Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  From the beginning, the American civilization has been simultaneously romantic and puritan. The World is corrupt. If the virtuous artist does not avoid its pomps and pleasures, he will crack up like Scott Fitzgerald or shoot his brains out like Ernest Hemingway, whose grim last days have assured him a place in the national pantheon which his novels alone would not have done. Of living writers, only Norman Mailer seems willing to live a life that is bound to attract lengthy comment of a cautionary sort. America’s literary critics and custodians are essentially moralists who find literature interesting only to the extent that it reveals the moral consciousness of the middle class. The limitations of this kind of criticism were remarked upon more than twenty years ago by John Crowe Ransom, who thought there was a place for at least one ontological critic in the American literary hierarchy. The place of course is still there; still vacant.

  “I stayed home and wrote,” Flaubert used to say, quoting Horace, and to the serious-minded this priestlike dedication is still the correct way for the good writer to live, even though it means that his biography will be disappointingly slim. Remote from public affairs, the unworldly American artist ought not to be concerned with aesthetic matters either. Whenever literary questions were put to William Faulkner, he would say, “I’m just a farmer,” neglecting to add that for thirty years most of his farming was of a seasonal nature in Hollywood, writing films. Yet he was always given credit for having turned his back upon the World, like J. D. Salinger, who is regarded with a certain awe because he lives entirely withdrawn from everyone. Never photographed, never interviewed, perfectly silent (except when The New Yorker is attacked), Mr. Salinger turns out fictions which, for a time, were taken to be more serious than they are because of the entirely admirable way their author lives.

  Except for a brief time during the 30’s, the notion of the writer as citizen has not been popular. In fact, during the 40’s, the intellectual catchword was “alienation.” The writers simply ignored the Republic, their full attention reserved for those dramas of the interior where Greek myths are eternally re-enacted in vague places beyond time, and Alcestis wears seersucker and majors in Comp. Lit. at Princeton. The 50’s were the time of the Great Golfer, and there was a death in the land to which the only response was the Beats. They were not even alienated. They just went. And felt. Then as swiftly as they appeared, they vanished; nothing but a whiff of marijuana upon the air to mark their exuberant passage. The 60’s began with a flourish. The young President detested all rhetoric except his own, in which he resembled most of the writers. A quasi-intellectual, he knew how to flatter even the most irritable man of letters. A master of publicity, he realized the value of having well-known people support him. If James Baldwin was an effective and admired television performer, then it was only common sense to try to win his support.

  In 1960 politics and literature officially joined forces. The politician had literary longings; the writer saw himself as president, leading the polity to the good life by means of lysergic acid or the copious orgasm or whatever bee buzzed loudest in his bonnet. More to the point, through television, the talking writer was able to command an audience in a way few politicians can. Not only is the writer a celebrity, he is also a free agent who does not have to be reelected or even to be responsible. And so, not unnaturally, writers have been drawn more and more to actual as opposed to symbolic politics. Many worked for the elections of both Kennedy and Johnson. Saul Bellow contemplated writing a biography of Hubert Humphrey. Norman Mailer took credit for Kennedy’s election because at a crucial moment in the campaign he gave the candidate the moment’s accolade; called him “hipster.” After Kennedy’s election, writers were regularly invited to the White House. It was a heady thousand days.

  But since Johnson’s accession, the links between poetry and power have snapped. Literary people annoy and confuse the President. The precise nature of Saul Bellow’s achievement does not seem to weigh heavily with him. Nevertheless, like his predecessor, he knows the propaganda value of artists and he has somewhat wistfully tried to win them over. It has not been easy. Despite the good things he has done at home, the President’s Asian adventures alarm the talking writers and they talk against him. In retaliation, he has refused to bestow Freedom Medals, Kennedy’s order of merit for excellence in science and art. But this state of siege is hardly permanent. For better or worse, the writers are very much in the real world, and the politicians know it.

  Simultaneously with their new-found celebrity, the writers have become the beneficiaries of a peculiar crisis in American publishing. Fifteen years ago the mass magazines lost much of their advertising revenue to television. To survive, they were forced to make radical changes. At the prodding of young editors, they began to raid the literary quarterlies. Overnight the work of writers like Bellow, Baldwin, and Paul Goodman replaced those cheerful fictions and bland commentaries that had made the popular magazines the despair of the intellectuals for half a century. All sorts of miracles began to occur: James Baldwin was allowed to deliver a sermon in The New Yorker, while Dr. Leslie Fiedler, having deserted raft, Huck, and Jim, became Playboy’s “writer of the year.” Curiously enough, the readers who had for so long been soothed by Clarence Budington Kelland seemed not to mind the abrasiveness of the new writers, while young people found them interesting, a matter of some importance to publishers, since the age of the average American is now twenty-seven and growing younger. In fact, those in college form the largest single subculture in the United States, far more numerous, say, than the organized-labor movement or nature’s noblemen, the farmers. As a result, courses in contemporary literature have made a generation of young people aware of writers who ordinarily might have gone on to the end in honorable obscurity. This new audience has at last been reflected in the publishing of books, both hard- and soft-cover.

