by Gore Vidal
Finally, the Authority may not limit free speech in any form, including criticism of itself. In fact, the Authority’s affairs should be under constant surveillance by watchful committees as well as by the press, though it might be advisable to deny the employees of the Authority any sort of personal public notice since love of glory has wrecked more human societies than all of history’s plagues combined. Unsung managers constantly scrutinized by the wise: that is the ideal, partially achieved in another time (and for quite a different purpose) by the Venetian Republic.
These then are the things which must now be done if the race is to continue. Needless to say, every political and economic interest will oppose the setting up of such an Authority. Worse, those elements which delight in destroying human institutions will be morbidly drawn to a movement as radical as this one. But it cannot be helped. The alternative to a planned society is no society. If we do not act now, we shall perish through sheer numbers, like laboratory rats confined to too small a cage. The human race is plainly nothing in eternity but to us, in time, it is everything and ought not to die.
Dialogue
Each of us contains a Private Self and a Public Self. When the two have not met, their host tends to be an average American, amiable, self-deluding and given to sudden attacks of melancholy whose origin he does not suspect. When the two selves openly disdain each other, the host is apt to be a strong-minded opportunist, equally at home in politics or advertising. When the selves wrangle and neither is for long dominant, the host is more a man of conscience than of action. When the two are in fierce and total conflict, the host is lunatic—or saint.
My own two selves wrangle endlessly. Hedonistic and solipsistic, my Private Self believes the making of literature is the whole self’s only proper task. The Public Self, on the other hand, sees world’s end plainly and wants to avoid it, sacrificing, if necessary, art and private pleasure in order to be of use. A Manifesto has given the two selves a good deal to quarrel about, and in their endless dialogue some of the many questions a Manifesto is bound to raise are posed, if not always answered.
Private Self: It is typical of you to state what needs to be done and then not tell us how it should be done—whether it ought to be done I’ll get to in a moment.
Public Self: And typical of you to dislike any kind of general statement (not to mention political action). One must first draw attention—in the broadest way imaginable—to the nature of the crisis. If the race is not to die of overpopulation, we must….
Private Self: You’ve made your point. But first, do you really think anyone can change our present course? And, second, why not let the thing die? I find beautiful the vision of an empty planet, made glass by atomic fission, forever circling a cooling sun….
Public Self: And you accuse me of rhetoric! I ignore your second question. The thing must not die. As for the first: it is possible to reduce population drastically in one generation. In two generations a viable balance could be arrived at….
Private Self: Could. Yes. But will it come to pass? Remember when we were in Egypt and Hassanein Heikal explained to us that even under Nasser—with all his power—the fellahin could not be persuaded to practice birth control….
Public Self: When persuasion fails, other means will be used.
Private Self: Yes! Force. That Authority of yours gives me the creeps….
Public Self: I don’t like it much myself but without it nothing will be done. The Authority must be absolute in certain areas.
Private Self: How does this square with your lofty guarantee of private freedom to everyone?
Public Self: There is only one limit to private freedom: no new citizen can be created without permission.
Private Self: And who will grant permission?
Public Self: Geneticists, biologists, anthropologists, politicians, poets, philosophers…in a year one could get some kind of general agreement as to how to proceed. Later, decisions would be made as to which types should be perpetuated and which allowed to die out….
Private Self: I must say, not even the Nazis….
Public Self: None of that! No demagoguery. The Authority’s aim is to preserve and strengthen human types through planned breeding. Eugenically, we have had enormous success with everything from cattle to hybrid corn. So why not people? A family in which the members are prone to die of cancer at an early age should probably not be allowed to continue….
Private Self: That means that John Keats would not be reproduced because he had a weak chest which his descendants might inherit, along with his genius….
Public Self: What strains are best worth preserving I’m willing to leave to science…with a good deal of overseeing from other disciplines. Anyway, since we descend from common ancestors, no seed can ever die: all men are cousins.
Private Self: Save that for television. Incidentally, it will be decades—if ever—before sperm and ova can be matched outside the human body….
Public Self: One must think in terms of decades as well as of today. In any case, the early stages should be simple. A moratorium on births for a year. Then an inquiry into who would like to have children…a smaller group than you might think, particularly if the tribe no longer exalts the idea of reproducing oneself. After the last war the Japanese realized that if they were to survive they would have to reduce population. They did so by making it, literally, unfashionable to have large families; overnight they reversed the trend of centuries. It can be done.
Private Self: But only in a disciplined society like Japan. It would be impossible in our country. The United Statesman is conditioned from birth to think only of himself. To think of any larger unit is to fall victim to the international menace of communism.
Public Self: I suspect we shall probably have to write off the generations now alive. They cannot be changed. But the newborn can be instilled with a sense of urgency.
Private Self: Oh, yes. The newborn! How do you plan to bring up the children?
Public Self: At first in the usual way through the family…even though the family as we have known it is ending due to the pressures of urban life. Incidentally, contrary to current tribal superstition, the family is not a biological unit. It is an economic one whose deterioration began the day it became possible for women to work and bring up their children without men.
Private Self: With men or without, in the family or in a commune, someone is going to have to look after those few children that you will allow us. Who is that someone?
Public Self: Those best suited.
Private Self: Their parents?
Public Self: Probably not. Very few people are good parents, a fact most are willing to admit—too late.
Private Self: But aren’t children psychologically damaged by being brought up communally….
Public Self: Not necessarily. The recent confrontation between a number of American psychiatrists and the products of an Israeli kibbutz was revelatory. The men and women who had been raised communally were alarmingly “healthy.”
Private Self: I daresay the end of the family will benefit humanity, but it will destroy the novel….
Public Self: Don’t worry. Mythmaking is endemic to our race. Neurosis will simply take new forms.
Private Self: To get back to the Authority. Just who and what is it? And in the United States is it to be achieved through constitutional means?
Public Self: Ideally, the Authority and the Constitutional establishment should exist side by side, each complementing the other. Shabby as our democracy is, I think it a good idea to retain it.
Private Self: But the world is not ideal. President and Congress will not suffer the existence of an Authority over which they have no control.
Public Self: What about the C.I.A., the F.B.I….
Private Self: Flip liberal cant. Congress and President would want control. And once they had it, nothing would be accomplish
ed. Can you imagine those Senators who are in the pay of the oilmen allowing the combustion engine to be superseded?
Public Self: Ultimate power must reside in the Authority.
Private Self: Dictatorship?
Public Self: Yes. But involving only those things that affect the public at large: environment, food, population….
Private Self: Do you really think it possible to order totally the economic and biological life of a country and yet not interfere in the private lives of its citizens?
Public Self: Why not?
Private Self: Because no dictatorship has ever confined itself to the public sector. Sooner or later the dictator….
Public Self: The Authority is not a dictator but a changing group of men, representing the widest and most divergent interests….
Private Self: Too wide and too divergent and it won’t function….
Public Self: All interests will be subordinate to the stated aims of the Authority. Those aims will not be open to dispute.
Private Self: Like “Marxism” in one-party states? I would think that whoever or whatever controls the public life of a society will automatically control the private sector.
Public Self: Obviously there will be a constant tension between public and private necessities. And it is possible that the private will lose. It usually does in authoritarian societies. But then it does not do very well in libertarian ones either. Witness the small-town American’s terror of his neighbors’ opinion. However, the one novelty I offer is a clear demarcation between public and private. The state may not intrude upon private lives as it does now. And private greed may not intrude upon the public welfare as it does now. And what is “good” and “bad” for the society’s welfare will be set down with a minimum of ambiguity.
Private Self: I find your Authority a potential nightmare. The world is already shrinking. Soon there will be no escape from the managers with their Telexes and computers. No border to cross. No place to hide.
Public Self: I am as alarmed as you by a world in which it is altogether too easy for the managers to have their way. And not only through instant communications but through mind-altering drugs and genetic rearrangements of the unborn….
Private Self: Genetic rearrangement! That ought to appeal to you: men bred to be gods, but whose gods?
Public Self: Something to brood on. Anyway, I do see the end of the laissez-faire society. Quasi-democracies like England and the United States are already moving toward totalitarianism—of Left or Right makes no difference. The result is the same: the control of the individual. Wanting to bolster currency, the British curtail travel and thus limit freedom. Our poor, needless to say, are quite as enslaved as they were when their ancestors built the Pyramids. In fact, they are worse off because technical means now exist for the state to control all its citizens simultaneously. The true nightmare is not the Authority. It is the popular television performer who will subvert the state simply for something to do….
Private Self: That’s you. Don’t deny it!
Public Self: I confess that if it weren’t for you, I might give it a try.
Private Self: I’ll bet you would! And we’d both be shot down, probably on The Tonight Show.
Public Self: Since an authoritarian society is inevitable, I am for accepting it but only in order to achieve certain goals. Once they are achieved….
Private Self: The Authority will wither away?
Public Self: Something else will take its place. But that is far in the future.
Private Self: Exactly how is the Authority to come into existence?
Public Self: A Party for Human Survival must be formed in the United States, and elsewhere. Naturally—again ideally—it would be best if the Authority were voted into power by a majority. With proper education, through television, it could happen….
Private Self: But if not?
Public Self: Then the Party will seize power and establish the Authority by force.
Private Self: You see yourself as Lenin?
Public Self: With you on my back, I am a natural victim. Anyway, if it does not happen, a mindless authority will come into being, one dedicated not to human survival but simply to its own aggrandizement, and we shall perish.
Private Self: What is wrong with that? It is not written in stars that we endure for all eternity. So why not let it end? The way it does for each of us. I have known from birth that when I die the world ends, too.
Public Self: For us it ends. But there are others.*
Esquire, October 1968
*This sort of dialogue can now be heard in every quarter. Five years ago to discuss these matters was thought eccentric. Progress?
LITERARY GANGSTERS
On a rare visit to the theater in the early sixties (visits have been equally rare in other decades), I opened Playbill, a throwaway magazine given me by an usher, and saw my own name; then “Golden Age of Television”; then “Chayefsky.” I was startled. A half-dozen years had passed since live television drama ended. Why bring up the subject now? And in Playbill? I read on. The tone of the piece was shrill, and the substance altogether too familiar. Apparently the television playwrights had not—oh, God, it’s that piece again!—been good. The writer did not offer much evidence one way or the other, but then did anyone ever see the three thousand or so plays that were done in those years? Better to dismiss the whole lot as kitsch, and refer to me, in particular, as “a culture hero of the 50’s.” Moss creeping up once-heroic limbs, I looked to see who cared so little for television’s twenty-one-inch dramatic Renaissance. Richard Gilman. The name—if not the style—was new to me.
Recently, I spent an evening with several other culture heroes, current and past (wherever we meet, there is the Pantheon), and we got onto the subject of literary gangsters. Since the invention of printing, there has been a need for people to write more or less to order for the press. Some of these professionals have been good, some have been bad, and a sizable minority have been gangsters: hit-and-run journalists, without conscience, forced to live precariously by their wits, and those wits are increasingly strained nowadays because there are fewer places to publish in than there used to be, which means a lot more edgy hoods hanging about the playgrounds of the West Side.
The literary gangster’s initial problem is a poignant one: how to be noticed? How to occupy a turf of one’s own? Having been for a quarter-century an observer of the scene, with a particular interest in literary crime—to use that well-loved New York Times Book Review phrase—I would suggest, right off, that the apprentice criminal write the following on the lid of his typewriter: Today’s reader is not interested in analysis but opinion, preferably harsh and unexpected. Some years ago a classic caper began with the statement that although Bernard Shaw was a bad playwright, a few pages of his music criticism were not without value. This caused interest. It was also a splendid heist because no attempt was made to prove a case. An opinion was stated loudly, and contrary evidence was ignored. The young apprentice should also feel free to invent sources and quotations, on the ground that readers of even the most high-minded journals know very little about anything, particularly the past. Needless to say, the more violent and ad hominem the style, the more grateful his readers will be. Americans like to be told whom to hate. Finally, the gangster can never go wrong if, while appearing to uphold the highest standards (but never define those standards or say just when it was that the theater, for instance, was “relevant”), he attacks indiscriminately the artists of the day, the popular on the ground that to give pleasure to the many is a sign of corruption and the much-admired on the ground that since all values now held by the society are false (for obvious reasons don’t present alternative values), any culture hero must reflect perfectly the folly of those who worship him. It is not wise to praise anyone living; unhappily, every now and then, it may be necessary to appear to like something done by a con
temporary, in which case select a foreign writer like Borges; he is old, admired abroad, and his works are short enough actually to read. In a few years, he can always be dismissed as a culture hero of the “Silly Sixties.” Remember that turnover is now as rapid in literary reputations as it is in women’s dresses. So keep moving, and if occasionally you contradict yourself, no one will notice, since no one is keeping score.
Was it ever thus? Yes, since antiquity or at least since newspapers. On February 20, 1767, Voltaire wrote a friend, “The infamous trade of vilifying one’s colleagues to earn a little money should be left to cheap journalists….It is those wretches who have made of literature an arena for gladiators.”
Gladiators, cheap journalists, gangsters, they are always with us. To the heroes of the forties, John W. Aldridge, Jr., was the first gangster to appear on the scene, and a source of wonder to us all. In 1947 he set himself up as—we thought—a legitimate literary businessman, opening shop with a piece describing the writers of the postwar generation in which he warmly praised John Horne Burns and myself. The praise made us think he was not a hood, his shop a legitimate business not a front. Little did we suspect that Mr. Aldridge was a master literary criminal who wanted to contribute not simply a modest footnote to each of our sagas but a terrible full chapter. To achieve this, he even moved to Connecticut in order to be close to certain of his victims. For several years he covered them with unctuous praise in print as well as in private. Meanwhile, he was thoroughly casing the territory. Then he struck. In a blaze of publicity, Mr. Aldridge bit one by one those very asses he had with such cunning kissed, earning himself an editorial in Life magazine congratulating him for having shown up the decadence and immorality of the postwar writers. He has long since faded from the literary scene…as have, fortunately, those scars on which we sit.
Other gangsters today? John Simon was lovingly noted. A Yugoslav with a proud if somewhat incoherent Serbian style (or is it Croatian?—in any case, English is his third language),* Mr. Simon has for twenty years slashed his way through literature, theater, cinema. Clanking chains and snapping whips, giggling and hissing, he has ricocheted from one journal to another, and though no place holds him for long, the flow of venom has proved inexhaustible. There is nothing he cannot find to hate. Yet in his way, Mr. Simon is pure; a compulsive rogue criminal, more sadistic Gilles de Rais than neighborhood thug.