The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (5 page)

THE TOP TEN BEST-SELLERS ACCORDING TO THE SUNDAY
NEW YORK TIMES
AS OF JANUARY 7, 1973

“Shit has its own integrity.” The Wise Hack at the Writers' Table in the MGM commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our pictures would entirely lack the one basic homely ingredient that spells boffo world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public. He was cynical (so were we); yet he also truly believed that children in jeopardy
always
hooked an audience, that Lana Turner was convincing when she rejected the advances of Edmund Purdom in
The Prodigal
“because I'm a priestess of Baal,” and he thought that Irving Thalberg was a genius of Leonardo proportion because he had made such tasteful “products” as
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
and
Marie Antoinette
.

In my day at the Writers' Table (mid-Fifties) television had shaken the industry and the shit-dispensers could now…well, flush their products into every home without having to worry about booking a theater. In desperation, the front office started hiring alien integers whose lack of reverence for the industry distressed the Wise Hack who daily lectured us as we sat at our long table eating the specialty of the studio, top-billed as the
Louis B. Mayer Chicken Soup with Matzoh Balls
(yes, invariably, the dumb starlet would ask, What do they do with the rest of the matzoh?). Christopher Isherwood and I sat on one side of the table; John O'Hara on the other. Aldous Huxley worked at home. Dorothy Parker drank at home.

The last time I saw Dorothy Parker, Los Angeles had been on fire for three days. As I took a taxi from the studio I asked the driver, “How's the fire doing?” “You mean,” said the Hollywoodian, “the holocaust.” The style, you see, must come as easily and naturally as that. I found Dorothy standing in front of her house, gazing at the smoky sky; in one hand she held a drink, in the other a comb which absently she was passing through her short straight hair. As I came toward her, she gave me a secret smile. “I am combing,” she whispered, “Los Angeles out of my hair.” But of course that was not possible. The ashes of Hollywood are still very much in our hair, as the ten best-sellers I have just read demonstrate.

The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to admire the product of that era. Like so many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something rich, strange, numinous—golden. For any survivor of the Writers' Table (alien or indigenous integer), it is astonishing to find young directors like Bertolucci, Bogdanovich, Truffaut reverently repeating or echoing or paying homage to the sort of kitsch we created first time around with a good deal of “help” from our producers and practically none at all from the directors—if one may quickly set aside the myth of the director as
auteur
. Golden-age movies were the work of producer(s) and writer(s). The director was given a finished shooting script with each shot clearly marked, and woe to him if he changed
MED CLOSE SHOT
to
MED SHOT
without permission from the front office, which each evening, in serried ranks, watched the day's rushes with script in hand (“We've got some good pages today,” they would say; never good film). The director, as the Wise Hack liked to observe, is the brother-in-law.

I think it is necessary to make these remarks about the movies of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties as a preface to the ten best-selling novels under review since most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years, while at least seven of the novels appear to me to be deliberate attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come full circle, film-maker) recall past success and respond accordingly. Certainly none of the ten writers (save the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn and the classicist Mary Renault) is in any way rooted in literature. For the eight, storytelling began with
The Birth of a Nation
. Came to high noon with, well,
High Noon
and
Mrs. Miniver
and
Rebecca
and
A Farewell to Arms
. Except for the influence of the dead Ian Fleming (whose own work was a curious amalgam of old movies in the Eric Ambler–Hitchcock style with some sado-masochist games added), these books connect not at all with other books. But with the movies…ah, the movies!

Let us begin with number ten on your Hit Parade of Fiction,
Two from Galilee
, by Marjorie Holmes. Marjorie is also the author of
I've Got to Talk to Somebody, God
and
Who Am I, God? Two from Galilee
is subtitled significantly, “
A Love Story of Mary and Joseph
.” Since the film
Love Story
really took off, what about a love story starring the Mother and the Stepfather of Our Lord? A super idea. And Marjorie has written it. We open with the thirteen-year-old Mary menstruating (“a bloody hand had smitten her in the night”). “‘I am almost fourteen, Father,' she said, ‘and I have become nubile this day.'” She is “mad for” Joseph, a carpenter's son; he is mad for her.

Shrewdly Marjorie has taken two young Americans of the lower middle class and placed them in old Galilee. I recognize some of the descriptions as being from the last version of
Ben-Hur
to which I made a considerable contribution. “The couches covered with a silken stuff threaded with gold. The glow from a hanging alabaster lamp….” Luckily, I was on the set at the beginning of the shooting and so was able to persuade the art director to remove tomatoes from Mrs. Ben-Hur Senior's kitchen. Otherwise, Marjorie might have had Hannah prepare a tomato and bacon sandwich for her daughter Mary.

Since Miss Holmes is not an experienced writer, it is difficult to know what, if anything, she had in mind when she decided to tell the Age-Old Story with nothing new to add. True, there are some domestic crises and folksy wrinkles like Joseph's father being a drunk. Incidentally, Joseph and Mary are known by their English names while the other characters keep their Hebrew names. Mary's mother Hannah is fun: a Jewish mother as observed by a gentile housewife in McLean, Virginia, who has seen some recent movies on the subject and heard all the jokes on television.

Hannah worries for her daughter. Will Joseph get into Mary
before
the wedding? “Hannah had no idea what it was like to be a man—this waiting. No woman could comprehend physical passion.” Helen Gurley Brown and Germaine Greer will no doubt set Miss Holmes straight on that sexist point. But perhaps the author is reflecting her audience (Who are they, by the way?
Where
are they? Baptists in Oklahoma City? Catholics in Duluth suburbs?) when she writes that Hannah “did not have the faintest concept of the demon-god that entered a youth's loins at puberty and gave him no peace thereafter.” Yes, I checked the last noun for spelling. Joseph, incidentally, is such a stud that when Mary is with him “the thing that was between them chimed and quivered and lent discomfort to all.”

