Speaker Well, I never thought that Burr made a deal with the devil. Others may have thought so, but. He made a deal with himself. He wasn’t like the others. He was called the first gentleman of the United States. He was the highest born of the founders. Jefferson’s family was middling. Washington’s basically was meddling with a bit of money in it, and of course, Washington married a great heiress, which is how he became our first millionaire. Alexander Hamilton was. John Adams in that West Indian bastard, which he was.
Speaker Literally.
Speaker Came from where his father was president of Princeton and his grandfather was a grandfather, great grandmother, Jonathan Edwards, one of the great divines, he was like the Protestant pope of the United States. So Burr came from this very grand family. In New England, mostly around Connecticut, although he’s associated with New Jersey. And he was a classmate of James Madison at Princeton, which was then called, I think the College of New Jersey, that. So he was the only gentleman. And took himself very seriously, a great sense of humor. Too much so for the other founders who are very serious middle class people with middle class values, and he saw through a lot of the hypocrisy, I mean, I don’t think he didn’t get the point of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson and all men are created equal and they’re Jefferson sitting with 200 slaves.
Speaker I mean, it would be Burr who would make a joke about that. And the joke would get back to Jefferson. And Jefferson would be seething because Jefferson knew that he was not the pure creature that he presented himself to the world as a bird was the realest. And realists are always hated, particularly in a sanctimonious society of hustlers, which is what the United States has been from the beginning.
Speaker We’re the first law is I won’t blow your scam, you don’t blow mine. We help the other in hiding, out hiding what we’re doing from the public. You could play the game perfectly well, but he let on that he understood the depths of hypocrisy that he was dealing with on all sides. I think that was bothersome. He was very much formed by Lord Chesterfield, who was a witty, satirical. Realistic, I use the word realistic, other people say cynical, because if you say it’s raining, it means you’re a bad person, you’re not an optimist, you say it’s raining. Well, only a bad person would say it’s raining. You’d say this little. There’s possibility of damp. You won’t say it’s raining. Well, he’s the source. It’s raining. They didn’t like that very much, and he also saw the world as kind of great game. The other founders to a man, they were atheists or agnostics, very much children of the Enlightenment, they still have been heavily influenced by the Protestant divines like John Edwards. And they were sort of they were always posing for posterity. From George Washington on, I mean, they saw themselves on future Mount Rushmore, they knew that they had done something unique in the history of the world and founding this country. So everything was for the record. And Bert was just making fun of them, and I think that Ma’aden them more than anything, that they didn’t take them that seriously. He has been criticized that he made no contribution to all of the Constitution. To the to the debates that went or as Hamilton was brilliant and so it was a lesser degree, it was John Jay and of course, James Madison is called the father of the Constitution. These three people created the republic. And the Federalist Papers, which are their meditations on power, how to organize a state. Perhaps the best ever written in any country at any time. Bur interestingly, made no contribution, he had a lot of things to say on the side about it. First of all, he didn’t think the Constitution would last 25 years. Neither did Jefferson. Jefferson wanted a constitutional convention once a generation, about once every 30 years, go back and redo it. Jefferson said. You cannot expect a man to wear a boy’s jacket. So he knew the need for change.
Speaker But I didn’t think it very important that he thought that we will work out something once the jacket falls apart. The state is not going to unravel just because of a constitution isn’t working. There was a strange moment when he came back to practice law after his every shot, Hamilton ceased to be vice president, went to France.
Speaker Exile came back practice law quite successfully when he was about 80, he married again and got caught in adultery by his rich wife with a young woman called Jane McManus, I think Paramus, New Jersey. So there he was at 80, being caught in adultery, but he was very merry about the whole thing, but he was he had a lot of disciples. I show one Charlie Schuyler, who turns out to be an illegitimate son, Enberg. And they were walking by Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street. And some workmen were building something, adding to the church. Irish workmen did already rather suspect they were Roman Catholic and Protestants didn’t know what to make of Roman Catholics. This is before the period Irish need not apply, but they were still regarded as something strange in the Republican. What sort of citizens they were going to be and nobody knew. And A and his illegitimate son are just standing at Trinity Church watching these guys work.
Speaker And Charlie and I was studying the law. Said, well, in the end, what determines?
Speaker Justice in a country like the United States Supreme Court had not yet seized power, as it has done in our time.
Speaker Where is the source of legitimacy other than with the people other than elections? You can’t have an election about every law.
Speaker And said, well.
Speaker Justice and the law. Will be determined by them. And he pointed at these Irish workmen working in Trinity Church. So believe me, they’re not lawyers. He said, no, they will vote, they will determine the laws of the country. I can’t, Chief Justice John Marshall, that they will determine it.
