The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  Teddy doesn’t know what to do with his life. He is passive and not very bright. He works in a bottle-top factory; studies accounting. Meanwhile, he struggles for light beneath his author’s thick blankets of research, intended to give us the sense of a world and a time in which Teddy himself has neither place nor perceptible interest: “And now the sordidness of illusions was leaking out of Hollywood itself. . . . Fatty Arbuckle, unsolved mystery of director William Desmond Taylor . . .” But there is some point to all this news from outside, because, in the next slice of the Wilmot saga, Teddy’s daughter, Esther or Essie, will become a Movie Star and avenge—“ambush,” as Updike did—a world that paid no attention to his father, her grandfather. When Teddy goes to work in Addison’s Drug Store (Stephenson’s back in Shillington), we are given page after page of what is sold in the store. Then Teddy marries a crippled girl with a strong character. Teddy gives up being a soda jerk and becomes a career postman. He endures a happy marriage, until his wife, as fictional characters tend to do, falls through one of the interstices in Updike’s web of Passing Parade notes on world events: “Jews and Arabs fought in Jerusalem; Chinese and Russians battled along the Manchurian border.” Social notes from all over. Teddy smokes Old Golds.

  Part Three. We shift from Teddy to Essie/Alma. I found myself curious that Updike did not choose to shift from third to first person in his studies of four generations. Since all his character writing is in essentially the same tone of voice, he might have dramatized—well, differentiated—his four protagonists by giving each a distinctive voice. But he remains in the lazy third person: Now she thinks this . . . now she does that . . . now Japan invades Manchuria.

  In Essie’s section, the Shillington/Basingstoke movie house is central, and Essie, now a beauty, is thrilled by what she sees on the screen, ideal life writ large in celluloid. Ambitious, for a dull Wilmot, she enters a beauty contest, where she meets a photographer from New York. “There was something mystical in the way the camera lapped up her inner states through the thin skin of her face. She had known as a child she was the center of the universe and now proof was accumulating, click by click.” She becomes a model. An actress. A star, as Alma De Mott.

  But for Updike, Essie is early blighted. Even before Hollywood and stardom she is taken in by liberals—Commies, too. Plainly, sinister osmosis was taking place at the movie house in her hometown. The liberal image of America the Bad was like some insidious virus contained in the celluloid, bacteria which, under the optimum condition of hot light projected through its alien nesting ground on to the screen, bred discontent in those not sufficiently vaccinated against Doubt by benign school and good church. So ravaged was Essie by Red films like Now, Voyager (“Why ask for the moon when we have the stars?”) that she actually objected to the loyalty oaths inflicted on so many Americans by President Truman’s administration, oaths that the self-conscious Updike cannot, like his father, find objectionable. When Essie’s little brother, Danny, says, “I hate Communists,” she says, “What do you know about anything? Who do you think beat Hitler’s armies?” And so the green twig was bent by the product of MGM and the Brothers Warner.

  Before Essie leaves New York for Hollywood, Updike helpfully tells us the names “of the big Hollywood movies at the end of the Forties.” He also lists the foreign films that ravished Essie. Curiously, he forgets to rate the Italian neorealists for Leftist content. In New York, Essie is taken up by a queer cousin, Patrick. He is worldly, knows his Manhattan: like all homosexuals, he is “sensitive” but “frustrating . . . and not just sexually; some inner deflection kept him on the sidelines of life, studying painting but not wanting to paint himself, and even sneering at those that did try”; but then “the arts, especially minor arts like window dressing, were dominated by them.” Patrick manages her career for a time: “A comforting accreditation . . . to have a poof bring her in.”

  Before Alma makes it to the silver screen, she serves time in live television. Updike tells us all about what it was like; but then there is a firm in New York that will do intensive research on any subject a writer might want—from the Golden Age of Television, say, to the flora and fauna of Brazil. I am certain that Updike, the artist, would never resort to so brazen a crib; even so, many of his small piled-up facts are so rotelike in their detail and his use of them so completely haywire that—well, vichyssoise qui mal y pense.

