Editorial / Penetrating the Mysteries of Ravello
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial / Penetrating the Mysteries of Ravello" R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. How abundant with curiosities is this land we call America, this AngloEuropean culture we call the melting pot. Our greatest...
...Vidal will be around to enjoy it...
...Sometimes he carries the day: Thrown in with some fundamentalist Christian or some dull-witted congressman, he bludgeons his prey as the audience marvels, if not at his compassion, then at his urbanity and intelligence...
...Gore fires off salvos at the Rockefeller conspiracy, lectures, and improves us with The Novels...
...Christened Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr., he is now known simply as Gore Vidal (ve 'dal) to his customer, and it is a rare Americano who has not at one time or another been his customer...
...And back in the villa the great work continues...
...Gore could not exist without the company of discriminating minds...
...Gore is the grandson of Senator Thomas Gore, an Oklahoma populist whose memory time has obscured for all save Gore, who makes the cranky old gasbag out to be the Daniel Webster of this century...
...It is a wonderful symmetry...
...There is (wportunity in America...
...By his own admission Vidal is "a propagandist, a proselytizer, and a teacher...
...The relationship has been a long one, and I cannot but believe it has been full of high purpose...
...Gore is of course a frequent author of best-sellers, nonetheless he places himself "at the top of the heap," while disparaging Faulkner, Hemingway, and practically all his more gifted forebears...
...He goes "from gluttony to starvation...
...Paul Newman launches into a discourse on a new econometric model that might bring the whole world up to the nutritional standards of Beverly Hills...
...or "Sirhan grew up in Pasadena, a center of the John Birch Society, a center of radical right reactionaries, a despicable blot on this earth...
...Nobody in particular was to blame...
...The creed of many of his villains, their traits, and the nature of his complaint against Mailer betray a congeries of prejudices which look like nothing so much as anti-Semitism...
...Vidal prepares the lectures that he gives during his annual invasion of the American chautauqua circuit...
...Our greatest author lives not here but in far-off Italy, as does our greatest literary critic, our greatest essayist, and probably our greatest visionary...
...And the gardener, I'd rather not talk about him," Howard fumed...
...Princess Margaret speaks of Chile, and Howard Austen turns the discussion to Gore's shoes: "He had three pairs made in London twenty years ago...
...He is a man of turbulent passions and irrational prejudices...
...These judgments are recorded in a rare interview granted by the fellows to Vogue magazine in the early seventies...
...While skiing in Switzerland Buckley threw off a novel of his own, Saving the Queen...
...I have followed Gore's work for years, and I like to think of him as the Frantz Fanon of upper Park Avenue...
...Just lolling around Gore's villa, making pies, and enduring the gardener—is the thing possible...
...the "stoic serenity," the "conscience to the world...
...but what is really riveting is the frequency of his own lapses into these deficiencies...
...They hate the Jews, they hate the Negroes, the poor, the foreign...
...His appearances on college campuses have been the high point in many a young student's educational development...
...That is to say, he turned up every few nights before the country's insomniacs to malign Buckley, his family, and his friends...
...He has come to think himself an intellectual of the uppermost rung...
...He simply accepted the way people in Pasadena think...
...Buckley must have had some uneasy moments digesting that revelation, and Howard Austen must have been in despair...
...During his concession speech after the Les Crane Show a woebegone Gore admitted that with Buckley he had become "emotionally involved...
...His homosexual novels, his carousals with Tennessee Williams and other such louts, his mawkish interludes with Anais Nin, his proud pilgrimage to Andre Gide, his Hollywood years...
...On August 5, 1968, he informed a national television audience that thirty million Americans were living in poverty...
...And Howard opines that Gore's diets are "dangerous...
...Nevertheless he pursued him doggedly and some(continued on page 36) 4 The American Spectator April 1978 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) what rabidly, much the way he was then pursuing Mailer...
...His is, in the words of George Orwell, "...a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it...
...We know that he does admire the late critic Edmund Wilson, because he has compared Wilson to himself...
...In 1954 he retired from belles lettres to write for TV and the movies...
...Whatever his role on this orb, my guess is that when he passes on to glory some lucky relative will be made heir to a vast collection of hitherto unknown watercolors full of vivid truth, poems that will inflame you, works of beauty...
...Violence and cruelty inhere through many of his novels, notably Myra Breckenridge, and his humanitarian protest that Mailer and Henry Miller celebrate violence and "hatred of women" is the campaign oratory of a popinjay fighting to maintain his status as TV sage...
...I put this down as the purest act of patriotism since Jimmy Carter forsook the plow...
...Many of the things he claims to believe are purely idiotic: "...we never talk about anything very important...
...Novels are sketched, bad books reviewed, and more and more conspiracy theories of American life are hatched...
