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The Golden Age

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from: James Fallows

Our Man Gore

Posted Monday, Sept. 18, 2000, at 11:30 AM ET

Good morning, Erik. Gee, I guess if we want people to keep reading, we should make clear that our man this week is Gore Vidal, not any other Gore. "Our" Gore is apparently some distant relation to the Other Gore; indeed, our Gore seems to know or be related to just about everyone, which is a theme I suspect we'll revisit. But we have the good fortune of dealing with a Gore who has never been called stiff or uninteresting.

As leadoff clubber, I have two duties: explaining what the book is about, and suggesting a leitmotif. Let me start on both by revealing our little secret, yours and mine.

No, the secret is not that we're located less than a mile from each other as we type this week's dispatches. If two correspondents were that close to each other in Manhattan or D.C, it would seem natural rather than parochial. But we're both tucked into the North Berkeley hills, your real home and my temporary one, so I guess we'll have to watch out for sounding "regional."

The real secret I have in mind is that we share the same birthday, one year apart, and have both recently entered our, umm, middle years. "Middle," if we live to 100. I mention this because generational-position and the passing of years have a lot to do with the subject of this book and also with my reaction to it. Indeed, I'll put these age-related points in the form of two hypotheses, for debate. The first, concerning subject, is that while this book is called a novel, it really should be seen as Vidal's memoir of the political life he has observed. The second, concerning reaction, is that, if it were considered as a novel, it would lead to the discouraging conclusion that Vidal, one generation older than us, is past his prime.

I will try to sell you on point No. 1 but hope you can talk me out of point No. 2, because I have been just about slavish as a fan of Vidal's. I hugely admire the way he's led his (literary) life--he keeps turning things out, he's succeeded in a wide variety of forms, he willed himself into prominence as a historical novelist and became very good at it. His novel Lincoln is a masterwork, in my view--and the more impressive for coming from the same person who wrote Visit to a Small Planet and Myra Breckenridge.

His essays and book reviews would on their own constitute a respectable output for most writers. And I have always thought that, sentence by sentence, his essays displayed a kind of perfectly controlled, economical archness that West Coast rustics like us should humbly study and emulate. Here's the clearest way I can illustrate the impact of his prose: I still remember a springtime day in 1973, when I opened an issue of the New York Review of Books and read his survey of the books then on the New York Times best-seller list. Vidal was then a little younger than we are now; I was the age my older son is now, I had just started working at the Washington Monthly, and I was walking home to save the 40-cent bus fare. I read as I walked and was so admiring that I kept bumping into things.

Imagine, then, how my heart sank on encountering this, the second sentence of The Golden Age:

He had just pulled into the driveway to Laurel House, set high above the slow-churning Potomac River, and there before him in the icy silver moonlight was the start of his movie had David O. Selznick not outbid him for the movie rights and then hired Alfred Hitchcock, of all people, to direct.

The third sentence is, "Plainly, a true disaster was now in the making." I hoped this was the old archness slyly reasserting itself and hope you can convince that that is so.

OK, so what is the book about? As Vidal's fans know, he began a series of historical novels with Burr--yes, he is related to Aaron Burr. I've read Burr and 1876 of this series; since you're an Actual Novelist, Erik, maybe you've read and can tell us about more. Descendants of characters in the earlier books appear in this one. And mainly, they watch American politics happen in the time between the run-up to FDR's victory in the 1940 election to the end of Bill Clinton's term. Along the way, Vidal expresses his views about the underlying tragedy of 20^th-century American Empire--the way little elite cabals are always tricking the public into costly foreign adventures.

I say this should be considered a memoir rather than a novel because the things it recounts seem to correspond closely to those Vidal witnessed or remembered. He was 15 at the time of the 1940 conventions, which play a big part here, and I believe in a recent interview Vidal said that his politically connected relatives had taken him to that convention. The young-man Vidal actually appears as a character in the novel, at literary-political parties in the late-1940s when he was getting noticed for Williwaw. Do you think these scenes are effective? I thought they were creepy, or nuts:

"Tim Farrell was standing with Gore Vidal at the foot of the stairs. Gore, Peter noticed, with some pain, was still lean while he himself had never been heavier or hungrier."

