It has taken me most of the year to read Gore Vidal's The Golden Age. That time should not be taken as indicating its length or complexity. For the first time, I found Vidal dull, I do not think of Vidal as an innovative stylist, but he was always witty and smart. I liked how he came at American history with the intent to bring humanity to our idols and strip us of our historical smugness. He made us think of ourselves. The Vidal that kept me reading his novel shows up in The Golden Age only in the last three chapters.
I started on the historical novels with Burr. That was about 50 years ago. I have had Aaron Burr on my mind ever since. What Burr represented for Vidal has puzzled me all this time. Towards the end of The Golden Age, Aaron Burr reappears in what seems to be a reincarnation. It seems now that Aaron Bur represented an alternative American imperialism, another American energy devoted to power and not to democracy, and not, as I read the character, a satirical, even Northern, counterpoint to Jeffersonian politics. That seems a let-down, even unto a bit of nihilism, when I consider Vidal's essays.
While I would rate Vidal the novelist as mid-level, Vidal as an essayist is one of our best. His language and ideas are sharp. It may even be that his American historical novels after Lincoln and 1876 have more of the essayist than the novel. The Golden Age may have done better as a series of essays. They may still have been wrong-headed, but avoided dullness by presenting an argument. The Golden Age surprises most by its lack of drama. Vidal was also a dramatist and screenwriter. He knew how to stage a drama. I still recall the scene in Lincoln where Lincoln suspends habeas corpus in a scene with Winfield Scott and William Seward, with a remark of the irony that three lawyers have worked to suspend The Great Writ. There is a drama in this that is personal, professional, intellectual, and political. The fictional characters intersect with Wendell L. Willkie and Harry Truman and FDR in scenes that, like snapshots, make a record without any meaning.
Vidal raises the old conspiracy theory about FDR wanting to start World War Two by sacrificing the Pacific Fleet. He then does nothing with this idea, other than to put it into the ether as a sign that FDR wanted to rule the world. No one pushes back at this idea by pointing out the evils of Nazism, or that it was Hitler who declared war on us. I do think that FDR wanted to go to war with Nazism; getting the Japanese to attack us did not guarantee that result. No one pushes back on the theory by pointing out how our racism colored our thinking towards Imperial Japan. Another point against the theory is that if the Japanese had been kept waiting by Cordell Hull, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would have come after Japan's declaration of war, and it was the surprise attack as part of an undeclared war that drove America to war. Vidal was a World War Two veteran, so this was an issue close to him. In his political essays, Vidal wrote about our government as an oligarchy - a ruling Property Party with two wing named Democrat and Republican. If his use of the Pearl Harbor conspiracy was meant to symbolize our oligarchy seeking world-wide domination, then he fell flat by not connecting the knots when he failed to properly dramatize his idea, by making us feel its possibility.
Vidal goes long on the rise of Wendell L. Willkie, which cheers this Hoosier. However, he indulges again on a conspiracy theory that deflates itself by the lack of any drama in whether the Republican convention was rigged for Willkie. And I think there is drama in the figure of Willkie - for the Republicans, certainly. They wanted to beat FDR and put forward a former Democrat for that job. There is a drama in FDR deciding to buck George Washington's two-terms are enough rule. What we get is an allegation thrown up against the wall without any satire on the Republicans' loss of their conservative ideals, or on FDR's running a third-time. It is an indictment of oligarchy that when it comes time for trial is bereft of evidence for its importance. In The Best Man, Vidal knew how to spin drama out of the games and corruption of a political convention.
I admit I have not read Myra Breckinridge, but I have read Duluth. That is, I think, his best novel. It is also the place where I first read the name Italo Calvino. That name reappears in The Golden Age. Too bad Vidal did not indulge into his fondness for the surrealism of Calvino before the last three chapters of The Golden Age. The closest he comes in the main body of his novel is introducing himself as a character. He does this more in the style of Somerset Maugham. He could have made a better case for 1945 -1950 as a Golden Age, he had interjected him, as did Maugham, a commentator on the story. Instead, we get episodes of cattiness and self-congratulation.
Enough of castigating an old man soon to be dead. And therein may be the cause of this novel's problems - a man trying to finish before death arrived on his door. He started his American chronicles with Washington, DC, then came Burr and all the rest. What remained was to tie Hollywood and Washington, DC. One criticism I ran across when I decided to write this post at this length, points out Vidal skips the Great Depression. That novel would mean writing two novels when Vidal was running out of time.
Continuity may be the greatest burden for a writer with a series. This may have been even more of a problem for Vidal. Nothing gives me the sense that he planned the series out. I read how Marvel movies have become dull from their paying duties to creating a framework for other movies. There is a detriment to the immediate story. Vidal trying to fit The Golden Age into the earlier written but set later Washington, DC seems to have had this problem. The last three chapters escape the need to fit continuity. That may be why there is the best writing in the novel.
No, I cannot recommend this book - except for obsessive completists like me, and even then without any great warmth. I feel that Vidal missed the chance for a great novel, certainly a greater novel, for there was something special in the time between 1945 and 1950. I see it in the movies released in that time period. There is also something in the novels and plays written - this was the time of Tennessee Williams and William Inge; of Mailer and Kerouac and Ross Lockridge, Jr. I am too old with too much on my plate for the research I would need to do. Not to mention, I doubt my skills. There was a moment there when the country was free of The Great Depression and world war before paranoid conservatism took us over. The L.A. Times review makes much of earlier outbreaks of culture, rightly so and wrongly, too. Right that American culture existed, but wrong that there was not something different, something bigger, something wider, than what we had before. Or maybe since. The closest competitor I can think of - especially with regard to film - is the early Seventies.
Now, I will show off what I found after I read the novel.
“The Golden Age” by Gore Vidal (LA Times, 2000)
Vidal seems so absorbed by this conceit that he drops the narrative thread for pages at a time to give us his “proof.” Why stake so much on this? For Vidal, the infamy at Pearl Harbor was the seed from which all later hoaxes and conspiracies grew. He includes among these--in no particular order--the Cold War, NATO, Harry Truman’s loyalty oaths, grants to universities and the humanities, liberal periodicals, the CIA, the Museum of Modern Art, Americans for Democratic Action, high income taxes, “mega-socialism,” the SATs and unnecessary airport security. This sort of paranoia has a depressingly familiar sound to it, like some dusty position paper from the Goldwater campaign raving about the fluoridation of water.
But this review does hit on a point, I never considered since I read Vidal's American chronicle as a portrait of American oligarchy's interconnecting threads (certainly since reading Lincoln, if not 1876; in Lincoln, Samuel L. Tilden who was Martin Van Buren's protégé who was alleged as being Burr's son in Burr comments on how Lincoln has acquired the powers Van Buren was supposed to be seeking):
To read all this is to realize just how absent the people have actually been from Vidal’s narratives, even as he has posed as their champion. Very few of the great mass movements in American history have been depicted in this series, and Vidal has largely skipped over the Great Depression. The travails of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the free soilers and the Populists, the civil rights and antiwar movements--all are generally absent as well.
More importantly to me was this paragraph, for it captures much of what I think is wrong with The Golden Age, and may now color my thinking of what Vidal did with his novels after 1876 (excluding Lincoln for it being concentrated with, of course, Lincoln):
The truth matters. The truth should matter to any writer of fiction, and it should matter even more to a writer of historical fiction, lest our history be reduced to no more than a collection of Holocaust deniers and ethno-propagandists. By squeezing the universe into such a neat little ball, Vidal has become so cynical about the workings of power as to actually sound naive. He seems unable to envision a world of any real complexity--a world where there are chance and bad timing and people are driven by mixed motives or hobbled by uncertainty. A world where, for a start, leaders are sometimes influenced by the people they rule, and where people and leaders alike are neither perfect dupes nor perfect villains. To deny, at every turn, this complexity is not only bad history. It is bad writing.
