Gore Vidal was, at times, a man effortlessly timeless, or at
least able to convey times wider than those he lived through. A man of many talents, author, playwright,
screenwriter, man of letters, political commentator, so-almost a politician, liberal,
right to be gay, if not necessarily gay rights, champion because there was
nothing remotely abnormal about it, self-imposed American exile, satirist, wit,
and national conscience when it appeared the United States had none, I wonder who
could take his place on the America’s intellectual stage.
Vidal formed part of the cadre of writers, all American, all
white, all male, who dominated the sixties and seventies literature scene being
famous in themselves as much as for their words. Vidal follows John Updike, Truman Capote, Norman
Mailer, Arthur Miller and all the others to the far side, leaving just Philip
Roth still working, still writing, still being relevant in a way, for a certain
sort of person.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Vidal recently, even before
the news of his death. I wanted to
shoehorn him into an upcoming blog series about the pleasures of rereading, but
also I’ve just read, for the first time Messiah, which I’d found a tatty
paperback of for seventy pence. A
compelling almost science fiction drama about the power of the media and
religion of the masses taking in notions of fleeting celebrity, it was,
incredibly, published in 1958 not 2008. He
didn’t make the cut of the writers I wanted to discuss, partly because he was
threatening to be yet another white male and I already had several of those,
but also because the sheer unadulterated joy I’d experienced in rereading the
entirety of the Narratives of Empire series in historical chronological order
was no surprise and so doesn’t fit with the theme I’m exploring.
The Guardian makes a compelling case Vidal’s novels being
irrelevant and lumpy when faced with his talents as an essayist, but with a
career spanning sixty years, from Williwaw, in 1948, to the final Narratives
instalment, the Golden Age, in 2008 it’s hard to ignore such a vast body of
work. It’s probably no surprise that he
was destined for greatness, he came from that sort of family. He learnt to read through reciting
congressional records to his blind Grandfather, the senator TP Gore, whilst his
father founded the airline TWA and was commerce secretary for Franklin Roosevelt
and his mother got drunk. Jackie Kennedy
was his half sister through his mother’s remarriage which got him a front seat
at the early-sixties Washington Camelot, although he later described John
Kennedy as “the most charming man I ever met and by far the worst
President.”
As a writer he was utterly unafraid of saying what was right
and true. The City and the Pillar, his
third novel at a time when it was normal to build up a catalogue before success
came knocking, no one-novel wonder massive sales in the late forties, caused
outrage for its sympathetic portrayal of homosexuality. Shocking at the time, today rather than
anything remotely graphic it instead reads as a tender paean to his love killed
on the beaches of Iwo Jimo. “There are
no such things as homosexual or heterosexual people, merely homosexual or
heterosexual acts,” he once said and whilst seemingly preferring men for most
of his life there were times where he was distinctly unfussy as to his partner’s
gender.
The novel caused such controversy that he was forced into
his first exile, escaping to Hollywood to write plays for television and films,
including an unaccredited rewrite of Ben Hur. When he eventually returned to the novel form
with the superb Julian, a dramatised biography of the only non-Christian
Emperor to ascend to the purple following Constantine’s conversion of Rome in
330AD, the book’s huge success may have indicated he was prepared to shy away
from upsetting the conservatives. Far
from it. The likes of Myra Beckenridge,
a satire starring a trans-sexual feminist, the aborted involvement with the
notoriously mildly pornographic film Caligula and the novel Live from Golgotha
which had him appearing on Newsnight in the UK with irate theologians answering
the charge that “there’s no historical evidence for St Paul being homosexual”
with “there’s no historical evidence for St Paul existing” showed he never lost
his nerve.
Somewhere along the way he managed to fall out with most of
the literary and political establishment, or at least those who dared to
disagree with him. He spitefully
declared Capote’s death to be a “good career move” and the argument with Mailer
deteriorated so badly that at a party Mailer threw whisky over Vidal, head-butted
him and then punched him to the ground.
Vidal responded with arguably the most biting insult to a writer: “What’s the matter, Norman? Lost for words again?”
He argued with Bobby Kennedy so badly – for apparently
touching Jackie in too intimate fashion of all things - that he was banished
from Camelot. It was hardly the man of
letter’s most erudite moment, apparently descending into a “no, fuck you”
row. Despite his worldly, liberal,
privileged image, meek he was not.
In the twenty-first century he seemed to take the election
of George W Bush as a personal affront, as though America had betrayed him
(even though he was living on the Italian coast, self-exiled again, at the
time) – but, then again, he was a relative of Al Gore. Still, he used his position of authorly
authority to go after “the junta”, as he referred to the administration, and
was one of the first commentators to seriously suggest – and be taken seriously
– that the wars in the Middle East were more about oil than any moral right for
revenge.
Age was however catching up with him. Shortly after his appearance at the Hay
Literary festival in 2008 my friend Jonathan commented that he appeared less
like a giant of literature and more like a tired old man who just wanted to be
left alone. And who, to be honest, would
have wished to prevent his retirement after having done so much other than
himself.
Despite all the above, and a lot more besides, it is the Narratives
of Empire series for which I, personally, will remember him best. An entire education in American political
history for the uninitiated, ie me, Gabriel Garcia Marquez called them
“historical novels or novelised histories” unable to tell apart the fictional
bent and the repetition of fact. For me,
they are like an exceptional version of the West Wing with more heart, better
jokes and real events against a backdrop of a society evolving at a pace never
seen before.
The series came about almost by accident. Vidal took the maxim write what you know and
crafted Washington DC as one of his comeback novels, essentially an account of
the Roosevelt administration using the insider knowledge of his father and
grandfather plus a thinly disguised Kennedy and dollops of gossipy scandal. The
process seemed to awaken an urge in him to cement his country’s brief history
into a fictional cannon. And so followed
Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire and Hollywood taking in, respectively, a
Vice-President who killed a rival in a duel whilst in office, the civil war, a
stolen Presidential election, American imperial expansionism through the
domination of trashy media and the vanity of celebrity. Who says that the lessons of the past aren’t
laid out before us today to be ignored?
The novels told, mainly, through the eyes of a fictional
family whose generations lurk around the corridors of power have a deep rooted
affection for the country and the men who made it, but shirk away from
sentimentality and the placing of people on a pedestal. Everyone in history is human, everyone is
fallible, heroes are just those who don’t get found out. That’s what makes them real and
interesting. That’s what makes them just
like us.
The Golden Age is an odd book, the final part of the
Narratives series it is partially a rewrite of Washington DC, partly a
companion piece, going further and beyond, with the same yet different
characters and events, the writer’s camera turning left when its predecessor
exited stage right. Vidal himself even
crops up towards the end as a legitimate cultural figure of the capitalist
Empire. It’s almost as though he drawing
to a close a magnificent sequence of novels, America’s past and his own life on
the page as his vanity demanded.
“...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.”
The Golden Age? The light’s gone out now.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment