Homage to Daniel Shays!

Our book today is Gore Vidal's 1973 essay collection Homage to Daniel Shays, containing high-point pieces from 1952 to 1972, spanning subjects from literature to cinema to theater to politics, presented in chronological order. The old Vintage paperback I've had for years is 450 pages long, which is a whole hell of a lot more hospitable than the wrist-straining 1100 pages of Vidal's surpassing masterpiece United States. I've praised that latter volume as one of the 20^th century's greatest works of nonfiction (although it occurs to me I've never posted the whole 50-item list here at Stevereads), but as a certain Dutch humanist well knew, sometimes we need a psalter in the field even more immediately – and more personally – than we need the big Bible back at home. You can carry Homage to Daniel Shays around in your pocket, and you should.

Vidal considered himself a multi-form genius, a Renaissance man capable of brilliant performance in almost any kind of endeavor. He was disastrously wrong, of course: his plays are almost unactably preachy, his novels are ill-disguised (and often ill-digested) history lectures, his screenplays are embarrassingly lachrymose, and his forays into actual politics exuded a dangerously Borgia-esque self-delusion that would make any sane person seek the good old-fashioned self-interest of a Johnson, or a Bush.

But as an occasional essayist, he was brilliant. And as a literary journalist, writing up long, discursive pieces for Commentary or The New York Review of Books or Esquire (pieces that were supposed to be book reviews but inevitably ended up being much more), he was unsurpassed in his century.

True, he has his hobby-horses, but any consistently good public writer will have those; they constitute a signature and are to be treasured in equal measure as they're lamented. If you read Homage to Daniel Shays with an evaluative squint, you can watch these writer-tics slowly worming their way right to the center of the apple (the collection's idiotically sensationalistic title is a good tip-off). Vidal's besetting hobby-horse was his megalomania, and it's a bit disconcerting to see it in embryo even half a century ago. In his famous essay on the writers of the 1940s, there's more than a hint of self-regard (which, for Vidal, is always mixed with self-pity):

On a social level, the hostility shown these essential artists is more important than their occasional worldly successes, for it is traditional that he who attempts to define man's condition demoralizes the majority, whether relativist or absolute. We do not want ever to hear that we will all die but that first we must live; and those ways of living which are the fullest, the most intense, are the very ones which social man traditionally dreads, summoning all his superstition and malice to combat strangers and lovers, the eternal victims.

But reading Vidal – and especially reading as taut and snapping a collection as Homage to Daniel Shays – with this kind of evaluative squint is just plain wrong. Not only are you thereby blinding yourself to the full register of what our essential artist is doing, you're depriving yourself of the wonderful sharpness of his wit – a quality that was never more obvious or brought to higher pitch than when he was using it to estimate the worth of wits that equaled it. Vidal could be an unforgiving colleague; in prose as in life, he didn't suffer fools gladly. When Mary McCarthy wrote a scathing review of Tennessee Williams' absurd play A Streetcar Named Desire, Vidal was outraged. But when it comes time to assess McCarthy's theater criticism as a whole (that criticism forms a briskly bracing little book we'll get to in the fullness of time here at Stevereads), he's not only fair but happily quotable:

But aside from Miss McCarthy's forty whacks at [Tennessee] Williams, when I finally came to read her collected criticism I was struck by her remarkable good sense. Uncorrupted by compassion, her rather governnessy severity, even cruelty, derives from the useful knowledge that the road to kitsch is paved with good intentions, and that one must not give the “A” for ambition without also giving simultaneously the “E” for the thing poorly effected. The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Naturally, Homage to Daniel Shays includes pieces on the Kennedys. How could it not? Their very existence in the realm of politics fundamentally upset Vidal's preconceived role as youthful denouncer of the musty exclusivity of the halls of power. If you've gained a large measure of your notoriety at Georgetown parties by being the best-looking anti-Eisenhower in the room, it's a bitter turn of events when a better-looking anti-Eisenhower gets elected lord of all Georgetown parties. Vidal took that bitter pill, wrapped it (poorly) in civic concern, and tried for thirty years to force it down his readers' throats, with no success whatsoever. But in the attempt, Vidal's unmatched eye for detail caught moments and currents that deserved preservation, as painful as they are to read today:

As Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges (at sixty-two the oldest member of the Cabinet) remarked, “There I was a few months ago, thinking my life was over. I'd retired to a college town. Now … well, that fellow in there” (he indicated the President's office) “he calls me in the morning, calls me at noon, calls me at night: Why don't we try this? Have you considered that? Then to top it all he just now asks me: Where do you get your suits from? I tell you I'm a young man again.”