Gore Vidal and Revisionism (2012) gives a biographical sketch and is a bit long, but it does cover the whole of the series.
It was nearly a decade before Vidal would add another volume to the American Chronicle series. That next volume was the celebrated Lincoln (1984), which follows events in Washington from Abraham Lincoln’s surreptitious arrival in the city to be inaugurated for his first term in the White House to his assassination scarcely four years later. Lincoln was followed, in quick succession, by Empire (1987), which focuses on the years 1898 to 1906, and Hollywood (1990), which focuses on US involvement in World War I and its immediate aftermath — the years 1917 to 1923. Then, after a decade of work unrelated to the American Chronicle, Vidal published the final volume of the series, The Golden Age (2000). Oddly, this volume does not depict a previously undramatized period of years. As Harry Kloman puts it, “Rather than simply taking place after Washington DC — which covers the years 1937 to 1952 — The Golden Age loops back to re-cover the same years, 1939 to 1954.” It also features almost all of the same characters. And, of course, the major historical events in the two novels are the same. As Kloman writes, The Golden Age “is the narrative Washington DC might have been had Vidal written the books chronologically.” Thus “You might think of the new book as an alternative version of the older one.” Kloman points out that “when Vidal published Washington DC in 1967, he had no plan to tell America’s story from the Revolutionary War through the present.” Accordingly, he counsels, “now that Vidal has completed the series, one might just consider it to be six books in length, with Washington DC standing off to the side, in part an accidental beginning to a Chronicle that it no longer fits, and in part an alternative conclusion that’s more literary and introspective than historical.”6
***
In summary, then, Gore Vidal’s American Chronicle novels tell a tale of American history that would seem passing strange to anyone whose understanding of the subject is confined to what has long been conventionally taught in American public schools and colleges. In Vidal’s American history, the Founding Fathers are not graven saints, but fallible mortals driven as often by vanity, greed, and lust (whether for power or for the flesh of attractive slave girls) as by any belief in the nobility of their cause, and more often bent on benefiting themselves and the members of their social class than on benefiting Americans in general. In Vidal’s American history, Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union at the cost of destroying everything about it that had made it worth preserving — the protections supposedly afforded by the Constitution to the inalienable individual rights of American citizens. In Vidal’s American history, a cabal of racist imperialists had seized control of the federal government within scarcely more than a hundred years of the Constitution’s ratification, and sent its young men on a rampage of international meddling and mass murder that culminated in the total destruction of two Japanese cities. In Vidal’s American history, it was the United States, not the Soviet Union, that launched and then prolonged the Cold War.
Less weighty is Ron Briley: Review of "I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics -- Interviews with Jon Wiener" (OR Books, 2012)
Vidal took great pride in being an iconoclast and one of the first American intellectuals to assert that the United States had established an empire endangering liberties at home and abroad. In his novels, however, Vidal usually employs the voice of the eliteelt to convey the course of empire. While the people tend to not have a direct voice in Vidal’s Narratives of Empire, he certainly anticipated the sexual politics of modern America in such satirical novels as Myra Breckenridge (1968). Many of Vidal’s observations may antagonize both liberals and conservatives, but as a public intellectual Gore Vidal dared to confront those in power and even challenge the assumptions of the historical profession. Such honesty and wit are often lacking in public life today, and as Jon Wiener suggests we may not see Vidal’s like again. Readers who enjoy the conversations of I Told You So, however, may get an even larger dose of the irrepressible Vidal in his Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (2006).
Andrew Delbanco's Gore Vidal's 'Empire' Was a Letdown of Epic Proportions (1987) makes interesting points concerning that earlier novel and in Vidal's writing in general.
