Gore Vidal's Detective Novels
Posted by Seth Colter Walls
August 3, 2012
When a prolific literary figure dies, it's not terribly long before we're asked to rank the vast output. The top public quips are collated; the curious reader is instructed to either ignore the fiction in favor of the essays, or else the reverse. So has it been in the first days after the passing of Gore Vidal. And so I hope, by now, that there is room for an anti-hierarchical corrective: readers, please be wary of any attempt to dismiss any period of Vidal's novelistic activity, even that least well-known one in the early nineteen-fifties, during which Vidal produced genre fiction under a pen name. Vidal's crime novels don't merely share the high wit and style of his more "serious" fictions; they also drop some rare clues about the nascent thinking that went into the more oft-cited efforts.
Writing for The Nation, in 1958, several decades before the rise of the M.F.A. program, Vidal offered a few bracing words about the state of the novel in America. No one was talking about much of anything, at least so far as Vidal could tell—outside of maybe Norman Mailer (of whom Vidal could only report mixed feelings, on the best of days). After having diagnosed the "vitiating diffidence" of the nation's less ambitious authors, Vidal presumed to articulate a mission statement in their voice, which went, in part: "We don't know very much…. We are deep of course, often mystic, and we do know that love and compassion are the most beautiful things in the world and in our studies of loneliness we like to show the full potentiality of love … but we don't know or want to know any senators, bishops, atomic scientists; as for psychiatrists—well, we like ours: he is a Jungian."
Naturally, Vidal couldn't let this know-nothing party of well-regarded writers have the last word in his essay. In his closing paragraph, he went on to propose an alternative: not "a good novel about the wool trade or building a dam," but rather a renaissance of the satiric approach, in a decade Vidal saw as begging to be held up to that form of scrutiny.
Vidal's next novel under his own name, "Julian," would not emerge until six years after this essay, while his prior effort, "Messiah," had come out all the way back in 1954. To any status-wise observer of the publishing world at the time, Vidal's Nation piece must have sounded like a howl voiced from some bitter and lonely remove. But that analysis was only possible because Vidal had been writing a trilogy of crime novels in secret, under the pen name Edgar Box—and already following some of his own advice.
These crime novels are not self-consciously deep—or even conventionally good at giving the thrill of a case well solved—though they are certainly eager to show that they know things. The hero of Vidal's Edgar Box novels, Peter Sargeant II—who is a heterosexual stand-in for Vidal himself—is a full-time publicist, accidental sleuth, and opportunistic crime reporter who, in each of the three books, winds up doing much the same thing: he traipses to a public assignment of some sort in his professional capacity as a publicist, is present on the grounds when an Agatha Christie-like murder goes down, and then proceeds to outwit the simple-minded police over the ensuing days, while writing first-person dispatches about all the suspects for a paper called the New York Globe.
There is nothing at all mystic about a structure that flaunts its formulaic attributes so openly. And yet a reader of Vidal's later fictions can see in these books that he was learning how to indulge all that he already knew of the world—regarding sex, politics, the foibles of the upper classes, and the gutter competition of the journalistic cadre—in a kicky genre setting. The question of how Vidal would later make all his "Narrative of Empire" novels so furiously compelling, with all their political and historical minutiae, can be answered with a look at these supposedly tossed-off crime novels. (After he claimed them as his own, Vidal hardly shrank from speaking of these pulp novels with some pride—whether in regard to their craft or else their substance.)
A flash of Vidal's conspiracy-ready mind appears in "Death Before Bedtime," when Peter Sargeant is pushing the local police lieutenant to think a bit harder about the demise of the late Senator Leander Rhodes, chairman of the committee on Spoils and Patronage (!), whose explosive death would appear to have been masterminded by a desperate government-munitions contractor.
"The Lieutenant was not taking me very seriously," Sargeant tells us, "and I took this as a tribute to the stability of our country…. The whole idea of a political murder, an assassination on ideological grounds, seemed like complete nonsense to him. The presidents who had been killed in the past were all victims of crackpots, not political plots." And then comes Vidal's nod to the base pragmatism of the freelance investigator and journalist: "I decided to hold back my theories on political murder until I had a contract from the Globe safely in my hand." Sargeant talks down to the professional detectives, but never to the reader, who in turn gets the satisfaction of being inducted into the realm of the sophisticated sort who can understand why a murder might be about politics now and again—or why contracts are advisable to have nailed down before too many honest opinions are shared.
Even more challenging, given one of the reasons for Vidal's writing fiction under an assumed name in the early nineteen-fifties, is Sargeant's broad-mindedness regarding sexual appetites. As the New York Times obituary of Vidal noted this week, the author's 1948 novel about "same-sex sex," "The City and the Pillar," "may have" resulted in his being blacklisted from the New York Times Book Review, which in turn spurred publisher Victory Weybright to ask Vidal for something "popular" under another name that the Times wouldn't know to bar from its roundups of crime-fiction reviews.
Given that this was how Edgar Box's work was born, it's exciting to read how homosexuality crops up in Peter Sargeant's first assignment, in "Death in the Fifth Position," a yarn which sees a ballet troupe become the locus of a series of grisly onstage murders. Louis, the male star in the company, is a bisexual of noted aggression—"he's had every boy in the company … even the ones who like girls," Sargeant is warned. And, just like most of the women in the Edgar Box mysteries, Louis is immediately attracted to Peter Sargeant, who has to fight him off upon their first meeting:
We played tag a moment and then he grabbed me, holding me the way a boxer holds another boxer in a clinch and both of us trying not to make any noise, for different reasons. I wondered whether to knee him or not; the towel had fallen off. I decided against it for the good of the company. I would be fired if I did. On the other hand I was in danger of being ravished; I couldn't move without seriously injuring him and, on the other hand, I couldn't stand like this forever pressed against his front while he fumbled and groped with his one free hand, embarrassing me very much.
At another point, when Louis grabs Sargeant's arm and comments with admiration about the publicist-detective's biceps, Sargeant snaps back, "I got it from beating up faggots in Central Park." Though Louis isn't particularly menaced. ("You kill me, baby.")
In a more relaxed moment, however, Sargeant has the capacity to question whether his reflexive distaste is really all that justifiable, in a section that seems exquisitely ballsy—or at least insistent—of Vidal to have written, after having suffered already by crossing similar, though less pulpy, terrain: "I wasn't convinced of the manly end of it but then it all depends on how you look at such things…. He certainly acts like a man and there may be, who knows, not much difference between nailing a boy to a bed and treating a girl in like manner; it's all very confusing and I intend one day to sit down and figure the whole thing out."
Sargeant, the cocksure detective who can moderate his views regarding a conservative senator's smarts (and consequent danger), and who can (eventually) open his mind to a bit more of the continuum of sexual practice than is currently fashionable, all while solving the case in front of him, seems molded to be a better man's-man than the one Vidal had to contend with in real life, in the person of Norman Mailer. In discussing "Advertisements for Myself," in 1960, Vidal wrote: "[Mailer] is too much a demagogue; he swings from one position of cant to the other with an intensity that is visceral rather than intellectual. He is all fragments and pieces."
Several decades later, in "Palimpsest," Vidal expanded on this line:
[Mailer] was trained at Harvard as an engineer, and I have a theory that the mind of an engineer, though well suited for many things, is ill suited for either literature or politics. For the engineer everything must connect; while the natural writer or politician knows, instinctively, that nothing ever really connects except what we imagine science to be. Literature, like the politics of a Franklin Roosevelt, requires a divergent mind.
Sargeant's mind is not too far afield from this model: always ready to move or change orientation, but in a graceful, less shambling manner than Mailer. As with some of the other ideas Edgar Box was allowed to test out on the page in the early nineteen-fifties, Peter Sargeant II has a few opinions along these lines that predate the critical essays Vidal would later write. Sometimes, when facing a case that seems ready to wrap up on page one hundred, all the intellectual reporter/publicist/sleuth says is "I don't like neatness." So is it any shock to reveal that Vidal, at that point in his career, chose to make Sargeant an aspiring, if frustrated, novelist, too? Or that Sargeant had on his mind the very sort of big public questions that Vidal would later single out as lacking in contemporary fiction?
When thinking upon a murder suspect in the ballet-focussed book, Sargeant tells us as much about the novel that he's thinking about writing as he will at any other point in the trilogy—and it sounds as though Vidal is steering him toward a decidedly anti-demagogic (and divergent-minded) place:
I felt very sorry for him then not only because of the spot he was in but because I was quite sure he had murdered her … which shows something or other about mid-twentieth century morality: I mean, we seem to be less and less aroused by such things as private murders in an age when public murder is so much admired. If I ever get around to writing that novel, it's going to be about this sort of thing … the difference between what we say and do—you know what I mean. Anyway, I didn't make the world.
Here we have the gumshoe reimagined as a tragically resigned social critic. Though literary hindsight has a way of making the past seem so obvious—so long as we allow ourselves to pay attention—it feels as though the biggest mystery in these books is how the reading public never identified Edgar Box as Gore Vidal right away.
