The Anxiety of Influence: Hitchens literacides Vidal

[Sheilbh]

Gore Vidal

More than a decade ago, I sat on a panel in New York to review the life and work of Oscar Wilde. My fellow panelist was that heroic old queen Quentin Crisp, perhaps the only man ever to have made a success of the part of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Inevitably there arose the question: Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day? The moderator proposed Gore Vidal, and, really, once that name had been mentioned, there didn't seem to be any obvious rival.

Like Wilde, Gore Vidal combined tough-mindedness with subversive wit (The Importance of Being Earnest is actually a very mordant satire on Victorian England) and had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones. Like Wilde, he was able to combine radical political opinions with a lifestyle that was anything but solemn. And also like Wilde, he was almost never "off": his private talk was as entertaining and shocking as his more prepared public appearances. Admirers of both men, and of their polymorphous perversity, could happily debate whether either of them was better at fiction or in the essay form.

I was fortunate enough to know Gore a bit in those days. The price of knowing him was exposure to some of his less adorable traits, which included his pachydermatous memory for the least slight or grudge and a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where it didn't quite belong. One was made aware, too, that he suspected Franklin Roosevelt of playing a dark hand in bringing on Pearl Harbor and still nurtured an admiration in his breast for the dashing Charles Lindbergh, leader of the American isolationist right in the 1930s. But these tics and eccentricities, which I did criticize in print, seemed more or less under control, and meanwhile he kept on saying things one wished one had said oneself. Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: "These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to write." Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: "This is not at all bad, except as prose." He once said to me of the late Teddy Kennedy, who was then in his low period of red-faced, engorged, and abandoned boyo-hood, that he exhibited "all the charm of three hundred pounds of condemned veal." Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were "Joyce Carol Oates"? In an interview, he told me that his life's work was "making sentences." It would have been more acute to say that he made a career out of pronouncing them.

However, if it's true even to any degree that we were all changed by September 11, 2001, it's probably truer of Vidal that it made him more the way he already was, and accentuated a crackpot strain that gradually asserted itself as dominant. If you look at his writings from that time, thrown together in a couple of cheap paperbacks entitled Dreaming War and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, you will find the more crass notions of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone being expressed in language that falls some distance short of the Wildean ideal. "Meanwhile, Media was assigned its familiar task of inciting public opinion against Osama bin Laden, still not the proven mastermind." To that "sentence," abysmal as it is in so many ways, Vidal put his name in November 2002. A small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks on New York and Washington and was seeking a pretext to build a long-desired pipeline across Afghanistan. (Not much sign of that, incidentally, not that the luckless Afghans mightn't welcome it.) For academic authority in this Grassy Knoll enterprise, Vidal relied heavily on the man he thought had produced "the best, most balanced report" on 9/11, a certain Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, whose book The War on Freedom had been brought to us by what Vidal called "a small but reputable homeland publisher." Mr. Ahmed on inspection proved to be a risible individual wedded to half-baked conspiracy-mongering, his "Institute" a one-room sideshow in the English seaside town of Brighton, and his publisher an outfit called "Media Monitors Network" in association with "Tree of Life," whose now-deceased Web site used to offer advice on the ever awkward question of self-publishing. And to think that there was once a time when Gore Vidal could summon Lincoln to the pages of a novel or dispute points of strategy with Henry Cabot Lodge ...

It became more and more difficult to speak to Vidal after this (and less fun too), but then I noticed something about his last volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation, which brought his life story up to 2006. Though it contained a good ration of abuse directed at Bush and Cheney, it didn't make even a gesture to the wild-eyed and croaking stuff that Mr. Ahmed had been purveying. This meant one of two things: either Vidal didn't believe it any longer or he wasn't prepared to put such sorry, silly, sinister stuff in a volume published by Doubleday, read by his literary and intellectual peers, and dedicated to the late Barbara Epstein. The second interpretation, while slightly contemptible, would be better than nothing and certainly a good deal better than the first.

But I have now just finished reading a long interview conducted by Johann Hari of the London Independent (Hari being a fairly consecrated admirer of his) in which Vidal decides to go slumming again and to indulge the lowest in himself and in his followers. He openly says that the Bush administration was "probably" in on the 9/11 attacks, a criminal complicity that would "certainly fit them to a T"; that Timothy McVeigh was "a noble boy," no more murderous than Generals Patton and Eisenhower; and that "Roosevelt saw to it that we got that war" by inciting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Coming a bit more up-to-date, Vidal says that the whole American experiment can now be described as "a failure"; the country will soon take its place "somewhere between Brazil and Argentina, where it belongs"; President Obama will be buried in the wreckage—broken by "the madhouse"—after the United States has been humiliated in Afghanistan and the Chinese emerge supreme. We shall then be "the Yellow Man's burden," and Beijing will "have us running the coolie cars, or whatever it is they have in the way of transport." Asian subjects never seem to bring out the finest in Vidal: he used to say it was Japan that was dominating the world economy, and that in the face of that other peril "there is now only one way out. The time has come for the United States to make common cause with the Soviet Union." That was in 1986—not perhaps the ideal year to have proposed an embrace of Moscow, and certainly not as good a year as 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt did join forces with the U.S.S.R., against Japan and Nazi Germany, in a war that Vidal never ceases to say was (a) America's fault and (b) not worth fighting.

