Gore Vidal, Radical Contrarian

Shortly after Patrick White’s death an admirer published a compendium of tributes to the famous Australian writer: Patrick White: A Tribute, edited by Clayton Joyce. Contributors ranged from academics such as Dorothy Green and Manning Clark to well-known columnists and politicians. The tributes were generous but not entirely laudatory. The historian W.J. Hudson, for example, confessed that he had never met Patrick White and doubted, if by chance they had met, that the conversation would have run smoothly—it seemed that very few of the Nobel laureate’s plays or novels were to Hudson’s liking, and he wasn’t stirred by the issues that had prompted White to raise his voice at public rallies.

Having made this confession, Hudson moved quickly to his main point:

Yet it remains that whatever confidence I have left in Australian society probably is based more on Patrick White than on any other. The reason for this simply is that, not uniquely but more than most, he seems never to have surrendered to group or fashion. He was his own person … What makes White stand out is not so much his scorn for the trashy and the mediocre as his capacity for aloneness, for pursuing his art and his life without protective colouring, without coteries … When one thinks of Patrick White one does not think of a push. Patrick White was Patrick White, and in that he would have been admirable even if he had not been a man of the highest art and cultivation.

Hudson went on to mention another quality:

In the very harshness of his repudiation of what he saw as philistinism, White showed an anguish inseparable from concern … He paid us the compliment of telling us in his own tones and his own language how we might do better.

Unlike White, these observations suggest, contrarians in this country are mostly well-known not so much for the independence of their outlook, or for the value of their insights, but rather for the predictability of their opinions—whether they conform to the fashion of the day.

The tone of contrarians of a radical hue will vary from place to place, of course, and an understanding of the context in which their views are expressed will colour the interpretation of what they have to say. If one turns to the United States for the sake of comparison, and to the era in which Patrick White came to prominence, it will be useful to revisit the life and times of Gore Vidal and to wonder what tributes, if any, would have marked his demise had he lived and worked in Australia.

Novelist, playwright, essayist, the author of two sardonic autobiographical works, both of which—like Patrick White’s Flaws in the Glass—mock the political and literary establishments, Gore Vidal had a penchant for skewering the pretensions of the rich and powerful in a tone of patrician disdain. In such a mood, in the aftermath of the Whitlam dismissal, Patrick White returned his Order of Australia because to keep “the wretched object” would have seemed “like taking a bribe”. Gore Vidal initially declined membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the grounds that he already belonged to Diners Club.

Born in West Point, Gore Vidal was the son of a football coach at the military school who went on to become Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s director of air commerce. Brought up in Washington DC, Gore Vidal spent a good deal of his youth in the company of his blind grandfather, a prominent senator who seems to have instilled in his grandson a deeply-rooted respect for the ideals underlying the American Constitution and a taste for the potent (at times sordid) stew of political life.

Having written a work of fiction drawing upon his war service, Gore Vidal soon became notorious for writing one of the first overtly gay novels in the post-war period: The City and the Pillar. He won renown as a playwright, as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, as a prolific novelist and later, being close to the Kennedy clan, he even stood as a candidate for Congress, but without success.

He then embarked upon a series of loosely linked novels presented as his own informal history of the United States, commencing with Burr, set in the Jeffersonian era, then leaping forward to Lincoln and the Civil War, digressing in 1876 to deal with the Hayes–Tilden election scandal of that year, before turning in Empire to the imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt, in Hollywood to the chicanery of the Harding administration, and in Washington DC to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to stack the Supreme Court and to the post-war McCarthy era. In The Golden Age Vidal closed the historical series (and the narrative circle) with the provocative thought that FDR was possibly complicit in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—as a means of bringing the United States into the war—and a suggestion that FDR and Truman were collectively responsible for creating a surveillance state and committing the nation to an imperial agenda.

The writing of these novels was accompanied by the publication of various satirical effusions such as Myra Breckinridge and Myron, plus the bizarre sci-fi novel Duluth which ends with President Reagan negotiating the sale of Washington DC to the Disney Corporation. To these must be added a flow of discursive essays about literature and current affairs which are regarded by some commentators as Vidal’s most significant work: Gore Vidal’s United States: Essays 1952-1992.

