My o my o Myra, my o my o Myron. Myra rides and Myron clowns through Myra Breckenridge and Myron, Gore Vidal’s wild, steely, and amazing rodeos of the word.¹ Vidal has coupled Myra and Myron as tightly as Jack and Jill, then filled their names to the rim and brimmed them with meanings. Surely Myra, my “ra,” is at once a deity; the symbol of radium, a radioactive element; and a cheer, Bronx-inflected, in the sports stadium of America. “M,” inverted, is “W,” the lead letter in that group “Woman.” Surely Myron, my “ron,” invokes the Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, who served as governor of California while Vidal was thinking Myra and Myron up. All this is possible and more. Amidst such plenitude, I will focus on Myra as self-willed woman and divinity, self-named “eternal feminine” and goddess. In brief, Myra and Myron are narratives of the godhead in the secular Space Age. Indeed, in such an age, we must create divinity for ourselves. If zoosemiotics is “the scientific study of signaling behavior in and across animal species,” if anthroposemiotics is the subordinate study of signalling systems specific to the human species (Sebeok 35–36), then this piece will contribute to “theosemiotics,” my neologism for the study of communications from, with, and about the gods.

General opinion, the go-cart of critical judgment, considers Myra a better novel than Myron.²Myra is, I believe, fresher, more ebullient, unleashing Myra first on a heedless, needy world. Myron must stick with Myron, who whines, atheistically fights the divinity, and like an unhappy camper gets homesick away from wife and pets. Nevertheless, the novels are faithful to each other in their fashion. So, too, are the books in another Vidalian narrative sequence, the story of Senator James Burden Day and the Sanford family.³ So hanging together, Myra and Myron have their 19th-century ancestry. Vidal compares Myra to Tom Sawyer, Myron to Huck Finn (Lasky 25; Myra Breckenridge and Myron x). As ironically, I might compare Myra to Little Women and Myron to Little Men. More soberly, another critic finds a parallel to the Alice books as “twin exercises in cerebral fantasy” (Wyndham 389). Like the Alice books, especially Through the Looking Glass, the Myra books, especially Myron, set up a situation that must seem, at best, a merely intellectual possibility to the ordinary reader. Think, for example, of a child behind a looking-glass or a transsexual goddess time-traveling to a movie set. These books are funny because their characters respond to such situations with a mixture of improvisation and earnest devotion to the everyday logic they brought with them.

Attaching Myra to Myron are the reliable staples of plot, theme, and character. To recapitulate them for their forgetters and to comment: In 1968, the year of Richard Nixon’s first election as President of the United States, Myra Breckenridge lands in Los Angeles.⁴ Apparently, she is the widow of Myron Breckenridge, a film critic with homosexual habits who has been writing a book about Parker Tyler and the films of the 1940s.⁵ Myra is claiming her share of the estate of Myron’s mother, a practical nurse named Gertrude, a Shakespearean allusion that hints at the nature of Breckenridge family ties. Gertrude’s brother, Buck Loner, also wants the property. Once a cut-rate singing cowboy, he is now the proprietor of the Academy of Drama and Modeling. To stall Myra, Buck gives her a job teaching Empathy and Posture. Eventually, Myra must reveal to him that once upon a time she was Myron, before a thrilling sex-change operation in Copenhagen. The ancient comic figure of the transvestite, crossbreeding with modern surgeons, now mutates into the comic figure of the transsexual.⁶

Myra, however, has an identity far greater than property-owner and pedagogue. Although she occasionally suffers a mortal pang, she is the spirit of femininity, the perfection of a human type, and the White Goddess of Robert Graves, a superhuman being. If she were an ordinary woman, she would be egomaniacal. Since she is Woman Incarnate and Woman Divine, her claims to power and her powers go with the territory. Myra pastes on to herself the names of deities from a jumble of cultures: Cybele, the great Mother Goddess, the Great Goddess, even Jesus and Buddha. Only the goody-goody Virgin Mary seems exempt from Myra’s grasp. Embracing multitudes, she is contradictory: cruel but gentle, exacting but forgiving, demanding of human sacrifices but giving of life, prepared to command but respectful of democratic rights. Though she might believe in equal rights under the boring old law, feminism is as relevant to her as theories of social justice would be to Dionysus on a toot.

In the seesaw of the pagan heavens, one deity’s ascent means another’s fall. Serving as the prophet of her own coming, Myra decrees, “… the cock-worshipping Dorians enslaved the West, impiously replacing the Goddess with a god. Happily his days are nearly over; the phallus cracks; the uterus opens…” (6). In large part, the god is falling because the male role is declining. The cosmos chains sacred and secular together. What Robert Bly now preaches to a mass audience, Myra has foretold. We have “… no ritual testing of … manhood through imitation or personal contest, no physical struggle to survive or mate” (57).

