The Golden Age

by Gore Vidal

  “What does mine seem like to you?” It is not often a character frees himself from the text. “After all, you are in my narrative.”

  “And I think you are in mine. I suppose that’s how every being—invented or not—perceives the world.”

  But I hardly know what I actually think as my inventions now circle me. Inside the salone, Peter was again being wired for sound. On the far wall the black-and-white mosaic hippocampus—part horse, part fish—seemed to be swimming past us, back to its primal origin in the mid-earth sea. Mediterranean.

  I opened the balcony door. Let A.B. go through first. As he did, I said, “You’re Aaron Burr, aren’t you?”

  A.B. grinned. “If you say so.”

  We stood facing each other in the open doorway between the evening chill and the warmth from the house—limbo? “You started our nineteenth century off with a bang. You were the vice president who made Jefferson president. So how do you plan to start our new century?”

  “Like this. With a television interview. You and Peter Sanford …”

  I laughed. “Aaron Burr as Larry King? No!”

  But A.B. was serene. “Remember how I … that is to say, Burr … took on every sort of case as a lawyer before I made my deal with the devil, Thomas Jefferson.”

  “You really are back, aren’t you, Colonel?”

  “If you think so, yes. I’m nothing more than energy to be put to use because, as Jeremy Bentham liked to say, without such energy there is nothing. Anyway, this time around I shall ignore parish-pump politics. That’s for puppets. Power to make the sort of world I dreamed of is elsewhere.”

  “Where?”

  A.B. gave a sweeping gesture that included the invisible temples at Paestum and the last of the sword of light and the entire dark Gulf of Salerno. “Nation-states are finished. The answer is now the round earth itself with all those billions waiting to be connected by …” He stopped.

  “By you?”

  “By energy.”

  “On the Internet?”

  “Oh, it will go far beyond that. But wherever it is, I already am.”

  “Leading it?”

  “Who knows? This time.”

  After the taping, the TV crew went back to Rome. A.B. and Iris walked into the village, where Peter and I would join them once we’d recovered from our complementary rather than competitive monologues to camera. The cats, one tortoiseshell and the other white, slept on the suede sofa, their claws extending and contracting in their sleep.

  Over Peter’s shoulder, Harry Truman and I are grinning at each other in a photograph. Truman came to Dutchess County in the late autumn of 1960 to speak for the Democratic ticket. I introduced him to the cheering faithful. He told the audience how he had recently gone to see my play, The Best Man, the story of two candidates for president at a convention where a former president is king-maker.

  “Funniest thing,” said Truman. “There we were, Mrs. Truman and I, walking up the aisle, and everyone’s staring at me in the most peculiar way. Can’t figure out why.”

  This got a laugh. It was generally believed that I had based the old president on Truman even though Eleanor Roosevelt had said, “He seems much more like Mr. Garner to me.”

  But that night in Fishkill, I was thought to be introducing one of my characters to the Democrats of Dutchess County. Truman played along with the joke. Then, when it came time to endorse me for Congress, he forgot my name and said, “Now you all gotta vote for this young man here for Congress because he’s … Uh, he’s got the words.” I thought that a fair description.

  Peter was amused. “Personally, I always liked Truman. You know, he once gave Diana and me a ride in his train …”

  “I know,” I said.

  Peter nodded. “Of course you do. You made him up. Then you made me up, too. How does it feel to play god?”

  “Unreal,” I said. “Do I wake or sleep?” I picked up Aeneas’s book. “Hard to recall now just how serious we were when we thought we could turn all those V-E and V-J Days into something new under the sun.” I looked at the title page: The Golden Age by Aeneas Duncan. “Well, we did have five years of peace. That’s quite a lot, really. From the Japanese surrender to the Korean … what?”

  “Defeat.” Peter shook his head. “After that, we went to war full-time. We had to save everyone from communism. Then communism went away, so now we have to save them from drugs. From terrorism. We are all under constant surveillance. Do you know that at every airport …”

  “I know, Peter.” I headed him off before he yet again confronted the security guard from Continental Airlines.

  “Well,” he gave me a hard look, “you should have constructed a better universe for us.”

  “One works with what one has and knows, as you know as well as I, in your universe.”

  “Do I really have one?” Peter sighed. “I suspect that I only have a few random memories. If they are memories. For me, the golden age came and went one spring day in 1948, when I had lunch at Robert’s in Fifty-fifth Street.”

  “With Cornelia Claiborne?” I thought of yellow roses. “You live in the past; don’t you?”

  “The only place,” said Peter, “where you can get a decent meal. Shad roe from the Hudson.” He smiled at the memory.

  I looked at the playbill of Touche’s revue. “You know, I thought I caught a glimpse of what we might have become that night at the Phoenix Theatre, with you and Diana and Aeneas …”

  “And Latouche, weeping about his second act. Oh, that night was unforgettable. But the golden age, if there had ever been one, was already shut down by then—1954, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. Which means that what we thought was a bright beginning was actually a last flare in the night.”

  “Well, it hasn’t been all that dark since.” Peter was judicious. “Do you understand the Internet?”

  “No.” I was firm. “And neither do you.”

  Peter rose and stretched. “We must consult A.B. He’s the future, not us. Our revels now are ended. Why do you keep letting Shakespeare leak in upon us?”