  For the first time since New England’s brief Indian summer, good writers with some regularity outsell commercial ones in hard cover. In recent years Mary McCarthy has outsold Daphne du Maurier; Bellow has outsold Uris; Auchincloss has outsold O’Hara. Financially, inflation has set in. The paperback publishers are pursuing the new best sellers with advances that go as high as a million dollars. No one knows whether or not the publishers will ever earn back these huge advances, but meanwhile they gain valuable newsstand space, and in the wake of a famous book they can display their less showy wares, which include, often as not, the best books. As a result, a serious and well-reviewed novel which has sold twenty-five hundred copies in hard cover can, in paperback, reach an audience of many thousands of readers, mostly young. This is the first sign that the novel, which has steadily declined as a popular art form in this century, may be able at last to hold its own not only with films and television but also with that high journalism which has so distracted the intellectuals since the Second War.

  Affluence, publicity, power, can these things be said to “corrupt” the artist? In themselves, no. Or as Ernest Hemingway nicely put it: “Every whore finds his vocation.” Certainly it is romantic melodrama to believe that publicity in itself destroys the artist. Too many writers of the first rank have been devoted self-publicists (Frost, Pound, Yeats), perfectly able to do their work quite unaffected by a machine they know how to run. Toughness is all. Neither Hollywood nor the World destroyed Scott Fitzgerald. He would have made the same mess had he taught at a university, published unnoticed novels, and lived in decorous obscurity. The spoiling of a man occurs long before his first encounter with the World. But the romantic-puritan stereotype dies hard. The misbehavior of the artist thrills the romantic; his subsequent suffering and punishment satisfy the puritan.

  Yet today new situations exist, and the old archetypes, never true, seem less relevant than ever. To be outside the World is not necessarily a virtue. To be in the World does not necessarily mean a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fatness of soul. William Faulkner’s thirty years as a movie writer affected his novels not at all. He could do both. Fina
lly, it is truly impertinent to speculate as to whether or not the effect of this or of that on a writer’s character is good or bad. What is pertinent is the work he does. Mary McCarthy is no less intelligent a literary critic because she plays games on television. But even if her work should show a sudden falling off, only the simplest moralist would be able to link her appearances as a talking writer to her work as a writing writer.

  It has been observed that American men do not read novels because they feel guilty when they read books which do not have facts in them. Made-up stories are for women and children; facts are for men. There is something in this. It is certainly true that this century’s romantic estrangement of writer from the World has considerably reduced the number of facts in the American novel. And facts, both literal and symbolic, are the stuff of art as well as of life. In Moby Dick Melville saw to it that the reader would end by knowing as much about whaling as he did. But today there are few facts in the American novel, if only because the writers do not know much about anything except their own immediate experience, which is apt to be narrow. It is no accident that the best of American writing since the war has been small, private, interior. But now that the writers have begun to dabble in the World, even the most solipsistic of them has begun to suspect that there are a good many things that other people know that he does not. Though senators tend to be banal in public statements, none is ever quite so wide of the mark as an impassioned novelist giving his views on public affairs, particularly if he accepts the traditional romantic view that passion is all, facts tedious, reflection a sign of coldness (even impotence) and the howl more eloquent than words. Fortunately, as writers come up against the actual World they are bound to absorb new facts, and this ought to be useful to them in their work. As for the World, only good can come of the writers’ engagement in public affairs. Particularly in the United States, a nation governed entirely by lawyers, those professional “maintainers of quarrels” whom Henry IV Plantagenet sensibly barred from sitting in Parliament. At last other voices are being heard, if only late at night on television.

  The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. “A talent is formed in stillness,” wrote Goethe, “a character in the stream of the world.” Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both. But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the World lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. This is disturbing. Until one recalls how many bad books the World may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers turned Worldly. The romantic-puritans can find consolation in that, and take pleasure in realizing that there is a rude justice, finally, even in the best of worlds.

  London Times Literary Supplement, November 25, 1965

  PORNOGRAPHY

  The man and the woman make love; attain climax; fall separate. Then she whispers, “I’ll tell you who I was thinking of if you’ll tell me who you were thinking of.” Like most sex jokes, the origins of this pleasant exchange are obscure. But whatever the source, it seldom fails to evoke a certain awful recognition, since few lovers are willing to admit that in the sexual act to create or maintain excitement they may need some mental image as erotic supplement to the body in attendance. One perverse contemporary maintains that when he is with A he thinks of B and when he is with B he thinks of A; each attracts him only to the degree that he is able simultaneously to evoke the image of the other. Also, for those who find the classic positions of “mature” lovemaking unsatisfactory yet dare not distress the beloved with odd requests, sexual fantasy becomes inevitable and the shy lover soon finds himself imposing mentally all sorts of wild images upon his unsuspecting partner, who may also be relying on an inner theater of the mind to keep things going; in which case, those popular writers who deplore “our lack of communication today” may have a point. Ritual and magic also have their devotees. In one of Kingsley Amis’s fictions, a man mentally conjugates Latin verbs in order to delay orgasm as he waits chivalrously for his partner’s predictably slow response. While another considerate lover (nonfictional) can only reduce tempo by thinking of a large loaf of sliced white bread, manufactured by Bond.