Exquisitely sensitive to the calibrations of power, Vidal distinguishes between a brutal machismo, cocky or sullen before the complexities of the world, and virility, a sculpted muscularity that flexes itself handsomely in the world. Vidal is happy to discard machismo, a “keep’em barefoot and pregnant” attitude towards women. He loathes the conjunction of domineering patriarchal god, patriarchal state, and patriarchal Pop too much to mourn their passing. However, he is ambivalent about the loss of virility. On the one hand, he believes that men must change if the human species is to avoid an apocalyptic doom and manage the great danger of the late 20th century: overpopulation. Myra’s messianic task is to struggle against overpopulation. She preaches, “… efforts must still be made to preserve life. … There is an off chance that my mission may yet succeed” (123). Her path to salvation is to change the sexes, “to re-create Man” by asking men to imitate Myron the First or Myra, the harbingers of a new race. So doing, men will snip off the heterosexual activity that equates sexuality with reproduction. This will stop the release of the countless spermatozoa that swarm towards the less plentiful, but plentiful enough, ova. Vidal’s fear of overpopulation pervades his work beyond the Breckenridge books, often articulated as lectures to the Roman Catholic Church and the Third World. “On Pornography” declares, “… man plus woman equals baby equals famine. If the human race is to survive, population will have to be reduced drastically…” (8).

On the other hand, the virile is a source of physical and aesthetic beauty. Moreover, curbing masculinity will join with social and economic hierarchies to deprive most men of any outlet for their power drive. Unable to prevail in work or battle, men may sublimate this lust in two ways: first, into sexual violence and bondage, and next, into a pathetic theatricality. Myra predicts to her therapist, Randolph Spencer Montag, that men will masquerade as traditional men. They will stand tall in the saddle in an urban bar. This anxiety has its plausibility. Intensifying it is a second fear about the price of population control, which quick-witted Myra also recognizes: the loss of civil liberties it may entail.

Myra first experiments with a hunk, one Rusty Godowski, raping him in body and soul. She next takes over his girl friend, sweet songbird Mary-Ann Pringle. So plotting and scheming, Myra embodies, indeed encourages, all those garish, atavistic fears that liberating a woman is tantamount to crawling before La Belle Dame Sans Merci, whetting the castrator’s knife, cracking the dominatrix’s whip, getting out the nanny’s ruler and the nurse’s enema tube, yodeling vainly to the Bacchae in blood-spattered wilds. Tough luck, Myra might say, Power to the Powerful. Fortunately for the fearful, a hit-and-run driver smashes into Myra. Perhaps Buck is taking his revenge; perhaps Rusty is. Perhaps it is simply an accident. Whatever the cause, the effect is clear. Myra’s female body vanishes and Myron’s male body returns, a stunning reversal, a carnal and literal peripetcia. “Where are my breasts? Where are my breasts?” shrieks Myra, an anguished rewrite of Ronald Reagan’s discovery of leglessness in King’s Row (210). Some anagnorisis, Buck Loner might have said, if he had had the benefit of a core curriculum.

From this wreckage, Myron the Second struggles forth. The end of Myra recapitulates and then bends the generic rules of the domestic comedy. Myron the Second, with a surgically devised phallus, marries Mary-Ann. They are happy and good. They have each other for sex and love, the television industry for work, Planned Parenthood for civic activity, and the God of Christian Science for worship. However, despite the best efforts of his medical team and non-medical faith, Myron the Second cannot have children and enact the promise of the final scene of traditional domestic comedy: the renewal of the household and family. Myron the Second and Mary-Ann must content themselves with oodles of dogs. However, if the survival of the species depends on population control, their happiness is an exemplary conclusion for the domestic comedy of the late 20th century: a virtuous couple, no kids.

Myron further domesticates the Breckenridges. Square as square can be, anti-Commie as anti-Commie can be, they now cater Chinese food in Orange County. The only residue of Myron’s homosexuality is a warm, cozy, avuncular feeling for a well-built adolescent boy. Unfortunately for them, that old trickster, history, is feeling his oats. For it is 1973, the year of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation of the presidency; of Miller v. California, the Supreme Court case that legally defined obscenity; and of the death of so many movie stars that a virtual Götterdämmerung has occurred. Among the dead is Fay Holden, who played Mom Hardy, the matriarch of the Hardy Family. To Myra, the Hardy Family is the peerless symbol of American virtue, a moral quality, and American innocence, a moral and cognitive quality. America threw both away when it dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, “… two mushroom shapes set like terminal punctuation marks against the Asian sky” (29). Since then, the honor of World War II has given way to the tortures of the Vietnamese War, the strength of President Roosevelt to the slyness of President Nixon, the clean-cut G.I. to the Green Beret.

In the midst of such decay and turmoil, Myra miraculously reappears, trilling and jilling and throwing her lead-weighted pocketbook around, a General Douglas MacArthur in drag. Psychologically, Myron’s “repressed feminine” has returned. Culturally, the competition to inscribe the narrative of America’s soul has a new champion. Politically and socially, the battle is rejoined between the Majoritarian American, one of the gang, a Myron, and the American Individual, a mad minority of one on a self-scripted Mission Impossible, Myra. Vidal’s preference is clearly for the minority of one.⁷ Mythically, the stage curtains of the sky have opened to reveal the Goddess, who has been hiding in the flies.

