by Gore Vidal
The Observer
28 November 1993
* PRIDE
Is pride a sin at all? The Oxford English Dictionary strikes a primly English note: “A high or overweening opinion of one’s own qualities, attainments or estate,” or too clever by half, the ultimate put-down in those bright arid islands where ignorance must be lightly worn.
Apparently, the Romans and the Greeks had other, by no means pejorative, words for it. The quintessential Greek, Odysseus, reveled in being too clever by any number of halves. Of course, neither Greeks nor Romans had a word for sin, a Judeo-Christian concept that the Germans did have a word for, Sünde, which Old English took aboard. Obviously, in any time and place an overweening person is tiresome, but surely laughter is the best tonic for restoring him to our common weeniness. He hardly needs to be prayed for or punished as a sinner. Yet pride is listed as the first of the seven deadly sins, and only recently—by accident, not design—did I figure out why.
Over the years I have taken some . . . well, pride in never reading my own work, or appearing with other writers on public occasions, or joining any organizations other than labor unions. In 1976, when I was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, I promptly declined this high estate on the ground that I was already a member of the Diners’ Club. John Cheever was furious with me: “Couldn’t you at least have said Carte Blanche? Diners’ Club is so tacky.” A couple of months ago I declined election to the Society of American Historians—politely, I hope.
James Joyce’s “silence, exile, and cunning” is the ultimate in artist’s pride. But for someone politically inclined, that was not possible; even so, one could still play a lone hand, as a writer if not as an engaged citizen. Recently, Norman Mailer asked me if I would join him and two other writers in a reading of George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell. The proceeds would go to the Actors Studio. I would play the Devil, who has most of the good lines.
So, out of Charity—Vanity?—I set to one side my proud rule and shared a stage with three writers and the fading ghost of a very great one; fading because Shaw can appeal only to those who think that human society can be made better by human intelligence and will. I am of Shaw’s party; the Devil’s, too, I found, as I began to immerse myself in the part.
In a very long speech, the Devil makes an attractive case for himself; he also explains the bad press that he has got from the celestial hordes and their earthly admirers. The Devil believes that the false view of him in England is the result of an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian, of course, is Dante, and the Englishman is John Milton. Somewhat gratuitously, Shaw’s Devil remarks that like everyone else he has never managed to get all the way through Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Although I had my problems with the second, the first is the masterpiece of our language, and Lucifer, the Son of Morning, blazes most attractively while God seems more arbitrary and self-regarding than ever, eager in His solipsistic pride to hear only praise from the angelic choirs, as well as from Adam and Eve, two mud pies He liked to play with.
It is Milton’s conceit that proud Lucifer, a bored angel, tempts Adam and Eve with the only thing a totalitarian ruler must always keep from his slaves, knowledge. Rather surprisingly, the First Couple choose knowledge—well, she chooses it; they lose Eden; go forth to breed and die while Lucifer and his party, expelled from heaven, fall and fall and fall through Chaos and Old Night until they reach rock bottom, hell:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n.
I first heard those words in 1941, spoken by Edward G. Robinson in the film of Jack London’s Sea Wolf. It was like an electric shock. The great alternative. I can do no other. Bright world elsewhere. To reign and not to serve. To say, No. This was my introduction to Milton and to Lucifer’s pride.
I was brought up in a freethinking Southern family where pride of clan could lead to all sorts of folly as well as to exemplary self-sacrifice.
My great-grandfather sat for a whole day on the steps of the courthouse at Walthall, Miss., debating whether to go fight with the rest of the clan in a civil war that he knew could not be won, and for a cause that he despised. Pride required him to fight with his clan; he fell at Shiloh.
Fifty years later in the Senate, his son defied the leader of his party, President Woodrow Wilson, on the issue of whether or not the United States should fight in World War I. The Chamber of Commerce of Oklahoma City sent him a telegram saying that if he did not support the war, he would be an ex-senator. He sent them a telegram: “How many of your membership are of draft age?” He fell from office, as they had promised.
There is a whiff of sulfur here, perhaps; but there is also the sense that one is the final judge of what must be done despite the seductive temptations and stern edicts of the gods. In the absence of a totalitarian sky-god or earthly ruler, there is the always troubling dictatorship of the American majority, which Tocqueville saw as the dark side to our “democracy.”
