The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (12 page)

While he forged ahead with his fiction during the Sixties, Vidal became, if anything, even more trenchant and ubiquitous as a commentator on the American scene. 'Living outside America helps: you see things more sharply and can say what you want.' Undiminished controversy shadowed his exile, In 1961
he launched his famous feud with Bobby Kennedy. 'Jack was tremendous company — really droll. But with Bobby... it was chemical. Put us in the same room and I'd want to kick him. He was a McCarthyite tough.’

In 1967, he wrote two remarkably clear-headed attacks on the Kennedy political machine,
The Holy Family
and
The Manchester Book;
he was later to say of Teddy's presidential aspirations, 'Well, he would have made a very good bartender.’

During elections he returned to gallivant round the US television circuit, eliciting on one occasion this lucid retort from William Buckley Junior: 'Listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face.' During the 1970 election Vidal became co-chairman of Dr Spock's New Party, a wet-lib fringe group running on a collection of fashionable issues (a protest-vote, surely?). Two years later his play
An Evening with Richard Nixon
earned him an impressive bundle of death threats. ('Well-written death threats, too. They weren't just lunatics.') Vidal is, and will remain, an energetic, increasingly Parnassian monitor of his homeland — 'a national treasure,' as one critic put it, 'one of the very few sane voices amidst the babble'.

'Oh to be in England, now that England's here,' drawled Gore when, on arrival ai my Ravello hotel, I diffidently telephoned his villa. I had reviewed Mr Vidal's work on two occasions, and with sufficient hostility to win his amused disdain, or so a common friend told me. I had met him once, last year, and he was geniality incarnate (later describing me, in a student-magazine interview, as 'a cute little thing'). Now Vidal is well known to harbour grudges, and for a moment I suspected that some small, patrician revenge might await me. A bit of lordly hetero bashing, perhaps, or at least several hours of Vidal's expertly decadent taunts.

Nothing — or very little — of the kind. He is excellent company and a superlative talker, aphoristic, funny, learned, with a delightful line in brutal mimicry (his Tennessee Williams is an unforgettable, croaky mixture of affection and savagery). There is that fundamental coldness in him, and occasionally one catches glimpses of it. But it is not something that a day-tripper would be permitted to inspect.

Vidal's life at present seems to be a masterpiece of order and productivity. He does most of his writing in the Ravello villa, an ivory palace slapped on the cliff-face, with occasional diversionary visits to his opulent apartment in Rome (it is there — if the late Tom Driberg was to be believed — that most of his startling socio-sexual escapades take place. 'So Tom sang, did he?' said Vidal grimly). He has a living-out maid, and there is always the devoted Howard to mastermind the running of villa and estate. Among other things, they make their own wine. On the ground floor, between Vidal's bedroom and Howard's, is a well-equipped bathroom/sauna/ gymnasium, complete with dumb-bells, where 'I work out irreligiously every day". He looks fit. He is fit, as I discovered during a back-breaking walk down the cliff to Amalfi.

As I wheezed down the endless steps behind him, Vidal chatted melodiously on. The two-year debacle over his recent screenplay,
Caligula,
continues to vex him. The producer, Bob Guccione of
Penthouse,
intended to call the film
Gore Vidal's Caligula;
having seen some of the revised script, Vidal set a lawsuit in train to have his name removed from the title. One of the stars, Maria Schneider
(Last Tango in Paris),
hardly an actress famed for her fastidiousness, quit the film rather than enact the sex scenes required of her by the Italian director.

'Oh, it's hard-core all right. Nothing wrong with that, in itself. It's just that the director has no talent. As for the producer ...' Some exuberantly libellous comments ensued.

'Right, give me some gossip,' Vidal demanded, producing wine as I recuperated after the walk.

Vidal is on record as saying that he always perks up at news of catastrophe among his friends. And, as I did my best with tales of professional failure, neurosis and marital collapse, a new intensity began to invade his features. In a curious way, despite his ameliorist image, you feel that he wishes everything were worse than it is — America, the modern marriage, the trials of his friends. It would be neater that way, and more fun to think about. He has removed pain from his own life, or narrowed it down to manageable areas; and it is one thing he cannot convincingly re-create in his fiction. But his deeply competitive nature is still reassured to know that there is plenty of pain about.

I have never met an American so English in his irony. No issue is serious enough for him to resist its satirical possibilities, a habit that reinforces his stirring pessimism about the way the world is changing. 'As cheerful as a leper-bell,' was how Simon Raven described his prognosis, a verdict which Vidal prizes. But the phrase misses his grisly relish or human folly, the sense you get that his world-view is obedient to a personal rhetoric, a private enjoyment of the badness of things.

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Postscript
In agreeing to the interview Mr Vidal had armed himself with the stipulation that he would be able to see and check the piece before it was published. There was nothing sinister in this: naturally he wouldn't attempt to trim my opinions. Nevertheless I had the ticklish task of calling on Vidal at the Connaught in London and sitting there in his room while he inspected the galleys. In the first paragraph he changed 'homosexual' to 'pansexual'. A little later he said, in his grandest voice, 'Now if you print that I shall most certainly sue,' and deleted a chance scurrility with a stroke of his pen. ('As one gets older', Vidal has remarked, 'litigation replaces sex.') Thereafter he merely did a bit of gardening, corrected some misquotations ('No, that's not my style at all'), and inserted a new joke or two ('If you take that out, I'll give you this'). We haggled over a number of points; there were no real cruces. Occasionally, as he read on, he gave a reluctant laugh. 'Mm,* he concluded. 'A bit thin on the
work.’

