The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (30 page)

Frederick takes Dodo to a publisher's party (our friend Dennis is there) and Dodo manages to appall. Lyle is hurt. Everyone is slightly fraudulent. A publisher who respects Frederick's integrity offers him the editorship of
Haw
, a low publication which of course Frederick makes a success of. Lyle writes her husband's plays. There is a literary man who talks constantly of Jane Austen, whom he may not have read, and teaches at the League for Cultural Foundations (a.k.a. The New School), where “classes bulged with middle-aged students anxious to get an idea of what it would be like to have an idea.” But under the usual bright mendacities of happy island life, certain relationships work themselves out. The most Powellesque is between two commercial artists, Caroline and Lorna:

Ever since their marriages had exploded Caroline and Lorna had been in each other's confidence, sharing a bottle of an evening in Lorna's studio or Caroline's penthouse. In fact they had been telling each other everything for so many years over their cups that they'd never heard a word each other had said.

In an ecstasy of female bonding, they discuss their lost husbands:

They told each other of their years of fidelity—and each lamented the curse of being a one-man woman. Men always took advantage of their virtue and Caroline agreed with Lorna that, honestly, if it could be done over again, she'd sleep with every man who came along instead of wasting loyalty on one undeserving male. After a few drinks, Caroline finally said she had slept with maybe forty or fifty men but only because she was so desperately unhappy. Lorna said she didn't blame anyone in Caroline's domestic situation for doing just that, and many times wished she had not been such a loyal sap about George, but except for a few vacation trips and sometimes being betrayed by alcohol she had really never—well, anyway, she didn't blame anyone.

Revelations bombard deaf ears. “Frequently they lost interest in dinner once they had descended below the bottle's label and then a remarkable inspiration would come to open a second bottle and repeat the revelations they had been repeating for years to glazed eyes and deaf ears.” Finally, “Both ladies talked in confidence of their frustrations in the quest for love, but the truth was they had gotten all they wanted of the commodity and had no intention of making sacrifice of comfort for a few Cupid feathers.” Powell was a marvelous sharp antidote for the deep-warm-sincere love novels of that period. Today she is, at the least, a bright counterpoint to our lost-and-found literary ladies.

Powell deals again with the, always to her, mysterious element of luck in people's careers. When one thinks of her own bad luck, the puzzlement has a certain poignancy. But she can be very funny indeed about the admiration that mediocrity evokes on that happy island where it has never been possible to be too phony. Yet when Frederick, free of his bondage to Dodo, returns to Lyle, the note is elegiac: “In a world of destruction one must hold fast to whatever fragments of love are left, for sometimes a mosaic can be more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.” We all tended to write this sort of thing immediately after Hiroshima,
mon assassin
.

         

The Wicked Pavilion
(1954) is the Café Julien is the Lafayette Hotel of real life. The title is from
The Creevey Papers
, and refers to the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion, where the glamorous and louche wait upon a mad royal. Dennis Orphen opens and closes the book in his by now familiarly mysterious way. He takes no real part in the plot. He is simply still there, watching the not-so-magic wheel turn as the happy island grows sad. For him, as for Powell, the café is central to his life. Here he writes; sees friends; observes the vanity fair. Powell has now become masterful in her setting of scenes. The essays—preludes, overtures—are both witty and sadly wise. She has also got the number to Eisenhower's American, as she brings together in this penultimate rout all sorts of earlier figures, now grown old: Okie is still a knowing man about town and author of the definitive works on the painter Marius; Andy Callingham is still a world-famous novelist, serene in his uncontagious self-love; and the Peggy Guggenheim figure is back again as Cynthia, an art gallery owner and party giver. One plot is young love: Rick and Ellenora who met at the Café Julien in wartime and never got enough of it or of each other or of the happy island.

A secondary plot gives considerable pleasure even though Powell lifted it from a movie of the day called
Holy Matrimony
(1943) with Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields, from Arnold Bennett's novel
Buried Alive
. The plot that Powell took is an old one: A painter, bored with life or whatever, decides to play dead. The value of his pictures promptly goes so high that he is tempted to keep on painting after “death.” Naturally, sooner or later, he will give himself away: Marius paints a building that had not been built before his “death.” But only two old painter friends have noticed this, and they keep his secret for the excellent reason that one of them is busy turning out “Marius” pictures, too. Marius continues happily as a sacred presence, enjoying in death the success that he never had in life: “Being dead has spoiled me,” he observes. It should be noted that the painting for this novel's cover was done by Powell's old friend, Reginald Marsh.

A new variation on the Powell young woman is Jerry: clean-cut, straight-forward, and on the make. But her peculiar wholesomeness does not inspire men to give her presents; yet “the simple truth was that with her increasingly expensive tastes she really could not afford to work…. As for settling for the safety of marriage, that seemed the final defeat, synonymous in Jerry's mind with asking for the last rites.” An aristocratic lady, Elsie, tries unsuccessfully to launch her. Elsie's brother, Wharton, and sister-in-law, Nita, are fine comic emblems of respectable marriage. In fact, Wharton is one of Powell's truly great and original monsters, quite able to hold his own with Pecksniff:

Wharton had such a terrific reputation for efficiency that many friends swore that the reason his nose changed colors before your very eyes was because of an elaborate Rimbaud color code, indicating varied reactions to his surroundings…. Ah, what a stroke of genius it had been for him to have found Nita! How happy he had been on his honeymoon and for years afterward basking in the safety of Nita's childish innocence where his intellectual shortcomings, sexual coldness and caprices—indeed his basic ignorance—would not be discovered…. He was well aware that many men of his quixotic moods preferred young boys, but he dreaded to expose his inexperience to one of his own sex, and after certain cautious experiments realized that his anemic lusts were canceled by his overpowering fear of gossip…. Against the flattering background of Nita's delectable purity, he blossomed forth as the all-round He-man, the Husband who knows everything…. He soon taught her that snuggling, hand-holding, and similar affectionate demonstrations were kittenish and vulgar. He had read somewhere, however, that breathing into a woman's ear or scratching her at the nape of the neck drove her into complete ecstasy…. In due course Nitabore him four daughters, a sort of door prize for each time he attended.

The Party is given by Cynthia now, and it rather resembles Proust's last roundup: “There are people here who have been dead twenty years,” someone observes, including “the bore that walks like a man.” There is a sense of closing time; people settle for what they can get. “We get sick of our clinging vines, he thought, but the day comes when we suspect that the vines are all that hold our rotting branches together.” Dennis Orphen at the end records in his journal the last moments of the wicked pavilion as it falls to the wrecker's ball:

It must be that the Julien was all that these people really liked about each other for now when they chance across each other in the street they look through each other, unrecognizing, or cross the street quickly with the vague feeling that here was someone identified with unhappy memories—as if the other was responsible for the fall of the Julien.

What had been a stage for more than half a century to a world is gone and “those who had been bound by it fell apart like straws when the baling cord is cut and remembered each other's name and face as part of a dream that would never come back.”

         

In 1962, Powell published her last and, perhaps, most appealing novel,
The Golden Spur
. Again, the protagonist is male. In this case a young man from Silver City, Ohio (again), called Jonathan Jaimison. He has come to the city to find his father. Apparently twenty-six years earlier his mother, Connie, had had a brief fling with a famous man in the Village; pregnant, she came home and married a Mr. Jaimison. The book opens with a vigorous description of Wanamaker's department store being torn down. Powell is now rather exuberant about the physical destruction of her city (she wrote this last book in her mid-sixties, when time was doing the same to her). There is no longer a Dennis Orphen on the scene; presumably, he lies buried beneath whatever glass-and-cement horror replaced the Lafayette. But there are still a few watering holes from the Twenties, and one of them is The Golden Spur, where Connie mingled with the bohemians.

Jonathan stays at the Hotel De Long, which sounds like the Vanderbilt, a star of many of Powell's narratives. Jonathan, armed with Connie's cryptic diary, has a number of names that might be helpful. One is that of Claire van Orphen (related to Dennis?), a moderately successful writer, for whom Connie did some typing. Claire now lives embalmed in past time. She vaguely recalls Connie, who had been recommended to her by the one love of her life, Major Wedburn, whose funeral occurs the day Jonathan arrives at the De Long. Claire gives Jonathan possible leads; meanwhile, his presence has rejuvenated her. She proposes to her twin sister, Bea, that they live together and gets a firm no. The old nostalgia burned down long ago for the worldly Bea. On the other hand, Claire's career is revived, with the help of a professionally failed writer who gets “eight bucks for fifteen hundred words of new criticism in a little magazine or forty for six hundred words of old criticism in the Sunday book section.” He studies all of Claire's ladies' magazine short stories of yesteryear; he then reverses the moral angle:

“In the old days the career girl who supported the family was the heroine and the idle wife was the baddie,” Claire said gleefully. “And now it's the other way round. In the soap operas, the career girl is the baddie, the wife is the goodie because she's better for
business….
Well, you were right. CBS has bought the two [stories] you fixed, and Hollywood is interested.”

