2 Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities
University of Southern California
Dec. 15, 2006
The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities is a group of 100 or so that brings together academics with independent writers, artists and critics. Modeled on the better-known New York Institute of the Humanities, it meets monthly during the academic year at USC, although faculty members come also from UCLA and other area campuses. The meetings include lunch followed by a talk, followed by questions and comments. Usually the talks are by fellows describing their new projects, but sometimes outsiders are invited—Joan Didion, Pico Iyer, Alex Ross, Michael Kinsley.
Vidal’s audience included theater director Gordon Davidson, Getty Museum Director John Walsh, Getty Research Institute director Thomas Crow, Time film critic Richard Schickel, novelist Marianne Wiggins (wife of Salmon Rushdie), and UCLA historians Joyce Appleby and Eugen Weber.
Vidal arrived wearing a Harvard athletic letter jacket.
Vidal: I didn’t go to Harvard, but I have gone on, as you can see, to be a professor of Harvard. I was in a terrible movie in which I played a Harvard professor.1 This is the winter wear there. I am now on a secret visit to the Southland, examining the facilities of the community colleges, and that is why I am here at USC today. [laughter]
Q. As a matter of fact, there is a fascinating passage in Point to Point Navigation, where you write that Paul Bowles,2 who was preparing to teach at Cal State Northridge—this must have been sometime in the late 1940’s—asked you the night before his first class how you teach writing. What was all this about?
A. I don’t think his students ever found out. Paul himself was very vague. He said, “What is a class?” He had this extraordinary literal mind that he learned from Gertrude Stein, who was his first mentor when he was just out of, or on the lam from, the University of Virginia. She told him, “You’re not a poet, you better be a musician, it’s easier.” So he went to study with Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copeland, and became a very distinguished musician, and then went back to writing, and wrote rather better than Ms. Stein. But that was all in the future. But no, our subject was community colleges. I am delighted: they are springing up all over.
Q. One of the things they do at community colleges is teach fiction writing. I think there are programs everywhere now. At my school, U.C. Irvine, we have an undergraduate major called “Literary Journalism.” It started only a couple of years ago, but it already has over 200 majors, and if there are 200 at Irvine, there is a similar number at a hundred other schools. This means hundreds of thousands of students are studying to be writers. What do you make of this?
A. We have Truman Capote to thank for that. As bad writers go, he took the cake. So bad was he, you know, he created a whole new art form: the nonfiction novel. He had never heard of a tautology, he had never heard of a contradiction. His social life was busy.
To have classes in fiction—that really is hopeful, isn’t it. People can go to school and bring in physics. The genius of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: He had to take all of his first year courses at, what was it, Cornell? One of his teachers was Nabokov. And everything he had in his first year’s physics went in to Gravity’s Rainbow. Whether it fit in or not, it just went in there. That’s one way of doing it.
Q. In Point to Point Navigation, you start by saying you were “once a famous novelist.” Were there famous novelists in the forties and fifties?
A. More so than now, yeah. When I gave the Massey Lectures at Harvard,3 I had mostly graduate students in the audience, very bright. A great many Chinese from mainland China, who know a great bit more about American civilization than the locals know. So it was quite a treat talking to them. But I noticed something interesting whenever I took on a class at Harvard, undergraduate, post graduate, whatever: no one ever mentioned a book, or a poem, or anything to do with literature. They’re interested in our history, they’re interested in our politics. But I finally broke the ice with my Chinese friends. I said, has anybody here seen The Doors?4 Well the whole room fell apart. Everybody had seen The Doors. I got away with a hour without having to do anything while they told me about The Doors. That’s fame, alas.
Q. You wrote a series of novels about American history. You call the series “Narratives of Empire.” They start with the revolutionary era and Burr and conclude seven novels later with The Golden Age, which is about the forties and fifties. It is hard to think about another writer who has written the entire history of his country in this way.
A. And it’s also hard to think of a reader in the United States, including those who pass as critics, who would read it. This is just off the map. Literature is supposed to be about merit, and there is nothing else that matters on earth. If you have values. Now, it’s always about somebody trying to get tenure in Ann Arbor, and his wife leaves him because of that au pair from England, and the child is autistic, and we have a lot of hospital scenes that are heartbreaking. And this goes on, and on, and on. I once had to judge the National Book Awards. There was no fiction in it—there was nothing. There was certainly no literature in it. It was just “write about what you know.”And what they knew wasn’t very much. At least with me you’ll find out who was Buchanan’s Vice President.
[laughter]
Okay, I’m tooting my own horn.
Q. On the subject of writing about what you know, you introduced the term “The American Empire”, I think, into polite society, and polite society wasn’t too happy about it initially.