  Sexual fantasy is as old as civilization (as opposed to as old as the race), and one of its outward and visible signs is pornographic literature, an entirely middle-class phenomenon, since we are assured by many investigators (Kinsey, Pomeroy, et al.) that the lower orders seldom rely upon sexual fantasy for extra-stimulus. As soon as possible, the uneducated man goes for the real thing. Consequently he seldom masturbates, but when he does he thinks, we are told, of nothing at all. This may be the last meaningful class distinction in the West.

  Nevertheless, the sex-in-the-head middle classes that D. H. Lawrence so despised are not the way they are because they want deliberately to be cerebral and anti-life; rather they are innocent victims of necessity and tribal law. For economic reasons they must delay marriage as long as possible. For tribal reasons they are taught that sex outside marriage is wrong. Consequently the man whose first contact with a woman occurs when he is twenty will have spent the sexually most vigorous period of his life masturbating. Not unnaturally, in order to make that solitary act meaningful, the theater of his mind early becomes a Dionysian festival, and should he be a resourceful dramatist he may find actual lovemaking disappointing when he finally gets to it, as Bernard Shaw did. One wonders whether Shaw would have been a dramatist at all if he had first made love to a girl at fourteen, as nature intended, instead of at twenty-nine, as class required. Here, incidentally, is a whole new line of literary-psychological inquiry suitable for the master’s degree: “Characteristics of the Onanist as Dramatist.” Late coupling and prolonged chastity certainly help explain much of the rich dottiness of those Victorians whose peculiar habits planted thick many a quiet churchyard with Rose La Touches.

  Until recently, pornography was a small cottage industry among the grinding mills of literature. But now that sex has taken the place of most other games (how many young people today learn bridge?), creating and packaging pornography has become big business, and though the high courts of the American Empire cannot be said to be very happy about this state of affairs, they tend to agree that freedom of expression is as essential to our national life as freedom of meaningful political action is not. Also, despite our governors’ paternalistic bias, there are signs that they are becoming less intolerant in sexual matters. This would be a good thing if one did not suspect that they may regard sex as our bread and circuses, a means of keeping us off the political streets, in bed and out of mischief. If this is so, we may yet observe the current President in his mad search for consensus settling for the consensual.

  Among the publishers of pornography (“merchants of smut,” as they say at the FBI), Maurice Girodias is uniquely eminent. For one thing, he is a second-generation peddler of dirty books (or “d.b.s,” as they call them on Eighth Avenue). In the 1930’s his English father, Jack Kahane, founded the Obelisk Press in Paris. Among Kahane’s authors were Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell, Cyril Connolly, and of course Henry Miller, whose books have been underground favorites for what seems like a century. Kahane died in 1939 and his son, Maurice Girodias (he took his mother’s name for reasons not given), continued Kahane’s brave work. After the war, Girodias sold Henry Miller in vast quantities to easily stimulated GIs. He also revived Fanny Hill. He published books in French. He prospered. Then the terror began. Visionary dictatorships, whether of a single man or of the proletariat, tend to disapprove of irregular sex. Being profoundly immoral in public matters, dictators compensate by insisting upon what they think to be a rigorous morality in private affairs. General de Gaulle’s private morality appears to have been registered in his wife’s name. In 1946 Girodias was prosecuted for publishing Henry Miller. It was France’s first prosecution for obscenity since the trial of Madame Bovary in 1844. Happily, the world’s writers rallied to Miller’s defense, and since men of letters are taken solemnly in France, the government droppe
d its charges.

  In a preface to the recently published The Olympia Reader, Girodias discusses his business arrangements at length; and though none of us is as candid about money as he is about sex, Girodias does admit that he lost his firm not as a result of legal persecution but through incompetence, a revelation that gives him avant-garde status in the new pornography of money. Girodias next founded the Olympia Press, devoted to the creation of pornography, both hard and soft core. His adventures as a merchant of smut make a nice story. All sorts of writers, good and bad, were set to work turning out books, often written to order. He would think up a title (e.g., With Open Mouth) and advertise it; if there was sufficient response, he would then commission someone to write a book to go with the title. Most of his writers used pseudonyms. Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg wrote Candy under the name of Maxwell Kenton. Christopher Logue wrote Lust under the name of Count Palmiro Vicarion, while Alex Trocchi, as Miss Frances Lengel, wrote Helen and Desire. Girodias also published Samuel Beckett’s Watt, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man; perversely, the last three authors chose not to use pseudonyms.

  Reading of these happy years, one recalls a similar situation just after the Second War when a number of New York writers were commissioned at so many cents a page to write pornographic stories for a United States Senator. The solon, as they say in smutland, never actually met the writers but through a go-between he guided their stories: a bit more flagellation here, a touch of necrophilia there….The subsequent nervous breakdown of one of the Senator’s pornographers, now a celebrated poet, was attributed to the strain of not knowing which of the ninety-six Senators he was writing for.*