The agon of Myron is the subsequent struggle between Myron and Myra, two mutually loathing souls imprisoned in a single body. Myra is determined to wrest “her” body away from Myron, drink hormone cocktails, and restore its feminine charms. The fight begins when “that bitch Myra” pushes Myron through a TV set while he is watching a late-late re-run of “Siren of Babylon,” a 1948 production starring Bruce Cabot and Maria Montez, whose name also doubles the letter “M.” Unhappily together, Myra and Myron, M & M candies without any sweetness, emerge on three strips: the strip of celluloid of the original film; this strip altered for TV through the addition of commercials; and, finally, the Hollywood Strip of 1948, the scene of the shooting of “Siren of Babylon.” Myra also compels men to strip and strip tease before her. The puns on “strip” speak to Vidal’s interconnected explorations of power, representations of reality, and reality. Power, obviously, resides in controlling as many strips as possible. Myron spends his energies trying to escape from celluloid and return to life in front of the 1973 TV. Myra spends her energies trying to remain in 1948 in order to manipulate “reel life” in ways that will alter and redeem the “real life” of TV-ridden 1973.

The savior’s first goal is to keep Louis B. Mayer in charge of MGM and his brand of movies in distribution. So doing, she will foil the ascendancy of such crude directors as Sam Peckinpah (peck-and-paw). However, this is but a means to a larger end. Even more radically than the Myra of Myra, the Myra of Myron seeks to alter human reproduction, now by giving all men the drastic excitement Myron the First experienced in his Danish surgery. She will abolish, not simply male heterosexual desire, but the male heterosexual body. She will substitute sperm banks for the penis and scrotum; fun-loving Amazons for men. MGM movies will convince America that all this is swell. With her silicone, knives, and little bottle of Lysol, Myra begins by transforming red-headed Steve Dude, Rusty’s successor, into Stefanie Dude. “Once I have restored Hollywood to its ancient glory (and myself to what I was!),” she gloats with habitual exuberance, “I shall very simply restructure the human race. This will entail the reduction of world population through a complete change in man’s sexual image” (250).

Unlike Uncle Buck, Myra has read the “great books” of the core curriculum, though often in translation. She exults in rewriting Plato, that “dumb Greek.” In The Symposium, a lovely narrative about an Athenian banquet that has its share of homosexual flirting, Aristophanes tells his famous fable about the three original human creatures: one female, one male, one female/male or androgynous. The gods split each of them in half as punishment for their arrogance, and then, relenting, permitted each half to reunite with its partner. The female couple is the prototype of the lesbian, the male couple of the male homosexual, and the androgyne of the heterosexual dyad. Myra’s mission is to cut the androgyne apart again.

For Myra to revise Plato, Myron’s final scenes must alter the conventions of ancient comedy, which affirm the renewal of life’s great cycles. Myron is sure that he has won out, that order is restored. He is back home with his barbecue, backyard, and Barbie-doll wife, “darned proud” to belong to the “highly articulately silent majority” (416). Foolish Myron. For the divine Myra lives, well beyond his petty domestic and social order. In Vidal’s theophany, she appears, neither in masque nor pageant, but in mirror-writing on the novel’s last page. She has guaranteed the cosmic survival of the species by beginning to block life’s outmoded reproductive techniques. The new fertility goddess is an anti-fertility goddess. “Stefanie Dude,” that “fun-loving Amazon,” is the governor of California. Myron, blind to Stefanie’s origins in the womb of Myra’s plot, complacently predicts that she will be the next Republican president of the United States. Whoopee.

Perhaps the best-known result of Myra/Myron’s search-and-enjoy missions among the classics is its debt to The Satyricon of Petronius. This title may be a pun on “saturika,” a “lecherous, randy” work concerned with satyrs, and “satura,” a satire, a potpourri of subjects and styles (Arrowsmith x). Myra/Myron makes hay with this double identity.⁸ If Encolpius, “The Crotch,” is the narrator of The Satyricon, Myra, Buck Loner, and Myron the Second, the squabbling narrators of the Breckenridge books, embody a spectrum of genital possibilities in the late 20th century: heterosexual biological male, homosexual biological male who has become a medically created but ardent female, prosthetic male (the dildo), medically created male. Like The Satyricon, Myra/Myron blithely accepts polymorphous sexual experiences, including the orgiastic masochism of Letitia Van Allen, killer agent and feminist nightmare of a career gal.

Myra’s insouciance about sexual difference has obscured the interesting difficulties of the novel’s ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender, ideas which Vidal anticipates in the 1966 essay “On Pornography.”⁹ Unlike many contemporary historians of sexuality, Vidal is no social constructionist, that is, one who interprets sexual desires, activities, and codes as the product of specific historical periods. Rather, for Vidal, sexuality has at least three constants.

First, we are a bisexual species. The mixture of Myra and the two Myrons symbolizes the potential human norm, not a perversion of it. Once released, bisexuality is the score both sexes play in their sensual games. In these sports, each of us will be top and bottom, male and female, transcendent and fleshly. Polytheistic deities know this better than monotheistic prigs. In one operatic passage, Myra glows:

I am … at heart … a mere woman. One who wishes to love and be loved. To hold out my hand to a masterful man, to let him draw me close to his powerful chest, to feel strong arms about my beautiful if not entirely re-equipped-for-action body, to look up into his strong face and say, “I love you!” And then fuck his ass off. Yes, I, too, am vulnerable, tender, insecure.

