Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  When Silverman fell from power, the new regime at NBC had no interest in Vidal’s script. The assumption that American history did not have a national audience still prevailed. Just before he began campaigning for the senatorial nomination, Jason Epstein, visiting at Outpost Drive and spending hours in the kitchen at his usual culinary magic, read the television script. He urged him to “make a novel out of this.” But Gore had reservations, which he shared with Peter Davison, an editor at Atlantic Monthly Press who hoped to entice him away from Random House. “First, I must know what my political life will be…. Second, I am being made a large offer by RH for a novel about A. Lincoln, which I rather dread as I’ve already done it for TV (not done yet) and will do it again for the theater this spring. Third, my irritable but continuing relations with RH and Jason E.” When the primary settled his political future, he was willing to consider Lincoln. “Both Jason and I suggested that Gore do it as a novel,” Owen Laster recalled. “He wasn’t enthusiastic. After Jason worked on him, he decided to do it,” though it took considerable persuasion. In October 1982, at Ravello, where he arrived in a driving rain, Owen brought for signing the handsome contract that Random House had offered and Gore agreed to. Vidal insisted that a few hundred thousand dollars be returned to compensate the publisher for a portion of the unearned advance on his previous contract. “He did something very unusual,” Epstein acknowledged. “Never in the history of publishing had that happened before. An expression of decency and responsibility. He thought that was the right thing to do. I was just amazed. I’ll never forget that. He never wanted to be in debt to his publisher.” That night at Ravello, Laster “got as drunk as I ever remember being. We went to dinner…. Then we came back. And Howard always disappears earlier. They had a setup then with two couches. He was lying on one couch, I on the other, facing each other. There’s a bottle of wine between us. We must already have had one or two bottles at dinner and a brandy in the town square. We were drinking wine, and then Gore told me how he had wanted to be President and how he had chosen to be a writer but never stopped wanting to be President.” By early November, one month after his fifty-seventh birthday, Gore was, he told Richard Poirier, “deep into Lincoln, an enjoyable process, all in all. For once, I start out with five years of research and two other versions behind me. He is endlessly interesting. The American Bismarck coming on like Will Rogers…. I trust Jason will make the fortune he and RH so richly deserve!”

  Publisher and author profited greatly from Lincoln, a huge bestseller from its initial publication in June 1984. It was to provide the linking centerpiece of what Vidal had now reconceived as a larger, multinovel series about American history from the beginning of the republic to the twentieth century. The overall structure and pattern of the series now, as he wrote Lincoln, became clear to him. Burr, 1876, and Washington, D.C. were already in place, Empire and Hollywood were to follow in the seven years after Lincoln. A final volume, The Golden Age, was planned as the culmination. A deep believer in history as the ultimately human subject, he desired to make history more vividly alive and intellectually credible than in textbooks, an alternative account of American history that embodies Vidal’s understanding of how politics and power work, past and present. It contrasts the American republic with the American empire. In Vidal’s story the Founding Fathers were a brilliant but mixed lot (George Washington the dullest of them all), who created a balance between the big-money interests of the Federalists and the small-farm, small-money, small-government civil-libertarian views of the Jeffersonians. But Jacksonian America broke the precarious balance. Land and power became the predominant concerns: the Indians east of the Mississippi were pushed westward or destroyed; slavery could not be contained, let alone abolished. Lincoln, as much villain as hero, established a nationalistic, monolithic Union, a huge, industrialized anti-Jeffersonian monster. In the next fifty years his successors, led by McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, transformed the United States from a republic into an aggressive empire. The Monroe Doctrine had established the Caribbean and South America as an American sphere of influence. Now the Pacific was going to be an American lake. World War I, into which Woodrow Wilson elected to insert America, made the United States the dominant economic power of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal retooled American government and slightly redistributed national wealth in order to make America safe for capitalism. Immediately after World War II, Harry Truman celebrated the absolute international dominance of the United States by creating for the first time a national-security state whose underlying premise was that the Soviet Union was so great a menace that Americans must give up some of their freedoms to guard themselves permanently against the enemy. The temporary wartime OSS was converted into the permanent peacetime CIA. Its ongoing task was to balk the Soviet Union, whose strength was exaggerated by those for whom the Cold War was an economic and ideological boon. For the first time a huge peacetime Army was put in place. The defense budget became sacred. The garrison state became permanent. Those who controlled and had always controlled wealth and political power in America kept themselves rich and powerful. Inevitably, the Korean and Vietnam wars followed. As with ancient Rome, America had moved from republic to empire. Lincoln was, in Vidal’s view, the pivotal figure in that movement.

