At Home

by Gore Vidal

  Frederick takes Dodo to a publisher’s party (our friend Dennis is there) and Dodo manages to appall. Lyle is hurt. Everyone is slightly fraudulent. A publisher who respects Frederick’s integrity offers him the editorship of Haw, a low publication which of course Frederick makes a success of. Lyle writes her husband’s plays. There is a literary man who talks constantly of Jane Austen, whom he may not have read, and teaches at the League for Cultural Foundations (a.k.a. The New School), where “classes bulged with middle-aged students anxious to get an idea of what it would be like to have an idea.” But under the usual bright mendacities of happy island life, certain relationships work themselves out. The most Powellesque is between two commercial artists, Caroline and Lorna:

  Ever since their marriages had exploded Caroline and Lorna had been in each other’s confidence, sharing a bottle of an evening in Lorna’s studio or Caroline’s penthouse. In fact they had been telling each other everything for so many years over their cups that they’d never heard a word each other had said.

  In an ecstasy of female bonding, they discuss their lost husbands:

  They told each other of their years of fidelity—and each lamented the curse of being a one-man woman. Men always took advantage of their virtue and Caroline agreed with Lorna that, honestly, if it could be done over again, she’d sleep with every man who came along instead of wasting loyalty on one undeserving male. After a few drinks, Caroline finally said she had slept with maybe forty or fifty men but only because she was so desperately unhappy. Lorna said she didn’t blame anyone in Caroline’s domestic situation for doing just that, and many times wished she had not been such a loyal sap about George, but except for a few vacation trips and sometimes being betrayed by alcohol she had really never—well, anyway, she didn’t blame anyone.

  Revelations bombard deaf ears. “Frequently they lost interest in dinner once they had descended below the bottle’s label and then a remarkable inspiration would come to open a second bottle and repeat the revelations they had been repeating for years to glazed eyes and deaf ears.” Finally, “Both ladies talked in confidence of their frustrations in the quest for love, but the truth was they had gotten all they wanted of the commodity and had no intention of making sacrifice of comfort for a few Cupid feathers.” Powell was a marvelous sharp antidote for the deep-warm-sincere love novels of that period. Today she is, at the least, a bright counterpoint to our lost-and-found literary ladies.

  Powell deals again with the, always to her, mysterious element of luck in people’s careers. When one thinks of her own bad luck, the puzzlement has a certain poignancy. But she can be very funny indeed about the admiration that mediocrity evokes on that happy island where it has never been possible to be too phony. Yet when Frederick, free of his bondage to Dodo, returns to Lyle, the note is elegiac: “In a world of destruction one must hold fast to whatever fragments of love are left, for sometimes a mosaic can be more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.” We all tended to write this sort of thing immediately after Hiroshima, mon assassin.

  * * *

  The Wicked Pavilion (1954) is the Café Julien is the Lafayette Hotel of real life. The title is from The Creevey Papers, and refers to the Prince Regent’s Brighton Pavilion, where the glamorous and louche wait upon a mad royal. Dennis Orphen opens and closes the book in his by now familiarly mysterious way. He takes no real part in the plot. He is simply still there, watching the not-so-magic wheel turn as the happy island grows sad. For him, as for Powell, the café is central to his life. Here he writes; sees friends; observes the vanity fair. Powell has now become masterful in her setting of scenes. The essays—preludes, overtures—are both witty and sadly wise. She has also got the number to Eisenhower’s American, as she brings together in this penultimate rout all sorts of earlier figures, now grown old: Okie is still a knowing man about town and author of the definitive works on the painter Marius; Andy Callingham is still a world-famous novelist, serene in his uncontagious self-love; and the Peggy Guggenheim figure is back again as Cynthia, an art gallery owner and party giver. One plot is young love: Rick and Ellenora who met at the Café Julien in wartime and never got enough of it or of each other or of the happy island.

  A secondary plot gives considerable pleasure even though Powell lifted it from a movie of the day called Holy Matrimony (1943) with Monty Woolley and Gracie Fields, from Arnold Bennett’s novel Buried Alive. The plot that Powell took is an old one: A painter, bored with life or whatever, decides to play dead. The value of his pictures promptly goes so high that he is tempted to keep on painting after “death.” Naturally, sooner or later, he will give himself away: Marius paints a building that had not been built before his “death.” But only two old painter friends have noticed this, and they keep his secret for the excellent reason that one of them is busy turning out “Marius” pictures, too. Marius continues happily as a sacred presence, enjoying in death the success that he never had in life: “Being dead has spoiled me,” he observes. It should be noted that the painting for this novel’s cover was done by Powell’s old friend, Reginald Marsh.

  A new variation on the Powell young woman is Jerry: clean-cut, straightforward, and on the make. But her peculiar wholesomeness does not inspire men to give her presents; yet “the simple truth was that with her increasingly expensive tastes she really could not afford to work….As for settling for the safety of marriage, that seemed the final defeat, synonymous in Jerry’s mind with asking for the last rites.” An aristocratic lady, Elsie, tries unsuccessfully to launch her. Elsie’s brother, Wharton, and sister-in-law, Nita, are fine comic emblems of respectable marriage. In fact, Wharton is one of Powell’s truly great and original monsters, quite able to hold his own with Pecksniff:

  Wharton had such a terrific reputation for efficiency that many friends swore that the reason his nose changed colors before your very eyes was because of an elaborate Rimbaud color code, indicating varied reactions to his surroundings….Ah, what a stroke of genius it had been for him to have found Nita! How happy he had been on his honeymoon and for years afterward basking in the safety of Nita’s childish innocence where his intellectual shortcomings, sexual coldness and caprices—indeed his basic ignorance—would not be discovered….He was well aware that many men of his quixotic moods preferred young boys, but he dreaded to expose his inexperience to one of his own sex, and after certain cautious experiments realized that his anemic lusts were canceled by his overpowering fear of gossip….Against the flattering background of Nita’s delectable purity, he blossomed forth as the all-round He-man, the Husband who knows everything….He soon taught her that snuggling, hand-holding, and similar affectionate demonstrations were kittenish and vulgar. He had read somewhere, however, that breathing into a woman’s ear or scratching her at the nape of the neck drove her into complete ecstasy….In due course Nita bore him four daughters, a sort of door prize for each time he attended.

  The Party is given by Cynthia now, and it rather resembles Proust’s last roundup: “There are people here who have been dead twenty years,” someone observes, including “the bore that walks like a man.” There is a sense of closing time; people settle for what they can get. “We get sick of our clinging vines, he thought, but the day comes when we suspect that the vines are all that hold our rotting branches together.” Dennis Orphen at the end records in his journal the last moments of the wicked pavilion as it falls to the wrecker’s ball:

  It must be that the Julien was all that these people really liked about each other for now when they chance across each other in the street they look through each other, unrecognizing, or cross the street quickly with the vague feeling that here was someone identified with unhappy memories—as if the other was responsible for the fall of the Julien.

  What had been a stage for more than half a century to a world is gone and “those who had been bound by it fell apart like straws when the baling cord is cut and remembered each other’s name and face as part of a dream that would neve
r come back.”

  * * *

  In 1962, Powell published her last and, perhaps, most appealing novel, The Golden Spur. Again, the protagonist is male. In this case a young man from Silver City, Ohio (again), called Jonathan Jaimison. He has come to the city to find his father. Apparently twenty-six years earlier his mother, Connie, had had a brief fling with a famous man in the Village; pregnant, she came home and married a Mr. Jaimison. The book opens with a vigorous description of Wanamaker’s department store being torn down. Powell is now rather exuberant about the physical destruction of her city (she wrote this last book in her mid-sixties, when time was doing the same to her). There is no longer a Dennis Orphen on the scene; presumably, he lies buried beneath whatever glass-and-cement horror replaced the Lafayette. But there are still a few watering holes from the twenties, and one of them is The Golden Spur, where Connie mingled with the bohemians.

  Jonathan stays at the Hotel De Long, which sounds like the Vanderbilt, a star of many of Powell’s narratives. Jonathan, armed with Connie’s cryptic diary, has a number of names that might be helpful. One is that of Claire van Orphen (related to Dennis?), a moderately successful writer, for whom Connie did some typing. Claire now lives embalmed in past time. She vaguely recalls Connie, who had been recommended to her by the one love of her life, Major Wedburn, whose funeral occurs the day Jonathan arrives at the De Long. Claire gives Jonathan possible leads; meanwhile, his presence has rejuvenated her. She proposes to her twin sister, Bea, that they live together and gets a firm no. The old nostalgia burned down long ago for the worldly Bea. On the other hand, Claire’s career is revived, with the help of a professionally failed writer who gets “eight bucks for fifteen hundred words of new criticism in a little magazine or forty for six hundred words of old criticism in the Sunday book section.” He studies all of Claire’s ladies’ magazine short stories of yesteryear; he then reverses the moral angle:

  “In the old days the career girl who supported the family was the heroine, and the idle wife was the baddie,” Claire said gleefully. “And now it’s the other way round. In the soap operas, the career girl is the baddie, the wife is the goodie because she’s better for business….Well, you were right. CBS has bought the two [stories] you fixed, and Hollywood is interested.”

  Powell herself was writing television plays in the age of Eisenhower and no doubt had made this astonishing discovery on her own.

  Jonathan is promptly picked up by two girls at The Golden Spur; he moves in with them. Since he is more domestic than they, he works around the house. He is occasionally put to work in bed until he decides that he doesn’t want to keep on being “a diaphragm-tester.” Among his possible fathers is Alvine Harshawe alias Andrew Callingham alias Ernest Hemingway. Alvine is lonely; “You lost one set of friends with each marriage, another when it dissolved, gaining smaller and smaller batches each time you traded in a wife.” Alvine has no clear memory of Connie but toys with the idea of having a grown son, as does a famous painter named Hugow. Another candidate is a distinguished lawyer, George Terrence, whose actress daughter, unknown to him, is having an affair with Jonathan. Terrence is very much school of the awful Wharton of The Wicked Pavilion, only Terrence has made the mistake of picking up a young actor in the King Cole Bar of the St. Regis Hotel; the actor is now blithely blackmailing him in a series of letters worthy of his contemporary Pal Joey. Terrence welcomes the idea of a son but Jonathan shies away: He does not want his affair with the daughter to be incestuous.

  * * *

  Finally, Cassie, the Peggy Guggenheim character, makes her appearance, and The Party assembles for the last time. There are nice period touches: girls from Bennington are everywhere. While Cassie herself “was forty-three—well, all right, forty-eight, if you’re going to count every lost weekend—and Hugow’s betrayal had happened at birthday time, when she was frightened enough by the half-century mark reaching out for her before she’d even begun to have her proper quota of love.” Cassie takes a fancy to Jonathan and hires him to work at her gallery. He has now figured out not only his paternity but his maternity and, best of all, himself. The father was Major Wedburn, who was, of course, exactly like the bore that his mother, Connie, married. The foster father appears on the scene, and there is recognition of this if not resolution. As for Connie, she had slept with everyone who asked her because “she wanted to be whatever anybody expected her to be, because she never knew what she was herself.” Jonathan concludes, “That’s the way I am.” At an art gallery, he says, “I have a career of other people’s talents.”

  The quest is over. Identity fixed. The Party over, Jonathan joins Hugow in his cab. “He was very glad that Hugow had turned back downtown, perhaps to the Spur, where they could begin all over.” On that blithe note, Powell’s life and lifework end; and the wheel stops; the magic’s gone—except for the novels of Dawn Powell, all of them long since out of print, just as her name has been erased from that perpetually foggy pane, “American Literature.”

  THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  November 5, 1987

  * I have omitted an interesting short novel because it is not part of the New York cycle. Powell made one trip to Europe after the war. Although Paris was no match for the Village, Powell, ever thrifty, uses the city as a background for a young man and woman trapped in A Cage for Lovers (published the year that Dawn roared at me in the Booth Theatre). The girl is a secretary-companion to a monster-lady, and the young man her chauffeur. The writing is austere; there are few characters; the old lady, Lesley Patterson, keeper of the cage, is truly dreadful in her loving kindness. In a rather nice if not perhaps too neat ending, they cage her through her need to dominate. Thus, the weak sometimes prevail.

  CHAPTER 24

  HOW I DO WHAT I DO IF NOT WHY

  In the beginning, there was the spoken word. The first narrations concerned the doings of gods and kings, and these stories were passed on from generation to generation, usually as verse in order to make memorizing easier. Then, mysteriously, in the fifth century B.C. all the narratives were written down, and literature began. From Greece to Persia to India to China, there was a great controversy. Could a narrative be possessed that had been committed to writing rather than to memory? Traditionalists said no; modernists said yes. The traditionalists lost. Now, twenty-five hundred years later, there is a similar crisis. Modernists believe that any form of narration and of learning can be transmitted through audiovisual means rather than through the, now, traditional written word. In this controversy I am, for once, a conservative to the point of furious reaction.

  In any case, we are now obliged to ask radical questions. What is the point to writing things down other than to give directions on how to operate a machine? Why tell stories about gods and kings or, even, men and women?

  Very early, the idea of fame—eternal fame—afflicted our race. But fame for the individual was less intense at the beginning than for one’s tribe. Thucydides is often read as a sort of biographer of Pericles when, indeed, he was writing the biography, to misuse the word, of their city, Athens. It is the idea of the city that the writer wants us to understand not the domestic affairs of Pericles, which he mentions only as civic illustrations. Love had not yet been discovered as opposed to lust. Marriage was not yet a subject except for comedy (Sophocles did not care who got custody of the children, unless Medea killed them; or they were baked in a pie). For more than two millennia, from Homer to Aeschylus to Dante to Shakespeare to Tolstoy, the great line of our literature has concerned itself with gods, heroes, kings, in conflict with one another and with inexorable fate. Simultaneously, all ’round each story, whether it be that of Prometheus or of a Plantagenet prince, there is a people who need fire from heaven or land beyond the sea. Of arms and of the man, I sing, means just that. Of the people then and now, of the hero then and his image now, as created or re-created by the poet. From the beginning, the bard, the poet, the writer was a most high priest to his people
, the custodian of their common memory, the interpreter of their history, the voice of their current yearnings.

  All this stopped in the last two centuries when the rulers decided to teach the workers to read and write so that they could handle machinery. Traditionalists thought this a dangerous experiment. If the common people knew too much might they not overthrow their masters? But the modernists, like John Stuart Mill, won. And, in due course, the people—proudly literate—overthrew their masters. We got rid of the English while the French and the Russians—ardent readers—shredded their ancient monarchies. In fact, the French—who read and theorize the most—became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries since our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That’s what happens when you take writing too seriously. Happily, Americans have never liked reading all that much. Politically ignorant, we keep sputtering along in our old Model T, looking wistfully every four years for a good mechanic.

  Along with political change—the result of general literacy and the printing press—the nature of narrative began to fragment. High literature concerned itself, most democratically, with the doings of common folk. Although a George Eliot or a Hardy could make art out of these simple domestic tales, in most hands crude mirrors of life tend to be duller than Dumas, say, and, paradoxically, less popular. Today’s serious novel is apt to be a carefully written teacherly text about people who teach school and write teacherly texts to dwindling classes. Today’s popular novel, carelessly, recklessly composed on—or by—a machine, paradoxically has taken over the heroes and kings and gods, and places them in modern designer clothes amongst consumer dreams beyond the dreams of Sheherazade.