(333–34)

Yet, read grouchily, this passage reveals a contradiction in Vidal’s dramas of sex and gender. Yes, Vidal does believe in bisexuality. Yes, he does delight in the spectacle of the female taking on a male body and gender role. Bisexuality entails equal opportunity for hedonists. The Breckenridge duet, however, takes more delight in the spectacle of the male taking on a female body and/or gender role, in Myron the First becoming Myra. The woman who has willed her femininity then enters into a competition with the lazier woman whose femininity is a birthright. As the “gobbling queen” brings another man to climax, he extracts “the ultimate elixir of victory … not meant for him but for … [a] wife or girl or simply Woman” (78).

Such a weighting of interests is compatible with Vidal’s projection of the second constant of sexuality: aggression as the motor of eros and the will to power as the starting mechanism and fuel of this motor. As Alfred Adler teaches Myra, we yearn to dominate. We prefer power to submission, hate to love. If we did not, Myra notes, we would have no satire, no Juvenal, Pope, or Billy Wilder. Some women do have a will to power—Myra, her buddy Letitia. Some men are gentle. Nevertheless, Vidal masculinizes the “aggressive/creative drive” and feminizes pliability and tenderness. Myra first goes soft in her relationship with Mary-Ann, woman with woman, though both squeamishly deny being lesbian, one of Les Girls. To penetrate sexually is the high, historic sign of domination; to be penetrated, especially anally, the historic sign of submission. “Real men” despise it. “Myra,” Steve Dude tells her after her assault on him, “I hated every last minute of what you did, and that’s the absolute truth so help me God, sincerely” (344). “Getting fucked” has often humiliated Myron the First, a pain for which Myra seeks revenge through the anal rape of guys who show off as guys. However, some gay men, like Myron the First, also reverse the power relationship of tough guy and queen. They only appear to be submissive. Actually, they are calling the shots, manipulating Big Butch into believing that he is in charge.

The third constant is fully a trait of both sexes: the marriage of mind and body. We are members of a fantasizing species that enfolds, infiltrates, and interprets its sexual activity with mental images. A passage in Myron dramatizes this coupling. Myra stumbles over “two guys making it” in a “pleasant bosky dell.” Staring at their penises, Myra calls the tips “a pair of standard American rosebuds.” Metaphor, here ironically formulaic, reveals the mind’s seizure of the flesh. Myra then adds graciously, “to be fair to the American rosebud, like a Christmas present, it is not the actual tiny gift but the thought behind the erection that counts” (334). The individuality of human minds guarantees an infinite, heterogeneous variety of sexual activities. Or, as Vidal puns in “On Pornography,” one man’s meat is another man’s poison. In turn, this variety insures that the theory and practice of bisexuality will be fluid rather than strict. “Sex,” Myra teaches, “is the union of two things. Any two things whether concave or convex or in any combination or number in order to provide more joy for all or any concerned with the one proviso that no little stranger appear as the result of hetero high jinks” (301). The orgy scene in Myra (Section 20), an echo of The Satyricon, is funny because of Myra’s vivid descriptions and initial prudishness. It also illustrates a free-floating, polymorphous, often sweetly silly joy, “the Dionysian … (as) necessity in our lives” (89).

Destructively, the “monstrous tribal norm” of the West represses the teeming energies of sexuality and presses us between the cold sheets of the heterosexual nuclear family. So tucked in, we learn to forget that a homosexual lives in every heterosexual, a heterosexual in every homosexual. Our structures are strictures. Because Myra has been a gay man (Myron the First), mostly but not exclusively a straight woman (Myra), and a yuckily normal man at heart but not in body (Myron the Second), her experiences replicate the Western conflict between repressive sex roles and a range of human sexual drives. So do her disagreements with Montag, a puritanical Jew in religion and culture, once a dentist by profession and still orally fixated.

Myra is also that girl goddess. In her divine mode, she affirms two cosmologies of sexuality, which simultaneously praise its glory and satirize such literary prophets of heterosexuality as Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer. In the first cosmology, sexual bliss with a woman will permit Myra to triumph over time, its cycles of life and death, its passages from womb to tomb. Fingering Mary-Ann’s “blonde silky thatch,” she raves, “… if I am to prevail I must soon come face to face with the Minotaur of dreams … in our heroic coupling know the last mystery: total power achieved not over man, not over woman but over the heraldic beast, the devouring monster, the maw of creation itself that spews us forth and sucks us back into the black oblivion where stars are made…” (189). Her second cosmology is even grander. In a daisy chain she drives across the galaxies, Myra links creativity, divinity, anality, homosexuality, filmmaking, and her mission of guaranteeing the survival of “the regnant species.” She is the new “Creatrix,” the creator who is also a trick. Extending the homosexual literary and conversational tradition, Vidal puns in order to link “respectable” discourses with that of homosexuality. A “tearoom” is a nice cafe and a subway lavatory where men pick each other up. A “spout” pours tea and semen. In an astonishing soliloquy that chaotically compresses ancient and modern, mythic and scientific, explanations of the origins of the universe, Myra vows:

… it is not possible for me to fail. In this I resemble God at the moment he created the universe with a single fart. Yes, I am happy to give my imprimatur to the big-bang theory that is generally accepted as being the first movement of music of this and all the other spheres.