A. I was born in the lair of Romulus and Remus, Washington D.C. I was right there at the beginning, at the heart of it. My grandfather was blind from the age of ten, and I lived with him until I was 17 when I went into the army. I would take him down to the Senate and act as his page, and it was the engine room of the Republic. We were a Republic turning military. The Second World War was beginning, and the town was flooded with Brits. There was something like 11,000 of them, I’ve been told. Some of the brightest people in England, starting with Isaiah Berlin, they were all there, to try and get us in the war to save England from Hitler. France had just fallen, I’m speaking now of the spring of 1940. And I understood perfectly well what an empire was. I had also been reading a lot of Roman history. I was fascinated. The first grown-up book I read was Stories From Livy, a 19th-century edition, which got me into the Republic, and then later the Empire surrounded us all.
It was a great time to be an observant kid in the position of a fly on the wall. My mother was a leading isolationist/hostess in the town—Mrs. Auchincloss, she was called5 —and Senator Gore was anti-Roosevelt, anti-going-to-war. He had opposed World War I, and was one of 80 per cent of people that did not want to go to war in Europe again. These were fierce years, this was a fierce debate.
I was head of the America First group at Exeter.6 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. always thought he could rile me by saying, “Oh, you know about Gore, he’s an isolationist.” Of course I was, you idiot! And so was every right-thinking young man on the left. Everybody from Norman Thomas to Senator Burton Wheeler,7 all the progressives in the United States were anti-war. This is something left out by many historians. We have always been a nation devoted to the principles of George Washington. Nations do not have particular friends or enemies, only interests—a nice mercantile piece of advice that most intellectuals accepted; Charles Beard as well, master of your discipline, was also on that side. It was highly respectable. Then “isolationist” became a word for anyone who—well, who had been abducted by aliens in the backyard, had seen a world elsewhere and didn’t like it much.
Q. As an America Firster in 1940, you weren’t on the left. How did you go from being an Exeter America Firster to being a critic of the empire?
A. Just lucky.
[laughter]
No, I knew it was a bad notion. I took Washington’s farewell address seriously. I took seriously John Quincy Adams’ Fourth of July address of 1824: America is not a nation that goes forth to foreign lands to kill dragons. We fight under no banner other than that of our own, even though it be compatible with liberty, freedom, justice, and all that. Yes we could do this, we could become dictator of the world. And we would lose our own soul. I was much moved by that, and stuck with it.
Q. Your grandfather, Senator Gore, was from Oklahoma, a Populist state. Did you visit Oklahoma? You were a Washington D.C. boy.
A. I didn’t like the empire, but I liked being in Rome. [laughter] I never set foot in Oklahoma until I was grown. I had to go to the army, then I went south of the border, and went on writing in Guatemala, in time to be there during the preparations by Ambassador Peurifoy8 to overthrow the government of Arbenz, democratically elected, because he wanted to put a small tax on United Fruit. And Mario Monteforte Toledo, President of their Assembly, and Vice President of the country, had an Indian girlfriend in Antigua, and he would come up on weekends, and we would always argue politics. He would talk about “yanqui imperalismo,” and I would always say, “The United States is not like that.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. He would say, “No, your government is prepared to overthrow us. I shall end up in exile.” I said, “Well, look, we’ve just conquered—we’ve just appropriated Japan and Germany. What do we want Guatemala for?” But he just knew instinctively that we were piggish, and needed a little fruit for our diet. That was to be the big banana for us.9
And so it came to pass. Arévalo was replaced democratically by a great believer in our constitution, and in Franklin Roosevelt—Jacobo Arbenz, who became President. And that’s when we called in the C.I.A to overthrow the government, and replace him with a fellow called Armas, who began a bloodbath that continues till this day.10 If that is not an empire, I don’t know what is.
Q. On the one hand, we have your books about American history, but you’ve also written a very different kind of book, of which Myra Breckinridge is my favorite. 1968 gave us Nixon, and 1968 gave us Myra. We know where Nixon came from, but where did Myra come from?
A. William F. Buckley, Jr. [laughter] I needed some model. And, some of you may remember, I debated him on television. At the ‘68 Convention in Chicago, and also in Miami at the Republican Convention, and he was just out of his mind with fury at whatever was going on. And I realized that here was a true American. I called him a “crypto-Nazi” because I couldn’t think of the word “fascist.” We were talking very quickly. Anyway, I take it all back now. He’s a very pure nothing. [laughter] I was doing him the honor of superimposing a system on him, a mind where none was present.
