Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “Isn’t the … the … the Panama Canal something?”

  “Nothing compared to reporting …”

  “… and inventing …”

  “… news.” This was an old debate between them, or, rather, discourse, since they were generally in agreement. To determine what people read and thought about each day was not only action but power of a kind no ruler could, with such regularity, exercise. Caroline often thought of the public as a great mass of shapeless modelling clay which she, in Washington, at least, could mould with what she chose to put in the columns of the Tribune. No wonder that Hearst, with eight newspapers, and a magazine or two, felt that he could—even should—be president. No wonder Theodore Roosevelt genuinely hated and feared him.

  The East Room of the White House had been simplified to the point of brilliance, and the result was more royal than republican. Also, the Roosevelts had increased the number of military aides, their gold-braid loopings complementing the quantities of gold-and-silver braid worn by the diplomatic corps. The astonishing McKinley pumpkin seats, each fountaining a sickly palm, had long since vanished; the mustard rug was now only a memory of a time when the East Room was like the lobby of a Cleveland hotel. The floor was now shining parquet, the chandeliers were more elaborate than ever, while the sparse furniture was much gilded and marbled. Red silk ropes were everywhere, in order to control the public, which were allowed, at certain hours, to wander through their sovereign’s palace.

  The President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt stood at the room’s center, shaking hands, as glittering aides discreetly moved the guests along. Theodore was more than ever stout, and hearty, and delighted with himself, while Edith Roosevelt was her usual calm self, ever ready to curb her volatile mate, whose self-love was curiously contagious.

  “Very sound. Very sound on Japan, Mrs. Sanford,” was his greeting to Caroline. “Things are about to happen.” Then he looked very grim, as Cassini, dean of the diplomatic corps, approached, Marguerite in tow. Caroline exchanged amiable whispers with Edith Roosevelt, and moved on. President and Russian Ambassador had nothing to say to each other, and contrary to all diplomatic usage said nothing to each other. Marguerite looked worn. She had had a love affair that had gone wrong, and now the word was that Cassini was to be replaced. End of glory, thought Caroline, as Henry James, the embodiment of all literary glory, shook her hand warmly and said, “At last. At last.”

  “It has been almost seven years since Surrenden Dering,” Caroline observed, with some not entirely banal wonder at the rapidity of time’s passage.

  “You never come to our side of the water, so I’ve come to yours.” James lowered his voice in mock fear, as if Theodore might be listening. “Ours. Ours! What have I said? Lèse majesté des États-Unis.”

  “I shall be on the other side this summer,” said Caroline, as they crossed the room, for the most part filled with people that she knew. Washington was indeed a village still; and so a newcomer like Henry James was a mild sensation. Once the diplomatic reception was concluded, there would be a supper for the chosen few, among them James and Caroline but not Blaise.

  They paused in an empty corner, as the Hays made their entrance. “Our Henry refuses to come,” James observed with quiet satisfaction. “He was here earlier this month, and he has now declared that he has had his absolute fill of the sublime Theodore, whilst conceding how strenuous, vigorous and, yes, let us acknowledge it, supple, our sovereign is, the sun at the center of the sky, with us as … as …”

  “Clouds,” Caroline volunteered.

  James frowned. “I once was obliged to let go an excellent typewriter-operator because whenever I paused for a word, she would offer me one, and always not simply the wrong word, but the very worst word.”

  “I’m sorry. But I quite like us as clouds.”

  “Why,” asked James, “with the delicious exception of yourself, are there no beautiful women at court?”

  “Well, there is Mrs. Cameron—if not Martha.”

  “Alas, not Martha. But Mrs. Cameron’s a visitor. What I take to be the local ladies here are plainer than what one would find at a comparable—if anything in poor shabby London could be compared to this incomparability—reception.”

  Caroline repeated the Washington adage that the capital was filled with ambitious energetic men and the faded women that they had married in their green youth. James was amused. “The same doubtless applies to diplomats.…”

  They were joined by Jules Jusserand, the resplendent French ambassador, and the three lapsed into French, a language James spoke quite as melodiously as his own. “What did the President say to you?” asked Jusserand. “We were all watching the two of you, with fascination.”

