I Told You So Page 2
Q.So, we had Prescott Bush, the grandfather, who I guess now would now be called a liberal Republican; then we had George H. W. Bush, who would be more of a Nixon Republican; and now we have George W. Bush. Is there any historical trend here?
A.I don’t think they are a dynasty we need bother with. I don’t see much future for them. It’s going to take four or five years to recover from this administration—to get the Constitution back, to get the legal codes back. They’ve done a lot of damage for a sort of nothing family.
Q.I wonder how you rank Bush 43 among the presidents. The Washington Post did a poll among historians asking who is the worst president, and it was sort of divided. Some said Bush 43, a lot said Nixon, one said Polk, for the Mexican War, one said Buchanan for not avoiding or anticipating the Civil War. What’s your ranking of Bush among the worst presidents?
A.He wins. And now every day we see his victory dance on television.
Q.In the past decade you’ve been relatively critical of Al Gore, who is some sort of relative of yours, I’m not sure. I wonder what you think of the Al Gore of today, the Academy Award winner.6
A.This is an invention that I’ve been critical of him. Quite the contrary. I think that Arianna Huffington, on this very stage, said, “Oh, you said such awful things about Al Gore.” I said, “I don’t say awful things about members of my family,” and I was sorry about the way his election was hijacked in the year 2000. I think he should have fought a little harder, that was my only criticism. I now think that he is the only candidate now who has a real theme, which is the planet.
Q.Now that we’ve considered Al Gore’s candidacy for the Presidency, of course I have to ask you about what you think of the other leaders of our opposition party: Hillary, Obama, John Edwards.
A.Oh splendid, all splendid. Look, anything to get rid of this Bush gang.
[applause]
Q.Anything else you’d like to say about Hillary?
A.I like her. She said something interesting when she was getting ready to run for Senator in New York—my own private advice was to go to Illinois and become Governor. Chicago is a much better city, I think, to launch yourself from. Anyway, she was going through where she was popular. She was most unpopular among white men with some property. She was asking, “What have I done to them?” And she kept on with some of her advisors, I am told—I didn’t get this firsthand. And she was told, “It is because you remind them of their first wife.” [laughter]
Q.Let’s talk about Iraq for a second. With all the emphasis on the stupidity of Bush’s war, and of the Coalition Provisional Authority, headed by Paul Bremer, the implication is that if we had more troops there, if we had people running this war who understood the Middle East, if we hadn’t had these Republican ideologues running the reconstruction, we could have succeeded in building “a democratic Iraq.” I wonder what you think about that.
A.First you would have had to have had a democratic war, in which the people have something to say. We didn’t have anything to say.
We had no business fighting in Iraq. It was only though a series of lies that the war got as far as it did in Congress. It was all nonsense. What we do is relentlessly search for enemies; we’ve been doing it now for many, many years, but it’s never been so highly developed as with this gang.
The point is that we should not have gone to war. This is no business of ours. I love the last minute idea of, “Oh, we are going to bring democracy to Iraq!” “It’s a fledgling democracy,” says the little fellow. What a fledgling! It looks more like a goose to me—one gently cooking and simmering.
I’m beginning to have a theory. I wrote a play in 1962, based on one by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, about Romulus the Great, the last Roman emperor. He had become an Emperor in order to destroy the Roman Empire, because it had been immoral and bloodthirsty. He had become Emperor for one purpose—to destroy Rome and its armies. I think we’ve got another one. I think the little fellow, instinctively, knew he was never going to measure up to a real president like Roosevelt, or even to his father. So he has wrecked everything that he touches.
To wreck the United Nations, he gets Mr. Bolton7 to go there, who hates it and wants to destroy it. Look at what he does with the army: he gets a pharmaceutical freak to play warlord of the Pentagon, and that just doesn’t work. “Heck of a job, Brownie.”8 He gets people who don’t know how to save a city from a flood. Whatever he does is a mess. Now that takes mind—and probably a plan.
Q.Let’s go to questions from the audience.
From the audience:
Q.I’d like you to comment on the healthcare in this country, because you are sitting in a wheelchair, and I am without my front teeth.
A.Madam, I see no connection.
[laughter]
From the audience:
Q.I’ve been a fan of yours since the 60’s, when you used to do those great debates with William F. Buckley9. I was wondering if you would consider doing those kinds of debates again. I’d pay good money to see them.
A.I’d pay good money not to do them.
[laughter]
Questioner 2, cont.Also, I was wondering if you had a comment on the recent passing of Buckley’s wife, Pat Buckley, who died a few days ago.
A.I liked her. She was very nice. Long suffering. When I was speaking in West Virginia in Charles Town, the capital of the state, to an audience about like this, someone asked a question from the audience: “When Buckley called you what he did on television, why didn’t you belt him one?” I said, “I’ve done many wrong things in my life—but I have never decked a lady.” [laughter]
Q.I’d like to ask the last question. In your career you’ve done it all: novels, essays, film, television. You’ve won all the big awards. What keeps you going? What gets you up in the morning?
A.Rage.
Q.Thank you, Gore Vidal!
2Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities
University of Southern California
Dec. 15, 2006
The Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities is a group of 100 or so that brings together academics with independent writers, artists and critics. Modeled on the better-known New York Institute of the Humanities, it meets monthly during the academic year at USC, although faculty members come also from UCLA and other area campuses. The meetings include lunch followed by a talk, followed by questions and comments. Usually the talks are by fellows describing their new projects, but sometimes outsiders are invited—Joan Didion, Pico Iyer, Alex Ross, Michael Kinsley.
Vidal’s audience included theater director Gordon Davidson, Getty Museum Director John Walsh, Getty Research Institute director Thomas Crow, Time film critic Richard Schickel, novelist Marianne Wiggins (wife of Salmon Rushdie), and UCLA historians Joyce Appleby and Eugen Weber.
Vidal arrived wearing a Harvard athletic letter jacket.
Vidal:I didn’t go to Harvard, but I have gone on, as you can see, to be a professor of Harvard. I was in a terrible movie in which I played a Harvard professor.1 This is the winter wear there. I am now on a secret visit to the Southland, examining the facilities of the community colleges, and that is why I am here at USC today. [laughter]
Q.As a matter of fact, there is a fascinating passage in Point to Point Navigation, where you write that Paul Bowles,2 who was preparing to teach at Cal State Northridge—this must have been sometime in the late 1940’s—asked you the night before his first class how you teach writing. What was all this about?
A.I don’t think his students ever found out. Paul himself was very vague. He said, “What is a class?” He had this extraordinary literal mind that he learned from Gertrude Stein, who was his first mentor when he was just out of, or on the lam from, the University of Virginia. She told him, “You’re not a poet, you better be a musician, it’s easier.” So he went to study with Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copeland, and became a very distinguished musician, and then went back to writing, and wrote rather better than Ms. Stein. But that was all in the future. But no, our subject
was community colleges. I am delighted: they are springing up all over.
Q.One of the things they do at community colleges is teach fiction writing. I think there are programs everywhere now. At my school, U.C. Irvine, we have an undergraduate major called “Literary Journalism.” It started only a couple of years ago, but it already has over 200 majors, and if there are 200 at Irvine, there is a similar number at a hundred other schools. This means hundreds of thousands of students are studying to be writers. What do you make of this?
A.We have Truman Capote to thank for that. As bad writers go, he took the cake. So bad was he, you know, he created a whole new art form: the nonfiction novel. He had never heard of a tautology, he had never heard of a contradiction. His social life was busy.
To have classes in fiction—that really is hopeful, isn’t it. People can go to school and bring in physics. The genius of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: He had to take all of his first year courses at, what was it, Cornell? One of his teachers was Nabokov. And everything he had in his first year’s physics went in to Gravity’s Rainbow. Whether it fit in or not, it just went in there. That’s one way of doing it.
Q.In Point to Point Navigation, you start by saying you were “once a famous novelist.” Were there famous novelists in the forties and fifties?
A.More so than now, yeah. When I gave the Massey Lectures at Harvard,3 I had mostly graduate students in the audience, very bright. A great many Chinese from mainland China, who know a great bit more about American civilization than the locals know. So it was quite a treat talking to them. But I noticed something interesting whenever I took on a class at Harvard, undergraduate, post graduate, whatever: no one ever mentioned a book, or a poem, or anything to do with literature. They’re interested in our history, they’re interested in our politics. But I finally broke the ice with my Chinese friends. I said, has anybody here seen The Doors?4 Well the whole room fell apart. Everybody had seen The Doors. I got away with a hour without having to do anything while they told me about The Doors. That’s fame, alas.
Q.You wrote a series of novels about American history. You call the series “Narratives of Empire.” They start with the revolutionary era and Burr and conclude seven novels later with The Golden Age, which is about the forties and fifties. It is hard to think about another writer who has written the entire history of his country in this way.
A.And it’s also hard to think of a reader in the United States, including those who pass as critics, who would read it. This is just off the map. Literature is supposed to be about merit, and there is nothing else that matters on earth. If you have values. Now, it’s always about somebody trying to get tenure in Ann Arbor, and his wife leaves him because of that au pair from England, and the child is autistic, and we have a lot of hospital scenes that are heartbreaking. And this goes on, and on, and on. I once had to judge the National Book Awards. There was no fiction in it—there was nothing. There was certainly no literature in it. It was just “write about what you know.”And what they knew wasn’t very much. At least with me you’ll find out who was Buchanan’s Vice President.
[laughter]
Okay, I’m tooting my own horn.
Q.On the subject of writing about what you know, you introduced the term “The American Empire”, I think, into polite society, and polite society wasn’t too happy about it initially.
A.I was born in the lair of Romulus and Remus, Washington D.C. I was right there at the beginning, at the heart of it. My grandfather was blind from the age of ten, and I lived with him until I was 17 when I went into the army. I would take him down to the Senate and act as his page, and it was the engine room of the Republic. We were a Republic turning military. The Second World War was beginning, and the town was flooded with Brits. There was something like 11,000 of them, I’ve been told. Some of the brightest people in England, starting with Isaiah Berlin, they were all there, to try and get us in the war to save England from Hitler. France had just fallen, I’m speaking now of the spring of 1940. And I understood perfectly well what an empire was. I had also been reading a lot of Roman history. I was fascinated. The first grown-up book I read was Stories From Livy, a 19th-century edition, which got me into the Republic, and then later the Empire surrounded us all.
It was a great time to be an observant kid in the position of a fly on the wall. My mother was a leading isolationist/hostess in the town—Mrs. Auchincloss, she was called5 —and Senator Gore was anti-Roosevelt, anti-going-to-war. He had opposed World War I, and was one of 80 per cent of people that did not want to go to war in Europe again. These were fierce years, this was a fierce debate.
I was head of the America First group at Exeter.6 Arthur Schlesinger Jr. always thought he could rile me by saying, “Oh, you know about Gore, he’s an isolationist.” Of course I was, you idiot! And so was every right-thinking young man on the left. Everybody from Norman Thomas to Senator Burton Wheeler,7 all the progressives in the United States were anti-war. This is something left out by many historians. We have always been a nation devoted to the principles of George Washington. Nations do not have particular friends or enemies, only interests—a nice mercantile piece of advice that most intellectuals accepted; Charles Beard as well, master of your discipline, was also on that side. It was highly respectable. Then “isolationist” became a word for anyone who—well, who had been abducted by aliens in the backyard, had seen a world elsewhere and didn’t like it much.
Q.As an America Firster in 1940, you weren’t on the left. How did you go from being an Exeter America Firster to being a critic of the empire?
A.Just lucky.
[laughter]
No, I knew it was a bad notion. I took Washington’s farewell address seriously. I took seriously John Quincy Adams’ Fourth of July address of 1824: America is not a nation that goes forth to foreign lands to kill dragons. We fight under no banner other than that of our own, even though it be compatible with liberty, freedom, justice, and all that. Yes we could do this, we could become dictator of the world. And we would lose our own soul. I was much moved by that, and stuck with it.
Q.Your grandfather, Senator Gore, was from Oklahoma, a Populist state. Did you visit Oklahoma? You were a Washington D.C. boy.
A.I didn’t like the empire, but I liked being in Rome. [laughter] I never set foot in Oklahoma until I was grown. I had to go to the army, then I went south of the border, and went on writing in Guatemala, in time to be there during the preparations by Ambassador Peurifoy8 to overthrow the government of Arbenz, democratically elected, because he wanted to put a small tax on United Fruit. And Mario Monteforte Toledo, President of their Assembly, and Vice President of the country, had an Indian girlfriend in Antigua, and he would come up on weekends, and we would always argue politics. He would talk about “yanqui imperalismo,” and I would always say, “The United States is not like that.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. He would say, “No, your government is prepared to overthrow us. I shall end up in exile.” I said, “Well, look, we’ve just conquered—we’ve just appropriated Japan and Germany. What do we want Guatemala for?” But he just knew instinctively that we were piggish, and needed a little fruit for our diet. That was to be the big banana for us.9
And so it came to pass. Arévalo was replaced democratically by a great believer in our constitution, and in Franklin Roosevelt—Jacobo Arbenz, who became President. And that’s when we called in the C.I.A to overthrow the government, and replace him with a fellow called Armas, who began a bloodbath that continues till this day.10 If that is not an empire, I don’t know what is.
Q.On the one hand, we have your books about American history, but you’ve also written a very different kind of book, of which Myra Breckinridge is my favorite. 1968 gave us Nixon, and 1968 gave us Myra. We know where Nixon came from, but where did Myra come from?
A.William F. Buckley, Jr. [laughter] I needed some model. And, some of you may remember, I debated him on television. At the ‘68 Convention in Chicago, and also in Miami at the
Republican Convention, and he was just out of his mind with fury at whatever was going on. And I realized that here was a true American. I called him a “crypto-Nazi” because I couldn’t think of the word “fascist.” We were talking very quickly. Anyway, I take it all back now. He’s a very pure nothing. [laughter] I was doing him the honor of superimposing a system on him, a mind where none was present.
Q.Myra loved film, yet the film of Myra Breckinridge was, let us say, not a success. What went wrong there?
A.It was produced by the wrong people. I think that is usually what goes wrong. They are drawn to unusual novels, sometimes even classics. They’ll go after The Great Gatsby, which is a lovely novel. They’ll go, many times, after Anna Karenina. Nobody going after it understands why it’s marvelous: it’s marvelous because there is a personal voice, which is the author’s. They don’t allow that there is an author. Grudgingly they say that the director is an auteur, but they wink at you when they say that because they know perfectly well that it is the producer’s brother-in-law who did the last script. And got credit.
Forgive me for this, but Hollywood film is a medium basically without a mind. It’s not a functioning mind, and it’s not a communicative mind. Minds can create it, but it’s essentially moving pictures, which are made to move you, and which are emotional. It’s very good at terror, pity, awe; but it can’t make you think.
You know, the French are a people who love cinema far, far too much. Their favorite is—and this I suppose is also mine—Battleship Potemkin. There is a scene in it that is just magical for them, I mean they look like they’ve just seen Bernadette at Lourdes when you mention it.11 And it’s the baby in the buggy going bumpety-bump-bump-bump down the steps, after the Potemkin has rebelled against the government. Next time they pull that on you, you pull this one on them: Tell me what that scene means. What does it have to do with the Revolution? The movie’s supposedly about that. It doesn’t mean anything. And movies can do that all too easily. We prose writers with flat pages have great difficulty in trying to recreate bumpety-bump-bumps.