User Submitted Blog Post: Patriotic Gore

Confession: Though I write a blog dedicated to American fiction, I have no real expertise in the works of Gore Vidal. This is a little like saying you're an NBA expert but haven't watched so much as a YouTube video of Michael Jordan, or that you love serious movies but never caught a Jean-Luc Godard film. Vidal's bibliography is enormous, but I've only made a dent in a pair of his books---his very first novel, 1948's modest gay coming-of-age novel The City and the Pillar, and his outrageous, bawdy Hollywood sendup, 1968's Myra Breckinridge, the inspiration, such as it was, for one of the worst movies you'll ever see.

Both are fine books, but I suspect that they're outliers in his oeuvre---they don't have intellectual force or, frankly, the bitchiness so often attributed to him. So I'm having a blast going through some of the old commentaries that he used to write for Esquire magazine in the '60s, and which the magazine has recently placed on its Web site. A 1961 essay in particular is a masterpiece of the kind of book criticism that doesn't really get around much anymore. There's grousing aplenty online these days, but Vidal's piece---a takedown of fuddy-duddy New York Times critic Orville Prescott and selfish bore Ayn Rand---is a genius bit of slow knife-twisting, annihilating their works while using plenty of space to explain why they're worth the opprobrium. Here's Vidal on Prescott's review of Lolita:

He still gives marks to novels not for style nor insight nor wisdom nor art, but for "morality." Are these nice people? Is this a nice author? Adultery, premarital intercourse, aberration, are wicked things nice people don't do and if an author does not firmly put them down and opt for marriage and fidelity the offending work must go. Prescott's favorite pejorative adjective is "dull." Lolita, he declared with more than usual horror, was "dull, dull, dull!" Now Lolita was many things (there is even a case to be made against it morally, and on its own terms), but it was never dull. It was also literature, a category peculiarly mystifying to Prescott.

And here he is blasting Rand:

This odd little woman is attempting to give a moral sanction to greed and self interest, and to pull it off she must at times indulge in purest Orwellian newspeak of the "freedom is slavery" sort. What interests me most about her is not the absurdity of her "philosophy," but the size of her audience (in my campaign for the House she was the one writer people knew and talked about). She has a great attraction for simple people who are puzzled by organized society, who object to paying taxes, who dislike the "welfare" state, who feel guilt at the thought of the suffering of others but who would like to harden their hearts. For them, she has an enticing prescription: altruism is the root of all evil, self-interest is the only good, and if you're dumb or incompetent that's your lookout.

None of this is to suggest that Vidal was merely a master of takedowns. His 1963 piece on Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan novels is at once a celebration of genre fiction, a memoir of being a boy, and a caution to the self-medicating:

The current fascination with L.S.D and non-addictive drugs--not to mention alcoholism--is all part of a general sense of frustration and boredom. The individual's desire to dominate his environment is not a desirable trait in a society which every day grows more and more confining. Since there are few legitimate releases for the average man, he must take to daydreaming. James Bond, Mike Hammer and Tarzan are all dream-selves, and the aim of each is to establish personal primacy in a world which in reality diminishes the individual.

These pieces speak to something that's lacking in a lot of writing on literature today, even at a time when a thousand flowers have bloomed online---a willingness to start arguments without being emptily provocative, and a willingness to take time to ruminate at length about a subject that isn't something that's brand-new and well-publicized. (It's illuminating that outside of the Vidal pieces the most-promoted book reviewing on the Esquire site is a review of a new novel, Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage. The piece clocks in at a mere 422 words.) I'm never in a hurry to proclaim a discipline dead, but given the lack of voices like Vidal's it could use a little more living.