The autobiographies—Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation—ponder Vidal’s relationship with the Kennedys and dwell upon the pretensions of various other notables including Orson Welles, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Vidal’s television sparring partner Norman Mailer. (When Vidal was knocked to the floor by Mailer in the aftermath of an appearance on The Dick Cavitt Show he said of his rival in a characteristically sardonic tone: “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.”)

On August 3, 2012, the marquee lights of Broadway theatres were dimmed in respectful acknowledgment of Vidal’s death three days earlier. At that time the most recent revival of his play The Best Man was still running—a play set in the Kennedy–Nixon era which epitomises the dire connection between politics and performance—and when politicians, actors and media personalities gathered for his memorial they heard Gore Vidal described by Congressman Dennis Kucinic as “a connoisseur of foreboding”.

The irreverent outlook, the acerbic tone that permeates Vidal’s essays and interviews, is to be found also in every corner of his historical novels, and it is certainly apparent in Washington DC, published in 1968 on the eve of the Nixon ascendancy. Gore Vidal’s principal character is the ageing Senator Burden Day, a presidential aspirant in the war years, who is eventually displaced by one his former staffers, Clay Overbury, a parvenu with an acclaimed but dubious war record who masters the art of political blackmail. Not surprisingly, Clay refuses to denounce McCarthyism until it is opportune to do so.

Towards the end of the novel, while reviewing his career, Burden Day wonders what he meant when he first proposed himself to the voters: an obscure young lawyer who wanted to be President:

The answer was, not much; but as the years passed he had so created himself that, finally, he did become what he seemed to be (despite one lapse) and that was the most any man could hope to achieve in a political system where the one unforgivable sin was to tell the dangerous truth. “Hypocrisy our shield, inaction our sword,” he had once observed in the cloakroom, to the laughter of his peers, who knew exactly what he meant. He had learnt very early that to do any good thing in the Senate, one must first present it as an act of self-interest since to do good for its own sake aroused suspicion. Mrs Roosevelt had been genuinely hated for what seemed to be a genuine lack of self-interest. Ultimately, she had been effective only because certain Senators, disliking her, decided that at heart she was a superb Machiavelli using the public money to attract the unwashed to the Roosevelt banner. Self-interest acknowledged, even she could occasionally work a miracle in the Congress.

Later in the novel another character, the newspaper proprietor Peter Sanford, forms the view that as time passed the division was bound to widen between the many who felt and the few who thought: “or was it, he sometimes wondered, simply between those who thought they were feeling and those who felt they were thinking?”

Sanford then says to a supposedly idealistic reporter:

You know, in a dreadful way, I’m much closer in character to Clay than I am to you. I was brought up to respect deeds, not theories; victories, not virtues. I see politics as men improvising. You see it as a series of stately position papers, reflecting some vast historic process. In the long run, you may be right. But the prizes in the moment go to the busy empty men like Clay, and though I may be unfair to the breed I do have his range, something you will never get.

In his portrayal of Clay Overbury, supposedly born only a few years earlier than Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Vidal shows in various passages akin to satire the dark processes behind the making of a successful American politician in the twentieth century, from the carefully shaped war record to the melodramatic television appearances, as on the occasion when Richard Nixon wound up his defence to charges of corruption by mentioning Checkers—the little cocker spaniel born and bred in Texas: “We did get a gift … And you know, the kids love the dog and I just want to say this right now … we’re going to keep it!”

In Empire, another novel in the historical series in which Gore Vidal adroitly blends fact and fiction, the newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst tells President Theodore Roosevelt that he has “created” him by making a heroic epic out of TR’s involvement in a minor raid up a Cuban hill during the Spanish-American war, to which TR replies with as much dignity as he can muster that “true history” will be the judge of that. With a shrug, Hearst replies: “True history is the final fiction.”

Some years later, in his essay “The Agreed-Upon Facts”, Vidal revisited this opinion. The press invents us all, he suggested, and the later biographer or historian

can only select from the mass of crude fictions and part-truths, those facts that his contemporaries are willing to agree upon. Where many English departments now favour literary theory over literature, the history departments—too often drudging bureaucrats—are solemnly aware that their agreed-upon facts must constitute, at least in the short term, a view of the Republic that will please the University trustees … All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead, and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require.

