A "Book-chat' with Michael Wood on Gore Vidal
MATHEWSON, RUTH
Perspectives A 'BOOK-CHAT' WITH MICHAEL WOOD ON GORE VIDAL BY RUTH MATHEWSON AS a term of abuse, "book-chat" yields only to "academe" in Gore Vidal's fourth collection of essays, Matters of...
...Some anger or resentment may well be swimming about behind all the high jinks...
...He was born in England, and after graduating from Cambridge in 1957, he "backed into a doctorate" because he "wanted to go on reading...
...the "great names" (all Jewish-sounding) on a list of academic critics...
...R.M.: When Vidal isn't charging promiscuity, he makes the old Mencken argument: The Academy is too timid, too "demure...
...And with the odd situation of novels written expressly for the classroom...
...Vidal is right that you can't do this scientifically, by arriving with a scheme and dumping it on the text...
...But I notice that he has described himeself as occupying "the wild marches of a border lord...
...Recently I suggested to a class—I rather like Von-negut—that we might read Cat's Cradle, and they all just laughed...
...But I do think that by teaching students how to read one book, you can get them to read the next one with more care, and so on...
...Vidal is obviously much smarter than the professors he mocks, and he writes better, but I think he has a sort of moral objection to people with audiences they haven't in any way earned...
...Vidal is, of course, a prolific writer with other steady interests: the classical world, American history and politics, homosexuality as civil right and ecological salvation...
...And there's Myra Breckinridge, quoting Levi-Strauss...
...M.W.: Yes, when he says he always skipped over Barthelme's New Yorker pieces to get to Perelman, 1 realized he has a fleeting resemblance to S.J.P...
...Mailer is a Bollingbroke, a born usurper...
...M.W.: But I would say that anything that gets people to read good books under whatever circumstances is probably a good thing...
...So now students are talking the way professors used to...
...Fortunately...
...R.M.: Yet he did say in 1965 that "those in college formed the largest single subculture in the United States...
...When he says that "the deducible laws which govern the execution of Emma are not going to be of much use in defining The Idiot," I get a wild idea of a procession of specialists, academic servicemen: "I've come to read the meter...
...Or "we can read that at home...
...R.M.: Maybe he thinks he makes up for this with his harshness toward his own reactionary background, or that he is, after all, merely playing a game Jewish writers have played with wasps...
...M.W.: Joyce couldn't have predicted the success he would have there...
...And, though my university job puts me on the other side of a very high fence, I think there's no way the Academy can be defended against a lot of his strictures...
...R.M.: He seems to want to preserve his professional and amateur standing at the same time—because he is a pro, and because he often is writing for the love of it...
...This makes for a special approach, an appeal to sophisticates and groundlings in the same sentence...
...Most of his mischief, though, is designed to hold his readers...
...Young professors like it, and students like it...
...These vocations, as well as the titles of his books—Stendhal and America at the Movies—show Wood to be at home in both the "Pfublic]" and "U[niversity]" worlds...
...I've come to do Emma," With a kit, you know...
...M.W.: I'll begin by saying how much I admire Vidal...
...Still, they are genuinely funny, and I suppose my discomfort is part of his plan...
...I think some of that formaldehyde business is just a writer's snobbery about critics...
...Of American novelists, Saul Bellow is perhaps the only candidate, and I don't have the feeling that people consider it part of their education to have read everything of his...
...He wants to hang on to two or three different publics at once...
...But that word "promiscuous"?Vidal can't give up a really natty expression, so it's hard to tell the depth of concern or considered opinion...
...It's true that nothing very drastic happens to professors with tenure...
...How many critics do you have to stop reading to have a good laugh...
...It's a form of fame writers didn't know until the 20th century, but no modern author (except Thomas Mann...
...It's not quite the same as Vidal's complaint about Barth—that he's writing academic novels...
...He writes for example, that Robert Moses "made Coriolanus look like Hubert Humphrey...
...But now Vidal is concerned with the "promiscuous" teaching of the work of living writers...
...They are not slips, but deliberate commissions...
