Rallying the Cynics
Rocking the Boat. By Gore Vidal. (Heinemann,, 30s.) A GOOD American novelist and less interesting playwright now presents ten years of auto- biography as an alert commentary on politics, theatre and books in the Age of the Great Golfer (1953-61) and proves himself one of the most entertaining pundits on the scene. His stamping ground is mostly respectable journals like the Reporter, Nation and Esquire, with occasional sorties into Life, Partisan Review and New World Writing, rocking the American boat as it moves wilfully, he believes, towards the totali- tarian right. Unlike the Mailer of Advertisements for Myself, which he admires, Vidal exposes little of his vulnerable insides, but he is in constant combat, and shares with Mailer the ability to write journalism which lasts because the sen- tences carry unfaked standards in personal rhythms, Vidal's prose controls anxiety for an America which believes it is the terminal society, in which office-seeker and electorate live in mutual congratulatidn unable to admit 'that they have anything to learn from the experiments of any other society,' and yet still part of a nation 'not at all certain about its future either as a society or as a world power,! a nation ripe for Senator Goldwater.
The art of power is Vidal's core theme. His aim is what he thinks President Kennedy's should be: 'to rally the bored and cynical Western world, to fire the imagination of a generation taught never to think of "we" but only of "I."' An American Cesar is likely to be an over-simplifying Truth-seeker of the radical right, appealing to the majority through extremism in his embodiment of 'just plain folks': 'a regular guy, warm and sincere, and While he was amusing us on television the Storm Troopers would gather in the streets.' His policy is reaction, back to the 'old agrarian America, before the income tax, the industrial revolution, the disturbing responsibilities of being a world Power.' The trial run is Goldwater, the man who believes in a republic rather than a democracy, whose demagoguery relies on the surrender of will and intelligence, the great democratic danger of surrender to the belief that the average citizen ought to stay aloof from 'dirty' politics, that Police or other censorship and ban, the FBI's right to third degree, belief in identity of fascism, communism and socialism, are part of good citizenship. In the theatre, Vidal sees surrender in the form. of addiction to Love as `a warm druggedness, a surrender of the will and the mind to inchoate feelings of Together- ness. Thought is the enemy; any exercise of mind betrays Love.' The audience demands consolation for inadequate living: 'most cultures have had a Pantheon; ours has but a single shrine, with a couch in it.'
Vidal admits his 'only serious interest is the subversion of a society that bores and appals Inc.' His respect goes to artists like Mailer, who,
for all their monomaniac belief in one revelatory Truth, confess their preoccupation with power and competitiveness is a waste of time, who are not private but public artists, who want `to influence those who are alive at this time.' His term of praise is 'honourable,' a Roman word, and his book is impregnated with Roman litera- ture as a public standard of writing; His other guide, as a 'correctionist,' is Santayana, who told him he lacked superstition and would therefore be happy, and whose vision of a collective life as a wolf pack troubles his sight. Like Walter Lippmann, Gore Vidal knows that total belief in the supreme will of the people • is a totali- tarian perversion of the State's democratic duty, which is to lead away from absolutes towards complex moral responsibility. So the popular Orville Prescott and Ayn Rand appear as 'Two Immoralists,' the New York Times critic because he degenerates criticism to know-nothing to- getherness levels, and' the so-called novelist because she promotes 'a new morality of rational self-interest,' rejects community, and claims `to love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you'—a weird transmutation of Arnold into capitalist theology.
For Vidal, America's popular writers are State life-prisoners: 'they want yard privileges and better food, but they shrink at the idea of choice, of life outside the familiar walls of superstition that we call the free world.' He does not make the trite mistake of blaming the 'mass media,' since The most dangerous and successful censor- ship is inner censorship.' The trouble is that critics today tend to praise neurosis, obsession and rebelliousness as literary criteria. Satire is necessary more than ever, but 'it is a poor period indeed which must assess its men of letters in terms of their opposition to society.' The critic needs law and revealed order, otherwise he sur- renders to civilised commentary based on tem- peramental likes and dislikes. But Vidal notices that the better contemporary American writers do exactly what demoralises the majority—they define man's condition, reject authority 'in these last days before the sure if temporary victory of that authoritarian society which, thanks to science, now has every weapon with which to make, even the most inspired lover of freedom conform to the official madness.'
In the end, Vidal's essays attack that slavery which is the surrender of private will, in any cul- tural activity. Essays on HUAC, O'Neill, Shaw, McCullers, Waugh and Goldwater are part of a single-minded rocking of the ship of state, by an intelligence unpadlocked, curious and un- cynically democratic. His minor sillinesses about the new criticism, John Aldridge, not reading all of The Naked and the Dead but going on about it, and dismissing the Beats as 'literary bleating,' are excusable in the continuity of general intelligence. Where Mailer ran for presi- dent in his own way, Vidal actually ran for Congress—Democrats—in 1960. He failed, but his campaign notes say a good deal why: at least he tried to practise his policy of taking risks in 'our second-rate culture' and not playing safely into boredom. He believes his reforms will reform, help on the nation' to civilisation before the Russians reach it. There is a nice ktreak of naïve egoism in Vidal. But when he put on his play, Visit to a Small Planet, he let the Commercials get him: 'by deliberately dulling of the edge of satire, the farce flourished.' Why?—`1 was obliged to protect an eighty- thousand-dollar investment.' Disappointing, but it makes the record complete and honest.
ERIC MOT1 RAM
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