The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

by Martin Amis

  Sunday Telegraph 1979

  * * *

  Postscript Governor Reagan prospered. Indeed, he is now floundering through his second term. And they still love him.

  I have nothing new to say about this phenomenon. Two lines in American life, not quite parallel, were moving towards each other: Ronald Reagan and television. And then they met. In retrospect, it is not entirely frivolous to view the 1980 election as a vanished Reagan Western, a lost outline for 'Death Valley Days'. Carter was the prosing weakie who kept the store. Anderson was the gesticulating frontier preacher who just held up the action. But Ronnie was the man who came riding into town, his head held high, not afraid to use his fists — well prepared, if asked, to become the next sheriff of the United States.

  What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation. We feel the discrepancy too — over here in this Prime Target. For President Reagan is not just America's keeper: like his opposite number, he is the keeper of the planet, of all life, of the past and of the future. Until 1988, old Ronnie, that actor, is the Lord of Time.

  Mr Vidal: Unpatriotic Gore

  Novelist, essayist, dramatist, epigrammatist, television polemicist, controversialist, pansexualist, socialist and socialite: if there is a key to Gore Vidal's public character, it has something to do with his towering immodesty, the enjoyable superbity of his self-love. No, this is not infatuation; this is the real thing. 'I can understand companionship. I can understand bought sex in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair,' Vidal has said; perhaps love is blind after all. Indeed, Vidal's paraded auto-crush has a way of summoning the most wistful refrains. It is a love whose month is ever May. Here is a man, you feel, who would walk a thousand miles for one of Gore's smiles.

  It could be argued, of course, that Gore Vidal has a lot to be self-loving about. Gore Vidal has certainly argued as much. 'My critics resent everything I represent: sex, wealth and talent' is a remark attributed to him. Vidal is, for a start, preposterously well-preserved for someone who, according to my records, will soon be fifty. Whereas early photographs of the growing Gore are almost embarrassing to behold (who is this strapping exquisite?), he even now resembles a pampered heart-throb cruising easily into mid-career. Unpleasant rumour has it that Vidal's pulchritude owes as much to the cosmetic surgeon as it does to natural health and proportion — one hears talk of face-lifts, lid-tucks, teeth-capping, etc. But those vigilant, ironic brown eyes, together with his mellifluous, patrician voice, are the energy-centres of Vidal's person, and age will not wither them. They strongly contribute to his immediate, knowing, slightly foxy charm.

  The gates to Vidal's Ravello villa are released by a hidden electronic device. With a shy smile, Vidal operates the powerful current to allow us entry, and explains: 'Kidnappers... I'm not big enough for them really - but someone might be dumb enough to think I'm Jackie Kennedy's brother." He saunters on down the path, his hysterical terrier, Rat, patrolling the steep terraces.

  Approached from the side, the villa seems impossibly narrow, wedged into the Mediterranean cliff-face. But once we were within, the white passages spanned out impressively in unexpected directions. A courteous if uneffusive host, Vidal parked me in his wood-and-leather library, seated himself opposite and began to talk, dividing his lustrous gaze between me and our photographer (who cavorted acrobatically round him throughout the afternoon, to Vidal's occasional unease). 'That's my bad side,' Vidal would say. 'My left side is my good side.’

  Vidal's looks, in common with everything else about Vidal, are dear to Vidal's heart. He minds about them: they are a source of both exhilaration and anxiety. The same applies to his varied talents and the extent to which society honours them with gratitude and rewards. This is not a love affair built on complacence: it is one grounded in ceaseless reassessment ('Am I really that great? ... Yes' is how the soliloquy probably goes). Vidal is perhaps one of the best-selling serious writers in the world, and certainly one of the most prolific; in addition, he has shone brightly in several careers (politics, television, theatre, cinema), any of which might have satisfied a less restively arrogant man. And yet success has not brought serenity: although he has little of the paranoia worryingly frequent among well-known writers, he is someone who delightedly cultivates the envies and rivalries of his peers; although he is assured of his eminence, he has no desire whatever to be above it all. Why?

