The Second American Revolution and Other Essays 1976--1982

by Gore Vidal

  In 1862, a year after Mary Ellen’s death, he sent to the printers a poem he had written in Greek on Jesus’ exuberantly vicious tirade (Matthew 10:34): “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” The executors of Peacock’s estate suppressed the poem; and only the last lines survive in translation. A pagan appears to be exhorting a crowd to “come now in a body and dash in pieces” this armed enemy, Jesus. “Break in pieces, hurl down him who is a seller of marvels, him who is hostile to the Graces, and him who is abominable to Aphrodite, the hater of the marriage bed, this mischievous wonder-worker, this destroyer of the world, CHRIST.” There are times when positive capability must masquerade as negative.

  Butler is at her most interesting when she relates Peacock to our own time where “students of literature are taught to think more highly of introspection than of objectivity, to isolate works of art from their social context, and to give them a high and special kind of value.” She ascribes this to “the early nineteenth century irrationalist reaction—Romanticism—[which] is a current movement still….In England at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, Romanticism was perceived to encourage indifference to contemporary politics, or to offer outright aid to illiberal governments. A literature that is concerned with style, and with feeling, rather than with intellect and reason, may be merely decorative; in relation to practical affairs, it will almost certainly be passive.”

  One can understand the emphasis that our universities continue to place on the necessary separation of literature from ideas. “We are stunned,” writes Butler, “by reiteration into believing that what the world wants is positive thinking. Peacock makes out a case, illustrated by Voltaire, for negative thinking, and its attendant virtues of challenge, self-doubt, mutual acceptance, and toleration.” Finally, “Since Coleridge we have been fond of the artist-prophet, and the art-work which is monologue, or confession, or even opium dream. Peacock, whose art is based on the dialogue, has waited a long time for his turn to be heard.”

  I don’t know how these things are being arranged in Butler’s England but the passive yea-sayer who has no ideas at all about politics, religion, ethics, history is absolutely central to our syllabus and his only competition is the artist as advertiser of sweet self alone. The culture would not have it otherwise and so, as McCarthy puts it, “in the place of ideas, images still rule the roost, and Balzac’s distinction between the roman idée and the roman imagé appears to have been prophetic, though his order of preference is reversed.”

  In Ideas and the Novel, McCarthy joins in the battle (assuming that this is not just a skirmish in a byway where the mirror lies shattered). Although McCarthy takes the Pavonian side, she moves beyond Peacock’s satiric dialogue-novels to those formidable nineteenth-century novelists to whom ideas are essential and, for her, it is James not Coleridge who is terminus to this line. “When you think of James in the light of his predecessors,” she writes, “you are suddenly conscious of what is not there: battles, riots, tempests, sunrises, the sewers of Paris, crime, hunger, the plague, the scaffold, the clergy, but also minute particulars such as you find in Jane Austen—poor Miss Bates’s twice-baked apples.”

  McCarthy is particularly interesting when she examines Victor Hugo, a great novelist doomed to be forever unknown to Americans. She examines Hugo’s curious way of staying outside his characters whose “emotions are inferred for us by Victor Hugo and reported in summary form.” Hugo deals with ideas on every subject from capital punishment to argot. He is also possessed by an Idea: “The manifest destiny of France to lead and inspire was identified by Hugo with his own mission to the nation as seer and epic novelist.” McCarthy’s survey of this sort of, admittedly, rare master (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Manzoni, Balzac, Stendhal, George Eliot) is illuminating, particularly when she discusses “the ambition to get everything in, to make this book the Book,” a passion still to be found post-James in Proust and Joyce “Though public spirit as an animating force was no longer evident (in fact the reverse)…the ambition to produce a single compendious sacred writing survived, and we may even find it today in an author like Pynchon (Gravity’s Rainbow).”

  It is usual in discussion of the novel (what is it for? what is it?) to point to the displacement that occurred when the film took the novel’s place at the center of our culture. What James had removed from the novel in the way of vulgar life, film seized upon: “It was not until the invention of the moving-picture,” writes McCarthy, “that the novel lost its supremacy as purveyor of irreality to a multitude composed of solitary units.” McCarthy goes on to make the point that “unlike the novel, the moving-picture, at least in my belief, cannot be an idea-spreader; its images are too enigmatic, e.g., Eisenstein’s baby carriage bouncing down those stairs in Potemkin. A film cannot have a spokesman or chorus character to point the moral as in a stage play; that function is assumed by the camera, which is inarticulate. And the absence of spokesmen in the films we remember shows rather eerily that with the cinema, for the first time, humanity has found a narrative medium that is incapable of thought.”

  If McCarthy’s startling insight is true (I think it is), the curious invention by the French of the auteur-theory begins to make a degree of sense. Aware that something was missing in films (a unifying intelligence), M. Bazin and his friends decided that the camera’s lens was nothing but a surrogate for the director who held it or guided it or aimed it, just as the painter deploys his brush. For M. Bazin et cie., the director is the unifying intelligence who controls the image and makes sense of the piece: he is The Creator. Needless to say, this perfect misapprehension of the way movies were made in Hollywood’s Golden Age has been a source of mirth to those who were there.

