The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal

by Gore Vidal

  There are differences of emphasis, certainly, as to what it is to read; and there are, within the narratives themselves, rearrangement of emphasis and interest. Perhaps, as metacritics often allege, these are to be attributed to a major shift in our structures of thought; but although this may be an efficient cause of the mutation of interests it does not appear that the object of those interests—narrative—imitates the shift.

  Phrased like a lawyer and, to my mind, demonstrably true. Nevertheless, the other “most distinguished critics” seem to believe that there has indeed been at least a gap or split or coupure between old and new writing, requiring, if not a critical bridge, an academic’s bandage.

  Professor Leon Edel chats amiably about “Novel and Camera,” reminding us that Robbe-Grillet’s reliance on the close-shot in his novels might have something to do with his early training as an agronomist where the use of a microscope is essential. Professor Edel notes that the audience for the novel is dwindling while the audience for films, television, comic books continues to grow; he echoes Saul Bellow:

  Perhaps we have had too many novels. People no longer seem to need them. On the other hand, pictorial biographies—real pictures of real lives—exist in abundance, and there will be more of these in the coming year. The camera is ubiquitous.

  In “Realism Reconsidered,” Professor George Levine has a number of intelligent things to say about writing. Although limited by a certain conceit about his own place in time (“Reality has become problematic in ways the Victorians could only barely imagine”), he is aware that the word “reality” is protean: even the French ex-agronomist wants to be absolutely realistic. Buttressed by Auerbach, Gombrich and Frye, Professor Levine’s meditation on realism in the novel is not only sensible but his sentences are rather better than those of his fellow most-distinguished critics. There is a plainness reminiscent of Edmund Wilson. Possibly because:

  My bias, then, is historical…. What is interesting here is that at one point in European history writers should have become so self-conscious about truth-telling in art [which I take to imply the growth of doubt about art in society] that they were led to raise truth-telling to the level of doctrine and to imply that previous literatures had not been telling it.

  Then Levine states the profound truth that “fiction is fiction,” ruling out Truth if not truth. Or as Calvin Coolidge said in a not too dissimilar context: “In public life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really natural to be actually artificial.”

  “The Death and Rebirth of the Novel.” The confident ring of the title could only have been sounded by America’s liveliest full-time professor and seducer of the Zeitgeist (no proper English equivalent), Leslie A. Fiedler. A redskin most at home in white clown makeup, Fiedler has given many splendid performances over the years. From a secure heterosexual base, he has turned a bright amused eye on the classic American goyim and finds them not only homoerotic to a man (or person as they say nowadays) but given to guilty pleasures with injuns like Queequeg, with niggers like Jim. As far as I know, Fiedler has yet to finger an American-Jewish author as a would-be reveler in the savage Arcadia of Sodom-America, but then that hedge of burning bushes no doubt keeps pure the American Jewish writer/person.

  Fiedler reminds us that for a “century or more” the leading novelists and a good many critics have forgotten “that at its most authentic the novel is a form of popular art.” But he shares the academic delusion that the novel was invented in the middle of the eighteenth century by “that extraordinary anti-elitist genius” Samuel Richardson, who launched “the first successful form of Pop Art.” For Fiedler, Richardson reflects little of what preceded him (the epic, the ballad) but he made possible a great deal that has come since: “the comic strip, the comic book, cinema, TV.” After the Second World War, the appearance of mass-production paperback books in the supermarkets of the West was insurance against the main line of the novel becoming elitist, for “the machine-produced commodity novel is, therefore, dream literature, mythic literature, as surely as any tale told over the tribal fire.” Consequently, “form and content, in the traditional sense, are secondary, optional if not irrelevant—since it is, in the first instance, primordial images and archetypal narrative structures that the novel is called on to provide.” Fiedler believes that dream-literature (Pickwick Papers, Valley of the Dolls) is peculiarly “immune to formalist criticism.” Further, “it sometimes seems as if all such novels want to metamorphose into movies…a kind of chrysalis yearning to be a butterfly.”