Suddenly between that chiming, quivering thing and Mary falls the shadow of the Holy Ghost. “Mary's flesh sang,” as she experienced “the singing silence of God:” Miss Holmes rises to lyricism. “The Holy Spirit came upon her, invaded her body, and her bowels stirred and her loins melted.” Obviously entry was not made through the ear as those Renaissance painters who lacked Miss Holmes's powerful realism believed. Mary soon starts wondering why “the blood pumps so painfully in my breast and my bowels run so thin?” She finds out in due course. Joseph has a hard time believing her story until the Holy Spirit tells him to get it together and accept his peculiar role as the antlered saint of a new cult.

At census time the young marrieds set out for Bethlehem, where the local Holiday Inn is full up or, as a passer-by says, “‘The Inn? You'll be lucky to find a corner for the ass at the inn.'” As these quotations demonstrate, Miss Holmes's style is beyond cliché. But when it comes to scene-making, she is sometimes betrayed by the familiarity of her subject matter. If the Story is to be told truly there must be a birth scene, and so she is obliged to write. “‘Some hot water if you can get it,'” adding, “‘Go no further even to fetch a midwife.'” To which a helpful stranger replies, “‘I'll send one of them for one,'” reminding us of the Joan Crawford interview some decades ago when the living legend asked with quiet majesty, “Whom is fooling whom?” Finally, “Each night the great star stood over the stable's entrance. Joseph had never seen such a star, flaming now purple, now white….”

I am told that religioso fiction has a wide audience around the country, and though these books rarely appear on best-seller lists in sinks of corruption like New York City, their overall sales in the country remind us that the enormous audience which flocked to see
Ben-Hur
,
The Robe
,
The Ten Commandments
is still waiting to have its simple faith renewed and stimulated with, as the sage at the Writers' Table would say, teats and sand.

Number nine,
The Eiger Sanction
, by Trevanian (just one name) is light years distant from
Two from Galilee
. For one thing, it is sometimes well-written, though hardly, as the blurb tells us, “vintage Huxley.” Actually
The Eiger Sanction
is an Ian Fleming byblow and of its too numerous kind pretty good. Fleming once remarked that he wrote his books for warm-blooded heterosexuals. I suspect that Mr. Trevanian (Ms. Trevanian?) is writing for tepid-blooded bisexuals—that is to say, a majority of those who prefer reading kinky thrillers to watching that television set before whose busy screen 90 percent of all Americans spend a third of their waking hours.

Mr. Trevanian's James Bond is called Dr. Jonathan Hemlock. A professor of art, he “moonlights” as a paid assassin for the Search and Sanction Division of CII, an aspect (presumably invented) of the CIA. Dr. Hemlock is engaged to kill those who kill CII agents. With the proceeds from these murders, he buys paintings to hang in the renovated church where he lives on Long Island. He drinks Pichon-Longueville-Baron, worships his “beloved Impressionists” (his taste in pictures is duller than the author suspects), and as for sex, well, he's a tough cookie and finds it temporarily satisfying, “like urination” or “a termination of discomfort, not an achievement of pleasure.” This drives women mad.

Mr. Trevanian has a nice gift for bizarre characters. The chief of Search and Sanction is an albino who lives in darkness; he must also undergo periodic changes of blood because he is “one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena,” presumably related to a cadet branch of the Plantagenet family. It seems only yesterday that Sidney Greenstreet was growing orchids in a most sinister greenhouse and chuckling mirthlessly. Actually, that was thirty years ago and writers are now having a difficult time thinking up unlikely traits…not to mention names. Unhappily the mind that created Pussy Galore cloned before it went to ashes, and Mr. Trevanian brightly offers us Felicity Arce, Jean-Paul Bidet, Randie Nickers, and a host of other cute names.

But he is also capable of writing most engagingly. “His line of thought was severed by the paternal and the plebeian voice of the pilot assuring him that he knew where they were going.” Or, “He intended to give [the book] a handsome review in obedience to his theory that the surest way to maintain position at the top of the field was to advance and support men of clearly inferior capacities.” More of this and Mr. Trevanian will write himself out of the genre and into Quality Lit, Satire Division. But he must refrain from writing beautifully: “mountain stars still crisp and cold despite the threat of dawn to mute their brilliance,” not to mention “organic viscosity of the dark around him”—an inapplicable description of a night in the high Alps worthy of Nathalie Sarraute, as is “Time had been viscous for Ben, too.”

It is sad to report that Mr. Trevanian cannot resist presenting in thin disguise Mr. and Mrs. Burton and Mr. and Mrs. Onassis. There is nothing wrong with this if you have a point to make about them. But he has nothing to say; he simply mentions them in order to express disdain. No doubt they deserve his Olympian disgust, but he should leave to Suzy the record of their doings and to the really bad writers the exploitation of their famous legends. It is interesting, incidentally, to observe the curiously incestuous feedback of the so-called media. About a dozen people are known to nearly everyone capable of reading a simply written book. Therefore the golden dozen keep cropping up in popular books with the same insistence that their doings dominate the press, and the most successful exploiters of these legends are the very primitive writers like Harold Robbins who not only do not know the golden dozen at first or even second hand but, inexcusably, lack the imagination to think up anything exciting to add to what the reader has already learned from gossip columns and magazine interviews. At times while reading these best-sellers I had the odd sensation that I was actually reading a batch of old Leonard Lyons gossip columns or a copy of
Photoplay
or anything except a book. But then it is a characteristic of today's writers (serious as well as commercial) to want their books to resemble “facts” rather than fiction.
The Odessa File
,
August 1914
,
The Eiger Sanction
are nonfiction titles.