Elsewhere in the same essay, Gore Vidal admits to continuing endlessly

to explain, to examine, to prophesy, particularly in these various novels where I deal with the history of the United States from the beginning to now. The fact that there is still a public interested in finding out who we are and what we did ought to encourage other writers to join me. But, by and large, universities have made that impossible. They have established a hegemony over every aspect of literature except the ability to make any … Mary McCarthy recently listed all the things you can’t put into a serious novel today, from a sunset to a hanging to a cabinet meeting.

It will be apparent from this overview of Gore Vidal’s writings that he disdains current orthodoxies or cosy assumptions. He says what he thinks and speaks without the aid of a protective colouring. The passages from Washington DC mentioned earlier reveal that his views are often spiced with a satiric undertone. The shenanigans of his fictional characters and their vernacular may seem bizarre at times but that is how the satirist usually works: by exaggeration, by the use of irony, by denunciation (or even demolition) as a means of keeping standards in good repair, pointing to how we might do better.

In an essay on Montaigne, Gore Vidal noted that the French philosopher’s political interests were to one side of his main preoccupation: the exploration of self. But in the course of that essay, while dealing with Montaigne’s observation that the fruits of dissension are usually not gathered up by those who initiate a controversy, Vidal described his own approach to public debate as “the great task of reworking my country’s broken-down political system”. This description of his so-called task might seem far-fetched, even vainglorious, coming as it did from the pen of a mere wordsmith, but it can’t be brushed aside.

One of Vidal’s contemporaries, Louis Auchincloss, a New York lawyer, a novelist and a keen observer of the American scene, confessed to being “uneasy” in some parts of Gore Vidal’s world after reading Burr and becoming hot under the collar at what he considered a travesty of his hero, Thomas Jefferson. He added:

But since that time the bottom has fallen out of my old world. We have undergone Watergate and Irangate; we have seen a President resign from office under fire and a daydreaming movie star occupy the White House … I have had to face the nasty fact that the world is—and probably always was—a good deal closer to the one brilliantly savaged by Vidal than any I had imagined. And finally, in the second volume of Robert Caro’s heavily documented life of LBJ the author attempts to prove that the lauded Texan liberal was the greatest and most unabashed rigger of elections in our political history. We may yet live to see Vidal branded as a sentimentalist!

Such an outcome seems unlikely. The problem facing the contemporary satirist in the United States, according to Vidal, is of a different kind. “If satire is to be effective,” he lamented in his essay “Visit to a Small Planet”:

the audience must be aware of the thing satirised. If they are not, the joke falls flat. Unfortunately, for our native satirists, the American mass audience possesses very little general information on any subject. Each individual knows his own immediate world, but as various research polls continually inform us, he holds little knowledge in common with others.

The Australian scene is affected by limitations of the same kind, and as to political knowledge held in common with others, the situation might even be worse, for our constitutional system lacks the mystique instilled in North American schoolchildren by the Declaration of Independence and victory in a revolutionary war. For many people in the Australian community, political events, from leadership challenges to changes of government, leave only a faint impression. Moreover, in an age of political correctness it becomes increasingly difficult for the would-be satirist to assume that the audience is aware of the thing satirised, and to practise his art with subtlety. Speech codes that were introduced initially to sanitise the language by suppressing some of its prejudicial features have led in the end to the creation of various taboo topics that can’t be discussed. The satirist finds it hard to hit targets that have been rendered invisible and finishes up resorting to farce.

The fact is that much of what passes for satire in modern Australia is little more than a string of obvious jokes, and the remedial objective is mostly absent. The self-professed contrarian simply strikes a predictable pose and, with a wink and a nudge, echoes the current orthodoxies, with little inclination, as Montaigne might have it, to relate his remarks to the exploration of self. And yet, the Australian novelist David Foster, one of the few absolutely fearless voices on the Australian literary scene, with considerable insight once described satire as a work portraying a civilisation in decline by a man who has felt it in his own personality.