Very much in the family tradition, in 1948, I ran counter to the majority’s loony superstitions about sex and fell quite far indeed. (This newspaper’s regular daily critic not only did not review the offending novel, The City and the Pillar, but told my publisher that he would never again read, much less review, a book of mine: six subsequent books were not reviewed in the daily paper.) But pride required that I bear witness, like it or not, and if the superstitious masses—or great Zeus himself—disapproved, I would go even deeper into rebellion, and fall farther. Understandably, for the cowed majority, pride is the most unnerving “sin” because pride scorns them quite as much as Lucifer did God.
Significantly, a story that keeps cropping up from culture to culture is that of the man who steals fire from heaven to benefit the human race. After Prometheus stole the fire for us, he ended up chained to a rock, an eagle gnawing eternally at his liver. Zeus’ revenge was terrible, but the Prometheus of Aeschylus does not bend; in fact, he curses Zeus and predicts: “Let him act, let him reign his little while as he will; for he shall not long rule over the gods.”
So let us celebrate pride when it defies those dominations and powers that enslave us. In my own case, for a quarter-century I have refused to read, much less write for, this newspaper, but, as Prometheus also somewhat cryptically observes, “Time, growing ever older, teaches all things.” Or, as Dr. Johnson notes, reflecting Matthew’s Gospel, “Pride must have a fall”; thus proving it was the real thing and not merely the mock.
The New York Times
4 July 1993
* LINDBERGH: THE EAGLE IS GROUNDED
On May 20–21, 1927, in thirty-three and a half hours, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., flew nonstop from New York City to Paris’s Le Bourget airport. At the age of twenty-five, Slim, as he was known to associates, became the most famous person in the world, and so he remained for much of a life that ended in 1974. As is usual with heroes, his popularity waxed and waned; also, as is not usual with ordinary heroes, he was much more than just the one adventure. He was also an engineering genius with a mystical bent that, by the time of his death, had made him regret the world he had helped create—Modern Times (starring the world’s second most recognized man, Charlie Chaplin). Slim was drawn more and more to Thoreau and to primal nature as well as to Lao Tzu, who saw essential change in those waters and tides that are able to wear down rock surfaces, no matter how adamantine, in order to make a new world. Finally, he turned himself into a good writer; school of Julius Caesar, yes, but Caesar crossed with Lucretius’ sense of the beauty of “things” and their arrangement, precisely described. Lindbergh was a very strange sort of American for the first part of the century now ending. He is practically incomprehensible today.
A. Scott Berg has produced a characteristically workmanlike survey of the many things that Lindbergh did, and of some of the things that he was. Aside from the creation of airlines in the 1930s, he invented a “per
fusion pump,” variations of which now keep alive bodily organs until they are ready to be transplanted. Also, as early as 1929, the prescient Lindbergh befriended Robert Goddard, whose rocket research could have given the United States the unmanned missile long before Hitler’s V-2, which nearly won the war for the Nazis.
In 1932, when the Lindberghs’ two-year-old son was kidnapped and killed, fearful for their growing family and hounded by a press every bit as dreadful then as now, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, moved to Europe, where they stayed for three years.
At the request of the American military, Lindbergh checked out the German Luftwaffe, which he found alarmingly advanced in both design and production, while the French and British air forces combined were not in the same league. In 1939 Lindbergh came home to call for “an impregnable system of defense.” Also, between 1939 and 1941, he was the chief voice raised against U.S. intervention in the Second World War. In a notorious speech at Des Moines in 1941, he identified America’s three interventionist groups: the Roosevelt administration, the Jews, and the British. Although the country was deeply isolationist, the interventionists were very resourceful, and Lindbergh was promptly attacked as a pro-Nazi anti-Semite when he was no more than a classic Midwestern isolationist, reflective of a majority of the country. But along with such noble isolationists as Norman Thomas and Burton K. Wheeler, not to mention Lindbergh’s friend Harry Guggenheim’s foundation, the “America First” movement, as it was called, did attract some genuine home-grown fascists who would have been amazed to learn that there was never a “Jewish plot” to get the United States into the Second World War. Quite the contrary. Before Pearl Harbor, as Berg notes, “though most of the American motion-picture studios were owned by Jews, most were virtually paranoid about keeping pro-Jewish sentiment off the screen.” Also, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, confided as late as September 1941 to the British Special Operations Executive agent Valentine Williams “that for the first time in his life he regretted being a Jew because, with the tide of anti-Semitism rising, he was unable to champion the anti-Hitler policy of the administration as vigorously and as universally as he would like, as his sponsorship would be attributed to Jewish influence by isolationists and thus lose something of its force.”
