Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  It is significant that Miller has had a considerable effect on a number of writers better than himself—George Orwell, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, to name three at random—and one wonders why. Obviously his personality must play a part. In the letters to Durrell he is a most engaging figure. Also, it is difficult not to admire a writer who has so resolutely gone about his own business in his own way without the slightest concession to any fashion. And though time may have turned the Katzenjammer Kid into Foxy Grandpa, the old cheerful anarchy remains to charm.

  Finally, Miller helped make a social revolution. Forty years ago it was not possible to write candidly of sexual matters. The door was shut. Then the hinges were sprung by D. H. Lawrence, and Miller helped kick it in. Now other doors need opening (death is the new obscenity). Nevertheless, at a certain time and in a certain way, Henry Miller fought the good fight, for which he deserves not only our gratitude but a permanent place of honor in that not inconsiderable company which includes such devoted figures as Havelock Ellis, Alfred M. Kinsey, and Marie C. Stopes.

  Book Week, August 1, 1965

  BYZANTIUM’S FALL

  One of the laws of physics as yet unrevised by the masters of the second of the two cultures is that in nature there can be no action without reaction. This law also appears to hold true in human nature. Praise Aristides too much for his justice and people will think him unjust. Evoke once too often a vision of golden youths listening to wise old men in the green shade of Academe and someone will snarl that those Athenian youths were a dreary lot taught by self-serving proto-fascists of whom Plato was the worst. Depict Byzantium as the last custodian of the Greek heritage, destroyed by barbarous Turks, and Professor H. Trevor-Roper will promptly ask the readers of the New Statesman: “As a living political system was the Byzantine Empire, at least in its decline, really better than the Ottoman Empire in its heyday?” Though Professor Trevor-Roper indicates that his own answer to the question is negative, the question itself is a useful one to ask, particularly now.

  During the last forty years the attitude of the West toward Byzantium (best expressed by Gibbon) has changed from indifferent contempt to a fascinated admiration for that complex and resourceful society which endured for a thousand years, governed by Roman Emperors in direct political descent from Constantine the Great who transformed the ruined village of Byzantium at the juncture of Europe and Asia into the New Rome. When the Western Empire broke up in the fifth century, Constantinople alone maintained the reality and the mystique of the Caesars. The city’s long, perilous success story has so aroused the admiration of recent scholars that there is indeed a tendency to glorify Byzantium at the expense of the Ottoman Turks and, as Professor Trevor-Roper suggests, the Turks must have had virtues quite as notable as the legendary vices of the Byzantines.

  Fortunately, a partial answer to Professor Trevor-Roper’s question is provided by the book he was reviewing when he asked it, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, by Sir Steven Runciman, a contemporary writer of history peculiarly unaffected by an age in which scholars quite as much as popularizers delight in publicity and perverse argument. Was Hitler mad? Evil? Neither, maintains one usually responsible historian: he was simply a better than average politician who nearly won a war made inevitable by a generation of political blunderers. Elsewhere, historians not content with telling what happened now reveal exactly why it happened, ordering events in such a way as to fit some overall and to them entirely satisfying theory of history. Alongside the publicists and grand designers, Sir Steven looks to be curiously demure. He tells his story plain. Since God has not revealed any master plan to him, he does not feel impelled to preach “truth” to us. He does make judgments but only after he has made his case. He likes a fact and distrusts a theory. He is always pleasurable to read, and his new book describing the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks is one of his best.

  The end of the Byzantine Empire began in 1204, when the crusaders seized Constantinople and divided much of the Empire amongst themselves. This terrible deed was particularly dishonorable since the crusade’s pious object had been the freeing of the holy sepulcher and the turning back of the Moslems. Instead, the crusaders greedily seized what belonged to their fellow Christians while making practical accommodations with the infidel. Simultaneously, the Pope did his best to bring the “schismatic” Greek church back into the fold. Not until 1264 were our ancestors (“those dark and wandering tribes…among whom neither grace nor muse takes shelter”) driven out of Constantinople by Michael Palaeologus, founder of the last dynasty. But despite the vigor of that dynasty’s domestic and foreign policies and the sudden artistic revival in the capital and at Mistra, the empire never recovered from the Fourth Crusade. By the end of the fourteenth century, only a part of the Morea, the cities of Constantinople and Thessalonica, and a few odd holdings remained to the Roman Emperors who, possibly as a result of their experience with contemporary Romans, took note at last that their culture as well as language was entirely Greek. Proudly, as Hellenes and not Romaioi, the last Byzantines now presented themselves to the world.

  Two centuries after the Byzantine Hellenic revival under the Comneni and the Angeli, the Western Renaissance began and with it a new interest in matters Greek, both contemporary and ancient, as well as a new and perhaps guilty sympathy for the beleaguered Emperor. Much of this sympathy was due to the gradual dispersal of Byzantine scholars to Europe, a “brain drain” which began at least a generation before the city fell. As the bookish Pius II remarked, any man with a pretension to learning must not only know Greek but he would be well advised to say that he had attended the University of Constantinople.

  At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Tartar victories in the East caused a great removal of Turks from Anatolia to the Balkans. By 1410 there were more Turks in Europe than in Asia Minor, further isolating the city from its old empire. Finally, with the fall of Thessalonica in 1430, it was plain that barring divine intervention, the absorption of Constantinople was only a matter of time. Although divine intervention was never entirely ruled out, human intervention was sought, particularly by John VIII Palaeologus, who made the round of European capitals, begging for aid. Although he was received respectfully, even warmly, his mission was a failure. For one thing, the Holy See had made it plain that the price of a new crusade would be the submission of the Greek church to Rome. Sir Steven is particularly illuminating as he describes the various wranglings at Constantinople for and against union, including the celebrated remark Lucas Notaras is supposed to have made: “Better the Sultan’s turban than a Cardinal’s hat.”

  In 1448 John VIII died and was succeeded by his forty-four-year-old brother Constantine XI, a shadowy figure whose fate it was to be the last Emperor of the East. At the time it was considered ominous that the new ruler’s name was Constantine and that his mother’s name was Helena; that the first and the last rulers of the city should have the same name is tribute to that neatness to which history is prone (the fact that the current King of the Hellenes is also named Constantine must give pause to the superstitious). Lacking money for mercenaries and a land empire for ordinary recruitment, the Emperor engaged in a desperate diplomacy to obtain Western aid, while spending the resources he did have on fortifying the city. Again the Pope insisted that the Greek church submit to Rome. For a time there was stalemate. Then Murad II, that most civilized of Sultans, died in 1451 to be succeeded by his son Mehmet II, a fierce youth of nineteen. When Mehmet’s Vizier came to him with gifts, the new Sultan pushed them aside and said, “Only one thing I want. Give me Constantinople.”

  The siege began April 2, 1453. Four months earlier, Constantine had finally submitted to the Pope, but no aid came from Italy. Every advantage was now with the Turks, including a Hungarian armorer named Urban who had previously offered his services to the Emperor, who could not afford them. Urban then presented himself to the Sultan, who engaged him to build the cannon that shattered the walls. When t
he siege began, Mehmet’s army numbered some eighty thousand men; the defenders numbered less than seven thousand. Nevertheless, the Christians fought valiantly and not until May 29 did the Turks break into the city through a gate left open by accident. Although Constantine’s advisers wanted him to withdraw to the Morea, he chose to remain with the city. And so he vanishes, literally, from history, his body never found. “The last Christian Emperor standing in the breach,” as Sir Steven records it, “abandoned by his Western allies, holding the infidel at bay until their numbers overpowered him and he died, with the Empire as his winding sheet.”

  It is a marvelous story, marvelously told. Sir Steven takes the traditional view that the fall of the city was indeed a great and significant event, and not merely a minor happening in some vast cyclic drama. But though his view is traditional, it is hardly romantic. He reminds us that the Turks though cruel conquerors were sensible governors. Unlike the Roman Catholics, they did not persecute others for their religion. By submitting politically to the Sultan, the Greek church was able to survive until the present day, while the Hellenic community, though politically enslaved, continued to maintain its identity in a way which might have proved impossible had the Westerners once more “saved” Constantinople.

  Much of the old Byzantine Empire accepted the rule of the Sultans without protest, preferring political and economic stability to the sad and dangerous comings and goings of bankrupt Despots. Particularly in Thessaly was Turkish rule welcomed. It is at this point that one wishes that Sir Steven had gone into fuller detail. For it was at Thessalonica in the 1340’s that the first recognizable class war of our era took place between aristocrats on the one hand and a well-organized communist-minded working class on the other, while a divided but powerful middle class representing “democratic” virtues vacillated between extremes. Significantly, the Palaeologi sided with the middle class, put down the revolution, and so maintained their dynasty for another century.

  To read an historian like Sir Steven is to be reminded that history is a literary art quite equal to that of the novel. The historian must be a master not only of general narrative but of particular detail. He must understand human character. He must be able to describe physical action, a difficult task for any writer; and, finally, he must be, in the best sense, a moralist. Yet today the historian is not accorded the same artistic rank as the “serious” novelist. I suspect that much of this is due to the high value we place on “creativity,” a vague activity that somehow has got mixed up with the idea of procreation. One ought to make something unique out of oneself, as opposed to assembling bits and pieces like Baron Frankenstein. But the art of a Runciman is certainly as creative as the art of the sort of novelist who tells us how his wife and his best friend betrayed him last summer. Both historian and novelist are describing actual events. Each must interpret those events in his own way. Finally, which is of greater significance: the work of private grievance or the work of history, which attempts to order fact in such a way as to show us what actually happened in the past and how what happened affects us still? Naturally, there is a place for both kinds of writing, but I consider it a sad commentary on our period that in the literary arts we tend to prefer gossip to analysis, personality to character, “creative writing” even at its worst to historical writing at its best.

