1876

GORE VIDAL

“VIDAL IS SUPERB ... he writes so well that you find yourself holding your breath over something that is a foregone conclusion ... Vidal’s talent makes the bloated corrupters of Washington live in a way history books don’t ... The performance is flawless!

—
BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

“A LITERARY EVENT ... Vidal’s wit, sophistication, erudition, grasp of American values of the time make this novel as contemporary as Woodward’s and Bernstein’s political journalism. Vidal is the ideal historical novelist.”

—
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

GORE VIDAL takes us back, with his accustomed bite and flair to the Centennial ...

“The Bicentennial reader will have as clear a picture of the year 1876—and of the election campaign—from this book as he would be likely to get from the pages of actual history. And certainly more entertainment ... CLEARLY ONE OF HIS BRIGHTEST WORKS.”

—
Cleveland Plain Dealer

“SUSPENSEFUL AND EXTRAVAGANTLY DECORATED ... If you think politics are dirty now, you should have witnessed the goings-on a hundred years ago ... IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST.”

—
Cosmopolitan

“PRICKLY, DROLL, PATRICIAN AND WONDERFULLY FUNNY ... This is history as few novelists could pull it off ... an exhilarating feat of storytelling.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“SUPERB ... SIMPLY SPLENDID ... A thoroughly grand book—must, must reading for everyone.”

—
Business Week

Other Books By Gore Vidal:

Williwaw

In the Yellow Wood

The City and the Pillar

The Season of Comfort

A Search for the King

Dark Green, Bright Red

The Judgment of Paris

Messiah

A Thirsty Evil
(short stories)

Visit to a Small Planet
(play)

The Best Man
(play)

Rocking the Boat
(essays)

Julian

Romulus
(play)

*
Washington, D
.
C
.

Weekend
(play)

Myra Breckinridge

Two Sisters

Homage to Daniel Shays
(collected essays)

Burr

An Evening with Richard Nixon
(play)

*
Myron

*
Published by Ballantine Books

Gore Vidal

1876

A Novel

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

For Claire Bloom

Copyright © 1976 by Gore Vidal

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Ballantine Books of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada. Originally published by Random House, Inc., 1976.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-34311

ISBN 0-345-25400-7-225

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Edition: September 1976

Second Printing: March 1977

Contents
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Afterword
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About the Author
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“THAT IS NEW YORK.” I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine. Ships, barges, ferry boats, four-masted schooners were shoved like a child’s toys against a confused jumble of buildings quite unfamiliar to me, a mingling of red brick and brownstone, of painted wood and dull granite, of church towers that I had never seen before and odd bulbous-domed creations of—cement? More suitable for the adornment of the Golden Horn than for my native city.

“At least I
think
it is New York. Perhaps it is Brooklyn. I am told that the new Brooklyn is marvellously exotic, with a thousand churches.”

Gulls swooped and howled in our wake as the stewards on a lower deck threw overboard the remains of the large breakfast fed us at dawn.

“No,” said Emma. “I’ve just left the captain. This is really New York. And how old, how very old it looks!” Emma’s excitement gave me pleasure. Of late neither of us has had much to delight in, but now she looks a girl again, her dark eyes brilliant with that all-absorbed, grave, questioning look which all her life has meant: I must know what this new thing is and how best to use it. She responds to novelty and utility rather than to beauty. I am the opposite; thus father and daughter balance each other.

Grey clouds alternated with bands of bright blue sky; sharp wind from the northwest; sun directly in our eyes, which meant that we were facing due east from the North River, and so this was indeed the island of my birth and not Brooklyn to the south nor Jersey City at our back.

I took a deep breath of sea-salt air; smelt the city’s fumes of burning anthracite mingled with the smell of fish not lately caught and lying like silver ingots in a passing barge.

“So old?” I had just realized what Emma had said.

“But yes.” Emma’s English is almost without accent, but occasionally she translates directly from the French, betraying her foreignness. But then I am the foreign one, the American who has lived most of his life in Europe while Emma has never until now left that old world where she was born thirty-five years ago in Italy, during a cyclone that uprooted half the trees in the garden of our villa and caused the frightened midwife nearly to strangle the newborn with the umbilical cord. Whenever I see trees falling before the wind, hear thunder, observe the sea furious, I think of that December day and the paleness of the mother’s face in vivid contrast to the redness of her blood, that endless haemorrhaging of blood.