  “Alma would play opposite, within the next few years, both Gary Cooper and . . . Clark Gable.” Boldly, Updike tells us a lot of personal things about Cooper and Gable which he could only have got from fan magazines or showbiz biographies. Updike is now frugging wildly into Collins Sisters territory. But where the Bel-Air Brontës are well advanced in the art and arts of popular fiction and write romans à clef with phallic keys, Updike, ever original, disposes with the keys. Confidently, he tells us about “Coop’s” aches and pains, about Clark’s career anxieties and sex. Updike has now made it to the heart of the heart of pop fiction: “there was in Gable a loneliness too big for Alma to fill. Where Cooper was a sublime accident (he reached over, while the wind rushed past and the sun beat sparkling dents in the Pacific below, and cupped his hand around her skull) . . . Gable had never been anything but an aspiring actor. . . . He had been so long a star he had forgotten to find mortal satisfactions.” Why ask for the butterscotch when we can have the fudge?

  For a beautiful heroine like Alma, sex is de rigueur, but though she fucks like a minx, the sexagenarian Updike has lost some of his old brio. Alma marries a nobody with a body; he never makes it in the business but makes a baby. Meanwhile, she grows more and more un-American. Proud to be a Hollywood liberal, she is prone to quarrel with her kid brother, Danny, now a CIA honcho. “Well, Danny darling, the movies have never pretended to be anything except entertainment. But what you’re doing pretends to be a great deal more.”

  “It pretends to be history,” he said quickly. “It is history. Cast of billions. The future of the globe is at stake. I kid you not.” Nice touch, this last. Television slang of the 1950s.

  Alma De Mott rises and falls and rises again. She is clearly based—research to one side—on Yvonne de Carlo’s performance as an up-down-up movie star of a certain age in Sondheim’s musical comedy Follies, whose signature song was “I’m Still Here.”

  Time now to shift to Alma’s son, Clark, named for . . . you guessed it. In the family tradition, he is a born Shillington loser. He is, of course, conscious of being a celebrity as a star’s son. But the connection does him no particular good. He also has a stepfather called Rex. When he asks Alma why she married Rex, she “told him calmly, Because he is all cock.”

  Clark is in rebellion against the Communism of his mother and her friends—pinks if not reds—and, worse, unabashed enemies of the United States in the long, long, war against the Satanic Ho Chi Minh. “Mom, too, wanted North Vietnam to win, which seemed strange to Clark, since America has been pretty good to her.” As irony, this might have been telling, but irony is an arrow that the Good Fiction Fairy withheld from the Updike quiver. Consequently, this non sequitur can only make perfect sense to a writer who believes that no matter how misguided, tyrannous, and barbarous the rulers of one’s own country have become, they must be obeyed; and if one has actually made money and achieved a nice place in the country that they have hijacked then one must be doubly obedient, grateful, too. Under Hitler, many good Germans, we are told, felt the same way.

  There is nothing, sad to say, surprising in Updike’s ignorance of history and politics and of people unlike himself; in this, he is a standard American and so a typical citizen of what Vice-President Agnew once called the greatest nation in the country. But Updike has literary ambitions as well as most of the skills of a popular writer, except, finally, the essential one without which nothing can ever come together to any useful end as literature, empathy. He is forever stuck in a psychic Shillington-Ipswich-New York world where everything outside his familiar round is unreal. Because of this lack of imaginatio
n, he can’t really do much even with the characters that he does have some feeling for because they exist in social, not to mention historic, contexts that he lacks the sympathy—to use the simplest word—to make real.

  Many of Updike’s descriptions of Hollywood—the place—are nicely observed. Plainly, he himself looked at the Three B’s—Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Brentwood—“the palm trees, the pink low houses, the Spanishness, the endlessness . . . the winding palm-lined streets of Beverly Hills, where there was no living person in sight but Japanese and Mexican gardeners wheeling dead palm fronds out from behind hedges of oleander and fuchsias.” “The wealth here was gentle wealth, humorous wealth even; these fortunes derived from art and illusion and personal beauty and not, as back home, from cruel old riverside mills manufacturing some ugly and stupid necessity like Trojans or bottlecaps.” The “humorous” is an inspired adjective, proving there is a lot to be said for firsthand observation. But then, alas, he must tell us about how films were made in the 1950s and what the makers were like, including Columbia’s Harry Cohn, a much-written-about monster. Once inside the celluloid kitchen, Updike falls far, far behind the Bel-Air Brontës at their cuisine-art.

