by Gore Vidal
Apologists (secret lovers of the novel, few but tender) surveying the seasonal flood of first novels of promise, the smaller wave of second novels of no promise, and, finally, most poignant of all, those minuscule ripples which continue so perversely to assault an indifferent shore—these apologists have noted a spiritual ergot in our country’s air which causes good writers to abort young while, tributary to this new myth, lingers the old conviction that American life, even now, lacks the class tensions, the subtle play of manners (Hialeah but no Ascot), the requisite amount of history to make even a small literature. That from Levittown no art may come is still an important critical thesis.
One senses, too, in academic dialogues and explications the unstated burden of the discussion that, at last, all the novels are in. The term is over, the canon assembled if not ordered, the door to the library firmly shut to the irrelevance of new attempts. More ominous, however, than the loss of the higher criticism has been the gradual defection of the public itself. After some three hundred years the novel in English has lost the general reader (or rather the general reader has lost the novel), and I propose that he will not again recover his old enthusiasm.
The fault, if it be a fault, is not the novelist’s (I doubt if there ever have been so many interesting and excellent writers as there are now working) but of the audience, an unpleasant accusation to make in a democracy where, ultimately, the taste of the majority is the measure of all things. Nevertheless, appalling education combined with clever new toys has distracted that large public which found pleasure in prose fictions. In an odd way, our civilization has now come full circle: from the Greek mysteries and plays to the printing press and the novel to television and plays again, the audience has returned to the play, and it is now clear that the novel, despite its glories, was only surrogate for the drama, which, confined till this era to theaters, was not generally accessible.
With television (ten new “live” plays a week; from such an awful abundance, a dramatic renaissance must come) the great audience now has the immediacy it has always craved, the picture which moves and talks, the story experienced, not reported.* In refutation, it may indeed be argued that the large sales of paperback books, both good and bad, are proof that there are millions out there in the dark, hungering for literature. But though it is true that all those books must go somewhere, I suggest that their public is not a serious one, that it is simply pursuing secret vices from one bright cover picture to another—consuming, not reading.
Yet all in all, this state of affairs, though disheartening, is by no means tragic. For one thing, those novelists whose interests are in polemic or mere narrative will doubtless join the new Establishment and write plays. Adventure stories, exotic voyages, superficial histories, all the familiar accouterments of the popular novel are now the scenarists’ by right of conquest. The novel is left only the best things: that exploration of the inner world’s divisions and distinctions where no camera may follow, the private, the necessary pursuit of the whole which makes the novel, at its highest, the humane art that Lawrence called “The one bright book of life.”
To strike an optimistic note, if faintly, it may well be that, with unpopularity, the meretricious and the ordinary will desert entirely, leaving only the devoted lashed to the mast. But now the tide is in. The course is set. The charts are explicit, for we are not the first to make the voyage out: the poets long ago preceded us into exile, and one can observe them up ahead, arms outstretched to greet the old enemy, their new companions at the edge of the known world.
The New York Times Book Review, August 5, 1956
*I certainly got that all wrong. Commercial American television abandoned the drama. Yet English and German television rather prove my point. Incidentally, this is the piece that is remembered as the one where I am supposed to have announced the novel’s death. I did no such thing. I made the point that the audience for the novel is vanishing—a fact not to be denied. But in the pseudodemocracy one must never criticize the majority, and so what I actually wrote about the dereliction of the audience was transformed into a supposed attack on a very healthy art form. Recently a British reviewer commented that, having proclaimed the death of the novel, I was cruel enough to send Myra Breckinridge to the funeral.
BOOK REPORT
Can you hear me? Oh, good. Then I won’t have to use this thing. It scares me to death! My husband always tells me, “Marian, you and your mother may not be very good but you’re certainly loud enough when you give a book report.” That’s what he always says. Now then: the book I’m going to talk to you about today is by an American writer named Robert Penn Warren. Robert Penn Warren. He has written some poems, and of course most of us read his book a few years ago called All the King’s Men, which they later made a movie out of and ruined, the way they always do. Mr. Warren’s new book is a historical—an historical—novel with a difference. It begins with a beautiful quotation from a poem by A. E. Housman, the poet: “When shall I be dead and rid of the wrong my father did?”
And that’s just what it’s about. About Amantha Starr, a beautiful girl of sixteen, raised in Ohio, where she’d been sent to be educated by her father—sent by her father to be educated—a wealthy Kentucky plantation owner. When suddenly he dies, she comes home for his funeral, where she finds that not only did he die bankrupt, but that she is really a Negress, the daughter of one of his slaves, and she has to be sold to pay off these debts he left. Well, this is how the story starts. A really awful situation for a girl to be in. One day she had everything money and refinement could bring, and the next day she is a slave. The very first sentence of the book is filled with symbolism: “Oh, who am I? For so long that was, you might say, the cry of my heart.” And then there follows a description of this wonderful house she lived in in Kentucky, south of Lexington, near Danville: a two-story brick house with a chimney at each end and a portico with pillars. The most beautiful house you could imagine! All of which she lost when she found she was colored and sold to a dealer who took her to New Orleans where she was put up for sale in the slave market as a slave.
