Matters of Fact and of Fiction:
Essays 1973–1976 by Gore Vidal
Nobody dissents from marking Gore Vidal high as an essayist, not even those—especially not those—who would like to mark him low as a novelist. His Collected Essays 1952–1972 was rightly greeted with all the superlatives going. Since one doesn’t have to read far in this new volume before realizing that the old volume has been fully lived up to and in some respects even surpassed, it becomes necessary either to wheel out the previous superlatives all over again or else to think up some new ones. Rejecting both courses, this reviewer intends to pick nits and make gratuitous observations on the author’s character, in the hope of maintaining some measure of critical independence. Gore Vidal is so dauntingly good at the literary essay that he is likely to arouse in other practitioners an inclination to take up a different line of work. That, however, would be an excessive reaction. He isn’t omniscient, infallible or effortlessly stylish—he just knows a lot, possesses an unusual amount of common sense and writes scrupulously lucid prose. There is no need to deify the man just because he can string a few thoughts together. As I shall now reveal, he has toenails of clay.
Always courageous about unfolding himself, Vidal sometimes overcooks it. He is without false modesty but not beyond poor-mouthing himself to improve a point. “The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of . . .” But wait a minute. It might remain a necessary task to point out that the nuttier film buffs are no more than licensed illiterates: the ability to carry out a semiotic analysis of a Nicholas Ray movie is undoubtedly no compensation for being incapable of parsing a simple sentence. But some of those bad movies were, after all, quite good. Vidal himself had his name writ large on both The Left-Handed Gun and The Best Man, neither of which is likely to be forgotten. It suits his purposes, however, to pretend that he was a dedicated candy-butcher. He wants to be thought of as part of the hardbitten Hollywood that produced the adage: “Shit has its own integrity.”
As a Matter of Fact, Vidal rarely set out to write rubbish: he just got mixed up with a few pretentious projects that went sour. Summarizing, in the first of these essays, the Top Ten Best-Sellers, Vidal makes trash hilarious. But there is no need for him to pretend that he knows trash from the inside. He was always an outsider in that regard: the point he ought to make about himself is that he never had what it took to be a Hollywood hack. It was belief, not cynicism, that lured him to write screenplays. Even quite recently he was enthusiastically involved in a mammoth project called Gore Vidal’s Caligula, once again delivering himself into the hands of those commercial forces which would ensure that the script ended up being written by Caligula’s Gore Vidal.
Yet you can see what he is getting at. Invention, however fumbling, must always be preferred over aridity, however high-flown. In all the essays dealing with Matters of Fiction, Vidal is constantly to be seen paying unfeigned attention to the stories second-rate writers are trying to tell. His contempt is reserved for the would-be first-raters obsessed with technique. For the less exalted scribes honestly setting about their grinding chores, his sympathy is deep even if his wit is irrepressible. Quoting a passage from Herman Wouk, he adds: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” Taken out of context, this might seem a destructive crack, but when you read it in its proper place there is no reason to think that the first half of the sentence has been written for the sole purpose of making the second half funny.
If this were not a nit-picking exercise we would be bound to take notice of Vidal’s exemplary industry. He has actually sat down and read, from front to back, the gigantic novels by John Barth and Thomas Pynchon for which the young professors make such claims. Having done so, he is in a position to give a specific voice to the general suspicion which the academic neo-theologians have aroused in the common reader’s mind. Against their religious belief in The Novel, Vidal insists that there is no such thing—there are only novels. In this department, as in several others, Vidal is the natural heir of Edmund Wilson, whose The Fruits of the MLA was the opening salvo in the long campaign, which we will probably never see the end of, to rescue literature from its institutionalized interpreters.
But Wilson is not Vidal’s only ancestor. Several cutting references to Dwight Macdonald are a poor reward for the man whose devastating essay “By Cozzens Possessed” (collected in Against the American Grain) was the immediate forerunner of everything Vidal has done in this particular field. It would be a good thing if Vidal, normally so forthcoming about his personal history, could be frank about where he considers himself to stand in relation to other American critical writers. In his introductory note to this book there is mention of Sainte-Beuve; in a recent interview given to the New York Times there was talk about Montaigne; but among recent essayists, now that Wilson is gone, Vidal seems to find the true critical temperament only among “a few elderly Englishmen.” Yet you have only to think of people like Macdonald or Mary McCarthy or Elizabeth Hardwick to see that if Vidal is primus it is only inter pares: there is an American critical tradition, going back to Mencken and beyond, which he is foolish to imagine can be disowned. This is the only respect in which Vidal seems shy of being an American, and by no coincidence it is the only respect in which he ever sounds provincial.
Otherwise his faults, like his virtues, are on a world scale. In the Matters of Fact, which occupy the second part of the book, the emphasis is on the corrupting influence of power and money. Born into the American ruling class, Vidal is as well placed as Louis Auchincloss (about whom he writes appreciatively) to criticize its behaviour. He is angrily amusing about West Point, Robert Moses, ITT, the Adams dynasty and the grand families in general. Indeed it is only about Tennessee Williams and Lord Longford that he is unangrily funny—for the most part his humour about Matters of Fact is sulphuric. There is no question of Vidal’s sincerity in loathing what he calls the Property Party. On the other hand he is a trifle disingenuous in allowing us to suppose that all connections have been severed between himself and the ruling class. Certainly he remains on good terms with the ruling class of Britain—unless Princess Margaret has become as much of an intellectual exile from the British aristocracy as he has from the American.