Q. Myra loved film, yet the film of Myra Breckinridge was, let us say, not a success. What went wrong there?
A. It was produced by the wrong people. I think that is usually what goes wrong. They are drawn to unusual novels, sometimes even classics. They’ll go after The Great Gatsby, which is a lovely novel. They’ll go, many times, after Anna Karenina. Nobody going after it understands why it’s marvelous: it’s marvelous because there is a personal voice, which is the author’s. They don’t allow that there is an author. Grudgingly they say that the director is an auteur, but they wink at you when they say that because they know perfectly well that it is the producer’s brother-in-law who did the last script. And got credit.
Forgive me for this, but Hollywood film is a medium basically without a mind. It’s not a functioning mind, and it’s not a communicative mind. Minds can create it, but it’s essentially moving pictures, which are made to move you, and which are emotional. It’s very good at terror, pity, awe; but it can’t make you think.
You know, the French are a people who love cinema far, far too much. Their favorite is—and this I suppose is also mine—Battleship Potemkin. There is a scene in it that is just magical for them, I mean they look like they’ve just seen Bernadette at Lourdes when you mention it.11 And it’s the baby in the buggy going bumpety-bump-bump-bump down the steps, after the Potemkin has rebelled against the government. Next time they pull that on you, you pull this one on them: Tell me what that scene means. What does it have to do with the Revolution? The movie’s supposedly about that. It doesn’t mean anything. And movies can do that all too easily. We prose writers with flat pages have great difficulty in trying to recreate bumpety-bump-bumps.
Q. If we’re talking about movies, I have to ask about Fellini’s. You have a wonderful chapter about Fellini in the book. You appear in Fellini’s Roma, one of his greatest films. Do you think Fellini was subject to the same limitations?
A. He wasn’t without limits, but he was essentially a painter. He did not like direct sound, so he never used it, as far as I know. He hated scripts, as far as I know he never really used one. The studio gave him one, and he would take it and pretend to make it. Direct sound and in English is how he got his money, and that’s the thing he never did. I used to argue with him about it all the time. He would tell me, “It’s very difficult to get money now.” I would say, “Well, your pictures don’t make any money.” He would say, “It’s not possible, look at the awards I got,” this award and that award. I said, “They like to give you awards, but they’re not going to give you money because they’ll lose it. They’re strange people, aren’t they.”
He was a wildly funny guy. At his best he was one of the greatest liars of all time. I noticed a Mr. Schickel in the room, who may have interviewed him.12 And others here may have interviewed him. The one word he hated, if you wanted him to go up the wall on you, would be “why.” There is no answer to “why?” And if there was, he was not going to tell you.
Q. We’ve lasted a half hour without mentioning George Bush, which I think is quite an achievement. But we need to mention George Bush. The Washington Post had a symposium where they rounded up a bunch of historians and asked them who was the worst President. It usually comes down to a contest between Nixon and Bush, although there was one essay that was titled “He’s Only the Fifth Worst”—you know the argument: Nixon did some good things and Bush did nothing good.13 I’m wondering if you would be interested in joining the “who is the worst President” debate.
A. I’d probably start, if you really want to be serious, with Woodrow Wilson. Imagine taking us to a war in Europe for nothing. We had no interests there, got no advantages out of it, and tens of thousands of Americans were killed. We got Prohibition out of it, and that was about it. And guess what his slogan was: “to make the world safe for democracy.” It’s like making the world safe for good temper. It’s as idiotic as that.
He had spent two seasons in the Lake District of England and had become an Anglophile. If he’d just gone back there to once again read Wordsworth and left the troops at home. Instead he redesigns Europe. He never took geography in kindergarten, he didn’t know where anything was. He broke up the only stable thing in Central Europe, the Austria-Hungarian empire. In order to create Yugoslavia?
Sigmund Freud was in such a rage. We like to think of him as a great genius of serene and august temperament. But Freud was so furious he did the most unprofessional thing ever done by any psychiatrist, much less a founder. He wrote a psychoanalysis of Woodrow Wilson without ever having met him. And he got all the details, mostly slanderous, from Bill Bullitt, a fifth-rate ambassador that President Roosevelt was sending around Europe. Oh, you should read it, it’s just fantasy gone mad. The great doctor was crazy with anger, he saw that the only stability in Europe, particularly the Europe of the Jews, was the Austro-Hungarian empire and its capital, Vienna. From there to Prague, that was a safety zone for Jews. At the end it was in shambles. So I think we must give Wilson a private place for number one.
Q. The big puzzle to me about George W. Bush is that his father represents a more traditional kind of American ruling entity, which indeed was wiser about what could be accomplished, and what couldn’t, in a place like Iraq. George Bush 41 comes from the milieu of your family, and had a more reasonable view of the world than his son, it seems.
