The Later Fiction of Gore
Vidal: 1962-2006
In 1964, with the publication of Julian, Vidal re-emerged as a
best-selling and critically praised novelist. He would continue to publish
fiction regularly for the rest of his career. During this same period, he
has published numerous books of collected essays and has earned a second
reputation as a trenchant commentator on politics, history, literature and
culture. Vidal never returned to writing introspective, contemporary
novels of the sort he did for a brief time in the 1940s. Rather, he
became known as a historical novelist more concerned with ideas than
psychologies, and also as the creator of some wild, satirical, post-modern
narratives, including Kalki, a novel of a death cult that made a
nice companion piece to his 1954 novel Messiah. Finally, this
period of his career saw the emergence and completion of his American
Chronicles, seven books
that occupy their own place in his canon.
Three (1962)
Vidal returned to the novel in 1964 with the publication of
Julian, which he began to write in 1959 and had somewhere in his
mind as early as 1952, when he completed Messiah. (That novel's
protagonist, Eugene Luther, talks of writing a book on the Roman emperor
Julian.) By 1962, Vidal had completed the early portions of the novel,
which he published in Three, along with the complete texts of
Williwaw and A Thirsty Evil. In Three, the
excerpt from Julian is titled "Julian the Apostate: The
Beginning of a Novel." Little of significance was changed in these early
chapters other than a tightening and revising of the prose.
Julian (1964)
For his return to the novel after a 10-year absense, Vidal embraced a form
for which he would become renowned. Julian the Apostate was a Roman
emperor, circa 4th Century A.D., who tried to rout Christianty from the
empire. Vidal tells Julian's story through the eyes of three narrators:
Libanius of Antioch, who in his time was a prolific writer of letters;
Priscus of Athens, whose writing (if any) has not survived; and Julian
himself, for whom Vidal constructs a fictional memoir. As Libanius and
Priscus - buth true historical figures - exchange letters and notes about
their late friend Julian some 20 years after his death, the emperor's
memoir fills in the gaps unknown to the two men.
This vivid, exciting historical novel immediately established Vidal as a
master of the form. Filled with decades of the author's love of
antiquity and the knowledge of his vast reading about it, Julian
was a huge best seller and returned him to the A-list of
popular American novelists. He would write about Roman imperial history
once more, in 1979, with a screenplay about the bloodthirsty Emperor
Caligula. But the film, produced by Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine,
was a high-class, hard-core disaster, despite the presence of such stars
as Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud.
Myra Breckinridge (1968)
After two novels that delighted the book-buying public, nobody expected
what came next from Vidal: In the character of Myra Breckinridge - nee
Myron Breckinridge - Vidal creates a ribald parody of sexual morality and
identity. Myra's adventures in Hollywood leave nothing to the imagination
- "The Rape of Rusty" in Chapter 29 in unparalleled in Vidal's canon - and
her narrative voice is the most wicked and bristling ever heard from
Vidal. The book was an enormous best seller, banned for a time in
Australia, and edited for publication in England, where they removed
explicit references to anal penetration, and where Vidal had to switch
publishers from Heinemann to Blond) for this one book, returning to
Heinemann for his next novel. It turned a corner on Vidal's public image
and created for him a startling, challenging new persona.
In 1987, Vidal republished Myra Breckinridge in a hardcover
edition called Myra Breckinridge and Myron, bring it together
with its 1975 sequel. He made minor revisions to Myra for
this reissue but "considerable" change to Myron. This two-book
volume also appeared in England boasting: "For the first time, the
unexpurgated versions." Presumably, between 1968 and 1987, anal sex came
back into vogue in our Mother Land.
Two Sisters (1970) This is a strange
little book. The cover calls it "a memoir in the form a novel." The title
page calls is "a novel in the form of a memoir." It's "then" and "now"
passages jump
back and forth in time to form a sort
of autobiographical roman-a-clef about Vidal's private and
literary life, including
a passage that recalls Jimmie. And then, stuffed in the middle of the
book, Vidal presents
a play, written by one of his fictional characters and set in ancient
Greece,
called "The Two Sisters of Euphesus." The Marietta Donegal character of
the novel - who
begins by revealing her breasts and lying about her age - is a thinly
veiled parody
of Anais Nin.
Myron (1975)
An unsatisfying and overly contrived sequel to Myra Breckinridge,
this novel finds Myron anatomically a man, although Myra is still inside
him and keeps coming out. When Myra tosses Myron's body inside a B-movie,
pandemonium ensues. This book was published during a time of censorship
alerts in the U.S. So as a parody on this state of affairs, Vidal removed
"dirty" words from the books and replaced them with the names of the
Supreme Court justices who ruled in the majority on the "community
standards" pornography decision. Thus he writes in his introduction: "I
believe that these substitutions are not only edifying and redemptive but
tend to revitalize a language gone stale and inexact from too much
burgering around with meaning." When he revised and republished the book
in 1987 in Myra Breckinridge and Myron, he restored the offending
words, saying that the time had passed for such things. The British
edition of this two-book volume also restores some graphic sexual
references that Vidal was forced to remove for the original U.K.
publication of Myra in 1969.