One chuckles, but there is something drearily repetitive about these caricatures. They have, in many cases, only the truth of cliché. As history, the novel is badly truncated. A serious inquiry into the roots of American imperialism must begin at least with the Mexican War, if not with the Louisiana Purchase and the post-colonial westward expansion. Vidal treats the former not at all; the latter he dealt with rather glibly in Burr: A Novel (1973). And as fiction Empire is tired. The book is one long expression of disgust. Its female lead, the castrating Caroline Sanford, is a rather mechanical combination of Edith Wharton's Undine Spragg and Henry Adams's Mrs. Lightfoot Lee—a sprightly witch who lends the book a certain energy, but who is really just another version of Vidal's frequently portrayed nouveau riche: "I have found," says Charlie Schuyler in 1876 (1976), "that when one starts to think ofmoney, one cannot, finally, think of anyother subject. More worries of this sortand I shall be a proper New Yorker . . .no longer alien." Empire is largely an extensionof that remark. At its center is aforeign-born woman who converts toAmericanism, by which Vidal means essentiallycarnivorous greed.
Vidal's fictions oscillate between revulsion and fascination for such people. He shuffles them into two piles: one for the stupid and reprehensible, the other for the sharp and delectable. The ultimate point of this game is to explode all received platitudes about the visible makers of American history. And so he works into Empire some bits of platitudinous decoration—public recitations of Kipling's poem on "the white man's burden," applause lines from Manifest Destiny speeches, dormant missionary instincts strategically revived. He writes very much in the voice of Henry Adams (who is his intellectual model) on the American conjunction between historical ignorance and technological genius: "McKinley barely knew of Caesar and Alexander; yet he had conquered almost as much of the earth as either, without once stirring from the ugly national house with its all-important telegraph-machine and no less potent telephone." Justin Kaplan has rightly said that the soundtrack for Empire would be selections from John Philip Sousa. Vidal, I think, would want the band to play slightly off key.
***
As for the victorious opposition, Henry Adams thought that “the progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin," and Vidal appears to agree. The country was now being run by simian fools—but unlike Adams, Vidal has no theory of declension (and does not therefore have to contend with the implications of such a theory for his own pride of family descent). Between Washington and Grant there is no distance. The gossip journalism of Leggett and Bryant in Burr is not fundamentally different from the yellow journalism of Hearst in Empire. Everyone in or near power is always the same.
Given the convulsive cynicism that produced this historical vision, the phenomenon of Lincoln was all the more remarkable. It was stylistically an entirely different work—written with a new tranquility and intensity, rarely spinning off into the almost hysterical mockery that characterizes its predecessors. Some of the familiar trappings remained: the canny madam who knows her generals and senators better than their wives know them; Lincoln's constipation that leads him to carry on discussions, like LBJ of the famous story, while seated on the pot. But this sort of joke has become dutiful; in fact it serves the purpose of demonstrating the pettiness of the men around Lincoln (who gossip over the question of whether he has syphilis and what its symptoms might be) in comparison to his capacious and undistracted understanding.
Mr. Delbanco makes a mistake, having thought of Vidal a moan of the left. In his essays, Vidal rained against the National Security State established with Truman and continuing unto today. That makes for a very strange case of liberalism.
Next to Lincoln, Vidal's new novel is a series of miniature lampoons. Empire is soundly researched and sporadically entertaining, but it has no center, and its point is easily made: America, spouting democratic ideals, ravages the world in order to satisfy the appetites of its fat-cat owners, who always want more. And it is in this unmasking of America's international behavior as pure, crude imperialism that Vidal lodges his claim to being a man of the left.
