Before we get down to cases, here is an exercise in the etiquette of reviewing. You are sent a book of essays of very many pages, which you look forward to reading over the summer months, as to a sort of prolonged, even spicy, intellectual buffet. After starting it, you discover, buried among its mountainous 1,200 or so pages, a mousy reference to yourself. Do you consider (a) that you can still read and give a fair account of the book or (b) that honour requires you to disqualify yourself from the critical role or (c) that you will not mention that slight, but grab the opportunity to give as good (or bad) as you’ve got or gotten?

Now for the supplementary: if, having chosen option (a), you find that your response is, in general, one of qualified enthusiasm, should you congratulate yourself on your unfashionable fairmindedness or suspect yourself of intimidated toadyism? That this piece has been written at all reveals my belief that I can rise above personal pique, but you should perhaps allow for a tincture of bile.

Gore Vidal’s greatest merit is moral courage, which I suspect to be sustained by his having had what used to be called ‘a good war’. He makes almost nothing of his service in the Pacific (unlike his close enemy Norman Mailer), but his reticence speaks in his volumes, which do not scorn to gore sacred cows, including (notoriously) his—I think—step-half-sisters, the Bouvier girls. Give or take a step, he does seem to be close to a lotta lotta famous people (Louis Auchincloss’s stories get a familiar pat on the back, rightly). At times Vidal reminds one of a well-connected Alastair Forbes: a Washington DC insider right from the cradle, he lent his step-half-brother-in-law Jack Kennedy books on Byzantine economics, which—we are told—he may have read in the bath (he had less recondite things to do in bed). Gore says that he liked Jack, but eventually disapproved of his presidency (in the spirit of ho gegrapha, gegrapha, however, he has the nerve to reprint an early piece of drool over Camelot).

These essays [United States] are copious (an editor would be bold to approach G.V. with a comment more cutting than V.G.) and often intelligent, though some of the ‘scholarly’ waffle—for instance, about the nouveau roman—could be truncated and still be too long. On the whole, however, Vidal fights good fights; with accurate affection, he rescues the novels of Dawn Powell, which I have never read, from what sounds to be unmerited oblivion. His most enduring admiration, however, is for himself. he tells us, more than once, how famous his first novel made him and how he fell from grace with his third, which recounted the unblue adventures of a male prostitute and earned him non-person status in the New York Times, for which—understandably enough—he cannot forgive that solemnly sententious organ.

He was a dignified, sometimes savage, defender of a person’s right to same-sex sex at a time before Gay Rights became a choral number. His defence of homosexual ‘preference’ is complex: he argues that adult sexual behaviour is a private matter—although it has been made ‘political’—and that, if we were logical, we should favour rather than deplore it, since it avoids baby-booms (this was written pre-Aids). Secondly, he insists that homosexuality was commonplace in the ancient world, at least until Judaeo-Christianity did its stuffy stuff. To my mind, it is not really decisive whether the ancients approved or not (would we advocate torture or slavery because the Lyceum crowd said it was OK?), but it has been argued—for instance by Professor Peter Green—that homosexuality in Athens was a coterie activity, not a common dish on the sexual menu. If it had been, the comedy of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata would not have worked, since the females’ sex strike would have been rendered futile by male blacklegs. Pejorative references to catamites in the literature, and their habitual political disgrace, suggest that antique hedonism was less flexible than Vidal chooses to argue. More significantly, Laius, the father of Oedipus, was condemned by Zeus for his pederastic tastes (Zeus would not have appreciated the tu quoque mention of Ganymede). But then again, so what?

On American politics and politicians, Vidal is amusing and illuminating. His grandfather, he soon tells us, and soon tells us again, was a senator; his father was in FDR’s ‘sub-cabinet’; he himself has run unsuccessfully, but honourably, for office on a liberal-democratic ticket, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt in whose political faith and wisdom he still places a certain boyish credence. When it comes to Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan, he uses both invective and ridicule; he has his applauding New York Review of Books gallery and he plays to it very smartly. He also accuses Jack Kennedy of thinking that war was ‘fun’. Perhaps he catches his own scent there, since polemic is available by the yard with him. I am lucky, I came to realise, to have been visited only by his teeniest gunboat (at least he hasn’t called me a ‘sissy’, yet).

All right, I hear you, I hear you: so what did Gore (we’re all on first-name terms with the nobs these days, are we not, Bryan?) say about me, and why? Well, in the process of sneering at Somerset Maugham, he alludes disparagingly to my little biography, which is his right. He then adds that I am the author of the obituary of Vidal, Gore, which he alleges may, unless he is assumed bodily into heaven like Elijah, one day appear in the London Times. As it happens, he has his leaked facts pettily wrong; it was for the Sunday Times that I was asked, one dark afternoon some years ago, to file a piece about him. Why me? Why not? Since I have admired his work (in particular Kalki and a number of the essays reprinted here), I agreed to write a paltry thousand words on Vidal’s literary story so far, without in the least wishing that it go no further: I remember asking tenderly after his health.

However, Vidal clearly imagines himself the victim of a buried hatchet job (a fear which, sweetly enough, echoes one of Mr Maugham’s own). Since he himself is said—truthfully, I trust—to have greeted word of Truman Capote’s death with the verdict, ‘Good career move’, one can understand a certain (unnecessary) apprehension, which seems to have led him first to abuse my modest book—modesty being a charge unlikely to be brought against any of his own—and then, by way of a one-two, to go on to allege that I am someone who claims to have read books which I have not.