...I am sure of it...
...Vidal, spring 1963: "One must never underestimate the collective ignorance of that informed electorate for whom Thomas Jefferson had such high hopes...
...He does, of course, write novels, but no critic worth his salt has ever taken one of them seriously...
...Yet maybe his association with Gore is entirely on the up and up...
...Sarkes Tarzian Inc...
...Gore was, in time, to suffer greater ignominies at Buckley's hands...
...It is apparent that for years he has been given to sojourning into a fantasy world in which he, Gore, is a statesman of moment...
...Assiduously he propagates his message of reason, progress, radical reform, and an end to the infernal doings of the Rockefellers...
...To defend the free world...
...He speaks of her often and fondly: the time he caught her arranging flowers in a toilet bowl, the "thorny Puritan American conscience" (which he admires...
...Whether Gore is really pleased with his performance I have no way of knowing, but his success has not been without heartache...
...But precisely what does Howard do, and what has he been doing since 1950...
...They're falling apart....What can you do with him...
...Vidal, December 1974: "Most Americans are liars or crooks if they can get away with it...
...The Soviet was dangerous...
...Still, the political fantasy lingers...
...As a novelist Miller towers over Vidal...
...Actually it was to continue pumping federal money into companies like Boeing and Lockheed and keep the Pentagon full of generals and admirals while filling the pork barrels of congressmen...
...Reflecting on his first novel he once admitted "I was easily the cleverest young fox ever to disguise his ignorance and make a virtue of his limitations...
...could it be that Howard is his Che Guevara...
...but then in the New York Review of Books he spoke of "forty million poor...
...I have read all Gore's ambitious works plus Saving the Queen...
...His recent 36 The American Spectator April 1978 books all show the Hollywood touch, with their cast of morons, their faked emotions, their utterly idiotic portrayals of reality...
...that's an idea whose time has not come...
...Who is this hind...
...Whether Mailer is more taken up with violence than Vidal rleave to other minds, but certainly to speak of Miller in this way is to mislead...
...As visionaries go Gore can be lumped in with the League of Women Voters, circa 1960...
...That his ardor against American readers is never complicated by his popularity with them is another colossal example of his talent for self-deception...
...The talk turns to health care, and Gore laments that our system compares unfavorably with the barber shops of the last Persian empire, one of the few cultures he still admires (he finds it "subtle...
...This passion for altercation and abuse has marked Gore's entire career...
...In November 1974, when Gore placed himself "at the top of the heap," he did not even include Golding in the heap...
...Of course, some of The Novels have been written in Ravello, and it is there that Mr...
...It was through the medium of television that he essayed to rid America of William F. Buckley, Jr., a man who quite definitely, albeit curiously, unhinges Gore...
...In 1974 he declared to an astonished interviewer that he had moved to Italy in the early 1960s "because I was giving up practical politics and trying to avoid being drafted to run again for the House in 1964...
...National health care is a must, and Gore will not rest until America has an educational system and a mass-transit system the equal of those serving some unnamed European paradise...
...After all, even Hannah Arendt had to buy an occasional evening gown...
...The change, of course, was never consummated, but it would have been a swell show had Gore become a Cambodian...
...There is mystery here...
...as one reviewer characterized it, Gore had his flesh nibbled off by "a fair-haired barracuda named William Buckley, Jr...
...Vogue reports that "They are just good friends, nothing else, now...
...By 1976 the book had made the best-seller list, right up there with Gore's 1876...
...and to a rising generation of radical thinkers in America it would be decidedly distressing...
...We must have new and expensive weapon systems...
...They are Gore Vidal himself alone...
...Vidal, August 25, 1968: "Well, it is the greater wisdom, finally to trust the people...
...We don't say that 4 percent of the people own the country...
...It is during these butcherings that Gore gives himself away, betraying the source of all his assorted varieties of moonshine...
...When he stifles his polemical oratory long enough to lay forth a political program it becomes clear that his is the most authentic projection of the...
...Poor Gore is emotionally frozen into early adolescence and a particularly turbulent adolescence at that...
...The fox slinks on...
...Think of the frantic calls that would have gone out from some fashionable neighborhood in Phnom Penh during that tragic April in 1975, desperate calls to the "last empire on earth...
...It would be a highly vexatious disruption of Mr...
...One of every five people in the U.S...
...Before a TV appearance back in the early seventies, Norman spotted him backstage, butted him smartly in the coco, and sent him spinning onto the stage looking queasy and confounded...
...Who are these expatriates...
...His first novels, full of savorless prose and cardboard characters, were unappealing imitations of the works of his superiors...
...It just happened...
...He even composed a slogan, "You'll Get More With Gore...
...Vidal's work were Comrade Berlinguer toexpropriate his villa...
