Over the years Gore Vidal has spilled a lot of ink telling readers how the mass media murdered serious book culture in the US, but he is the only living US novelist to have his own coffee table book. Snapshots in History’s Glare is a photo album of fine design and no small expense ($40.00). It is published by Abrams, the preeminent art book publisher in the US. The fact that Vidal knew the jet set’s most beautiful people and lived in beautiful places provides ample justification. A photo album dedicated to Saul Bellow or John Updike or Philip Roth might not be so exciting to the Vanity Fair demographic.
Long-time readers of Vidal’s essays and earlier volumes of autobiography (Palimpsest [1995] and Point to Point Navigation [2006]) will be familiar with the narrative arc of his liner notes for Snapshots in History’s Glare: born to a privileged political-military family; a precocious youth spent in New Deal Washington DC; the early splash as a very serious post-war novelist; writing for theater, TV, and Hollywood in the 1950s; a return to the novel and many decades of hard work and high living. Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee Williams, JFK, and dozens more of the famous from politics, movies, TV, and the visual arts make their appearances.
The tone throughout the book clearly indicates Vidal is much pre-occupied with “last things” as he makes another tour through his life. Many, if not most, of the old friends are gone: Howard Austen, Paul Newman, Johnny Carson, and Tennessee Williams. Even old TV opponents like Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley Jr. have taken their places in the underworld. The pessimistic weltanschauung Vidal deploys is similar in range to that of Leopardi.
A stance, not a program
Few US novelists have been as successful as Vidal while at the same time being outspokenly and defiantly a rationalist, an atheist, a bisexual, and supremely derisive about the two-party electoral system (even when himself descending into the fray of electoral cretinism). His career nicely illustrates the deep contradictions imperialist culture reserves for the independent-minded artist: a critical and contrarian stance to the most ignorant, vulgar, and hypocritically squalid aspects of life under capitalism, but embracing a merely individual, negative view of opposition and analysis, sooner or later leading to quietist cynicism.
Vidal, like most petty bourgeois radicals of his generation (Chomsky, Mailer, Sontag, et cetera), is strongest when explaining the many crimes and base motivations behind Washington and Wall Street’s bloody rule at home and abroad. But when it comes time to given an answer to the “question of questions” that flows from such criticism (what is to be done?), nostrums and episodic quackery reign: in response to Nixon and Reagan, Vidal could only suggest a new constitutional convention or replacing the federal government with a parliamentary system. Tired of “perpetual war for perpetual peace”? Mourn eloquently, but don’t organize.
Vidal has been a consistent left radical in bourgeois politics since the Vietnam War. While many of his friends or fellow cultural workers capitulated over the years and embraced Reagan, the AEP, “ending welfare as we know it”, and the theory of Islamofascism, Vidal has remained faithful to the fully justified and honest outrage he first felt when he realized what the US did around the world in the name of its people. Today Vidal still empirically intuits the reactionary nature of U.S. imperialism from what he sees around him: it commits any crime and indulges in any lie and rationalization to justify the maintenance of its exploitive rule.
Rejecting all potential for progressive mass struggle and independent labor political action, as well as a progressive role for labor in general, Vidal often succumbs to snake oil ideas ubiquitous in middle class radical politics today: conspiracism and apocalyptic fatalism. Vidal waxes and wanes over time between praising the Machiavellianism of Clinton, decrying the Bush “junta”, and finally ending up predicting that Obama’s presidency will be overturned by rightists. His Cassandra sound bites no fighting perspective. Like Chomsky, he sees every turn of events in the world as making a fightback more impossible. He sees the U.S. ruling class as unbeatable both politically and militarily.
“A better essayist than a novelist?”
Attention given to Vidal’s polemics against imperialist war, loss of democratic rights, and the “end of the republic” (which Vidal has been eulogizing for about four decades) have pushed the novels into the background, safely ignored or written-off. This is unfortunate, as few novelists are as meticulous and graceful in their style, and as confident in the organization of material.
Messiah (1954) is a richly textured and lapidary fantasy perfectly delineating a stultified and increasingly irrational Cold War hothouse culture. In it, a Madison Avenue pro helps create and market a pseudo-science death cult that quickly overruns the US before the real meaning of life is discovered: more life.
Duluth (1983) is a brief, hectic, and funny novel about everyday life in the US as it might be narrated by a Martian (or an expatriate novelist).
Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), and The Golden Age (2000) tell the story of Vidal’s finest fictional creation, Caroline Sanford. From 1898 onward, she participates in everything from Hearst journalism to pre-code Hollywood to the Cold War. Along the way she meets such Vidal touchstones as Henry Adams and Eleanor Roosevelt. The faultless power and drama of these novels, and the unity they attain in following the growth, triumph, and apotheosis of a single character, give them a matchless authority.
Vidal’s novels embrace the contradictions history imposes on characters (real and invented) that have a sense – like their creator – that they inhabit history and being judged accordingly.
The theory that Vidal’s essays are superior to his fiction is a too-clever pose among reviewers eager to question the validity of everything Vidal writes. Certainly many of his essays (one on Tennessee Williams, another on the French New Novelists, two on Italo Calvino) are intelligent and provocative and a spur the reader. But most of the political essays, which are those reviewers particularly praise in order to damn the novels, are bitterly small-minded. Though larded with amusing anecdotes and acerbic bon mots, they never rise above the level of contrarian nay-saying.
Speaking truth to power is only the beginning of knowledge. For a Marxist even the cleverest castigations and send-ups of the two-party system or the national security state or the neo-cons will not serve. A mordantly skeptical bourgeois radicalism can lead to Tea Parties as easily as to a vote for John Kerry or Barrack Obama. The social function of such a stance is to disqualify considerations of independent working class political action. Vidal knows the rich run the world; after all, he went to school with a few of them. But sarcasm alternating with reformist vote-mongering hardly answers the damning bill of particulars Vidal himself lays at the feet of this ruling class. To the extent Vidal has ever given a thought to the toiling majority of humanity, it is to see it as an undifferentiated mass of complacent and somnolent consumers forever doomed to be tricked by those smarter than themselves.
Artists need not be held to account for their politics alone. The contradictions of bourgeois politics and bourgeois culture confronted by an artistic avant-garde that has never enjoyed the tutelage of a politically ascendant and mobilized proletariat typically produces authors with an even lower level of political consciousness and historical imagination than Vidal. Happily, his youth among the Washington, DC potentates and an early reverence for the most exacting of bourgeois novelist (Henry James, Thomas Mann) made for fertile ground, and the glare of history has done the rest.
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