Fortunately, she was bought by the most interesting person in the book, a fascinating older man with a lame leg who always walked with a heavy blackthorn stick with a great silver knob. His name was Hamish Bond, and he became her protector. Not until much later does she find out that he’s really not named Bond but Hinks, that he was raised in Baltimore where he was a slave trader, going to Africa regularly and bringing back Negroes. He had some awful experiences in Africa. One in particular, a description of a massacre, is really gruesome where these Amazon women go through an entire village, slaughtering all the men, women and children because they’re so enormous and bloodthirsty, much stronger than men. When Hamish, whose real name is Hinks, tries to keep one of the Amazons from killing a baby, this is what happens: “I just shoved her a little. It’s very peculiar the way you have a habit. I just shoved her gentle because she was, in a way of speaking, a lady, and I had learned manners back in Baltimore. Here she was a crocodile-hided, blood-drinking old frau, who had been in her line of business for twenty years, and I caught myself making allowance for a lady.” Well, he wished he hadn’t, because right after he pushed her she slashed his leg with a big razor, making a long jagged cut which is what made him lame and why he had to always walk with that blackthorn cane with the silver knob.
Anyway, Hamish was kind in his brooding way to Amantha, and he treated her like she was really a lady which made her feel a bit better about being a slave. As somebody in the book says, the trouble with Hamish is he has “kindness like a disease.” Another fascinating character Amantha meets is Hamish’s k’la (meaning Negro best friend) Rau-ru, “whose eyes were wide, large and deepset, his nose wide but not flattened, the underlip full if not to the comic fullness favored in the minstrel shows of our day, and the corners of the mouth were drawn back so that the effect of that mouth was one of arrogant reserve and not blubbering doc
ility.”
Hamish was a very unusual man, especially after the Civil War started. One night there is a storm at Hamish’s house—and Hamish takes Amantha in his arms while the rain blows in the window and she knows for the first time what love is. “With the hand of Hamish Bond laid to my side, and the spreading creep and prickle of sensation across the softness of my belly from the focus of Hamish Bond’s sandpaper thumb, and the unplaiting and deliquescence of the deep muscles of thighs were as much History as any death-cry at the trenchlip or in the tangle of the abatis.”
Can you still hear me? Well, that’s how she feels as she discovers what love is and this maybe is the only serious fault in the book. I mean would a young girl like Amantha, even though she was well educated in Oberlin, Ohio, think thoughts quite like that? I mean, older more experienced women would, but would she? However, Mr. Warren writes poetic English and we can certainly excuse an occasional symbolic sentence like that. Well, there are many beautiful passages like this in the book, but the story never gets bogged down and the parts about the Civil War are really fascinating. Especially in New Orleans where she meets, completely by accident, Seth Parton, her girlhood sweetheart, who is now an officer in the Union Army, and also Tobias Sears, “the New England idealist to whom the butcheries of war must be justified by ‘truth.’ ” I don’t think it will spoil the book any if I tell you that everything ends all right with Tobias and Amantha…Miss Manty, as everybody calls her…together in quite a beautiful and touching ending.
I’d like to say something, by the way, if I may make a digression, about the much-maligned historical novel…the “bosom books” as they are disdainfully called by some critics, who think they know everything and can’t keep from tearing apart books like Mr. Warren’s. Now, I know and you know that maybe these books aren’t exactly history, but they’re awfully close, some of them, especially this one, and I can’t help but think of Mrs. Gregg Henderson’s fascinating report some meetings ago about the boys in Korea who were captured and tortured and brainwashed by the Chinese Communists who found that American boys were easy to break down BECAUSE THEY DID NOT KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT AMERICAN HISTORY AND WHY THEY WERE FIGHTING. Most of us here are mothers and we all know the trouble we have getting boys to read about history and all the things which don’t seem important to them until they’re caught by the enemy, when it’s too late. So I don’t think it’s fair to make fun of novels that may be a little romantic but are still very useful ways of teaching what America is to people who are never going to read history or really deep things. I think Mr. Warren has done a wonderful job of bringing to life the Civil War and certain problems of that time—and frankly, I don’t care a penny what the critics say about the book. After all, if people didn’t want books like this, writers wouldn’t write them and publishers wouldn’t publish them. You can’t argue with facts!
This book has been high on the best-seller list, and the movies have bought it, though they’ll probably ruin it like they always do. A lot of people are going to be hearing about Amantha Starr and the Civil War. And they’ll learn something. I firmly believe that these characters will stay with you for many a long day. Rau-ru, Miss Manty, the Amazons who go into that village killing all the men, Hamish Bond with his heavy blackthorn stick with the great silver knob—all these wonderful characters come alive for you in the pages of Band of Angels by Robert Penn Warren, published by Random House, three hundred and seventy-five pages long. Long? I wanted it to go on forever, and so will you!
