had been the seducer, as I was to prove for the rest of my life, and so it had never occurred to me that it might have been the other way round. Like me, Jimmy would have been repelled at the idea of a sexual act with a grown man. But with another boy, an equal other half, it is the most natural business in the world.”
Vidal’s last novel, The Smithsonian Institution, was the fantasy of a boy mysteriously called to Washington’s great museum. After various encounters with the historic figures who are immortalised there, he is incorporated into a military tableau as the marine killed by a Japanese hand grenade in an Iwo Jima foxhole. The boy is called T. Jimmy Trimble is clearly still in Vidal’s mind, if not in his heart.
In fact, despite the sharp, bright, quick persona, Vidal is clearly a man who values love and loyalty. Howard Austen has been his companion for more than 40 years. Asked how they have managed to stay together for so long, he replied, “No sex,” and he still insists that celibacy is the best guarantee for lasting relationships. Sex, he insists, with an intensity which makes him sound sincere, is best gratified for money. His conviction that the rule applies to hetero as well as homosexual relationships is reinforced by requests to consider the damage done to children in “emotional break-ups”.
Despite a brief excursion into active politics in the 1960s, it is reading and writing that have filled Vidal’s life. His novels, plays and essays have an invariable polish that can only be the product of hard work. But he attempts to preserve the illusion of effortless superiority, speaking of Myra Breckinridge – a story of an apparent woman who turns out to be a biological man – as if the brilliant construction all happened by mistake: “I was halfway through before I realised that Myra had been a man. A voice within me said: `I’m Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will possess.’ All this came thundering into my head and I just followed the lead.”
He is similarly dismissive about the great achievements of Julian – a novel which combines an historical understanding of ancient Rome with his views on the American 20th-century imperium. Did he choose to write about Julian because he thought that particular emperor a great man? “He tried to stop Christianity. So Julian was a great man in my book. Literally in my book and metaphorically in my book.”
The Roman period came to an unhappy ending. He was employed to write the screenplay of Caligula, which “was a serious movie that got taken over by Penthouse and turned into a travesty”. Litigation followed. Vidal wanted his name removed from the credits.
Vidal has a high opinion of his own literary merit and an equally low one of most 20th-century novelists. Ernest Hemingway “never wrote a good novel. Even at 15 or 16, I could see that For Whom the Bell Tolls is bullshit.” Even that is better than A Farewell to Arms. “It’s raining in the death scene between Katherine and Lieutenant Henry … It always rains in Hemingway to show the mood is dark.” F Scott Fitzgerald? “He always puts a foot wrong … Tender Is the Night is painful. [The Great] Gatsby is a special category. That’s a lovely work, but really a long short story.”
William Faulkner he dismisses with a bruising parody: “Don’t you remember when Aunt Nana was in the kitchen and the child had fits so they tied him to the stove? That was when the fire came but I don’t know how it started. There are stories that she started it, but I don’t know.”
Perhaps Vidal is so critical of others because literary success came to him early. Williwaw is one of the great novels of World War II. Vidal served mostly in the Aleutians at the wheel of supply ship FS35. He was a warrant officer (junior grade). For a man of his background, a commission would normally have been a formality. According to his version of events, his bad eyesight kept him in the ranks, though suspicions of homosexuality may well have contributed to the decision.
However, “In the Forties, it wasn’t so bad. They needed everybody in the army. But by the Fifties there was a real pogrom in the US against what they called `fags’. There could be a man with four children and 12 grandchildren, a good job in the interior department and he would lose it. He would be found with a man and his career would be ruined. This is the kind of thing I do speak on and I make myself extremely unpopular.”
He certainly made himself extremely unpopular – at least with a certain sort of person – when he published The City and the Pillar in 1948. But by then he had already written Williwaw and it had brought instant critical acclaim to a young man still in his 20s. He “had been all over Life magazine, all over the press were beautiful reviews. Then suddenly the blackout came.”
The blackout was ostracism by the literary establishment in response to The City and the Pillar, a novel of homosexual life. The New York Times, “the most powerful book reviewing in the United States until this day”, ignored everything he wrote. “The senior reviewer of the Times weekday edition told my publisher: `I will not only never review him again, but I’ll never read him after this disgusting book.’ So I had to take about 10 years off to earn a living, which I did through television, movies and the theatre.”