  Alma is still here, as the song goes, while the son, Clark, works at a Colorado ski resort, owned by his great-uncle. Clark has gone through the usual schools and done the usual drugs and had the usual run-of-the-mill sex available to a movie star’s child. Now he must find himself—if there is a self to find—in a partially pristine Colorado rapidly being undone by ski resorts and the greenhouse effect.

  Except for Alma, who knew from the beginning that she was unique in her beauty and sweet self-love, none of Updike’s protagonists has any idea of what to do with himself during the seventy years or so that he must mark time in this vale of tears before translation to sunbeam-hood in Jesus’ sky-condo. Happily, if tragically, true meaning comes to Clark in Colorado.

  Updike, nothing if not up-to-date, re-creates the celebrated slaughter at Waco, Texas, where the charismatic David Koresh and many of his worshipers were wiped out in their compound by federal agents. In Updike’s fiction, a similar messiah and his worshipers withdraw to Colorado in order to live in Christian fellowship until the final trump, due any day now. An attractive girl leads Clark to the Lower Branch Temple and to Jesse, a Vietnam veteran who is now a “high-ranch messiah.” As a novelist, Updike often relies on the wearisome trick of someone asking a new character to tell us about himself. Within the rustic temple, skeptical Clark and primitive Scripture-soaked Jesse tell us about themselves. Clark: “Yeah, well. What was I going to say? Something. I don’t want to bore you.” Jesse: “You will never find Jesse bored. Never, by a recital of the truth. Weary, yes, and sore-laden with the sorrows of mankind, but never bored.” A good thing, too, considering the level of the dialogue. Jesse fulminates with biblical quotes from the likes of Ezekiel, while Clark wimps on and on about the emptiness of gilded life in the Three B’s.

  The actual events at Waco revealed, terribly, what a paranoid federal apparatus, forever alert to any infraction of its stern prohibitions, was capable of when challenged head-on by nonconformists. How, I wondered, will Updike, a born reactionary, deal with the state’s conception of itself as ultimate arbiter of everything, no matter how absurd? Even “the good child” must be appalled by the slaughter of Jesse and his fellow believers by a mindless authority.

  Since we shall witness all this through Clark’s eyes, Updike has made him even more passive than his usual protagonists. Too much acid in the Vipers Lounge? Clark does have a scene with Uncle Danny, who explains the real world to him in terms that the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal might think twice about publishing. Danny: “Vietnam was a hard call. . . . But somebody always has to fight.” (In the case of Vietnam, somebody proved to be poor white and black males.) “You and I walk down the street safe, if we do, because a cop around the corner has a gun. The kids today say the state is organized violence and they’re right. But it matters who’s doing the organizing . . . Joe Stalin . . . or our bumbling American pols. I’ll take the pols every time.” Thus, straw villain undoes straw hero; neither, of course, relevant to the issue, but Updike—Danny (true empathy may have been achieved at last) is now in full swing: “The kids today . . . grow long hair . . . smoke pot and shit on poor Tricky Dicky” only because of “the willingness of somebody else to do their fighting for them. What you can’t protect gets taken away. . . .” Hobbesian world out there. Danny does admit that we got nothing out of Vietnam, not even “thanks”—one wonders from whom he thinks gratitude ought to come. But, no matter. Danny hates Communism. Hates Ho Chi Minh. Hates those “Hollywood fatcats and bleeding hearts” who oppose the many wars. Even so, “I try to be dispassionate about it. But I love this crazy, wasteful, self-hating country in spite of myself.” It would seem that Updike–Danny has not got the point. The people of the country don’t hate the country, only what has been done to it by those who profit from hot and cold wars and, in the process, bring to civilian governance a murderous military mentality, witness Waco.

