The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (19 page)

Then Levine states the profound truth that “fiction is fiction,” ruling out Truth if not truth. Or as Calvin Coolidge said in a not too dissimilar context: “In public life it is sometimes necessary in order to appear really natural to be actually artificial.”

“The Death and Rebirth of the Novel.” The confident ring of the title could only have been sounded by America's liveliest full-time professor and seducer of the
Zeitgeist
(no proper English equivalent), Leslie A. Fiedler. A redskin most at home in white clown makeup, Fiedler has given many splendid performances over the years. From a secure heterosexual base, he has turned a bright amused eye on the classic American
goyim
and finds them not only homoerotic to a man (or person as they say nowadays) but given to guilty pleasures with injuns like Queequeg, with niggers like Jim. As far as I know, Fiedler has yet to finger an American-Jewish author as a would-be reveler in the savage Arcadia of Sodom-America, but then that hedge of burning bushes no doubt keeps pure the American Jewish writer/person.

Fiedler reminds us that for a “century or more” the leading novelists and a good many critics have forgotten “that at its most authentic the novel is a form of popular art.” But he shares the academic delusion that the novel was invented in the middle of the eighteenth century by “that extraordinary anti-elitist genius” Samuel Richardson, who launched “the first successful form of Pop Art.” For Fiedler, Richardson reflects little of what preceded him (the epic, the ballad) but he made possible a great deal that has come since: “the comic strip, the comic book, cinema, TV.” After the Second World War, the appearance of mass-production paperback books in the supermarkets of the West was insurance against the main line of the novel becoming elitist, for “the machine-produced commodity novel is, therefore, dream literature, mythic literature, as surely as any tale told over the tribal fire.” Consequently, “form and content, in the traditional sense, are secondary, optional if not irrelevant—since it is, in the first instance, primordial images and archetypal narrative structures that the novel is called on to provide.” Fiedler believes that dream-literature (
Pickwick Papers
,
Valley of the Dolls
) is peculiarly “immune to formalist criticism.” Further, “it sometimes seems as if all such novels want to metamorphose into movies…a kind of chrysalis yearning to be a butterfly.”

Certainly Pop narratives reveal the society's literally vulgar daydreams. Over and over again occur and recur the sex lives and the murders of various Kennedys, the sphinx-like loneliness of Greta Garbo, the disintegration of Judy Garland or, closer to the heart of Academe, the crack-up of Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, the principal factory of this century's proto-myths. Until recently no Art Novelist (Fiedler's phrase) would go near a subject as melodramatic as the collapse of a film star or the murder of a president. Contemporary practitioners of the Art Novel (“beginning with, perhaps, Flaubert, and reaching a climax in the work of Proust, Mann and Joyce”) are doggedly at work creating “fiction intended not for the market-place but the library and classroom; or its sub-variety, the Avant-Garde Novel, which foresees immediate contempt followed eventually by an even securer status in future Museums of Literary Culture.”

To put it as bluntly as possible, it is incumbent on all who write fiction or criticism in the disappearing twentieth century to realize that the Art Novel or Avant-Garde Novel is in the process of being abandoned wherever fiction remains most alive, which means that that sub-genre of the novel is dying if not dead.

Although Fiedler's funeral oration ought to alarm those teachers who require a certain quantity of serious “novel writing” so that they can practice “novel criticism,” I suspect that they will, secretly, agree with him. If all the Art Novels have been written, then no one need ever run the risk of missing the point to something new. After all, a lot can still be written about the old Modern masterpieces.

As always, Fiedler makes some good sense. He can actually see what is in front of him and this is what makes him such a useful figure. Briskly, he names four present-day practitioners of the Art Novel of yesteryear: Bellow, Updike, Moravia, Robbe-Grillet. This is an odd grouping, but one sees what he means. Then he gives two examples of what he calls, approvingly, “the Anti-art Art Novel.” One is Nabokov's
Pale Fire
. The other is John Barth's
Giles Goat-Boy
: “a strange pair of books really”—note the first sign of unease—

the former not quite American and the latter absolutely provincial American. Yet they have in common a way of using typical devices of the Modernist Art Novel, like irony, parody, travesty, exhibitionistic allusion, redundant erudition, and dogged experimentalism, not to extend the possibilities of the form but to destroy it.