***
Vidal writes that "when Confucius was asked what would be the first thing that he would do if he were to lead the state—his never-to-be-fulfilled dream [Vidal, as every book jacket reminds us, ran well for Congress as a Democrat in Republican Dutchess County]—he said rectify the language. This is wise. This is subtle." These terms—"correctionist" and "rectify"—are revealing. Vidal harbors a secret vision of return to a lost condition of proper relations, social and linguistic. There is an ideal order; and therefore there is a certain fastidiousness in Vidal's brand of satire, a kind of hold-the-nose distaste for everyone. His aspiration to "rectify the language" (which is a pretty wild claim, given his usually cavalier diction) belongs, I think, not to the radical native tradition of American writers who have wanted, with Whitman, to see the national language inflamed into an unprecedented and open future—"fann'd by the breath of nature"—but to the reactionary tradition of Fisher Ames, who wrote, in Burr's day, that "of all flattery, the grossest...is that the voice of the people is the voice of God."
Too bad he did not put the idea and his passion for the idea into The Golden Age.
I was not aware of the interview or the essay referred to below; The Golden Age would have benefitted from a touch of Dos Passos (who is a great novelist). That this might contain a serious self-description seems to have passed unnoticed.
He can have it, in effect, both ways, because he can tell the New Left Review (with a cheerfulness that must have been discomfiting for the interviewer) that he is "a left-wing conservative Puritan." That is as good a phrase as any to describe his hybrid political instincts. In an essay on Dos Passos he confesses to having "enjoyed, even admired, the dottiness of his politics. His political progress from Radical Left to Radical Right seems to me very much in the American grain." This is quite right. The tropes of right and left fiendish conspirators bilking the people—often run together. And Vidal's own writings offer a reprise of the theme.
If my reading of Burr in The Golden Age is correct, then every aspirant to the Presidency has been a would-be imperialist and every President an outright imperialist. Yes, I would even put Lincoln into that category, either as a covert imperialist or in establishing the Union as an Empire.
The Empire of Gore Vidal: The legacy of an American writer may skewer Vidal even further and closer to our time.
As Donald Trump might say, at the height of his fame in the 1970s and 1980s Gore Vidal was yuge. Beginning with Burr, his historical novels were bestsellers. His contemporaries John Updike and Philip Roth may have been esteemed by professors, but Gore Vidal was the Great American Novelist for Americans who seldom read novels. He could be seen frequently on TV talk shows, saying catty things about Washington politicians and Hollywood celebrities. And you might catch him on public television or European TV, posing in front of the arch of Titus in Rome and lamenting the decline and fall of the American Republic. With his foreign-sounding name and his vaguely British mid-Atlantic accent, like his bete noire Bill Buckley, Gore Vidal was a middlebrow’s idea of a highbrow.
Before his death in 2012, Vidal suffered a series of setbacks, including the death of his companion Howard Austen and, according to Parini, the ravages of alcoholism. His historical and satirical novels got worse and worse, and he penned tracts that read like student’s notes from a class with Noam Chomsky, like Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be Hated. He lost many of his friends and admirers, including yours truly, when he described as a “noble boy” Timothy McVeigh, who, when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, murdered more Americans (168) on American soil than any other terrorist before the 9/11 attacks.
Many of us, as we age, turn into a parent or a grandparent. Vidal’s hero and model all his life was his great-grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, a blind democratic senator from Oklahoma whose populist hatred of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt as warmongering tyrants was passed on to his grandson. Among the other nuggets in Parini’s biography is the revelation that young Gore and his grandfather wrote to each other of their pleasure on learning of the death of the detested FDR in April 1945. In The Golden Age, the last of the novels in the Narratives of Empire series that began with Burr, Roosevelt, scheming to embroil the U.S. in an unnecessary war with Japan, knows about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance. Vidal did not simply end in tinfoil-hat territory; like his grandfather, he had dwelled in it all his life, even if the trans-Atlantic intelligentsia for a few decades mistook his isolationist Jeffersonian populism for leftism.
Still, did the novel need to have a non-existent plot, and dull dialog?