This brings me to a new work, Political Animal: Gore Vidal and Power by Heather Neilson (Monash University Publishing). The author, who is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales, Canberra campus, has made a wide-ranging study of the American writer and it is apparent from the citations that she not only interviewed Gore Vidal but also corresponded with him as her research proceeded. This adds a personal dimension to what proves to be a perceptive analysis of Vidal’s oeuvre, although she maintains a scholarly tone throughout.

Heather Neilson begins with a survey of Gore Vidal’s career. She reminds us that for several years Vidal’s revered grandfather—the blind senator Thomas Pryor Gore—relied on his precocious grandson to read to him, thus giving Vidal, in turn, the benefit of a rigorous education in history, political science and classical literature. The first part of her book—called Ancient Worlds—looks at Vidal’s reconstructions of various eras and episodes in classical times, although it quickly becomes apparent that these are used by Vidal to make the reader think about modern America, and the themes pervading Vidal’s works generally.

Neilson describes the novel Julian—a portrait of the last pagan Roman emperor—as a sustained lament for the world that was conquered by Christianity, a story that asks to be read alongside Vidal’s play The Best Man for its observations about the exercise of power, the nature of political instincts and the politician’s perpetual habit of perceiving himself as being engaged in a form of theatrical performance. The demystification of American imperialism is said to be one of the recurring forms of satire in Creation. And in the same novel, according to Heather Neilson, the narrator’s fictional memoir belies his insistence that what he is writing is a Persian history. She says: “His narrative calls into question the very concept of a national history, and complicates the distinction between history and fiction, and fiction and autobiography.” She notes elsewhere that “throughout his oeuvre Vidal identifies vanity as the most common weakness of the powerful”.

In the next part of the book Neilson takes us from ancient worlds to the series of historical novels set in North America and to Vidal’s self-appointed role as the man who says what needs to be said. Again, the trope of politics as a form of theatre predominates, mastery of the art of self-fashioning being a crucial element in the pursuit of power, from the first novel in the series (Burr) to the final story (The Golden Age).

The best-known historical facts about Aaron Burr are that he served as Thomas Jefferson’s first vice-president, that he fatally shot Alexander Hamilton (while Burr was still vice-president), and that he was later tried for treason, for having allegedly conspired to separate the western states from the Union. Through Burr, Neilson contends, Gore Vidal challenged the “false report” which congeals into historical “truth”—in this case those representations of Burr as a traitor, despite the fact that he was acquitted at every trial. Burr’s image frames the entire series as other politicians like him (and Burr’s fictional descendants) reproduce the realities of the past as a counterpoint to the dictates of the present. Inevitably, the novel demystifies the Founding Fathers by showing that Burr’s political career was destroyed by a concerted media campaign and fierce political jealousies.

In his novel Lincoln, as in Burr, Vidal is still in his “correctionist” mode, attempting to recover and to communicate the realities which the accretion of legend has obscured. As is true of many figures in political life, the protagonists of Vidal’s historical novels perpetually have to combat the substitution of invented identities for their own. Lincoln’s habitual folksy story-telling is arguably a means of evading personal revelation, although, as one of the characters in the novel says of Honest Abe: “He hates all this rail-splitter nonsense even though he uses it to ingratiate himself with the folks.”

The novel goes on to question the folkloric image of Lincoln as the great emancipator, emphasising that Lincoln’s foremost concern was not slavery but rather the metaphysical concept of the Union:

For the first time Seward understood the nature of Lincoln’s political genius. He had been able to make himself absolute dictator without ever letting anyone suspect that he was anything more than a joking, timid backwoods lawyer, given to fits of humility in the presence of all the strutting military and political peacocks that flocked about him.

Vidal’s preoccupations—the burden of secrets in public life, the creation of questionable identities in the pursuit of power, the use of political legends to achieve contentious goals, the doing of what you don’t actually believe in as a means of staying in power, the role of the media in reconstructing history—these themes are distributed throughout the historical novels. In Empire Vidal’s character Caroline Sanford (supposedly a descendant of Aaron Burr) concludes from what she had seen and heard of the master of the yellow press, William Randolph Hearst, “that the ultimate power is not to preside in a white house or open a parliament while seated on a throne but to reinvent the world for everyone by giving them the dreams that you wanted them to dream”.