But I have now begun to outdo the prime mover himself as I weave this cage of old time, salvaged from cloacal confusions of that mindless universe the first mover has so wisely surrendered to me. Slowly, carefully, I now draw to myself the very stuff and essence of all time … sucked into the last FADE OUT which is FADE IN to the other … the negative universe beyonds the quasars and pulsars of our knowing…

(359)

Myra/Myron is, then, a series of collisions among sexual codes and rebellious sexual realities, epistemological codes and our heads, sacred codes and profane aspirations to appropriate them, sacred codes that deny sexuality and sacred codes that enshrine it, “good taste” and a flamboyant sexual performance that defy its criteria. Myra’s “high baroque comedy of bad taste” is the proper literary form for these clashes. For the baroque “is the art of wreaking an explosion deep inside the classical structure and re-assorting the classical elements back into an incongruity grotesque, ironic, comic, barbarically majestic or all at once, but always—by virtue of the discipline which creates a new form to hold the … elements together—beautiful” (Brophy 412). As a comedy of bad taste, Myra/Myron commandeers our ridicule of a rigid decorum and promises that the loss of decorum will permit structures that are deeper and more flexible: in life, bisexuality; in fiction, deftly controlled narrative form.

If there are more things in our sexual heaven and earth than our moralists permit, pornographers are our sexual realists. “They recognize that the only sexual norm is that there is none” (Vidal “Pornography” 8). Given this definition, which neither social conservatives nor some radical feminists would accept, Myra is willful pornography. Moreover, Vidal is satirizing the pornographic tradition and correcting its errors. The novelist is doing literary criticism. Has this tradition neglected two “… modest yet entirely tangible archetypes, the girl and boy next door, two creatures far more apt to figure in the heated theater of the mind than the voluptuous grotesques of the pulp writer’s imagination” (“Pornography” 6)? Vidal will provide Rusty Godowski and Mary-Ann Pringle, a girl and a boy in love. Perhaps Vidal’s plumpest target is the Marquis de Sade. If Sade, a boring village overexplainer, calls on Nature to justify harmful behavior, Myra will glory in being “unnatural,” a transsexual. If Sade, as boringly, reiterates his syllogism of power (the strong must violate the weak; men are strong; women are weak; therefore men must violate women), Myra will be a strong woman who violates men. Some of Myra’s rhodomontade also mimics the “tirades” of Sade that “often strike the Marlovian note” (“Pornography” 6). In one scene, for example, she imagines the bliss she will feel when she transforms the obnoxious Half-Cherokee into an Amazon. Myra exults, “It is plain that nature and I are on a collision course. Happily, nature is at a disadvantage, for nature is mindless and I am pure mind. … I alone can save the human race” (293).

Half-Cherokee is obnoxious because he chillingly acts out a theory of sex as racial vengeance of Eldredge Cleaver in Soul on Ice. He wants to rape and humiliate “white bitches” because of Wounded Knee. However, Myra has her grisly plans for him. Their encounter is a slapstick variant on the theme of the conflict between two wills to power, that of the castrator and that of the rapist. Simultaneously, Half-Cherokee is a sketch of a Native American as a smug, dumb stud. Throughout Myra/Myron, Vidal claims the privilege of the satirist and refuses to exempt any person or group, no matter how disadvantaged, from his mockery. An affirmative action employer would dread his treatment of minorities (the figures of Half-Cherokee, Irving Amadeus, Mr. Williams), lesbians (sporty Miss Cluff), and religions (Judaism and Catholicism). Myra/Myron is, then, a test case of American culture’s ability to accept satire as well as polymorphous sexualities, no matter whom the satire slashes.

Not surprisingly, the presence of Myra as revisionary pornography slipped by many of its first reviewers in the United States. Nearly all agreed that it was camp, that Myra’s rhetoric took a particular homosexual style as one linguistic model. They disagreed whether Myra was unreconstructed pornography, to them a genre that putatively focuses on sex for the sake of sex, or dirty-minded, to them a childish perspective that sees sex everywhere. “[S]ome of this wild fantasy … is funny,” Publishers’ Weekly flounced, “but most of it just seems sniggering, like a small boy delighting in writing dirty words on a wall” (“Fiction” 63).¹⁰ Marrying two United States obsessions, correct sex and business, the reviews also stress Myra’s unusual marketing plan, its dramatic appearance without any previews, advance copies, or advertising.

Today, the sexualities of Myra/Myron seem tame, more game than gamey. Myra’s rape of Rusty is still ugly, but Myra’s sadistic shouts of ecstasy as she rides her “sweating stallion into forbidden country” revolt us, not her dildo. She, too, is ultimately “saddened and repelled” by a power trip in pain-giving overdrive (150). This is the one touch of guilt from the goddess. A blessing of divinity is the exemption it grants from secular moral codes and punitive superegos.

