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FIFTY-ONE

On my table there is a copy of Gore Vidal’s America, by Dennis Altman. I am writing this commentary on my eightieth birthday which Howard was looking forward to as an excuse for a gala event, not exactly what I wanted but if he wanted it…Anyway I shall have lunch here at the house in the Hollywood Hills with a producer and dinner with Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher as well as my nephew Burr Steers and his wife, Jennifer. Eighty sounds serious to me. Certainly when people ask “How are you feeling?” they are actually interested, for the moment at least, in your answer. Most people my age are safely dead and I must soon throw out my book of telephone numbers since nearly everyone in it has, as they used to say, fallen from the perch or ridden on ahead—mad euphemisms abound. But there are living voices on the telephone today, particularly from Europe where the birthdays of notables are noted. First call from Moscow: Tanya, one of my translators (aged eighty-four). She has a married daughter living in the Midwest and she will soon be visiting her. I say that I hope she won’t be too distressed by the lunatic jingoism on every side. She is tactful. “I really only know you and Mailer and then I am in civilization.” The voice trails off. Our roles are reversed; for thirty years she has apologized to me for Russian folly, now I…A fax from Germany. One from London. Soon the fax will characteristically break down. Meanwhile my face on the cover of Altman’s book stares up at me from the partners desk which now accommodates a single solitary partner with few attachments. A friend recently diagnosed with lung cancer rings. I share what knowledge I have picked up during Howard’s two-year siege. My Italian publisher Elido Fazi thinks that I should tell more about Howard but what does one say of a private relationship? This month there are three books about me: two by Australians, one by a Canadian. U.S. persons are not encouraged to contemplate the subject. Altman’s is the most thorough study and deals with the numerous riptides, political and cultural, that I have encountered on my way to Rock Creek Cemetery.

Dennis Altman, author of Gore Vidal’s America, is a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Much of this year he has been teaching at Harvard. I’ve known him slightly since 1973 when we appeared on the same TV program in Sydney. I value Altman’s new book for his general reflections on sex, politics, and religion. But I was a bit jolted to read, early on, “Luckily there is no need here to do more than sketch briefly Vidal’s life: it has been dealt with exhaustively in a biography by Fred Kaplan, which was written over a period of years during the 1990s and reflects, at times too much, Vidal’s own perception of his life.” Actually what it reflects is Kaplan’s close reading of my first memoir, Palimpsest, which Altman seems to think I cobbled together after reading K.’s “exhaustive” biography. Altman also thinks I took my grandfather’s name for my own “though he had been christened Eugene Luther Vidal.” But I had been christened “Eugene Luther Gore Vidal” by the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas, headmaster of St. Albans. When I started to publish stories I lopped off the first two names.

By and large Altman’s errors are few and have to do only with me, his second lead after America. He does write that on enlisting in the army “[He] was too young for active service.” But, of course, I was not too young. The army with characteristic bad faith had started an Army Specialized Training Program for high-school graduates. We were to be trained, among other things, in foreign languages to take our place in AMGOT the future Allied military government of the defeated Axis nations. So the army scooped up thousands of seventeen-year-olds and then when the Nazis began their counterattack in the so-called battle of the bulge the ASTPers were thrown, barely trained, into the infantry where many of my friends and classmates were killed. They were plainly not “too young for active service” but just right for “cannon fodder.” Altman’s most serious errors come when he writes that my “claim” that the daily New York Times, after The City and the Pillar, refused to review my next five novels is “inaccurate.” He could have easily checked out the daily paper’s list of books reviewed: it does not include The Season of Comfort; A Search for the King; Dark Green, Bright Red; The Judgment of Paris; Messiah; as well as, of course, the offending novel The City and the Pillar. A later editor of the Sunday New York Times weekly book review Rebecca Sinkler told me “you forgot a sixth book of yours that was ignored: A Thirsty Evil, the collection of your short stories.”

Finally, Altman is always at his best when he does serious research. Just as the neocons found it necessary to smear Edward Said as a liar who had no real connection with Palestine, it also became necessary for them, in the light of my attack on Sharon for drawing the 1982 blood bath in Lebanon, to invent anti-Semitic quotes allegedly written by me. Altman thinks that this goes back to my “famous comment in 1959 that ‘each year there is a short list of the OK writers. Today’s list consists of two Jews, two Negroes, and a safe floating goy of the old American establishment just to show there is no prejudice in our loving land; only the poor old homosexualists are out.’ ”“The critic Leslie Fiedler acutely pointed out,” writes Altman, “that ‘the comment was written in mock horror but with an undertone of real bitterness too.’ ” Fiedler, a friend during the fifties when we were both living in Athens, is seldom acute in his efforts at criticism convinced as he was, at least back then, that American WASP males were all homosexually inclined particularly in the direction of the likes of Mark Twain’s escaped slave Jim. My use of the list was sardonic and was so perceived at the time. The “two Jews” that I adverted to was to emphasize the point that the American literary establishment had long been centered on the absolute primacy of WASPs and so Jews were marginalized as writers and often proscribed as teachers by college English Departments, to which the late Alfred Kazin so often furiously testified; while African Americans were encouraged to go live in Paris as did Richard Wright and, in the end, Jimmy Baldwin. His first book was turned down by E. P. Dutton where I was then an associate editor and had tried for a year to get Cry Holy, first title for Go Tell It on the Mountain, accepted by Dutton; but the owner, Elliott Macrae, told me: “I can’t publish Baldwin, I’m from Virginia.” Altman thinks that I have largely ignored black literature. Politically minded African Americans are better informed. As recently as a month ago Representative Cynthia McKinney invited me to address the Black Caucus of the House of Representatives. I am also chided for not doing enough about AIDS; but my virological skills are few.