  “He expressed his delight—the very word he used, as, apparently, he always does—at my—and his—election to something called the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which has, parthenogetically, given birth to an American Academy, a rustic version of your august French Academy, some half a hundred members whose souls if not achievements are held to be immortal.”

  “What,” said Jusserand, “will you wear?”

  “Ah, that vexes us tremendously. As the President and I tend to corpulence, I have proposed togas, on the Roman model, but our leader John Hay favors some sort of uniform like—Admiral Dewey’s.” James bowed low, as the hero passed by them. “He is my new friend. We have exchanged cards. I know,” James swept the air with an extended arm, “everyone at last.”

  “You are a lion,” said Caroline.

  Supper was served in the new dining room, where a number of tables for ten had been set. Henry James was placed at the President’s table, a Cabinet lady between them. Saint-Gaudens was also at the monarch’s table, with Caroline to his right. Edith Roosevelt had come to depend upon Caroline for those occasions where the ability to talk French was necessary, not that the great American Dublin-born sculptor, despite his name, spoke much French. He lived in New Hampshire, not France. Of Lizzie Cameron, who had posed for the figure of Victory in Saint-Gaudens’s equestrienne monument to her uncle General Sherman, he said, “She has the finest profile of any woman in the world.”

  “How satisfactory, to have such a thing, and to have you acknowledge it.”

  Unfortunately, a table of ten was, for the President, no place for the ritual dinner-party conversation: first course, partner to right; second course, partner to left; and so on. The table for ten was Theodore’s pulpit, and they his congregation. “We must see more of Mr. James in his own country.” Theodore’s pince-nez glittered. As James opened his mouth to launch what would be a long but beautifully shaped response, the President spoke through him, and James, slowly, comically, shut his mouth as the torrent of sound, broken only by the clicking of teeth, swept over the table. “I cannot say that I very much like the idea of Mark Twain in our Academy.” He looked at James, but spoke to the table. “Howells, yes. He’s sound, much of the time. But Twain is like an old woman, ranting about imperialism. I’ve found there’s usually a physical reason for such people. They are congenitally weak in the body, and this makes them weak in nerves, in courage, makes them fearful of war …”

  “Surely,” began James.

  The President’s shrill voice kept on. “Everyone knows that Twain ran away from the Civil War, a shameful thing to do …”

  To Caroline’s astonishment, James’s deep baritone continued under the presidential tirade. The result was disconcerting but fascinating, a cello and a flute, simultaneously, playing separate melodies.

  “… Mr. Twain, or Clemens, as I prefer to call him …”

  “… testing of character and manhood. A forge …”

  “… much strength of arm as well as, let us say …”

  “… cannot flourish without the martial arts, or any civilization …”

  “… distinguished and peculiarly American genius …”

  “… desertion of the United States for a life abroad …”

  “… when Mr. Hay telephon
ed Mr. Clemens from the Century Club to …”

  “… without which the white race can no longer flourish, and prevail.” The President paused to drink soup. The table watched, and listened, as Henry James, master of so many millions of words, had the last. “And though I say—ah, tentatively, of course,” the President glared at him over his soup spoon, “the sublimity of the greatest art may be beyond his method, his—what other word?” The entire table leaned forward, what would the word be? and on what, Caroline wondered, was James’s astonishing self-confidence and authority, even majesty, based? “Drollery, that so often tires, and yet never entirely obscures for us the vision of that mighty river, so peculiarly august and ah—yes, yes? Yes! American.”

  Before the President could again dominate the table, James turned to his post-soup partner, and Caroline turned to Saint-Gaudens, who said, “I can’t wait to tell Henry. The reason he won’t set foot ever again in this house is that he’s never allowed to finish a sentence and no Adams likes to be interrupted.”

  “Mr. James is indeed a master.”

  “Of an art considerably higher than mere politics.” Saint-Gaudens reminded Caroline of a bearded Puritan satyr, if such a creature was possible; he seemed very old in a way that the lively Adams, or the boyish if ill Hay, did not. “I wish I had read more in my life,” he said, as a fish was offered up to them.