It was not until November 25, 1996, that an American academic, Thomas E. Mahl, researching Britain’s various secret service archives, came across the Williams file. He has now published Desperate Deception, as full a story as we are ever apt to get of “British Covert Operations in the United States 1939–44.” Although media and schools condition Americans to start giggling at the mention of the word “conspiracy,” there are, at any moment, all sorts of conspiracies crisscrossing our spacious skies and amber fields of grain, and of them all in this century, the largest, most intricate and finally most successful was that of the British to get us into the Second World War. Mahl shows us just how busy their operatives were, from Ronald Colman, starring in pro-British films and the Korda brothers making them, to Walter Winchell reading on his Sunday broadcast pro-British messages written for him by Ernest Cuneo, who also ghosted pro-British newspaper columns for Drew Pearson. There was indeed a vast conspiracy to maneuver an essentially isolationist country into war. There was also a dedicated conspiracy to destroy Lindbergh’s reputation as hero.
Meanwhile, just who was the hero? In 1932 the rococo English journalist Beverly Nichols met Lindbergh. “What is all this fuss about flying the Atlantic?” Nichols later marveled. “Isn’t that just the sort of thing a bore like that would do? Now if Noel or I had flown, you would have a real story!” So one would. But Slim did fly, alone, and thereby hangs a century’s great story, The Lone Eagle.
Lindbergh’s daughter, Reeve, has now written a charming memoir of her father and mother, Under a Wing. She sets out to place her father in his native country, specifically, at Little Falls, above the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. For reasons that have to do with the nature of the sky in the upper Midwest, a great many of the early—I almost wrote real—fliers came from that part of the world: from the Ohio Wright brothers, who pretty much started it all at the turn of the century, to Minnesota Lindbergh and Kansas Earhart to my South Dakota father, an army flier since 1917 and from 1927 to 1930 general manager of Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, later TWA), for which Lindbergh acted as consultant and general publicist.
On my one visit to South Dakota, as I drove from Madison to Sioux Falls, I was conscious of an all-enveloping bowl of light, as if one were at the bottom of a vast goldfish bowl; odder still, the light also seemed to be coming as much from below as from above. Then I noticed how flat the plain was that I was crossing, how tall sky and low horizon made a luminous globe. In such a landscape, aerial flight seems, somehow, inevitable. So Lindbergh must have felt of his native country over which he was to fly for much of his youth as one of the first airmail carriers.
Earthly geography aimed him for the sky. Family, too. A paternal grandfather left Sweden during a political-financial scandal that Berg handles the best of anyone I’ve read. Ola Mansson was a farmer with a large family. Elected to the Swedish Parliament in 1847, he had an illegitimate child by a Stockholm waitress. Thanks to a scandal that involved the king, he fled Sweden, leaving behind his first family but taking with him the mother of his young son, Karl August. By 1859 he had changed his name to August Lindbergh; he had also become a farmer near Sauk Center, Minnesota, where Sinclair Lewis would be born in 1895. A politician in the old country, August became something of one in the new, but it was his eldest son, now called Charles August, who was to rise in that line of work. C.A. became a lawyer, married and had two children. After the death of his wife, he married a doctor’s daughter. Evangeline Land was twenty-four; C.A. was forty. They were considered the best-looking couple in the heart of the heart of the country.
Enter American literature. Evangeline was a schoolteacher, well educated for the time, with fanciful artistic leanings. She loved amateur theatricals. Beauty, too. She wanted to “be an inspiration. I suppose I’d better become a teacher then . . . I’ll make ’em put in a village green, and darling cottages. . . .” Thus speaks Carol Kennicott, heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Thus spake, it would appear, Evangeline Lindbergh, on whom Carol appears to be based. Most intriguingly, Lewis wrote his novel seven years before Carol-Evangeline’s son became world-famous.