Speaker Now, he could have gone into this is real life. He’s actually quoted as having said this. He might have gone further into what he felt about the majority rule, which he’s also on record as being highly suspicious of, as was Jefferson, as was George Washington. They didn’t feel they needed the advice of a majority of their fellow citizens. But he saw what he’s saying is, look, there are no absolutes, there are no fundamentals, there is the fact of the citizenry and they’ll determine what sort of state they want to have.
Speaker You wrote this, but I’m going to ask you this question that you wrote for yourself. Well, obviously, you like Burr, but he certainly cannot be regarded as a good man or philosopher government. In fact, wasn’t he one of the first professional politicians representing only himself?
Speaker Much of the objection to Arenberg started in the election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson was eager to become president, but you were supposed to in those days to pretend that you didn’t want it. But Washington had served two terms, John Adams had served one disastrous term in the federalist interest, and Jefferson was a Republican not we had parties then, but those loose groupings. Of people with different philosophies of government. And Burr really joined neither faction, he dealt with each. But what he had done in New York State, he got himself elected to the Senate from New York by the legislature. And he was getting ready for the election of 1800. And Jefferson had made a deal with him. That could deliver New York, Jefferson could certainly deliver Virginia in the South. And they would jointly win the election. In those days, you didn’t run, one was running for president, one for vice president, but you did.
Speaker You took the top two, those who pulled the most votes than one who pulled the most votes became president. And second, most votes became vice president.
Speaker Jefferson had already cheated before four years earlier, and the South was supposed to support him for vice president. Jefferson, generally treacherous, went back on his word.
Speaker Now, the deal is as follows that. They’ll both be running for president. With the understanding that Jefferson would, as they calculated to get the most votes or would get second most would become vice president. With the understanding that Jefferson, after one or two terms, would go the way of Washington and Burr would inherit.
Speaker Burt was. Interested in. Politics and not in infection, as they call political parties.
Speaker Some of the others, but the others were more hypocritical. Jefferson was desperately interested in being president. He would say he thought of the most beautiful reasons why he should be elevated, but it was the sole ambition. But it was a great political manager. And what he did, he extended the franchise. Only men of property can vote in any of the states. All right, what he did was he took immigrants and New York was still the great hub of immigration from Europe. And he would he would get a house and plant a dozen immigrants in it and they would have equity in the house and thus became a property. And enroll them in a society to which he himself did not belong to the society of Tammany Tammany Hall. Which was created really basically for her and these new citizens. Well, this drove the professional politicians crazy. He had stolen the march on them. He had all these brand new voters, immigrants. Each man, a man of property who could go say, yes, I own, you know, 42 Pearl Street, I live there as my residence and I’m on the rolls and I can vote for the House of Representatives. Well, he had sort of double the franchise in New York City, which basically was, as it is today, pretty much New York State. So through Tammany Hall, he made Thomas Jefferson president. Unfortunately, they tied. It’s got the same number of votes as the other. Jefferson thought that Bush should step down and say he didn’t want it. Burr said our agreement was, I shall not lift a finger on my own behalf. That it is you who must become the president and I to be the vice president, I will not step down. But I will in no way help anyone to obtain this election. So Burr behaved honorably. He did nothing. You just sat for hours. I think they went to 36 votes were going on in the House of Representatives trying to determine who was to be the president. Jefferson was as busy as a bee trying to get votes from this one votes on that one. Meanwhile, bad mouthing Burr saying that he was doing the same thing and Burr was up in Albany or someplace like that, miles away from the voting. So Vera behaved well, and finally Jefferson squeaked through. And there they are, president and vice president. Because Burr had behaved honorably, Jefferson hated him, no good deed goes unpunished is one of the great laws of nature, at least of human nature. Jefferson never forgave her for behaving well. And always did very it was a man of his word because, again, it was the difference between the gentleman with his code. And the. Profit to give Jefferson a polite word, the prophet of democracy who didn’t believe in democracy, but. And that the bad blood began right down in there and Jefferson then worked to totally eliminate Burr from the government. So that by the time of the 04 election and Burset have been returned as vice president, Jefferson just driven him out of the administration. Subir headed for New York, ran for governor. Alexander Hamilton said something despicable about him, but said, what do you mean by despicable? Hamilton wouldn’t tell him again. The great gentleman believed in personal honor. The code do allow the door if if somebody who thinks he’s your equal.
Speaker Says something so insulting about you, you must call him out and have a crack at killing him or he killing you, Hamilton waffled on this and called him out and shot him.
Speaker Now, here’s the vice president, United States just kill the former secretary of the Treasury and is under indictment for murder in the state of New York City, has to flee down the Hudson River and finally comes back to Washington, where he’s still vice president and presides over the Senate. And Jefferson was trying to get rid of a judge. He was always after somebody and they had a trial in the Senate over which Aaron Burr, vice president, resided.
