by Gore Vidal
This is a strange reversal. The best writers tend to write, in a highly minimal way, of the simple and the dull, while the worst give us whirlwind tours of the house—I mean home—of Atreus, ripping every skeleton from its closet, and throwing back every Porthault sheet. The fact that this kind of bad writing is popular is not because the reading public—an endangered minority—cherishes bad writing for its own sake but because the good writers fail to interest them. As a result, everything is now so totally out of whack that the high academic bureaucrats have dropped literature, with some relief, and replaced it with literary theory, something that one needs no talent to whip up. As a result, in twenty years, enrollment in American English departments has been cut by more than half. Writers and writing no longer matter much anywhere in freedom’s land. Mistuh Emerson, he dead. Our writers are just entertainers, and not all that entertaining either. We have lost the traditional explainer, examiner, prophet.
So what am I up to? If nothing else, I continue, endlessly, to explain, to examine, to prophesy, particularly in the five novels*1 where I deal with the history of the United States from the beginning to now. The fact that there is still a public eager to find out who we are and what we did ought to encourage others to join me but, by and large, the universities have made that impossible. They have established an hegemony over every aspect of literature—except the ability to make any. They have also come to believe that a serious novelist deals only with what he knows and since our educational system is what it is he is not apt to know much about anything; and since our class system is uncommonly rigid he is not going to have much chance to find out about any world other than the one he was born into—and the school he went to. Certainly, he will never, like his predecessors, be able to deal with his nation’s rulers. They prefer the shadows. Mary McCarthy recently listed all the things that cannot be put into a serious novel—from sunsets to a hanging to a cabinet meeting. Also, to be fair, though our political life is entirely devoid of politics, it is so vivid with personalities and the stuff of bad fiction that one can hardly expect the novelist to compete with the journalist.
One of the absolutes of bookchat land is that the historical novel is neither history nor a novel. On the other hand, a literal record of a contemporary murder is, triumphantly, a novel. This is what I call “the Capote confusion,” his monument. Actually, there is no such thing as The Novel as opposed to novels. No one can say what a novel ought to be. But history is something else. Although I try to make the agreed-upon facts as accurate as possible, I always use the phrase “agreed upon” because what we know of a figure as recent, say, as Theodore Roosevelt is not only not the whole truth—an impossibility anyway—but the so-called facts are often contradicted by other facts. So one must select; and it is in selection that literature begins. After all, with whose facts do you agree? Also, in a novel, as opposed to a literal history, one can introduce made-up characters who can speculate on the motives of the real people. How real are the real people? Do I have them say what they really said, or am I, like Shakespeare, reinventing them? For those of you ablaze with curiosity regarding the difference between Shakespeare and me, I’ll give you an example.
There is in Washington, D.C., my native city and often subject, a South Korean newspaper called the Washington Times. This paper is owned by the Moonies and its political line is, baroquely, fascist. Now let’s watch one of their employees in action. The first scene of a recent book of mine, Empire, takes place in England, at a country house that has been rented for the summer of 1898 by Henry Adams and Senator Don Cameron for the use of their friend John Hay, our ambassador. All those present at a lunch that I describe were actually there, including Henry James, an old friend of Hay and of Adams, who was living at nearby Rye. Confronted with such a scene, the hostile reviewer—who writes only of what he knows—often shouts name-dropper. But how is it possible to tell the story of John Hay without mentioning the fact that as Lincoln’s secretary, he got to meet Lincoln? The South Korean reviewer does the ritual attack on me: I hate my native land because I deplore the National Security State. Because I deplore our imperial adventures, I am an isolationist. He tells us, “Henry James and Henry Adams figure in Empire, neither of them believably, alas…for their main function is to serve as spokesmen for Mr. Vidal’s isolationism. ‘You speak of the laws of history and I am no lawyer,’ says the Vidalized James. ‘But I confess to misgivings. How can we, who honestly cannot govern ourselves, take up the task of governing others? Are we to govern the Philippines from Tammany Hall?’ Neither in style nor in substance does this mini-editorial sound even remotely like the Master.” That is very magisterial indeed. Plainly, a James scholar. But let’s look at what the Master actually wrote apropos the Spanish-American war. In a letter, he remarks on his “deep embarrassment of thought—of imagination. I have hated, I have almost loathed it.” James also spoke most sardonically of the exportation of Tammany and King Caucus to the newly acquired Philippines, “remote countries run by bosses.” My South Korean critic did not quote easily the harshest of the Vidalized Henry James’s remarks: “The acquisition of an empire civilized the English. That may not be a law but it is a fact….But what civilized them might very well demoralize us even further.” That’s about as anti-imperial—or “isolationist”—as you can get. Now did the real Henry James ever say so un-American a thing? Yes, he did, when he confided to his nephew Harry: “Expansion has so made the English what they are—for good or for ill, but on the whole for good—that one doesn’t quite feel one’s way to say for one’s country ‘No—I’ll have none of it.’ Empire has educated the English. Will it only demoralize us?” Now you see how I have “my” James say, in substance, precisely what the original said. I do condense and rearrange, something a biographer must never do but a novelist must do. If the James of Empire is not credible then he himself would not be credible to a jingo on a Washington newspaper, who also tells us, basking in his ignorance, that no young woman—like my invented Caroline—could have taken over a Washington newspaper and made a success of it. But less than twenty years later one Eleanor Patterson, whom I knew very well, did just that and published the earlier Washington Times-Herald. As for America’s perennially venal press, the Washington Times reviewer will be stunned to hear Henry James, in real life, blame the newspapers for the despicable war with Spain because of “the horrible way in which they envenomize all dangers and reverberate all lies.” Like Mark Twain and William Dean Howells he was, incredibly, an “isolationist” with a contempt for the popular press. So, as you can see, I do not invent my literary ancestors. If anything, they invented me.