A. I would not want to have to be immodest and check the IQ of any Bush against that of any Gore. [laughter] I do not mean to boast, but I think we’re well ahead in that desperate race. No, George Bush Sr. was just about as dumb as the son, but he took the education of a gentleman seriously, and as much as he could, behaved like one. Remember, he enlisted in the army, he was a pilot, a hero in the war—except for the two flight members who had to bail out. We never heard their story. I believe Kitty Kelley is working on it now.14 Soon we’ll know his last words to them were “bye-bye.” [laughter] That’s what they said about him at Andover, you know, when it was all over.
Q. I know we have many people here who would like to ask questions.
From the audience:
Q. You’ve written many books, and they’ve been reviewed many times, including in the New York Times. What reviews that you have received seem to you now to be the most interesting, or even the most helpful in causing you to rethink your work?
A. I’m more apt to rethink the New York Times than I am to rethink my work. I’d say the piece I most liked, and admittedly it was admiring, was Harold Bloom on Lincoln and on my approach to American history. There is a wonderful German word that I’ve tried to make popular, when I can remember it: “Einfuehlen.” That is the ability to work your way into the past, never forgetting you’re in a foreign country. It isn’t the present with new decorations, it’s another place. It’s another world. If you can keep that sense of strangeness as you work, then you’ve got half the job done. But I find most American writers lack Einfuehlen. They’re not very good at being naturalistic writers either, which means that they have a hard time with their own surroundings. Due to the, you know, rigors of getting tenure at Ann Arbor, which I’ve already referred to. As for the negative stuff about me: consider the source.
Audience Q. Your observation about the changes in the meaning of the word narcissism: I wonder if you’d talk about that.
A. As it’s used now, narcissist means a fag. I tried to give it a deeper meaning. I was helping out some book reviewer. I said “a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are.” [laughter] I think that struck a nerve, because I’ve had people come up to me on the street, keening, howling, over that. Still suffering over that blow.
Follow-up Q. You go on to make the point about how the word is now sometimes associated with liberals.
A. Yes, narcissistic liberals. Because they want to help others, and not themselves. The height of narcissism. But then altruism has never had a big market for the freedom clan. I thought you were going to quote me on altruism. I thought that wasn’t too bad. I said, “Altruism is a bit like acne, it hits many people in different ways. It hits the young, often in adolescence, but luckily usually leaves no scars.”
Audience Q. I read a recent piece about your book, in which you were quoted as saying the only times you’ve been completely happy have been at the movies. Watching movies. I am wondering if you could explain the origins of that happiness.
A. Oh, it was generational. I was born at the time when the talkies first came in, and I was fourteen years old in the greatest year of the talking picture, 1939. I saw them all, and it was bliss to have been fourteen then, seeing the Wizard of Oz. That was all I meant by that. I did not mean I get that feeling going to see Monsieur Mel Gibson, the famous French auteur. No, I don’t feel it in later cases.
Audience Q. I was curious about how easily the American electorate is manipulated in all kinds of ways. As somebody who is a member of a democracy of some sort, some crude sort, how do you deal with that? Jefferson thought we really shouldn’t be an electoral democracy, you know, a one man-one vote kind of thing. How do you look upon the future of this country with any optimism, when how blatantly manipulated a great deal of the electorate is—like people who vote against their economic interests in Ohio, etc, etc.
A. Well the only optimists are the gas and oil people, and they have every reason to be. It has always been the trick of our republic to get people to vote wholeheartedly against their interests. That’s very exciting when you can do it. [laughter] I remember when I was running for Congress upstate New York, in Duchess Country, and there would be these farmers going around in old, old, Model-T Fords and so on, with stickers—Vote for Rockefeller. Sometimes I would stop them, and we’d chat. I’d say, “Why do you like him?” because he was pretty poisonous even then. They said, “He’s so rich he wouldn’t steal our money.”
I said, “That wouldn’t stop him. Rich people go right on robbing people you know.” He was spending a lot of money up in Albany. He has his grand pyramid, he has his sphinx, all types of things up there to remind people of the Rockefellers.15 And I couldn’t get a straight answer out of them.
I asked, “Do you think you’ll get a check out of him someday? Or, like his grandfather, he’ll give you a dime?”A lot of people out there could be bought for a dime. I remember when I was running for the House, Republicans since time immemorial had bought votes in the district. And the price had gone up in 1960 to about $15, which is a hell of a lot of money up there. And particularly in nearby Tivoli, which I lived not too far from.
My campaign manager was Judge Hawkins, a wonderful guy. He was head of the Democratic Party up there. He said, “They’re going to beat us because of the bought votes.”