Of course, the good burghers of Bookland are a more permissive, a more Petronian audience than we were in 1968. This is a boon for criticism, for a fuss over sex has deflected attention from the ingenuity with which Vidal fulfills the second formal mandate in the word Satyricon, to provide “potpourri of subjects and styles.” He mixes fewer subjects than styles. The trajectory of the Divine Miss M.’s mission gives Myra/Myron a taut thematic coherence. It is her voice, almost by itself, that provides a variety show of style. This mouth is a carnival of registers—from cosmic rants, through autodidactic allusions to anthropology, film, and Aldous Huxley; through cajoleries and commandments to bitchy pungencies. She is also an echo chamber for the smarts and whimsies of Myron the First. In brief, her rhetoric moves from high drama to low colloquialism as easily as sexual desire can zip around if liberated. To increase diversity, Vidal has two other narrators: in Myron the written banalities of Myron the Second; in Myra, the far more agrammatical, non-linear, taped banalities of Buck Loner. His “recording discs” are the tablets of the future. Ominously, they begin, “Other matters to be taken up by board in reference to purchases for new closed circuit TV period paragraph I sort of remember that Gertrudes boy was married some years ago and I recall being surprised as he was a fag…” (20). Though only Myra has explicit sociolinguistic interests, these three narrators record conversations that capture the patterns of Late Imperial American speech.

Vidal is also picking over the various narrative forms available to the 20th-century writer: the nouveau roman (Kiernan 98–99); the memoir, written or taped; the client’s confession to the therapist/analyst¹¹; the Hollywood star biography/autobiography¹²; the Hollywood novel; and the female impersonator’s monologue, which both pays lavish tribute to traditional femininity and tosses acid at the world. The stiletto heel of the drag queen is a stiletto. Not accidentally, “Myra” is both an anagram of “Mary,” a generic name for a homosexual queen (Kiernan 106) and the stage name of a female impersonator Vidal knew (Dick 170). Like Jean Genet, Vidal is taking the language of a subculture out of the bars, baths, and streets and transcribing it for publication. Significantly, only the Hollywood novel and the queen’s monologue permit fiction the social role of entertaining an audience while instructing it about the ways of the world. The nouveau roman is too fretful about language; the memoir and client’s confession too self-centered; the Hollywood biography and autobiography too giddily self-serving.

Like that of many contemporary writers, Vidal’s catalogue of narrative possibilities is a tough-minded elegy for literary culture composed in a visual culture that reads little or nothing, that writes little or nothing except its autograph. The late 20th century, Vidal realizes, is the post-Gutenberg age. Literary genius can never be wholly extinguished. The ability to provide narratives, stories, zooms across all media. Nevertheless, literary genres have withered. Poetry has given way to the novel, the novel to the visual media, literary criticism to book-chat, Myra the novel to a film adaptation that Vidal scorned and repudiated. Inseparable from the decline of writing is the decline of speaking, of verbal wit and eloquence. Language itself, the material of literature and speech, is dissolving—like classical and neo-classical architecture in the polluted air of modern cities. Plato’s Symposium and Petronius’s banquet scene are now Myra’s conversations about gender and population control with Rusty and Mary-Ann in the Cock and Bull Restaurant on the Hollywood Strip. On this street of dreams, Myra’s linguistic force is as singular as her body.

Myron is the most glittering and gay obituary for contemporary literature. There, inside a Westinghouse television set, are Vidal’s contemporaries and rivals: Maude, a gossipy hairdresser, a “fat small man with a big, bald pug-dog head” (225), a parody of Truman Capote; Whittaker Kaiser, a drunken cook from Philadelphia, a fag-hating, woman-hating nutcase, a parody of Norman Mailer; Mel and Gene, two Beat boys from New York, parodies of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. There, too, is their master and leader, Mr. Williams, a “dinge queen” from Albany in communion with Louis B. Mayer, as furtive and omnipotent as an omniscient narrator, attempting to sabotage the march of culture, an iconoclastic bowling-over of Henry James as a devotee of the art of realpolitik.

Self-determinedly optimistic, Myra is more cheerful about the evolution of modern culture than her creator. Let Hollywood triumph over the novel! Hollywood gives us our myths and dreams. It is our paradise, our heaven, our pantheon of universe-class deities. Myra once asks a rhetorical question and answers it bluntly, “Could the actual Christ have possessed a fraction of the radiance and mystery of H.B. Warner in the first King of Kings. … No” (32). Like saints in training, the students in Buck’s academy will submit to torture in order to achieve the apotheosis of stardom and enter the Kingdom of Hollywood. Myra’s happiest and most lavish self-praise is to compare herself to a star from Hollywood’s classic period: her chuckle to Irene Dunne, her pursed lips to Ann Sothern, her baby talk to Ginger Rogers, her toughness to Barbara Stanwyck. Indeed, her drive pays homage to that of the great female stars, to Miss Crawford or Miss Davis.

Brazenly ambitious, Myra seeks to be even more than a goddess/star. She aspires to industry mogulhood, to be a maker of myths, a producer of dreams, a god’s god. Her surreptitious but titanic battle with Mr. Williams is between The Word and The Image for the control of the studios of culture and the collective unconscious. However, most acutely in Myra, the goddess recognizes that television, especially its commercials, has usurped the throne of the Hollywood movies. Like McLuhan, she predicts that the new medium will create “a new kind of person who will then create a new kind of art.” She writes in her notebook, “It is a thrilling moment to be alive!” (95). Culturally promiscuous, she soars on. A writer can but dramatize her flight.

