Gore Vidal: Writer, Political Provocateur and All-Around Contrarian

"We should stop going around babbling about how we're the greatest democracy on earth, when we're not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic."---Gore Vidal on the modern United States

I note with sadness the passing of Gore Vidal the other day, at age 86.  Not that I agreed with all his historic viewpoints,  his stubborn belief that  Franklin Roosevelt's embargo of oil and iron exports  to Japan was an invitation for that Empire to destroy the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the reasons behind the rise of Christianity in the Ancient World to name two .   But I found him to be that rare person who not only wrote interesting novels about American life and its checkered past, but also someone who was quite capable of speaking his mind in television and radio interviews in an entertaining and provocative way.  His was a voice that allowed me to see the world in a different light.  

 

I am also writing this little note to give the man his due---his views from the 1960's to the 90s were pretty much correct--the USA was an empire, both parties were controlled by giant corporations, especially the Republicans but too often the Democrats,   that the war on drugs was un-winnable,  that Ronald Reagan was a corporate shill and he would bring worse shills to follow his path, that religion could be used as an instrument of hatred and intolerance, that it didn't matter a hoot in hell who people choose to sleep with, etc. 

 

And that Mr. Vidal could make all these statements in his interviews and highly cogent essays with a big dollop of wry and sharp humor. If he was a  Jeremiah issuing warnings against the inflated hopes of American Exceptional-ism, he did it with panache and satiric skill.  He was as much an entertainer in the best sense as he was a pundit and that former attribute had to be the ONLY reason he had such a high--profile platform in America's mainstream media.        

There wasn't much Gore Vidal didn't do in that major media.  He started out as one of many promising post-war novelists (after spending three years in the US Navy) and had the family connections to pursue a career in politics.  According to Vidal in his first volume of memoirs, he had  a god shot at an open seat for Congress in the state of New Mexico, where he had attended prep school.  But his novel "The City and the Pillar" about two male gay lovers, published in 1948, put an end to those chances.  Homosexuality was a no-go and even a hint of it could kill a political career, as Vidal himself showed in his  most famous play, "The Best Man" (1963) about  political in-fighting at an American party convention.

 

  A television and Hollywood screenwriter in the 1950's, he left America often to write his novels in the more tranquil old-world vistas of central Italy.  Starting with "Julian" (1964) , a novel of the last non-Christian emperor of Rome,  most of his novels were popular, despite the fact that he broke taboos and smashed icons that others had tried and failed to make pay either form a lack of talent or censorship.   It was no matter if he was writing about a transvestite hero in 1940's Hollywood, "Myra Breckinbridge" (1968) or revealing the warts-and-all biographies of our sacred Founding Fathers in his favorite novel of mine,  "Burr" (1973) or writing a more sympathetic novel of the trials of the Civil War, "Lincoln" (1985), Vidal's books were entertaining and subtle subversive.  

Each of his historic novels took him about a year of research and it paid off in my view.  He also was a prolific contributor to "The New York Review of Books" "Time", "Smithsonian" , "The Nation", et al, and his book tours always gave his fans plenty of vigor and vitriol even before they bought the book.  I still recall how, in an appearance on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in the mid-80s', how he  blithely predicted that the United States would overtly  invade Mexico because "we've done it before for land and now we need their oil."   Carson's look of faux-stoicism and quick cut to a commercial was a priceless moment. 

The Mexican invasion  didn't quite happen of course,  although the prophecy came all too true in the Middle East first with Bush I and then Bush II in Iraq and Kuwait on behalf of Big Oil and Big Military Contractors like Vice President Cheney's own boys club at Haliburton.        

 

 His feuds with his contemporaries like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and his old friend Tennessee Williams  were also famous.     Indeed I don't think we will ever see his like again---the writer-figure as a personage in him or herself, known to anyone interested in his nation or in politcal ideas.  Vidal  was right again--the value of the profession writer was ebbing in American  mainstream society , he noted lamentedly several times in interviews. I see nothing today to dispute that.       

Empire (1987)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Gore Vidal

"T.R." and "The Chief" Get the Vidal Treatment

(Theodore Roosevelt): "Your press incited--incites--violence and class hatred. Do you deny that?"

W.R. Hearst: "I don't deny or affirm anything. Do you understand that? I'm here at your request, Roosevelt. Personally I have no wish to see you at all., anywhere, ever--unless of course , we share the same quarters in hell. So I must warn you, no one says 'Do you deny' to me, in my country."

"Your country is it?" Roosevelt's falsetto had deepened to a mellifluous alto. "When did you buy it?"

from "Empire", Random House, 1987.

Gore Vidal's "Empire" , which chronicles the years roughly between 1898 and 1906, is a historical novel about the launch of the United States into creating an overseas empire, at the expense of the declining Spanish hold over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Those who are familiar with Mr. Vidal from his other novels, essays or still frequent radio and television appearances, know that this grand old man of letters has quite a sharp wit. He also takes a rather jaundiced view of the men and women of power in past and present America. "Empire" is no exception.

The two main characters are Caroline and Blaise Sanford, a fictional set of wealthy half-siblings. Blaise goes into the publishing game as a very junior partner with the very real William Randolph Hearst, the man who was the most famous practitioner of sensationalistic "Yellow Journalism".

It is Vidal's contention--and he is not alone in this--that Hearst did a great deal to bring American public opinion toward war with Spain in the Spring of 1898. (It helped that an American battleship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana Harbor on February 15 of that year, killing over two hundred sailors.)

His half-sister, who feels cheated out of her fair share of the family estate left by her late father, manages to purchase a small Washington daily, The Tribune. Though these two characters, Vidal leads us into the corridors of power in William McKinley's Washington and in the press headquarters of Hearst, the man who invented the way the modern mass media invents issues for the public to get vexed over and demand whatever the publisher might like them to demand...war, for instance, and the swelling of patriotic pride that leads to long overseas wars and dominion over far -off lands and distant peoples who mean us no harm.

What makes this historical novel of war stand out from other specimens of the kind is that it does not have any chapters set in combat, unlike the two greatest historical novels in Vidal's "American Chronicle" series, "Burr" (1973) and his masterpiece, "Lincoln" (1985). The "action" takes place almost solely in New York (the media capital of America even then), on the floor of the Democratic and Republican conventions of that time , in the White House and the near-by fashionable home of the great historians Henry Adams (grandson and great-grandson of Presidents) and his friend, the writer and statesman John Hay.

Hay is another important figure in the novel---a direct link to the Civil War since he was once one of two personal aides to President Lincoln throughout the four plus bloody years of that Administration. In the story, Hay is a dying man who serves as Secretary of State for McKinley and, after his assassination by an anarchist in 1901, for his successor, the vibrant, mercurial and complex Theodore Roosevelt.

Empire" is a wonderful book for fans of American History who don't mind eschewing the triumphalism of American power that you would find from other novelist or historians more in tune with "Teddy" Roosevelt as the embodiment of image of the great man on the face of Mount Rushmore.

Indeed, fans of Theodore Roosevelt will no doubt be disappointed that Vidal concentrates so much on "TR"s weaker points, from a modern perspective--promoting American power and not being a 1960's style liberal when it comes to corporate "trust-busting" and economic regulation. Almost no mention is made of Roosevelt's mediation of the Russo-Japanese War (for which he won the Nobel Prize) and his greatest legacy to the people of the United States
a century later: setting aside 150 million acres of timber-lands for posterity, plus doubling the number of national parks and monuments. It is as a conservator in the truest sense that we owe a debt to our first 20th Century President. But,in Vidal's defense, "Empire" is not about legacies but about power for power's sake--one of the writer's favorite themes--and the spread of American hegemony over faraway nations. Some readers may find that issues familiar in our own times.

TR was a leader of his time and all nations that aspired to greatness, from the USA to the major European powers and Japan did much the same in this era. W.R. Hearst, "The Chief", is the real villain of the novel and in real life, and, thankfully, he never manipulated the nation as a whole to entrust him with control of the White House.

One interesting note from "Empire": the Oval Office/West Wing part of the White House was built during the first term of Roosevelt's administration. The centerpiece of power at the Executive Branch was originally a a glass hot house conservatory that past Presidents like McKinley used as a informal meeting place. Vidal has done his homework so well that you feel he had to be there personally to get all the hundreds of other details a scene just right. All in all, a worthwhile read that might inspire you to read other sources on a vital era.