I have mentioned agreed-upon facts as the stuff of history. But if it is impossible to take seriously the press of one’s own time, why should the historian treat old newspaper cuttings as unimpeachable primary sources? For instance, I am now writing about Warren Harding. One of the few quotations of Harding that I have known all my life was what he said, after his unlikely nomination for president, “We drew to a pair of deuces, and filled.” This strikes absolutely the right note for the agreed-upon Harding that our canting society requires: a sleazy poker-playing, hard-drinking, womanizing nonentity put in office by cynical Republican bosses. Yet the journalist Mark Sullivan was with Harding before, during, and after the 1920 convention. In Our Times he quotes the poker phrase; then, in a footnote, he says this sort of phrase was not characteristic of Harding, who had a considerable sense of his own dignity. Apparently, Sullivan, who could have asked Harding at any time during the next three years if he had made this remark, never did. Instead he tells us that maybe Harding said it when he was “off balance” from excitement. “Or he may never have said it—it may have been some reporter’s conception of what he ought to say.” There we have it. In effect, the press invents us all; and the later biographer or historian can only select from the mass of crude fictions and part-truths those “facts” that his contemporaries are willing to agree upon.
Where ma
ny English Department hustlers now favor literary theory over literature, the workaday bureaucrats of the History Departments are solemnly aware that their agreed-upon facts must constitute—at least in the short term—a view of the republic that will please their trustees. Since all great Americans are uniquely great, even saints, those who record the lives of these saints are hagiographers. This is quite a big solemn business, not unlike the bureaucracy of some huge advertising firm, handling a hallowed account like Ivory soap. A major bureaucrat is Comar Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale. A southerner, he noticed, many years ago, that blacks were people. This Newtonian revelation brought him tenure; and landed him many important accounts.
Like so many academic bureaucrats the Sterling Professor is highly protective of his turf; he does not want the untenured loose in the field. Sadly, he noted in the New York Review, regarding my novel Lincoln, that the “book was extravagantly praised by both novelists and historians—a few of the latter at least. Some of the foremost Lincoln scholars do not share these views. After listing numerous historical blunders and errors of the novel, Richard N. Current, a leading Lincoln biographer, declares that “ ‘Vidal is wrong on big as well as little matters. He grossly distorts Lincoln’s character and role in history.’ ” Woodward gives no examples of these distortions. He does tell us that “Roy P. Basler, editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, estimates that ‘more than half of the book could never have happened as told by Vidal.’ ” Apparently, Woodward believes that it is sufficient merely to assert. He does not demonstrate, doubtless because he is innocent of the text in question; so he cites, vaguely, other assertions.
The late Vladimir Nabokov said that when anyone criticized his art, he was indifferent. That was their problem. But if anyone attacked his scholarship, he reached for his dictionary. After reading Woodward, I took the trouble to read the two very curious little essays that he cites. What case do they make? Is half the book all wrong; and Lincoln himself grossly distorted? Although I do my own research, unlike so many professors whose hagiographies are usually the work of those indentured servants, the graduate students, when it comes to checking a finished manuscript, I turn to Academe. In this case professor David Herbert Donald of Harvard, who has written a great deal about the period which the Sterling Professor, as far as I recall, has not written about at all. Once the book was written, I employed a professional researcher to correct dates, names, and even agreed-upon facts.
Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead, and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment, and I can see why. “Indeed, Vidal claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (‘hagiographers’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.
Now it is true that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson. In principle, it would be better if English teachers did not write novels and history teachers did not write history. After all, teaching is a great and essential profession, marvelously ill-practiced in our country as was recently demonstrated when half of today’s college freshmen could not locate on an unmarked map of the world, the United States. Obviously, there are fine academic historians (to whom I am indebted) but the Donalds, McPhersons, and Foners are greatly outnumbered by—the others.
Then, zeroing in on my chat with Larry King, Current writes that
by denying there is any real basis for Vidal’s intimation that Lincoln had syphilis, [Stephen] Oates “shows,” according to Vidal, “that,…Mr. Oates is not as good a historian as Mr. Vidal.”
First, I like Current’s slippery “any real basis” for Lincoln’s syphilis. No, there is no existing Wassermann report or its equivalent. But there is the well-known testimony of William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, that Lincoln told him that he had contracted syphilis in his youth and that it had “clung to him.” This is a primary source not to be dismissed lightly; yet Mr. Oates was quoted in the press as saying that there was never any evidence that Lincoln had had syphilis, ignoring Lincoln’s own words to Herndon. It was Newsweek, not I, who said that Mr. Vidal is a better historian than Mr. Oates. I have no opinion in the matter as I’ve never read Oates except on the subject of me, where he is bold and inaccurate.
Current finds my trust in Herndon naïve; and quotes Professor Donald on Herndon as being important largely because of “the errors that he spread.” But Donald was referring to Herndon’s haphazard researches into Lincoln’s family and early life, conducted after Lincoln’s death. I am not aware that Donald or anyone—except a professional hagiographer—could doubt Herndon when he says that Lincoln himself told him something. For the record, Donald’s actual words: “Herndon stands in the backward glance of history, mythmaker and truthteller.”
* * *
Current has literary longings; he frets over my prose. I spell “jewelry” and “practice” in the English manner and speak of a house in Fourteenth Street instead of on Fourteenth Street. It was not until H. L. Mencken, in 1919, that an attempt was made to separate the American language from the English; and even then, many writers ignored and still ignore the Sage of Baltimore. Since Burr and 1876 were written in the first person, as if by an American early in the last century, I used those locutions that were then common to agreed-upon American speech. For consistency’s sake, I continued them in Lincoln. As for myself, neither in prose nor in life would I say that someone lived on Fourteenth Street, though in the age of Reagan I have detected quite a few people living on rather than in streets. I also note that two novels I’ve been rereading follow my usage: The Great Gatsby, 1925, The Last Puritan, 1936. Current wins only one small victory: I use the word trolley in 1864 when the word did not surface until the 1890s. But his other objections are not only trivial but wrong. He says Charles Sumner was struck with a “cane” not, as I say, a “stick”; then and now the words are interchangeable, at least in Senator Sumner’s circles. He also trots out the tired quibble over the origin of “hooker.” For the purposes of a Civil War novel it is enough to give General Hooker the credit because the whores in Marble Alley, back of, what is now the Washington Post Office, were commonly known as Hooker’s Division. According to Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang, the only British meaning we have for the word at that time is a watch-stealer or pickpocket.
Current then fires off a series of statements that I have written such and such. And such and such is not true. This is dizzy even by contemporary American university standards. For instance, “Ulysses S. Grant had not failed in ‘the saddlery business.’ ” That he had failed is an offhand remark I attribute (without footnote) to a contemporary. The truth? At thirty-seven Grant had failed at every civilian job he had put his hand to, obliging him to become a clerk in his father’s firm, Grant & Perkins, which “sold harnesses and other leather goods…providing new straps for old saddles” (William McFeely’s Grant), and the business was run
not by failure Grant but by his younger brother Orvil. Current is also outraged by a reference to Lincoln’s bowels, whose “frequency,” he tells us, “cannot be documented.” But, of course, they can. “Truth-teller” Herndon tells us that Lincoln was chronically constipated and depended on a laxative called blue-mass. Since saints do not have bowels, Current finds all this sacrilegious; hence “wrong.”
* * *
Now there is no reason why Current, master of our language though he is, should understand how a novel—even one that incorporates actual events and dialogue—is made. The historian-scholar, of course, plays god. He has his footnotes, his citations, his press clippings, his fellow scholar-squirrels to quote from. If he lacks literary talent, he then simply serves up the agreed-upon facts as if they were the Truth, and should he have a political slant—and any American schoolteacher is bound to, and most predictable it is—the result will emerge as a plaster saint, like that dead effigy of Jefferson by Dumas Malone and his legion of graduate students.
Although a novel can be told as if the author is God, often a novel is told from the point of view of one or more characters. For those of us inclined to the Jamesian stricture, a given scene ought to be observed by a single character, who can only know what he knows, which is often less than the reader. For someone with no special knowledge of—or as yet interest in—Grant, the fact that harnesses and other leather goods were sold along with saddles by the failure Grant is a matter of no interest. The true scholar-squirrel, of course, must itemize everything sold in the shop. This is the real difference between a novel and a biography. But though I tend in these books more to history than to the invented, I am still obliged to dramatize my story through someone’s consciousness. But when it comes to a great mysterious figure like Lincoln, I do not enter his mind. I only show him as those around him saw him at specific times. This rules out hindsight, which is all that a historian, by definition, has; and which people in real life, or in its imitation the novel, can never have.