  A tall, dark shadow hovering over all lesser shadows, Lincoln is the only figure other than Burr so important in Vidal’s American story that he warrants his own title. The historical character over whom he has brooded most, the Lincoln of Vidal’s remythologizing is given fictional coherence by the novelist’s art. Sculpting his narrative out of the years of Lincoln’s presidency, Vidal created a pragmatic and manipulative politician with one overriding vision: to save the Union and by saving it to transform it into a modern, industrialized, national state so powerfully and tightly coherent that nothing can tear it apart again. Opposed to slavery, Lincoln does not believe slavery an issue worth fighting about. In favor of civil liberties, he has little hesitation in suspending them to fight the war more efficiently. Deeply sincere and incontrovertibly honest, he knows how to dissemble, to reward friends and punish enemies, to manipulate men and money, to further his cause: in sum, the consummate politician. Deeply ambivalent about Lincoln, Vidal ends up doing Lincoln the honor of deepening his complexity, humanizing his character, and making him more real by depicting him warts and all. A controversial portrait that has within it touches of Vidal’s Southern inheritance—his view that just as the South should have let the slaves go, the North should have let the South go—many Lincoln enthusiasts found unsettling. Its vividness and credibility made it even the more formidable. Details of character and scene are rendered superbly. If the novel suffers from an occasional overschematism, a certain reductive sweep, the familiarity of many of the events makes that difficult to avoid. To deal with potential problems of voice and point of view, Lincoln is narrated in the third person. The character whose consciousness most dominates is that of Lincoln’s young secretary, John Hay, later to be Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of State and a prominent figure in Empire. Weaving a plot composed of facts about Lincoln and the war with fictional accounts of personal and political lives, Lincoln created a tapestry of conflicts that embody the issues of America’s national crisis.

  When Lincoln’s critical success, reinforced by its immense sales, was capped by its being nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Vidal was both pleased and skeptical. He thought it unlikely that his vision of Lincoln was idealistic enough to find favor with the committee. Some Lincoln scholars, to whom Vidal responded in two essays in 1991, “Lincoln and the Priests of Academe” in The American Historical Review and “Last Note on Lincoln” in The New York Review of Books, condemned his portrait of the sixteenth President, often with high academic condescension. Some were offended that it was not their Lincoln, others that it was a-less-than-perfect Lincoln. Soon Newsweek’s reviewer and literary columnist, Walter Clemons, who proposed that he become Vidal’s biographer, reported to him that the three j
udges of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize Committee for fiction, on which he served, had selected Lincoln, but the general committee refused to give the award to Vidal. When Clemons persuaded Little, Brown to outbid Random House for the rights to his proposed biography and received a $350,000 advance against royalties, Jason commented to Gore, “You’ve led a very expensive life.” Vidal’s response was to search for some position between irony and self-inflation as he helped spread the news of his value. “I boasted to Bowles as well as to you,” he wrote to Louis Auchincloss, “of the Clemons advance and got back one of those hard Caesarian Bowlesian letters to the effect that as he is getting so much money oughtn’t he to do all the work? putting his usual finger on the open sore. One always does the work for them, if ‘authorized.’” Gore agreed to cooperate fully with Clemons.

