The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (7 page)

Then, of course, there is the problem of Mr. Wouk and sex. Daughter Madeline rooms with two girls and “both were having affairs—one with a joke writer, the other with an actor working as a bellhop. Madeline had found herself being asked to skulk around, stay out late, or remain in her room while one or another pair copulated…. She was disgusted. Both girls had good jobs, both dressed with taste, both were college graduates. Yet they behaved like sluts….” But then to Madeline, “sex was a delightful matter of playing with fire, but enjoying the blaze from a safe distance, until she could leap into the hallowed white conflagration of a bridal night. She was a middle class good girl, and not in the least ashamed of it.”

Incidentally, Mr. Wouk perpetuates the myth that the SS were all fags. This is now an article of faith with many uneducated Americans on the ground that to be a fag is the worst thing that could befall anyone next to falling into the hands of a fag sadist, particularly the SS guards who were as “alike as chorus boys…with blond waved hair, white teeth, bronzed skin, and blue eyes.” Actually the SS guards in 1939 were not particularly pretty; they were also not fags. Hitler had eliminated that element.

Mr. Wouk's prose is generally correct if uninspired. The use of the ugly verb “shrill” crops up in at least half the best-sellers under review and is plainly here to stay. Also, I suppose we must stop making any distinction between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” The book ends with Pearl Harbor in flames and…yes, you've guessed it. The stars! “Overhead a clear starry black sky arched” (at least the sky was overhead and not underfoot), “with Orion setting in the west, and Venus sparkling in the east…. The familiar religious awe came over him, the sense of a Presence above this pitiful little earth. He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief.”

The films
Since You Went Away
and
The Best Years of Our Life
come to mind; not to mention all those
March of Times
in the Trans-Lux theaters of the old republic as it girded itself for war. But for all Mr. Wouk's idiocies and idiosyncrasies, his competence is most impressive and his professionalism awe-inspiring in a world of lazy writers and TV-stunned readers. I did not in the least regret reading every word of his book, though I suspect he is a writer best read swiftly by the page in order to get the sweep of his narrative while overlooking the infelicities of style and the shallowness of mind. I realize my sort of slow reading does a disservice to this kind of a book. But then I hope the author will be pleased to know that at least one person has actually read his very long bestseller. Few people will. There is evidence that a recent best-seller by a well-known writer was never read by its publisher or by the book club that took it or by the film company that optioned it. Certainly writers of book-chat for newspapers
never
read long books and seldom do more than glance at short ones.

Number six on the best-seller list,
The Camerons
, by Robert Crichton, is a mystifying work. One understands the sincerity of Herman Wouk, number seven, as he tries to impose his stern morality on an alien culture, or even that of the dread Marjorie Holmes, number ten, exploiting Bible Belt religiosity with what I trust is some degree of seriousness (all those chats with God must have made her a fan). But Mr. Crichton has elected to address himself to characters that seem to be infinitely remote from him, not to mention his readers. A UK mining town in what I take to be the 1870s (there is a reference to Keir Hardie, the trade unionist). With considerable fluency Mr. Crichton tells the story of a miner's sixteen-year-old daughter who goes to the Highlands to find herself a golden youth to give her children. She captures a Highland fisherman, locks him up in the mines for twenty years, and has a number of children by him who more or less fulfill her “genealogical” (as Trevanian would say) dream.

Of all these books this one is closest to the movies. The characters all speak with the singing cadences of Burbank's
How Green Was My Valley
. Another inspiration is
None But the Lonely Heart
, in which Ethel Barrymore said to Cary Grant, “Love's not for the poor, son.” Mr. Cameron plays a number of variations on that theme, among them “Love, in everyday life, is a luxury.”

One reads page after page, recalling movies. As always the Mirror Scene. The Food Scene (a good recipe for finnan haddie). There is the Fever Breaks Scene (during this episode I
knew
that there would have to be a tracheotomy and sure enough the doctor said that it was sometimes necessary but that in this case…). The Confrontation between Mr. Big and the Hero. Cameron has been injured while at work; the mine owner will give him no compensation. Cameron sues; the miners strike. He wins but not before the Confrontation with the Mob Scene when the miners turn on him for being the cause of their hunger. There is even the Illiterate Learning about Literature Scene, inspired by
The Corn Is Green
, in which Bette Davis taught the young Welsh miner John Dall to read Quality Lit so that he could grow up to be Emlyn Williams. Well, Cameron goes to the library and asks for
Macbeth
and reads it to the amazement of the bitter drunken librarian (Thomas Mitchell).