This witless charge passes a little beyond the genial malice with which citizens of the Republic of Letters must learn to live. It is, however, quite shrewd, in a silly way, since—like the chant of ‘The referee’s a wanker’—it is almost certain to have some truth in it (Gore’s gospel, the Kinsey Report, having established that not only referees but nearly all those who abuse them have probably indulged in one or more hand-jobs during their lives). In much the same way, it is statistically improbable that anyone who has been subject to the English higher educational system can swear that he or she never referred to a text or author who had not been conned from cover to cover. Though few have the nerve to claim, as did Lawrence of Arabia, to have read all the books in the Bodleian, less flagrant lies are almost de rigueur among those seeking to gain academic applause or preferment (bluff is part of intellectual poker). Perhaps it has even been true of Vidal, though the last thing I should like to assert, without evidence, is that he is a man like any other.

In the style of a saint unsure that others will speak well enough of him, he asserts elsewhere that he esteems himself more or less unique in always reading every word of the books he reviews. Although United States supplies a demanding test of critical integrity, I have now read every word; but has the author? I hesitate to say that the repetitions, misprints and venial howlers suggest that self-criticism is not among his priorities, if only to avoid another outbreak of hostilities, but truth will be served, in due course.

As for the original casus belli (his literary luggage is swanky with Latin tags), would anyone be utterly astounded to hear that it is now 25 years since I observed, apropos Myra Breckinridge, that ‘Gore Vidal has announced that the novel is dead, and now he has sent M.B. to the funeral’? Subsequently, I commented amiably on his work, but if you want your words to remain unremembered among book-chatters, you have to say only nice things about them. In the trudging pursuit of his long grievance (he has many, many more against other people), Vidal goes ironically italic over the use—in my ‘twee’ Maugham book—of ‘constipated’ to describe Theodore Dreiser’s fiction. Perhaps, despite his etymological affectations, Vidal is not clear that the word means, literally, stuck together or coagulated in a lump; it says nothing of the quality of the mass, only that it is pressed together. Maybe An American Tragedy strikes Vidal, whose wit knows little brevity, as a model of airy elegance, but one is not obliged to go to the pillory for failing to join him in his tastes.

Vidal is a great one for great ones. As befits a man whose grandfather—you will remember—was a US senator (albeit from hicky-sticky Oklahoma, where the waving wheat etc), he is at ease in lofty company, where his horse can be relied on to be at least as high as the next man’s. He writes persuasively well on Henry James, as of a classmate, and he jeers at bestsellers with condescending fairness (finding reluctant skill in Herman Wouk, whose orthodox, marriage-orientated Jewishness does not, prima facie, recommend him to the waspish grandee).

Although our author has too much morgue for Ezra Pound’s ‘suburban prejudice’, he does not conceal his disdain for Ikey-come-lately presumption in the US/socio-literary scene. Well, we can all wince together at the smugnesses of the late Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe and some of the Commentary crowd (Midge Decter’s queer-bashing gets a deserved bash in response). Why, on the other hand, Vidal insists so querulously on the illiteracy of alluding to ‘homosexuals’ (he would like us to say ‘homosexualists’), I am not clear. He objects to the use of adjectives as nouns, but how seriously deplorable is it? Does he refer to himself as an Americanist?

It is very much Vidal’s style to adopt the haughtiness, if not always the charm, of his betters: for instance, he preens himself on honouring the Nabokovian distinction between criticism of his art (which he affects to take in good part) and that of his scholarship. In the latter case, the ‘Black Swan of Lake Leman’—hardly an apt designation, since black swans are found only in Australia, which VN never was—announced that he always ‘reached for his dictionary’. He did so to better effect than Gore, who—had he reached for Liddell and Scott in due time—might have avoided explaining the etymology of ‘pornography’ by reference to the putative Greek words ‘pornos’ and ‘graphos’. He would have discovered that ‘pornos’ does not exist; although pornee, the word for whore, had a number of derivatives, none was masculine. As for graphos, my Liddell and Scott tells me that the noun was used once in the sixth and once in the fourth century, both in inscriptions and never in extant literature. Does it matter that ‘pornography in fact derives from porne(ia)-graphein (to write about whores or whorish matters)? Not really, but if one choose to parade one’s scorn and irony, with regard both to Academe and to Hackademe (a twee locution which I offer Mr Vidal without ascriptive obligation), one had better get things—preferably everything—right, had one not?

Although he has given us improving entertainment with his recensions of the ancient world (the sideshow nature of Xerxes’ Greek expedition was splendidly caught in Creation) and his Julian was a fine, if extensive, gloss on Ammianus Marcellinus, Vidal should beware of speaking in dead tongues. His oeuvre is heavy with play on the phrase ‘e pluribus unum’, but his coinage ‘e pluribus meum’ is Latin which not even the dog (canis) would swallow or cough up. He admits to speaking French with André Gide, in his post-war youth, but he pays too bold a homage to the old master when he attributes to him the invention of the ‘acte gratuite’ (sic). Even when propounding extremely silly notions of freedom, no mandarin Frenchman, however heterodox, would take it upon himself to change the gender of words.

Although its princely author may never believe me, and it is unlikely to deter him from another prolix display of Charlus-like hauteur, I did not solicit this volume, nor did I have advance knowledge of its reference to me. If I should not have reviewed it, meum culpa, as our author might say. After taking a good deal of pleasure in its aigre-doux flavour, I conclude that some people are born bloody-minded: others have Gore thrust upon them.