The Last Empire

by Gore Vidal

  The Swedish Lindberghs were as foreign to this establishment as the Sulzbergers. But in the instance of war or peace the Sulzbergers sided with the WASP elite, while Charles Lindbergh missed the point which Anne swiftly got the moment he showed her the medal that Goering had unexpectedly handed him at dinner in Berlin. “Your albatross,” she said. Lindbergh seems never to have got it.

  Meanwhile, between WASP elite and British agents, the United States was being totally transformed. From President Washington’s day to Pearl Harbor, isolationism was the honorable, if sometimes opportunistically ignored, national creed. But by 1940, one of the two leading isolationist senators, Arthur Vandenberg, had been converted to war and, later, to global hegemony, by three enchanting ladies in the pay of the British. Mahl gives names, addresses. One of them, wife to a British diplomat, code name “Cynthia,” was the heroine of an eponymous study by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1965. Finally, just in case FDR was defeated in 1940, the other great isolationist, Senator Robert A. Taft, was overwhelmed at the Republican convention by the British candidate, the previously unknown Wendell Willkie.

  After Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh offered his services to the Air Force. FDR, never one to forgo an enmity, took pleasure in turning him down, despite the New York Times editorial to the effect that he should be used as “he is a superb air man, and this is primarily and essentially an air war.” But Roosevelt could not allow his competition to regain hero status, which, indeed, despite the best efforts of many interested parties, he never did lose for most of the people. Lone Eagles tend to outsoar presidents, no matter how bad the weather. As it was, Lindbergh got to the South Pacific, where he flew clandestine combat missions with men half his age. As he was only an observer, this was illegal, but commanders in the field were delighted to have so consummate and useful an airman in their midst.

  Once the war was over, Lindbergh continued his travels with Anne; they also raised their five surviving children. It appears that Lindbergh was a conscientious father, with a tendency to reinvent the wheel when there was something to be explained. He was also a bit of a martinet with checklists (yes, he invented that pilot’s routine) for each child. He was alert to the utility of things. Reeve records a hilarious (to read, that is) lecture on “punk design”:

  He also had a normal-looking flashlight with an ugly hexagonal head, to which feature he drew our attention every time he put the flashlight down on a flat surface.

  “You see that?” He would point. “It doesn’t move.” We saw. The flashlight lay there on the shelf, or the table, or the floor, exactly as he had placed it. It didn’t move a bit. Nor did we, as he fixed us with his penetrating, instructive blue eyes.

  “It doesn’t roll off the table,” he would say, looking at us searchingly, challenging someone to contradict him. Nobody did.

  “Why aren’t all flashlights made like this one?” he wondered aloud. None of us would hazard a guess.

  “Cylinders!” He explained irritably. “You buy a flashlight, nine times out of ten it comes in a cylindrical shape. Now, a cylinder will always roll. A cylinder was made to roll. And rolling is fine, for a rolling pin. But you put down a cylindrical flashlight in the dark, near a place where you’re working, so you can use two hands, and what’s it going to do? It’s going to roll away from you, of course! Off the shelf, under the car, what good is that?”

  No good at all, we knew. And we knew what he would say next, too.

  “All they would have to do is change the shape of the head. Not the whole flashlight, just the head. The whole problem would be solved. What’s the matter with these people? Pentagonal, hexagonal, even a square, for heaven’s sake. Just the head. . . .”

  As one surveys his life, one sees him move from phase to phase, much as the human race itself has done. The boy on the farm, fascinated by husbandry. By eugenics, a pseudoscience of the day. By nature. By medical science to improve life. By machinery. By flight. By the next step after the propeller, jet propulsion—as early as the late 1920s. Fascinated by the old civilizations that he had flown over throughout his life, he now saw how precarious they were in the face of the instrument that he had helped perfect, the aircraft. He saw the necessity for the avoidance of war, while establishing an equilibrium between the planet’s resources and human population. By the need to understand ancient tribal patterns, in order to undo or mitigate what science is doing to modern man. He lived among primitive tribes; tried to understand their ancient adaptabilities. He literally thought himself, doggedly, from one level to the next.