Rounding off his interview, an obviously shocked Mr. Hari tried for a change of pace and asked Vidal if he felt like saying anything about his recently deceased rivals, John Updike, William F. Buckley Jr., and Norman Mailer. He didn't manage to complete his question before being interrupted. "Updike was nothing. Buckley was nothing with a flair for publicity. Mailer was a flawed publicist, too, but at least there were signs every now and then of a working brain." One sadly notices, as with the foregoing barking and effusions, the utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity. Sarcastic, tired flippancy has stolen the place of the first, and lugubrious resentment has deposed the second. Oh, just in closing, then, since Vidal was in London, did he have a word to say about England? "This isn't a country, it's an American aircraft carrier." Good grief.

For some years now, the old boy's stock-in-trade has been that of the last Roman: the stoic eminence who with unclouded eyes foresees the coming end of the noble republic. Such an act doesn't require a toga, but it does demand a bit of dignity. Vidal's phrasings sometimes used to have a certain rotundity and extravagance, but now he has descended straight to the cheap, and even to the counterfeit. What business does this patrician have in the gutter markets, where paranoids jabber and the coinage is debased by every sort of vulgarity?

If Vidal ever reads this, I suppose I know what he will say. Asked about our differences a short while ago at a public meeting in New York, he replied, "You know, he identified himself for many years as the heir to me. And unfortunately for him, I didn't die. I just kept going on and on and on." (One report of the event said that this not-so-rapier-like reply had the audience in "stitches": Vidal in his decline has fans like David Letterman's, who laugh in all the wrong places lest they suspect themselves of not having a good time.) But his first sentence precisely inverts the truth. Many years ago he wrote to me unprompted—I have the correspondence—and freely offered to nominate me as his living successor, dauphin, or, as the Italians put it, delfino. He very kindly inscribed a number of his own books to me in this way, and I asked him for permission to use his original letter on the jacket of one of mine. I stopped making use of the endorsement after 9/11, as he well knows. I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal's character—a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide.

I don't in the least mind his clumsy and nasty attempt to re-write his history with me, but I find I do object to the crank-revisionist and denialist history he is now peddling about everything else, as well as to the awful, spiteful, miserable way—"going on and on and on," indeed—in which he has finished up by doing it. Oscar Wilde was never mean-spirited, and never became an Ancient Mariner, either.

Christopher Hitchens is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. Send comments on all Hitchens-related matters to [email protected].

I think this is sadly true - I'll add that age is showing its effects on Vidal too which excuses the loss of wit.  But as a fan of so many of his novels it's just rather sad that he's not so interesting anymore.  There's something sad about an aging writer, whether it's Vidal, Roth or Nabokov.  It's awful when you see the sort of sputtering excitement of much of their work just increasingly peter out

[Razgovory]

Ah, Hitchens.  Never uses a scaple when a hammer is available.  Possibly a sickle as well.  Though I don't care for Vidal either.  Buckley should have punched him back in the 1960's.  Eh, this is the kind of whiny shit that old gays do at each other.  It's a pathetic old man bitch slapping contest.

[Admiral Yi]

Best thing I've read by Hitchens in quite some time.

[Martinus]

I think Hitchens mythologises Wilde. Unlike our perception of him now, Wilde was reviled by many of his contemporaries, he was an ideological scattershot (i.e. a lot of hits but a lot of misses as well) and, perhaps most importantly, he never lived to an old age. In all likelihood, an old and senile Wilde would have been unbearable.

Let's wait a century and see where this puts Vidal in our memories.

[CountDeMoney]

Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: "This is not at all bad, except as prose."

He's such a bitch. 

[CountDeMoney]

It's awful when you see the sort of sputtering excitement of much of their work just increasingly peter out

But still, you have to respect a writer that says his Muse doesn't arrive until he's had his coffee and morning dump.

[Sheilbh]

I think Hitchens mythologises Wilde. Unlike our perception of him now, Wilde was reviled by many of his contemporaries, he was an ideological scattershot (i.e. a lot of hits but a lot of misses as well) and, perhaps most importantly, he never lived to an old age. In all likelihood, an old and senile Wilde would have been unbearable.