This is nonsense. Professor (Emeritus) Nabokov's bright clever works are very much in the elitist Art-Novel tradition. It is true that the Black Swan of Lac Léman makes fun of American academics and their ghastly explications, but his own pretty constructions are meant to last forever. They are not autonomous artifacts designed to “self-destruct.”

Giles Goat-Boy
is a very bad prose-work by Professor John Barth. Certainly the book is not, as Fiedler claims,

a comic novel, a satire intended to mock everything which comes before it…it is itself it mocks, along with the writer capable of producing one more example of so obsolescent a form, and especially us who are foolish enough to be reading it. It is as if the Art Novel, aware that it must die, has determined to die laughing.

With that, Professor Fiedler goes over the side of Huck's raft. Whatever Professor Barth's gifts, humor, irony, wit are entirely lacking from his ambitious, garrulous, jocose productions. If this is the Anti-art Art Novel, then I predict that it will soon be superseded by the Anti-Anti-art Art Novel, which will doubtless prove to be our moribund friend the Art Novel. I suspect that the works of Professor Barth are written not so much to be read as to be taught. If this is the case then, according to Fiedler's own definition, they are Art Novels. Certainly they are not destined for the mass marketplace where daydreams of sex and of money, of movie stars and of murdered presidents are not apt to be displaced by a leaden narrative whose burden is (oh, wit, oh, irony) the universe is the university is the universe.

Happily, Fiedler soon abandons the highlands of culture for those lowlands where thrive science fiction and the Western, two genres that appear to reflect the night mind of the race. Fiedler mentions with approval some recent “neo-Pop Novels.”
Little Big Man
excites him and he is soon back on his familiar warpath as white skin confronts redskin. Yet why the “neo” in front of Pop? Surely what used to be called “commercial fiction” has never ceased to reflect the dreams and prejudices of those still able to read. Fiedler does not quite deal with this. He goes off at a tangent. “At the moment of the rebirth of the novel, all order and distinction seem lost, as High Art and Low merge into each other, as books become films….” Fiedler ends with an analysis of a novel turned into film called
Drive, He Said
, and he suggests that “therapeutic” madness may be the next chapter in our collective dreaming: injuns, niggers, subversives…or something.

Rebirth of the novel? That seems unlikely. The University-novel tends to be stillborn, suitable only for classroom biopsy. The Public-novel continues to be written but the audience for it is drifting away. Those brought up on the passive pleasures of films and television find the act of reading anything at all difficult and unrewarding. Ambitious novelists are poignantly aware of the general decline in what Professor Halperin would call “reading skills.” Much of Mr. Donald Barthelme's latest novel,
The Dead Father
, is written in a kind of numbing baby talk reminiscent of the “see Jane run” primary school textbooks. Of course Mr. Barthelme means to be ironic. Of course he knows his book is not very interesting to read, but then life is not very interesting to live either. Hopefully, as Professor Halperin would say, the book will self-destruct once it has been ritually praised wherever English is taught but not learned.

Obviously what Fiedler calls the Art Novel is in more trouble than the Pop novel. Movies still need larvae to metamorphose into moths. The Anti-art Art Novel does not exist despite the nervous attempts of teachers to find a way of making the novel if not news, really and truly new. I think it unlikely that Barthes, Barth, and Barthelme will ever produce that unified field theory of Art-Novel writing and theory so long dreamed of by students of Freytag's pyramid.

Meanwhile, the caravans bark, and the dogs move on. Last December the Modern Language Association met in San Francisco. According to a reliable authority, the most advanced of the young bureaucrats of literature were all reading and praising the works of Burroughs. Not William, Edgar Rice.

Times Literary Supplement
February 20, 1976

SOME MEMORIES OF THE GLORIOUS BIRD AND AN EARLIER SELF

“I particularly like New York on hot summer nights when all the…uh, superfluous people are off the streets.” Those were, I think, the first words Tennessee addressed to me; then the foggy blue eyes blinked, and a nervous chuckle filled the moment's silence before I said whatever I said.

Curtain rising. The place: an apartment at the American Academy in Rome. Occasion: a party for some newly arrived Americans, among them Frederic Prokosch, Samuel Barber. The month: March 1948. The day: glittering. What else could a March day be in the golden age?

I am pleased that I can remember so clearly my first meeting with the Glorious Bird, as I almost immediately called him for reasons long since forgotten (premonition, perhaps, of the eventual take-off and flight of youth's sweet bird?). Usually, I forget first meetings, excepting always those solemn audiences granted by the old and famous when I was young and green. I recall vividly every detail of André Gide's conversation and appearance, including the dark velvet beret he wore in his study at 1-bis rue Vaneau. I recall even more vividly my visits to George Santayana in his cell at the Convent of the Blue Nuns. All these audiences, meetings, introductions took place in that
anno mirabilis
1948, a year that proved to be the exact midpoint between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of what looks to be a permanent cold war. At the time, of course, none of us knew where history had placed us.

At that first meeting I thought Tennessee every bit as ancient as Gide and Santayana. After all, I was twenty-two. He was thirty-seven; but claimed to be thirty-three on the sensible ground that the four years he had spent working for a shoe company did not count. Now he was the most celebrated American playwright.
A Streetcar Named Desire
was still running in New York when we met that evening in a flat overlooking what was, in those days, a quiet city where hardly anyone was superfluous unless it was us, the first group of American writers and artists to arrive in Rome after the war.

In 1946 and 1947 Europe was still out-of-bounds for foreigners. But by 1948 the Italians had begun to pull themselves together, demonstrating once more their astonishing ability to cope with disaster which is so perfectly balanced by their absolute inability to deal with success.

Rome was strange to all of us. For one thing, Italy had been sealed off not only by war but by Fascism. Since the early thirties few English or American artists knew Italy well. Those who did included mad Ezra, gentle Max, spurious B.B., and, of course, the Anglo-American historian Harold (now Sir Harold) Acton, in stately residence at Florence. By 1948 Acton had written supremely well about both the Bourbons of Naples and the later Medici of Florence; unfortunately, he was—is—prone to the writing of memoirs. And so, wanting no doubt to flesh out yet another chapter in the ongoing story of a long and marvelously uninteresting life, Acton came down to Rome to look at the new invaders. What he believed he saw and heard, he subsequently published in a little volume called
More Memoirs of an Aesthete
, a work to be cherished for its quite remarkable number of unaesthetic misprints and misspellings.

“After the First World War American writers and artists had emigrated to Paris; now they pitched upon Rome.” So Acton begins. “According to Stendhal, the climate was enough to gladden anybody, but this was not the reason: one of them explained to me that it was the facility of finding taxis, and very little of Rome can be seen from a taxi. Classical and Romantic Rome was no more to them than a picturesque background. Tennessee Williams, Victor [he means Frederic] Prokosch and Gore Vidal created a bohemian annexe to the American Academy….” Liking Rome for its many taxis is splendid stuff and I wish I had said it. Certainly whoever did was putting Acton on, since the charm of Rome—1948—was the lack of automobiles of any kind. But Acton is just getting into stride. More to come.

Toward the end of March Tennessee gave a party to inaugurate his new flat in the Via Aurora (in the golden age even the street names were apt). Somehow or other, Acton got himself invited to the party. I remember him floating like some large pale fish through the crowded room; from time to time, he would make a sudden lunge at this or that promising bit of bait while Tennessee, he tells us, “wandered as a lost soul among the guests he assembled in an apartment which might have been in New York…. Neither he nor any of the group I met with him spoke Italian, yet he had a typically Neapolitan protégé who could speak no English.”

At this time Tennessee and I had been in Rome for only a few weeks and French, not Italian, was the second language of the reasonably well-educated American of that era. On the other hand, Prokosch knew Italian, German, and French; he also bore with becoming grace the heavy weight of a Yale doctorate in Middle English. But to Acton the author of
The Asiatics
, the translator of Hölderlin and Louise Labé was just another barbarian whose works “fell short of his perfervid imagination, [he] had the dark good looks of an advertiser of razor blades….” Happily, “Gore Vidal, the youngest in age, aggressively handsome in a clean-limbed sophomore style, had success written all over him…. His candour was engaging but he was slightly on the defensive, as if he anticipated an attack on his writings or his virtue.” Well, the young G.V. wasn't so dumb: seeing the old one-two plainly in the middle distance, he kept sensibly out of reach.

“A pudgy, taciturn, moustached little man without any obvious distinction.” Thus Acton describes Tennessee. He then zeroes in on the “protégé” from Naples, a young man whom Acton calls “Pierino.” Acton tells us that Pierino had many complaints about Tennessee and his friends, mostly due to the language barrier. The boy was also eager to go to America. Acton tried to discourage him. Even so, Pierino was enthralled. “‘You are the first
galantuomo
who has spoken to me this evening.'” After making a date to see the
galantuomo
later on that evening, Pierino split. Acton then told Tennessee, “as tactfully as I could, that his young protégé felt neglected…. [Tennessee] rubbed his chin thoughtfully and said nothing, a little perplexed. There was something innocently childish about his expression.” It does not occur to the memoirist that Tennessee might have been alarmed at his strange guest's bad manners. “Evidently he was not aware that Pierino wanted to be taken to America and I have wondered since whether he took him there, for that was my last meeting with Tennessee Williams.” It must be said that Acton managed to extract quite a lot of copy out of a single meeting. To put his mind at rest, Tennessee did take Pierino to America and Pierino is now a married man and doing, as they say, well.

“This trifling episode illustrated the casual yet condescending attitude of certain foreigners towards the young Italians they cultivated on account of their Latin charm without any interest in their character, aspirations, or desires.” This sentiment or sentimentality could be put just as well the other way around and with far more accuracy. Italian trade has never had much interest in the character, aspirations, or desires of those to whom they rent their ass. When Acton meditates upon The Italian Boy, a sweet and sickly hypocrisy clouds his usually sharp prose and we are in E. M. Forsterland where the lower orders (male) are worshiped, and entirely misunderstood. But magnum of sour grapes to one side, Acton is by no means inaccurate. Certainly he got right Tennessee's indifference to place, art, history. The Bird seldom reads a book and the only history he knows is his own; he depends, finally, on a romantic genius to get him through life. Above all, he is a survivor, never more so than now in what he calls his “crocodile years.”

I picked up Tennessee's
Memoirs
with a certain apprehension. I looked myself up in the Index; read the entries and found some errors, none grave. I started to read; was startled by the technique he had chosen. Some years ago, Tennessee told me that he had been reading (that is to say, looking at) my “memoir in the form of a novel”
Two Sisters
. In this book I alternated sections describing certain events in 1948 with my everyday life while writing the book. Memory sections I called
Then
. The day-by-day descriptions I called
Now
. At the time Tennessee found
Two Sisters
interesting because he figured in it. He must also have found it technically interesting because he has serenely appropriated my form and has now no doubt forgotten just how the idea first came to him to describe the day-to-day life of a famous beleaguered playwright acting in an off-Broadway production of the failing play
Small Craft Warnings
while, in alternating sections, he recalls the early days not only of Tennessee Williams but of one Thomas Lanier Williams, who bears only a faint familial resemblance to the playwright we all know from a thousand and one altogether too candid interviews.

There is a foreword and, like all forewords, it is meant to disarm. Unfortunately, it armed me to the teeth. During the 1973 tryout of a play in New Haven, Tennessee was asked to address some Yale drama students. Incidentally, the style of the foreword is unusually seductive, the old master at his most beguiling: self-pity and self-serving kept in exquisite balance by the finest comic style since S. L. Clemens.

“I found myself entering (through a door marked
EXIT
) an auditorium considerably smaller than the Shubert but containing a more than proportionately small audience. I would say roughly about two-score and ten, not including a large black dog which was resting in the lap of a male student in the front row…. The young faces before me were uniformly inexpressive of any kind of emotional reaction to my entrance….” I am surprised that Tennessee was surprised. The arrogance and self-satisfaction of drama students throughout Academe are among the few constants in a changing world. Any student who has read Sophocles in translation is, demonstrably, superior to Tennessee Williams in the untidy flesh. These dummies reflect of course the proud mediocrity of their teachers, who range, magisterially, through something called “world drama” where evolution works only backward. Teachers and taught are to be avoided.

“I am not much good at disguising my feelings, and after a few moments I abandoned all pretense of feeling less dejection than I felt.” The jokes did not work. So “I heard myself describing an encounter, then quite recent, with a fellow playwright in the Oak Room Bar at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel.” It was with “my old friend Gore Vidal. I had embraced him warmly. However, Mr. Vidal is not a gentleman to be disarmed by a cordial embrace, and when, in response to his perfunctory inquiries about the progress of rehearsals…I told him…all seemed a dream come true after many precedent nightmares, he smiled at me with a sort of rueful benevolence and said ‘Well, Bird, it won't do much good, I'm afraid, you've had too much bad personal exposure for anything to help you much anymore.'

“Well, then, for the first time, I could see a flicker of interest in the young faces before me. It may have been the magic word Vidal or it may have been his prophecy of my professional doom.” Asked if the prognosis was accurate, Tennessee looked at the black dog and said, “Ask the dog.”

An unsettling anecdote. I have no memory of the Plaza meeting. I am also prone, when dining late, to suffer from what Dorothy Parker used grimly to refer to as “the frankies,” or straight talk for the other person's good like frankly-that-child-would-not-have-been-born-mongoloid-if-youhadn't…. An eyewitness, however, assures me that I did not say what Tennessee attributes to me. Yet his paranoia always has some basis in reality. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I was probably thinking what I did not say and what he later thought I did say. When it comes to something unspoken, the Bird has a sharp ear.

It is hard now to realize what a bad time of it Tennessee used to have from the American press. During the Forties and Fifties the anti-fag battalions were everywhere on the march. From the high lands of
Partisan Review
to the middle ground of
Time
magazine, envenomed attacks on real or suspected fags never let up. A
Time
cover story on Auden was killed when the managing editor of the day was told that Auden was a fag. From 1945 to 1961
Time
attacked with unusual ferocity everything produced or published by Tennessee Williams. “Fetid swamp” was the phrase most used to describe his work. But, in
Time
, as well as in time, all things will come to pass. The Bird is now a beloved institution.

Today, at sixty-four, Tennessee has the same voracious appetite for work and for applause that he had at twenty-four. More so, I would suspect, since glory is a drug more addictive than any other as heroes have known from Achilles on (Donald Windham's
roman à clef
about Tennessee bore the apt title
The Hero Continues
). But fashions in the theater change. The superstar of the Forties and Fifties fell on bad times, and that is the burden of these memoirs. In sharp detail we are told how the hero came into being. Less sharply, Tennessee describes the bad days when the booze and the pills caused him to hallucinate; to slip out of a world quite bad enough as it is into nightmare land. “I said to my friend Gore, ‘I slept through the Sixties,' and he said, ‘You didn't miss a thing.'” Tennessee often quotes this exchange. But he leaves out the accompanying caveat: “If you missed the Sixties, Bird, God knows what you are going to do with the Seventies.”