  In January 1986 Vidal published in The Nation “The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas,” the lecture he had delivered to the PEN conference the previous October. When Norman Podhoretz, in his New York Post column, and Midge Decter soon afterward in Contentions, registered their objections to Vidal’s criticism of the “American Empire,” he felt it desirable to answer back. In the article Vidal proposed that America’s economic survival would best be served by an alliance with the Soviet Union that would allow those two countries together to compete effectively with the increasingly powerful Asian economies, which he predicted would ultimately be spearheaded by a Sino-Japanese alliance. Vidal, Decter claimed, “does not like his country.” Otherwise, why would he write such a slanderously inaccurate account of America’s motives and actions? America was not an “empire,” let alone an evil empire. That was the Soviet Union. In his role as defender of the country’s reputation, as a pro-Reagan neoconservative, as a Cold Warrior demanding a solid front against the enemy and the largest possible defense budget, as a strong supporter of the policies and values of the Israeli Likud government and its military-economic alliance with the United States, Podhoretz responded angrily to Vidal’s overview of American history and current policy. That the attack came from Vidal especially seemed a red flag to a pained patriot, though he included other of his former liberal literary friends in his indictment, especially Norman Mailer, with whom he had had a falling-out.

  In March 1986, in a brief essay, Vidal characterized Podhoretz’s furious response to his essay on the American empire and the desirability of an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union as “The Empire Lovers Strike Back.” Victor Navasky was delighted to publish it in The Nation’s anniversary issue, partly because he thought it a fine, typically Vidalian piece whose thrust was entirely political, partly because The Nation, which took a balanced view toward Israeli-American relations and the Palestinian issue and had strong Jewish support from the left, had little sympathy for the neoconservatives. The essay had two lines of attack. The minor one was a dissection of the issues that related to American-Israeli policy, mainly emphasizing Israel’s unjust treatment of the Palestinians, comparing it to the American treatment of the Filipinos after the Spanish-American War; the other was an ad hominem attack on the Podhoretzes. Vidal argued that “in order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews, who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus-Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives, and attack the likes of Mailer and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of Sharon and Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain.” Podhoretz and Decter were “propagandists … for these predators.” It was not a question of being pro- or anti-American or pro- or anti-Israel. It was the denunciation of certain policies advocated by particular individuals and political groups, whether American or Israeli. In the case of the Podhoretzes, it seemed to Vidal that in their support of Israel they elevated Israeli interests over American. They relentlessly exaggerated the Russian threat in order to pressure Congress into providing large sums to support the Israeli military. The solution was simple: America should not support injustice and it should not support military activities by foreign governments, not only in the case of Israel but in any instance. The obligation of American political leaders was to make rational decisions based on America’s overall national interests, not in response to self-interested pressure groups. The United States, Vidal proposed, should end military aid to all Middle Eastern countries. “The Middle Easterners would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever. In any case, we would be well out of it.” The rhetoric and sharp ironies of the essay spotlighted the level of Vidal’s contempt for the Podhoretzes and what they represented, and the politically incorrect sharpness of its language, whose ironies sensitive Jewish-American readers were not likely to take as such, was designed to shock. As a polemical piece it was witty, devastatingly dismissive of the enemy, and sublimely indifferent to the obvious fact that the Podhoretzes did not elevate Israeli interest over American. They simply saw them as identical. It also did not take into account that for intertwined moral, historical, and cultural reasons, there was strong American support for Israel and any Israeli government. For the Podhoretzes any effort to claim that American and Israeli interests were not identical was not only monstrously mistaken but monstrous. It had to rise to some higher or lower level of explanation than political differences. The Likud was their Israel and neoconservatism their America. To attack their America (or any aspect of it that they defended) was not to like America. To attack Likud’s policies was to attack Israel as a whole. To criticize Likud’s right-wing version of “Zionism” was to attack all Jews. The conclusion to be drawn from Vidal’s attack was simple: To be strongly critical of Likud’s Israel was to be anti-Semitic.

