The Vital Vidal
[In the following review of United States, MacIntyre offers a largely positive assessment of Vidal's essays, though he argues that Vidal is a “snob” whose writings sometimes suffer from his “aloofness.”]
Say what you like about Gore Vidal (and no living American writer has generated more conversation), he has not been idle in the past forty years. Were he a character in one of his novels, he might be dismissed as exaggerated and improbable, for he has been, in ascending order of accomplishment, a politician, an actor, a playwright, a script-writer, a novelist and finally, and most brilliantly, an essayist—a form in which he combines elements of all the above, writing prose that is political, histrionic, dramatic, filmic and fictive.
Both of his bids for political office, in 1960 and in 1982, proved ineffective; as an actor (most recently in the film Bob Roberts, playing a politician), he was not much more successful. His plays have not weathered as well as they deserve, and his twenty-three novels veer from the scholarly and remarkable (Lincoln, Burr) to the pallid and otiose (Hollywood). But his essays, here collected in one vast volume three inches thick, are the vital Vidal, full of brio and braggadocio, sharply learned, wittily argued and beautifully written. This collection illustrates why Vidal became a phenomenon—he would both relish and scorn that exhausted television tag—in his youth, after publishing his first novel, Williwaw, at the age of twenty. It also explains why, at almost seventy, he continues to occupy a unique niche in American cultural life, part intellectual D’Artagnan, part media personality and entirely, oddly, isolated.
This collection is [United States] divided into three “states”: the state of the art (literature), the state of the union (politics) and the state of being (Gore Vidal and attendant subjects). The distinctions are slightly nebulous, since Vidal the essayist ranges over the entire cultural landscape of America, pausing here to excoriate the “Christers”, there to laud the under-appreciated, and here again to put an exquisite, handmade epigrammatic boot into an old enemy (Norman Mailer, say, or “academic hacks”), or to enrage a new one by the same technique. He is a supreme stylist, almost incapable of an inelegant sentence, an inapt allusion or a spongy metaphor. If that can be traced to his talents as a novelist, it is tempting to ascribe his taste for the grand gesture and the camp put-down to his experience of Hollywood. Vidal can demolish in a single stiletto phrase, with the effortless mot juste or, for that matter, injuste. So Cecil Beaton becomes “an elegant lizard just fed 20 milligrams of Valium”, while Howard Hughes “demonstrated, from the beginning, an attractive talent for failure which almost—but not quite—catapults him into the ranks of the human”. The essay on America’s twenty-sixth president (“Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy”) is a brilliant piece of calculated desecration, while his “Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures” does more damage, in a few pages, than a dozen Kitty Kelleys could achieve in a lifetime.
There is no better guide to take one, usually by the scruff of the neck, and propel one through the lunacies of modern America “as our dismal century draws to a close”. Here, laid brutally bare, are the smiling horrors of America’s religious Right; the cult that is the Kennedy clan; the end of America’s brief imperium; the argument for legalizing drugs and deracinating homophobia. If, thirty years on, these sound like familiar themes, even approaching conventional wisdom, many originated here in their most pungent form.
But the plethora of Vidal’s concerns leaves one, after 1,200 pages, breathless and a little bewildered as to what he really cares about; for the same sincere anger and scorching erudition are brought to bear on matters ranging from the crucial to the abstruse, the fundamental to the flippant. There are principles and values here, and opinions aplenty, but few beliefs or genuine convictions. Perhaps that does not matter. Convictions are much overrated (particularly in America), and beliefs can be both downright dangerous and insufferably boring.
It is Vidal’s penchant for the limelight, almost any limelight (remember Caligula?), that causes one to wonder whether he actually believes in his many carefully argued certainties. He is a superb television performer. His much publicized quarrels (such as that with William Buckley) have probably done more to establish his name in America’s increasingly illiterate society, than anything he has written. But his addiction to hype makes one suspect that he would rather make a nasty or clever remark than a true one, and that winning every argument is sometimes more important to him than choosing a good argument to win. The theatricality of his prose exacerbates that feeling. For example, at the start of a 1978 essay for the New Statesman, “On Prettiness” (Cecil Beaton’s memoirs), Vidal remember wandering through King’s College, Cambridge with E.M. Forster and remarking “pretty” as the approached the chapel.
“Forster thought I meant the chapel when actually, I was referring to a couple in the damp middle distance”, Vidal recalls. “A ruthless moralist, Forster publicised my use of the dread word.” This is a useful anecdote, since it simultaneously launches Vidal into his topic and sets the record straight, something that occupies much of his energy. The only problem is that scene has the unmistakable feel of post-factum reworking.
There is too an aloofness in Vidal, a patrician finger-wagging instinct that can sound didactic and Victorian (“Let me explain…”, he offers too often), and only increases the sensation that he is not always fully connecting, at least with readers. Discussing the availability of post-war sex in “Why I Am Eight Years Younger Than Anthony Burgess” (1987), Vidal wrote: “Those of us who joined the orgy in our teens often failed, in later life, to acquire the gift of intimacy.” Vidal is distant partly because he is rather a snob. He is acutely aware and celebratory of his lineage, his forebears, and even his nearbears by marriage if they are deemed sufficiently illustrious. His maternal grandfather, a blind senator he describes as “legendary”, crops up in many of his essays, sometimes without obvious relevance. Vidal changed his Christian name from Eugene to Gore in deference to the senator, and somehow conveys the impression that America’s political institutions would have collapsed without the aid of his relatives; in fact, Senator T.P. Gore would be distinctly less legendary without the assiduous publicity provided by his grandson. His family is one of the few subjects on which Vidal seems incapable of irony. Perhaps it is too much to ask of anyone to be a master ironist, exceptionally funny and also thoroughly sincere. And while he some times toys mercilessly with the views of others, Vidal has made himself the champion of the writer’s right, even duty, to say exactly what he wants about anything, unfettered by political correctness, tact or any other prevailing nicety. He is the sworn enemy of the “second-rateness which has characterised our garrison state the last third of a century”. This last is something in which Gore Vidal clearly and genuinely believes. It may be the only thing, but perhaps it is enough.
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