  Towards the end, he had come to dislike the world that he had done so much to create. First, he noticed the standardization of air bases everywhere. The sameness of food, even landscape. The boredom of air travel in jet liners. The fun was gone. A key word in his early works was “adventure.” He stops using it. Finally, there is his lifelong vein of mysticism. Many of the early flyers had a curious sense of hyperreality when contemplating their own relationship with earth and sky, not to mention with the tiny human beings whom they passed over, swiftly, like gods. Much of the magic of air power at the beginning was the image of a silver ship-bird coming out of the blue, like a sky-god returning to the ground people.

  The early fliers were literally extraterrestrial as they came in for their landings, for their rebirth as earthlings. On this subject, Lindbergh was amused by the great myth-maker himself, Carl Jung. The Lindberghs sat with the “old wizard” on the Zurichsee’s north bank. “Conversation turned to ‘flying saucers.’ Jung had written a book about them. . . . I had expected him to discuss the psychological and psychiatric aspects of people’s fantasizing. . . . I was amazed to find that he believed in their reality. . . . When I mentioned a discussion I had had with General Carl Spaatz, the chief of staff of the Air Force . . . Jung said, ‘There are many things taking place upon earth that you and General Spaatz do not know about.’ ” Lindbergh reflects upon superstition as a constant in human affairs:

  I know myself as mortal, but this raises the question “What is I?” Am I an individual, or am I an evolving life stream composed of countless selves? . . . As one identity, I was born in A.D. 1902. But as twentieth-century man, I am billions of years old. The life I consider as myself has existed through past eons with unbroken continuity. Individuals are custodians of the life stream—temporal manifestations of far greater being, forming from and returning to their essence like so many dreams. . . . I recall standing on the edge of a deep valley in the Hawaiian island of Maui, thinking that a life stream is like a mountain river—springing from hidden sources, born out of the earth, touched by stars, merging, blending, evolving in the shape momentarily seen.

  By thinking ahead from what he had observed, Lindbergh had been able to think himself back to Lucretius: Nil posse creari de nilo, “Nothing can be created out of nothing.” Or, “The sum of things is ever being replenished and mortals live one and all by give and take. Some races wax and others wane, and in a short space the tribes of living things are changed, and like runners hand on the torch of life.” Lindbergh sums up: “I am form and I am formless. I am life and I am matter, mortal and immortal. I am one and many—myself and humanity in flux. . . . After my death, the molecules of my being will return to the earth and sky. They came from the stars. I am of the stars.”

  Disraeli, born a Jew, christened an Anglican, avoided church. A character in one of his novels was asked what his religion was. The character responded, “All wise men have the same religion.” When asked what that was, he said, “Wise men never say.” It is the most perfect irony that Roosevelt and Lindbergh, heroic antagonists, shared, at the end, the same religion. Each wanted to be buried so that his atoms would get back into circulation as quickly as possible, one with a missing side to his coffin in a rose garden, the other in a biodegradable wooden box on a Pacific island. Thus, each meant to rejoin the life stream, and the genitive stars. Meanwhile, it might be a pleasant gift to the new century and the new millennium to replace the pejorative 1812 caricature of
a sly treacherous Uncle Sam with that of Lindbergh, the best that we are ever apt to produce in the hero line, American style.

  The Times Literary Supplement

  30 October 1998

  * SINATRA

  At least two generations of Americans were conceived to the sound of Sinatra’s voice on record or radio. Conception in cinema houses was not unknown but considered flashy. There were several Sinatras in the six or seven decades of his career. There was the wartime idol of the young. He was skinny, gaunt-faced with a floppy bow tie and a left profile like that of a Donatello bronze. At New York’s Paramount Theater pubescent girls howled like Bacchae at the sight and sound of him and fainted like dowagers in tight stays.

  I met him first while I was in the army, just before going overseas. We were at a Hollywood party where everyone was a star and I was a private to whom no one spoke except Sinatra, who singled me out and charmed me for life. In person and in art. That was the hero Sinatra whose populism was to bring him soon to ruin.

  The story, a selective part of it, is well known. Born in New Jersey, Francis Sinatra had a formidable mother, active in Democratic city ward politics. He knew at first hand the politics of immigrant Italians, of the urban working class. He was one of them.

  He began his career singing wherever he could; he became famous singing with the big bands of the day. “His grace notes are like Bach,” said Virgil Thomson, our leading music critic. Everyone thought Virgil was joking but he wasn’t. Sinatra’s voice was like no other. But I leave that to music critics. What interests me is the rise and fall of a political hero whose apotheosis, or, to be precise, hell, was to become a neutered creature of the American right wing, crooning in Nancy Reagan’s ear at the White House. An Italo-American Faust.

