Homage to Daniel Shays

by Gore Vidal

  Robert Brustein, on the other hand, is not pure; he has ambitions about his station. Mr. Simon knows that he is only an Illyrian gangster and is blessedly free of side; he simply wants to torture and kill in order to be as good an American as Mr. Charles Manson, say, or Lyndon Johnson. But Mr. Brustein wants to matter, to go straight. A failed theater person, he had/has ambitions not only as director but as an actor. The actor side of him explains why one always felt he was playing, in a somewhat hollow way, the part of a stern highbrow critic, and having the field pretty much to himself because true highbrow critics don’t deal with theater. His specialty was lamentation, a sort of Broadway Old Testament prophet, wailing for a Jerusalem that never was. Mr. Brustein’s ambition has now translated him from literary gangster to academic bureaucrat at Yale but I’m sure he’ll be back one of these days. Recidivism is a hundred percent in such cases.

  My fellow heroes then mentioned Richard Gilman. A notorious hood, they assured me. But except for my brief glimpse of him in the pages of Playbill (like Cosa Nostra, they will infiltrate anything), he was just another face, as it were, on the post-office wall. Now I have read him.

  It is difficult to know what to say about The Confusion of Realms. Mr. Gilman has collected a number of pieces dealing with the novel and the theater, and he presents them to us for…what? Our illumination? Admiration? I have read each piece carefully (something no self-respecting gangster would do) and I took many notes. In some ways I found him worse than I expected—gangsters seldom write so dully; he sounds at times as if he were addressing a not-very-bright class in remedial reading. In other ways, he is better than anticipated: he is not above betraying enthusiasm for a living American writer. Yet at the end of 272 pages I could not make out what he was up to—or, more precisely, just what audience he had in mind. His work is too simple for those who know literature and much too long-winded for those who do not but are sufficiently interested to want to know more.

  Mr. Gilman’s examination of Norman Mailer (last year’s obligatory piece) is typical. He writes thousands of words about Mailer; yet says nothing that the Master has not said better about himself (admittedly it is not easy to deal with Mailer since that sly operative is always there first with the most words), concluding with the emotional argument that although Mailer’s novels are not much good, it doesn’t really matter because he’s ours. To which the rude answer is he may be yours, but he’s certainly not mine. Mr. Gilman goes even farther off the rails when he finds Mailer’s passion for being in history (not to mention the press) harmful to him as an artist. I would say it was the making of him. The idea of the artist as priest is much loved in gangsterland. They believe that worldly commitment is corrupting. Yet what about Goethe, Voltaire, Byron or, to come up to date, Gunter Grass (admired by John Simon…oh, the dread kiss of the Mafioso!)? But bookchat writers have never been able to understand that there is no correct deportment for the good artist. Some are exhibitionists, some are shy; some are political, some are apolitical. What matters is not a writer’s personality or politics or private behavior but his books. This should be obvious, but in an age of slick journalism and swift reputation, it is quite forgotten. More to the point, books are no longer much read, while pieces about writers are. Personality is all that matters—as Mailer has neatly grasped—and the chorus does not yet comprehend.

  Mr. Gilman’s prose style is…well, let him speak for himself: “American critics have rarely possessed any substantial philosophical power or interest (Edmund Wilson accomplished important things without having had any such power or interest at all, but would have been more important, I think, if he had had some) and have shied away from metaphysical areas as from a contagion.” This is as bad a sentence as I have ever read and though, admittedly, Mr. Gilman is writing about Miss Susan Sontag, whose style is often not much better, some editor ought to have come to his aid.

  Stylistically he—but who cares about language? With each generation American prose grows worse, reflecting confused thinking, poor education, and the incomplete assimilation of immigrant English into the old language (see Henry James’s remarks on the subject at Bryn Mawr, 1904). Nevertheless, even in a bad time, a writer’s prose does give some idea of the way his mind works. From his prose, I should say that Mr. Gilman’s mind is slow and uncertain, more at home with moral exhortation than with analysis. The uncertainty is betrayed by the use of adjectives. He likes them in threes, and even fours, resembling in this many popular lady writers (and at least one good one, Nathalie Sarraute): “…documents of the white normative Western consciousness and spirit, which blacks in America today have begun to repudiate in ways that are as yet clumsy, painful and confused.” Then, on the same page: “…hard, local, intransigent, alien [The Autobiography of Malcolm X] remains in some sense unassimilable for those of us who aren’t black.” He is also unnaturally fond of the word “increment,” which he occasionally misuses—or at least I think he does: it is often hard to guess his meaning.

  For the most part, Mr. Gilman’s subjects are as fashionable as his opinions. He believes that black writing cannot be judged by white standards. Good politics but an intellectual cop-out. This is followed by the usual piece on McLuhan, a solemn meditation on Susan Sontag’s theory of the new, which we shall get to in a moment, hesitant praise for William Gass and Donald Barthelme, attacks on Rechy’s City of Night (why bother?) and Updike, whose mastery of English prose makes Mr. Gilman, predictably, uneasy; and then a good deal about the theater, most of it dated (“the extraordinary public awareness of Macbird! as a solid fact, a potent presence”). Excepting Barthelme and Gass, the subjects are familiar, the judgments unsurprising, the uneasy self-importance irritating (“I myself, a ‘judge’ who passes on writing”—the quotes around the word “judge” are the giveaway). But though Mr. Gilman’s theories of art are resolutely secondhand, they are still worth examining for what they have to tell us about—how would he put it?—our life today.

  Mr. Gilman has his idols—somewhat. He thinks Miss Sontag “one of the most interesting and valuable critics we possess, a writer from whom it’s continually possible to learn, even when you’re most dissatisfied with what she’s saying, or perhaps especially at those times.” Mr. Gilman relies heavily on the “or perhapses” that let him off those critical hooks he has a tendency to get himself hung on as his slow, bumbling sentences unfold like bolts of wet wool. Here are two hooks in one sentence: “We might call her a critic of ideas, except that she has always wished to treat ideas sensuously, aesthetically; or decide that she is a philosopher of cultural forms, except that philosophy for her has always been a drama rather than a method.” Reading this, one realizes that Mr. Gilman is a serious literary critic even though he does not actually write criticism; a profound thinker were his mind not shallow.

  Throughout The Confusion of Realms, Mr. Gilman reminds us that the writers he admires (Gass and Barthelme) are making new things, and the ones he cannot endorse, like Mailer, are simply repeating old forms. But again let us listen to his very own voice: “The Naked and the Dead remains at bottom a conventional work of literature. As it shapes itself into a tale, it proceeds along predictable lines, creates no convincingly new style, and offers no new purchase on imaginative reality, nothing that can be used by other writers as a model of a way of seeing, or as incontrovertible vision by anyone else.” Let us pause (Gilman’s “we-ness” is contagious) and try to figure out what he is saying. First, The Naked and the Dead is a conventional novel, predictable, no new style, etc. Placed beside Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, yes, it is an ordinary sort of book, and though one could excuse some of its ordinariness on the ground that most first novels are derivative, let’s allow Mr. Gilman the point. Next he tells us that Mailer’s novel offers “nothing that can be used by other writers…” This is a startling approach to literature. Apparently books are valuable only to the extent that they will help other writers to make newer and newer books to be added as links to some sort of He
gelian chain. Could it be, terrible thought, that Mr. Gilman believes in Progress? If I did not know the reading habits of gangsterdom better, I’d suspect him of having read Comte.

  Repeatedly, Mr. Gilman rejects what he thinks of as old forms of theater and the novel on the ground “that the distinction between form and content in art was never valid and that we have not simply come into a new use for content as form but into a condition in which seeming content, ‘subject matter,’ no longer is needed to serve as pretext and instigation for aesthetic action.” “Fiction…can no longer be (if ever it wholly was) the expression or [sic?] interruption or simulacrum of life and its values…” And finally, “…fiction ought not to be an employment of language for ends beyond itself, but language in its own right, mysteriously saturated with reality, perpetually establishing a new synthesis of reality and the imagination, and doing this partly by driving out all language which has accomplished an earlier synthesis.” As those interested in theories of the novel will recognize, Mr. Gilman has been reading Robbe-Grillet, or at least he has learned about him through Miss Sontag’s high Hollywood or Hollywood High prose. They are great drivers-out of language. But to what end? Everyone agrees that three-act plays imitating real people in a real room are as tedious as realistic novels that deal with quotidian affairs. There is no point in reading a novel which could have been written by Galsworthy or—to be just—a novel which might have been written by Joyce. Nevertheless, as Mr. Gilman himself points out—positively insists—writers do use one another. Literature cannot be born “new” the instant a writer, even a master, starts to write. Writing is a more complicated matter than that and no critic—much less gangster—has yet cracked the code.

  Traditionally, what a critic admires defines him, and makes him a critic rather than a gangster. To Mr. Gilman’s credit, he does his best to appreciate certain new-seeming writers. Unfortunately, in controlling the Mafioso side to himself he often sounds like an old hood who now serves, somewhat uncomprehendingly, on the board of a bank whose safe he would rather be cracking. Mr. Gilman likes William Gass, and he writes interestingly about Mr. Gass’s novel Omensetter’s Luck—at least his remarks are interesting to one who has not read the novel. He even communicates enthusiasm, up to a point; then the banker feels compelled to give his report to the board. “The novel is Gass’s prose, his style, which is not committed to something beyond itself” (a paraphrase of Robbe-Grillet, by the way), “not an instrument of the idea…he fashions his tale of the mind, which is the tale of his writing a novel.” But then, realizing the extent of his endorsement, Mr. Gilman begins to take it back. He confesses to finding the novel faulty because of “its partial organization along narrative lines, its compulsion to tell a ‘story’ ” (those quotes again: doesn’t he know what a story is?) “while its whole internal action struggles against the reductions and untruthfulness of story-telling, while its verbal action is struggling to be the story.” (Note the assumption that storytelling is false, but putting down words—at random?—is the novel’s proper “struggle.”) “For narrative, which Bernard Shaw long ago called ‘the curse of all serious literature’ and which every major novelist since Flaubert has either abandoned or used ironically, is precisely that element of fiction which coerces it and degrades it into being a mere alternative to life, like life…”

  None of this is true. Every major novelist since Flaubert has been as much involved with narrative as those who went before; not to mention Flaubert himself as he meticulously maneuvered his Emmas and Homaises logically from place to place. Specialists even assure us that there is a preordained structure to Finnegans Wake. As for Lawrence, Conrad, Hardy, Mann, Musil, Proust, none eschewed or treated with irony narrative. One has only to study those extraordinary scenarios Henry James wrote for each of his works to realize just how important narrative is to a master novelist.

  Now, if Mr. Gilman were simply to say that we ought not to read bad novels with familiar plots, who would disagree with him? But wanting to be resonant, and radical, and full of certain French critics (at second-hand, I suspect; curiously enough, he seems not to have read Barthes, nor grasped semiology), he writes such inflated nonsense as “What Gass has written is a work of the imagination and the mind whose study is the mind and imagination themselves as they grant us the instruments of knowing, which are at the same time the sources of all our inability to know.” It makes one long for the good old days of Bonnie and Clyde, of Simon and Brustein.

