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FIFTY-TWO

Once these fits of political correctness have passed, Altman has panned a nugget or two of purest gold in the great swamp that is Norman Podhoretz land. “The prominent neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, former editor of
Commentary
, has claimed that Vidal is clearly anti-Semitic: he identified a piece written by Vidal for the
Nation
in 1986 as ‘the most blatantly and egregiously anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II.’ In the piece Podhoretz claims Vidal declared that ‘the Jews were impoverishing the United States and bringing the world closer and closer to a nuclear war,’ and warning that ‘the Jews (never mind if they were born here or were naturalized citizens) had better watch out if they wished to stay on among us.’

“This would be damning,” Altman concedes,

if indeed Vidal had written it. Checking the original article, to which Podhoretz himself referred me, I cannot find these alleged quotes. What Vidal does say is: “He and Midge [his wife] stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel—a country they don’t seem eager to live in…Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department…”

Altman continues,

No mention of the warning to Jews. What is missed in those attacks on Vidal for anti-Semitism is any recognition of his sense of betrayal when some New York Jewish intellectuals, with whom he had mixed as a young writer, enthusiastically denounced the new gay movement. Midge Decter…at
Harper’s Magazine
…published an article by Joseph Epstein in which he wrote: “If I had the power to do so I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” It was Vidal, not the Jewish Decter, who saw the striking parallel in this language to that used by Hitler.

Although the Bush administration has got us used to the telling of lies about such important matters as war and peace, the thriving cottage industry of ascribing to public figures words that they never said is less well known. But severe laws are in place with very severe penalties for those who, like Norman Podhoretz, simply invent inflammatory statements which he then ascribes to his numerous enemies as their actual words, a practice that should he persist in, he will be, under current law, prison-bound.

Altman occasionally has trouble keeping separate what my characters think and what I think: “Thus his historical novels refer often to Washington as an African city, without ever giving us a sense of how it might have seemed to the Africans.” First, it is my character Caroline Sanford who was brought up in Europe who was startled to find Washington, D.C., “an African city.” She expresses neither delight nor dismay at the fact she also becomes a friend of an “African” who is related to the black Jefferson family, a first family of the city. Altman then misreads my play
Weekend
in which the son of a presidential candidate marries an African American. Altman is upset by my jarringly superficial tone which, of course, is the whole point to the exercise: audiences in Washington, where the play first opened, were amused and relieved that the presidential candidate has no feeling at all about race nor does his wife; they only care about the coming election and will such a marriage as their son’s be helpful. When they decide that it will be an electoral plus, there is a mock happy, even ecstatic, ending where they all remember to smile. Opportunism has won again. I am not a playwright who lectures audiences on good citizenship. I don’t have to, as the Black Caucus might have enlightened Altman. He also makes strange leaps in the dark. He writes that the editors of
The New York Review of Books
“rejected some of Vidal’s pieces particularly those seen as too strident in their criticism of Israel.” There were no such pieces either written by me nor rejected by them. Our only political quarrels were over Robert Kennedy whose nimbus—bright to them—was not visible to me.

Here I am on
Laugh-In
in 1971 with June Gable, a marvelous comic who had invented a Latin huckster character called Esmeralda whose speech was surrealist. Here she is explaining to me how she is “an endangered feces.”

Altman is at his best when he meditates on Sex, Hollywood, Politics, and Religion. He has many wise things to say on those essential subjects which I have spent years trying to get into proper focus, particularly religion. Alongside Altman’s book on my desk there are the uncorrected page proofs of a Duke University Press book called
How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV
subtitled “The Lessons of Gore Vidal,” by Marcie Frank. I met Professor Frank during a panel discussion celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of
The City and the Pillar
at Yale’s Davies Auditorium. Half a dozen writers/teachers read papers on that ancient novel to a crowd of several hundred interested parties, including myself. I recall Professor Frank’s remarks as sharply witty and now they are the core of a book about how a public intellectual from the hot world of print can survive in the coolest medium of all, television. Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: “Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News. Since
autre temps, autre moeurs
as Roseanne Barr might say. Frank links my remark to Andy Warhol’s famous ecumenical prayer: “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” “Both,” she writes,

understand television as a transmissions apparatus that links the famous with their audience in a giant circle jerk…Many accounts of the public intellectual suggest that the species is virtually extinct, yet Vidal has been a veritable fixture on the American intellectual scene for the past forty years. Paradoxically, perhaps, his ubiquity in print, in politics, and on big and small screens has discouraged the recognition of his achievements, though a few have overcome the chronic resentment of celebrity that plagues those who tally such matters. For Edward Said, for instance, Vidal is an ideal example of the intellectual; however, this is because of his position as an independent (not institutionally affiliated) expatriate (Vidal moved to Italy in 1963, though in 2004 he returned to Los Angeles, where he has maintained a residence since 1978)…while he has been almost completely ignored by the academic literary establishment. Although recent interest, academic and other, in matters of gender and sexuality has prompted a slight increase in institutional attention to Vidal, his refusal to be labeled as gay and his insistence that no identities follow from sexual practices have proved problematic for those who would include him in a gay canon…Vidal has been slippery to categorize because he has consistently played against expectations. In blurring the fine line between insider and outsider, he redefined those boundaries…[H]e wrote
The City and the Pillar
(1948), the first American novel to depict homosexual sex explicitly, yet this did not stop him from running for public office twice, first for Congress in 1960, as a Democrat in heavily Republican upstate New York, and then for the Democratic nomination for Senate in 1982, against Jerry Brown.

Frank and others seem not to believe that by publishing
The City and the Pillar
I had permanently shut the door on a political career because I did run twice and in the first race got the most votes for a Democrat since 1910 and in the second got half a million votes while spending the least money in a field of nine candidates. But that was that. Hardly anyone goes into American politics without wanting to go, ultimately, all the way. But I could not, for demonstrable reasons. Although
The New York Times
never covered elections in the 29th Congressional District so far to the north of Times Square, they sent a special journalist called Ira Freeman to do the necessary ax job. He kept giggling nervously and repeating over and over again, “I don’t know anything about politics.” He did know how to smear, of course; and did.

Frank offers an account of the film
Visit to a Small Planet
, originally a play for television, then a play for Broadway and, finally, terminally, a movie with the dread Jerry Lewis who Frank tells us: “According to Lewis, it was Vidal’s idea to cast him.” It was Vidal’s idea to cast David Niven and Paramount agreed; then Lewis, somehow, got the part which he played as a nine-year-old from outer space. Frank is a truly audacious explorer in the rain forest of my career. She finds shadowy monsters unknown to me and similarities where I find none. Jacqueline Susann was a popular novelist who exploited TV in her successful efforts to sell her exciting and excited novels, largely about feminine ailments and addictions. Although I have never read her I enjoyed meeting her several times with her large dark eyes whose thick false lashes resembled a pair of tarantulas in a postcoital state. Frank writes:

But, like Susann, Jerry Lewis has much in common with Vidal’s Myra. I put Vidal in the company of Susann (just as I put him in the company of Jerry Lewis earlier) in order to suggest an alternative genealogy for the intellectual, one excluded from those accounts that have been dominated by the print-based model of the intellectual. If Vidal maintains the status of exemplary American writer-intellectual in the age of TV, it is because he has both exploited the print-screen circuit in the genre of romance and found ways to transmit his sexual politics on-screen.

Frank is very good on
Live from Golgotha
though its alleged subtitle is not “The Gospel According to Gore Vidal,” an addition made by a creative dust-jacket designer. My Gospel would have been very different. “James Tatum has given a persuasive exposition of Vidal’s adherence to the world of Roman which he calls Vidal’s
Romanitas
. Underwriting Vidal’s
Romanitas
is a universalism evident in his treatments of sexuality but also there in his mode of political address. The example of Vidal should thus prompt an alternative account of the intellectual and the media that would consider the prospects of universalism in our day.” Now Ms. Frank is getting to the engine room of her subject. The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of
Tales from Livy
that I’d found in my grandfather’s library. Although in school I was like so many others persecuted with Julius Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
of which Montaigne observed that although every reader is eager to know why he was so brilliant a general, not to mention a transformer of the old republic into a principate suitable for himself, he tells us nothing interesting on those subjects so busy is he trying to convince us what a greater engineer he was. (I, though not a general, generalize like the emperor and god-to-be.) Frank handles this most originally:

Perversely, perhaps, when I call Vidal’s intellectual career an
exercise in televisual classicism
I take my cue from the man whom Vidal obliterated from his alternative political history of the United States: Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who recognized and confirmed Vidal’s classic status. When asked to what purposes he would put the auditorium of his presidential library, Nixon said that it should be used to reenact “great debates like—oh, Vidal and Buckley’s 1968 battle” had brought sexuality into the political arena, something the noncharismatic, conservative Nixon would seem the least likely to have recognized, but here Nixon confers on Vidal and Buckley the status of national treasures.

FIFTY-THREE

“Bemoaning the demise of the serious novel, or the disintegration of literary fame, as the consequence of the loss of history makes Vidal’s satirical stance reminiscent of Alexander Pope. He thus might seem to support those who believe in the decline of the intellectual or of literary seriousness. But Vidal simultaneously overrides Pope’s famous definition of wit—‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’—by expressing it so well, so often, verbatim. Such reproduction, enabled by the central position of television in Vidal’s writing, points to the future possibilities suggested by Myra’s utopian mission, to ‘re-create the sexes and thus save the human race from certain extinction.’ Exploiting the television commercial as ‘the last demonstration of
necessary
love in the West,’ Vidal successfully negotiates a public role for the author as intellectual on the basis of the circuit that he establishes between the page and the movie screen, a circuit that relies on the mediation of that amnesia-inducing and immortality-producing medium: the television. Vidal uses TV to ward off the blurring of the boundaries between culture and politics in identity-based politics. He exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital, and technological determinism. By these means, he has refused to be ghettoized…in TV he has found both a vehicle through which to convey his politics and a mode of address for a new televisual public, that is, a public conditioned by television even when it reads. Vidal’s career teaches us that it is possible to remain a universal intellectual in the age of TV. He has done so by negotiating the print-screen circuit.”