Kalki (1978)
Teddy Ottinger, lesbian aviatrix and part-time journalist, becomes
personal pilot to Kelly, an
ex-G.I. from New Orleans who's an expert in chemical-biological warfare
from his time in
Vietnam. Together with a few followers, he declares himself the
reincarnation of the
Hindu god Kalki and becomes leader of a religious cult that takes on a
world following.
But Kelly/Kalki has a deeper
purpose: He wants to destroy all of mankind and repopulate the world with
his progeny. This is
a dark, imaginative, engaging novel of religion and culture, and something
of a companion
piece to Messiah, although not quite as original or captivating.
Creation (1981, 2002)
With Cyrus Spitama - the blind, 75-year-old Persian ambassador to Athens,
and the grandson of Zoroaster, the last earthly prophet of the Wise Lord -
Vidal creates his most worldly historical narrators. Cyrus lived at the
time of "creation" - that is, when culture as we know it was born in
Greece, Persia, Bactria, India and Cathay, the lands we visit as Cyrus
dictates his memoirs to his young nephew Democritus. A faithful Persian,
he has very little good to say about the demi-civilized Greeks, who forbid
discussion of astronomy and who still worship the ancient gods, which
amuses Zoroaster's monotheist kin. (Cyrus doesn't fear Greek insults
because they save their best ones for each other.) As a 7-year-old, Cyrus
stood beside his grandfather at the moment of his death at the hand of
invading Turanians and heard the dying Zoroaster speak the actual words of
the Wise Lord. Therefore, as a devout Zoroastrian, he cannot tell a lie -
which makes him a conveniently "reliable" narrator through whom Vidal can
debunk conventional history as he wishes.
Creation opens at a long-winded lecture given by Herodotus, not
yet known as "the father of history," about the Greek-Persian wars.
Naturally, he gets everything wrong, but Cyrus, a foreigner and a
diplomat, cannot correct him. A friend to Darius the Great and Xerxes, and
a contemporary of Buddha, Confucius, Pythagoras, Pericles and many others,
Cyrus shares his lifetime of historical encounters with his eager nephew,
retelling the story of the Greek-Persian wars and setting the record
straight on just about everything. Are we to believe that the bright but
incompetent young Socrates was the mason who botched the repairs to the
front wall of Cyrus' home? Or that the poet Aeschylus died when an eagle
mistook his bald head for a rock and, with deadly accuracy, bombed it with
a turtle? Cyrus tells us these things with the kind of cool Vidalian elan
that's hard to contradict. He's also Vidal's most sincerely devout
religious figure, although after traveling the world and seeing so many
other sincere (if misguided) religions, Cyrus confesses that he's not sure
which theology is the true one. And of course, Cyrus' observations on
politics echo into our own time - and through Vidal's own essays. (We are
told, for example, that the Greeks were the only people who let their sex
lives interfere with their politics.)
For Vidal, this novel marked something of a return to ancient
Greece: Among the papers in his archives at Harvard is a 13-page
film treatment (never filmed) from the early 1960s titled "The Golden
Age." It opens with the trial of Socrates - "the jury consisted of 500
male citizens of Athens" - and goes on to tell a story about Pericles, the
Athenian statesman who lived in the 5th Century B.C., the same era as
Creation, in which Pericles is a character.
Vidal reissued Creation in a "restored" hardcover edition in
2002. Back in '81, Vidal's long-time editor at Random House, Jason
Epstein, felt the novel was too long and cut four chapters from it. The
episode precipitated the demise of Vidal's relationship with Epstein.
Twenty years later, Vidal had moved to a new publisher, Doubleday, which
agreed to restore the missing chapters and reissue the novel in hardcover.
Duluth (1983)
Vidal calls Myra Breckinridge and other post-modern novels like
it in his canon his "inventions" because of the imaginary worlds he
creates. This novel, which has a popular cult following, takes place in a
mythical American city called Duluth, where every aspect of American life,
climate and landscape is represented. But "Duluth" is also a TV series
where people from the town of Duluth go when they die. With this loopy
premise, Vidal cuts loose on American culture. The story is
inconsequential to the endless spray of biting jokes about the American
Way of Life. But the jokes seem repetitive after about 30 pages, and the
book doesn't really seem to go anywhere.
