Vidal’s flag-scragging extends from public life through literary questions to social mores. In ‘the land of the tin ear’, where ‘stupidity … is deeply revered’, where humourlessness is endemic (‘what other culture could have produced Hemingway and not seen the joke?’), cultural conspiracies flourish unchecked. ‘Americans will never accept any literature that does not plainly support … a powerful and bigoted middle class’, a state of affairs institutionalised by the universities, which are themselves torpid bureaucracies of preferment and tenure. Among the bigotries of this powerful middle class is a deep and mindless ‘homophobia’, the American establishment being militantly heterosexual. Vidal has written about this before, of course, but never quite so virulently. ‘In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles’ — hence the book’s title. The moral stakes could hardly be raised any higher; Vidal’s tic nerveux has developed into an obsession, a crusade, and the effect on his writing is everywhere apparent.
In the opening essay, on Scott Fitzgerald’s Notebooks, we learn that Fitzgerald makes ‘rather too many nervous references to fairies and pansies’. In the second, on Edmund Wilson, we learn that Wilson’s notebooks, too, ‘are filled with innumerable references to ‘fairies that range from derisive to nervous’. What does ‘nervous’ mean here exactly? Does it mean that Fitzgerald and Wilson are ‘nervous’ about being fairies themselves? Yes, because Vidal has always believed that heterosexuals got that way purely through the conditioning of that powerful middle class. The third essay, on Isherwood’s Christopher and his Kind, ends with a plangent clarion call: ‘one can only hope that thanks to Christopher’s life and work, his true kind will increase even as they refuse, so wisely, to multiply’. A few pages earlier Vidal has called Isherwood ‘the best prose writer in English*. This is a meaningless tribute anyway, but by now the nervous hets among Vidal’s readers will be wondering whether the verdict is really a literary one. It sounds like a manic-depressive overpraising Sylvia Plath, a postmaster general making excessive claims for Trollope, a midget going ape for Pope.
Vidal expands his platform. The ruling classes fear the gays because they aren’t as easily dominated by the hen-pecked, ball-broken straights with their nagging wives and grasping children. Everyone — oh, happy day — is potentially bisexual. This is a terrific plus because ‘we have more babies than we know what to do with’. Finally, and clinchingly, ‘the family is an economic, not a biological, unit’. Actually, of course, the family is both: how could a parent-child relationship not be biological? But what the family mainly is is a unit, willy-nilly. To disapprove of this fact is as futile as disapproving of oxygen or bipedalism.
Besides, the whole line sounds rather — American, does it not, tending to reduce argument to a babble of interested personalities, an exchange of stricture and veto, with money as the bottom line? Well, if Vidal sounds unusually shrill, ‘there is a good deal to be shrill about’. He sees his freedoms as being under particular threat, and maybe he is right. More likely, the stand just happens to suit his antic pessimism. ‘Real stupidity does excite me,’ he once said. America is the perfect rumpus-room for this witty invigilator. Meanwhile it should be stressed that the new book is a peach. It will give everyone many hours of nervous pleasure.
Sunday Telegraph 1977 and Observer I982
Too Much Monkey Business: The New Evangelical Right
‘I call it Mickey Mouse mentality,’ proclaimed Judge Braswell Deen, referring to the theories of Charles Darwin: ‘monkey mythology methodology monopoly, mysterious musings and mundane dreams of all this monkey business!’ The audience of 15,000 — most of them Baptists, Methodists, charismatics, fundamentalists, pentecostalists and journalists — applauded and whooped.
Elsewhere in the Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas, a frowning Ronald Reagan told a press conference that he had ‘a great many questions about evolution’. ‘I believe schools should be even-handed on the issue,’ he added. This was a nervous moment for gaffe-dreading Ronnie, in the week of Taiwan. And, sure enough, here was another howler jumping out of his mouth. But who cared? Perhaps this particular gaffe would win him 50 million votes.
Meanwhile, wearing a press badge that identified me as ‘Marty Amis’, I strolled the Reunion Arena concourses, sampling the pro-family propaganda on offer there. New in Dallas, I returned to the hotel restaurant and ate The American Way (hamburger and cottage cheese), plus an Elite Pastry. Beside my plate lay a stack of pamphlets. What was going on around here?