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The Golden Age

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from: James Fallows

Patriotic Gore

Posted Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000, at 12:17 PM ET

I'm glad you've led us from the style of Gore Vidal's narrative to the content of his worldview. (Love the Tolstoy comparison.) And here at last we may have found something to disagree about. I think that the Vidal Theory of American democracy and America's place in the world, far from being totally bogus, in fact consists of equal and opposite elements: one part fatuous and poseur-like, and one part that I at least have sympathy for.

The part I find exasperating can be summed up as, "It's all one big conspiracy." This is a familiar, lazy, Hollywood-Manhattan view of politics. Its proponents look down pityingly at the rubes who pay attention to the surface-level action in politics--which politician made a good speech, which one has lined up labor endorsements, who says what about Medicare--poor fools. Don't they realize that the game is rigged from the start? Actual, tedious experience with how politics works has taught me, at least, that most things happen a) by accident and error; or b) pretty much for the observable reasons. But that's too dull to support a movie plot.

I suppose we should call this the Hollywood-Manhattan-Berkeley view, since each of those cities has produced a leading exponent. From Hollywood we have the master: Oliver Stone, with JFK. From our own Berkeley, Barbara Garson--whose Vietnam-era play MacBird developed the premise that Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady MacBird Johnson, had schemed to have John Kennedy murdered. And let's assign Gore Vidal to Manhattan, one of his several seats. (Others include Hollywood and his Italian villa.) He presents himself in this book as an "old Washingtonian," steeped in the ways of the town, but his sensibility is about as un-Washington as can be imagined. In most cases that wouldn't be a criticism, but to the extent it means that he indulges Stone-type "nothing is as it seems" fantasies, I intend it as one.

I'll let you pluck out some classics of conspiracy-reasoning as shown in the book. One of the few sustained plot elements is the effort to unveil the "secret" that FDR actively invited the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, as the way to overcome U.S. opposition to joining the war. (You know what's really mysterious about December 1941? Why Hitler declared war on the United States, after the American declaration of war on Japan. How exactly was that supposed to help the Germans?) This confuses a known strategic reality--that Roosevelt was drawing lines in Asia that sooner or later the Japanese would be forced to cross--with a sinister plot.

On the other hand, I like the way Vidal expresses his "America First" anti-imperial view in the book. Yes, I know that through the years he's given whiffs of the unsavory side of America-firstism. And yes, I know there is something odd about his patrician-proletarian stance, defending the American yeomanry from the evil elites planning to send them to war.

But I recognize and dislike even more the enemy Vidal is confronting: the politicians and pundits of D.C. who like to prove that they're Men of Consequence by talking about "showing firmness" around the world. And I think two of the better moments in the book are when Vidal openly argues his view that if America is an empire it can't be a democracy. One is an amazingly sympathetic portrayal of Herbert Hoover, trying to warn FDR what war would mean. ("Franklin goes on and on about how he hates war because he has seen war. As usual he lies ... Does he hate what he has never experienced? Who knows. But I had to feed the victims of that war [WWI], and I don't want anything like that to happen ever again.")

The other is a memo from a fictional Sen. James Burden Day, who opposes the George Marshall/Dean Acheson plan for full U.S. involvement in Europe to hold off the Soviet Union. "Those rich boys daydream about vast armies and navies conquering all the seas and lands while humble folk think of boys that we know--sons even--dying in a process that benefits no one but the international banks and the lawyer-lobbyists, like Mr. Acheson himself."

Is this shrill and nutty in its own way? Sure--especially when Vidal runs down George Marshall as a dolt. Was Hoover right (assuming he really said anything like that) about not facing Hitler? No. Does Vidal make these points better in his essays? Probably so. Still, they represent an actual, articulated worldview, and for that I give our man Gore some credit.

Don't tell anyone in Berkeley that I was making fun of MacBird. We can continue this when we run into each other at Cedar and Shattuck.

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from: James Fallows

Patriotic Gore

Posted Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000, at 12:17 PM 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'?"