Powell herself was writing television plays in the age of Eisenhower and no doubt had made this astonishing discovery on her own.

Jonathan is promptly picked up by two girls at The Golden Spur; he moves in with them. Since he is more domestic than they, he works around the house. He is occasionally put to work in bed until he decides that he doesn't want to keep on being “a diaphragm-tester.” Among his possible fathers is Alvine Harshawe alias Andrew Callingham alias Ernest Hemingway. Alvine is lonely; “You lost one set of friends with each marriage, another when it dissolved, gaining smaller and smaller batches each time you traded in a wife.” Alvine has no clear memory of Connie but toys with the idea of having a grown son, as does a famous painter named Hugow. Another candidate is a distinguished lawyer, George Terrence, whose actress daughter, unknown to him, is having an affair with Jonathan. Terrence is very much school of the awful Wharton of
The Wicked Pavilion
, only Terrence has made the mistake of picking up a young actor in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis Hotel; the actor is now blithely blackmailing him in a series of letters worthy of his contemporary Pal Joey. Terrence welcomes the idea of a son but Jonathan shies away: He does not want his affair with the daughter to be incestuous.

         

Finally, Cassie, the Peggy Guggenheim character, makes her appearance, and The Party assembles for the last time. There are nice period touches: girls from Bennington are everywhere. While Cassie herself “was forty-three—well, all right, forty-eight, if you're going to count every lost weekend—and Hugow's betrayal had happened at birthday time, when she was frightened enough by the half-century mark reaching out for her before she'd even begun to have her proper quota of love.” Cassie takes a fancy to Jonathan and hires him to work at her gallery. He has now figured out not only his paternity but his maternity and, best of all, himself. The father was Major Wedburn, who was, of course, exactly like the bore that his mother, Connie, married. The foster father appears on the scene, and there is recognition of this if not resolution. As for Connie, she had slept with everyone who asked her because “she wanted to be whatever anybody expected her to be, because she never knew what she was herself.” Jonathan concludes, “That's the way I am.” At an art gallery, he says, “I have a career of other people's talents.”

The quest is over. Identity fixed. The Party over, Jonathan joins Hugow in his cab. “He was very glad that Hugow had turned back downtown, perhaps to the Spur, where they could begin all over.” On that blithe note Powell's life and lifework end; and the wheel stops; the magic's gone—except for the novels of Dawn Powell, all of them long since out of print just as her name has been erased from that perpetually foggy pane, “American Literature.”

The New York Review of Books
November 5, 1987

MONTAIGNE

“In every work of genius,” wrote Emerson, “we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” After four centuries, Montaigne's curious genius still has that effect on his readers and, time and again, one finds in his self-portrait one's own most brilliant
aperçus
(the ones that somehow we forgot to write down and so forgot) restored to us in his essays—attempts—to assay—value—himself in his own time as well as, if he was on the subject, all time, if there is such a thing.

For thirty years I have kept Donald M. Frame's translation of
The Complete Works of Montaigne
at, if not bedside, hand. There are numerous interlocking Olympic circles on the maroon binding where glasses were set after I had written some no longer decipherable commentary in the margin or, simply, “How true!” I never actually read all of
The Complete Works
, but I did read here and there, and I reread favorite essays rather more than I ever tried to read the famous “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” who needed, I used to think, neither apology nor indeed memorial. But the generation of the twenty-first century is now in place, and to celebrate its entry into the greenhouse there is a new translation of
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
by M. A. Screech who, years ago, so ably—even sternly—led me through Rabelais.

It has taken me one month to read every one of the 1,269 pages. (Montaigne, III 8: “I have just read through at one go Tacitus's
History
[something which rarely happens to me, it is twenty years since I spent one full hour at a time on a book]….”) I enjoyed comparing Screech with Frame. Where Frame is sonorous and euphemistic, Screech is sharp and up-to-date, as readers of his
Montaigne and Melancholy
(1983) might suspect. Although my nature inclines me to enrol Montaigne in the relativist school of Lucretius and the Epicureans, thus making him proto-Englightenment, Screech firmly nails Montaigne within the Roman Catholic Church of his day, beleaguered as it was by the Reformation, which took the form of civil war in France between Catholics and Protestants, an ideological, that is pointless, war of the crude sort that has entertained us for so much of our own science-ridden century.