Once I decided to mentally re-title this book: "My Golden Years: Prominent People I've Met and Interesting Things I've Thought," I actually began to enjoy it. But tell me if I'm wrong about what's wrong with it as a novel:

Not much plot, in the normal sense. There is incidental stage action, but what really seems to drive the book is the collection of set-pieces: the rise of Wendell Wilkie, what the McCarthy years were really like, etc.
Some atypically sloppy writing. I'll limit myself to one more sentence, about FDR:

Somehow, everything had been dramatically changed by the mysterious cripple in the White House, who fascinated everyone as he spun his webs all round an entire world that was now rapidly converging upon the city in an effort to get his spidery eminence's attention so that, yet again, the maps of old Europe--and who knew what else of the world?--might be redrawn.

A repeated, heavy-handed trick that seems well beneath his talents. This is the "ironic," winking introduction of characters who their contemporaries don't know are famous--but the reader does! "There's a young man over there, kind of an odd duck, sure he'll never amount to much. Oh Ben, young Ben Franklin, come here a minute!" That's not in the book, but a dozen things like it are.

So, whaddya think? Is it really a novel? If so, is it a better one than I think?

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from: James Fallows

Our Man Gore

Posted Monday, Sept. 18, 2000, at 11:30 AM ET

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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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Reader Comments from The Fray:

Mr Tarloff's memory fails him concerning Vidal's discussion of The Winds of War; [Monday] Vidal gave the book a pretty thorough drubbing. It was Mary Renault for whom he betrayed the sneaking affection. Alas, the sentences you fellows have chosen to quote are pretty dire, and it seems that the Lion of Ravello may at last be succumbing to the writerly entropy that drags down all except Saul Bellow (so far). I always found most of the novels a bit--what, astringent?--but let's remember him above all as the finest essayist our nation produced in the 20th century. The American Montaigne will always be welcome on that shabby table at my bedside.

--Bruce Lanier Wright

(To reply, click here.)

If I might rattle the teacups a bit, these two gentlemen are delineating fine points of the novel in an atmosphere so rarefied as to be all but unbreathable. What has happened to the Berkeley air?

I, too, remember with deep admiration Vidal's NYRB piece reviewing all 10 novels on the NY Times fiction bestseller list. Have our correspondents looked at the NY Times fiction bestseller list lately? Granted there are 15 books on it now, but no writer who prizes his sanity would dream of reviewing most of that sludge. But it was possible back then. It's not now.

My point is not that in a sloppy age Vidal is to be forgiven slapdash practice of the craft of fiction. By all means, summon Tolstoy and Joyce and Henry James to make your case against Vidal (if, indeed, those writers are precisely relevant to a discussion of The Golden Age?) But both of you go on to fault Vidal for writing about, caring about, a Big Idea. For pete's sake, at least he has one! Roth, Updike, Bellow-and Vidal--can barely make it to the bestseller list these days, and surely can't stay on it long.

Do you gentlemen who care for the craft of fiction note the decline that has occurred in the last quarter-century? Vidal does, I'm sure; and I'll wager The Golden Age will be more important, more memorable, than the finely crafted Jamesian ironies now propounded by twelfth-rate imitators of James currently practicing fiction, precisely because Vidal's work does at least tackle ideas. That's one of the jobs of the novel, a job few "craftsmanlike" writers today even consider undertaking. Please ponder that poisonous state of affairs before you start lambasting Vidal for not advancing the art of fiction in his latest novel. What art of fiction? Him and who else?

Besides, Vidal has already advanced the art considerably (to take a small example, consider the paradox that Vidal's Lincoln, beloved of both our correspondents, is about a tragic president yet is structured comically, like a Trollope novel, with the White House at the center of the action like a Barchester manse; this is a book written by a man who knows the novel form intimately). In novel after novel, from Myra Breckenridge to Creation, Vidal has stretched the form to accommodate ideas. To take him to task now for finishing what he--and, I'd submit, largely he alone--started with respect to American historical fiction is to underappreciate his considerable contribution. I'm betting that The Golden Age, even if wobbly, will stand alone as a kind of fiction not much honored, much less done well, these days. As a novelist, Vidal will take a tormenting idea over a tormented ego any day. That fast-fading literary instinct--you can't buy it or teach it in a writing class--is to be cherished, not trashed.

--Ivan Webster

(To reply, click here.)

Notes from the Fray Editor: There was this argument on which was Vidal's first historical novel. And Colleen wants to tell James Fallows "if you read Washington, DC you will find out all about Diana, Clay and Peter in the early years and it will answer all the questions you asked in your piece. He is just not re-treading old ground--it is a series and meant to be read that way."

Loki says Gore Vidal just is like that, he hasn't changed: "These types of sentences have appeared in almost all the novels I've read from him. I guess it's a matter of taste, but hardly worth pointing out, really...and what exactly is anachronistic about the term 'elitist'?"