Let's wait a century and see where this puts Vidal in our memories.

Well I hate Wilde.  He may have been reviled by his contemporaries but so has Vidal for all of his career.  As Raz mentioned back in the 60s he accused Buckley of being a crypto-Nazi and Buckley in turn threatened to punch Vidal, a 'God-damn queer'. 

His autobiographies and novels are just a joy.

To give an idea - I think Marty would love Vidal - here's Martin Amis's review of Vidal's Palimpsest:

Gore Vidal's Palimpsest is a tale of the unexpected.  Contemplating its arty, finicky title (pronounce 'Pelimpsest', perhaps, with full Sitwellian delicacy), its handsomely 'integrated' photographs (grand houses, Caligulan profiles), its bulk, its celebrity-infested index, one gears oneself for predictable pleasures.  Namely, the invigoratingly high-plumed cynicism of Vidal's discursive prose, plus plenty of gossip.

I though I was wise to all his moves.  I knew Vidal would have me frowning and nodding and smiling and smirking - with admiration, and exasperation, and scandalised dissent.  I never dreamed Vidal would have me piping my eyes, and staring wanly out of the window, and emitting strange sighs (many of them frail and elderly in timbre).  Approaching seventy, Vidal now takes cognisance of the human heart, and reveals that he has one.  Palimpsest is a tremendous read from start to finish.  It is also a proud and serious and truthful book.

First, though, the familiar diversions and the familiar humour which, frequently and typically, tends towards the unintentional.  How can this be?  Is it that Vidal, like Lear, has ever but slenderly known himself?  Or is it that he just wants it both ways - all ways?  The latter, I believe.  Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray.  He knows everybody and doesn't want to know anybody.  He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing - deliberately, at least - to please the other'.  Publicly despairing of the American political system, he runs for Congress (and, later in the life than this book takes us, for president).  The ambivalence follows Vidal through all spheres and orbits, and involves him in many decorative contradictions.

Gossip, particularly sexual gossip, is viewed as the sworn enemy of truth; and truthfulness, for Vidal, remains the prince of the natural virtues.  Yet gossip-fans will find much to gossip about in Palimpsest.  On page seven, Jackie Kennedy is already hoiking up her gown to show Vidal's half-sister Nini 'how to douche post-sex'.  Elsewhere we are told that Marlon Brando had 'two abortionists on retainer'.  'Look at that ass,' says Tennessee Williams 'thoughtfully', as he follows Jack Kennedy through a doorway.  Then there are Nureyev's dreamy insinuations about Bobby.  Promiscuity was 'perfectly normal ... in the high-powered world', as Jackie knew.  Gore himself got about a bit: 'Jack raised his head from the pillow to look at me over his left shoulder.'  But relax.  This isn't Jack Kennedy.  It's only Jack Kerouac.

Towards the end of the book, Vidal confides that he dislikes social gatherings.  Still, this hater of parties clearly went to several thousand of them, perhaps just to make sure.  Vidal never had to go looking for all these parties, unlike Truman Capote, say, whom Vidal keeps running into at all these parties, along with Williams, Kerouac, Isherwood, et al.  ('Avoid writers,' Vidal cautions us, more than once.)  'Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad,' he wearily notes, having charted another 'season' spent among the white trash (up to and including the Duke of Windsor and Princess Margaret).  Vidal isn't namedropping.  Who else is there?  A galaxy of luminaries has always clustered itself around this literary quasar and his huge gravitational pull.  The bloke in the next office is Federico Fellini ('Fred, as I called him').  The current flatmates are Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.  In these pages ordinary people are the true exotics - such as Howard Austen, who has written no operas, ruled no countries, and inherited no fortunes, and with whom Vidal has chastely dwelt for more than forty years.

These days, Vidal is resignedly aware that he has somehow gained a reputation for physical vanity.  It seems inexplicable, because he never boasts about his looks.  He may remark on the 'astonishingly handsome' figure cut by his father, and may mention the 'flaring Gore nostrils' that he inherited, as has the current Vice President (a dim cousin).  But that's all he'll say on the matter.  Others can say what they like, and Vidal is of course free to adduce their testimonies, in print.  Harold Acton found him 'aggressively handsome'.  Cecilia Sternberg thought his face 'curiously of the antique world, like a Greek mask'.  'Just the sight of Gore', wrote Elaine Dundy, 'had the effect of instantly cleansing my palate - like some tart lemon sorbet' ('He is handsome, yet').  Having seen 'the picture that adorns his latest opus', William Burroughs urgently wanted to know: 'Is Gore Vidal queer or not?'

To which the answer is a strangely qualified yes.  Vidal is queer, sort of: but in Vidal's world so is everybody else.  There's Capote, Williams, Isherwood, Kerouac, Baldwin, E.M. Forster, and so on.  But even fanatical skirt-chasers - Marlon, Jack, Bobby - betray certain leanings.  Greta Garbo had 'an eye for girls'; in Hollywood, so did 'just about every star or star's wife'.  Ken Tynan, too, was 'one of nature's innate and unalterable lesbians.'  During the war, in Vidal's all-gay army, 'most of the boys' embraced the chance 'to do what they were designed to do with each other'.  Earlier, in Vidal's all-gay school, boys 'thought that kissing had been invented by girls ... it was not always pleasant for us when the increased estrogen flow made their salivas unpleasant.'  No, unpleasant things are not always pleasant.  But I have never heard a word of complaint about that oestrogen flow, or indeed any moention of it.  Maybe the boys I know are differently 'designed'.  As elsewhere in his writing, Vidal gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice - registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper - is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria: a hoax, a racket or sheer propaganda.

Sexually - and here we approach the heart and the truth of the book - Vidal is a fabulous beast.  A unicorn, perhaps, or a satyr with a strict set of rules.  'I never go to bed with friends,' he writes.  A hyperactive cruiser, Vidal has never had a love affair.  Indeed, 'since I don't really know what other people mean by love, I avoid the word'.  But he knows what he means by it; and in the end the word can't be avoided.  For once and once only he 'moved far beyond sex or eroticism and on to the wilder shores of love, and shipwreck'. 

In general, novelists are intimately repelled by the business of psychoanalysis.  Nabokov could probably have written an extra book or two in the time he sat around loathing Freud.  The self- that holding operation between the mind's various factions - is what novelists feel obliged to grope their way around: they don't want to see the A to Z.  Vidal is, of course, painfully reluctant to view himself as a clear-cut case.  But he has the courage to let the pattern emerge, in all its embarrassing symmetry.

Two relationships appear to have decided everything, and they are established early on in the life, and in these pages, with passionate force.  'Never have children, only grandchildren,' Vidal was told by his grandfather, T.P. Gore.  Having lost his sight in two different accidents, one for each eye, and then gone on to become the first senator from the state of Oklahoma, T.P. was an inspirational figure for the whole nation.  In his grandson (and sometimes ward), Senator Gore found a vital resource: little Gore would read to him, eagerly, for hour after hour - an indefatigable falsetto.  After such a childhood, after such an example, Vidal was destined for stoicism.  Any weakness can be worked into a strength, he writes, in this book's steeliest phrase, by 'those who mean to prevail'.

The second formative figure is the vanished young man called Jimmie Trimble.  Vidal's first and only love is instantly summoned in terms of lost duality: 'What I was not, he was, and the other way around'; 'Jimmie, of course, was something else - me'; 'He was the other half of me that never lived grow up.'  Jimmie was killed on Iwo Jima in 1945.  He never grew up, and never grew old, and never relinquished his pristine burnish.  Palimpsest thus shyly invites us to see Vidal as a version of Narcissus, in the classical mould, struggling with illusion, with despair, with death.  It is a lot to ask - but this reader assented willingly enough.  When he died, Narcissus was transformed into the flower that bears his name.  Vidal wanted a different fate: he wanted to survive and to prevail.

With its elaborate double-time scheme, its cunning rearrangements and realignments of the past, its blend of impetuous candour and decent reticence, Palimpsest is a work of considerable artistry.  And Jimmie, the hidden other, illuminates its core.  As a character, as a creation, he seems to shine through unassisted, all by himself; but this is an effort wrought by great authorial guile.  He becomes universal - like the German soldier in Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting' ('I am the enemy you killed, my friend').  Of course, Jimmie was an American.  In a late letter to his mother, he signed off as follows: 'All my love to the swellest Mom in all the world.'  It was very intelligent of Vidal to quote another letter, from another marine on Iwo Jima, whose ingenuous repetition ('he was a joy') gives the right sense of there being nothing more to say:

We were all real proud of Jim Trimble, and everybody else was.  He was a joy to be around.  He had a good personality.  He was always joking.  I know he wanted to go back and go to school and play professional baseball.  He was just a joy to be around.

[Grallon]

... It's awful when you see the sort of sputtering excitement of much of their work just increasingly peter out

That's old age Sheilbh lad - something which awaits us all.  In an age where constant change is the order of the day individuals, even some of the finest, find themselves washed out and unable to follow the parade; yesterday's 'flavor of the month'.  It's a sad testimony about our era.





G.