As with most public pundits who overestimate themselves sufficiently to write about politics (as the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying, “Those who can, do; those who can't should shut the fuck up”), Vidal was never better than when writing about literature. Here as everywhere else in his writings, he was the voice of enlightened conservatism, the holder of standards, the champion of “the thing done right.” He was too much the craftsman ever to agree with the young writer's disdain of craft (however, eh, personally pleasing he might find the young writer himself), and he was too much the traditionalist not to agree in spirit with Norman Podhoretz's famous gripe, “A feeling of dissatisfaction and impatience, irritation and boredom with contemporary serious fiction is very widespread.” (He might have added, in that dry patrician tone of his, “of course when Norman says that, he means he's impatient and bored,” but what difference would that make? In this, Podhoretz was a pure weather-vane: brainless and accurate).

Hence if the avant-garde ever looked to Vidal as the most promising of the older literary lions on the scene, they were sorely disappointed to encounter after all an unapologetic purist:

No doubt there are those who regard the contradictions in [the charlatan Alain] Robbe-Grillet's critical writing as the point to them – rather in the way that the boredom of certain plays or the incompetence of certain pictures are, we are assured, their achievement. Yet it is worrisome to be told that a man can create a world from nothing when that is the one thing he cannot begin to do, simply because, no matter how hard he tries, he cannot dispose of himself. Even if what he writes is no more than nouns and adjectives, who and what he is will subconsciously dictate order. Nothing human is random …

United States is the gigantic banquet of which Homage to Daniel Shays is the exquisite sampler; here are all the strengths of Vidal the essayist with almost none of the weaknesses that began to creep to the forefront of his work in the late 1970s, as biting turned to gnawing and acid turned to acid reflux. The kind of death Vidal should have had – in an expensive hotel room, atop Bret Easton Ellis, after a glorious PEN/Faulkner speech, in 1990 (with United States to then be the posthumous volume it was so obviously meant to be) – has eluded him (only truly lucky bastards get what they deserve), and despite the counter-example of Vidal's eerily sedate doppelganger Louis Auchincloss, all work must eventually decline. But we'll always have these magnificent words, and it seems only fitting to let them have center-stage at the end:

Affluence, publicity, power, can these things be said to “corrupt” the artist? In themselves, no. Or as Ernest Hemingway nicely put it: “Every whore finds his vocation.” Certainly it is romantic melodrama to believe that publicity in itself destroys the artist. Too many writers of the first rank have been devoted self-publicists (Frost, Pound, Yeats), perfectly able to do their work quite unaffected by a machine they knew how to run. Toughness is all.

United States!

Our book today is  Gore Vidal’s mammoth collection of essays, United States, which was published in 1993, won him the National Book Award, and will almost certainly stand as the greatest work of his long and varied career (I write ‘almost’ here out of superstitious reflex – Janus-faced rumors have abounded for years, after all: that the man is so far deteriorated mentally that he can no longer distinguish past from present or craft a coherent line of prose, and that the man has been steadily working on a book that will strike amazement, both hallowing and exploding the very notion of late style). His various scripts and stage plays are embarrassments of catty infighting; his novels are radically uneven in the way that can only come from a having a sense of literary entitlement to write novels in the first place. Each is a grand soiree of the season – any hint of a work ethic is entirely absent. So meticulous triumphs like Julian or Creation will give way to narcissistic cryptograms like Hollywood or The Golden Age (or the breathtakingly horrifying Live from Golgotha); Vidal has amassed a cadre of loyal fans over the decades, and in his novels he forces them to read the tea leaves of his creative moods, without seeming to care about their embarrassment, or his own.

