Tiresias' Truths
[In the following review of A View from the Diner’s Club, Lefkowitz commends Vidal's “pronouncements on politics and life,” though finds his literary criticism less interesting.]
The curious title of this book [A View from the Diner's Club] is emblematic, but not of its contents. It expresses Vidal’s attitude toward the elite literary world where one would naturally have placed him, had he not warned us by the title that he wanted none of it (or us). Vidal explains that in 1976 he could not accept the honour of election to the (American) National Institute of Arts and Letters because he was already a member of the Diners Club. What more elegant way to tell the Writers Club how much he values their opinion, and, for that matter, the opinion of anyone who likes what they write? And what more subtle way to let us know that he, Vidal, was in fact elected to that exclusive group, and by his refusal made another famous writer (John Cheever) sad?
If you approve of Vidal’s allegiance to the Diners Club, you will enjoy this book. It contains a series of essays that appeared in various journals, mostly in the United States, some on literature, others on politics, all expressing the formidable wit and wisdom of an author who, despite his lack of formal qualifications, has been, by his own admission, invariably right. According to Vidal, formal qualifications would have been a hindrance; he is not a scholar-squirrel who teaches at a university; he has never written a review for money: “when I need money I write for the movies”. At the same time, he beats us scholar-squirrels-cum-literary-hacks at our own miserable game. He can drop more literary names per page than an English literature professor at a session of the Modern Languages Association and disembowel the academic critics of his novel Lincoln and serve them up for our delectation, much as in the ancient myth Atreus killed and cooked Thyestes’ children and then invited Thyestes over to dinner.
What can Vidal tell the world that we squirrels cannot? For one thing, the Truth. Where else could we learn the real significance of another emblem, the sled Rosebud in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane? As befits the importance of the revelation, Vidal tells the story twice: Rosebud, the word that Kane whispers on his death-bed, was what William Randolph Hearst called his mistress Marion Davies’s clitoris. If Welles concealed this truth from his audience, why does Vidal insist on revealing it? The story implies, certainly, that Hearst could be vulgar—one can also learn that by taking the guided tour of San Simeon. It also implies that sex is the key to existence. Vidal does have a gift for discovering sex where ordinary readers have failed to notice it (is the meeting between Vautrin and Lucien de Rubempré in Balzac’s Illusions perdues “one of the most erotic ever recorded”? Did Henry James “lust” for men?) But most of all, the True Rosebud story reminds us of Vidal’s authorial presence: whether we want to hear it or not, like the prophet Tiresias, Vidal knows and tells.
According to the myth, Tiresias lived through seven generations of men, had been both a man and a women and was blinded by the goddess Hera for revealing that women had more fun. Like him, Vidal has been an eyewitness, either himself or through the reports of his connections, to many important events, even before he was born. In July 1882, Vidal’s twelve-year-old grandfather heard Oscar Wilde speak in Vicksburg, Mississippi: “he wore a girdle”. Vidal himself in 1940 shook Wendell Willkie’s “limp hand” at the Republican Convention, which he attended with his grandfather, the former Senator T.P. Gore. Because family connections brought him into Washington society, Vidal can claim that the American world was, and still is, small. But the intimate knowledge he has of this world leaves some doubt about his credentials as a card-carrying member of the Diners Club.
Modern inquirers can still learn the Truth about America from Vidal even when he is in his home-from-home, Ravello, Italy. Thanks to the miracle of television, on which he can appear at any time and in the most unlikely company (William F. Buckley, Junior), we could have learned, had we been watching, at least three years before it happened, that Soviet Communism was doomed. Now at least we can read about this prediction, at least twice, even if in retrospect. Who likes this kind of I-told-you-so prophecy? But it probably makes sense to ask if Vidal’s other predictions might not be equally true and apposite: our next enemy will not be the Japanese (they won’t let us), nor the Arabs (they have the oil), but—as it was for Oedipus—mankind, ourselves, because over-population threatens to destroy what’s left of our planet.
Scholar-squirrel (or chipmunk) that I am, I prefer these pronouncements on politics and life to Also sprach Vidal on literature. He writes about his old friend Dawn Powell’s novels with studied zeal, but none of the plots he summarizes or the quotations he selects makes me eager to read one, even though Powell describes a New York world that I know about by osmosis. Does Somerset Maugham ever approximate to Jane Austen? Although Vidal implies that he has read and thought (why doubt it?) about every imaginable literary topic, he lacks the patience to persuade, or (God forbid) teach. His own marvellously self-conscious style surpasses anything he quotes from other writers. Does that explain why he chose those writers to write about? Unlike a scholar-squirrel, Vidal doesn’t try to hide himself behind his author; who we remember in the end is not Maugham or Powell but Vidal.
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