  A recent much-publicised punch-up with his rival Norman Mailer is illuminating in this respect — and highly entertaining, let me say. Vidal's eyes flood with dissimulated pleasure as he prepares to tell the oft-told story; he is looking forward to coming well out of it.

  The scene was a New York party, thrown by Lally Weymouth for publisher Lord Weidenfeld (freshly arrived Ambassador Peter Jay was among the startled guests). Vidal was talking to a group of people, when he felt an agitated hand on his shoulder. It belonged to Mailer. The two men had been wary friends for years; but their polarities grew intolerable after Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex, and they nearly came to blows on a Dick Cavett television show in 1971.

  'It was Norman, looking small, fat and out of shape. "Gore," he said, "you look like an old Jew.”

  '"Well, Norman," I said in my witty way, "you look like an old Jew, too."' (Mailer, by the way, is Jewish. Gore is, if anything, oppressively Aryan in appearance and ancestry.)

  'Then he threw the contents of his glass in my face, and punched me gently on the side of the mouth. It didn't hurt. Then I pushed him. Norman has always hated die fact that, apart from everything else, I'm much taller and stronger than he is. He went flying backward six or seven feet, landing — to our alarm — on top of the man who invented Xerox.’

  Order then laboriously re-established itself. But Mailer is said to have gone round the room attempting to enlist an anti-Gore faction and demanding that the hostess eject him. She refused. Dourly, Mailer reapproached his foe. It is at this point that the tale turns brutal.

  "'Come outside," he said to me. His mouth was working and you could smell the fear. "Norman," I said, "you can't go on this way. You're too old for all this." At that point, my friend Howard [Howard Austen, Vidal's aide/secretary/companion for the past twenty-eight years] turned on Norman. Howard is Jewish; he grew up on the same streets as Norman; he knew what Norman was doing. Howard advanced on him steadily, saying, "You flea! Get out, you fucking asshole loser, you fucking asshole loser." That was it. No more Norman. The next day he was on the phone to the gossip columnists, convincing them that there had been a fight, that he was some sort of — what's his word? — "existential hero".’

  According to the press reports, Vidal had the last word: 'Once again, words failed him.' All Mailer could manage was: 'Vidal? He's just a mouth.’

  Mailer had had an early word, though, which goes a bit nearer home. It's the sort of he-man dismissal one would expect from an existential hero; but there may be something to it. 'Vidal', said Mailer once, 'lacks the wound.’

  Vidal would no doubt be happy to concur. 'My God, what a lucky life,' he confesses. 'I was born into Washington society. Both sides of my family were political. Money, fame, power — I was never in awe of any of that. It had no spell over me.’

  His family was grand, but it was also scattered. His father, Eugene Vidal, was on F.D. Roosevelt's cabinet as the first chief aviation administrator. ('I was the youngest person ever to land a plane,' says Vidal, nodding proudly at a framed photograph of father and son in the cockpit. One wonders, confusedly, whether he still is.) He spent most of his childhood, however, under the tutelage of his grandfather, Senator Gore, Oklahoma's first elected senator. Gore senior had been blind from the age of ten, and Gore junior often used to guide the old man to and from the Capitol (one summer Gore junior wore a swimsuit when he went to collect his grandfather; Gore senior was none the wiser, until he overheard catty speculat
ions about the family's red-neck origins).

  The Gores were Anglo-Irish, settling in America in the 1690s, the Vidals Alpine newcomers arriving'in 1848: Gore Vidal combined the family names in a melodious clinch, one that I take to be an indispensable ingredient of his glamour. At an early age little Gore acquired a further sprig to the family tree. His mother divorced his father and became the second wife of Hugh Auchincloss, a descendant of Aaron Burr, whom Vidal would eventually write a novel about. Mr Auchincloss was plainly a lucky man: his third-wife was the mother of Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy, and who is now Jackie Onassis.