This was perfectly true. I had read
Myra
and
Myron
(with difficulty), some of
Williwaw,
half of
The City and the Pillar
and most of
Julian;
I had also spent three weeks reading three chapters of
Burr.
I cannot get through Vida!'s fiction. The books are too long. Life is too short. In the interests of balance I append a piece about VidaPs essays, where I am a little older and a little more forthright.

May I also take the opportunity here to pit Vidal's account of his fight with Mailer against Mailer's account of his fight with Vidal? Needless to say, at no point do they tally. When I asked Mailer for his version, he nodded, squared his shoulders, and spoke with solemn deliberation.

'Vidal had written things about me. I had resolved that the next time I saw him, I was going to hit him. You understand? The next time I saw him was at Lally's. I walked up and banged him over the head with a glass — a heavy cocktail glass. He looked very scared. I asked him to come outside. Then his little friend started in on me.

"All right," I said. "Come on. I'll take out the two of yous." They stayed where they were. I walked away.”

Perhaps, towards the end, I am guilty of importing the accents of De Niro's Jake la Motta; but that was it, in substance. One day I must triangulate the story with the version of an impartial onlooker, if any such exist. Whom to believe, though? In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.

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Gore Vidal is probably the cleverest book-reviewer in the world. This needn't sound like faint praise, even to someone as exhaustively lauded as Mr Vidal. He is too clever to write effective Hollywood screenplays, too clever to be an effective politician (he flunked in the senatorial primaries in 1981), too clever, really, to be an effective novelist. Essays are what he is good at: you can't be too clever for them.

Vidal is the unchallengeable master of the droll stroll. Rightly indulged by his editors, who give their star performer all the rope he wants, Vidal saunters at his leisure through the books tendered for review, with many a delightful diversion, racy short-cut, startling turn of speed. He is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blindspots are illuminating.

Roughly half the essays in
Pink Triangle and Yellow Star
are literary, half socio-political. When writing about the real world, Vidal sounds like the only grown-up in America — indeed, his tone is that of a superevolved stellar sage gazing down on the globe in pitying hilarity. There are two reasons for this. First, Vidal was born into the governing classes, and has never regarded them with anything but profound suspicion. In 1940, following the death of the virtuous Senator William Borah ('the lion of Idaho'), a large stash was found in his safety deposit box, causing uneasy speculation. Vidal approached his grandfather, Senator Gore, and asked him who had paid Borah off: 'The Nazis,' came the reply. To keep us out of the war.' This is traumatic news, even now. Vidal must have been fifteen at the time. It is easy to see how such disclosures would have shaped and hardened his thinking.

The second and closely related reason for Vidal's bracing hauteur is that Vidal is incorrigibly anti-American. My, is Gore unpatriotic!

No pomaded Hanoverian swaggerer could have such natural contempt for that coarse and greedy colony. Writing about the Framing of the First Constitution, Vidal does not accept 'the view that a consortium of intellectual giants met in Philadelphia in order to answer once and for all the vexing questions of how men are to be governed'. He finds, rather, that their 'general tone is that of a meeting of the trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell'. In another essay Vidal resolutely fails to distinguish between American polity and the workings of the Chase Manhattan Bank: bureaucrats are 'tellers', voters are 'depositors'; and when Banksman Nixon goes to Peking or Moscow, he goes 'in search of new accounts'. As for the judiciary, and the moral code it enforces, Vidal claims that the prisons throng 'with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have sex in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium' — i.e. the Bible (or 'the Babble', as many of its adherents seem to call it). How true or 'helpful' all this is remains unclear. But the gleeful iconoclasm has the conviction of satirical truth.

Vidal's flag-scragging extends from public life through literary questions to social mores. In 'the land of the tin ear', where 'stupidity ... is deeply revered', where humourlessness is endemic ('what other culture could have produced Hemingway and
not
seen the joke?'), cultural conspiracies flourish unchecked. 'Americans will never accept any literature that does not plainly support ... a powerful and bigoted middle class', a state of affairs institutionalised by the universities, which are themselves torpid bureaucracies of preferment and tenure. Among the bigotries of this powerful middle class is a deep and mindless 'homophobia', the American establishment being militantly heterosexual. Vidal has written about this before, of course, but never quite so virulently. 'In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles' — hence the book's title. The moral stakes could hardly be raised any higher; Vidal's
tic nerveux
has developed into an obsession, a crusade, and the effect on his writing is everywhere apparent.

In the opening essay, on Scott Fitzgerald's
Notebooks,
we learn that Fitzgerald makes 'rather too many nervous references to fairies and pansies'. In the second, on Edmund Wilson, we learn that Wilson's notebooks, too, 'are filled with innumerable references to 'fairies that range from derisive to nervous'. What does 'nervous' mean here exactly? Does it mean that Fitzgerald and Wilson are 'nervous' about being fairies themselves? Yes, because Vidal has always believed that heterosexuals got that way purely through the conditioning of that powerful middle class. The third essay, on Isherwood's
Christopher and his Kind,
ends with a plangent clarion call: 'one can only hope that thanks to Christopher's life and work, his true kind will increase even as they refuse, so wisely, to multiply'. A few pages earlier Vidal has called Isherwood 'the best prose writer in English*. This is a meaningless tribute anyway, but by now the nervous hets among Vidal's readers will be wondering whether the verdict is really a literary one. It sounds like a manic-depressive overpraising Sylvia Plath, a postmaster general making excessive claims for Trollope, a midget going ape for Pope.