The Golden Age

Jim and Tony,

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I confess I may not be quite the Vidalian you both seem to be. He's a considerable figure, a civilized and intelligent man of letters, and some of his work will endure. But he's also a member of what Tom Brokaw has called "the greatest generation," and that description justly applies to writers as well as to World War II infantrymen. The novelists who came to prominence during the war and the decade following probably included a higher density of heavyweight talent than any other in our history. In that impressive company, Vidal holds a respectable place, but not, I think, a stellar one.

I even find myself resisting the contrarian qualities he enjoys displaying, and which both of you applaud. They're in a grand old American tradition, and it's obviously a healthy thing to have our national shibboleths questioned, but his iconoclasm is so unrelenting it can seem knee-jerk. Was the Cold War a transparent fiction designed to promote American imperialism? Not if the recently opened KGB archives are any indication. Was Alger Hiss framed? Were the Rosenbergs innocent? Probably not. Did FDR deliberately engineer a Japanese sneak attack on American Pacific forces? Well, perhaps in the same sense that Lincoln, unwilling for political reasons to initiate the impending hostilities, engineered the firing upon Fort Sumter, but surely not out of some intricate, covert scheme of world conquest.

If he selected his targets with discrimination rather than firing scattershot, I think he'd be a more effective naysayer.

One thing I do admire about him, something which has perhaps received insufficient attention in these exchanges of ours (although Tony adverts to it briefly in his note about The Best Man), is the role homosexuality has played in his work. From his second novel, The City and the Pillar, through the one under discussion, it has been a consistent theme. (Included in my observation are even several of his screenplays; Tony mentioned Ben-Hur, a wonderfully mischievous bit of subtext, but his teleplay for The Left-Handed Gun provides another example. A gay buckaroo? Played by Paul Newman, no less? You have to give Vidal credit for chutzpah.)

The courage involved in publishing The City and the Pillar back in 1948 must have been considerable. He risked not only scorn and social disgrace, but potentially even more injurious, a kind of ghetto-ization, relegation to a nether world of gay genre fiction. The novel itself is neither very good nor very bad, but it's impossible not to applaud the author's guts. There are no precedents I can think of in mainstream English literature (Proust might be cited as a French precursor, although Proust's narrator/alter ego, "Marcel," never strays from heterosexuality himself, which may be interpreted as a kind of authorial insurance policy). The sort of camp fiction written by Ronald Firbank occupies an entirely different literary realm.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that among the things I liked best in The Golden Age were some of the New York party scenes. Unlike Jim, I didn't even mind it when Vidal himself occasionally put in a stray appearance (although I agree with him that the self-praise, whether intended humorously or not, struck an embarrassingly discordant note). Party scenes are notoriously hard to bring off, and it's here that Vidal's craft is most in evidence; he navigates unerringly through the crowded rooms, providing us with a wonderfully vivid sense of time, place, and ambience. But what I liked best about these scenes remains all but unmentioned, remains, characteristically, as subtext (there is one small, glancing overt reference on Page 321): It's the notion that there is an unwritten cultural history of any given epoch, a history involving the relationships within a clandestine gay coterie.

A much younger writer, an Englishman named Alan Hollinghurst, has written a provocative novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (click here to buy it), concerned almost exclusively with this same notion. But Vidal, precisely because he integrates these elements within a larger social history, and because he doesn't hit us over the head with them, probably paints the more compelling picture. Here are Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, Leonard Bernstein and Virgil Thompson, all sharers in a secret (a pretty open secret in their own circle, of course, but one "which dare not speak its name" in the world at large), and all influential shapers of a culture. There is an integrity to these scenes, and a verve, otherwise sadly lacking in the novel as a whole.

And it would be remiss of me, before I close, not to mention what I regard as the single best passage in the novel, a virtuoso piece of writing that demonstrates what Vidal is capable of when he's at the top of his form. It is a long drunken monologue put in the mouth of Dawn Powell, an all but forgotten novelist from the period (and, it should be said, a real-life friend of, and mentor to, Vidal), largely but not exclusively devoted to Ernest Hemingway. It is funny, bitchy, erudite, and devastating. It sounds exactly like the inspired rant of a brilliant, bitter drunk who has watched the reputations of her inferiors eclipse her own. One needn't agree with it to be dazzled. The passage is at once a generous tribute to Ms. Powell herself--she's probably due for a revival, and this passage might single-handedly encourage one--and a classic piece of comic writing.

A few more passages like that, and I might have become a Vidalian.

Jim, I suppose it's a shame we weren't able to disagree more, but conflict isn't the only useful mode for a discussion of this kind, and I do believe we've been true to our reactions to the book. And Tony, what the hell are you doing out there on the wrong coast? I mean, sure, you have all that music and art and theater and the better newspaper, but we have Peet's and Chez Panisse and San Francisco twinkling across the bay like the Emerald City of Oz. We'll buy you lunch. Pack your bags!

Best wishes,
Erik

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This week, our Book Clubbers discuss The Golden Age, Gore Vidal's opus about Washington and Hollywood in the 1940s and '50s. Click here to buy the book and here for an explanation of Slate's new and improved "Book Club" format.

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