The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (8 page)

At the book's core there is nothing beyond the author's crypto-Christianity, which is obviously not going to please his masters; they will also dislike his astonishing discovery that “the best social order is not susceptible to being arbitrarily constructed, or even to being scientifically constructed.” To give the noble engineer his due he is good at describing how things work, and it is plain that nature destined him to write manuals of artillery or instructions on how to take apart a threshing machine. Many people who do not ordinarily read books have bought this book and mention rather proudly that they are reading it, but so far I have yet to meet anyone who has finished it. I fear that the best one can say of Solzhenitsyn is
goré vidal
(a Russian phrase meaning “he has seen grief”).

A peculiarity of American sexual mores is that those men who like to think of themselves as exclusively and triumphantly heterosexual are convinced that the most masculine of all activities is not tending to the sexual needs of women but watching other men play games. I have never understood this aspect of my countrymen but I suppose there is a need for it (bonding?), just as the Romans had a need to see people being murdered. Perhaps there is a connection between the American male's need to watch athletes and his fatness: according to a W.H.O. report the American male is the world's fattest and softest; this might explain why he also loves guns—you can always get your revolver up.

I fear that I am not the audience Mr. Dan Jenkins had in mind when he wrote his amiable book
Semi-Tough
, but I found it pleasant enough, and particularly interesting for what it does
not
go into. The narrator is a pro football player who has been persuaded “that it might be good for a pro football stud to have a book which might have a healthy influence on kids.” Question: Do young people watch football games nowadays? It seems to me that “jock-sniffers” (as Mr. Jenkins calls them) are of Nixonian age and type—though few have the thirty-seventh president's nose for such pleasures. The unfat and the unsoft young must have other diversions. One wonders, too, if they believe that “a man makes himself a man by whatever he does with himself, and in pro football that means busting his ass for his team.”

Semi-Tough
tells of the preparation for the big game. Apparently, training involves an astonishing amount of drink, pot, and what the narrator refers to as “wool,” meaning cunt. There is one black player who may or may not like boys and the narrator clams up on what is a very delicate subject in jock circles. I am not sure Mr. Jenkins is aware of all the reverberations set off by the jokes of one of his white players. Asked why he is an athlete, the stud says, “‘Mainly, we just like to take showers with niggers.'” It is a pity Mary Renault did not write this book. And a pity, come to think of it, that Mr. Jenkins did not write
August 1914
, a subject suitable for his kind of farce. No movie in
Semi-Tough
. As the Wise Hack knows all too well, sports movies bomb at the box office. Perhaps the Warhol factory will succeed where the majors have failed.
SHOWER ROOM
—
LONG SHOT
.
CUT TO
:
CLOSE SHOT
—
SOAP
.

At first glance
The Odessa File
, by Frederick Forsyth, looks to be just another bold hard-hitting attack on the Nazis in the form of a thriller masked as a pseudo-documentary. But the proportions of this particular bit of nonsense are very peculiarly balanced. First, the book is dedicated “to all press reporters.” The dust jacket tells us that the author worked for Reuters in the early 1960s; it does not give us his nationality but from the odd prose that he writes I suspect his first language is not English. Also the book's copyright is in the name of a company: a tax dodge not possible for American citizens. Next there is an Author's Note. Mr. Forsyth tells us that although he gives “heartfelt thanks” to all those who helped him in his task he cannot name any of them for three reasons. Apparently some were former members of the SS and “were not aware at the time either whom they were talking to, or that what they said would end up in a book.” Others asked not to be mentioned; still others are omitted “for their sakes rather than for mine.” This takes care of the sources for what he would like us to believe is a true account of the way Odessa (an organization of former SS officers) continues to help its members in South America and the Federal Republic.

After the Author's Note there is a Foreword (by the author). We are told who Adolf Hitler was and how he and the Nazis ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945 and how they organized the SS in order to kill fourteen million “so-called enemies of the Reich,” of which six million were Jews. When Germany began to lose the war, “vast sums of gold were smuggled out and deposited in numbered bank accounts, false identity papers were prepared, escape channels opened up. When the Allies finally conquered Germany, the bulk of the mass-murderers had gone.”

