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FORTY-ONE

Someone has dug up some irritable letters of mine to various publications. Apparently in the British New Statesman (August 28, 1976) I took exception to A. J. P. Taylor’s obituary of my old friend Tom Driberg. Tom had been chairman of the Labour Party as well as member of Parliament for years. He was the original William Hickey, a sort of highbrow columnist (yes, there was once such a thing and in a Beaverbrook newspaper, too). He was a dedicated Christian as well as Marxist and a powerful debater particularly on television. That he is not easily summed up is a tribute to his originality. He enjoyed writing about the higher Bohemia and championed the Sitwells when it was not fashionable; then he continued to do so, most bravely, when it was. A formidable gossip, his world of glamorous ladies overlapped with Waugh’s to the delight of neither. He was on his way to the airport to go to Ravello when he died in a taxicab. He had been at work on his memoirs written in a perfect hand on special cards. Compton Mackenzie had written a roman à clef about him called Thin Ice which just about says it all. When the Labour Party was holding its conference in Scotland, I think it was toward the end of the war, Tom was arrested while having carnal knowledge of a Norwegian sailor. Happily for Tom the arresting officer was a Labour voter and, best of all, a fan of Tom’s Hickey column. Tom applied the extreme unction of his hortatory style to the policeman about how this brave blameless lad, who had been fighting with the Allies against Hitler, knew no English; had just happened to be in port and should be allowed to return to his ship. The policeman told the brave lad to return to the war. The lad fled. As Tom told me the story, with some satisfaction, he noted that without the sailor’s presence there was no case against him. He then proceeded to charm the policeman. They discussed politics. Then over the years Tom became a friend of both the policeman and his wife who sent Tom the policeman’s library when he died.

The historian A. J. P. Taylor’s obituary of Tom in the New Statesman, a paper I wrote for in those days, inspired me to respond to his condescension and inaccuracies. Particularly this observation: “Tom was also homosexual and flagrant and unashamed.” This was a bit much even by the lower-middle-class insular standards of that day. I wrote that “I was not aware that homosexuality was something to be ashamed of. Certainly Taylor would not write of Lloyd George that he was heterosexual, flagrant and unashamed. I daresay Taylor meant compulsive or promiscuous; even so, shame hardly enters in.” Then Taylor warms to his subject: “Tom was not at all a clever man or an intellectual. He did not understand either Marx or Keynes.” This is a startling non sequitur. First, Tom knew as much Marx and Keynes as was good for him; second, a close knowledge of outdated economic theory is not a decisive factor in determining whether or not a man is an intellectual. Tom’s knowledge of poetry was vast; his mind was literary; it was also divergent not convergent. He was often an inspired theologian; he had a formidable gift for logic (without which it is hardly possible to be an intellectual), his ear for the false note in poetry or reasoning was near-perfect. As for not being “clever”…Well, I have no idea what Taylor means by cleverness. Admittedly, Tom never taught school.

On July 7, 1977, I wrote to The New York Times:

In what looks to be a review of my new collection of essays [Matters of Fact and of Fiction], your dispenser of book-chat tells us that my attack on nearly two hundred years of American imperialism as symbolized by the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (where my father was an instructor when I was born) is the result of an “unresolved hostility toward his father, further evidence of which, some would argue, is Mr. Vidal’s cheerfully admitted homosexuality.”

This is quintessential New York Times reporting. First, it is ill-written, hence ill-edited. Second, it is inaccurate. Third, it is unintelligent in the vulgar Freudian way. There is no evidence of an “unresolved hostility” toward my father in the pages under review or elsewhere in my work. Quite the contrary. I quote from Two Sisters, a Novel in the form of a Memoir: “my father was the only man I ever entirely liked….” Nowhere in my writing have I “admitted”(“cheerfully” or dolefully) to homosexuality, or to heterosexuality. Even the dullest of mental therapists no longer accepts the proposition that cold-father-plus-clinging-mother-equals-fag-offspring.

These demurs to one side, I am grateful to your employee for so beautifully demonstrating in a single sentence so many of the reasons why The New York Times is a perennially bad newspaper and bound to champion the disreputable likes of Judith Miller [name added later, obviously].