Posted by Seth Colter Walls
August 3, 2012
When a prolific literary figure dies, it's not terribly long before we're asked to rank the vast output. The top public quips are collated; the curious reader is instructed to either ignore the fiction in favor of the essays, or else the reverse. So has it been in the first days after the passing of Gore Vidal. And so I hope, by now, that there is room for an anti-hierarchical corrective: readers, please be wary of any attempt to dismiss any period of Vidal's novelistic activity, even that least well-known one in the early nineteen-fifties, during which Vidal produced genre fiction under a pen name. Vidal's crime novels don't merely share the high wit and style of his more "serious" fictions; they also drop some rare clues about the nascent thinking that went into the more oft-cited efforts.
Writing for The Nation, in 1958, several decades before the rise of the M.F.A. program, Vidal offered a few bracing words about the state of the novel in America. No one was talking about much of anything, at least so far as Vidal could tell—outside of maybe Norman Mailer (of whom Vidal could only report mixed feelings, on the best of days). After having diagnosed the "vitiating diffidence" of the nation's less ambitious authors, Vidal presumed to articulate a mission statement in their voice, which went, in part: "We don't know very much…. We are deep of course, often mystic, and we do know that love and compassion are the most beautiful things in the world and in our studies of loneliness we like to show the full potentiality of love … but we don't know or want to know any senators, bishops, atomic scientists; as for psychiatrists—well, we like ours: he is a Jungian."
Naturally, Vidal couldn't let this know-nothing party of well-regarded writers have the last word in his essay. In his closing paragraph, he went on to propose an alternative: not "a good novel about the wool trade or building a dam," but rather a renaissance of the satiric approach, in a decade Vidal saw as begging to be held up to that form of scrutiny.
Vidal's next novel under his own name, "Julian," would not emerge until six years after this essay, while his prior effort, "Messiah," had come out all the way back in 1954. To any status-wise observer of the publishing world at the time, Vidal's Nation piece must have sounded like a howl voiced from some bitter and lonely remove. But that analysis was only possible because Vidal had been writing a trilogy of crime novels in secret, under the pen name Edgar Box—and already following some of his own advice.
These crime novels are not self-consciously deep—or even conventionally good at giving the thrill of a case well solved—though they are certainly eager to show that they know things. The hero of Vidal's Edgar Box novels, Peter Sargeant II—who is a heterosexual stand-in for Vidal himself—is a full-time publicist, accidental sleuth, and opportunistic crime reporter who, in each of the three books, winds up doing much the same thing: he traipses to a public assignment of some sort in his professional capacity as a publicist, is present on the grounds when an Agatha Christie-like murder goes down, and then proceeds to outwit the simple-minded police over the ensuing days, while writing first-person dispatches about all the suspects for a paper called the New York Globe.
There is nothing at all mystic about a structure that flaunts its formulaic attributes so openly. And yet a reader of Vidal's later fictions can see in these books that he was learning how to indulge all that he already knew of the world—regarding sex, politics, the foibles of the upper classes, and the gutter competition of the journalistic cadre—in a kicky genre setting. The question of how Vidal would later make all his "Narrative of Empire" novels so furiously compelling, with all their political and historical minutiae, can be answered with a look at these supposedly tossed-off crime novels. (After he claimed them as his own, Vidal hardly shrank from speaking of these pulp novels with some pride—whether in regard to their craft or else their substance.)
A flash of Vidal's conspiracy-ready mind appears in "Death Before Bedtime," when Peter Sargeant is pushing the local police lieutenant to think a bit harder about the demise of the late Senator Leander Rhodes, chairman of the committee on Spoils and Patronage (!), whose explosive death would appear to have been masterminded by a desperate government-munitions contractor.
"The Lieutenant was not taking me very seriously," Sargeant tells us, "and I took this as a tribute to the stability of our country…. The whole idea of a political murder, an assassination on ideological grounds, seemed like complete nonsense to him. The presidents who had been killed in the past were all victims of crackpots, not political plots." And then comes Vidal's nod to the base pragmatism of the freelance investigator and journalist: "I decided to hold back my theories on political murder until I had a contract from the Globe safely in my hand." Sargeant talks down to the professional detectives, but never to the reader, who in turn gets the satisfaction of being inducted into the realm of the sophisticated sort who can understand why a murder might be about politics now and again—or why contracts are advisable to have nailed down before too many honest opinions are shared.