  Vidal’s “empire lovers” struck back again, this time in the form of a long essay by Podhoretz in Commentary in November 1986. Since “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Podhoretz had been certain that Vidal was a dangerous enemy. Podhoretz read as anti-Semitism Vidal’s advice that blacks, Jews, and gays should effect a “cease-fire and a common front against the common enemy” because even the neoconservative Jews (whom Vidal compared to a small group of German-Jews who had embraced Nazism) might end up in “the same gas chambers with blacks and homosexuals.” The title of Podhoretz’s response to Vidal, “The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” cleverly conflated into a single anathema homosexuality, which only the title alluded to, and anti-Semitism, a charge against Vidal that the essay was dedicated to proving. Podhoretz argued that Vidal was part of a long-standing tradition of elitist anti-Semitism, the previous epitome of which in American culture had been Henry Adams; that Vidal had indicated his anti-Jewish “animus” years before when he had associated himself with complaints by non-Jewish writers that Jewish writers dominated the American literary culture of the postwar years (it had been Capote, not Vidal, who had thus whined); that his proposal to cut off military aid to all Middle Eastern countries was tantamount to advocating the destruction of Israel; that not to support Israel was inseparable from anti-Semitism; and that the lack of outrage on the left at Vidal’s essay (outrage Podhoretz had solicited by writing friends and supporters of The Nation, asking whether they had protested the article’s appearance in the magazine) indicated the rise of a dangerous laxity on the left about this crucial issue. That compared unfavorably, Podhoretz claimed, with how William F. Buckley and the National Review had recently handled a similar instance within their ranks. “From Vidal’s political friends on the Left, then, mainly denial, and from the editor of The Nation, stonewalling. From [Joseph] Sobran’s political friends on the Right, mostly outrage, and from the editor of National Review, dissociation and repudiation of anti-Semitism.” The conclusion was that “anti-Semitism had largely if not entirely been banished from its traditional home on the Right, and that today, especially in the guise of anti-Zionism, it is meeting with more an
d more toleration, and sometimes even approval, on the Left.” Podhoretz’s agenda was clear, the political uses of the charge of anti-Semitism irresistible, mostly because he, like Buckley, without the slightest doubt or vestige of intellectual nuance, believed he was absolutely right, as an a priori given, about everything to do with such issues.

  During the 1980s daily life at La Rondinaia was mainly devoted to work, and the occasional pleasure of visitors, a large number of whom had assembled for a special occasion in September 1983. On an early-autumn evening Gore had waited, sitting outdoors at a café in Ravello, for the Calvinos to arrive. As the last light left the sky, his visitors, who had telephoned to tell him, without any invitation from him, that they were coming, saw him sitting “alone on the terrace. I think I’ll always remember that image,” Judith Calvino remarked. “He was so striking. He had on something light and something navy blue, and he wasn’t much different from his younger days, the image I had seen of him in photos. . . . I’ll always see Gore, no matter how he changes, like that. I had seen him before, but my private photo is that. We left our baggage at the hotel, the Palumbo. He was waiting for us there. That’s my Gore Vidal. He has so much physical presence. It was not only physical. It was a man containing his biography. That’s what I saw. Nothing excluded. You see what I mean? He seemed radiant. He didn’t look happy. He looked as if something was eating him. But the effect was extraordinary.” Whatever might have been making him unhappy had not affected his creative energy or his eagerness to engage the enemy. “Last days can be as much fun as first days,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny. “I have enjoyed this epoch enormously. But then, as they used to say when I was in the army, fire at will. One did. Does.” The next day, a little after his fifty-eight birthday, Ravello had declared him an honorary citizen, a rare event, orchestrated with formal speeches, grand presentations, and celebratory decorations in the high Italian style. His friend Marella Agnelli had come from Rome. Two well-known Italian writers, Luigi Barzini and Alberto Arbasino, were there. A state dignitary from the foreign office had come to represent the Italian government. That Italy’s most revered living author was also there gave even more special resonance to the occasion, and particularly to Gore, who had come to admire Italo Calvino perhaps more than any other contemporary writer and whose words of praise for him Gore found particularly gratifying. In 1974, before he knew Calvino, though he knew of him since 1948, he had published in The New York Review of Books an essay on “Calvino’s Novels.” “I just told Barbara that I was doing Calvino. She didn’t know much about him,” he recalled. “Neither did anyone else, which is why one writes pieces.” Within a short time Calvino had, for the first time, an American audience, and Gore had a generous letter of thanks for his lucid, laudatory, and influential essay. That fall, “just out of the blue,” Calvino and his wife, Judith, came to Gore’s fund-raising lecture at the American Academy in Rome. They began to see one another socially, though never when Corsini, who had remained loyal to the Communist Party, was present. Calvino had renounced his membership. Calvino “was very cheery with me,” Gore recalled. “He used to say, ‘I stammer in every language.’ He had uncertain English, quite good French, and I guess pretty good Spanish…. Whenever we gave a party that I thought would be interesting for him, they would come.”