Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 22

GORE VIDAL IS ON the brink of immortality. He must be, he has a biographer, and so will soon have a Life. Or will he? True, he’s lately taken to writing down luminous, pastoral reminiscences about his boyhood age of innocence (which did not last long, and he couldn’t wait to get it over with) – going brown and barefoot into the Senate to visit his grandfather, blind Senator Gore from Oklahoma, and flying across the States in the Thirties with his dashing aviator father, Gene. But for the rest? ‘Most biographies are about love and marriage and divorce and children, the more autistic the better, and alcoholism and suicide. The usual American writer’s life. I seem to have missed most of the Great Things …’

About the only way in which he’s a rounded character is physical. These days he’s, well, large, and indeed looks magisterial, not entirely unlike the Senator. (‘All the senators were fat – I always thought everybody’s grandfather was fat and a senator.’) He’s disappointed in himself. ‘I never thought I would lose my beauty,’ he says, waving it away with sincere regret. He likes people’s outsides and (worse, much worse) says so, instead of claiming to be interested in their souls. His new novel, Empire, about the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, is one of his respectable ones, but nonetheless continues in its own way his scandalous polemic against inwardness, niceness, the mystification of the personal, ‘real folks’, unconscious destiny and such. The style, in keeping with the period, has a whiff of Edith Wharton, a writer he admires. ‘I like Wharton’s wit, and her toughness. She knows her world, and there is nothing soft or romantic in her approach. One must look to men,’ he adds nastily, ‘for those feminine qualities.’

He is a moralist: he believes that heterosexist, imperialist, born-again Americans are wicked. Or rather, he would if he believed in sin. Instead he thinks them hypocritical, deluded and dangerous, their gospel very Bad News. So clear is he about this that he himself is in danger of preaching. ‘The American Empire is one of the most successful inventions in history, and all the more remarkable because no one knows it’s there. Now the economy is coming apart and the locus of the world’s economy has shifted to our far eastern province of Japan. There will be wars of liberation in due course.’ He relishes all this stuff, playing the prophet of doom, Cassandra-to-whom-no-one-paid-attention-until-it-was-too-late.

What saves him from his own opinions is, first, that in fact he hates not being listened to, and knows it’s the jokes and the inventions that spellbind; and secondly, that his impulse to mock and his sense of absurdity are in any case out of his control. In conversation he’s a mimic, with a repertoire of voices ranging from the wise man’s drawl, complete with pauses for deep thought, to an ecstatic tweetie-pie babble used for talking to the animals and cutting out the humans. In his work the propensity for mimicry famously displays itself in the variety of his styles and genres – theatre, television, film scripts, essays, historical novels and satires, not in that order, nor in any particular order at all. Even his soberest third-person voice in the fiction has a doubleness about it (now be serious) and of course his regal first persons include the Emperor Julian and Myra Breckinridge, so ably plagiarised by our own Dame Edna.

Vidal thinks, or says he thinks, that it may all have something to do with his granny. ‘I don’t know where my voices come from, and I don’t try to find out. All I know is that they start and I write down what they say, the way my grandmother went in for automatic writing. She was in touch with the dead, of course. As they don’t exist for me, I hear from the living … it’s probably Shirley Maclaine, anyway. She was given several hundred hours (it seemed) on television to tell us about her extra-terrestrial adventures and the fact that she is God. Which of course she is, but isn’t it a bit immodest to say so on television? Even the dread Jesus did a bit of shit-kicking when Pontius Pilate started asking him snooping questions. “You have said it,” has always been my own way of handling Godhood.’

Myra B., megastar and living legend, came out in 1968 (‘Has literary decency fallen so low?’ – Time) and has now been resurrected, revised, and reissued back to back, or whatever is the right way to put it, with Myron, in a bumper edition. Both books seem to have been meticulously dirtied up by the author. Anyone who couldn’t work out before exactly how Myra unmanned Rusty Godowski as part of her neo-Malthusian plot to control population and dominate the world, or what a prostate is for, will now be enlightened. With Myron the operation was simpler: in the original Vidal wittily excised all the bad words and replaced them with the names of the members of the Supreme Court who’d just decided (1974) to privatise censorship, and allow local communities to do it themselves. That joke lost its topicality and has been abandoned, so that readers will no longer have to puzzle over the translation of (for example) ‘the whizzer whites that are cutting our powells off’.

Not that these changes really signal a slackening of censorship, rather (something that fills him with despair) the fact that books are so relatively unread that they simply don’t matter. Book-readers are a tiny minority, and probably perverts anyway. The censorship has shifted with the majority, to television, whose programme-makers are increasingly urged to produce uplifting fibs, as in Plato’s Spartan Republic. Vidal is somewhat tempted by TV, too: he wrote a lot of drama for the box in the Fifties when he was making his money and smarting from the reception of his homosexual novel, The City and the Pillar, and he still returns from time to time. He recently scripted a much-watched ‘mini-series’ (the kind of word he really relishes) about a murder at West Point. He wrote film scripts too, and points out that he was in on the end of the great studios.