Even more challenging, given one of the reasons for Vidal's writing fiction under an assumed name in the early nineteen-fifties, is Sargeant's broad-mindedness regarding sexual appetites. As the New York Times obituary of Vidal noted this week, the author's 1948 novel about "same-sex sex," "The City and the Pillar," "may have" resulted in his being blacklisted from the New York Times Book Review, which in turn spurred publisher Victory Weybright to ask Vidal for something "popular" under another name that the Times wouldn't know to bar from its roundups of crime-fiction reviews.
Given that this was how Edgar Box's work was born, it's exciting to read how homosexuality crops up in Peter Sargeant's first assignment, in "Death in the Fifth Position," a yarn which sees a ballet troupe become the locus of a series of grisly onstage murders. Louis, the male star in the company, is a bisexual of noted aggression—"he's had every boy in the company … even the ones who like girls," Sargeant is warned. And, just like most of the women in the Edgar Box mysteries, Louis is immediately attracted to Peter Sargeant, who has to fight him off upon their first meeting:
We played tag a moment and then he grabbed me, holding me the way a boxer holds another boxer in a clinch and both of us trying not to make any noise, for different reasons. I wondered whether to knee him or not; the towel had fallen off. I decided against it for the good of the company. I would be fired if I did. On the other hand I was in danger of being ravished; I couldn't move without seriously injuring him and, on the other hand, I couldn't stand like this forever pressed against his front while he fumbled and groped with his one free hand, embarrassing me very much.
At another point, when Louis grabs Sargeant's arm and comments with admiration about the publicist-detective's biceps, Sargeant snaps back, "I got it from beating up faggots in Central Park." Though Louis isn't particularly menaced. ("You kill me, baby.")
In a more relaxed moment, however, Sargeant has the capacity to question whether his reflexive distaste is really all that justifiable, in a section that seems exquisitely ballsy—or at least insistent—of Vidal to have written, after having suffered already by crossing similar, though less pulpy, terrain: "I wasn't convinced of the manly end of it but then it all depends on how you look at such things…. He certainly acts like a man and there may be, who knows, not much difference between nailing a boy to a bed and treating a girl in like manner; it's all very confusing and I intend one day to sit down and figure the whole thing out."
Sargeant, the cocksure detective who can moderate his views regarding a conservative senator's smarts (and consequent danger), and who can (eventually) open his mind to a bit more of the continuum of sexual practice than is currently fashionable, all while solving the case in front of him, seems molded to be a better man's-man than the one Vidal had to contend with in real life, in the person of Norman Mailer. In discussing "Advertisements for Myself," in 1960, Vidal wrote: "[Mailer] is too much a demagogue; he swings from one position of cant to the other with an intensity that is visceral rather than intellectual. He is all fragments and pieces."
Several decades later, in "Palimpsest," Vidal expanded on this line:
[Mailer] was trained at Harvard as an engineer, and I have a theory that the mind of an engineer, though well suited for many things, is ill suited for either literature or politics. For the engineer everything must connect; while the natural writer or politician knows, instinctively, that nothing ever really connects except what we imagine science to be. Literature, like the politics of a Franklin Roosevelt, requires a divergent mind.
Sargeant's mind is not too far afield from this model: always ready to move or change orientation, but in a graceful, less shambling manner than Mailer. As with some of the other ideas Edgar Box was allowed to test out on the page in the early nineteen-fifties, Peter Sargeant II has a few opinions along these lines that predate the critical essays Vidal would later write. Sometimes, when facing a case that seems ready to wrap up on page one hundred, all the intellectual reporter/publicist/sleuth says is "I don't like neatness." So is it any shock to reveal that Vidal, at that point in his career, chose to make Sargeant an aspiring, if frustrated, novelist, too? Or that Sargeant had on his mind the very sort of big public questions that Vidal would later single out as lacking in contemporary fiction?
When thinking upon a murder suspect in the ballet-focussed book, Sargeant tells us as much about the novel that he's thinking about writing as he will at any other point in the trilogy—and it sounds as though Vidal is steering him toward a decidedly anti-demagogic (and divergent-minded) place:
I felt very sorry for him then not only because of the spot he was in but because I was quite sure he had murdered her … which shows something or other about mid-twentieth century morality: I mean, we seem to be less and less aroused by such things as private murders in an age when public murder is so much admired. If I ever get around to writing that novel, it's going to be about this sort of thing … the difference between what we say and do—you know what I mean. Anyway, I didn't make the world.
Here we have the gumshoe reimagined as a tragically resigned social critic. Though literary hindsight has a way of making the past seem so obvious—so long as we allow ourselves to pay attention—it feels as though the biggest mystery in these books is how the reading public never identified Edgar Box as Gore Vidal right away.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/08/gore-vidals-detective-novels.html#ixzz22aDPZeDw
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