...His target is probably the too sudden change—like a religious conversion—in the university's attitude toward contemporary literature...
...He has deadlines to meet and they have to do their stuff for tenure...
...But those aren't the books people assign (except as popular literature, for extraliterary reasons...
...What follows is taken from the tape of our discussion, our causerie, our causette...
...M.W.: Perhaps, but his jokes make me wince...
...Neither pieces for magazines nor papers for the Modern Language Association turn into criticism all that often...
...The professor has them there for the full 50 minutes, and he can give them exams or flunk them out of the course...
...Here these epithets are trained on the literary scene between 1973-76, but they have been trusty weapons since he published his first criticism 25 years ago...
...I was struck by the number of anti-Jewish-establishment gags?at the expense of Commentary, Herman Wouk...
...Yet his attack on "solemn embalmers, specialists in English lit," university "bureaucrats," "hacks," and "lintheads" has been so unremitting that it chose itself as the subject of a conversation I had recently with Michael Wood, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, and frequent reviewer of fiction for the New York Review of Books...
...Those opposed to it used to worry about standards...
...They take the old line...
...R.M.: The old complaint against academe was its inhospitality to contemporary literature...
...Kennedy read Coriolanus aloud on a foggy day in Hyannis Port...
...you get the sense that every educated German has read him) has that old-fashioned middle-class following...
...Presumably this phenomenon was a good thing, for it was "reflected in the publishing of both hard- and soft-cover books," many of them worthy novels...
...There was a scandal when William Lyon Phelps conducted the first class in the moderns at Yale in 1895...
...Incidentally, who but Vidal could report that on his recommendation, President and Mrs...
...I think we may be charitable in assuming he simply wants to shock us and is not really scoring points...
...But then, the border lords do pretty well, too...
...What probably bothers him about academics is the idea that they've got listeners they don't have to work for, whereas the writer has to hang on to his with every page...
...In an earlier essay he wrote, "Outside the university, one finds the buccaneers who mean to seize the crown by force, blunt Bollingbrokes to the Academy's gentle Richards...
...He works for these audiences, performs for them, keeps them by flattering them...
...Our book-chat...
...one may be more sympathetic to what Vidal produces, as I am, but both he and they are engaged in professional activities within a recognized framework of making money...
...M.W.: There may be more Bollingbrokes in the Academy now?it's not so demure any more...
...if we start saying "anything goes," how can we stop them teaching By Love Possessed and Valley of the Dolls...
...Possibly Anthony Powell is read by segments of the British public in that way...
...Harold Bloom is not my idea of a gentle Richard...
...Part of him must be cackling away at the very idea of these dunderheads staggering around doing this...
...Sometimes he slaps them, with impeccable bad taste...
...He's very intelligent, very well read and very funny...
...As a result, courses in contemporary literature have made a generation of young people aware of writers who ordinarily might have gone on to the end in honorable obscurity...
...Now, however, when academics tell Vidal that "if it were not for them, the young would never read the Public novels of even the recent past (Faulkner, Fitzgerald)," he would "prefer for these works decently to die rather than to become teaching tools, artifacts stinking of formaldehyde in a classroom...
...Perspectives A 'BOOK-CHAT' WITH MICHAEL WOOD ON GORE VIDAL BY RUTH MATHEWSON AS a term of abuse, "book-chat" yields only to "academe" in Gore Vidal's fourth collection of essays, Matters of Fact and of Fiction (Random House, 285 pp., $10.00...
...What it doesn't adequately recognize is the possibility of teaching people to read better...
...There seems to be a new audience, both inside and outside the university, that likes difficult stuff to tackle...
...The books taught are more serious, and very ambitious, like Gravity's Rainbow or JR...
...The occasional student who might have an interest in reading will not survive a course in English unless he himself intends to become an academic bureaucrat...
...On the other hand, I'm not sure that between Vidal and these academic "hacks" the difference is always as great as he likes to think...
...We've all read it," they said...
...Vidal regretted the situation: "After all, none of this is the way to live...
Vol. 60 • May 1977 • No. 11
