A Thousand Shards of Glass

A few days ago I learned of the passing of Gore Vidal. My feelings were first of gratitude and then regret. Gratitude to a man who had unknowingly done me a great service, and regret because my hoped-for visit with him after our exchanges never materialized, due to my responsibilities as caregiver. Time and events conspired against me, and in that instant any possibility of our meeting ended for ever. I shall always regret that.

Years ago, when I was very young and believed that I had already chosen my direction in life, I found myself as a guest on a local television show in Los Angeles. I can still see that sunny afternoon. It was the day that was to confuse and change my life profoundly. At the time I was like many young people, insecure with an air of arrogance, never able to admit that it was merely a mask cloaking my insecurity, even from myself. With that illusion firmly in hand, I was ushered on to a makeshift set that had been constructed outside the station’s studio under a stand of trees. I stood behind the cameras, watching the commotion, and then turned to see two men politely discussing the Vietnam War. The men were Gore Vidal and Senator Eugene McCarthy.

As they talked, I was drawn – as a voyeur – into the discussion. I had never heard such conversation. There were words I could not identify and ideas that I struggled to comprehend. The language and pace of the exchange sparkled: it was beautiful. It was as though I was witnessing something from a world far beyond my own. I was.

Senator McCarthy spoke softly and with conviction while Vidal responded with a wit I first mistook for a lack of seriousness. Later, I realized that his was a mordant irony, peppered with facts and knowledge but served in a more palatable and entertaining form. When the talk became more serious and the men began to disagree, the argument remained focused but, oddly, even more convivial and engaging. It was like watching a remarkable dance with music that resonated, so much so that it could change me – and change me it did.

As they continued, I understood for the first time in my short life how much I did not know and how much I wanted to learn. I wanted to recognize those words I had never heard and the ideas I could not understand. I wanted to know more about the people whose names had been woven throughout their conversation, like Socrates and Plato, Hume, Diem and Johnson. I wanted to understand the history of Vietnam, the French and British involvement prior to our own. I wanted to know everything and to dance in conversation as they had done.

The stage director cued me and as I stood waiting I realized, absolutely, that after this brief appearance I would not be going back to the life I had been living just hours before. As you might imagine, I was stunned. How could this be? How could this have happened: my life turned upside down and in less than an hour?

I suppose part of the answer was that I was already in mid-change but had not known what that change would look like or whether I would even recognize the road I must travel when it finally appeared. To be sure, I was hungry for the world in a way I had never been before and sensed there was much to do. I felt that my future was to become uncertain, as futures truly are, while also evolving into some kind of quest, though I did not know for what purpose. It was a pull that suggested something choosing me rather than the other way around and it was terrifying and wonderful at the same time. In hindsight, it felt like what is sometimes referred to as a ‘calling’.

It was that afternoon, listening to those two men, that lit the spark that would give my undisciplined mind just a bit more focus. Words and ideas had set fire to my imagination and I have been grateful ever since.

I did not understand then, nor for some time afterwards, that I had been hungry for experiences that would impart to me knowledge, the kind of knowledge that might one day lead to wisdom and restraint. I wanted to understand the world as it was, not just as I wished it to be. After listening to Vidal and McCarthy, I instinctively knew that I could not attempt to make the world or myself better until I saw both as they were. It seems so simple now, but at the time it was a profound awakening for me. What I remember clearly is that, days after the program, I understood that my quest would begin with two things: books and travel. But which books, and travel to where? I decided to begin with the words of Gore Vidal.

There is a quote that Vidal used often, and he used it that day on the set. Quoting Socrates, he said, ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ I began with that challenge and kept it close throughout the following years as if it were a talisman, and so it came to be. Some time later I heard Vidal manipulate the quote to provide a witty but very cutting analysis of present-day America. ‘The untelevised life is not worth living,’ he said as the people laughed. I found the quote to be very sharp eyed, but in contradiction to his other cheekier dictum, that one should ‘never pass up an opportunity to have sex or be on television’. Employing such mordant irony sometimes allowed critics to dismiss him as an entertainer rather than a serious commentator on the American story. That was a mistake.

Vidal possessed a sparkling gift for writing, and for me this is particularly evident in his essays. He had mastered the use of wit and irony, and could always find humour in the most serious of subjects. He was a calculating jester, delivering the worst of medicines wrapped in something that also brought about a smile, at least some of the time. Those who make the error of thinking him a mere provocateur, ‘enfant terrible’ or witty television personality would do well to read his essays on America: they show a brilliant mind and masterful writer at work. The essays always seemed to me to be written by someone who, despite his masks of wit, occasional cruelty and sometimes outrageous conclusions, also cared deeply for his country. He was both heartbroken and angered by what it had become. If one wants a synthesis of America in the twentieth century, one need only read ‘How We Missed the Saturday Dance’ to observe a serious intellect in action. Some have written that Vidal was America’s Montaigne. I would like to suggest, with apologies to my French friends, that he was better than Montaigne, much better.

