This was perfectly true. I had read Myra and Myron (with difficulty), some of Williwaw, half of The City and the Pillar and most of Julian; I had also spent three weeks reading three chapters of Burr. I cannot get through Vida!’s fiction. The books are too long. Life is too short. In the interests of balance I append a piece about VidaPs essays, where I am a little older and a little more forthright.
May I also take the opportunity here to pit Vidal’s account of his fight with Mailer against Mailer’s account of his fight with Vidal? Needless to say, at no point do they tally. When I asked Mailer for his version, he nodded, squared his shoulders, and spoke with solemn deliberation.
‘Vidal had written things about me. I had resolved that the next time I saw him, I was going to hit him. You understand? The next time I saw him was at Lally’s. I walked up and banged him over the head with a glass — a heavy cocktail glass. He looked very scared. I asked him to come outside. Then his little friend started in on me.
“All right,” I said. “Come on. I’ll take out the two of yous.” They stayed where they were. I walked away.”
Perhaps, towards the end, I am guilty of importing the accents of De Niro’s Jake la Motta; but that was it, in substance. One day I must triangulate the story with the version of an impartial onlooker, if any such exist. Whom to believe, though? In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
* * *
Gore Vidal is probably the cleverest book-reviewer in the world. This needn’t sound like faint praise, even to someone as exhaustively lauded as Mr Vidal. He is too clever to write effective Hollywood screenplays, too clever to be an effective politician (he flunked in the senatorial primaries in 1981), too clever, really, to be an effective novelist. Essays are what he is good at: you can’t be too clever for them.
Vidal is the unchallengeable master of the droll stroll. Rightly indulged by his editors, who give their star performer all the rope he wants, Vidal saunters at his leisure through the books tendered for review, with many a delightful diversion, racy short-cut, startling turn of speed. He is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blindspots are illuminating.
Roughly half the essays in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star are literary, half socio-political. When writing about the real world, Vidal sounds like the only grown-up in America — indeed, his tone is that of a superevolved stellar sage gazing down on the globe in pitying hilarity. There are two reasons for this. First, Vidal was born into the governing classes, and has never regarded them with anything but profound suspicion. In 1940, following the death of the virtuous Senator William Borah (‘the lion of Idaho’), a large stash was found in his safety deposit box, causing uneasy speculation. Vidal approached his grandfather, Senator Gore, and asked him who had paid Borah off: ‘The Nazis,’ came the reply. To keep us out of the war.’ This is traumatic news, even now. Vidal must have been fifteen at the time. It is easy to see how such disclosures would have shaped and hardened his thinking.
The second and closely related reason for Vidal’s bracing hauteur is that Vidal is incorrigibly anti-American. My, is Gore unpatriotic!
No pomaded Hanoverian swaggerer could have such natural contempt for that coarse and greedy colony. Writing about the Framing of the First Constitution, Vidal does not accept ‘the view that a consortium of intellectual giants met in Philadelphia in order to answer once and for all the vexing questions of how men are to be governed’. He finds, rather, that their ‘general tone is that of a meeting of the trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell’. In another essay Vidal resolutely fails to distinguish between American polity and the workings of the Chase Manhattan Bank: bureaucrats are ‘tellers’, voters are ‘depositors’; and when Banksman Nixon goes to Peking or Moscow, he goes ‘in search of new accounts’. As for the judiciary, and the moral code it enforces, Vidal claims that the prisons throng ‘with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have sex in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium’ — i.e. the Bible (or ‘the Babble’, as many of its adherents seem to call it). How true or ‘helpful’ all this is remains unclear. But the gleeful iconoclasm has the conviction of satirical truth.