Michel Eyquem was born in 1533 at his father's estate, Montaigne, east of Bordeaux. A family of fish and wine merchants, the Eyquems were minimally ennobled by the acquisition of Montaigne, which gave them their “de.” The mother's family were Spanish Jewish, presumably long since converted. When schism came, Michel, his parents, two brothers, and a sister remained Catholic, while one brother and two sisters became Protestant. By the 1560s, there was an out-and-out civil war that continued to Michel's death in 1592. The Montaigne family remained on amiable terms not only with the Catholic court at Paris but with that Protestant sovereign of nearby Navarre who so proverbially celebrated a Mass in order to become King Henry IV of France.

Montaigne's education was odd but useful. As his tutor spoke no French, Latin became his first language, spoken and written, until he was six. Then he went on to spend seven years at a Latin school, where he was immersed in the Roman classics; but little Greek. He also learned the agreed-upon French of the day, as well as Gascon dialect. He was more or less trained to be a soldier, a lawyer, an estate manager, and what used to be called a “gentleman,” a category that no longer exists in our specialized time. As such, Montaigne naturally hated lying, and it was his essay on the subject that first drew me to him years ago. “Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying, we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes…. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up” (I 8). As one who has been obliged to spend a lifetime in diverse liar-worlds (worlds where the liar is often most honored when he is known to be lying and getting away with it), I find Montaigne consoling.

Montaigne's father became Mayor of Bordeaux, while his son spent thirteen years in the city's legal council. It was during this period that he met a fellow public servant, Étienne de La Boëtie. Each was to become the other's other self. “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel that it can only be expressed by replying ‘Because it was him: because it was me.'…We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other…” (I 28). Their relationship was an intense dialogue on every possible subject. De La Boëtie inclined to stoicism. He had written against tyranny. He died young.

Montaigne's letter to his father on de La Boëtie's last days is rather like that of Ammianus Marcellinus on the death of the Emperor Julian, something of a hero to Montaigne if not to the Holy Office. (Letter to father: “He gave up the ghost at about three o'clock on the Wednesday morning, August 18th, 1563, after living 32 years, nine months, and 17 days….”)

         

Certainly, we are all in poor de La Boëtie's debt for dying, because Montaigne was never to find another soulmate and so, in due course, after marriage, children, the inheritance of the estate, “In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employment…”, retired to Montaigne, where he then began to make attempts at understanding everything, which meant, principally, the unknowable (so Socrates thought) self. In the absence of a friend to talk to or an Atticus to write to, Montaigne started writing to himself about himself and about what he had been reading which became himself. He made many attempts to try—
essayer
—to find his form. “If I had somebody to write to I would readily have chosen it as the means of publishing my chatter…. Unless I deceive myself my achievement then would have been greater” (I 40). At first, he wrote short memoranda—how to invest a city, or what one is to make of a certain line of Seneca. Later, he settled for the long essay that could be read in an hour. He did a lot of free-associating, as “all subjects are linked to each other” (III 5). Essentially, he wrote as a man of action, involved in the world both locally and nationally. He was personally esteemed by Catherine de Medici, Henry III, Marguerite de Valois, and Henry of Navarre, who twice visited him at Montaigne and would, as King of France, have made him a counsellor had the essayist not made one final attempt to understand death—life by dying.

The greatest action of this man of action was to withdraw to his library in order to read and think and write notes to himself that eventually became books for the world:

At home I slip off to my library (it is on the third storey of a tower); it is easy for me to oversee my household from there. I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to and fro, noting down and dictating these whims of mine…. My libraryis round in shape, squared off only for the needs of my table and chair: as it curves round, it offers me at a glance every one of my books ranged on five shelves all the way along. It has three splendid and unhampered views and a circle of free space sixteen yards in diameter (III 3).