Since Myra’s birth in a satiric novel, an apocryphal story has been alive in the land, told in health clubs and meetings, printed on T-shirts and cards. It consists of two brief sentences separated, in the telling, by a pause: 1) “God has come back to earth.” 2) “And is she ever mad.” In more vulgar versions, Sentence 2 substitutes “pissed” for “mad.” Is Myra this deity? Vengeful but tender? Irate but amusing? Dotty but shrewd? A touch too tyrannical but taken with democratic virtues? Human of feature but superhuman in will? Female and male? Homosexual and heterosexual? If she is, few may bring offerings to her temple. Our reticence is less the consequence of her delirious and comic monstrosity than of her birth. If we are to believe her creator, in a post-Gutenberg age our most popular gods and goddesses will be born and borne from celluloid, not paper. Our theosemioticians will huddle around screens. For those of us who read there remains—the glow of the embers on which Vidal throws his pages, an occasional graffiti, the provocations of satire, and the risible comfort of Myra/Myronic cult figures.

Notes

1. Myra Breckenridge was first published in 1968, Myron in 1974. In 1986, Gore Vidal put them out in one volume. I am using its 1989 British edition. The new volume made some typographical alterations, substituted a new “Introduction” to both books for an untitled foreword to the 1974 Myron, and erased a sardonic political joke. In 1973, while Vidal was writing Myron, the United States Supreme Court issued its infamous ruling on obscenity, Miller v. California. The obscene work, the Court declared, has three defining features: (1) The average person, applying “contemporary community standards,” would find that the work as a whole appealed to “prurient interest”; (2) The work depicts or describes sexual conduct in a “patently offensive way”; (3) The work, again taken as a whole, “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” In response to the decision, Vidal called for “massive civil disobedience” and said that he was modifying Myron in a surprising way “that would distress the Supreme Court.” (“Broad Spectrum of Writers”). His device was to replace “bad” words (in the arithmetic of United States puritanism, “bad” = “dirty”) with the names of the five Supreme Court justices who had concurred in the majority opinion (Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White, Blackmun, Burger) and of “two well-known warriors in the battle against smut” (Myron ix–x). These men were Father Morton Hill, S.J. and Edward Keating, who in 1989 and 1990 was to become a central figure in the savings and loans scandal of the late 20th century in the United States. Two examples of such ironic euphemism: Too proud for self-pity, Myra nevertheless rages at the “private tragedy” of the last five years of her life, “… being trapped inside a Chinese caterer in the San Fernando Valley, with, admittedly, a big restructured rehnquist between his legs but no powells” (Myron 7). In the 1986 revision, Myra is still too proud for self-pity, but now snarls at “… being trapped inside a Chinese caterer in the San Fernando Valley, with, admittedly, a big restructured phallus between his legs but no scrotal sac…” (Myra Breckenridge and Myron 221). In another scene in the first version, Whittaker Kaiser challenges Myron, “My rehnquist is bigger than your rehnquist” (Myron 19). In the rewrite, he now burbles aggressively, “My cock is bigger than your cock” (Myra Breckenridge and Myron 231). I miss the original. Perhaps the rewrite purges Myron of excessive topicality. However, many other topical jokes remain. Moreover, the first version shows the giddy ease with which we can rename the fluidities of the body and sexuality, the variousness of the linguistic codes for these fluidities. The phallus can become a rehnquist. Nevertheless, both the thing and a sentence about the thing carry on.

2. Even Robert Mazzocco, who reads Myron shrewdly, writes that it is a “vampiristic vaudeville, baroquely cadenced and cleverly done … nevertheless, no match for the ineffable ease and raunchy simplicity of its predecessor” (Mazzocco 13).

3. In Hollywood, Caroline Sanford has plastic surgery in order to become more youthful and gain more power in the movie business. Although Caroline’s surgery is less extreme, her ambitions less cosmic, her self-willed passage through the theater of the operating room in order to control the theater of the collective unconscious mimics Myra.

4. In 1969, the Stonewall Riots in New York City marked the formal beginning of the Gay Liberation Movement, a political event that Myra and earlier Vidal novels helped to make possible through the clarity of their confrontations with homophobia.

5. Several critics have discussed the relationships between Myra and Parker Tyler’s criticism (Dick 144–148; Kiernan 98; Mast and Cohen 4; Schickel vi). A rule-of-thumb judgment is that the more solemnly devoted a critic is to Tyler, the more he will resent Vidal and find him a crude thief of Tyler’s wisdom, an attitude that Tyler’s own responses to Myra might initially seem to encourage, e.g. “It is slanderous to assume that I ever indulged in anything like the simple-minded, extravagant, mock-serious stuff which both Vidal’s novel and the film script put on Myra’s lips” (Tyler 4). Tyler’s rhetorical assault, however, has echoes of Myra’s campiness. “Why can’t … Mr. Vidal take me at my own, virile enough, words rather than tilt at me as if I were a trans-sexualized windmill in the mind of some sex-mad Don Quixote of a film buff?” (Tyler 4). The presence of these echoes makes the Vidal-Tyler textual exchange more than an outraged victim’s identification of the man who mugged him. The exchange also shows, I believe, a mutual appreciation of stylistic flair. To be sure, Myra does parody Tyler’s alliance of brilliant generalization and precise detail, aphorism and enthusiasm. However, the motive for parody can be respect as well as contempt. Something or somebody is worth sending up Vidal also praises a pornographic piece that Tyler wrote with Charles Henri Ford as a “pioneer work (that) … reads surprisingly well today” (“Pornography” 5).