  Vidal 'quit schooling' at the age of seventeen, and has been a tireless autodidact ever since. Recent reading includes Balzac and D.H. Lawrence: 'Balzac is giving me great pleasure. Lawrence — my God — every page I think, "Jesus, what a fag. Jesus, what a faggot this guy sounds."‘

  As the war was petering out, Vidal saw peripheral service in the Aleutians. 'For all my generation, the war was just a great interruption.' He was committed to hospital in mid-service with premature arthritis; the break nevertheless allowed him to complete his first novel Williwaw, a cool look at war from the edges, at the age of nineteen. The book was a succès, but hardly a success. Sales were indifferent, and Vidal now found that he had to write a novel a year to stay alive. Contrary to popular belief, Vidal was no princeling: he got a handsome send-off when he came of age, but nothing since.

  Between 1945 and 1949 he wrote six novels, living frugally in cheap countries like Guatemala. One of these novels was a notorious work called The City and the Pillar. It was enough to evaporate the little repute Vidal had.

  'I took on the whole heterosexual dictatorship of America at the age of twenty-three. Enough wounds were given and received in that battle to satisfy even Norman Mailer.' The City and the Pillar was about 'the essential naturalness, if not normality, of homosexuality'. It seems mild enough — even evasively cerebral - today; but all the closets were locked in the American 1940s, and the book scuppered Vidal as a serious novelist. A few more fictions trickled out until 1953 (including three detective novels under the quibbling name of Edgar Box — 'they took eight days each to write'), then Vidal put down his quill, opened his eyes and looked round about himself.

  There followed a busy, public decade. Spreading his wings, Vidal became one of the last contract writers for MGM. 'It wasn't like working as a writer. It was like working for General Motors,' he admits coolly. One of his (uncredited) screenplays was for Ben Hur: 'By the time I arrived on the set, everything had already been built — including Charlton Heston.' He wrote plays for television and Broadway; he wrote essays and political pieces; Vidal embarked on his long career as a television pundit. At one point there was surprising talk of a romance and engagement between Vidal and Joanne Woodward. They ended up living à trots for a time in California, the third member of this curious ménage being Paul Newman.

  In 1960, he submitted to the old tug of politics and ran for Congress: he stood as a Democratic-Liberal candidate for a safe Republican seat in upstate New York. He lost, of course, 78,789 to 103,325, but he trebled the Democratic showing and won 20,000 more votes than John Kennedy — 'as I never ceased to remind him'. Two years later, he was asked to stand for the US Senate. Vidal pondered the offer carefully — then fled the country.

  'Why did you give up politics?’

  'I would never have gone far enough to be of any use. But I could have made it. I am just perfect for television, and that's all a President has to be these days. No — I would have become a drunken Senator who said something interesting once a year.’

  'Why did you want to be President?’

  'Why not? Admittedly I lack the character and wisdom of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. But the office itself ennobles. Anyway, I left the country. I wanted to be a writer again.’

  'Why couldn't you be that in America?’

  'Because I didn't want to become an alcoholic, basically. They all are there, for some reason. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner are the classic examples, but it didn't stop with them. Apart from the Jews, all American writers do seem to booze a great deal. After all, there's something to be said for being an alcoholic in America.

  'Either that or they barricade themselves away, like Salinger. But I wonder how he passes the time. It is very cold where he lives...’

  Besides, Vidal had a specific novel to research and compose, and it was this that brought him to Italy. The book was called Julian: it turned out to be the start of a fresh track in Vidal's career as a writer. A study of the fourth-century apostate Roman Emperor, the new novel combined imaginative passion (Vidal's suspended nostalgia for pre-Christian grandeur and chaos) with intellectual distance (a chance to be rigorous and erudite). Julian was his first fiction for ten years: it was a huge success, critically and commercially, and prepared the way for his equally redoubtable trilogy about the American political past, Washington, DC, Burr and (well-timed for the bicentennial year) 1876. These novels, together with the problematical Myra Breckinridge, have made him world famous — and a millionaire at least a couple of times over.

