is a set of casual and irreverent reflections on the necessity of living in the present. Or even the future:
I’ve always thought … that you don’t have experience, that you don’t grow older. The slow accumulation of events and experiences that gradually create a character is one of the myths of the late nineteenth century.
He congratulates himself on belonging to old age, at least in the sense that ‘I’m not an adult any more’ and ‘only faintly’ male. ‘Adult,’ ‘male’ sex, we learn, he never really enjoyed (‘I was more a masturbator of women than a copulator’) perhaps because he disliked ‘letting go’ – ideally ‘the other person was yielded up and I was not’.
He connects his writings with his general predilection for what is against nature, humanly invented: even in the matter of food, it’s always been the cooked for him, not the raw. He goes into a comic ecstasy of squeamishness at the thought of fresh fruit. ‘It’s lying on the ground, in the grass. It’s not there for me; it doesn’t come from me.’ Nature, fecundity – ‘all that’ – constitute ‘a philosophical problem’.
Perhaps I am exaggerating the lightness of the conversation. Certainly graver matters are touched on: ‘I wrote, which has been the essence of my life. I’ve succeeded in what I longed for from the age of seven or eight …’ But what de Beauvoir gives here (and, surely, what she wanted) is the specifically, even absurdly, human. She ends with a dialogue about God – that ‘infinite intermediary’ Sartre and she had learnt to do without, though His Almighty absence explained why one must face one’s freedom, why one must write everything out again, including, or especially, age and death:
You and I, for example, have lived without paying attention to the problem [of God]. And yet we’ve lived; we feel that we’ve taken an interest in our world …
To keep God out, you need to deconstruct the myth of ‘the great man’, too. This, or something like it, is de Beauvoir’s logic, and she’s probably right. ‘Adieu’ – except that le bon Dieu has nothing to do with it, ‘this life owes nothing to God’.
What a frightful bore it is to be Gore
Profile of Gore Vidal
GORE VIDAL IS ON the brink of immortality. He must be, he has a biographer, and so will soon have a Life. Or will he? True, he’s lately taken to writing down luminous, pastoral reminiscences about his boyhood age of innocence (which did not last long, and he couldn’t wait to get it over with) – going brown and barefoot into the Senate to visit his grandfather, blind Senator Gore from Oklahoma, and flying across the States in the Thirties with his dashing aviator father, Gene. But for the rest? ‘Most biographies are about love and marriage and divorce and children, the more autistic the better, and alcoholism and suicide. The usual American writer’s life. I seem to have missed most of the Great Things …’
About the only way in which he’s a rounded character is physical. These days he’s, well, large, and indeed looks magisterial, not entirely unlike the Senator. (‘All the senators were fat – I always thought everybody’s grandfather was fat and a senator.’) He’s disappointed in himself. ‘I never thought I would lose my beauty,’ he says, waving it away with sincere regret. He likes people’s outsides and (worse, much worse) says so, instead of claiming to be interested in their souls. His new novel, Empire, about the rise of Theodore Roosevelt, is one of his respectable ones, but nonetheless continues in its own way his scandalous polemic against inwardness, niceness, the mystification of the personal, ‘real folks’, unconscious destiny and such. The style, in keeping with the period, has a whiff of Edith Wharton, a writer he admires. ‘I like Wharton’s wit, and her toughness. She knows her world, and there is nothing soft or romantic in her approach. One must look to men,’ he adds nastily, ‘for those feminine qualities.’
He is a moralist: he believes that heterosexist, imperialist, born-again Americans are wicked. Or rather, he would if he believed in sin. Instead he thinks them hypocritical, deluded and dangerous, their gospel very Bad News. So clear is he about this that he himself is in danger of preaching. ‘The American Empire is one of the most successful inventions in history, and all the more remarkable because no one knows it’s there. Now the economy is coming apart and the locus of the world’s economy has shifted to our far eastern province of Japan. There will be wars of liberation in due course.’ He relishes all this stuff, playing the prophet of doom, Cassandra-to-whom-no-one-paid-attention-until-it-was-too-late.
What saves him from his own opinions is, first, that in fact he hates not being listened to, and knows it’s the jokes and the inventions that spellbind; and secondly, that his impulse to mock and his sense of absurdity are in any case out of his control. In conversation he’s a mimic, with a repertoire of voices ranging from the wise man’s drawl, complete with pauses for deep thought, to an ecstatic tweetie-pie babble used for talking to the animals and cutting out the humans. In his work the propensity for mimicry famously displays itself in the variety of his styles and genres – theatre, television, film scripts, essays, historical novels and satires, not in that order, nor in any particular order at all. Even his soberest third-person voice in the fiction has a doubleness about it (now be serious) and of course his regal first persons include the Emperor Julian and Myra Breckinridge, so ably plagiarised by our own Dame Edna.
Vidal thinks, or says he thinks, that it may all have something to do with his granny. ‘I don’t know where my voices come from, and I don’t try to find out. All I know is that they start and I write down what they say, the way my grandmother went in for automatic writing. She was in touch with the dead, of course. As they don’t exist for me, I hear from the living … it’s probably Shirley Maclaine, anyway. She was given several hundred hours (it seemed) on television to tell us about her extra-terrestrial adventures and the fact that she is God. Which of course she is, but isn’t it a bit immodest to say so on television? Even the dread Jesus did a bit of shit-kicking when Pontius Pilate started asking him snooping questions. “You have said it,” has always been my own way of handling Godhood.’
Myra B., megastar and living legend, came out in 1968 (‘Has literary decency fallen so low?’ – Time) and has now been resurrected, revised, and reissued back to back, or whatever is the right way to put it, with Myron, in a bumper edition. Both books seem to have been meticulously dirtied up by the author. Anyone who couldn’t work out before exactly how Myra unmanned Rusty Godowski as part of her neo-Malthusian plot to control population and dominate the world, or what a prostate is for, will now be enlightened. With Myron the operation was simpler: in the original Vidal wittily excised all the bad words and replaced them with the names of the members of the Supreme Court who’d just decided (1974) to privatise censorship, and allow local communities to do it themselves. That joke lost its topicality and has been abandoned, so that readers will no longer have to puzzle over the translation of (for example) ‘the whizzer whites that are cutting our powells off’.
Not that these changes really signal a slackening of censorship, rather (something that fills him with despair) the fact that books are so relatively unread that they simply don’t matter. Book-readers are a tiny minority, and probably perverts anyway. The censorship has shifted with the majority, to television, whose programme-makers are increasingly urged to produce uplifting fibs, as in Plato’s Spartan Republic. Vidal is somewhat tempted by TV, too: he wrote a lot of drama for the box in the Fifties when he was making his money and smarting from the reception of his homosexual novel, The City and the Pillar, and he still returns from time to time. He recently scripted a much-watched ‘mini-series’ (the kind of word he really relishes) about a murder at West Point. He wrote film scripts too, and points out that he was in on the end of the great studios.
He also, of course, performs. He’s very good (which in his case means bad, Bad Taste, scene-stealing and so on) at being interviewed, confronted, chatted up, and inclines to be sceptical about other people’s desire to stay pure. He tells a story of two Britishers: ‘In Moscow I had a late dinner with Graham Greene. There had been a froideur