He also, of course, performs. He’s very good (which in his case means bad, Bad Taste, scene-stealing and so on) at being interviewed, confronted, chatted up, and inclines to be sceptical about other people’s desire to stay pure. He tells a story of two Britishers: ‘In Moscow I had a late dinner with Graham Greene. There had been a froideur between him and his neighbour, Anthony Burgess. As I quite like both, I am tactful. Greene suddenly said, “I saw him on television. In France. I don’t do television, you know.” I pointed out that in Moscow the two of us had not been off television for four days. “Well, this is Eastern,” he said. “It won’t get back. I hate having one’s face known, and talking on television.” I said sternly that I liked television very much because it was my only opportunity to talk about politics directly, without the discrediting mediation of a journalist. “Of course,” I said, “I never talk about my books if I can help it. What did Anthony talk about?” Greene shuddered, and whispered, as if something too obscene for others, “His books.” Greene’s eyes were wide with horror. “In French.”’

Vidal himself belongs in a less squeamish club (the late Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams spring to mind, as does Norman Mailer) – the author as celebrity: ‘Modesty is a British invention that has never had much of a market in the United States. I do note at times a sort of dismay amongst your deep critics when faced with a writer who contemplates actual power in this world and does not blush and apologise. Different cultures. You are too modest – in a very vain way. We are too busy – in a very humble way, of course.’

He is interested in ‘actual power’ and has several times been tempted to cut corners and go into politics – in 1972 he joined Dr Spock in the People’s Party, in 1982 he polled half a million votes for the Senate, in California. A few years back he explained to Michael Billington that politics seemed to him a family firm – ‘most of those who write about politics are essentially provincials, journalists from the provinces who arrive with big round eyes. To me it’s the family business, like being brought up in a tannery. I know exactly what the smells are, and how the leather’s made.’

However, since he also knows the world of the media inside out – and since politics now happens in the media – what might once upon a time have been a public career has been turned inside out. Vidal is one of the age’s most scathing commentators on the way in which newspapers and television, especially television, have changed the political process, emptied it out, filled it with fictions, ‘public images’ and lies. In the new novel, Empire, the front man is Teddy Roosevelt, but the power belongs to William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. ‘Hearst is the great original. If there is no news you invent it. While I was “inventing” him, I kept thinking of that passage in Oblomov where the hero starts his slide into perfect sloth by giving up newspapers and coffee houses, where everyone talks about (say) the political situation in Turkey. But is there really such a place as Turkey? My Hearst wouldn’t care. If there was no Turkey he’d make one up. What does one ever know about anything?’

The general sloth, passivity, delight in being lied to, is his great topic. And he brings to it an urgency of outrage that must have a lot to do with his conviction that in a parallel universe, on another channel somewhere, he could have been one of the actors. His most savage satire yet, Duluth (1983), one of his best and most frenziedly inventive books, has characters entirely enmeshed in third-rate dreams. On a more practical level, he foresaw long before it happened that the logical presidential candidate would be an actor; and more recently, in News-week, he exactly prophesied the effect Ollie North would have via the networks. When we learn from Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA that ‘since Ronald Reagan did not read many books but watched movies the CIA began to produce profiles of leaders that could be shown to the President … soon the CIA began providing a classified travelogue of all countries that Reagan planned to visit’, then we’re in Vidal’s territory. Not only is the President in a movie, but everyone else has to join him there.

Duluth, though, was only a book. Vidal’s satires are fuelled with frustration. ‘Myra Breckinridge is very much a frustrated power figure who takes charge of her admittedly fictive universe.’ He flourishes in gloomy triumph a sheet of statistics thoughtfully compiled by the British Public Lending Right people, which shows that last year 30,000 people borrowed Duluth, but you feel that 30,000 strikes him as not very many. He likes to point out (his own statistics) that at least one third of Americans are functionally illiterate.

So he is back to his public/private dilemma. ‘The public self is just that – the extent to which one wants to get involved with politics or whatever. The private self does the writing. I don’t think I bring the two together. I certainly try not to.’ But what about the Life? Well, his writing self lives, and has done for more than 30 years, with Howard Austen, who is even less of a sentimentalist (were that possible) than Vidal. They – he – used to explain to romantically ‘programmed’ interviewers that it wasn’t a marriage – ‘none of the assumptions are there. Each marriage I know of starts on the assumption of sexual exclusivity’; however, as time’s gone by, the distinctions seem to have lapsed, perhaps because marriages in any case tend to become companionable. The house in Ravello, Italy, where I talked with him is out on a promontory, islanded from the town by gardens, vines, walks. He was entertained to discover that it had been built by my husband’s first cousin twice-removed, Lucille Beckett – ‘Welcome to your patrimony … How are the mighty fallen.’ Some of the Thirties furniture is still there, the floors are tiled, the walls white, with 18th-century paintings and a Roman mosaic. There is the patter of tiny feet (two dogs, a cat) and there are books, books, books. They have an apartment in Rome and another place in Los Angeles, but this, increasingly, is where the writing gets done.

The hapless biographer will have to dig deep to come up with the inner Life, there’s so much on the surface. Vidal has long ago published his selected indiscretions – for instance, Anaïs Nin (‘Well she was exotic, I must say; and I was 20, she was 42, and she had a radiant act’). Then there was the conquest of Jack Kerouac. He is, he says, distracting his biographer with famous friends – ‘Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Sitwell, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Taylor’, not to mention Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and other assorted celebrities. ‘I have lived in many different worlds … I didn’t even try to meet anyone. I give my biographer all sorts of fascinating names to track down, hoping he’ll forget all about me.’