[In the following review, Kazin offers unfavorable assessments of Live from Golgotha and The Decline and Fall of the American Empire. While conceding small “pleasure” in reading Screening History, Kazin objects to Vidal's view of history and his abrasive tone.]

“American life for the writer is so desperate that it has driven Gore Vidal to live abroad.”

—Erica Jong, The New York Observer, June 29, 1990

One night in Rome, in 1975, the Italian journalist Luigi Barzini told me that Gore Vidal was thinking of becoming an Italian citizen and had sought his advice on the matter. Barzini was beside himself with scorn, but I was impressed. Until then I had not seen Vidal as the exasperated radical that he claimed to be; he seemed to be playing the part of a weary patrician at Hollywood dinner tables, where it was easier to chatter on about America as a “sinking ship” than to describe hard-pressed American lives in his novels. And I understood his addiction to apocalyptic images as rage against the demeaning of homosexual love. “The heterosexual dictatorship has got to go!” he once wrote. “And I’m here to challenge it, and I’m here every time I can put an end to it.”

Of course Vidal not only adored Italy (what American writer discovering it after the war did not!) but could actually afford to live there much of the year, year after year. He was in a few years to acquire a magnificent estate in Ravello perching on the Mediterranean coast. But for a writer so dependent on the American market, and so enthusiastically playing the part of an American grandee in devastated Italy, even to think of joining himself to this scene as a naturalized Italian! Clearly, I had missed the man’s very real political despair, the intellectual darkness he favored and its sense of urgency.

The urgency has also to do with his other favorite role: the anti-Christian revivalist of paganism. Nothing would be more foolish than to regard Live from Golgotha, Vidal’s farce parodying Acts of the Apostles (it follows the Gospels in the New Testament and describes St. Paul’s missionary journeys to extend the still primitive Church), as nothing but bawdy entertainment for the bathhouse boys; since nothing about the human body, what it can do and what can be done to it, including all incessant acts of violence, war, and so on, is news even to children watching television, Live from Golgotha, though it tries to shock, is actually no dirtier than anything else these days. What makes Vidal’s book different are its “pagan” emphases, its affirmations. The only unsullied character in the book is Petronius singing the soft winds of classic Italy. Vidal made a point of allowing only a gay magazine, The Advocate, to see the text before the publication date. But since any normal person these days is more interested in sex than in religion, the joke is on the book buyers. Vidal’s target in this book is Christianity, which was founded by Jews.

The book is full of clowns, fools, and monsters, but its only villain is Jesus. He disapproves of the Church founded in his name, and at the end he gladly describes himself as a “twentieth-century Zionist terrorist” who looks forward to establishing the Kingdom of God in the next century, replete with Isaiah’s “ring of fire,” for nationalistic reasons. For this, he deserves crucifixion.

Vidal’s Jesus envisions an eventual nuclear holocaust on the goyim. His New Testament Jews are disgusting as well as dangerous. So the novel opens on the circumcision of Paul’s gofer Timothy, the future bishop and saint. This was reluctantly ordered by his boss and lover Paul, in order to placate the still Jewish Jews (especially James the brother of Jesus) who were the first Christians.

Paul, always laughingly put down here by Timothy as “Saint,” is Elmer Gantry with an immense Rolodex, a super salesman who orders “follow-up” letters to the newly reborn once his sales pitch has had its effect and he has pushed on to find fresh suckers. Timothy (“I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor”) is too gorgeous in his own eyes to respect the scrawny, money-mad, clownish salesman (a tap dancer in his spare moments) he sleeps with. But you have to hand it to a Jew who “ate with goyim, … christened goyim, … was having carnal knowledge of a teen-age Greek with two centimeters of rose-velvety foreskin, me.”

Thanks to computer technology, fast forwards, memory banks, and the like, the joke on which the plot rests is that these biblical characters are brought to our own day, if not quite as flesh and blood. Because print has gone out of style and the history of the Church now exists only in memory banks, Timothy and friends have to save their own history from some devilish hacker who has introduced a virus that threatens to cheat mankind of the true story. This includes such tidbits as the fact that Judas, not Jesus, was happily mistaken for the Messiah to be crucified. The sap weighed 400 pounds, and how would the Romans get him up on the cross?

