Gore Vidal - Another Appraisal - and How He Predicted Our Dictatorial End

 Will Lloyd's Gore Vidal: American prophet (The New Statesman) has its subtitle "The writer understood better than anyone how far the United States was going to fall". I agree with the thesis - even if Vidal's The Golden Age annoyed me by being so disappointingly dull.

Christopher Hitchens accused him in Vanity Fair of hawking “crank-revisionist and denialist history”. At the time, Hitchens was the spokesperson for a large constituency that believed liberal democracy could be spread throughout the Middle East by the US Marine Corps and the Fifth Fleet. Vidal thought that elements within the Bush administration might have allowed 9/11 to happen. He also predicted that the US would be run out of Afghanistan, paving the way for China to resume its historic role as a world power.

Vidal seemed mad and sad and alone and drunk. His writing – his writing, Vidal’s, whose essays had been compared to his hero Montaigne’s – no longer seemed contemporary. It was the early Obama era. The cargo-cult optimism that accompanied the 44th president’s rise was not yet completely dispersed. And there was Vidal, who couldn’t read the room any more, gabbling from his wheelchair about the downfall of the United States, writing and saying everything was bad and would only get worse. Maybe he had nothing left to say, mistaking the decline of his own flesh and mind for the decline of the world itself. His watchful attendants – all of whom would be cut from Vidal’s legacy when he died in July 2012 – approached him wearing surgical gloves, as if to protect themselves from contagion. Vidal had always liked to quote Montaigne on death: “How did the living die and what did they say and how did they look at the end?” Those near Vidal as he lingered on and on noticed that however reduced he was, even when he was wracked and struggling to breathe, his eyes stayed wide open.

And cranky, and as disputatious as ever - qualities I did like in him.

 It is hard to place Vidal as an American writer. His prose does not sparkle like his contemporaries. I cannot imagine him writing Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse Five, for all of him belonging to the same generation. On the hand, he writes better than Norman Mailer. I write this without having read Vidal's World War Two novel. I do not think he ever wrote anything as moving as Sophie's Choice; even though he and William Styron were also of the same generation. I have seen much of the movie version of his The Best Man. Philip Roth might have had acid in some of his novels, but Vidal belonged to a different class. And I wonder if he is not a better playwright than novelist. He was certainly a better essayist. Yet, he was a best-selling writer - in his time. What he was, perhaps, best performing as Gore Vidal. What I like in the following is the placing of Vidal in the terms of his contemporary writers.

The US in 1925 was largely dominated by a north-eastern Wasp establishment which took their manners, clothing, sporting habits, husbands and stylised anti-Semitism from the British aristocracy. The country was ambitious and industrious, driving hard and fast towards an imperial horizon. After the Second World War, Vidal would grow to become the chronicler of that transition from republic to empire. “We have embarked upon empire (Rome born again our heavy fate) without a Virgil in the crew, only tarnished silver writers in a bright uranium age,” he wrote in 1956: part lament, part audition for the role he was destined to play. An essayist, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and occasional ham actor, Vidal’s work adds up to a beguiling, barbed compound of Tacitus and Oscar Wilde.

He confused his contemporaries, the American alpha novelists like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His art was not as pure or secluded as Roth’s or Bellow’s, less frenzied than Mailer’s. “Art is energy shaped by intelligence,” he wrote. His intelligence was lacerating. His energy was bullying and gratuitous; he liked to goad his targets, to kick and scratch at them when they were down. An irrepressible bitch, he impugned people by questioning their mental acuity. He liked to tell his readers who people really were. Edward VIII: “The Duke’s stupidity was of a perfection seldom encountered outside institutions.” F Scott Fitzgerald: “barely literate”. The English: “eccentric Norwegians”. Ronald Reagan: “an indolent cue-card reader”. When he was an old man he said he regretted that he had never killed anybody. He had no need for regrets. His essays were already littered with bodies.

He produced trash from time to time in a way that even Mailer, author of an alimony-raising Marilyn Monroe biography, sidestepped. Caligula (1979) was “easily one of the worst films ever made”, Vidal said. He was its screenwriter. In Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), Fred Kaplan reports how Bellow introduced his son to Vidal with the words, “I want him to meet someone really cynical!” They thought Vidal, when he turned to politics and power – the subject that is the true through-line of his work – was a paranoid bore. Roth, whose overblown late-historical novel sequence has rightly been compared to watching a man chewing, dismissed Vidal as “a society hairdresser who has written a book or two”. While Roth lived like a monk in his forested 150-acre Connecticut estate, Vidal palled around with Tim Robbins and Princess Margaret and Tennessee Williams. Following Goethe, Vidal did not believe talent could survive if it was solitary. Talent must enter the torrent of the world and fight. That was how real character formed. He laughed at the alphas for their “terrible garrulousness” and their lamely insular writing about writing. Men like Roth and Bellow were chestless talents, not mighty characters. Vidal noted that American authors were, “if not Waldenised solitaries, Darwinised predators constantly preying on one another”. He was a superb and steely predator.

That the writer often refers to Vidal's essays may influence my favoring this essay, it is Vidal's puncturing of our American mythos that should draw our attention. John Updike with his Rabbit Angstrom novels punctures our moral hypocrisy, and Philip Roth's American Pastoral goes far in facing American radicalism and American complacency, and Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night exposes the political games played at the 1968 political conventions, but only Vidal touched on the rottenness underlying the political and social conventions that have permeated our American culture. We have not escaped the fear the Founders had for our future; captured most often in Franklin's "A republic, if we can keep it." No, we, the people, have collaborated in our being ruled by oligarchs, until we will welcome a Caesar.

Vidal did not live to see this moment but he would have recognised it. America was “rotting away at a funeral pace” he told the Times in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.” He believed Obama would be broken by the “madhouse” that the US had become. The Americans were chased out of Kabul in 2021, years after it had become obvious that China had resumed its historic role as a major world power and a peer of the US, something Vidal had anticipated in 1988. The cost of empire that pushed America down with “nukes, bases, debts” had eventually inspired a populist revolt from its immiserated citizenry, opening the gates of the capital to a figure Vidal knew well from history: Caesar. America First would return, Vidal said in early 1995. “It’s no bad rallying cry.”

The people do not really appear in Vidal's novels of American politics. He is not John Dos Passos. But he knew his history and his politics - maybe the best American writer at both - and that The People had never asserted their power, probably could never assert that power, and would succumb to a leader who would tell them he was power incarnate, and they needed to follow him.

sch 10/8 (Except for the link to the original essay, Google provided the links.)