If (a big if) we can get over his view late in life of Timothy McVeigh as a misguided but noble rebel against federal tyranny, what of the works of Gore Vidal can we expect to last? The conventional wisdom, shared by his friend and biographer Jay Parini, is that he put his talent into his novels and his genius into the essays he wrote for The New York Review of Books and The Nation. According to this school, Vidal will be remembered in the future as a great essayist.
I disagree. Vidal was a brilliant and funny stylist, to be sure, and when he wrote about Hollywood, the major source of his millions, or literary friends and acquaintances like Tennessee Williams, he had no peers. But he knew next to nothing about the real world of politics and economics. His lack of first-hand experience or careful study shows in his essays on those subjects. He bluffs his way through by repeating a few cliches he inherited from his populist grandfather: the republic has become an empire, there is only one party, the property party or the banker’s party, and so on.
Far from being daring, these are the banal common places of the populist right and the faculty lounge left alike. What gave Vidal authority of a kind not possessed by, say, your retired uncle, was his mystique as a rebellious member of the elite. He posed as a member of one of America’s ruling families like Henry Adams, an intimate of Roosevelts and Kennedys who had betrayed his class to spill the beans, a Tacitus from the senatorial class recording the republic’s decline in an age of American Caesars.
***
My guess is that if what he called “the Great Eraser” does not obliterate his posthumous reputation altogether, Gore Vidal will be remembered as a sort of American Oscar Wilde. Some of his quips may achieve immortality: “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
Like Wilde, Vidal may be remembered not only for his apercus but also for a handful of clever, perfect plays. The constraints imposed by writing for the stage rescued Vidal from the indulgence in prolixity and polemic that ruined many of his novels.
***
Two of his plays in particular have a shot at a permanent place in the repertory. The Best Man, his well-crafted 1960 play about national politics, made into a movie in 1964, still enjoys periodic revivals on Broadway. And his play Visit to a Small Planet, a masterpiece of the alien-on-earth genre of comedy, appears to have joined the canon of plays performed by generations of American high school drama students.
Although Gore Vidal: Narratives of Empire(2023) is kinder than the previous two sources to Vidal as a writer, it is not kinder to The Golden Age.
There's a great deal of noise about the old canard that Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbour. There are a lot of cheap shots at his successor, Truman. There are even some perfunctory attempts at metafiction when Vidal introduces himself (both young and old) as a character in the narrative.
But there's none of the old zest, the sense of being in the hands of an immensely knowing and well-informed fictional prestidigitator. Tiresome factual glitches and even downright errors disfigure the pages: Churchill is described as a major player at the post-war Potsdam conference whereas he was actually replaced by his successor Clement Attlee early in the discussions; Clay Overbury has to share the stage with his presumed original, the real JFK (Vidal gets out of this one by having Clay die in a plane crash, which it's hinted may have been arranged by Peter!) ...
Analysis of Gore Vidal’s Novelsis not as wide-ranging as it may seem (no discussion of The Golden Age), but is put here as a less-political overview of his works.
I think his Lincoln should endure, It taught me one certain idea I had never gotten from any straight history book. What it taught me is that Lincoln is unknowable - he is self-contained, maybe even self-created as a political figure.
I have wondered what Vidal would make of Trump. Working this blog post, I came to an idea. He would see Trump as another of the mediocrities that have been President for most our Republic's life, and even the epitome of the American President: intellectually deficient while accruing power to himself, a blunter imperialist, no longer even winking at the Constitution in his pursuit of power.
Which, in turn, makes me think Trump may be the President we have needed. He will either break the Constitution and destroy us, or he will make us take ourselves seriously as a democratic people who do not need an imperial boss of a President. Either we will become a nation of sheep ordered about to create an unreal country in the image of right-wing fantasies, or the people will reject the need for bosses other than themselves. I will hope then not in the wise elite like Henry Adams who thinks political power belongs to them, or those who think through their will to impose an ideology making them, but in Walt Whitman's vision of American democracy of rule by free and equal people.
sch 8/23
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment