gore vidal united states essays pdf

United States: Essays 1952-1992

1295 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

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Two Score of Gore Date: June 20, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By R. W. B. Lewis; Lead: UNITED STATES Essays 1952 - 1992 . By Gore Vidal . 1,295 pp. New York: Random House. $37.50. Text: THIS gigantic volume brings together essays and articles written by Gore Vidal over 40 years, interspersed as it were between his novel writing (23 novels to date, including the acclaimed fictional biography of America: "Lincoln," "1876," "Empire" and so on), playwriting ("Visit to a Small Planet" and "The Best Man") and sundry television and screenwriting chores. As an older colleague once said to me about a wondrously energetic younger man, "He writes faster than I can read." "United States: Essays 1952-1992" divides into three parts, or "states" -- literature, the public world, the personal life -- and there are 114 pieces in all, some of them full-scale appraisals, always beautifully informed, of the author or topic in question. The book's title suggests Mr. Vidal's hope that united they may all stand. They mostly will, especially as animated by Mr. Vidal's sweeping, grasping prose style, with its mix of the elegant and the wittily vernacular. Within the literary component, we are given articles examining English writers from Thomas Love Peacock and George Meredith down through Christopher Isherwood and V. S. Pritchett (who is rightly and acutely praised as a critic). It is impossible to think of another American observer so intimately acquainted with the English world of letters and its tradition (Peacock's "novel-as-dialogue" even exerted an influence on the novelist Vidal, as Mr. Vidal acknowledges, of "The Judgment of Paris," in his own respectful review of a 1968 scholarly book called "Gore Vidal"). The American literati considered here are a much more varied lot. There is a splendid and welcome essay on Fredric Prokosch, reminding us of the power and productivity of this shamefully neglected self-exiled (to the south of France) writer, the author of, among other books, "The Seven Who Fled" in 1937 (about European escapees on the run from a disintegrating Tashkent). There are amiable jostlings with Norman Mailer (and his "nice but small gift for self-destruction") and thoughtful glances at John O'Hara, Paul Bowles and Henry Miller, along with Mr. Vidal's attention-seizing diatribes in the 1970's against best-selling novels, the New Novel (John Barth, Thomas Pynchon et al., most of whom, in my view, Mr. Vidal misreads), academic critical theorists far and wide (back on target) and the nonreading or wrong-reading American public. At the heart of the American literary section is an assessment of the social novel as very differently practiced by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Dawn Powell and Louis Auchincloss. If Mr. Vidal is expert on Henry James, especially on a collection of his book reviews, he is better than that on Howells. In fact, the long essay on Howells, occasioned by a Library of America volume of his fiction, is probably the most substantial and searching discussion of that writer, and the soundest in its judgment, yet written. It begins with Howells's open letter to The New York Tribune in 1886, vigorously protesting the unjust condemnation to death of seven persons following the Haymarket Street riots in Chicago -- the only one of "the Republic's major literary and intellectual figures," Mr. Vidal emphasizes, who "took a public stand." It continues through a shrewd tracing of Howells's entire career and exemplary readings of such Howells novels as "A Modern Instance" and "Indian Summer." As to Dawn Powell, a longtime resident of Greenwich Village (she died there in 1965) and the author of such should-be-classic stories of the provincial amid the anarchy and charm of New York City as "The Wicked Pavilion" and "The Golden Spur," Mr. Vidal follows Edmund Wilson in a vain attempt to establish her name and her achievement. About Louis Auchincloss, Mr. Vidal remarks accurately that he is the only fiction writer in the country who tells us how "our rulers" actually behave in their board rooms and law offices and clubs; and that by betraying his patrician class and forging his own literary tradition (mostly Henry James and Edith Wharton), Mr. Auchincloss has created a unique place for himself. Exploring the public scene, Mr. Vidal writes luminously about Presidential families -- the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys -- unintentionally, no doubt, giving the impression that he is somehow related to all of them, at least by marriage. He evinces an attractively personal admiration and affection for Eleanor Roosevelt (she "never stopped believing" that the wrongs of human society "can be put right by human action"); and he refers repeatedly to Ronald Reagan, with casual wit, as "the Acting President." We are provided with a full display of Mr. Vidal's social and political opinions. The moment I salute most warmly is his memory (and ours) of a televised "live chat" with William F. Buckley Jr. at the Republican National Convention in 1968, when Mr. Vidal, as he says, "came close to revealing what I really am: a dedicated anti-anti-Communist." Say it again. Even more stirring are the half-dozen pieces, about a hundred pages altogether, addressed to the whole matter of sex, law and politics -- more generally sexuality and cultural mores, with the main stress on homosexuality, or in Mr. Vidal's preferred phrase same-sex sex. In this area Mr. Vidal writes more intelligently, knowingly, angrily, compassionately, entertainingly and downright smartly than anyone else around. There is a book about homosexuality and the American temperament embedded in "United States," and the centerpiece of it would be his 1981 article in The Nation about the soul-shriveling prejudice of the evangelical right and its kin against gays and Jews ("Pink Triangle and Yellow Star"). Included in such a book would be Mr. Vidal's tender memories of Tennessee Williams and other gay writer friends (with a note reporting Mr. Vidal's rejection of the word "gay" as "a ridiculous word to use as a common identification for Frederick the Great, Franklin Pangborn and Eleanor Roosevelt"). IN the shorter third section, Mr. Vidal escorts us through reminiscences of West Point, where his father was the first aviation instructor (hence also Mr. Vidal's fascinating follow-up discourse "On Flying") and where he was born in 1925; of television and theater writing; of life in Hollywood and Italy. Here and elsewhere Mr. Vidal evokes his association with Italo Calvino, the supremely gifted and extraordinarily engaging Italian writer, upon whose death at 61 in 1985 "Italy went into mourning, as if a beloved prince had died." Mr. Vidal attended Calvino's funeral on a rainy hillside not far from his own long-established home at Ravello, south of Naples. It has to be said that this collection is a good deal too long. A number of the pieces were really not worth reprinting: for example, the silly put-down, in the arch voice of a women's-club speaker, of Robert Penn Warren's novel "Band of Angels." It is hardly one of Warren's best, but it and he deserve better than this kind of campy snickering. Mr. Vidal's often headlong pace of thought and expression can lead him into bizarre generalizations, as when he identifies "the main purpose of literary biography" in our time as being "the Life as opposed to the Work." I think of Richard Ellmann, Leon Edel, Ernest Samuels and other biographers who endlessly intermesh the Work with the Life and wonder what on earth Mr. Vidal is talking about. Over all, 1,200-plus pages of Mr. Vidal take a toll; I couldn't help recalling Alice Gibbens James's comment in a letter to her husband, William, about the aftereffect of a long evening's conversation with brother Henry. "Very pleasant," she said, "but leaving a curious lassitude behind." But Alice quickly added: "And he is so good!" Likewise Gore Vidal, essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of state.

United States Summary

Exploring america's history through provocative essays and reflections.

“United States: Essays, 1952-1992” by Gore Vidal

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Gore Vidal the novelist’s best character is Gore Vidal the essayist. Beside him even Myra Breckenridge seems a pale creation, and this great fat book, chronicling 40 years of the essayist’s adventures, is like a lively picaresque novel in reverse.

Its hero starts out as a wickedly clever but world-weary 26-year-old: between the inauguration of Eisenhower (“The Great Golfer”) and the election of Clinton (sobriquet still to come), he grows steadily cleverer, funnier, more indignant and less amenable to compromise. At 66, Vidal appears to be just coming to his full dimensions as an enfant terrible: one of the best, most stinging pieces in the book is a passionate attack on Christianity--and, for good measure, Judaism and Islam--published last July.

Age has strengthened his hand, in part because the character of Vidal the essayist has always rested on his claim to possess a memory that goes back, in leaps and bounds, at least 2,000 years. America (a k a “Amnesia”) forgets; Vidal remembers. He has put together for himself a lineage that makes him as old as the hills. His father’s job, as director of the Bureau of Air Commerce during the New Deal, makes Vidal a vicarious intimate of F.D.R. (and a friend of Eleanor’s); his maternal grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma, gives him a foothold in the ruling class under Theodore Roosevelt. From there, it is a short hop to Lincoln’s Washington. (Vidal, like Lincoln’s son Robert, went to school at Exeter, where, circa 1940, “memories of Lincoln were still vivid.” Vidal is a great one for milking his connections, however far-fetched or cousinly far-removed.) The Lincoln link gets him, in another long stride, to Jefferson, Tom Paine, Voltaire, from whom he makes the easy jump to Swift and Montaigne. Once there, he takes the 30-minute shuttle back to the Roman satirists, Juvenal and Martial. In no time at all, the friend of John F. Kennedy (“I told Jack that (Tennessee Williams had commented favorably on his ass. He beamed. ‘Now, that’s very exciting,’ he said”), the fifth--or is it sixth?--cousin to Jimmy Carter, and sometime Democratic Liberal candidate for the U.S. Senate, is in toga and sandals, his gray locks becomingly encircled by a wreath of bays.

The pose is crucial to Vidal’s literary method. Seen from this quasi-Roman perspective, everything from Christianity to television presents itself as a vulgar abomination. For Vidal, though a contributing editor to the Nation and widely thought of as a dangerous lefty, is a conservative. The past he appeals to is simply a much older past than the one beloved by the American Spectator and the National Review--not the Golden Age of unbridled Victorian capitalism but the era of Enlightenment rationalism and the sexy, literate, secular society of Rome before the later Caesars corrupted it with their tyranny. There is a lot of Latin in his prose style--its sting-in-the-tail sentences, their poison cunningly withheld until the clinching verb at the end--and Latin, too, in the characteristic Vidal mixture of sensuality and high-spirited ferocity.

Satire, he wrote in 1958, “is truth grinning in a solemn canting world.” It’s the grin that makes Vidal irresistible--his huge appetite for pure verbal mischief. No one else would manage to identify George Bush’s home town as Kennebunkport, Tex.--as no one else would labor for several paragraphs under the happy misapprehension that Hilton Kramer is a resort hotel in the Catskills. Vidal’s anecdotes are laced with threads of finespun malice. In an essay on Frederic Prokosch, he describes taking Prokosch to an academic party full of tenured poets:

“Prokosch was entirely ignored. But he listened politely as the uses of poetry in general and the classics in particular were brought into question. Extreme positions were taken. Finally one poet-teacher pulled the chain, as it were, on all of Western civilization: The classics, as such, were totally irrelevant. For a moment there was a blessed silence. Then Prokosch began to recite in Latin a passage from Virgil; and the room grew very cold and still. ‘It’s Dante,’ a full professor whispered to a full wife.”

Nor is Vidal ever too pushed for time to settle an old score when the opportunity arises. In the course of a particularly brilliant piece about Somerset Maugham, he suddenly pulls off the shelf an “agreeable picture book” about Maugham, compiled some 15 years before by Frederic Raphael, an English book reviewer. “Mr. Raphael,” writes Vidal, “quotes from Dreiser, whom he characterizes as ‘an earnest thunderer in the cause of naturalism and himself a Zolaesque writer of constipated power.’ Admittedly, Dreiser was not in a class with Margaret Drabble, but--constipated?” Here Vidal posts an asterisk, which leads to the only footnote in the essay:

* Mr. Raphael has many opinions about books that he has not actually read. You will see him at his glittering best in the Times, in his obituary of Gore Vidal (date to come).

Such parenthetical skirmishes and revenges give a tart edge to Vidal’s writing even at its sweetest and most reminiscent: You never know when he’s going to find an enemy to wipe the floor with.

His style is provocatively de haut en bas; it is the style of a man who has spent a lifetime suffering fools ungladly. He is fond of tweaking his readers’ ears, school master-fashion: “Third Republic? Fourth Republic? What am I talking about? Let me explain”; “ . . . the penultimate Dispensation? The what? Let me explain.” In “The State of the Union: 1975” he regaled the readers of Esquire with his state-of-the-union address for 1974, interleaved with notes on its reception by the various women’s luncheon clubs at which it was delivered. “ . . . Nervous intake of breath on this among women’s groups . . . . “ “ Sodomy gets them. For elderly, good-hearted audiences I paraphrase, the word is not used.” To the Esquire sophisticates, Vidal confided that he tried to speak wherever possible to “conservative middle-class audiences off the beaten track--Parkersburg, West Virginia; Medford, Oregon; Longview, Washington.”

Irony, as Fowler nicely explains in “Modern English Usage,” is a form that always requires two audiences: one that gets it, and one that doesn’t (though Fowler puts it more prettily than that); or that enlightened legion of subscribers to Esquire (Esquire?) and the flag-waving, church-supper blue-rinse crowd. Getting the one to laugh at the reactionary naivete of the other is a standard Vidal tactic. So is his trick of seeming condemned to fight Reason’s lonely corner in venues like Longview, Wash. and Medford, Ore. Like St. Stephen, Vidal needs the stones to keep coming.

There is another sort of irony here. The appearance of Olympian solitude is a necessary part of Vidal’s pitch as the unregarded wise man in a crass, uneducated world. Yet the world is constantly regarding him: he’s on Larry King, Barbara Walters, Dick Cavett; he’s playing himself in the movies; 14 months ago (let’s say), the views of Gore Vidal were a good deal better known than those of the current President of the United States. Nor are his views so shockingly heterodox (and I write as someone who lives within spitting distance, more or less, of Longview, Wash.): cut the defense budget and put an end to the “garrison state”; tax the profits of churches like those of other businesses; restore literacy; cure society of its superstitious homophobia; limit campaign spending; stop state interference in matters of private morality; discourage “schoolteachers” from writing “R&D” novels (John Barth’s “The Sot-Weed Factor,” the later Pynchon) whose chief function is to be taught in class; give thanks for “R&R” writers like Louis Auchincloss and Dawn Powell (a writer new to me, who turns out to be much funnier and more vivid about New York life in the 1940s and ‘50s than her British namesake, Anthony, is about London life in the same period); undermine the complacent hegemony of the New York Times.

Vidal the controversialist has a genius for making his least controversial thoughts take on the dangerous glitter of sedition. In 1986 he addressed the question of the American deficit vis-a-vis the growing economic dominance of Japan. That topic. It was less frequently spoken of then than now, but Vidal was hardly breaking new ground--except in his phrasing of the problem.

” . . . last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to $2 trillion in debt. Then, in the fall, the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that was the end of our empire. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we--the white race--have become the yellow man’s burden. Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we have treated him. . . “

In a footnote (“Believe it or not . . . “) Vidal feigns innocent astonishment at the furor created by this passage, in which every word is teasingly trailed under the noses of the PC crowd, as sodomite was trailed under the noses of the blue-rinses. Bite, suckers! They bit.

His taste for schoolboy hazing, his love of the swash and buckle of debate (“It’s savory scholar-squirrel stew time again!” he announces with horrid relish, as he prepares to boil alive a brace of historians who have found fault with his novel, “Lincoln”), have tended to marginalize Vidal as merely outrageous --the word that has come to haunt him. “He can’t be serious . . . “ says the luncheon clubber with a pleasurably appalled giggle--and those who treasure Vidal for his sanity in a silly world may wish that his high spirits were sometimes a little more repressible.

For he is at heart a more serious writer than the dozens of solemn preachers and tipsters whose work is discussed across the nation with an earnestness never accorded to that of Gore Vidal. His gloriously funny tirades against the various hacks of academe spring from the conviction that there has been a shameful treason-of-the-clerks by literary intellectuals in the United States. He stands for the proud tradition in which the imaginative writer has a place of honor at the table of the big bad world of politics, money, manners and morals. In Vidal’s work, cultivated worldliness is the order of the day, and he is our best example of the chastening power of a truly free-lance intelligence on the loose among the specialists.

Defending the novel as the civilized and civilizing secular entertainment, wrangling with Jefferson, the Adamses, Lincoln, Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, as if they were his obstreperous contemporaries, speaking out for the right of the individual to share his or her bed with whomsoever he or she pleases, damning religion (“The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism . . . “), Vidal is fearless and cogent. He writes of himself as a “born-again atheist.” It’s a telling phrase, for he believes in reason (and reason’s bright child, wit) with something closely akin to religious fervor: denouncing the Puritan sky-god, he sounds eerily like Cotton Mather reincarnated with a magnificently un-Puritan sense of humor.

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United States: Essays 1952-1992 Hardcover – May 18, 1993

• Print length 1295 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Random House
• Publication date May 18, 1993
• Dimensions 6.5 x 2.75 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0679414894
• ISBN-13 978-0679414896
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; 1st edition (May 18, 1993)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1295 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0679414894
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0679414896
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 3.9 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 2.75 x 9.5 inches
• #54,048 in Politics & Government (Books)

About the author

Gore Vidal has received the National Book Award, written numerous novels, short stories, plays and essays. He has been a political activist and as Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York, he received the most votes of any Democrat in a half-century.

Photo by David Shankbone (Photographer's blog post about the photo and event) [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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