Reading Vidal’s commentary on September 11, while others at The New York Times, The New Yorker and other publications were drinking the patriotic Kool-Aid and marching in step with the Bush Administration’s fictional narrative, was also to understand something of the man’s courage. In his book Dreaming War, Gore Vidal wrote:

[The war on terror] . . . is an imperial grab for energy resources. . . . After 9/11 the country was really shocked and terrified. [Bush] does a little war dance and talks about evil axis and all the countries he’s going to go after. And how long it is all going to take, he says with a happy smile, because it means billions and trillions for the Pentagon and for his oil friends. And it means curtailing our liberties, so this is all very thrilling for him. He’s right out there reacting, bombing Afghanistan. Well, he might as well have been bombing Denmark. Denmark had nothing to do with 9/11. And neither did Afghanistan, at least the Afghanis didn’t.

While I do not always agree with Vidal’s opinions or conclusions, I marveled at his courage in saying here what he thought to be true, even at a time when a majority of the country was in opposition to such positions being held, let alone voiced. With the exception of a very few prominent people, like the equally brave Susan Sontag, Vidal was quite fearless and alone in his critical views of the United States and its behavior following the attacks on September 11. Vidal’s life seems to have been punctuated with words that were determined to speak truth to power and never more so than after the attacks, a time when many of the American people, hallucinating in their own patriotic delusions, wanted people with questions or opposing views to just shut up and get on the bus. Thankfully, Gore Vidal was never a passive passenger.

What makes Vidal so infuriating to his critics is how often his observations have proved to be correct. What makes him even more infuriating is that, despite being a patrician, it was the wealthy and powerful, the established order, his ‘class’, as he described them, who were so often his primary targets and the ones he held responsible for what the country had become. He told me as much in our phone conversation.

As my life went on, I was determined that I would attempt to live a life of learning and action and would take Vidal’s example and try to be brave with my words. I would travel the world, keep journals, write endless letters and read, read, read. I would ask questions, treat the world with respect and attempt to understand both the good and the bad that I came upon. As much as possible, I did this by abandoning my western perceptions and putting myself in the other guy’s shoes. I have done so with varying degrees of success ever since.

The words in the journals mounted and my bags were rarely at rest. I would work late at night in restaurants, washing dishes until I had enough money to leave again. I was learning.

As a result of the person I was becoming, one day, in a crowded university hall, I was able to recognize someone I did not know. I asked a friend if they knew who she was. ‘That’s Dr. Kris Hardin. She’s just returned to the States after years of field work in Africa.’ I had met my future wife. She was an anthropologist with the Smithsonian and her work was in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Over the following months we talked of the world and in our conversations, we danced.

In Washington, D.C., during a lull from my clumsy attempts at courting, I decided to go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I was shocked when I found a school friend’s name and was deeply shaken by my reaction. My journal entry from that day records my surprise:

At Wall 25, I began to look for Line 91. The black granite reflected my image and I clearly saw my face; then there he was. I stared for a moment, not at his name, but at my reflection. I had changed; my hair had some gray and the lines around my eyes showed experience and wear. I reached out to touch my friend’s name and felt my friend was the same, still eighteen. Young people who die are forever frozen in time. Everything around the names will change in time I suppose. The public will come year after year and they will see their reflections in the stone, their graying hair and their bodies aging. They will change and, one day, they will be gone, but all these names will remain as they are, forever. I touched Wayne’s name and I began to cry. I cried for a long time and the granite reflected my sadness and release. I was finally able to say good-bye to my friend. I knew he would always be there.

So began a two-and-a-half-year project to photograph and interview people at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While working, there was seldom a time that I did not think of something that had been said between those two men long ago. I focused on the legacy of the war, the people left behind, the roads not taken and what it had come to mean years later. I approached the subject with seriousness and resolve but also with a gentle humor, for when talking with surviving family and soldiers I slowly came to understand that all of those wounded souls were in need of something, anything that might, even for a moment, take them away from their attempts to find a peace that would never come.

In the evenings I would go back to Kris and tell her what I had seen and what people had told me. After a year she thought I should approach a publisher. Two years later, my first book was published.

After all this time I am still unable to describe how it felt seeing the first copy. It was as if I had been on the right road, with work, with the woman I loved and with life. I started to think that maybe, just maybe, my work could touch people and perhaps matter in some way. Further books followed, some better than others but all attempting to be something done well and with purpose.