  “Why not? He gives names to things, real and unreal. He understands how the actors—the Roosevelts and the Trumans—are simply spirits and once their scenes are acted out, they melt into air, into thin air, as we shall presently do, still hankering after what was not meant to be, ever, other than a lunch at Robert’s for you and then, for both of us, two hours in a far-below-Broadway theater called the Phoenix—at least the name indicates hope, doesn’t it? A cleansing fire followed by a dazzling rebirth: also the logo of a thousand dishonest insurance companies. The phoenix could well be the sign in which A.B. conquers where Aaron Burr failed. Burr wanted to be a mere emperor of Mexico. A.B. wants the great globe itself—all cloud-capped towers, gorgeous palaces, solemn temples, the whole lot bound together by waves of energy of which we are insubstantial, interchangeable parts. Now—should I let you go?”

  Peter was silhouetted against the fire. “Go where?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “ ‘What Is the Matter with Matter?’ was the title of a piece I published, by a physicist, right after Hiroshima.”

  “What was the matter?”

  “Nothing,” said Peter. As his host—and creator—I let him have the last word, which is something.

  As for the human case, the generations of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—is not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.

  AFTERWORD

  For those who mistakenly regard history as a true record and the novel as invention (sometimes it can be precisely the other way round), the “historical” novel does seem to be a contradiction on the order of Thomas Jefferson’s famous “true facts.” Yet I think it is fair to
ask of a given writer, “What did you make up and what did you take from the agreed-upon historical record?” In The Golden Age I found myself unusually situated. I had lived through the period. I had been at the convention that nominated Willkie. I knew a number of the historical figures that I describe. Also, as one who had grown up in political Washington, D.C., I was an attentive listener to the many voices which sound and resound in that whispering gallery. Later, as an adult, I listened to some of the principals in other settings. Eleanor Roosevelt’s aria on jealousy is not word for word what she said to me in the early 1960s at Hyde Park, but I suspect that my memory of what she said is a lot closer to her actual words than, say, a reconstruction of a Periclean speech by even so great if interested a writer as Thucydides. The lives of such invented characters as Caroline and Blaise and Peter Sanford intersect with those of “real” people like Roosevelt and Hopkins. What the real people say and do is essentially what they have been recorded as saying and doing, while the invented characters are then able to speculate upon motivation, dangerous territory for the historian.

  I realize that in these American history narratives, over the years, I have broken a number of taboos. For instance, in Lincoln (1984) Abraham Lincoln tells his law partner, William Herndon, where and with whom he had once contracted syphilis. Since I use the language that Herndon himself used, I thought that all this was very much to the point, since mercury was the “cure” for syphilis in those days, and Lincoln’s later melancholy and odd health could well have come from mercury poisoning. Unfortunately, the Lincoln brigade in academe was outraged by my reference to this “maggoty story.” Apparently, no great American could ever have caught a venereal disease or been untrue to his wife, and so on. It was then that I discovered how many bold fictioneers reside in Clio’s grove.

  It was well known within the whispering gallery of the day that FDR had provoked the Japanese into attacking us. In fact, our preeminent historian, Charles A. Beard, was on the case as early as 1941 with President Roosevelt and the Coming of War. Needless to say, apologists for empire have been trying for fifty years to erase him. But he is indelible. Finally, did Roosevelt know that the inevitable first strike would come at Pearl Harbor rather than at, say, Manila? I leave this moot.

  Over the years, I have been publicly advised by no less a personage than Dumas Malone that as no gentleman in the antebellum South would ever go to bed with a slave and as Thomas Jefferson was a very great gentleman indeed, he could not have had children by his slave Sally Hemings. Thus a national tall tale is firmly based on a false syllogism. What I wrote of the Jefferson-Hemings affair (Burr, 1973) has now been proved true through DNA testing. Burr’s latest academic biographer believes that my intuition as to what Hamilton had said about Aaron Burr that led to the fatal duel appears to be true. But enough of I-told-you-so boasting. The real problem here is why so many American historians become so frantically unhistorical when a national icon is placed in too severe a light.

  President Eisenhower may have solved this mystery when he warned us against the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower acknowledged the costliness of modern weapons; then he alluded, unexpectedly, to the complex’s influence on the universities, once “the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery.” This has changed, he noted. “Because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.… The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present, and is gravely to be regarded.” There it is or, until recently, was.

  The vast amounts that government spends on research and development in the science departments cannot help but affect the fragile humanities. Hence, the ongoing revisions of our history and the inevitable fury that truth-telling often evokes. I don’t believe that the good Professor Dumas Malone actually wore a cloak and carried a dagger for his country when writing his life of Jefferson, but I do know that the “intellectual” operatives in the CIA of his day liked to refer to their busy establishment at Langley, Virginia, as “the ministry of culture,” from which they founded literary magazines like Encounter in Europe, funded culture at home, and even made Hollywood films like Orwell’s Animal Farm in order to demonize our enemy, who, rather meanly, folded in 1990, leaving our propagandists at such a loose end that there are now furtive signs of a revival among younger academics of the realist historians—anti-ideologues like Richard Hofstadter and William Appleman Williams. With luck, a golden age of historians may now be at hand, freeing novelists to return to the truly great themes—how a sensitive, innately good person was wrongly accused of political incorrectness and so failed to get tenure at Ann Arbor, while his wife left him for another.… Shakespeare country up ahead!