  The movie-goer is passive, unlike the reader; and one does not hear a creator’s voice while watching a movie. Yet, curiously enough, the kind of satire that was practiced by Aristophanes might just find its way onto the screen. As I watched Airplane, I kept hoping that its three auteurs (bright show-biz kids) would open up the farce. Include President Carter and his dread family; show how each would respond to the near-disaster. Add Reagan, Cronkite, the Polish Pope. But the auteurs stuck to the only thing that show-biz people ever know about—other movies and television commercials. Although the result is highly enjoyable, a chance was missed to send up a whole society in a satire of the Old Comedy sort.

  At the end of McCarthy’s notes on the novel, she looks about for new ways of salvaging a form that has lost its traditional content. She thinks that it might be possible, simply, to go back in time: “If because of ideas and other unfashionable components your novel is going to seem dated, don’t be alarmed—date it.” She mentions several recent examples of quasi-historical novels; she also notes that “in the U.S.A., a special license has always been granted to the Jewish novel, which is free to juggle ideas in full public; Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth still avail themselves of the right, which is never conceded to us goys.” With all due respect to three interesting writers, they don’t use their “concession” with any more skill than we mindless goys. The reason that they sometimes appear to be dealing in ideas is that they arrived post-James. Jewish writers over forty do—or did—comprise a new, not quite American class, more closely connected with ideological, argumentative Europe (and Talmudic studies) than with those of us whose ancestors killed Indians, pursued the white whale, suffered, in varying degrees, etiolation as a result of overexposure to the Master’s lesson. In any case, today’s young Jewish writers are every bit as lacking in ideas as the goyim.

  McCarthy admires Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “an American story of a cross-country trip with philosophical interludes.” She believes that “if the novel is to be revitalized, maybe more such emergency strategies will have to be employed to disarm and disorient reviewers and teachers of literature, who, as always, are the reader’s main foe.” They are not the writer’s ally either—unless he conforms to thei
r kitsch romantic notions of what writing ought to be or, more to the point, what it must never be.

  Although I suspect that it is far too late for emergency strategies, one final tactic that might work is to infiltrate the genre forms. To fill them up, stealthily, with ideas, wit, subversive notions: an Agatha Christie plot with well-cut cardboard characters that demonstrated, among other bright subjects, the rise and fall of monetarism in England would be attractive to all sorts of readers and highly useful.

  In any case, write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect: that is the only way out of the dead end of the Serious Novel which so many ambitious people want to write and no one on earth—or even on campus—wants to read.

  The New York Review of Books

  DECEMBER 4, 1980

  Who Makes the Movies?

  Forty-nine years ago last October Al Jolson not only filled with hideous song the sound track of a film called The Jazz Singer, he also spoke. With the words “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet” (surely the most menacing line in the history of world drama), the age of the screen director came to an end and the age of the screenwriter began.

  Until 1927, the director was king, turning out by the mile his “molds of light” (André Bazin’s nice phrase). But once the movies talked, the director as creator became secondary to the writer. Even now, except for an occasional director-writer like Ingmar Bergman,*1 the director tends to be the one interchangeable (if not entirely expendable) element in the making of a film. After all, there are thousands of movie technicians who can do what a director is supposed to do because, in fact, collectively (and sometimes individually) they actually do do his work behind the camera and in the cutter’s room. On the other hand, there is no film without a written script.

  In the Fifties when I came to MGM as a contract writer and took my place at the Writers’ Table in the commissary, the Wise Hack used to tell us newcomers, “The director is the brother-in-law.” Apparently the ambitious man became a producer (that’s where the power was). The talented man became a writer (that’s where the creation was). The pretty man became a star.

  Even before Jolson spoke, the director had begun to give way to the producer. Director Lewis Milestone saw the writing on the screen as early as 1923 when “baby producer” Irving Thalberg fired the legendary director Erich von Stroheim from his film Merry Go Round. “That,” wrote Milestone somberly in New Theater and Film (March 1937), “was the beginning of the storm and the end of the reign of the director….” Even as late as 1950 the star Dick Powell assured the film cutter Robert Parrish that “anybody can direct a movie, even I could do it. I’d rather not because it would take too much time. I can make more money acting, selling real estate and playing the market.” That was pretty much the way the director was viewed in the Thirties and Forties, the so-called classic age of the talking movie.

  Although the essential creator of the classic Hollywood film was the writer, the actual master of the film was the producer, as Scott Fitzgerald recognized when he took as protagonist for his last novel Irving Thalberg. Although Thalberg himself was a lousy movie-maker, he was the head of production at MGM; and in those days MGM was a kind of Vatican where the chief of production was Pope, holding in his fists the golden keys of Schenck. The staff producers were the College of Cardinals. The movie stars were holy and valuable objects to be bought, borrowed, stolen. Like icons, they were moved from sound stage to sound stage, studio to studio, film to film, bringing in their wake good fortune and gold.

  With certain exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock, for one), the directors were, at worst, brothers-in-law; at best, bright technicians. All in all, they were a cheery, unpretentious lot, and if anyone had told them that they were auteurs du cinéma, few could have coped with the concept, much less the French. They were technicians; proud commercialities, happy to serve what was optimistically known as The Industry.