My life of learning progressed: I had been reading carefully, extensively and traveling the world. There was Morocco and West Africa, Cuba, China and Taiwan, the Philippines, Korea, England, France and a journey with my father back to his beginnings on Crete, a place where he had seen such horrible things during World War II and where the secrets were kept. In Spain I spent two days with a man people would describe as a terrorist. He was a member of ETA. I kept an open mind and I learned.

I read Gore Vidal’s essays on America and with great sadness I recognized his observations and his conclusions. As ever, his was a sharp eye, a pen that, when angered, gave no quarter and expected none in return. But again and again I detected a melancholy, a wish that things could be different, an unspoken belief that honest, well-thought-out words might inform the country and, with that knowledge, might change its course. Because of that frustrated hopefulness, I have always seen Vidal as a reluctant optimist.

Some years ago I decided to write to Gore Vidal. In that letter I told him of the program long ago and how it had changed the direction of my life. I told him what I had been reading and where I had traveled and what I thought about a number of things, including the Vietnam War. I wrote about the people I had talked to around the world and the woman I had married. I wrote about how important and helpful his essays had been. I wanted him to know how much I appreciated what he had unknowingly done for me. I wanted to thank him for all of it but words failed to express what I held in my heart. I told him many things, serious and otherwise, personal and general. The letter was long and filled with sentiments, not of idolatry, but of respect, fondness and appreciation.

My wife read the letter, leaning over my shoulder, and said, ‘I would so love to receive such a letter. You should send it.’ I did not send the letter for another two weeks. I had hoped to find better words, but those words never came. It was time to get on with it.

I knew that Vidal was living in Italy at the time but also had a home in southern California. I contacted an acquaintance in New York who knew Mr. Paul Newman and Ms. Joanne Woodward who, I had been told, were dear friends of Vidal. The acquaintance contacted me and said that they (Newman and Woodward) would either mail the letter directly or hand-deliver it when they visited him soon. I sent a sealed envelope with the letter inside and then made a second letter and sent it to Gore Vidal’s attention, Ravello, Italy, along with some of my books.

Some weeks later, while at work, I received a call from my wife saying that a beautiful envelope had arrived.

‘Open it,’ I said, but ever wise, Kris told me that she wanted me to see the letter as she saw it now.

‘Forgive me, dear, but I want the pleasure of seeing you open it. I want to watch the expression on your face.’

That evening I sat at the kitchen table staring at the little envelope. It was beautiful thin paper, pale blue in color, and the Italian stamp spoke of a life far away. My name appeared to have been written by an older, unsteady hand. I lingered as I moved my fingers across the stamp. Kris passed me the letter opener.

The letter itself was written on paper even thinner than the envelope and was both delicate and strong. This was a letter writer’s paper.

His words were direct and kind, funny and intelligent. Mr. Vidal thanked me for my letter. He told me that what I had done thus far was something to be proud of and then suggested, because of some of the conclusions I had reached, that I could now use the four greatest words in the English language: ‘I told you so.’

He went on to say that I had followed, to a wide degree, one of my ancestor’s dictums that ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’ There was Socrates again. The letter was handwritten and welcoming and he was very kind. I put it down and looked up to see Kris smiling.

‘What a lovely letter. I love you and I’m so very proud of you.’ Kris was always like that.

Life went on, with more writing and travel, and I took to writing more letters and getting lovely paper to write them on. Maybe being a better letter writer would make me a better writer, I thought.

A few years later a friend told me that Vidal had left Italy and was living in California. He suggested that I call him. He told me that Vidal preferred people to fax him with their number. He would then choose whether or not to respond. And so I sent a fax, one sunny California afternoon, and after about twenty minutes the phone rang. I immediately recognized the voice on the line.

Our conversation began as if it were a continuation of some past discussion. We spoke of the recent election of George W. Bush. ‘Oh, Katakis, the greatest criminal class in US history has just ascended the White House.’ We debated that a bit and then moved on to John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which I had studied in detail. We talked about Tennessee Williams, Hiroshima and then Vietnam. He seemed delighted when we discussed literature and I told him how much I thought of Italo Calvino’s work.

We talked on and in a moment I realized that our conversation sparkled and, even though he led, we were dancing. Our conversation seemed effortless and the words used I now understood and the ideas discussed were my ideas as well, for I had learned a few steps of my own. Back and forth we went, ending with the mutual hope that some time soon I would travel down to his home in Hollywood. It was not to be. We never spoke again, but the dance lingered. It lingers still.

His was a voice that amused, informed, infuriated, scolded, reminded and asked repeatedly for people to remain conscious and to think for themselves. That was Gore Vidal’s dance and for a few moments, on a single day, he let me join in and it was wonderful. So, merci, adieu and thanks for the dance, Mr. Vidal.