As a Matter of Fact, Gore Vidal is a Beautiful Person who chooses his drawing rooms with care. He hobnobs with the rich and powerful. He hobnobs also with the talented, but they tend to be those among the talented who hobnob with the rich and powerful. He likes the rich and powerful as a class. He hates some of them as individuals and attacks them with an invective made all the more lacerating by inside knowledge. For that we can be grateful. But we can also wish that his honesty about his own interior workings might extend to his thirst for glamour. Speaking about Hollywood, he is an outsider who delights to pose as an insider. Speaking about the ruling class, he is an insider who delights to pose as an outsider. In reality he is just as active a social butterfly as his arch-enemy Truman Capote. But in Vidal’s case the sin is venial, not mortal, since his writings remain comparatively unruffled by the social whirl, whereas Capote has become a sort of court dwarf, peddling a brand of thinly fictionalized tittle-tattle which is really sycophancy in disguise. Vidal reserves that sort of thing for after hours.
Yet even with these nits picked, it must still be said that Vidal is an outstanding writer on political issues. “The State of the Union,” the last essay in the book, is so clear an account of what has been happening in America that it sounds commonplace, until you realize that every judgement in it has been hard won from personal experience. Only one of its assumptions rings false, and even there you can see his reasons. Vidal still assumes that any heterosexual man is a culturally repressed bisexual. This idea makes a good basis for polemical assault on sexual intolerance, but as a Matter of Fact it is Fiction. As it happens, I have met Gore Vidal in the flesh. The flesh looked immaculately preserved. In a room well supplied with beautiful and brilliant women, he was as beautiful as most and more brilliant than any. I was not impervious to his charm. But I examined myself in vain for any sign of physical excitement. He might say that I was repressing my true nature but the real reason was simpler. It was just that he was not a female.
Not even Gore Vidal is entirely without self-delusion. On the whole, though, he is among the most acute truth-tellers we possess. Certainly he is the most entertaining. The entertainment arises naturally from his style—that perfectly disciplined, perfectly liberated English which constitutes all by itself a decisive answer to the Hacks of Academe. Calling them “the unlearned learned teachers of English” and “the new barbarians, serenely restoring the Dark Ages,” he has only to quote their prose against his and the case is proved. A pity, then, that on page 260 there is a flagrant (well, all right: barely noticeable) grammatical error. “Journalists who know quite as much or more than I about American politics . . .” is not good grammar. There is an “as” missing. But the other 281 scintillating pages of error-free text go some way towards making up for its loss.
New Statesman, 1977; later included in
From the Land of Shadows, 1982
POSTSCRIPT
A quarter of a century has gone by but I would not now write any less enthusiastically about the virtues of Gore Vidal’s easy-seeming fluency. Indeed there is one stricture that I would take back, or at least tone down. It was true that he had a thirst for glamour, but it was also true that he did his best to make sure it would not sap his strength. His self-exile in Ravello got him away from a too-constant presence in New York, Los Angeles and London. When he was in those places, he dined in grand company several nights a week. It was on just such a night that I first met him, and you couldn’t count the countesses. Of the men, those he did not insult hung on his words, and those he did wanted to hang themselves afterwards. He was in demand like Talleyrand. Had he not banished himself for long periods of solitary concentration, he would have dined at the same altitude every night of the year. His powers of self-discipline were proved by both the volume of his work and its meticulous quality, and I was dense to allow otherwise. Had I been prescient, however, I could have suggested that a proclivity already noticeable might grow to a distortion. An off-shore base gave him the advantage of an outside view, but he valued his birthright as a scion of the American East Coast political elite too highly to let it go. In his later days this tenacious quirk has led to destructive effects: never on his style, but often on his message.
He is as sure as John Foster Dulles ever was that American power is decisive anywhere in the world. He warns us against it, but he takes it as a fact. In 2001 he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement to expound his conviction that the United States had tricked Japan into World War II. With great reluctance I opposed this view in the letters column of the same paper, and incurred his wrath by doing so. The sorcerer did not like to see the apprentice concocting spells of his own. But the apprentice had good reason. Born on the eve of the Pacific War, and in a country which might well have shared the fate of Nanking, I had cause to remember the devastation which was initiated by Imperial Japan for its own purposes, and with a strength that was all its own. The Japanese right wing is still a force, and likes nothing better than to hear illustrious figures from abroad promoting the seductive theory that the U.S. was entirely responsible for the whole event. With an eye to the future as much as to the past, the first duty of any Australian capable of getting his views on the subject published is to buttress liberal opinion in Japan, where the most elementary truths about Japan’s Imperial adventure are still struggling to get into the school textbooks.
Admirably alert to the discrepancy between entrenched financial interest and democratic ideals, Vidal has always seen it as his first duty to warn America against itself, and hence the world against America. But the “hence” is suspect. There are things of this world that are decided without America’s say-so—the September 11 attack was only the most spectacular—and to argue otherwise is to exemplify the very imperialism that he condemns. How well he condemns it, though. He sounds like an oracle even when he is wrong: the drawback of oracles.
2003