  “You have time.”

  “No time.” He smiled. “Hay was furious at Mark Twain, who wouldn’t answer the telephone. We knew he was home, of course, but he didn’t want to join us at the Century Club. What bees are swarming in that bonnet! Twain’s latest bogey is Christian Science. He told me quite seriously, after only one Scotch sour, that in thirty years Christian Scientists will have taken over the government of the United States, and that they would then establish an absolute religious tyranny.”

  “Why are Americans so mad for religion?”

  “In the absence of a civilization,” Saint-Gaudens was direct, “what else have they?”

  “Absence?” Caroline indicated James, who was smiling abstractedly at the President, who was again in the conversational saddle, but only at his end of the table. “And you. And Mr. Adams. And even the Sun King there.”

  “Mr. James is truly absent. Gone from us for good. Mr. Adams writes of Virgins and dynamos in France. I am nothing. The President—well …”

  “So Christ Scientist …”

  “Or Christ Dentist …”

  “Sets the tone.” Caroline never ceased to be amazed at the number of religious sects and societies the country spawned each year. Jim had told her that if he were to miss a Sunday service at the Methodist church in American City, he would not be reelected, while Kitty taught Sunday school, with true belief. If for nothing else, Caroline was grateful to Mlle. Souvestre for having dealt God so absolute a death blow that she had never again felt the slightest need for that highly American—or Americanized—commodity.

  The voice of Theodore was again heard at table. “I stood in the Red Room, I remember, on election night, and I told the press that I would not be a candidate again. Two terms is enough for anyone, I said, and say again.” Henry James stared dreamily at the President, as if by closely scrutinizing him he might distil his essence. “Politicians always stay on too long. Better to go at the top of your form, and give someone else a chance to measure up, which is what it is all about.”

  “Measure up,” James murmured, with mysterious, to Caroline, approval. “Yes, yes, yes,” he added to no one, as Theodore told them how he had invented, first, Panama, and then the canal. He did not lack for self-esteem. James kept repeating, softly, “Measure up. Measure up. Yes. Yes.”

  – 3 –

  BLAISE delivered William Randolph Hearst into the eager presence of Mrs. Bingham. “I can never thank you enough,” said Frederika, as she and Blaise stood at one end of the Bingham drawing room and together watched Mrs. Bingham’s perfect ecstasy at so great a catch. The Chief could now talk and smile at the same time, a valuable political asset that he had finally acquired.

  “I hope Mr. Sullivan has not been invited.” Blaise looked at Frederika with a sudden fondness, the result of having got to know, at last, someone well. The experience of furnishing a house with another person was, he decided, the ultimate intimacy: each comes to know the other through and through until the very mention of Louis XVI sets off endless reverberations in each.

  “Mr. Sullivan has been warned away. Did you hear Mr. Hearst’s speech yesterday?”

  Blaise nodded. “He was remarkably good.” Sullivan, an iconoclastic Democrat, had seen fit to attack Hearst on the floor of the House. Until that moment, Hearst had never made a speech; he also left to others the presentation of his own bills, of which the latest, to control railroad rates, had distressed Sullivan. The attack on Hearst as an absentee congressman was answered with an attack on Sullivan in the New York American. Sullivan again rose in the House, and this time he inserted into the record a libellous attack on Hearst, made years earlier in California. Hearst was depicted as a diseased voluptuary, a blackmailer and bribe-taker, to the delight of the nation’s non-Hearstian press. Sullivan described Hearst as “the Nero of modern politics.”

  The Chief then rose to make his maiden speech to the House. He spoke more in sorrow than in anger, a style he had become remarkably good at. The California attack had been made by a man who was once indicted for forgery in New York State; and fled to California, under another name. As for Sullivan, Hearst shook his head sadly. He remembered Sullivan altogether too well from his Harvard days. Sullivan and his father were proprietors of a saloon that Hearst had never visited, as he was temperance. But the saloon was known to everyone in Boston after a drunken customer was beaten to death by Sullivan and his father.