  Happily, works like The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 continue to illuminate the present by recreating the past. For instance, when Zoë, the niece of Constantine XI, married the Grand Prince of Moscow, the masters of the Kremlin became not only defenders of the Greek Orthodox faith but by styling themselves Caesar (Tsar), they made it plain that as Emperors of the East they must one day liberate that imperial city to the south which they regarded as their rightful capital. And still do.

  The Reporter, October 7, 1965

  WRITERS AND THE WORLD

  Recently Variety, an American paper devoted to the performing arts, reviewed a television program about life inside the Harlem ghetto. The discussion was conducted “by literary oriented…Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine, who initially tried to guide the colloquy along bookish lines….” And apparently failed. “Podhoretz, who described himself as a ‘cold, detached intellectual,’ is given to verbosity and for about half the program was annoyingly the obtrusive interviewer, more eager to talk than to probe his subject. He receded in the second half, however, and overall was a good foil….”

  For several years, Variety has been reviewing television’s talking writers in precisely the same terms that they review comedians and singers. Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Dwight Macdonald are now familiar actors in the world of Variety. Yet until this decade, no more than half a dozen writers were known to the mass audience at any given moment. It took a generation of constant performing for someone like Carl Sandburg to become a national figure. Today fame is the work of a night. As a result, any number of contemporary novelists, poets, and critics are known to the innocent millions, who value them not only as entertainers but seem to take them seriously as public moralists. As resonant chorus to the Republic’s drama, the writers have replaced the clergy. It is to Norman Mailer, not to Norman Vincent Peale, that the television producer turns when he wants a discussion of “America’s Moral Decline” or “The Meaning of Violence.”

  This dramatic change in literature’s estate is not due to any sudden passion for books among the people. Americans have never liked reading. According to the ubiquitous Dr. Gallup, fifty per cent of the adult population never reads a book once school is done. Nor was the writers’ condition altered by the brief re-creation of Camelot beside the Potomac. It was reassuring to the intellectual community to know that the thirty-fifth President knew the difference between Saul Bellow and Irwin Shaw, but it was also true that he preferred Shaw to Bellow and Ian Fleming to either. What he did respect was success in the arts, which is not quite the same thing as excellence, though more easily identified. Finally, it was neither the public nor the New Frontier which glorified the writers. It was around-the-clock television and its horror of “dead air.”

  Producers discovered that one way of inexpensively enlivening the air is to invite people to talk to one another while the camera records. There are now literally thousands of talk shows, national and local, ranging from the “Today Show,” which commands the attention of most of the country’s “opinion makers,” to late-night educational symposia where literary men deal with such knotty questions as “Has There Been a Really Important American Novel Since A Passage to India?” The thought of people sitting at home watching other people talk is profoundly sad. But that is the way we live now, electronic villagers tuned in to the machine if not to the pundits.

  In the search for talkers, it was soon discovered that movie stars need a script and that politicians are not only evasive but apt to run afoul of the “equal time for the opposition” statute. Of the well known, only the writers were entirely suitable and perfectly available. From poets (Auden haggling with Professor Trilling over who was older) to journalists (Walter Lippmann benignly instructing his countrymen in the ways of history), the writers responded to the Zeitgeist’s call with suspicious alacrity. From the commercialite peddling his latest book-club choice to the serious critic getting in a good word for Partisan Review, the writers are now public in a way that they have never been before, and this has created all sorts of problems for them and their admirers, many of whom believe that it is degrading for a distinguished man of letters to allow himself to be questioned by an entertainer in front of an audience of forty million people who have not a clue as to who he is other than the vague knowledge that he has written a book.

  To this charge, the highbrow writer usually replies that any sort of exhibitionism is good for selling books. After all, no one would criticize him for giving a paid reading at a university. The middlebrow murmurs something about educating the masses. The lowbrow echoes the highbrow: “exposure” is good for trade. Yet in actual fact, th
ere is no evidence that television appearances sell novels as opposed to volumes of gossip or sex hygiene. Most people who watch television regularly do not read books or much of anything else. Yet this does not deter the talking writers. There are other pleasures and duties than trade. For one thing, those who have strong views of a political or moral nature are free to express them (aesthetic judgments are not encouraged by compères for obvious reasons). Finally if the writer talks often enough, he will acquire a movie-star persona which ought eventually to increase the audience for his books if, meanwhile, he has found the time to write them.

  But even if the writer who talks well continues to write well, there are those who believe that publicness of any kind must somehow be corrupting, like Hollywood. Americans prefer their serious writers obscure, poor, and, if possible, doomed by drink or gaudy vice. It is no accident that those contemporary writers most admired within the Academy are the ones whose lives were disorderly and disastrous, in vivid contrast to their explicators, quietly desperate upon dull campuses.