Speaker And Jefferson then goes on his knees to Burr saying, you’ve got to find this man guilty. We’ve got to get him off the bench. This is the treacherous Jefferson. And as it was, the man was not kicked off the bench. But Byrd was impeccable in conducting the trial. The Senate became a jury. And then at the end, he addressed the Senate. And he said, should I have to paraphrase what he said, should the United States ever be in danger, its institutions at the hands of a tyrant?
Speaker Of bloody revolutionaries. It’s expiring. Days, moments. We’ll take place within this body. This is the last refuge of the republic. And with that, I say farewell.
Speaker He walked out of the chamber and went west immediately, Jefferson charged him with treason for trying to separate the Western states from the east, put him on trial in Richmond. Chief Justice Marshall presided over, worked as a lawyer on his own behalf, were called Thomas Jefferson. The president, as a witness, were to come to Richmond with your documents, Dukas taken. And of course, Jefferson was hysterical. Anyway, Berg was found not guilty of treason. Now, you see, I just as briefly as possible, told you how somebody could be totally smeared. If you have a powerful enough opposition to Hamilton on the one hand. Whom he shoots in a duel, which Hamilton didn’t have to fight. And Thomas Jefferson, who was smeared him to the day, died. You’re not going to get a terribly good reputation.
Speaker What you said that there was something in your research that the thing that most surprised you that you found in your research was his diary, no letters to his daughter or journal?
Speaker Oh, no, I know. What I said was I had to think of something as as a novelist. What was it that Hamilton had said about Burr?
Speaker That was so despicable, that was the adjective everybody used. And Hamilton wouldn’t answer what it was. And I figured out I wrote letters to his daughter as though she were a son, as though he were Lord Chesterfield who did write letters to his son, in which Burr writes perfectly openly about his sex life, he’s constantly picking up ladies and very, very busy right to the end. And also, he was a great feminist, probably the first the only one in the founding of the country. And he had to learn Latin and Greek, he brought her up as a boy and she was considered the most brilliant young woman of her time, at least in the republic. And she was the only person I ever cared for.
Speaker I intuited, but I don’t know, this is my novelistic invention, that there was a charge of incest. Which was Hamilton was perfectly capable of that sort of thing. Hamilton really ran off at the mouth.
Speaker But I have no proof it was a device for me, Joanne Freeman, a professor at Yale, has written a book called Affairs of Honor. It was a brilliant. And she thinks that I am imposing a 20th century view on it, that indeed the code of the gentleman, which Burr had to live up to because he was one, but Hamilton was a nobody from nowhere. I didn’t have to. So Hamilton’s all the more prickly and goes out of his way to appear more gentlemanly than the gentleman, that was a whole matter of class as a whole matter of of of a code. I mean, you couldn’t fight a duel with a newspaper editor who gave you a bad review because he wasn’t in your class.
Speaker But the vice president could certainly do a deal with the secretary of the Treasury, and that’s what he did.
Speaker Let’s talk briefly about 1876.
Speaker You wrote in the afterword you wrote, 1876 is probably the low point in our republic’s history, and knowing something about what happened then is, I think, useful to us now at times as times are again becoming rather too interesting for comfort.
Speaker Now, you wrote that when you publish the book 1976, how would I mean?
Speaker Well, with 1876, it’s Charlie Schuyler illegitimate son, a very old man with his daughter. They’ve been living in Europe and they come back to the United States since the year of the Centennial of the Republic. Charlie is back as a historian. He’s going to write about it. It’s got a beautiful daughter who’s a widow who needs to marry a rich man. And indeed, is Mr. Sanford, whom we have already met in Lincoln. As he was involved with Chief Justice Chase’s daughter, so. I felt that. 1876 was just was the low point in the history of the republic until the year 2000, in 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes was the choice of the Republican Party, which was the ruling party as it was the party of Abraham Lincoln, and then had the presidency ever since Lincoln. Hayes lost the popular vote to Samuel Tilden, who was governor of New York. It was the first Democrat to win in the post-war period. However, the Republicans controlled a number of states, including Florida, always Florida. And so they saw to it they had troops to keep order. And former slave states, as well as places like Nevada. And although Tilden won by I think it was some 300000 votes, more votes than Hayes. They just switched it around. I went into the House of Representatives and there was a special commission in which a deeply bent. Supreme Court justice. Sells out the election to the Republicans. Curiously enough, a Supreme Court justice appointed by Lincoln and so Hayes, who had lost the election, becomes president. So at the end of the book, the book was published in 1976, 100 years after the centennial. I said, I think times are getting very interesting again, this was during the time with the possible impeachment of Nixon. It might be salutary to read about it well, it’s far more salutary to read about it in the year 2000. When Albert Gore gets a half million votes more than George W. Bush and the Supreme Court forbids him to become president because they don’t want him to be president and the ownership of the country. Is united against keeping him out and so the loser becomes president, as happened in 1876. So I’d say. We live in even lower times now than when that book was written.