There is the Nubile Scene (“For a small girl she had large breasts and the shirt was tight and made her breasts stand out, and she kept the jacket near at hand because she didn't want to embarrass her father if he came into the room. She had only recently become that way and both she and her father weren't quite sure how to act about it”). Young Love Scene (the son's girl friend is named Allison—from
Peyton Place
). At the end, the Camerons sail for the New World. The first night out Cameron “wouldn't go down to her then and so he stayed at the rail and watched the phosphorescent waves wash up against the sides of the ship and explode in stars.”

There is something drastically wrong with this smoothly executed novel and I cannot figure out what it is other than to suspect that the author lacks the integrity the Wise Hack insists upon. Mr. Crichton has decided to tell a story that does not seem to interest him very much. At those moments when the book almost comes alive (the conflict between labor and management), the author backs away from his true subject because socialism cannot be mentioned in best-seller land except as something innately wicked. Yet technically Mr. Crichton is a good writer and he ought to do a lot better than this since plainly he lacks the “integrity” to do worse.

Can your average beautiful teen-age Persian eunuch find happiness with your average Greek world conqueror who is also a dish and aged only twenty-six? The answer Mary Renault triumphantly gives us in
The Persian Boy
is
ne!
Twenty-five years ago
The City and the Pillar
was considered shocking because it showed what two nubile boys did together on a hot summer afternoon in McLean, Virginia. Worse, one of them went right on doing that sort of thing for the rest of his life. The scandal! The shame! In 1973 the only true love story on the best-seller list is about two homosexualists, and their monstrous aberration (so upsetting to moralists like Mr. Wouk) is apparently taken for granted by those ladies who buy hardcover novels.

At this point I find myself wishing that one had some way of knowing just who buys and who reads what sort of books. I am particularly puzzled (and pleased) by the success of Mary Renault. Americans have always disliked history (of some fifty subjects offered in high school the students recently listed history fiftieth and least popular) and know nothing at all of the classical world. Yet in a dozen popular books Mary Renault has made the classical era alive, forcing even the dullest of book-chat writers to recognize that bisexuality was once our culture's norm and that Christianity's perversion of this human fact is the aberration and not the other way around. I cannot think how Miss Renault has managed to do what she has done, but the culture is the better for her work.

I am predisposed to like the novel dealing with history and find it hard to understand why this valuable genre should be so much disdained. After all, every realistic novel is historical. But somehow, describing what happened last summer at Rutgers is for our solemn writers a serious subject, while to re-create Alexander the Great is simply frivolous. Incidentally, I am here concerned only with the traditional novel as practiced by Updike, Tolstoi, George Eliot, Nabokov, the Caldwells (Taylor and Erskine) as well as by the ten writers under review. I leave for another and graver occasion the matter of experimental high literature and its signs.

In
The Persian Boy
Miss Renault presents us with Alexander at the height of his glory as seen through the eyes of the boy eunuch Bagoas. Miss Renault is good at projecting herself and us into strange cultures. With ease she becomes her narrator Bagoas; the book is told in the first person (a device
not
invented by Robert Graves as innocent commentators like to tell us but a classroom exercise going back more than two millennia: write as if you were Alexander the Great addressing your troops before Tyre). Bagoas's father is murdered by political enemies; the boy is enslaved; castrated; rented out as a whore by his first master. Because of his beauty he ends up in the bed of the Great King of Persia, Darius. Alexander conquers Persia; sets fire to Persepolis. The Great King is killed by his own people and Bagoas is presented by one of the murderers to Alexander, who, according to historical account, never took advantage sexually of those he captured. Bagoas falls in love with the conqueror and, finally, seduces him. The love affair continues happily to the end, although there is constant jealousy on Bagoas's side because of Alexander's permanent attachment to his boyhood friend Hephaestion, not to mention the wives he picks up en route.