  Certainly Pop narratives reveal the society’s literally vulgar daydreams. Over and over again occur and recur the sex lives and the murders of various Kennedys, the sphinx-like loneliness of Greta Garbo, the disintegration of Judy Garland or, closer to the heart of Academe, the crack-up of Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, the principal factory of this century’s proto-myths. Until recently no Art Novelist (Fiedler’s phrase) would go near a subject as melodramatic as the collapse of a film star or the murder of a president. Contemporary practitioners of the Art Novel (“beginning with, perhaps, Flaubert, and reaching a climax in the work of Proust, Mann and Joyce”) are doggedly at work creating “fiction intended not for the market-place but the library and classroom; or its sub-variety, the Avant-Garde Novel, which foresees immediate contempt followed eventually by an even securer status in future Museums of Literary Culture.”

  To put it as bluntly as possible, it is incumbent on all who write fiction or criticism in the disappearing twentieth century to realize that the Art Novel or Avant-Garde Novel is in the process of being abandoned wherever fiction remains most alive, which means that that sub-genre of the novel is dying if not dead.

  Although Fiedler’s funeral oration ought to alarm those teachers who require a certain quantity of serious “novel writing” so that they can practice “novel criticism,” I suspect that they will, secretly, agree with him. If all the Art Novels have been written, then no one need ever run the risk of missing the point to something new. After all, a lot can still be written about the old Modern masterpieces.

  As always, Fiedler makes some good sense. He can actually see what is in front of him and this is what makes him such a useful figure. Briskly, he names four present-day practitioners of the Art Novel of yesteryear: Bellow, Updike, Moravia, Robbe-Grillet. This is an odd grouping, but one sees what he means. Then he gives two examples of what he calls, approvingly, “the Anti-art Art Novel.” One is Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The other is John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy: “a strange pair of books really”—note the first sign of unease—

  the former not quite American and the latter absolutely provincial American. Yet they have in common a way of using typical devices of the Modernist Art Novel, like irony, parody, travesty, exhibitionistic allusion, redundant erudition, and dogged experimentalism, not to extend the possibilities of the form but to destroy it.

  This is nonsense. Professor (Emeritus) Nabokov’s bright clever works are very much in the elitist Art-Novel tradition. It is true that the Black Swan of Lac Léman makes fun of American academics and their ghastly explications, but his own pretty constructions are meant to last forever. They are not autonomous artifacts designed to “self-destruct.”

  Giles Goat-Boy is a very bad prose-work by Professor John Barth. Certainly the book is not, as Fiedler claims,

  a comic novel, a satire intended to mock everything which comes before it…it is itself it mocks, along with the writer capable of producing one more example of so obsolescent a form, and especially us who are foolish enough to be reading it. It is as if the Art Novel, aware that it must die, has determined to die laughing.

  With that, Professor Fiedler goes over the side of Huck’s raft. Whatever Professor Barth’s gifts, humor, irony, wit are entirely lacking from his ambitious, garrulous, jocose productions. If this is the Anti-art Art Novel, then I predict that it will soon be superseded by the Anti-Anti-art Art Novel, which will doubtless prove to be our moribund friend the Art Novel. I suspect tha
t the works of Professor Barth are written not so much to be read as to be taught. If this is the case then, according to Fiedler’s own definition, they are Art Novels. Certainly they are not destined for the mass marketplace where daydreams of sex and of money, of movie stars and of murdered presidents are not apt to be displaced by a leaden narrative whose burden is (oh, wit, oh, irony) the universe is the university is the universe.

  Happily, Fiedler soon abandons the highlands of culture for those lowlands where thrive science fiction and the Western, two genres that appear to reflect the night mind of the race. Fiedler mentions with approval some recent “neo-Pop Novels.” Little Big Man excites him and he is soon back on his familiar warpath as white skin confronts redskin. Yet why the “neo” in front of Pop? Surely what used to be called “commercial fiction” has never ceased to reflect the dreams and prejudices of those still able to read. Fiedler does not quite deal with this. He goes off at a tangent. “At the moment of the rebirth of the novel, all order and distinction seem lost, as High Art and Low merge into each other, as books become films….” Fiedler ends with an analysis of a novel turned into film called Drive, He Said, and he suggests that “therapeutic” madness may be the next chapter in our collective dreaming: injuns, niggers, subversives…or something.

  Rebirth of the novel? That seems unlikely. The University-novel tends to be stillborn, suitable only for classroom biopsy. The Public-novel continues to be written but the audience for it is drifting away. Those brought up on the passive pleasures of films and television find the act of reading anything at all difficult and unrewarding. Ambitious novelists are poignantly aware of the general decline in what Professor Halperin would call “reading skills.” Much of Mr. Donald Barthelme’s latest novel, The Dead Father, is written in a kind of numbing baby talk reminiscent of the “see Jane run” primary school textbooks. Of course Mr. Barthelme means to be ironic. Of course he knows his book is not very interesting to read, but then life is not very interesting to live either. Hopefully, as Professor Halperin would say, the book will self-destruct once it has been ritually praised wherever English is taught but not learned.

  Obviously what Fiedler calls the Art Novel is in more trouble than the Pop novel. Movies still need larvae to metamorphose into moths. The Anti-art Art Novel does not exist despite the nervous attempts of teachers to find a way of making the novel if not news, really and truly new. I think it unlikely that Barthes, Barth, and Barthelme will ever produce that unified field theory of Art-Novel writing and theory so long dreamed of by students of Freytag’s pyramid.

  Meanwhile, the caravans bark, and the dogs move on. Last December the Modern Language Association met in San Francisco. According to a reliable authority, the most advanced of the young bureaucrats of literature were all reading and praising the works of Burroughs. Not William, Edgar Rice.

  Times Literary Supplement

  February 20, 1976

  SOME MEMORIES OF THE GLORIOUS BIRD AND AN EARLIER SELF

  “I particularly like New York on hot summer nights when all the…uh, superfluous people are off the streets.” Those were, I think, the first words Tennessee addressed to me; then the foggy blue eyes blinked, and a nervous chuckle filled the moment’s silence before I said whatever I said.

  Curtain rising. The place: an apartment at the American Academy in Rome. Occasion: a party for some newly arrived Americans, among them Frederic Prokosch, Samuel Barber. The month: March 1948. The day: glittering. What else could a March day be in the golden age?

  I am pleased that I can remember so clearly my first meeting with the Glorious Bird, as I almost immediately called him for reasons long since forgotten (premonition, perhaps, of the eventual take-off and flight of youth’s sweet bird?). Usually, I forget first meetings, excepting always those solemn audiences granted by the old and famous when I was young and green. I recall vividly every detail of André Gide’s conversation and appearance, including the dark velvet beret he wore in his study at 1-bis rue Vaneau. I recall even more vividly my visits to George Santayana in his cell at the Convent of the Blue Nuns. All these audiences, meetings, introductions took place in that anno mirabilis 1948, a year that proved to be the exact midpoint between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of what looks to be a permanent cold war. At the time, of course, none of us knew where history had placed us.

  At that first meeting I thought Tennessee every bit as ancient as Gide and Santayana. After all, I was twenty-two. He was thirty-seven; but claimed to be thirty-three on the sensible ground that the four years he had spent working for a shoe company did not count. Now he was the most celebrated American playwright. A Streetcar Named Desire was still running in New York when we met that evening in a flat overlooking what was, in those days, a quiet city where hardly anyone was superfluous unless it was us, the first group of American writers and artists to arrive in Rome after the war.

  In 1946 and 1947 Europe was still out-of-bounds for foreigners. But by 1948 the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.

  Rome was strange to all of us. For one thing, Italy had been sealed off not only by war but by Fascism. Since the early thirties few English or American artists knew Italy well. Those who did included mad Ezra, gentle Max, spurious B.B., and, of course, the Anglo-American historian Harold (now Sir Harold) Acton, in stately residence at Florence. By 1948 Acton had written supremely well about both the Bourbons of Naples and the later Medici of Florence; unfortunately, he was—is—prone to the writing of memoirs. And so, wanting no doubt to flesh out yet another chapter in the ongoing story of a long and marvelously uninteresting life, Acton came down to Rome to look at the new invaders. What he believed he saw and heard, he subsequently published in a little volume called More Memoirs of an Aesthete, a work to be cherished for its quite remarkable number of unaesthetic misprints and misspellings.