Zero, Spring 1956
WRITING PLAYS FOR TELEVISION
Until I began to write plays for television, I entertained an amiable contempt for my stagestruck playwright friends who so meekly (masochistically, I thought) submitted their talents to the irrelevant strictures of directors and stars, of newspapermen in Wilmington and of sudden, brief acquaintances in hotel rooms. I had taken to heart the failure of the prose writer in the theater. From Smollett’s irritable attempts to get his tragedy produced to Henry James as he was jeered from the stage on his first night, the novelist has cut a ponderous, sad figure beneath the proscenium arch. As a novelist, I was wary, preferring to suffer my reverses and petty triumphs on the familiar ground of prose and not in the theater, strewn already with the corpses of illustrious confrères.
The reason for our party’s failure in what should have been a natural arena is caught in Flaubert’s phrase: “The theater is not an art but a secret.” And the secret is deceptively simple: dialogue is not prose. It is another language, and a talent for the novel does not necessarily mean a talent for the theater. The novel is the more private and (to me) the more satisfying art. A novel is all one’s own, a world fashioned by a single intelligence, its reality in no way dependent upon the collective excellence of others. Also the mountebankery, the plain showmanship which is necessary to playwriting, strikes the novelist as disagreeably broad. One must show every collision on the stage, while in the novel it is often a virtue to avoid the obvious scene, to come at the great moments obliquely. Even dialogue is not the same in a novel as it is on the stage. Seldom can dialogue be taken from a book and played by actors. The reason is one of pace rather than of verisimilitude. Certainly, in our country, most novelists have an accurate ear for speech; it is a gift liberally bestowed upon the good and the bad alike, the gray badge of naturalism. Yet in the novel, duration differs from the stage. The novelist’s arrangement of dialogue is seldom as concentrated as the playwright’s, whose line must finally be achieved by people talking, unassisted by an author’s stage management.
Aware of the essential difference between the novel and the play, I kept happily to my own country until the black winter of 1953, when I realized in a moment of revelation that the novel as a popular art form had come to a full halt. There were many reasons. Television had stunned it. The new critics had laid it out all neat in a blue suit, a flower in its waxy hands (HERE LIES THE NOVEL, EXPLICATED), and their funeral orations were already under way in the literary quarterlies. The newspaper reviewers, lagging in their serene way some twenty years behind the fact, wanted more Kipling and less art, while the public, its attention distracted by television and the movies, firmly refused to pay five dollars for anyone’s novel, aware that if a book contained enough healthy American sadism they could eventually buy it in a cheap paperback edition. By 1953, unpopular novelists like myself were living precariously on the bounty of reprint publishers; a bounty which ended when those jolly opportunists flooded the newsstands, sinking many, both good and bad. Needless to say, none of this happened quickly. Disaster approached with stealthy tread, and not until my revelation did I awaken to the harshness of the situation: that I was on the verge of providing future thesis writers with a poignant page or two of metropolitan suffering, before I went off to Africa to run rifles.
But happily, when faced with ruin, all one’s cunning and resourcefulness rush to the surface, and if one’s career is conducted beneath a beneficent star, crisis is healthy. I looked about me. I had been a novelist for a decade. I had been hailed as the peer of Voltaire, Henry James, Jack London, Ronald Firbank and James T. Farrell. My early, least satisfactory works had been best-sellers. Though not yet thirty years old, I was referred to in the past tense, as one of those novelists of the 1940’s from whom so much had been expected.
I turned to my peers to see what they were doing. I discovered that the most colorful was writing unsuccessful musical comedies and the most talented had virtuously contrived to die. The others had dropped from view, most of them finding dim employment either in anonymous journalism or in the academy. The cleverest ones had married rich wives and traveled a lot. The prospect was not flooded with light.
But one must live, as they say, and since I do not write popular short stories or journalism, or teach, and since I was spoiled by ten years of receiving money for the work I would have done whether I had been paid or not (the happiest of lives and the luckiest), it looked very much as if I sho
uld have to turn to the fantasy world of business and get a job. At that crucial moment, I discovered television.
I had not watched television until the winter I decided to write for it. At the time, its great advantage for me was proximity. I live on the bank of the Hudson, and there to the south, in New York City, was this fine source of revenue. I was intrigued. I was soon enthralled. Right off, there is the immediacy of playwriting. There they are, one’s own creations, fleshed out by living people, the symbolic detail isolated by the camera as millions of strangers in their homes watch one’s private vision made public. The day after my debut in February of 1954, I was committed seriously to writing for the camera. I discovered that although the restrictions imposed by a popular medium are not always agreeable, they do at least make creative demands upon one’s ingenuity. More often than not, the tension between what one is not allowed to say and what one must say creates ingenious effects which, given total freedom, might never have been forced from the imagination. The only analogy I can think of is the nineteenth-century novel. Nearly all the productions of that extraordinary age were published first in magazines edited for gentlewomen and supervised by Mrs. Grundy, her fist full of asterisks. There was so much the harried novelist could not say that he was impelled to freight heavily what he could say with other meanings, accomplishing the great things by indirection, through association and logical echo.