6. Brigid Brophy makes this point as well (Brophy 412). Like Vidal, Brophy not only condemns censorship of sexual materials, but sees the connection between sexual and political censorship. “[T]he images lodged in citizens’ imaginations are part of the socio-political character of a country.”

7. In 1990 Vidal wrote, “The tragedy of the United States in this century is not the crackup of an empire, which we never knew what to do with in the first place, but the collapse of the idea of the citizen as someone autonomous whose private life is not subject to orders from above” (“Notes” 202).

8. Purvis E. Boyette was among the first to treat Myra seriously as prose satire, tracing its lineage to Sterne and Swift, the picaresque novel, and the anti-novel, especially Nathanael West’s A Cool Million. Interpreting satire as a moral genre, in which the satirist seeks to reform the object of his attack, Boyette finds the America that Vidal is exposing “ahistorical, empty of traditional values … artistically shallow” and spiritually sterile (Boyette 235). So far, so plausible, but Boyette resists Vidal’s sexual anarchy and radicalism. He insists that “transsexual Myra is … the … figure of our cultural impotence … as the archetypal pervert she is the image of a debased and debauched society.” Quivering with fears of castration and anal penetration, Boyette blames Rusty Godowski for allowing himself “… to be raped by a woman wearing a dildo. …” Rusty “could … have escaped the event had he fought hard enough” (236). Protecting phallic power, Boyette unwittingly echoes the language that blames female rape victims for their misery.

9. Peter Conrad also reads Myron through “On Pornography,” stressing more than I would the separation of sex, “playfully experimental and unfaithful,” from “the craven attachments of love” (Conrad 65). Promiscuity, then, is “the final conversion of sex into art,” and Myra “a feminine Don Giovanni” (65).

10. Dennis Altman wryly describes his vain efforts to prove to Australian authorities that Myra is not obscene when he brought a copy back from America. (Altman). Kiernan (99–100) analyzes Vidal’s skittish treatment of fetishism and the rhetoric of pornography, especially for gay men.

11. In 1969, a year after Myra, Philip Roth, whom Vidal admires, published Portnoy’s Complaint, another study in sexual excess and exploitation of the analyst’s office as fictive setting.

12. A review of Myron mourns that it must take second place in the 1974 camp sweepstakes to Rona Barrett’s autobiography, “a rags-to-riches Queens-to-Hollywood saga, with plenty of wretchedness along the way … told in a headlong no-holds-barred style that … would have done Myra proud” (Fremont-Smith 91).

Works Cited

Altman, Dennis. “How I Fought the Censors and (partly) Won,” Meanjin Quarterly 29, Winter 1970, 236–239.

Arrowsmith, William. “Introduction” to Petronius, The Satyricon. University of Michigan 1959.

Boyette, Purvis E. “Myra Breckenridge and Imitative Form,” Modern Fiction Studies 17, Summer 1971, 229–238.

“Broad Spectrum of Writers Attacks Obscenity Ruling.” New York Times, August 21, 1973, 38.

Brophy, Brigid. “The Tang of Uncertainty,” Listener 80, September 26, 1968, 412.

Conrad, Peter. “Look At Us,” New Review 2, July 1975, 63–66.

Dick, Bernard F. The Apostate Angel: A Critical Study of Gore Vidal. Random House 1974.

“Fiction.” Publishers Weekly 193, February 5, 1968, 63.

Fremont-Smith, Eliot. 1974. “Second Prize in the Camp Sweepstakes,” New York Magazine 7, October 21, 1974, 90–91.

Kiernan, Robert F. Gore Vidal. Frederick Ungar 1982.

Lasky, Michael S. “His Work, His Work Habits, His Workings,” Writer’s Digest 55, March 1975, 20–26.

Mast, Gerald and Marshall Cohen, eds. Film Theory and Criticism. Oxford 1974.

Mazzocco, Robert. “The Charm of Insolence,” New York Review of Books 21, November 14, 1974, 13–15. See, too, “Letters,” New York Review of Books 22, February 6, 1975, 37.

Schickel, Richard. “Introduction” to Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination. Simon and Schuster 1944.

Sebeok, Thomas A. “Zoosemiotic Components of Human Communication,” The Sign and Its Masters. University of Texas 1979.

Tyler, Parker. “Letter” in “Movie Mailbag,” New York Times, July 19, 1970, 4.

Vidal, Gore. “On Pornography,” New York Review of Books 6–7, March 3, 1966, 4–10.

———. Myron. Random House 1974.

———. Myra Breckenridge and Myron. Grafton 1989.

———. Hollywood: A Novel of America in the 1920s. Random House 1990.

———. “Notes on Our Patriarchal State,” Nation 251, August 27/September 3, 1990, 185, 202–204.

Wyndham, Francis. “Hooray for Hollywood,” Times Literary Supplement, April 11, 1975, 389.