And I, a perfect Populist, said, “Why don’t we buy them too? Just pay a few dollars more?” I understand the workings of the market. That’s how it works. That’s why I proposed myself for office in the great republic, for deals in business. He said, “They always catch us, they never catch them.” And that man was a judge.
Audience Q. I read Myra Breckinridge a long time ago, I remember it absolutely wowed me because it seemed so sexually perverse, but absolutely brilliant. It’s been forty years since you wrote Myra, yet America seems to have become more puritanical. Do you have any sort of insights on where America might be heading on accepting more sexual pluralism?
A. I think what you have now is a combination of advertising, which is essentially erotic. And we had a drug generation for a time, which perhaps encouraged sexual activity. I don’t know what the changes have been, but forget all about values. I don’t see the freedoms that we enjoyed back in the ’60’s, they have not been translated into political action, nor have they had much of any effect, that I can tell.
But we are a funny country: we’ve always had more good writers than good readers. So here we are, a bunch of writers just sort of marooned in limbo with nobody to read the things. Just passing asteroids. With other countries, if you have writers, you have readers. We have writers, we can’t get anyone to read them. The theory of American publishing today is “print and pulp, print and pulp, print and pulp,” as quickly as possible, to have room for another to “print and pulp.”
The intermediary time, which might have been used for marketing—I know I sound like a merchant, but we’ve got to sell something—should have been used to get people to read. Also look at what the schools do. Those who even take up literature at all, they removed Shakespeare—it’s too difficult for the curriculum. It used to be you had to read Julius Caesar at least, because there was no sex in it. It’s not my reading of what happened with Cassius and Brutus, which could have been a very hot scene, but anyway—in the eye of the beholder is the beholden.
Audience Q. Is God a Republican? I mean, if you were writing that book, would it be in the sci-fi section? The comic section? Who could write about what is going on now? And would anyone believe it?
A. I think I could have thought it up. It’s not difficult, you know. I mean, it’s so easy to propagandize. 70 per cent believed, and still believe, that Saddam Hussein was working hand in glove with Osama bin Laden. They hated each other, and that is known everywhere but in the land of the free, where nothing is known. And nothing is known because the media is so poisonous and so controlled.
And they say, “The people are dumb.” No, they’re not dumb, they are ignorant. They have no access to information. Or they get so much access they don’t know what to believe and end up believing nothing. I think, as a writer fifteen years ago, I would have been more interested in that subject—how you turn people off the whole idea of learning anything at all through reading.
I remember when Burr first published. I had a great friend in the business, very bright woman. I introduced her to Edith Wharton and she never looked back, so she is a good reader when she wants to be. She said, “Oh, I got your book,” and I said, “But you’re not going to read it.” She said, “How did you know?”
I said, “Why not?” And she said, “Well, I don’t know who Aaron Burr is.” I replied, “That’s the idea! If you already knew, why would I have written a book?” This was beyond her.
Everyone here has written journalism. You’re up against it all the time: no one knows who that person is—so why write a book about them? Why write a piece about them? Nobody knows them. But that’s the reason for writing, isn’t it. Difficult thought, difficult thought. Only write about what you already know. So we’ve got Elizabeth Taylor until the end of time.
Audience Q. If you could look back over the course of a life, what do you think have been the major factors that contributed to the rise in political apathy?
A. Apathy is just lack of energy, which to me, is just the literal definition of decadence. So the energy gives out in a society—that is decadence. We gave out some time ago. If it were just in the culture—literature and so on, music—ok, ok, we can play other games. But it’s gone out of everything. It was outsourced. And apathy came in from India, and we’ve got apathy in every street corner. Our old get-up-and-go-ness has gone to Bangladesh.
Follow-up Q. But why?
A. Society’s changed. Capitalism, if we want to get down to it, as Marx put it. You can make widgets cheaper in poor countries, so we go to poor countries to make them, depriving our own people of livelihood. If we had labor unions we might be able to change that, but we’ve done away with them because they stood in the way of Republican majorities. So, there is work to be done politically.
Q. Our time is almost up, I’m going to ask the last question. At this point in your life you’ve done it all. You’ve written almost two dozen books, you’ve won all the prizes, you’ve done the movies, the plays. What keeps you going?
A. All my life I’ve been over-excited by stupidity. Just before I came here I was listening to the leader of the free world eulogizing the great man of the Iraq war as the greatest Secretary of Defense in history. We used to call him the Secretary of War, before the dumb-dumbs took over, and then after 1948 it became Defense, once we decided we were going to be at war all the time. Too much overlap. All I have to do is turn on CNN now, and I have to say, I’m rolling on the floor.