...Few among the intelligentsia have been more selfless and single-minded...
...Clear as mud...
...The United States is my theme and all that dwell in it...
...That his political mentor was Eleanor Roosevelt has long been known...
...Conceivably Howard, whosemarkedly boyish facade conceals a man of middle years, is Gore's contact with the Baader-Meinhof gang...
...He is girlish...
...In the soft light of the great vaulted living room sit Claire Bloom, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Princess Margaret, and the scholarly Newmans, Joanne and Paul...
...is mentally disturbed...
...But it's implicit in the idea of democracy, and when our system collapses and gas and food and everything has to be rationed we'll realize that was our goal anyway...
...He has no serious ideas about history, though he has written several historical novels...
...From his badinage in Vogue it is apparent he is a smooth operator...
...It was in this same year that he solemnly declared: "For myself, should the war continue after the 1968 election a change of nationality will be the only moral response...
...With intellectual courage and emotional sincerity, Miller wrote some of the finest American novels of the century...
...Let the Rockefellers, the generals, and the other rulers of the heterosexual dictatorship work their wicked wills...
...But thrown in with someone who knows what's what, he either falls sullen and silent or makes the fur fly and retreats furless...
...In 1975 the rascal Buckley struck out at him...
...I knew that if I went on living up the Hudson, I'd be a full-time politician and never write again...
...To justify our having become a garrison state, gallant Harry Truman set about deliberately alarming the American people...
...He is boyish...
...At times he sounds like the brightest graduate student ever to take a Masters of Teaching degree at Cleveland State University...
...And only Yahweh knows...
...Doubtless a sizeable minority of Americans are just as bigoted, intolerant, smug, and stupid as Gore insists...
...To Gore she was an American Socrates, and we shall be hearing of her wisdom for years...
...Now all the profligacy of his youth was decorously shoved behind the arras...
...It's heaven," Howard Austen has observed, "except for the phones and the servants...
...Other testimonials reveal an intellect that simply does not operate very well:"The true end of a democratic society is economic equality...
...Other times he is either being a tease or making heavy weather of it with the knowledge that any moderately intelligent college freshman has graspedafter an elementary course...
...In 1945 we were the world's greatest power...
...Still almost no other writer is ever allowed such unqualified praise...
...There they were together, the Great Novelist and William F. Buckley, Jr...
...From a spectacular Romanesque villa commanding a cliff hundreds of feet above the Mediterranean Sea, Vidal looks ever westward, and with garlic fumes to his back, analyzes "the last empire on earth," capitalism run amok, and the horror of the "heterosexual dictatorship" that so oppresses the libidinous elf squirming within us all...
...His lack of, shall we say, fixity is legendary...
...Howard has been Gore's constant companion since 1950...
...This man is no fool...
...Perhaps he clandestinely bankrolls a Puerto Rican bomb emporium or a liberation cabal as yet unactivated...
...He decided that Bobby Kennedy was evil and he killed him...
...Admittedly, Vogue is not known to have a very intellectual readership, but then if one is truly serious about socialism and the heterosexual dictatorship one will carry the struggle to all parts...
...Officially this was to protect us from the evil Commies...
...It's voluptuous and maybe auto-sexually satisfying, and his diets might be a sort of rebirth, but I think they're too traumatic for the body...
...Review he notified the literary world that "There's only one living writer in English that I entirely admire...William Golding...
...Far into the Mediterranean night the colloquy goes...
...So far as I am able to ascertain, it is all humbug...
...When the revolution finally comes one hopes that Mr...
...two nights later the figure inexplicably dropped to twenty-two million...
...On summer nights the villa fills with the most renowned left-wing intellectuals of what the reactionaries persist in calling the Free World...
...Full of duty and courage, he set out to elucidate the frightening dimensions of right-wingery then being resurrected by this fellow Buckley...
...And so Gore returned to his Art...
...This must have been a grim time back in Ravello...
...When he finally returned to the novel he brought with him a professionalism that can only be learned in the clever company of Hollywood hacks...
...And when under pressure he is feverish...
...Vidal, November 1968: "I have always felt that we must never underestimate the essential bigotry of the white majority in the United States...
...In pursuit of the congressman's gaud no indignity was beneath him...
...Through the years Gore has learned to write fluent and amusing essays, but here too he lives a life of fantasy...
...Sirhan grew up in this atmosphere and I do not doubt that he heard many anti-Kennedy speeches...
...The cold war began...
...Gore's struggles continue, and the beatings inflicted on him have been fearful...
...In 1960 the fantasy took life, and he ran for Congress in New York's 29th district...
...You get a couple, and either the woman is crazy or the man's a drunk...or both...
...The happy result has been a relentless stream of learned disquisitions, generally appearing in the New York Review of Books, but occasionally turning up in more abstruse journals like Marxist Perspectives...
...Gore could use a Boswell, and Howard assuredly has perceived the essence of the great man: "He's crazy about peas, and he'll kill for baby potatoes and asparagus...
...EDITORIAL Penetrating the Mysteries of Ravello R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Gore makes a very big thing out of the derisible character of a middle-class American burgher, who in Gore's composite has large elements of George Babbitt and George Wallace along with just a vague suggestion of Nelson Rockefeller...
...How fine are The Novels...
...mind of Eleanor now operating in America...
...Yet the villa, built in 1927 by Countess Szechenyi, the daughter of Lord Grimthorpe, is spacious, serene, and secure, an ideal laboratory for his valuable cerebrations...
...In the fall 1974 issue of the Paris...
...Twenty-five thousand votes were the thin margin between defeat and a rebirth of the American Republic...
...Precisely whom he does admire is not easy to establish, his penchant for contradiction being as active in literary judgments as in political asseverations...
...Vidal, the author of Williwaw and so many other memorable masterworks, lives in Ravello, south of Naples, where, as he says, "I do nothing but think about my country...
...Could he be in the pay of Arab idealists...
...Championing radical reform in America is an unrewarding business, and we intellectuals will never forget the November/December 1974 issue of Architectural Digest: The Connoisseur's Magazine of Fine Interior Design, wherein our brother's villa, named "La Rondinaia," was featured...
...A friend and advisor to Carlos (Fats) Martinez, the international terrorist...
...They are one in the same...
...In Ravello, the flame of idealism still burns, and if Gore has his way, by God, it will become a general conflagration...
...some rainy afternoon not yet arrived a middle-aged Patty Hearst might just thumb through an ancient copy of Vogue and 0000h the old flame could rekindle, the Internationale could strike up anew, and the American establishment might again be wobbled...
...On the other hand, one has to hope that the revolution does not arrive in Italy before coming to America...
...Yet if one considers the whole of Gore's public life, all those years of preposterous pronunciamentoes and fantastic poses, one gets the impression that he has become "emotionally involved" more often than might be expected of a middle-aged writer...
...His earlier, less complicated writing made him a fortune of sorts, but today he is almost wholly devoted to writing literature for the ages and to apprising the world of the doom that awaits it if America does not follow a more enlightened course...
...He deserves a time of dawn rather than an era of gloom...
...Unfortunately those industries that had become rich during the war combined with the military [creating] a vast military establishment...
...Through the years Gore's conspiracy theories have grown increasingly outlandish, as they approximate ever more closely those of the lunatic right...
...Vogue notifies us that his spinach soup and lemon chiffon pie are universally admired, but I have heard nothing of them...
...I find these to be really terrible people...
...Bloomington, Indiana 38 The American Spectator April 1978...
...Furthermore he has appeared on television more often than Idi Amin...
...Lemon Trees and Flowers These are the kinds of calculations Gore and Howard must make, as the pasta boils in the kitchen and the gardener flummoxes in the sunshine amid "La Rondinaia's" six acres of lemon trees and flowers...
...alas, the amateur Buckley stands close to the top of the heap...
...but what is Howard's role...
...The irony is that the Soviet was not dangerous to us at that time...
...The people of Pasadena are well off...
...In fact it is doubtful that he has any serious ideas at all...
...Gore's portrayal of homosexuality's place in the ancient world is either ignorant or dissembling...
...and the first and second world wars destroyed the old European empires, and created ours...
...How different from Vidal, and it is fitting that Miller should live his last days in a quiet California neighborhood, confident in his authorship of many fine books and utterly remote from the fantasies of Ravello...
...Buckley merely outwits him, while Mailer actually does him violence, often pausing during cocktail parties to paste him a good one...
...Actually, Gore's life as a novelist is only a little less illusory than his life as a politician...
...The Pope, at least in the early sixties, was in especially good odor with TV junkies, and Gore found the battle joined...
...They are all best-sellers and all provide irrefutable support for his criticism of the best-seller list...
...The trashiness of American literary tastes is one of Gore's favorite and most persuasive propositions...
...The war ended sadly for Gore when he appeared face to face with the fabled debater on New York's Les Crane Show...
...His sense of history is erratic...
...He has written novels, mysteries, Hollywood and TV screenplays, book reviews, essays, and poems...
...The noble effort began in January 1962, on a national TV talk show during which Gore, then as now a confirmed pagan, charged that Buckley had attacked no less an eminence than the Pope...
...And Howard allows as how "We each have our own friends, and we each respect what the other does...
...Vidal's is not an easy life...
...He knows the arcana of the ancients, world literature, the quiddities of enlightened policy...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