Montaigne seems to have read every Latin author extant; he was also much intrigued with contemporary stories of the Americas and other exotic places where cannibals and realms of gold coexisted. Much of his writing starts with a quotation that sets him to ruminating on his own, buttressed by more quotations, making a sort of palimpsest. If nothing else, he was a superb arranger of other men's flowers. He was particularly drawn to biographical anecdote, and it was lucky for him that not long after he settled in his tower room, Bishop Jacques Amyot published a French translation of Plutarch, who quickly became Montaigne's most useful source and touchstone. In fact, one wonders what the essays would have been like without Plutarch. Would Montaigne have found so attractive those human titans, Alexander and Caesar? Or those paradigms of human virtue, Epaminondas and Cato the Younger?

Among the thousand books on the five shelves, Montaigne returns most often to Lucretius and Seneca. He reveres Homer, but he is happiest with those two worldly writers who appeal to his own worldliness. The first because of his sense of the diversity—even relativity—of things, the second as a wise counsellor, not only in the conduct of a life at home but at a dangerous court. He turns often to Cicero, but he is vaguely disapproving of the vanity of that politician, ever avid, especially in retirement, for glory. Cicero “said he wanted to use his withdrawal and his repose from affairs of state to gain life ever-lasting through his writings” (I 39). Then Montaigne, slyly, quotes Persius: “Does
knowing
mean nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it?”

I thought of a chat with Robert Lowell at my Hudson river house forty years ago. Somehow, we had got on to the subject of Julius Caesar's character. I mentioned Cicero's letter to Atticus on how unnerving it was to have Caesar as a house guest. “But,” said Lowell, “remember how pleased Cicero was when Caesar praised his consulship.” Of course, each of us wanted the other to know that
he
had read the letter and that, if nothing else, we held, in common, a small part of the classical heritage—so etiolated! so testeronish! so Eurocentric!—that Montaigne had spent his life in communion with. I wonder what a poet and a novelist would have in common to talk about nowadays. After all, a shared knowledge of old books was probably the largest part of the “loving friendship” between Étienne and Montaigne. Today they would share—what? Robert Altman's films?

Montaigne disliked pedants. He notes that in his local dialect they are called
Lettreferits
—word-struck. He himself is after other game than words or “words about words”: “scribbling seems to be one of the symptoms of an age of excess” (III 9). “We work merely to fill the memory, leaving the understanding and the sense of right and wrong…. Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me—not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to the book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place. We only know, I believe, what we know now: ‘knowing' no more consists in what we once knew than in what we shall know in the future” (I 24). He frets about his poor memory. “I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realising it” (II 17). This is a bit swank. But writers often forget what they have written, since the act of writing is a letting go of a piece of one's mind, and so an erasure. Montaigne's first two volumes of essays were published in 1580: he was forty-seven. Eight years later, he revised the first two volumes and published a third. From the beginning, he was accepted as a classic in the Roman sense, or as a writer
utile-doux
, as the French styled the great works.

Montaigne was much concerned with his body and believed Sebond's proposition that man is a marriage between soul and body. He hated doctors, a family tradition to which he not only adhered but attributed the long lives in the male line (he himself was dead at sixty, rather younger than father and grandfather). He feared kidney stones, which tortured his father and, finally, himself. To cure “the stone,” he visited spas everywhere and took the baths: “I reckon that bathing in general is salubrious and I believe that our health has suffered…since we lost the habit…. we are all the worst for having our limbs encrusted and our pores blocked up with filth” (II 37). Of himself, “my build is a little below the average. This defect is not only ugly but unbecoming, especially in those who hold commands…” (II 17), but “my build is tough and thick-set, my face is not fat but full, my complexion is between the jovial and the melancholic…. Skill and agility I have never had…except at running (at which I was among the average).”

He records without despair or even pride that he has almost no gifts for music, dancing, tennis, wrestling, and none at all for swimming, fencing, vaulting, and jumping.

My hand is so clumsy that I cannot even read my own writing, so that I prefer to write things over again rather than to give myself the trouble of disentangling my scribbles…. That apart, I am quite a good scholar! I can never fold up a letter neatly, never sharpen a pen, never carve passably at table, nor put harness on horse, nor bear a hawk properly nor release it, nor address hounds, birds or horses. My bodily endowments are, in brief, in close harmony with my soul's. There is no agility, merely a full firm vigour, but I can stick things out.

Like his father, he wore mostly black and white. “Whether riding or walking I have always been used to burdening my hand with a cane or stick, even affecting an air of elegance by leaning on it with a distinguished look on my face” (II 25).