Well, one knows about Eichmann, and of course Martin Bormann is a minor industry among bad journalists; so presumably there are other “important” SS officers growing old in Paraguay. But do they, as Mr. Forsyth assures us, have an organization called Odessa whose aim is “fivefold”? Firstfold is “to rehabilitate former SS men
into the professions
of the Federal Republic” second, “to infiltrate at least the lower echelons of political party activity” third, to provide “legal defense” for any SS killer hauled before a court and in every way possible to stultify the course of justice in West Germany; fourth, to promote the fortunes of former SS members (this seems to be a repeat of the first of the fivefolds); and, five, “to propagandize the German people to the viewpoint that the SS killers were in fact none other than ordinary patriotic soldiers.”

This is food for thought. Yet why has one never heard of Odessa? Mr. Forsyth anticipates that question: “changing its name several times” (highly important for a completely secret society), “the Odessa has sought to deny its own existence as an organization, with the result that many Germans are inclined to say that Odessa does not exist. The short answer is: it exists….” We are then assured that the tale he is about to tell represents one of their failures. Obviously fun and games; presumably, there is no such thing as the Odessa but in the interest of making a thriller look like a document (today's fashion in novels) the author is mingling true with “false facts,” as Thomas Jefferson would say.

Now for the story. But, no, after the Dedication and the Author's Note and the Foreword there comes a Publisher's Note. Apparently many of the characters in the book are “real people” but “the publishers do not wish to elucidate further because it is in this ability to perplex the reader as to how much is true and how much false that much of the grip of the story lies.” The publishers, Viking, write suspiciously like Mr. Forsyth. “Nevertheless, the publishers feel the reader may be interested or assisted to know that the story of former SS Captain Eduard Roschmann, the commandant of the concentration camp at Riga from 1941 to 1944, from his birth in Graz, Austria, in 1908, to his present exile in South America, is completely factual and drawn from SS and West German records.” So let us bear this Publisher's Note in mind as we contemplate the story Mr. Forsyth tells.

After the fall of Hitler, Roschmann was harbored at “the enormous Franciscan Monastery in Rome in Via Sicilia.” There is no such establishment according to my spies in the order. “Bishop Alois Hudal, the German Bishop in Rome” (Mr. Forsyth seems to think that this is some sort of post) “spirited thousands [of SS] to safety.” “The SS men traveled on Red Cross travel documents, issued through the intervention of the Vatican.” After a period in Egypt, Roschmann returns to Germany in 1955 under a pseudonym. Thanks to Odessa, he becomes the head of an important firm. He conducts secret research “aimed at devising a teleguidance system for those rockets [he] is now working on in West Germany. His code name is Vulkan.”

Why is Roschmann at work on the rockets? Because Odessa and its evil scientists “have proposed to President Nasser” (whose predecessor Mr. Forsyth thinks was named Naguil), and he “accepted with alacrity, that these warheads on the Kahiras and Zafiras be of a different type. Some will contain concentrated cultures of bubonic plague, and the others will explode high above the ground, showering the entire territory of Israel with irradiated cobalt-sixty. Within hours they will all be dying of the pest or of gamma-ray sickness.”

This is splendid Fu Manchu nonsense (infecting the Israelis with bubonic plague would of course start a world epidemic killing the Egyptians, too, while spreading radioactive cobalt in the air would probably kill off a large percentage of the world's population, as any story conference at Universal would quickly conclude). Next Mr. Forsyth presents us with the classic thriller cliché: only one man holds this operation together. Roschmann. Destroy him and Israel is saved.

The plot of course is foiled by a West German newspaperman and its details need not concern us: it is the sort of storytelling that propels the hero from one person to the next person, asking questions. As a stylist, Mr. Forsyth is addicted to the freight-car sentence: “This time his destination was Bonn, the small and boring town on the river's edge that Konrad Adenauer had chosen as the capital of the Federal Republic, because he came from it.” (Adenauer came from Cologne but Mr. Forsyth is not one to be deterred by small details: after all, he is under the impression that it was Martin Bormann “on whom the mantle of the Führer had fallen after 1945.”) What is important is that Mr. Forsyth and Viking Press want us to believe that the Vatican knowingly saved thousands of SS men after 1945, that six of the ten high-ranking Hamburg police officers in 1964 were former SS men, that President Nasser authorized a clandestine SS organization to provide him with the means to attack Israel with bubonic plague, and that when this plot failed, the Argentine government presumably offered asylum to Captain Roschmann.
Caveat emptor
.

