A friend of mine is convinced that the film critic Roger Ebert is the number one public intellectual in the United States. No doubt my friend thinks so because of Ebert's regular television appearances rather than his frequent film reviews. The idea seems to be that if you want to be a public intellectual, you had better get on TV and stay there.
This is certainly the view of Marcie Frank in her book How to be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal (Duke University Press, 2005). Some of her claims are implicitly echoed in a book more centrally about Vidal, Gore Vidal's America (Polity Press, 2005) by Dennis Altman. Though neither book takes direct account of the other, both contain plenty of information and opinions about Vidal, now 80, and his long career as novelist, playwright, radical pundit, political candidate, TV personality, celebrity and as the most profound American satirist alive today. It is not every wit who can tell an interviewer that because he has a house in Italy and one in Hollywood, one might say he doesn't live in America at all.
Vidal: the last public intellectual?
Frank is interested in the question of whether or not there can even be a public intellectual. In an unlikely agreement the conservative jurist Richard Posner and the French philosopher Michel Foucault think that the age of the universal public intellectual is over, though it is still possible for there to be "special" public intellectuals. Both Posner and Foucault attribute the rise of specialization to the shift away from the time when all of Europe listened to the likes of Voltaire or Tolstoy. Knowledge is too segmented and offers too much resistance to synthesis to promote public intellectuals any longer.
Frank traces this idea, and adds to it the complementary notion that the decline of public intellectuals is due partly to the decline of serious reading and the rise of trivial television viewing. When Karen Black's Rayette tells Jack Nicholson's pretentious friends, in the film Five Easy Pieces, that there are "some good thangs on TV sometime", the aggressive response of one of them typifies intellectual disdain for the boob tube. Frank, however, rejects the inevitable decline of the public intellectual, and thinks Gore Vidal is a good example of how it doesn't have to be that way.
Vidal has famously said he never passes up the chance to have sex or be on TV. Frank, too, disassociates herself from the demonized and paranoid views of television that often emanate from the left. She thinks and believes that Vidal thinks it's just a matter of how television is used, and that Vidal has used it well. Not only that, but he has used it to make himself into a universal public intellectual. Over the past 35 years or so he has declaimed as a celebrity talk-show guest on politics, sexuality, film, religion and much else. Frank herself is more interested in proving this thesis than in writing extensively about Vidal. But we have Dennis Altman to do that.
Altman's book is not overly long but written with an economy and elegance that Vidal himself has imparted to his own work. (Regrettably, Frank sometimes writes in the turgid academic style that Vidal himself has criticized, where "understandings" is the subject and "privileges" the verb, and where "distinctions are mobilized".) Altman's volume is nuanced and lucid, and superbly organized around such aspects of Vidal's career as "Hollywood," "Celebrity," "Religion," "Sex" and "Vidal as Writer".
The book is not fawning. When Vidal's political judgment seems amiss, Altman says so. He thinks that Vidal stretches definitions when he calls men of such humble backgrounds as Harry Truman and Richard Nixon "Protestants of the American ruling establishment", and believes we cannot take seriously such Vidalisms as the assertion that if Osama bin Laden were alive today, he would be living in a comfy Jakarta mansion.
For non-American readers there is also careful background information about US issues on which Vidal has commented or about which he has fictionalized. He reminds us of those days when it seemed treason to suggest, as Vidal once did, that the US should back North Vietnam on the grounds (which turned out to be solid) that Ho Chi Minh was an enemy of a far greater mutual foe China. Altman also traces the culture wars which grew out of the 1960s, when now neoconservative intellectuals such as Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter decided that their once beloved Democratic party, with its alleged pacifism and promotion of identity politics, had given them reason to desert.
Vidal the conservative
For all of Vidal's apparent left-wing radicalism he wrote one of the first important American novels about overt homosexual practice and has debunked American icons such as Theodore Roosevelt and Truman for their imperialism he is in many ways an old-fashioned conservative. His beloved grandfather was a blind US Senator from Oklahoma who came there from Mississippi. Thomas Gore eventually broke with Franklin Roosevelt because he was an isolationist and FDR an internationalist, a vision very much retained in the senator's grandson. Vidal has suggested that during the early 1940s the Japanese wanted compromise while the US wanted war, and that Pearl Harbour and America's entry into World War II need not have occurred. Such views are more the province of the isolationist the "America First" right of Pat Buchanan than of the left.
It is hard to know exactly where America, in Vidal's view, took a remorseless turn for the absolute worst. Vidal has suggested that the beginnings of presidential fiat may be traced back to Abraham Lincoln's stubborn determination to fight the Civil War instead of allowing the South to secede. But for Vidal it is especially post-World War II America that has gone rotten, when the American Republic became the American Empire.
Here he echoes the views of Chalmers Johnson and other critics, that such an America is constantly obsessed with masculine war and the military, afflicted by incessant propaganda and unconstitutional seizure of power, and beset by extravagant government expenditures and borrowing.
Gore Vidal's America is an America in which citizens have trouble distinguishing between reality and screened reality, where there is lack of voting and abundance of political indifference, and where a continuing Puritan hypocrisy about sexual freedoms threatens the liberty of millions. It is an America where ex-actors and fervent right-wing evangelicals can be elected president. This sounds radical and left-wing, but Vidal harks back to an older, better and (yes) more conservative America.