  How does Clark take all this? “To Clark, Uncle Danny seemed a treasure, a man from space who was somehow his own. . . .” Clark has not known many employees of the CIA, for whom this sort of bombast is the order of the day. That order flows not only through the pages of The Wall Street Journal but throughout most of the press, where Hume’s Opinion is shaped by the disinformation of a hundred wealthy tax-exempt American foundations such as Olin, Smith-Richardson, Bradley, Scaife and Pew, not to mention all the Christian coalitions grinding out a worldview of Us against Them, the Us an ever-smaller group of propertied Americans and the Them the rest of the world.

  Clark would now be ripe for neo-conhood, but for the fact that he was never a con or anything at all until he drifted into Jesse’s orbit, already set on a collision course with the U.S. government, which allows no group the pleasure of defiance even in the name of the One in whose Image we were fashioned. Jesse has been stockpiling weapons for “The Day of Reckoning.” Lovingly, Updike lists the arsenal. Clark suddenly realizes that here, at last, is the perfect orgasm, something well worth dying for. “The gun was surprising: provocative like a woman, both lighter and heavier than he would have thought.” The ultimate love story of a boy and his gun, “ready to become a magic wand.” Disappointingly, at the end, Updike is too patriotic or too timid to allow federal law-enforcement officers to destroy the temple along with the men, women, and children that Jesse has attracted to him. Colorado State Troopers do Caesar’s work, unlike Waco, where Caesar himself did the deed.

  At the end, Clark turns on Jesse and betrays him. In order to save the children from the Conflagration, Clark “shot the false prophet twice.” Although Clark himself perishes, he dies a hero, who saved as many lives as he could from the false prophet whom he had, for no coherent reason, briefly served. Finally, world television validates Clark’s life and end. Who could ask for anything more?

  Stendhal’s view that politics in a work of art is like a pistol shot at a concert is true, but what is one to do in the case of a political work that deals almost exclusively with true patriot versus nonpatriot who dares criticize the common patria? I quoted at length from Updike’s Self-Consciousness in order to establish what human material this inhuman novel is based on. I have also tried to exercise empathy, tried to feel, as President Clinton likes to say, the author’s pain. Actually, to find reactionary writing similar to Updike’s, one must turn back to John Dos Passos’s Midcentury, or to John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent. But Updike, unlike his predecessor Johns, has taken to heart every far-out far-right piety currently being fed us.

  Also, despite what Updike must have thought of as a great leap up the social ladder from Shillington obscurity to “Eliotic” Harvard and then on to a glossy magazine, he has now, Antaeus-like, started to touch base with that immutable Dutch-German earth on which his ladder stood. Recent American wars and defeats have so demoralized our good
child that he has now come to hate that Enlightenment which was all that, as a polity, we ever had. He is symptomatic, then, of a falling back, of a loss of nerve; indeed, a loss of honor. He invokes phantom political majorities, righteous masses. Time to turn to Herzen on the subject: “The masses are indifferent to individual freedom, liberty of speech; the masses love authority. They are still blinded by the arrogant glitter of power, they are offended by those who stand alone . . . they want a social government to rule for their benefit, and not against it. But to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads.”

  Updike’s work is more and more representative of that polarizing within a state where Authority grows ever more brutal and malign while its hired hands in the media grow ever more excited as the holy war of the few against the many heats up. In this most delicate of times, Updike has “builded” his own small, crude altar in order to propitiate—or to invoke?—“the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”

  The Times Literary Supplement

  26 April 1996

  * A NOTE ON THE CITY AND THE PILLAR AND THOMAS MANN

  Much has been made—not least by the Saint himself—of how Augustine stole and ate some pears from a Milanese orchard. Presumably, he never again trafficked in, much less ate, stolen goods, and once this youthful crime (“a rum business,” snarled the unsympathetic American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) was behind him, he was sainthood-bound. The fact is that all of us have stolen pears; the mystery is why so few of us rate halos. I suspect that in certain notorious lives there is sometimes an abrupt moment of choice. Shall I marry or burn? Shut the door on a life longed for while opening another, deliberately, onto trouble and pain because . . . The “because” is the true story seldom told.