  “After the First World War American writers and artists had emigrated to Paris; now they pitched upon Rome.” So Acton begins. “According to Stendhal, the climate was enough to gladden anybody, but this was not the reason: one of them explained to me that it was the facility of finding taxis, and very little of Rome can be seen from a taxi. Classical and Romantic Rome was no more to them than a picturesque background. Tennessee Williams, Victor [he means Frederic] Prokosch and Gore Vidal created a bohemian annexe to the American Academy….” Liking Rome for its many taxis is splendid stuff and I wish I had said it. Certainly whoever did was putting Acton on, since the charm of Rome—1948—was the lack of automobiles of any kind. But Acton is just getting into stride. More to come.

  Toward the end of March Tennessee gave a party to inaugurate his new flat in the Via Aurora (in the golden age even the street names were apt). Somehow or other, Acton got himself invited to the party. I remember him floating like some large pale fish through the crowded room; from time to time, he would make a sudden lunge at this or that promising bit of bait while Tennessee, he tells us, “wandered as a lost soul among the guests he assembled in an apartment which might have been in New York…. Neither he nor any of the group I met with him spoke Italian, yet he had a typically Neapolitan protégé who could speak no English.”

  At this time Tennessee and I had been in Rome for only a few weeks and French, not Italian, was the second language of the reasonably well-educated American of that era. On the other hand, Prokosch knew Italian, German, and French; he also bore with becoming grace the heavy weight of a Yale doctorate in Middle English. But to Acton the author of The Asiatics, the translator of Hölderlin and Louise Labé was just another barbarian whose works “fell short of his perfervid imagination, [he] had the dark good looks of an advertiser of razor blades….” Happily, “Gore Vidal, the youngest in age, aggressively handsome in a clean-limbed sophomore style, had success written all over him…. His candour was engaging but he was slightly on the defensive, as if h
e anticipated an attack on his writings or his virtue.” Well, the young G.V. wasn’t so dumb: seeing the old one-two plainly in the middle distance, he kept sensibly out of reach.

  “A pudgy, taciturn, moustached little man without any obvious distinction.” Thus Acton describes Tennessee. He then zeroes in on the “protégé” from Naples, a young man whom Acton calls “Pierino.” Acton tells us that Pierino had many complaints about Tennessee and his friends, mostly due to the language barrier. The boy was also eager to go to America. Acton tried to discourage him. Even so, Pierino was enthralled. “‘You are the first galantuomo who has spoken to me this evening.’” After making a date to see the galantuomo later on that evening, Pierino split. Acton then told Tennessee, “as tactfully as I could, that his young protégé felt neglected…. [Tennessee] rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said nothing, a little perplexed. There was something innocently childish about his expression.” It does not occur to the memoirist that Tennessee might have been alarmed at his strange guest’s bad manners. “Evidently he was not aware that Pierino wanted to be taken to America and I have wondered since whether he took him there, for that was my last meeting with Tennessee Williams.” It must be said that Acton managed to extract quite a lot of copy out of a single meeting. To put his mind at rest, Tennessee did take Pierino to America and Pierino is now a married man and doing, as they say, well.

  “This trifling episode illustrated the casual yet condescending attitude of certain foreigners towards the young Italians they cultivated on account of their Latin charm without any interest in their character, aspirations, or desires.” This sentiment or sentimentality could be put just as well the other way around and with far more accuracy. Italian trade has never had much interest in the character, aspirations, or desires of those to whom they rent their ass. When Acton meditates upon The Italian Boy, a sweet and sickly hypocrisy clouds his usually sharp prose and we are in E. M. Forsterland where the lower orders (male) are worshiped, and entirely misunderstood. But magnum of sour grapes to one side, Acton is by no means inaccurate. Certainly he got right Tennessee’s indifference to place, art, history. The Bird seldom reads a book and the only history he knows is his own; he depends, finally, on a romantic genius to get him through life. Above all, he is a survivor, never more so than now in what he calls his “crocodile years.”