  “We are bored,” Mr. Gilman suddenly announces, “by most plays today…bored by Shakespeare, too, and Molière and Greek tragedy (young people have never been so bored by classics), by Shaw and Pirandello and Brecht. Even by Ionesco and Genet.” He is probably right (and writers and teachers like Mr. Gilman have certainly helped make art dull for the many) but he never questions the why of this boredom. Instead he gives us his neo-Robbe-Grillet analysis: “As long as we regard [theater] as illusion instead of a form of reality, we will go on being bored with it as we are bored, ultimately, with all illusions.” This is fatuous. People live by illusions. Whether it is that college boy who rises at the end of the lecture and declares, not asks, “Don’t you think Bob Dylan is the greatest living poet?” or Richard Nixon not wanting to be the first American President to lose a war or the audience of Easy Rider, which knows it is not on the road itself but watching actors on a screen create a naturalistic illusion of freedom that corresponds with their own daydreams, we live by illusion in life as in art. Theater is plays. Plays are simulacra of life just as print (to the astonishment of Robbe-Grillet) stands not for its own black inky self but for words which in turn stand for objects and actions. That words and phrases become corrupt with use and misuse is a perennial problem which only high excellence among writers can solve.

  Reading The Confusion of Realms (with some continence I have refrained from making any play on the title: a gangster would have gone on and on about it), I find myself wondering who reads this sort of writing and what pleasure and revelation they get from it. Is there a public I know nothing of? Quite possibly. After all, I am often away from the United States. For all I know there are students of education who carefully read (with lips moving?) these long confusions. But I doubt it. With the exception of one piece, there is no ease, no joy, no light in Mr. Gilman’s writing. Every sentence seems to have been an effort for him to make, as though he knew he had nothing to say but was impelled for career reasons to set down something. Certainly he has no talent at all for our difficult and various language—by no means a deterrent, let me quickly say, to a literary career in America. Yet it must be a terrible strain to have to keep on doing something one does not do easily or well.

  As I write, I have been thinking about other careers for Mr. Gilman. English teaching? No. He would be redundant. Political commentary or action seems out; he shows no great interest in such things. Should he be an actor like Mr. Brustein? Manage a team of lady wrestlers? Work with his hands? But I have no way of knowing his true talents. So accepting him for what he would like to be, a writer, I can hold out some hope. I enjoyed his straightforward description of what happened at the Village Gate when two sets of gangsters (the anarchist hoods led by Mr. and Mrs. Beck of the Living Theatre and the old guard led by Mr. Brustein) had their showdown. Not having to worry about Culture and Meaning, Mr. Gilman has written a genuinely interesting—even witty—report of the evening (all right, he does bring in Artaud and he refers to that profoundly boring play The Brig as “remarkable and revivifying” but for him these are small bêtises). He has a surprising gift for psychological description, particularly when he records the Livers’ doctrine of love (which is really hate). I particularly liked his reference to the Becks as “pushy martyrs.”

  Quite seriously, I would advise Mr. Gilman to leave respectable gangsterdom to Mr. Brustein. But not go back to his old ways. Leave them to Mr. Simon, who still prowls the criminal night, switch knife at the ready. Instead, I would very much like to see Mr
. Gilman write popular journalism; he has a real talent for it. But I fear he will be deceived by the good reviews he has no doubt already arranged for his book, and so persist in error. But should he go straight, we heroes will gladly allow him to attend us, if not at the Pantheon, as a faithful spear-carrier at high Valhalla.

  Commentary, March 1970

  *Mr. Simon has since instructed us that English is his fifth language.

  AN AMERICAN PRESS LORD

  Shortly after Richard Nixon was chosen to bring us together, he announced that he would write each of the many thousands of Americans listed in Who’s Who a letter requesting guidance. Although everyone would get the same letter, Nixon did want to make one thing very clear: he himself would add a personal postscript complimenting the recipient for his particular contribution to the American imperium. On tender hooks, as the late Alfalfa Bill Murray would say, I waited for my letter. What word of praise would Nixon have for the author of The Best Man? The suspense was exquisite. At last the letter arrived. Office of the President-Elect (a nostalgic moment as I recalled 1960’s joke: the President-Erect) Richard M. Nixon, Washington, D.C. was the heading. Under this my name and address; then nothing until the bold signature Richard Nixon. Thus did the wittiest administration in American history begin.