  This state of affairs lasted until television replaced the movies as America’s principal dispenser of mass entertainment. Overnight the producers lost control of what was left of The Industry and, unexpectedly, the icons took charge. Apparently, during all those years when we thought the icons nothing more than beautiful painted images of all our dreams and lusts, they had been not only alive but secretly greedy for power and gold.

  “The lunatics are running the asylum,” moaned the Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table, but soldiered on. Meanwhile, the icons started to produce, direct, even write. For a time, they were able to ignore the fact that with television on the rise, no movie star could outdraw the “$64,000 Question.” During this transitional decade, the director was still the brother-in-law. But instead of marrying himself off to a producer, he shacked up, as it were, with an icon. For a time each icon had his or her favorite director and The Industry was soon on the rocks.

  Then out of France came the dreadful news: all those brothers-in-law of the classic era were really autonomous and original artists. Apparently each had his own style that impressed itself on every frame of any film he worked on. Proof? Since the director was the same person from film to film, each image of his oeuvre must then be stamped with his authorship. The argument was circular but no less overwhelming in its implications. Much quoted was Giraudoux’s solemn inanity: “There are no works, there are only auteurs.”

  The often wise André Bazin eventually ridiculed this notion in La Politique des Auteurs, but the damage was done in the pages of the magazine he founded, Cahiers du cinéma. The fact that, regardless of director, every Warner Brothers film during the classic age had a dark look owing to the Brothers’ passion for saving money in electricity and set-dressing cut no ice with ambitious critics on the prowl for high art in a field once thought entirely low.

  In 1948, Bazin’s disciple Alexandre Astruc wrote the challenging “La Caméra-stylo.” This manifesto advanced the notion that the director is—or should be—the true and solitary creator of a movie, “penning” his film on celluloid. Astruc thought that caméra-stylo could

  tackle any subject, any genre….I will even go so far as to say that contemporary ideas and philosophies of life are such that only the cinema can do justice to them. Maurice Nadeau wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If Descartes lived today, he would write novels.” With all due respect to Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Méthode would today be of such a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily.

  With all due respect to Astruc, the cinema has many charming possibilities but it cannot convey complex ideas through words or even, paradoxically, dialogue in the Socratic sense. Le Genou de Claire is about as close as we shall ever come to dialectic in a film and though Rohmer’s work has its delights, the ghost of Descartes is not very apt to abandon the marshaling of words on a page for the flickering shadows of talking heads. In any case, the Descartes of Astruc’s period did not make a film; he wrote the novel La Nausée.

  But the would-be camera-writers are not interested in philosophy or history or literature. They want only to acquire for the cinema the prestige of ancient forms without having first to crack the code. “Let’s face it,” writes Astruc:

  between the pure cinema of the 1920s and filmed theater, there is plenty of room for a different and individual kind of film-making.

  This of course implies that the scriptwriter directs his own scripts; or rather, that the scriptwriter ceases to exist, for in this kind of film-making the distinction between author and director loses all meaning. Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing.

  It is curious that despite Astruc’s fierce will to eliminate the scriptwriter (and perhaps literature itself), he is forced to use terms from the art form he would like to supersede
. For him the film director uses a pen with which he writes in order to become—highest praise—an author.

  As the French theories made their way across the Atlantic, bemused brothers-in-law found themselves being courted by odd-looking French youths with tape recorders. Details of long-forgotten Westerns were recalled and explicated. Every halting word from the auteur’s lips was taken down and reverently examined. The despised brothers-in-law of the Thirties were now Artists. With newfound confidence, directors started inking major pacts to meg superstar thesps whom the meggers could control as hyphenates: that is, as director-producers or even as writer-director-producers. Although the icons continued to be worshiped and overpaid, the truly big deals were now made by directors. To them, also, went the glory. For all practical purposes the producer has either vanished from the scene (the “package” is now put together by a “talent” agency) or merged with the director. Meanwhile, the screenwriter continues to be the prime creator of the talking film, and though he is generally paid very well and his name is listed right after that of the director in the movie reviews of Time, he is entirely in the shadow of the director just as the director was once in the shadow of the producer and the star.

  What do directors actually do? What do screenwriters do? This is difficult to explain to those who have never been involved in the making of a film. It is particularly difficult when French theoreticians add to the confusion by devising false hypotheses (studio director as auteur in the Thirties) on which to build irrelevant and misleading theories. Actually, if Astruc and Bazin had wanted to be truly perverse (and almost accurate), they would have declared that the cameraman is the auteur of any film. They could then have ranked James Wong Howe with Dante, Braque, and Gandhi. Cameramen do tend to have styles in a way that the best writers do but most directors don’t—style as opposed to preoccupation. Gregg Toland’s camera work is a vivid fact from film to film, linking Citizen Kane to Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives in a way that one cannot link Citizen Kane to, say, Welles’s Confidential Report. Certainly the cameraman is usually more important than the director in the day-to-day making of a film as opposed to the preparation of a film. Once the film is shot the editor becomes the principal interpreter of the writer’s invention.