  Blaise was seated with Brisbane in the crowded press gallery when the House exploded with joy and fury. Various friends of Sullivan shouted at the Speaker to stop Hearst, but Mr. Cannon, a Republican, was delighted by this battle between two Democrats, and Hearst was allowed to end his attack with the pious hope that he would always be considered the enemy by the criminal classes.

  Later, the Chief had been in an exuberant but odd mood. “I won that,” he said, “but I can’t win the party. I’ve got to start a third party. That’s the only way. Or knock off half the politicians in the country, which I could do, if I really wanted to get even.” When Blaise asked how this might be done, the Chief had looked very mysterious indeed. “I’ve got a lot of research on everybody.” Meanwhile, he was preparing to run for governor of New York in 1906; and from Albany, he would try again for the presidency in 1908.

  James Burden Day introduced Blaise to a recently elected Texas congressman. “John Nance Garner,” said James Burden Day. “Blaise Sanford.” Once again, Blaise felt somehow nude without the third all-defining name so valued by his countrymen. Garner was a cheerful young man with quick bright eyes.

  “We were talking about Mr. Hearst,” said Frederika. “And Mr. Sullivan.”

  “Sullivan’s a polecat,” observed Garner. “I’m for Hearst. We all are in my neck of the woods, now Bryan’s drifted off.”

  Blaise looked at Jim, who seemed tired and distracted. The previous fall, he had failed to be elected to the Senate; and he was restive in the House. Kitty was a good political partner, but nothing more. Blaise suspected that Jim had another woman. But Blaise did not ask; and the prudent Jim did not volunteer. On the other hand, Jim had been delighted to go with Blaise to New York’s most elegant bordello, in Fifth Avenue. Here Jim had performed heroically, and surpassed in popularity Blaise, who was never more contented than when he could play sultan in his rented harem, with a friend like Jim. “I like our colleague,” said Jim, indicating Hearst’s back, “but those who don’t really don’t.”

  “A third party?” Blaise repeated not only the phrase but imitated the Chief’s tone of voice.

  “They don’t work, ever,” said Garner. “Look at the Populists. They’re going nowher
e like a bat through hell.”

  “So are we.” Jim was grim. “The country’s Republican now, and we can’t change it. TR’s pulled it off. He talks just like us and acts just the way the people who pay for him want him to act. Hard to beat.”

  Mrs. Bingham drew Blaise into her orbit where Hearst now moved, larger than life. “He is my ideal!” she exclaimed.

  “Mine, too.” Blaise winked at Hearst, who blinked, and smiled, and said, “I’m running for mayor of New York. This year.”

  Mrs. Bingham emitted a tragic cry. “You’re not going to leave us? Not now. We need you. Here. You are excitement.”

  “Oh, he’ll be back.” But Blaise wondered how anyone with the Chief’s curious personality could prevail in politics. Then he thought of those cheering delegates in St. Louis; and of the sizeable majorities Hearst obtained in his congressional district. “What about Tammany?” asked Blaise. The Democratic candidate for mayor was almost always a Tammany creature.

  “I’m running on a third-party ticket.” The Chief looked suddenly mischievous, and happy. “Tammany’s going to run McClellan again. I’m going to beat him.”

  Blaise was amused by the Chief’s confidence. George B. McClellan, Jr., son of the Civil War general, had been a New York City congressman; now he was the city’s mayor. Despite the support of “Silent” Charlie Murphy, the head of Tammany, McClellan was honest and civilized and, Blaise thought, impregnable. “But I’ll beat him. I’m putting together my own machine.”

  “Like Professor Langley.” Mrs. Bingham could be tactless.

  “This won’t crash.” Hearst was serene. “I’m coming out for the public ownership of all utilities.”

  “Isn’t that socialism?” Mrs. Bingham’s eyes widened, and her lips narrowed.

  “Oh, not really. Your cows are safe,” he added.

  “Mr. Bingham’s cows. I’ve never met them.”

  “Have you done ‘research’ on McClellan?” Blaise was still intrigued by the Chief’s reference to what sounded like police dossiers on his enemies.