Towards the end of her book Heather Neilson sums up neatly: “In 1980 Ronald Reagan became the first professional actor to be elected President of the United States, in Vidal’s view an inevitable and logical convergence of the two professions.” It was Vidal himself, later, in the course of an interview, who described Ronald Reagan’s capacity to present a friendly grin to the world as “a triumph of the embalmer’s art”.

The suggestion that there is an inextricable relationship between politics and theatre, between verifiable facts and reinvented “facts”, is given an extra twist in one of Gore Vidal’s letters to Heather Neilson:

When you write about anyone you are simply catching reflections of dead stars the way telescopes do. By the time you get the light the star’s out—all you see of the star is its fading light, and each eye perceives the fading light as best it can. By the end of the book there is “a” Lincoln I have chosen, but he will never be “the” Lincoln who was shot on Good Friday 1865. He’s gone, and all that’s left is what we make of him.

This is a poignant description of biographical ventures, be they undertaken by historians or storytellers of any kind, even satirists, and one is immediately reminded that, in carrying out his self-appointed task of saying what has to be said, Gore Vidal, throughout his life, was greatly affected by the stoic example of his blind grandfather—his mentor, the elderly senator he read to as a boy—and a belief in the ideals of equality and freedom underlying the American Constitution, a belief that these ideas not only have an enduring value but have to be defended.

And so, David Foster’s description of satire as the portrayal of a civilisation in decline by a man who has felt it in his own personality can arguably be applied to Gore Vidal’s voluminous output. In his own way, and consistently with values of personal importance to him, Vidal looked at a political system he saw as being in danger of breaking down and sought to remind its custodians of its history and of its standards—by telling the dangerous truth about what was going on. In that way, he aimed to affect the consciousness of his time and to improve the shape of times to come. It is not surprising, then, that Heather Neilson should close her review of his work by saying that “he will be recognised for the whole oeuvre, for his inimitable wit, for his contradictions, and for his moral courage in the lifelong defence of the values in which he believed”.

This conclusion brings me back to Patrick White and the issues I raised earlier. There is a need in this country for contrarians who are prepared to say what has to be said “without protective colouring, without coteries”, and with a view to reinforcing deeply-held personal and communal values. There is certainly no shortage of targets for the political satirist in present-day Australia—confected outrage, inflated claims of victimhood, politicians weeping in parliament or on television, crossbenchers siphoning fifteen minutes of fame from the thimbleful of primary votes that brought them to the Senate and, behind it all, at every level of the political system, the manifestos and recycled policy papers littered with bullet points and patched-up thought balloons. One yearns for the voice that says what has to be said.

In an essay on Somerset Maugham written some years ago Gore Vidal described the occasion when the English writer was brought to a film set in Hollywood where a new version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was being made, starring Spencer Tracy. When Maugham was told that the great American actor was playing the dual role with such finesse that there was no need for make-up or different costumes—one could tell from the actor’s facial expressions and skilful use of body language when he was meant to be the suave Dr Jekyll and when he was meant to be the loathsome Mr Hyde—Maugham fixed a saurian gaze upon his informant but made no comment. The clapboard sounded, the camera trolley tracked the versatile actor to a bed occupied by a scantily-clad maiden, and as Spencer Tracy began slavering and drooling and making animalistic noises, Somerset Maugham was heard to say in an audible whisper: “Which one is he meant to be now?”

In that essay Gore Vidal spoke approvingly of Maugham’s cool, sardonic intervention, his capacity to dispose of nonsense with a few well-chosen words—a skill frequently exercised by Vidal himself—and there are probably many people on the Australian continent today who are of the same mind. Thus, when yet again the television cameras dwell upon a local politician’s confected outrage, or when the instigator of some minor kerfuffle speaks indignantly of “taking offence”, or when the media treats a lame joke or an excusable slip of the tongue as a major “gotcha” moment, or when an ABC comedy panel ratchets up the laughter to implausible levels, there are many people who must be thinking: if only Somerset Maugham or Gore Vidal or Patrick White were here. They could save us from this.