He also did it by writing detective stories under the name of Edgar Box, a part of his oeuvre which rarely intrudes into his conversation.
As he lay fallow he also developed a social life – more irregular in Paris and Florida than in Washington, but clearly highly enjoyable in every location. His biography includes a picture of Vidal the groomsman at the wedding of his half-sister, Nina. All the men – including Senator John F Kennedy, on the fringe of the group – wear the regulation marriage uniforms of the American upper class. In those days, Vidal looked, at least at first glance, the archetypal American gentleman – obviously rich, evidently suave, undoubtedly self- confident.
Then you notice the hair. The line of the classic cut is broken by a quiff of which James Dean would have been proud. The caption makes clear that Vidal did not, even then, think of himself as part of the Washington establishment. “Behind me stands my sister’s next husband, Michael Whitney Straight. As family tradition required, both marriages failed.” The man cannot help it. The ice is in his soul.
Sting, who got to know Vidal when one of his friends was making a film about Vidal’s life and work, agrees that the ice is there, but believes that it hides “a genuinely kind nature”. The rock star pays all the usual compliments – funny, intellectual, entertaining. But he says that what attracts him to the man is generosity of spirit. The compliment is probably justified, but Vidal would certainly reject and probably resent it. He works so hard to cultivate his brittle reputation.
Vidal’s description of his sister’s wedding is a perfect example of behaviour behind which (according to Sting) he hides his gentle nature. It includes an account (presumably second-hand rather than observed) of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy “hitching up her gown to show the innocent Nina how to douche post-sex – one foot in the bathtub and the other on the white tiled floor”.
Vidal’s fictional sex is often followed by washing – ritual, erotic or purely hygienic. The wandering boy of The Smithsonian Institution is scrubbed clean by an Indian squaw from the museum’s Native American tableau. The temptation to suspect something deeply Freudian – rather than mildly prurient – is irresistible. The suggestion that washing has some symbolic significance is met with the crushing response: “I’ve noticed that the British are not given to it.” Then he corrects his own story.
“I left out the detail which betrayed Jackie as not the best Catholic on earth. She told Nina to put vinegar in the water. They believed in those days that if you sloshed around in vinegar and water you would not propagate. I left the vinegar out, so the thing doesn’t make such sense.” He reacts with not-quite-mock-horror to the suggestion that the detail was omitted out of kindness and decency.
“Certainly not! I was so transfixed by the picture of primordial rites, that I forgot.” For a moment he becomes uncharacteristically defensive: “I don’t go into anybody’s private life unless there is something irresistibly comic; it was a long time ago and they are dead.”
Now, with a lifetime of literary success behind him, it is impossible to tell how bruised he was by the philistines’ response to The City and the Pillar. But one thing is absolutely clear. It did not end his romantic attachment to America. For years, he has spent more time in Italy than in the US – first in Rome and now looking out towards the blue Tyrrhenian Sea.
But he rejects the notion that he is in any sort of exile. In fact his criticism of his homeland are the sad cries of a disappointed lover. He believes in the Great Republic. And when its politicians – particularly if they are presidents – failed to live up to his high expectations, he turns on them with his customary tailored savagery.
“There is a great speech, which I can only paraphrase, from John Quincy Adams. He said, `You know America is not the paladin of the world. Yes we have the power’ (this was in the 1820s and 30s) `to conquer the world, but in the process we would lose our souls.” Vidal adds that Adams’s view was too intelligent for his time – speaking in a manner which emphasises that it goes without saying that it is too intelligent for our time as well.
His resentment at the US’s failure to heed the good advice has produced 30 years of philippics, eventually published in anthologies which switch, page by page, from obscure literary criticism to denunciations of the corruption which now infests Washington and the policy failures which are its results.
Reflections from a Sinking Ship (published in 1968) sets the tone in its preface: “I have selected a title which seems to me altogether apt this bright savage spring with Martin Luther King dead and now Robert Kennedy. The fact that these deaths occurred at a time when the American empire was sustaining a richly deserved defeat in Asia simply makes for added poignancy if not tragedy.”