  Although there is almost total unanimity about Vidal's quality as an essayist, assessments of his fiction vary to an unusual degree. To some, Vidal's gifts are primarily analytical and expository. So long as his fiction is tied to argument — as in the historical novels — it has all the wit and conviction of his essays, with an added spaciousness and poise, a sense of intimacy with the way the world works. Once freed from this reality, though - as in the satirical fantasies Myra Breckinridge and Myron — his imagination founders in a kind of puerile vivacity, mere low-campery. Auberon Waugh remarked of Myron that only humourless people seemed to find it funny. And such people would, on Vidal's admission, include a great many Americans.

  While he forged ahead with his fiction during the Sixties, Vidal became, if anything, even more trenchant and ubiquitous as a commentator on the American scene. 'Living outside America helps: you see things more sharply and can say what you want.' Undiminished controversy shadowed his exile, In 1961 he launched his famous feud with Bobby Kennedy. 'Jack was tremendous company — really droll. But with Bobby... it was chemical. Put us in the same room and I'd want to kick him. He was a McCarthyite tough.’

  In 1967, he wrote two remarkably clear-headed attacks on the Kennedy political machine, The Holy Family and The Manchester Book; he was later to say of Teddy's presidential aspirations, 'Well, he would have made a very good bartender.’

  During elections he returned to gallivant round the US television circuit, eliciting on one occasion this lucid retort from William Buckley Junior: 'Listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face.' During the 1970 election Vidal became co-chairman of Dr Spock's New Party, a wet-lib fringe group running on a collection of fashionable issues (a protest-vote, surely?). Two years later his play An Evening with Richard Nixon earned him an impressive bundle of death threats. ('Well-written death threats, too. They weren't just lunatics.') Vidal is, and will remain, an energetic, increasingly Parnassian monitor of his homeland — 'a national treasure,' as one critic put it, 'one of the very few sane voices amidst the babble'.

  'Oh to be in England, now that England's here,' drawled Gore when, on arrival ai my Ravello hotel, I diffidently telephoned his villa. I had reviewed Mr Vidal's work on two occasions, and with sufficient hostility to win his amused disdain, or so a common friend told me. I had met him once, last year, and he was geniality incarnate (later describing me, in a student-magazine interview, as 'a cute little thing'). Now Vidal is well known to harbour grudges, and for a moment I suspected that some small, patrician revenge might await me. A bit of lordly hetero bashing, perhaps, or at least several hours of Vidal's expertly decadent taunts.

  Nothing — or very little — of the kind. He is excellent company and a superlative talker, aphoristic, funny, learned, with a delightful line in brutal mimicry (his Tennessee Williams is an unforgettable, cr
oaky mixture of affection and savagery). There is that fundamental coldness in him, and occasionally one catches glimpses of it. But it is not something that a day-tripper would be permitted to inspect.

  Vidal's life at present seems to be a masterpiece of order and productivity. He does most of his writing in the Ravello villa, an ivory palace slapped on the cliff-face, with occasional diversionary visits to his opulent apartment in Rome (it is there — if the late Tom Driberg was to be believed — that most of his startling socio-sexual escapades take place. 'So Tom sang, did he?' said Vidal grimly). He has a living-out maid, and there is always the devoted Howard to mastermind the running of villa and estate. Among other things, they make their own wine. On the ground floor, between Vidal's bedroom and Howard's, is a well-equipped bathroom/sauna/ gymnasium, complete with dumb-bells, where 'I work out irreligiously every day". He looks fit. He is fit, as I discovered during a back-breaking walk down the cliff to Amalfi.

  As I wheezed down the endless steps behind him, Vidal chatted melodiously on. The two-year debacle over his recent screenplay, Caligula, continues to vex him. The producer, Bob Guccione of Penthouse, intended to call the film Gore Vidal's Caligula; having seen some of the revised script, Vidal set a lawsuit in train to have his name removed from the title. One of the stars, Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris), hardly an actress famed for her fastidiousness, quit the film rather than enact the sex scenes required of her by the Italian director.

  'Oh, it's hard-core all right. Nothing wrong with that, in itself. It's just that the director has no talent. As for the producer ...' Some exuberantly libellous comments ensued.