Vidal himself belongs in a less squeamish club (the late Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams spring to mind, as does Norman Mailer) – the author as celebrity: ‘Modesty is a British invention that has never had much of a market in the United States. I do note at times a sort of dismay amongst your deep critics when faced with a writer who contemplates actual power in this world and does not blush and apologise. Different cultures. You are too modest – in a very vain way. We are too busy – in a very humble way, of course.’
He is interested in ‘actual power’ and has several times been tempted to cut corners and go into politics – in 1972 he joined Dr Spock in the People’s Party, in 1982 he polled half a million votes for the Senate, in California. A few years back he explained to Michael Billington that politics seemed to him a family firm – ‘most of those who write about politics are essentially provincials, journalists from the provinces who arrive with big round eyes. To me it’s the family business, like being brought up in a tannery. I know exactly what the smells are, and how the leather’s made.’
However, since he also knows the world of the media inside out – and since politics now happens in the media – what might once upon a time have been a public career has been turned inside out. Vidal is one of the age’s most scathing commentators on the way in which newspapers and television, especially television, have changed the political process, emptied it out, filled it with fictions, ‘public images’ and lies. In the new novel, Empire, the front man is Teddy Roosevelt, but the power belongs to William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. ‘Hearst is the great original. If there is no news you invent it. While I was “inventing” him, I kept thinking of that passage in Oblomov where the hero starts his slide into perfect sloth by giving up newspapers and coffee houses, where everyone talks about (say) the political situation in Turkey. But is there really such a place as Turkey? My Hearst wouldn’t care. If there was no Turkey he’d make one up. What does one ever know about anything?’
The general sloth, passivity, delight in being lied to, is his great topic. And he brings to it an urgency of outrage that must have a lot to do with his conviction that in a parallel universe, on another channel somewhere, he could have been one of the actors. His most savage satire yet, Duluth (1983), one of his best and most frenziedly inventive books, has characters entirely enmeshed in third-rate dreams. On a more practical level, he foresaw long before it happened that the logical presidential candidate would be an actor; and more recently, in News-week, he exactly prophesied the effect Ollie North would have via the networks. When we learn from Bob Woodward’s Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA that ‘since Ronald Reagan did not read many books but watched movies the CIA began to produce profiles of leaders that could be shown to the President … soon the CIA began providing a classified travelogue of all countries that Reagan planned to visit’, then we’re in Vidal’s territory. Not only is the President in a movie, but everyone else has to join him there.
Duluth, though, was only a book. Vidal’s satires are fuelled with frustration. ‘Myra Breckinridge is very much a frustrated power figure who takes charge of her admittedly fictive universe.’ He flourishes in gloomy triumph a sheet of statistics thoughtfully compiled by the British Public Lending Right people, which shows that last year 30,000 people borrowed Duluth, but you feel that 30,000 strikes him as not very many. He likes to point out (his own statistics) that at least one third of Americans are functionally illiterate.
So he is back to his public/private dilemma. ‘The public self is just that – the extent to which one wants to get involved with politics or whatever. The private self does the writing. I don’t think I bring the two together. I certainly try not to.’ But what about the Life? Well, his writing self lives, and has done for more than 30 years, with Howard Austen, who is even less of a sentimentalist (were that possible) than Vidal. They – he – used to explain to romantically ‘programmed’ interviewers that it wasn’t a marriage – ‘none of the assumptions are there. Each marriage I know of starts on the assumption of sexual exclusivity’; however, as time’s gone by, the distinctions seem to have lapsed, perhaps because marriages in any case tend to become companionable. The house in Ravello, Italy, where I talked with him is out on a promontory, islanded from the town by gardens, vines, walks. He was entertained to discover that it had been built by my husband’s first cousin twice-removed, Lucille Beckett – ‘Welcome to your patrimony … How are the mighty fallen.’ Some of the Thirties furniture is still there, the floors are tiled, the walls white, with 18th-century paintings and a Roman mosaic. There is the patter of tiny feet (two dogs, a cat) and there are books, books, books. They have an apartment in Rome and another place in Los Angeles, but this, increasingly, is where the writing gets done.
The hapless biographer will have to dig deep to come up with the inner Life, there’s so much on the surface. Vidal has long ago published his selected indiscretions – for instance, Anaïs Nin (‘Well she was exotic, I must say; and I was 20, she was 42, and she had a radiant act’). Then there was the conquest of Jack Kerouac. He is, he says, distracting his biographer with famous friends – ‘Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Sitwell, Hannah Arendt, Elizabeth Taylor’, not to mention Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward and other assorted celebrities. ‘I have lived in many different worlds … I didn’t even try to meet anyone. I give my biographer all sorts of fascinating names to track down, hoping he’ll forget all about me.’
Obituary
MARY MCCARTHY DIED, IT’S safe to assume, unreconciled and unconciliated. The salad of genes and traditions that went into her making – Catholic on father’s side, Jewish and Protestant on mother’s – was a good start for a life-long balancing-act, and also for laying claim forcefully to the elusive middle ground of American cultural life. She was a liberal. She was the liberal, it sometimes seemed, but then the very label had already joined the ranks of near-unusable words, degenerated into a term of abuse. She was to compile, during her life in literature and politics, a sort of informal lexicon of these, rising to heights of comic indignation during the Watergate hearings when she realised that Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Krogh and company thought of themselves as an intellectual elite. Her characteristic tone was cool, fastidious, reasonable and despairing. And this may have had to do with the other basic autobiographical datum – that she was orphaned in early childhood, which was what led to being passed around the various sides of the family, and perhaps helps to account for her deep distaste for dramatics, shows of sincerity and breast-beating.
She cut her teeth and honed her pen during the McCarthy era. The eerie coincidence of the name was itself a portent of a career of needling the histrionic public figures by getting inside their rhetoric and gutting it. Her essays from the period – like ‘The Contagion of Ideas’ from 1952 – are a series of extraordinary and almost exotic exercises in ‘balance’. For her, the real casualty was not so much the Left as the language of sanity and criticism, drowned out by the clamour of accusations, betrayals, confessions, excommunications and conversions. It was in the midst of this collective paranoia that she became (to quote an ironic Norman Mailer) ‘our saint, our umpire, our lit. arbiter’, and uttered one of her most memorable sentences – ‘the liberal’s only problem is to avoid succumbing to the illusion of “having to choose”’. She makes the whole thing sound like a bad movie, a vulgar and untruthful projection of private grey areas into public technicolour. The leading characteristic of the modern world, she said a bit later, was its ‘irreality’, by which she meant the packaging and marketing of life-styles and the erosion of cultural common ground