Books
Blood, thunder and Gore
Peter Ackroyd
Washington, D.C. Gore Vidal (Heinemann 21.50) Burr Gore Vidal (Heinemann £2.75) 1876 Gore Vidal (Heinemann £4.10)
1876, the latest of Gore Vidal's historical novels, is the book everyone expected Mr Vidal to write. The voice with all those plummy vowels, enunciated with a Miss Jean Brodie twang, and that fruity exterior —in the sense that a lemon, however sharp, is still a fruit—have been perfectly transposed in this new novel and 1876 represents all that Mr Vidal thinks that politics ought to be: gossip, corruption, money, dinner-parties, more corruption, and all the tacky panoply of power. Mr Vidal has now become the great chronicler of power, and in the course of these three books he has pinned himself so successfully to the wall that he is now all but indistinguishable from the surroundings.
It wasn't always like that : 'The generations of man come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life and its hope.' Will the real Gore Vidal please stand up? This is not the tone of the sophisticated novelist, who in that context would be placed in the quite unglamorous role of a laboratory technician changing the slides, but it is the tone of the moralist. And, more importantly, it is the tone of a moralist who has turned quite naturally to journalism to make things easier for himself.
The quotation is from the first of Vidal's historical novels, Washington, D.C., which takes a lounge-lizard look at American politics in the period of the late 'thirties to the early 'fifties. This gives Mr Vidal plenty of opportunity to dish the dirt on a world he knew and, despite his protestations, loved. Ostensibly it is the story of an irresistible politician, Clay Overbury, on the make, clambering over friends and enemies alike to reach the Presidency. It is a novel of smoke-filled rooms and marble hallways, press-barons and politicos. But it is also the story of Peter Sandford, the scion of a rich family, who plays the role of writer and observer in much the same way as Vidal, and who bears distinct resemblances to Vidal both in deed (Sandford at one point is told 'to obtain a master's degree while continuing to study the career of Aaron Burr') and in thought.
The young Sandford, you see, daydreams: 'In the main square of the ancient city, older than recorded time, the Thark army was drawn up. When they saw him, they cheered, recognising the cloak of the Grand Murg . .. For a long moment, he looked out across the sea of cheering Tharks. He felt the power rising in him. He glanced up at the balcony where Thulia stood, wearing the helium crown of the old empire.' This is very close to the mature Vidal's image of more recent politics in the same book : 'The Senator smiled his beyond-tragedy smile . . in the cold voice they heard power. ... a stranger's eyes reflected unnatural light and in their brightness Burden saw the power to come.' Gore Vidal, too, is something of a teenage fantasist. And far from being the sharpeyed observer of human weaknesses, he is a writer who insists upon sentimentalising politics and politicians; his books are melodramas, and his characters are really only mouthpieces.
Burr is the second of Vidal's political novels, and veers backward to the time of the American Revolution and the early years of the Republic. It has been taken to be the definitive American version of Eminent Victorians (give or take a decade or two) as Vidal turns the history of the Republic all the way around by allowing the iconoclast and traitor, Aaron Burr, to tell his 'true story' through an eager amanuensis, Charles Schuyler, who bears not a small resemblance to Vidal himself. The record is set straight: Washington an overweight paranoiac, Jefferson an obtuse hypocrite, Martin Van Buren a nonentity. Mr Vidal quite rightly refuses to accept, and works actively to undermine, those social myths which bind human communities together but, in the process, he has created a much more dangerous myth of his own: that politics is interesting, and that politicians make interesting characters. So Aaron Burr, the murderer of Alexander Hamilton, the wild man of American folklore, becomes everything that Vidal would like a politician to be: devious but spontaneous, clever but with a clever man's cunning. As always, Vidal glorifies backroom politics in ways that Richard Nixon would envy: he makes it romantic, and he makes it sound like fun.
And so to the new novel, /876, perhaPs the last of Vidal's historical fictions, and in many ways the most accomplished. Gone are the references to humankind as 'bacteria', gone are those moments of inexplicable passion which peep fitfullY through Washington, D.C. and Burr; what we have instead is a novel perfectly contrived, a solid bourgeois entertainment which avoids seriousness as remorselesslY as Vidal had once pursued it. Charles Schuyler, Burr's secretary in the earlier book has returned to America after a long stay in Europe. He returns home at a time of particular crisis for the Republic; the Presidency of Ulysses Grant has become enmeshed in scandal, and Washington (or 'Africa' as it is known to behaviourists of Vidal's stamp) is agog with the BelknaPs, the Blaines, and all the other courtiers whom Vidal delights in resuscitating. The book has pace, the narrative has wit and the prose has a sort of campy authenticity which we normally associate with revivals of 'forties pop and 'thirties clothing. But there is very little else to be said for it which could not be said about a hundred other 'good reads'. If Mr Vidal had some kind of grand design before he embarked upon his political novels (and I imagine he saw his proper role as that of a Tacitus, or at least a Suetonius, or at the very least an Aubrey, turning over the 'foul papers' of history to make some sort of human point), he has unravelled it by becoming absurdly selfindulgent. Although 1876 is set, as uric might expect, in 1876 much of the narrative is devoted to drawing implicit parallels with 1973 and 1974. Charles Schuyler is a scarcely disguised portrait of Mr Vidal himself, and a great many characters bear odd resemblances to our contemporary heroes: I thought I saw Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, and I know I saw Nixon. Vidal has avoided the problems of being a novelist by reverting too easily tojournalism; But what Charles Schuyler says 01 Turgenev, 'With uncommon passion he writes only of politics and so is able t°, create living men and women on the page', I do not think Vidal will ever say 01 himself.
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