Vidal the liberal?
Vidal has written that there was once something special about America and about leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, who wanted the United States to remain a republic that tended to its own knitting and tried to perfect the experiment of happiness-pursuing democracy here at home.
It has nearly all been lost, he thinks, and in some regards Vidal has affinities that have been recognized between isolationist conservatives and free-thinking libertarians. He has insisted, for instance, that there is no such thing as homosexuality, but only homosexual acts. People who engage in such acts, he maintains, should in no way feel obligated to sign up for gay identity politics.
One aspect of Vidal's career that Marcie Franks admires is that Vidal's political and cultural comment has been "non-identitarian", which makes him in her book a universal intellectual. Alfred Kinsey admired Vidal's writing in the late 1940s when he published The City and the Pillar, about a homosexual attraction that turned violent (in 2003 Yale ran a 55th anniversary retrospective on this significant novel). Like Kinsey, Vidal believes that most people tend to be bisexual to a degree. Accordingly, politics should be about human freedom rather than gay freedom.
Vidal the writer
Vidal has written in a bewildering array of genres, all the while maintaining the pristine clarity and pre-emptive sentence rhythms that constitute his glorious style of insight and ridicule. Christopher Hitchens and others have observed that Vidal's novels are a strange blend of realism, romance, magical realism and science fiction. In Lincoln he has written what Harold Bloom believes to be "the tragedy of American political history, with its most authentic tragic figure at the centre, which is to say, our centre". Bloom admires Vidal's unique portrait of a "plausible and human Lincoln". Vidal works hard in researching his historical novels such as Burr, Lincoln and The Smithsonian Institution. He adheres to the historical record as best established, but does create characters who comment often echoing Vidal's opinions on major historical personages. One character, for example, conjectures that Roosevelt might be impeached for his actions surrounding Pearl Harbour.
The same Vidal who hews to history, albeit with liberties, also has a potent imagination for the fantastical. Myra Breckenridge (in a novel of the same name) is an amazon who takes over the movie industry in Hollywood in order to return it to the glory days of MGM 1935-45, deflowers (anally) a young and pretentious stud, and eventually with a sex-change operation becomes Myron (in a sequel novel). In Duluth Vidal relocates that frigid upper-Midwestern community to the south, complete with palm trees, a major immigration "problem", compulsions about national security and yet another amazon, this time a police chief who humiliates males.
Such wild musings are in the service of Vidal's relentless satirizing of American attitudes towards sexuality and power. He has also written several books of collected essays (most notably his United States), plus several plays, more than 70 television drama scripts and contributed to at least two movie scripts (Ben-Hur and Suddenly Last Summer, both of which have gay texts or subtexts).
Which Vidal?
Dennis Altman notes one paradox of Vidal's work: that he is much more careful about accuracy and detail as a historical novelist than he is as a political commentator and satirist. Altman is critical of some of Vidal's political views, arguing that he sees conspiracy where there is more likely bumbling and messiness and that he fails to appreciate the real threats to American security that were posed by fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia.
He thinks Vidal lacks sufficient understanding of racism in the United States, is missing the sociological imagination necessary to realize the full complexities of the sex trade (especially the economic weakness of women), and ignores how much the United States has improved since 1945 (for instance, the success of the civil rights movement, which began without the mountains of money that Vidal cynically thinks is the great motor of American politics).
These are fair and noteworthy criticisms, but here Altman might have profited from reading Vidal in the spirit of Marcie Frank. Though Frank herself doesn't say so, Vidal probably shares the attitude expressed by Oliver Stone when he said that his film JFK wasn't always historically accurate but was intended as a "counter myth" to the official view that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to murder John Kennedy. Likewise, Vidal may believe that the influence of his own counter-myth is in direct proportion to how dramatically and simply he can put it on TV, a medium not always patient with complexity and easily bored with talking heads.
Vidal is something of a puzzle, which is one of the refreshing things about him. Here is a true cosmopolitan, at home from Hollywood to Ravello, in whom Hitchens detects a trace of overcompensating provincialism and about whom Altman goes further: "Vidal remains as America-centric as any of the conservative ideologues he despises."
Here is an arch-patrician who spouts opinions about homosexuality that appear unconventional to both right and left. He supports feminism though his grounds for doing so have almost nothing to do with identity politics (he believes feminism's real goal is allow men and women to be known first as human beings rather than as male or female and also thinks that feminism is good because it reduces global overpopulation). Here is someone who prides himself on being a supreme, unsentimental rationalist (he wonders why any good capitalist would not support legalized prostitution), yet he has likened Oklahoma City terrorist Timothy McVeigh to Paul Revere.
Someone has observed that Vidal urinates on human folly from so high above that he seems to want not to be remembered so much as memorized. Vidal himself has said (with at least a hint of irony, surely) that "there is not one human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise". Altman says that Vidal is a celebrity who, like all celebrities, demands attention in the room. But Altman thinks he deserves it.
Vidal's nostalgia for a "golden age" that probably never was seems misplaced, and it is unclear whether his cerebral and topical satire will last for the ages. But Altman is right: for more than half a century of trying to make Americans think differently about a country he undoubtedly loves, accolades seem in order. These two books help us think about where to place them.
