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The Golden Age

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from: A.O. Scott

Broadway Dispatch: Reviving Gore

Posted Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000, at 3:34 PM ET

Dear Erik and Jim,

Like both of you, I'm a confirmed Vidalian, though I care more about the essays--especially the ones he did for the New York Review in the '70s and '80s, on subjects from (as you mentioned) the New York Times best-seller list, to Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (the book, not the movie) to Calvino and Mishima--than the novels, about which I'm inclined to agree with Erik's "first row of the second-raters" assessment. There is no literary critic of the past 40 years I'd rather read, and I don't mean this as faint praise, since I believe (self-servingly, no doubt) that criticism is the lifeblood of civilization.

And speaking of civilization, it's a shame to hear that, in The Golden Age, Vidal, no longer content to be its ablest chronicler, has decided to appoint himself its master theorist. He has never been one for modesty ("Of course I love my country," he once wrote, after having his patriotism questioned by, if memory serves, Midge Decter, "I'm its official biographer"), but his taste for Spenglerian grandiosity has become more pronounced of late, and his provocations have hardened into crotchets. Some of this is perhaps the familiar tendency of senior citizens to repeat themselves, and to settle down to the retrospective contemplation of vanished golden ages, personal and historic. Tell us again, Uncle Gore, about how you shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy, about how your granddad was a great blind Oklahoma senator ("the real senator Gore"), about how you stuck that homoerotic subtext into the script of Ben-Hur right under Charlton Heston's butch little aquiline nose ... And in the mix of old gossip and worn anecdote the note of pontification and conspiracy-mongering sounds louder and shriller. Someone in "The Fray" drew a cruel, but not altogether inapt, parallel to Grandpa Simpson. ("The president is a Demmycrat!")

But last night, happily, I was privileged to witness, in the company of our Book Club's editor, a bit of Vidal in his witty, crowd-pleasing prime. His 1960 play The Best Man is currently being revived on Broadway. (The film version, starring Henry Fonda in the role played by Spalding Gray in the current production, was the key text in David Edelstein's incisive survey of movies about American politics a few weeks ago.) The production, as my colleague Ben Brantley noted in his review, could use a bit more snap and maybe a few more weeks of rehearsal. (Spalding Gray, in one of his better performances as a person other than himself, tripped over his lines a few times too many.) What was most fascinating about the evening was the curious blend of datedness, topicality, and timelessness. The setting is an old-fashioned political convention: the climactic moment, in which a deadlock over the party's presidential nominee is broken on the sixth ballot, might as well, for someone of my age, be taking place in the court of Nebuchadnezzar. But the play's specific political issues--the relationship between private behavior and political fitness, the dragging of a politician's sex life into a campaign--are eerily prescient, as though Vidal had glimpsed the crisis of the Clinton presidency in the year of Kennedy's election.

What makes The Best Man worth seeing now--aside from the in itself sufficient reason that it's a sharp, entertaining, and accessible piece of theater--is Vidal's lucid insight into the deep moral logic of democratic politics, its counterpoint of means and ends, its porous boundary between honor and corruption. The three main characters are at once recognizable American types--the flawed, upright patrician liberal, the grasping self-made demagogue, the wily backwoods operator--and quasi-allegorical figures. The question the play raises is whether the democratic system is rigged to ensure the defeat of the best and most capable leaders. And though, like any good political play, it deals from a stacked deck, The Best Man, especially now, addresses the question with a welcome sense of irony and complexity. Some of Vidal's characteristic preoccupations are in evidence--his distaste for monotheism and monogamy, his populism, his snobbish disdain for television--but the full Weltanschauung has not yet lumbered into view.

Like Jim, I have sympathy for many of that Weltanschauung's features, in particular its skepticism of the claims of empire, and I think Vidal has performed a heroic service to the republic by calling attention to, and extending, a dissenting tradition that links the now-forgotten or maligned figures in his American pantheon: Daniel Shays, Aaron Burr, Henry Adams, William Jennings Bryan, and his own grandfather, the real Sen. Gore. It's interesting to recall that, while The Best Man was in its original run on Broadway, its author was running for Congress--as a Demmycrat--in upstate New York. He lost his heavily Republican district but got more votes in it than Kennedy did. Though it was doomed, Vidal's wasn't a celebrity vanity campaign, like Norman Mailer's run for mayor of New York in 1969 or his own later run for the U.S. Senate in California, but rather a brave gamble on the possibility that, in the midst of empire, it might be possible to live up to the old republican ideal of civic obligation, to be a man of letters and a man of politics at the same time, and in fulfillment of the same enlightenment impulse. A laudable ambition, it seems to me, even if quixotic. In the past few days, some interesting historical parallels have been raised--by you two and in The Fray--between Vidal and Tolstoy, James, Montaigne, etc., all of them interesting and, in their way, just. But to me Vidal at his best is a latter-day Jonathan Swift, a one man Addison and Steele: the greatest 18^th-century American writer of the 20^th century.

All the best,
Tony

the book club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

from: A.O. Scott

Broadway Dispatch: Reviving Gore

Posted Wednesday, Sept. 20, 2000, at 3:34 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'?"