The boldness of author and publisher commands…well, awe and alarm. Is it possible now to write a novel in which Franklin Roosevelt secretly finances the German American Bund because he had been made mad by infantile paralysis? Can one write a novel in which Brezhnev is arranging with the American army defectors in Canada to poison Lake Michigan (assuming this is not a redundancy)? Viking would probably say, yes, why not? And for good measure, to ensure success, exploit the prejudices, if possible, of American Jewish readers, never letting them forget that the guilt of the Germans (“dreaming only in the dark hours of the ancient gods of strength and lust and power”) for having produced Hitler is now as eternal in the works of bad writers and greedy publishers as is the guilt of the Jews for the death of Jesus in the minds of altogether too many simple Christians. Exploitation of either of these myths strikes me as an absolute evil and not permissible even in the cheapest of fiction brought out by the most opportunist of publishers.

The number one best-seller is called
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
. It is a greeting card bound like a book with a number of photographs of seagulls in flight. The brief text celebrates the desire for excellence of a seagull who does not want simply to fly in order to eat but to fly beautifully for its own sake. He is much disliked for this by his peers; in fact, he is ostracized. Later he is translated to higher and higher spheres where he can spend eternity practicing new flight techniques. It is touching that this little story should be so very popular because it is actually celebrating art for art's sake as well as the virtues of nonconformity; and so, paradoxically, it gives pleasure to the artless and to the conforming, to the drones who dream of honey-making in their unchanging hive.

Unlike the other best-sellers this work is not so much a reflection of the age of movies as it is a tribute to Charles Darwin and his high priestess, the incomparable creatrix of
The Fountainhead
(starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal), Ayn Rand.

There is not much point in generalizing further about these best-sellers. The authors prefer fact or its appearance to actual invention. This suggests that contemporary historians are not doing their job if to Wouk and Solzhenitsyn falls the task of telling today's reader about two world wars and to Forsyth and Trevanian current tales of the cold war. As Christianity and Judaism sink into decadence, religioso fictions still exert a certain appeal. It will surprise certain politicians to learn that sex is of no great interest to best-selling authors. Only
Semi-Tough
tries to be sexy, and fails. Too much deodorant.

Reading these ten books one after the other was like being trapped in the “Late Late Show,” staggering from one half-remembered movie scene to another, all the while beginning to suspect with a certain horror that the Wise Hack at the Writers' Table will be honored and remembered for his many credits on numerous profitable pix long after Isherwood (adapted “The Gambler,” with Gregory Peck), Faulkner (adapted
The Big Sleep
, with Humphrey Bogart), Huxley (adapted
Pride and Prejudice
, with Greer Garson), Vidal (adapted
Suddenly, Last Summer
, with Elizabeth Taylor) take their humble places below the salt, as it were, for none of us regarded with sufficient seriousness the greatest art form of all time. By preferring perversely to write books that reflected not the movies we had seen but life itself, not as observed by that sterile machine the camera but as it is netted by a beautiful if diminishing and polluted language, we were, all in all, kind of dumb. Like Sam, one should've played it again.

The New York Review of Books
May 17 and May 31, 1973

FRENCH LETTERS: THEORIES OF THE NEW NOVEL

To say that no one now much likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of “fact.” But then, Americans have never been enthusiastic readers. According to Dr. Gallup, only five percent of our population can be regarded as habitual readers. This five percent is probably a constant minority from generation to generation, despite the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century there were as many bookstores in the United States as there are today. It is true that novels in paperback often reach a very large audience. But that public is hardly serious, if one is to believe a recent
New York Times
symposium on paperback publishing. Apparently novels sell not according to who wrote them but according to how they are presented, which means that
Boys and Girls Together
will outsell
Pale Fire
, something it did not do in hard cover. Except for a handful of entertainers like the late Ian Fleming, the mass audience knows nothing of authors. They buy titles, and most of those titles are not of novels but of nonfiction: books about the Kennedys, doctors, and vivid murders are preferred to the work of anyone's imagination no matter how agreeably debased.

In this, if nothing else, the large public resembles the clerks, one of whom, Norman Podhoretz, observed nine years ago that “A feeling of dissatisfaction and impatience, irritation and boredom with contemporary serious fiction is very widespread,” and he made the point that the magazine article is preferred to the novel because the article is useful, specific, relevant—something that most novels are not. This liking for fact may explain why some of our best-known novelists are read with attention only when they comment on literary or social matters. In the highest intellectual circles, a new novel by James Baldwin or William Gass or Norman Mailer—to name at random three celebrated novelists—is apt to be regarded with a certain embarrassment, hostage to a fortune often too crudely gained, and bearing little relation to its author's distinguished commentaries.

An even odder situation exists in the academy. At a time when the works of living writers are used promiscuously as classroom texts, the students themselves do little voluntary reading. “I hate to read,” said a Harvard senior to a
New York Times
reporter, “and I never buy any paperbacks.” The undergraduates' dislike of reading novels is partly due to the laborious way in which novels are taught: the slow killing of the work through a close textual analysis. Between the work and the reader comes the explication, and the explicator is prone to regard the object of analysis as being somehow inferior to the analysis itself.

In fact, according to Saul Bellow, “Critics and professors have declared themselves the true heirs and successors of the modern classic authors.” And so, in order to maintain their usurped dignity, they are given “to redescribing everything downward, blackening the present age and denying creative scope to their contemporaries.” Although Mr. Bellow overstates the case, the fact remains that the novel as currently practiced does not appeal to the intellectuals any more than it does to the large public, and it may well be that the form will become extinct now that we have entered the age which Professor Marshall McLuhan has termed post-Gutenberg. Whether or not the Professor's engaging generalities are true (that linear type, for centuries a shaper of our thought, has been superseded by electronic devices), it is a fact that the generation now in college is the first to be brought up entirely within the tradition of television and differs significantly from its predecessors. Quick to learn through sight and sound, today's student often experiences difficulty in reading and writing. Linear type's warm glow, so comforting to Gutenberg man, makes his successors uncomfortably hot. Needless to say, that bright minority which continues the literary culture exists as always, but it is no secret that even they prefer watching movies to reading novels. John Barth ought to interest them more than Antonioni, but he doesn't.

For the serious novelist, however, the loss of the audience should not be disturbing. “I write,” declared one of them serenely. “Let the reader learn to read.” And contrary to Whitman, great audiences are not necessary for the creation of a high literature. The last fifty years have been a particularly good time for poetry in English, but even that public which can read intelligently knows very little of what has been done. Ideally, the writer needs no audience other than the few who understand. It is immodest and greedy to want more. Unhappily, the novelist, by the very nature of his coarse art, is greedy and immodest; unless he is read by everyone, he cannot delight, instruct, reform, destroy a world he wants, at the least, to be different for his having lived in it. Writers as various as Dickens and Joyce, as George Eliot and Proust, have suffered from this madness. It is the nature of the beast. But now the beast is caged, confined by old forms that have ceased to attract. And so the question is: can those forms be changed, and the beast set free?

Since the Second World War, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, and Robert Pinget, among others, have attempted to change not only the form of the novel but the relationship between book and reader, and though their experiments are taken most seriously on the Continent, they are still too little known and thought about in those countries the late General de Gaulle believed to be largely populated by Anglo-Saxons. Among American commentators, only Susan Sontag in
Against Interpretation, and Other Essays
, published in 1966, has made a sustained effort to understand what the French are doing, and her occasional essays on their work are well worth reading, not only as reflections of an interesting and interested mind but also because she shares with the New Novelists (as they loosely describe themselves) a desire for the novel to become “what it is not in England and America, with rare and unrelated exceptions: a form of art which people with serious and sophisticated [
sic
] taste in the other arts can take seriously.” Certainly Miss Sontag finds nothing adventurous or serious in “the work of the American writers most admired today: for example, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, William Styron, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud.” They are “essentially unconcerned with the problems of the novel as an art form. Their main concern is with their ‘subjects.'” And because of this, she finds them “essentially unserious and unambitious.” By this criterion, to be serious and ambitious in the novel, the writer must create works of prose comparable to those experiments in painting which have brought us to Pop and Op art and in music to the strategic silences of John Cage. Whether or not these experiments succeed or fail is irrelevant. It is enough, if the artist is serious, to attempt new forms; certainly he must not repeat old ones.

The two chief theorists of the New Novel are Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. As novelists, their works do not much resemble one another or, for that matter, conform to each other's strictures. But it is as theorists not as novelists that they shall concern us here. Of the two, Alain Robbe-Grillet has done the most to explain what he thinks the New Novel is and is not, in
Snapshots
and
For a New Novel
, translated by Richard Howard (1965). To begin with, he believes that any attempt at controlling the world by assigning it a meaning (the accepted task of the traditional novelist) is no longer possible. At best, meaning was

an illusory simplification; and far from becoming clearer and clearer because of it, the world has only, little by little, lost all its life. Since it is chiefly in its presence that the world's reality resides, our task is now to create a literature which takes that presence into account.

He then attacks the idea of psychological “depth” as a myth. From the Comtesse de La Fayette to Gide, the novelist's role was to burrow “deeper and deeper to reach some ever more intimate strata.” Since then, however, “something” has been “changing totally, definitively in our relations with the universe.” Though he does not define that ominous “something,” its principal effect is that “we no longer consider the world as our own, our private property, designed according to our needs and readily domesticated.” Consequently:

the novel of characters belongs entirely to the past; it describes a period: and that which marked the apogee of the individual. Perhaps this is not an advance, but it is evident that the present period is rather one of administrative numbers. The world's destiny has ceased, for us, to be identified with the rise or fall of certain men, of certain families.

Nathalie Sarraute is also concerned with the idea of man the administrative number in
Tropisms
and in
The Age of Suspicion
, translated by Maria Jolas (1964). She quotes Claude-Edmonde Magny: “Modern man, overwhelmed by mechanical civilization, is reduced to the triple determinism of hunger, sexuality and social status: Freud, Marx and Pavlov.” (Surely in the wrong order.) She, too, rejects the idea of human depth: “The deep uncovered by Proust's analyses had already proved to be nothing but a surface.”

Like Robbe-Grillet, she sees the modern novel as an evolution from Dostoevsky-Flaubert to Proust-Kafka; and each agrees (in essays written by her in 1947 and by him in 1958) that one of its principal touchstones is Camus's
The Stranger
, a work which she feels “came at the appointed time,” when the old psychological novel was bankrupt because, paradoxically, psychology itself, having gone deeper than ever before, “inspired doubts as to the ultimate value of all methods of research.”
Homo absurdus
, therefore, was Noah's dove, the messenger of deliverance. Camus's stranger is shown entirely from the inside, “all sentiment or thought whatsoever appears to have been completely abolished.” He has been created without psychology or memory; he exists in a perpetual present. Robbe-Grillet goes even further in his analysis:

It is no exaggeration to claim that it is things quite specifically which ultimately lead this man to crime: the sun, the sea, the brilliant sand, the gleaming knife, the spring among the rocks, the revolver…as, of course, among these things, the leading role is taken by Nature.

Only the absolute presence of things can be recorded; certainly the depiction of human character is no longer possible. In fact, Miss Sarraute believes that for both author and reader, character is “the converging point of their mutual distrust,” and she makes of Stendhal's “The genius of suspicion has appeared on the scene” a leitmotiv for an age in which “the reader has grown wary of practically everything. The reason being that for some time now he has been learning too many things and he is unable to forget entirely all he had learned.” Perhaps the most vivid thing he has learned (or at least it was vivid when she was writing in 1947) is the fact of genocide in the concentration camps:

Beyond these furthermost limits to which Kafka did not follow them but to where he had the superhuman courage to precede them, all feeling disappears, even contempt and hatred; there remains only vast, empty stupefaction, definitive total, don't understand.

To remain at the point where he left off or to attempt to go on from there are equally impossible. Those who live in a world of human beings can only retrace their steps.

The proof that human life can be as perfectly meaningless in the scale of a human society as it is in eternity stunned a generation, and the shock of this knowledge, more than anything else (certainly more than the discoveries of the mental therapists or the new techniques of industrial automation), caused a dislocation of human values which in turn made something like the New Novel inevitable.

Although Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet are formidable theorists, neither is entirely free of those rhetorical plangencies the French so often revert to when their best aperçus are about to slip the net of logic. Each is very much a part of that French intellectual tradition so wickedly described in
Tristes Tropiques
by Lévi-Strauss (1964, translated by John Russell):

First you establish the traditional “two views” of the question. You then put forward a common-sensical justification of the one, only to refute it by the other. Finally, you send them both packing by the use of a third interpretation, in which both the others are shown to be equally unsatisfactory. Certain verbal maneuvers enable you, that is, to line up the traditional “antitheses” as complementary aspects of a single reality: form and substance, content and container, appearance and reality, essence and existence, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. Before long the exercise becomes the merest verbalizing, reflection gives place to a kind of superior punning, and the “accomplished philosopher” may be recognized by the ingenuity with which he makes ever-bolder play with assonance, ambiguity, and the use of those words which sound alike and yet bear quite different meanings.