Since then the tragedy has deepened. “We have not declared war since December 1941 and we have fought about 50 wars since then. That means that the House of Representatives has given up its great powers and the power of the purse is now rather dubious since the executive does all sorts of funny things when it wants to raise money without consulting the House if it feels the House won’t go along. The Constitution doesn’t work.”
The result, according to Vidal, is Pax Americana – the empire which rules where it has no right to govern. He will not even concede that there are occasions when the richest country in the world needs to spend its treasure and sacrifice its sons in a good cause.
“Who determines a good cause? The Croats might say it’s good and the Serbs might say it’s bad.” Pressed on the possible annihilation of Kosovo, he remains adamant. “Of course we should not do anything. What is our national interest?” His defence against the suggestion that his high moral tone is not very different from his grandfather’s isolationism is met with a response which is more philological than philosophic: “I don’t accept isolationists because now it means somebody who believes the Earth is flat and that flying saucers land in your backyard and abduct people. The word has been totally smeared. I simply say we have no moral responsibility. It may be for God to keep his eye on the swallow as it falls. But it is not for the United States of America, a country that always acts in bad faith.”
Not always – even by Vidal’s own account. There was a “golden age” in American politics and Burr is his novel about those early days of the republic. There is, in much of what he writes, a yearning for that mythical past – the age of primitive innocence before the fall of federal government. Now he is bitterly critical of the political system and of those politicians who depend on great corporations to pay their election expenses. Grandfather Gore was a survivor of that Elysian time – uncorrupted because he was incorruptible – who stood out against the vested interests in his state.
Vidal justifies his nostalgia with a literary parallel: “Hazlitt said something quite startling. He said that all of art had its best in the beginning. Playwriting really is Shakespeare.” He will never be convinced that the rules of literature are not necessarily the rules of life.
He is, of course, on Bill Clinton’s side against the House of Representatives. It is, after all, the “insurance lobby who hate healthcare and the tobacco companies” which are out to destroy the president. In any case, Vidal is not judgmental about anything except public matters. “That’s where you must exert judgment, a private matter is a private affair and one shouldn’t, wouldn’t, doesn’t …” For once he allows the incomplete sentence to hang in the air and moves on to praise Clinton’s ability. “He’s a lot more intelligent than Roosevelt. He doesn’t have the flair of Roosevelt or the look either, but he doesn’t have the same country.” Vidal comes second only to William Cobbett as an exponent of the backward glance.
Fifteen years ago he wrote The Best Man – a play which became the one film that lived up to Vidal’s expectations for his own work. In it, a mature and admirable presidential candidate contests his party’s nomination with a young and handsome opportunist. The characters in some part reflect the battle between Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy – which the best man lost. The play also contains a sideswipe at Richard Nixon, a Vidal hate-figure long before his failings were generally acknowledged in the US.
Sting believes that the play reflects Vidal’s yearning for a life in active politics and insists that he really did once dream of occupying the White House. As he well knows,The City and the Pillar made that impossible 50 years ago. But he was still the best man in his own mind. Yet there was a brief flirtation with active electoral politics.
In 1960 he was the Democratic Party’s candidate for a Congressional seat which he had no chance of winning. It was the year that Kennedy just won the presidency and Vidal polled more votes in his district than his party’s presidential nominee. When he was offered the chance to fight a safe seat, he turned it down.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens – afraid that his admiration for Vidal is no longer reciprocated because of recent attacks on Clinton – believes that he has regretted it ever since. “He was delighted when Hillary and Chelsea Clinton went to see him. It was not just the Clintons trying to establish contact with literate America, it was Gore’s reconciliation with politics.”
He has, of course, been in politics for the past 50 years. His essays – “remarkable how well they stand up”, says Hitchens – have provided a more intelligent critique of American policy than anything that has been written since the war. Often they are wrong. However he chooses to describe his foreign policy position, he is an isolationist.
But he is also the living proof of a glorious truth: literature and politics are not necessarily at war with each other. It is still possible to forget the soundbite and have an elegant debate.
The Essential Gore Vidal, edited by Fred Kaplan, will be released in South Africa by Little, Brown in May