Although Lindbergh (born 1902) was to remain as close to his mother as two cool Scandinavians could ever be (or so she termed them when they refused to embrace for the press as he left for Paris), she was never to be the influence that his father was. In 1906, C.A. was elected to the House of Representatives as a Progressive on the Republican ticket, very much in the Robert La Follette populist isolationist tradition.
To understand the son’s politics—or, perhaps, tropisms, reflexes to the public business—one must understand C.A. and his world.
Although Berg’s book is well assembled and full of new detail, Loss of Eden by Joyce Milton is still, perhaps, the liveliest biography in the sense that she manages to bring alive her cast in a way not usual in contemporary biographies. But finally, it is Lindbergh himself, particularly in his posthumous Autobiography of Values, who bears the most interesting witness to a life so extraordinary that it becomes, paradoxically, emblematic of the American character at its most fulfilled.
Of his childhood, Lindbergh wrote:
My father grew up on the frontier. His parents had brought him there from Sweden when he was six years old. They staked out a homestead and from it axed a clearing and plowed a field. His early boyhood had been spent in constant fear of Indians and reliance upon soldiers. On one occasion when the Sioux had taken the warpath, my grandfather abandoned his homestead and with his family fled by ox-cart to the fort at St. Cloud. A massacre of settlers took place in a village to the south and reasonable security was not regained until soldiers came with their rifles. . . . During the early years of my life, I lived un
der the influence of three environments: our farm and town, my grandfather’s Detroit laboratory (Dr. Land invented the porcelain tooth), and the city of Washington, D.C., where my father served for ten years in Congress and where I attended school. My interests were divided between the farm and the laboratory, for I disliked school and had little curiosity about the politics of Washington.
It is hard to think of the boy Lindbergh serving two years at Friends School, where so many of us were to do time in later years, including Mrs. Ronald Reagan.
In Congress, C.A. was the people’s man or, as Milton puts it:
If there was a single event that symbolized for the Progressives all that was wrong with unfettered capitalism, it was a meeting held in the library of the Madison Avenue home of New York financier J. P. Morgan in December 1890. At that conference Morgan had convinced the presidents of seven major railroads to call a halt to their cutthroat competition and form a cartel. The meeting marked the beginning of the era of the trusts, and during the next fifteen years Morgan would personally preside over the organization of more than a half-dozen mega-corporations—among them United States Steel, the Guggenheim copper trust, etc.
Most Progressives glumly accepted things as they were, but C.A. declared war on what he called the Money Trust, centered on the house of Morgan. Needless to say, the Money Trust survived his attacks but his marriage did not. C.A. and Evangeline separated. By 1907, she and Charles were in Detroit with her parents. Dr. Land was, like so many of the livelier figures of that age, an inventor. Charles would also become an inventor, a natural sort of activity at the dawn of the age of technology, whose presiding genius was Henry Ford.
In the end, Evangeline agreed to live in Washington, but not with C.A. At the age of eleven, Charles mastered Ford’s invention and drove C.A. about his Minnesota district. Although more interested in the combustion engine than C.A.’s attacks on the Money Trust, Charles was bound to absorb a good deal of the populist faith. C.A. blasted the gold standard, the “subsidized press,” the “anglophiles” who, by 1914, were eager for us to enter the European war, aided and abetted by J. P. Morgan, who supported the British and French currencies while supplying the Allies with arms. During all this, President Wilson was quietly maneuvering the United States into the war while running for reelection in 1916, using Senator T. P. Gore’s slogan, “He kept us out of war.” Representative Lindbergh and Senator Gore were not only allies in this, but each admired LaFollette, who also opposed, along with a majority of the American people, foreign entanglements and adventures. But the bankers’ war, as the isolationists thought of it, was inevitable. The subsidized press that would later so damage Charles’s reputation beat the drums for war, and, according to C.A.’s hyperbole, “at no period in the world’s history has deceit been so bold and aggressive as now [sic] attempting to engulf all humanity in a maelstrom of hell.” Little did the apolitical, science-loving Charles suspect that a generation later he would be making the same sort of speeches in the face of a conspiracy that neither he, nor anyone else much, understood at the time.