  At the height of Sinatra’s popular fame as a singer he made a short documentary called The House I Live in. This was 1947; he won an Academy Award for the song, whose lyrics—The people that I work with. The workers that I meet. . . . The right to speak my mind. That is America to me—were a straightforward plea for tolerance that neither cloyed nor bored.

  Jon Wiener in Professors, Politics and Pop (Verso) has given a moving account of how Sinatra then fell foul of the FBI and the professional patriots and the then powerful Hearst press. In the course of the next eight years, Congress’s Un-American Activities Committee, in its Index “of Communists,” named The House I Live In twelve times while the New York Times, forever up to no good, in its Index for 1949 published a cross-reference: “Sinatra, Frank: See U.S.—Espionage.” That was all the news fit to print about our greatest popular singer.

  To add to the demonization, one Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Narcotics Bureau, and the FBI’s ineffable J. Edgar Hoover (who lived long enough to keep a file on the subversions and perversions of John Lennon), were out to get Sinatra not only as a crypto-Communist but as a mafioso. Since any nightclub singer must work in a nightclub or a casino and since the mob controlled these glittering venues, every entertainer was obliged to traffic with them.

  In 1947 Sinatra was smeared as a mafioso by a right-wing Hearst columnist, Lee Mortimer. Sinatra, notoriously short-tempered and not unfamiliar with fiery waters, knocked Mortimer down in a nightclub. Press ink flowed like Niagara Falls. Sinatra was transformed by the right-wing press “overnight,” as Wiener wrote, “from the crooning idol of bobby-soxers into violent, left-wing mafioso.”

  Roman Catholic organs, respectful of their co-religionist’s fame, tried to downplay the attacks, maintaining he was a mere “pawn.” But he wasn’t. Sinatra had indeed been active in left-wing (by American standards) activities. In 1946 he blasted Franco, a favorite of America’s High Command. That same year he became vice-president of the Hollywood Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, along with many other stars and Thomas Mann.

  In 1948 he supported Henry Wallace for President against the proto-McCarthyite Harry S Truman. Undeterred by the harm to his career, Sinatra wrote an open letter to the then liberal New Republic imploring Henry Wallace, as heir to Roosevelt, “to take up the fight we like to think of as ours—the fight for tolerance, which is the basis of any fight for peace.” Wiener reports that three months later he was publicly branded a Communist and sacked from his radio show; by 1949 Columbia Records had broken with him and by 1950 MGM dismissed him from his film contract. A has-been at thirty-four.

  After a time of trouble with his wife, Ava Gardner, and the loss of his voice due to alcohol and stress, he made his astonishing come-back in the film From Here to Eternity, for which he was obliged to take a minimal salary. He also developed a brand-new voice, grace notes like Mabel Mercer.

  By 1960 Sinatra was again political. He had been a playmate of Jack Kennedy in his senatorial days; he was also gung-ho to help out his conservative but attractive Catholic friend. But some Kennedy advisers thought the Red Mafioso should be avoided at all costs, others wanted to use him for a voter drive in Harlem “where he is recognised as a hero of the cause of the Negro,” something that Kennedy was not, to say the least.

  Although, at times, Sinatra seemed to be ranging between megalomania and just plain hard drinking, he was still a major singer, also a movie star, famous for doing scenes in only one take—known in the trade as “walking through.” Kennedy’s candidacy revved him up. But for those who have wondered what dinner might have been like for Falstaff when Prince Hal—now King—snubbed him, I can report that after Kennedy was nominated in Los Angeles at the convention where I was a delegate, Tony Curtis and Janet Lee gave a movie-star party for the nominee. I was placed, along with Sinatra, at the table where Kennedy would sit. We waited. And waited. Sinatra looked edgy; started to drink heavily. Dinner began. Then one of the toothy sisters of the nominee said, casually, “Oh, Jack’s sorry. He can’t come. He’s gone to the movies.” Opposite me, Falstaff deflated and spoke no more that evening.

  Once Kennedy was elected, Sinatra organized the inaugural ball. But the President’s father and brother Robert said no more Sinatra and there was no more Sinatra.