But his essays – by turns dazzling and erudite and chatty and tossed off and so, so often brilliant – soar. Here the various lamentable trainings his early life gave Vidal (that true literary success was success in writing fiction, or that the 19^th century concept of writing theme-fiction was, gawd help us, still an artistically valid thing to do in a post-Fitzgerald world) are burnt and purged away. What remains is polished stone – it can take any weight, and it glitters when the light hits it just right.

The essays in United States span four decades, from 1952 to 1992, and Vidal divides them into three large categories: The State of the Art, in which he concentrates on writers and books, The State of the Union, in which he concentrates on how seldom the Kennedys took his advice, and The State of Being, in which he allows chit-chat to run gloriously, uncontrollably rampant. Each section has its appeals, and because each moves forward in time independently of the others, each has its perils as well, although all the perils can be summarized in one quick warning label: like Oedipus, Lear, and Elvis, Vidal started out gorgeous and (therefore?) grew to be quite mad.

Any re-reading of United States will involuntarily stumble across the madness, alas. The same old brass-notes are hit again and again – hidden conspiracies of the wealthy and powerful, secret cabals chortling over their unparalleled – and undetected – control over all aspects of American society, every missed taxi cab or miscalculated meal check a knowing wink from paymaster to plaything. The regular harping on such notes is the price we pay for admission to the genius – and the humor – of the rest, as soiling a price as it might be, especially since the sincerity of Vidal’s jeremiads is severely undercut by his painfully obvious longing to be invited into a cabal or two. Those invites never come (we never implored him, across party lines and unanimously, to be our President! He’s bigger than the rest of us, he’s let bygones be bygones, but you can tell this still bothers him), and out of bitterness he reacts like all autocrats – by calling for revolution:

True revolution can only take place when things fall apart in the wake of some catastrophe – a lost war, a collapsed economy. We seem headed for the second. If so, then let us pray that that somber, all-confirming Bastille known as the consumer society will fall, as the first American revolution begins. It is long overdue.

Vidal was a genius early and lauded as a genius early, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he so quickly grew to believe that he was the only sighted man in a country – a world – full of the blind. But as stylistic tics go, it’s pretty damn annoying, especially for those of his readers who might, perhaps, know a thing or two about history themselves. Here he is in 1983:

To understand Nixon’s career you would have to understand the United States in the twentieth century, and that is something that our educational, political, and media establishments are not about to help us do. After all: no myth, no nation.

This couldn’t come any closer to Vidal writing “I am the only person in the world who can understand Nixon’s career,” and if you swap out the subjects you find it repeated throughout United States, to irksome effect.

But it’s only one effect in a vast menagerie, so it’s easy to forgive! This is a huge book (an intensely satisfying 1300 pages) of endless delights, and it would be wrong to say Vidal’s overweening egotism – that sense of him and only him – wasn’t one of those delights, perhaps even the greatest of them all. As the pages fall like individual flakes of snow, you soon find yourself socked in talk, buried in badinage, shuttered in schadenfreude . When Vidal finds himself sitting across from a zeppelinesque Orson Welles, watching the great man’s face redden with laughter, and he asks himself – which is to say, he asks aloud in front of us – what he would do if Welles had a stroke right there, you know the answer will not be – could never be – “call a doctor.” Lucky for Welles, it never happens – it would be a hard, hard thing for the creator of Citizen Kane to choke to death on his shrimp scampi while an epigone struggles for the right epigram.



The spotlight never really wavers, even when (perhaps especially when) our author is trying to waver it. In a charming little 1985 piece he wrote for Architectural Digest (most of the really charming pieces in this book weren’t written for self-consciously literary venues, which may constitute Vidal’s ultimate pronouncement on those venues and their readers), “At Home in a Roman Street,” he tries with an utterly deliberate insincerity to present himself as somehow not epochal:

Literature? Two blocks to our north, back of the Pantheon, Thomas Mann lived and wrote Buddenbrooks. Nearby, George Eliot stayed at the Minerva Hotel. Ariosto lived in Pantheon Square; Stendhal was close to us. I myself have written at least a part of every one of my books from Washington, D.C., to Lincoln in this flat. The last chapters of Lincoln were composed on the dining room table.