The effect of the book is phantasmagoric. Marvelous cities, strange landscapes, colliding cultures, and at the center the golden conqueror of the earth as he drives on and on past the endurance of his men, past his own strength. Today when a revulsion against war is normal, the usual commercialite would be inclined to depict Alexander as a Fag Villain-Killer, but in a note Miss Renault makes the point: “It needs to be borne in mind today that not till more than a century later did a handful of philosophers even start to question the morality of war.” Alexander was doing what he thought a man in his place ought to do. The world was there to be conquered.

The device of observing the conqueror entirely through the eyes of an Oriental is excellent and rather novel. We are able to see the Macedonian troops as they appeared to the Persians: crude gangsters smashing to bits an old and subtle culture they cannot understand, like today's Americans in Asia. But, finally,
hubris
is the theme; and the fire returns to heaven. I am not at all certain that what we have here is the “right” Alexander, but right or not, Miss Renault has drawn the portrait of someone who
seems
real yet unlike anyone else, and that divinity the commercialites are forever trying for in their leaden works really does gleam from time to time in the pages of this nice invention.

As a fiction,
August 1914
is not as well managed as Mr. Wouk's
Winds of War
. I daresay as an expression of one man's indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society we must honor if not the art the author. Fortunately the Nobel Prize is designed for just such a purpose. Certainly it is seldom bestowed for literary merit; if it were, Nabokov and not the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn would have received it when the Swedes decided it was Holy Russia's turn to be honored.

Solzhenitsyn is rooted most ambitiously in literature as well as in films. Tolstoi appears on Novelists and Critics of the 1940s and Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud. In a sense the novel is to be taken as a dialogue between the creator of
War and Peace
and Solzhenitsyn; with the engineer opposing Tolstoi's view of history as a series of great tides in which the actions of individuals matter not at all. I'm on Solzhenitsyn's side in this debate but cannot get much worked up over his long and wearisome account of Russian military bungling at the beginning of the First World War. The characters are impossible to keep straight, though perhaps future volumes will clarify things. Like
Winds of War
, this is the first of a series.

The book begins with dawn on the Caucasus, towering “so vast above petty human creation, so elemental…” The word “vast” is repeated in the next paragraph to get us in the mood for a superspectacle. Then we learn that one of the characters has actually met Tolstoi, and their meeting is recalled on Tarzan Revisited. “‘What is the aim of man's life on earth?'” asks the young man. Tolstoi's reply is prompt: “‘To serve good and thereby to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.'” How? “‘Only through love! Nothing else. No one will discover anything better.'” This is best-seller writing with a vengeance.

In due course we arrive at the Mirror Scene: “She was not even comforted by the sight of her naturally rosy skin, her round shoulders, the hair which fell down to her hips and took four buckets of rain water to wash.” The Nubile Scene: “She had always avoided undressing even in front of other women, because she was ashamed of her breasts, which were large, big and generous even for a woman of her build.” Wisdom Phrases: “The dangers of beauty are well known: narcissism, irresponsibility, selfishness.” Or “Evil people always support each other; that is their chief strength.” Like Hitler and Stalin? Also,
Christian
Wisdom Phrases: “There is a justice which existed before us, without us and for its own sake. And our task is to
divine
what it is.” Not since Charles Morgan's last novel has there been so much profundity in a best-seller.

As for the movies, the best Russian product is recalled, particularly
Battleship Potemkin
. Also, boldly acknowledging the cinema's primacy, Solzhenitsyn has rendered his battle scenes in screenplay form with “=” meaning
CUT TO
. These passages are particularly inept.
“Mad tearing sound of rifle fire, machine-gun fire, artillery fire!/ Reddened by fire, THE WHEEL still rolls./ = The firelight glitters with savage joy/”
and so on. The Wise Hack would have been deeply disturbed by the presumption of this member of the audience who ought to be eating popcorn in the second balcony and not parodying the century's one true art form that also makes money. From time to time Solzhenitsyn employs the Dos Passos device of random newspaper cuttings to give us a sense of what is going on in August 1914. This works a bit better than the mock screenplay.