Since the novel constantly jerks from the first decades of the twentieth century to the last, we are supposed to die of laughter when all the forces of contemporary television are mustered to present the Big Event on Golgotha. But at the very last moment the hacker is revealed to be Jesus, the enemy of the one written record that Timothy has saved (in a janitor’s closet). Because Jesus gladly admits that he is the King of the Jews, his effort “to erase Paul’s work and bring on a nuclear Judgment Day was simply not in the cards. He had lost. We had won. Christianity was saved, as well as the residents of 2001 A.D.”

So the true Jesus is crucified after all. As Nietzsche said, he was neither the first Jew nor the last Jew to die on the cross. But who would have expected Gore Vidal—that mere entertainer, as I once foolishly thought him—to nail Jesus on the cross because he was, and forever remains, a Jew? What’s wrong with that? The answer is, Vidal’s Jesus is a fanatically self-limiting Jew. Jesus believed in Judgment Day, a folly that keeps the Jews frothing even now, with their tiresome inability to forget the Holocaust. This is one of the many throw-away lines in Vidal’s book: “AIPAC has insisted on a twelve-part series based on how Moses and God established the Jews in Palestine forever, as well as another year of reruns of the Holocaust.”

So what is Vidal’s own religion? In “Monotheism and Its Discontents,” the last one in his collection of think pieces for The Nation that is now published as The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, Vidal is as forthright and uncomplicated on that subject as he is about the “last days” of the United States:

Now to the root of the matter. The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three antihuman religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal—God is the omnipotent father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.

The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, and he is in place not just for one tribune but of all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good.

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

The tone is maybe too childishly brash, the content maybe too simple to explain monotheism as a great foundation of science in human thought? Not to worry. Vidal has everything down pat, in op-ed lengths. Simone Weil, who also resented the Jews, complained of monotheism that it posited belief in one figure alone, and the removal of that figure therefore led to no belief at all. Vidal’s objection is different. His “paganism” is entirely sexual. His views are those of the brilliant, angry boy at Exeter already revolting against authority. It seems that nothing about monotheism arose from human speculation about the possibly unitary nature of creation; the sky-god just imposed himself like a headmaster. Religion does not rise from the everywhere observable thirst for transcendence; it is just a racket in the hands of some priestly mafia. Beastly authority, especially the kind so hard on same-sexers, is the rule everywhere.

Of all these little books, the only one that gave me any pleasure, meaning relief from the clang clang of this man’s too confident voice, is Screening History, his largely charming and almost idyllic memories of life at the movies. As the Frenchmen wistfully remembering the whorehouses of their youth said at the end of Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, there, truly, was our happiness. Vidal correctly points out that Americans, or at least those of a certain generation, owe such scant knowledge of history as they possess to the costume dramas that once presented European lords and ladies, and he is right to lament the comparative absence of great American figures like Jefferson and Washington from the screen.

Vidal fondly remembers Henry Fonda playing the young Lincoln about to walk into the future. He is as good on this as he is bemoaning Hollywood’s inability to present the American past. The lack of the historical sense even among supposedly educated Americans is more and more stupefying, and explains why politicians can get away with any falsehood, since for the most part they too don’t know the falsehoods to be false.

But the subject of Lincoln brings to mind Vidal’s own Lincoln, which was roundly criticized for its falsehoods by Lincoln scholars, whom Vidal nastily calls “Lincoln priests.” As it happens, I know one of these “Lincoln priests,” who is a Hungarian refugee teaching at Gettysburg College and the author of a valuable book called Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream. This scholar complained that “to the general public, Vidal’s is the most influential Lincoln image of our time. It is also the most insidiously ahistorical.” Vidal’s rebuttal: “I think ‘ahistorical,’ in a sense, means a lack of footnotes.” This is cheap enough, and it is thoroughly beside the point. But not content to let bad enough alone, Vidal goes completely wild and notes “the historian’s provenance as Stalinist Hungary because the style is that of a defender of a totalitarian regime.” When I came to this sentence, I found myself saying right out loud, Shut up, Vidal! Just for once, shut up!