Italo Calvino now lives at the north of the street, and we cher confrere one another when we meet. Then we move on. Yes, we are all growing old. But a baby’s being born to the wife of the hardware-store owner, while a half-dozen babies of a few years ago are now men and women. So – plenty more where we came from. That is the lesson of the street. Meanwhile, what time is it? Free the bejeweled ladies held captive! Daffodils, tulips, and mimosa! What time is it? The same.

The humor here is bruising – we cannot believe that ‘plenty more where we came from’ even if we want to. And given how thoroughly, how openly Vidal disbelieves it, we often very much do want to believe it – but it’s not possible. The sheer power of the achievement that is United States admits of no quibbling – the book has only one real equal in the 20^th century (and only because nobody in that benighted era succeeded in creating equivalent volumes for the two or three other giants whose periodic deadline-work still lies scattered over a thousand fields; indeed, given the parlous state of publishing today, these volumes might never get created), the collected essays of V.S. Pritchett, and in a 1979 appreciation, Vidal has the quick and entirely amiable good grace to acknowledge it (although not, of course, without hobby-horsing around):

The fact that America’s English departments are manned by the second-rate is no great thing. The second-rate must live, too. But in most civilized countries the second-rate are at least challenged by the first-rate. And score is kept in the literary journals. But as McDonald’s drives out good food, so these hacks of Academe drive out good prose. At ever level in our literary life they flourish. In fact, they have now taken to writing the sort of novels that other tenured hacks can review and teach. Entire issues of “literary journals” are written by them. Meanwhile, in the universities, they are increasing at a positively Malthusian rate; and an entire generation of schoolteachers and book chatterers now believes that an inability to master English is a sign of intellectual grace, and that a writer like Pritchett is not to be taken seriously because he eschews literary velleities for literary criticism.

But the extended, sonorous wonder of Pritchett’s collected literary essays is a decidedly high table affair, as elevated as it is elevating. In United States readers are treated (and there in the end no better word – for all its maddening mannerisms and in glowing conjunction with its gargantuan length, this book is one seemingly unending treat) to a much wider register – the backstairs and the kitchen are invited to mix in the merriment. The verbal portraits here are so vivid as to be actionable, as in this 1965 take on the deservedly forgotten fourth-rate novelist John Horne Burns:

In 1947 The Gallery by John Horne Burns was published, to great acclaim; the best book of the Second World War. That same year Burns and I met several times, each a war novelist and each properly wary of the other. Burns was then thirty-one with a receding hairline above a face striking in its asymmetry, one ear flat against the head, the other stuck out. He was a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great (he had written a number of novels before the war, but none was published). He was also certain that to be a good writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed, he named half a dozen celebrated contemporaries. “A pleiad,” he roared delightedly, “of pederasts!”But what about Faulkner, I asked, and Hemingway. He was disdainful. Who said they were any good? And besides, hadn’t I heard how Hemingway once …

We can note the cat-like delicacy with which the author refrains from quite actually calling The Gallery the best book of the Second World War; we can see the significance always given to asymmetry by the flawlessly symmetrical; we can laugh out loud at Gore Vidal calling himself a war novelist; we can share a fraternal certitude that “a pleiad of pederasts” was never roared delightedly at any point in Western history … but the point is, we do all these things while in the full torrent of the narrative, as helplessly swept away as if we couldn’t tell a velleity from a strawberry daiquiri. That’s the prevailing power of United States: it’s the apotheosis of gossip.

In 1959 Vidal wrote, “All of us tend more or less consciously to arrange our personas in an attractive way,” and certainly United States stands as a vast monument to the author’s own such floral arrangements, perhaps the most psychopathically self-serving yet overwhelmingly entertaining example of such an arrangement since The Education of Henry Adams. And besides, haven’t you heard how Adams once …