Live from Golgotha (1992)
As with Duluth, the jokes here fly by faster than the "Amens" as
a Sunday church service. The targets: Religion, history and media culture,
especially the corporate-dominated commercial television networks. The
story of this novel - which, like Duluth, is difficult to get
through unless you simply read it for the jokes - has NBC discovering a
way to go back in time to Golgotha and broadcast the crucifixion of Jesus
live to the modern world. And it's a good thing: A 20th century computer
whiz, known to them only as the Hacker, has begun to hack back in time,
erasing the Gospel from its Jesus-era computer tapes, and thus
obliterating the Messiah from future history. Confused? So is Timothy,
bishop of Macedonia and our befuddled narrator, who's been ordered by his
boyhood lover, Paul - friend and disciple to Jesus back in the olden days,
but now a short bald liar who gropes men without asking permission - to
write down his memories of Jesus' life story PDQ before the Hacker can
erase them all from the face of human history. And history could use an
account of the true story of Jesus: In Timothy's memory, Jesus
was "enormously fat with this serious hormonal problem - the so-called
parable about the loaves of bread and fishes were just the fantasies of
someone who could never get enough to eat." In fact, it's not even the
real Jesus on the cross that day: It's Marvin Wasserstein, City College
graduate, doctorate from MIT, and former chief executive of General
Electric, which owns NBC, which is broadcasting the event live.
Despite this wildly imaginative (and thoroughly blasphemous) premise
- or perhaps because of it - Live from Golgotha is a sit-com for
highly educated religious and cultural historian. (How many people will
recall that "Wojtyla" is the Christian name of Pope John Paul II?) Vidal
stuff its with every quip and play on words he can muster, a few of them
executed swiftly enough to provoke a smile. When someone tells Timothy,
"I'm Jewish," Timothy muses: "[That's] a curious thing to say since it is
hardly possibly in that matter to be 'ish'. Either one is a Jew or not, a
hacker or not."
Although this novel brims with Vidal's knowledge of ancient history -
which he routs as much as he explores - perhaps it's best to think of
Live from Golgotha as part of a Vidalian trilogy of
time-and-space-tripping inventions: Duluth parodies television
and American culture; Live from Golgotha continues the parody of
television and throws in religion and history; and The Smithsonian
Institution (1998) picks up the notions of time travel and historical
parody where Golgotha leaves off. The degree to which you enjoy
the jokes will determine the degree to which you like these novels. But
all in all, Vidal covers these issues much more concisely and
provocatively in his essays.
The Smithsonian Institution (1998)
Bringing together his "inventions" and his historical novels
- and resurrecting Vidal's beloved Jimmie in the grandest way yet - this
fantasy takes place in the the venerable old museum, where "T.", a young
teen-age physics whiz from St. Albans School - the very school that Vidal
attended as a boy - gets mixed up in experiments to alter time and change
the past. By night in the Smithsonian, wax figures of historic people come
to life, and "T." has an affair with Mrs. Grover Cleveland. "T." seems to
be very much like the young Vidal himself, except at one point he alludes
to knowing Vidal. So when "T." realizes that his tinkering with history
will result in the death of his St. Albans friend at Iwo Jima - that's
where Jimmie Trimble died - "T." travels back in time to save his friend.
Thus Vidal uses this novel to save Jimmie from his fate - something he's
been doing in his literature, one way or another, for half a century.
Clouds and Eclipses (2006)
The short stories in this collection aren't really later works by Vidal.
He wrote them all in the late 1940s through the mid-1950s, and with the
exception of the title story, all appeared in his 1956 short story
collection, A Thirsty
Evil. But Vidal withheld Clouds and Eclipses from the
1956 collection: He based the story upon an anecdote told to him by
Tennessee Williams about Williams' family, and Vidal worried that
publishing it might cause some embarrassment for his friend's kinfolk.
Flash forward to 2005, when archivists at Harvard found the manuscript for
the long-lost story as they prepared his papers for public viewing. The
Harvard Review approached Vidal about publishing it, and the story
appeared in the journal's issue No. 29 along with a note on the story by
Vidal. Now, in September 2006, a publisher will issue this paperback short
story collection, which includes Clouds and Eclipses together at
last with the stories from A Thirsty Evil.
The title story concerns a minister, who's being blackmailed for a sexual
indiscretion with a teen-age girl, and his young nephew, who bears witness
to the old man's fiery penance. (In real life, Williams thought the
incident, which happened to his maternal grandfather, may have involved a
teen-age boy.) The title comes from Shakespeare's 35th sonnet about the
good and the bad in everything: "Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and
sun,/And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud." It's all very discreetly
told, as the times and the form demanded.
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©Copyright 2005 by
Harry Kloman
University of Pittsburgh
kloman@pitt.edu