  When President Kennedy came to stay in Palm Springs, he stayed not with Sinatra, as announced, but with his rival Bing Crosby. Insult to injury. From then on, in public and private, he often behaved boorishly (to riot in understatement).

  In due course, he was called before a Congressional committee on the Mafia. They got nowhere. Nowhere to go. Nowhere for him, either. He became a Reagan Republican. But then no Democratic President asked him to perform at the White House. It was sly old Nixon, whose House committee had smeared him, who asked Sinatra to sing The House I Live In.

  “At the end of the program,” Wiener writes, “for the first time in his public career, Sinatra was in tears.” It is not easy to be good, much less a tribune of the people, in the land of milk and money once your house is gone.

  The Observer

  17 May 1998

  * C. P. CAVAFY

  Forty years ago, in a more than usually run-down quarter of Athens, there was a bar called the Nea Zoe. The brightly lit raw-wood interior smelled of pinecones and liquorice—retsina wine and ouzo. A jukebox played Greek music—minor key with a strong martial beat—to which soldiers from a nearby barracks gravely danced with one another or in groups or alone. Women were not encouraged to join in. The Nea Zoe was a sanctuary where Greek men performed pre-Christian dances taught them by their fathers, who in turn had learned them from their fathers all the way back to the start of history if not before. The dances celebrated the deeds of gods and heroes. I recall one astonishing—dizzying—solo where a soldier arrived on the dance floor with a great leap and then began a series of rapid turns while striking the floor with the flat of his hand.

  “He is doing the dance of Antaeus,” said the old Greek colonel who had brought me to the bar. “Antaeus was son of the sea god Poseidon out of Gaia, mother earth. Antaeus is the world’s strongest wrestler but he can only remain strong by touching earth, his mother.” The colonel knew all the ancient
dances and he could tell from the way a boy danced where he came from: the islands, the Peloponnese, Thessaly. “There used to be a dozen of these places here in Athens but since that movie . . .” He sighed. That movie was the recently released Never on Sunday; it had charmed the world but it had also inspired many American tourists to come to places like the Nea Zoe to laugh at the fairies dancing. Since ancient Greek has no word for such a made-up category as fairy, the soldiers were at first bewildered by so much weird attention. Then, when they realized how insulting the fat Americans were, they would gravely take them outside and beat them up. Unfortunately, tourism is more important to governments than two-thousand-year-old dances; the bars were shut down.

  Nea Zoe means new life. “That was also the name of the magazine where Cavafy published many of his best poems.” I should note that my first visit to Athens took place in 1961, the year that The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy was published by the Hogarth Press with an introduction by W. H. Auden. We were all reading Cavafy that season, in Rae Dalven’s translation from the Greek. Now, forty years on, Theoharis Constantine Theoharis has given us what is, at last, all the poems that he could find.

  Constantine P. Cavafy was born at Constantinople, April 17, 1863, not too long after Walt Whitman added Calamus to Leaves of Grass. Constantinople had been built to be the capital of the Eastern—and largely Greek—Roman empire. For several generations the Cavafys were successful manufacturers and exporters. But by the time of the death of Cavafy’s father, there was almost no money left. After a time in London, the widow Cavafy and six sons moved on to the other ancient Greek city, Alexandria, in Egypt. Although Cavafy’s formal education was classical, he was a bookish young man who largely educated himself while being supported by a family network until, on March 1, 1892, not quite twenty-nine—a shadow-line for the young men he writes of in his poems—he became provisional clerk in the Ministry of Irrigation. Since he had chosen to be a Greek citizen, he remained for thirty years “provisional,” a permanently temporary clerk of the Egyptian government. Thanks to his knowledge of English, French, Italian, Greek, and Arabic, he sometimes moonlighted as a broker. In 1895 he acquired a civilized friend, Pericles Anastasiades, who would be for him the other self that Etienne de la Boëtie had been for Montaigne. This was also the year Cavafy began to write “seriously.” By 1903 he was being published in the Athenian magazine Panatheneum. A year later he published his first book, containing fourteen poems; he was now forty-one. From 1908 to 1918 he published frequently in Nea Zoe; he became known throughout the Greek world: then came translations in English, French, Italian. From 1908 to 1933—the year of his death—Cavafy lived alone at 10 Lepsius Street, Alexandria, today a modest shrine. There is a long hallway lined with books and a living room that contains a large sofa and what is described as “Arab furniture”; his study was also his bedroom.