Speaker Oh.
Speaker In Empire, there’s such wonderful portraits of five parts.
Speaker Those some of the five parts, Henry Adams, Henry James and John King, who I found wonderful to read about and and so interesting and so, so wonderfully and widely depicted. Was this a fun book to write?
Speaker Oh, I enjoyed it very much. And that was.
Speaker Well, all of my characters are in order, and they made the American they were the conscious founders of the American empire. Jefferson knew pretty much what he was doing with the Louisiana Purchase. But this was something this is European power politics. And there was Henry Adams and his brother, Brooks Adams, Henry Cabot Lodge in the Senate. Theodore Roosevelt, the sharpest card in the deck is, I think, undersecretary of the Navy, and then there’s Admiral Man, Captain man who’s written a book on sea power. England and Seapower, and his thesis was to form an empire, particularly if you’re an island nation, and he regarded the United States is essentially an island, even though it’s a continent. But we have two great oceans, one on one side, one on the other side, that by mastering the seas. Through ships. You will need more and more bases for those ships across the two oceans and Arcade’s you’ll need and to get those bases, you will need colonies in order to trade, in order to get from place to place. Well, the five hearts, as they call themselves. I was sitting there in what is now the Hay Adams Hotel, which was the house where John Hay, later secretary of State, and Henry Adams shared jointly a great house right across the street from the White House. And they decided, well, now’s the moment. We must become a world power, and we were already masters of the Western Hemisphere, but that wasn’t good enough. We debated the war with Venezuela, with England, that we might have lost that one, so we backed away from it. Then we decided they decided that war was Spain, which was a collapsing colonial empire in Europe. And very weak.
Speaker And we would do it to free Cuba. We always fight these wars were a bit like Hitler. You know, he was always going to free the Sudeten Germans from the wicked Czechs who are going to conquer Europe.
Speaker And so we would free Cuba, hence the Cuba Libre from Spain. Well, they pulled it off, it was in the summer months when President McKinley was out of town. And the secretary of the Navy was out of town and Theodore Roosevelt was in town, and he sent Admiral Dewey not to Cuba, to the Philippines, which belonged to Spain. And then came the events of the sinking of the Maine big war scare. We go to war with Spain. Sink their fleet out of Manila very easily. We get Puerto Rico, we get Cuba, we get the Caribbean in general. But the main thing we wanted were the Philippine islands. This is a vast property. Off the coast of China and off the coast of Japan. And Admiral Dhuey has a great victory there.
Speaker And that’s how the American empire was born and I have these four. At its Senate fire, very brilliant man, and I know their conversations because they wrote so many letters and diaries. And you can actually overhear them discussing how they’re going to turn the United States into a great world empire because at the end of it, we had the Pacific Ocean. And we had our eyes on mainland China, and this was the quarrell that later developed in the Second World War between Franklin Roosevelt, who was very pro Chinese because he hated the Japanese because they were competition for us. China was falling apart. The Roosevelt, the Delano’s, his mother’s family had been in the opium trade and China. And Roosevelt also had his eye on China. They all had their eye on China. And Shanxi Province, which is up around Manchuria, northern north China, was the richest spot on earth. Had the most most iron and the most coal things that they use then for power. And Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams, said he who controls Shanxi Province controls the Earth. So the Japanese were aiming for it and they got it in the 30s. They seized Manchuria. We wanted it. And we even got as far as the Great Wall was the wonderful footage of Marines, American Marines on the Great Wall of China, American Marines occupying Shanghai. None of this is in our history books, of course, but we we have the evidence in film, so. With Empire, and I call it just bleakly empire, I show how we got it and who thought it up and how they pulled it off.
Speaker You have Henry James speaking in much the way he wrote.
Speaker How did you how did you know what he sounded like? I mean, their letters.
Speaker Who are you? Tell from the letter? I knew several people who knew Henry James. And Ruth Draper, a monologist. Who did dramatic sketches? I saw her in action and she did a superb imitation of Henry James. And I’m something of a mimic. So I picked it up from that. Just reading the news, you start to sound like a.
Speaker Oh, this is such a detail, but I found a scene with MacKinley and his epileptic wife at dinner.
Speaker Absolutely hilarious. Just paint that little picture.
Speaker President McKinley was a. A man of great charm and sweetness, a character. And he had an epileptic wife. And so it meant admitted White House state dinner, the president’s wife is at one end of the table with the guests, male guest of honor on one side and the president on the other end with the lady guests. But the McKinley’s had to sit side by side. And he would be just talking, she’d be on his ride and he’d be talking to somebody on his left and he could tell if she was having a fit without even moving, she would make some little odd noises and she’d be here having a fit and he’d be talking to somebody already take his napkin like that. And he would just go like that and put it over her face as she would twist and gag underneath and he would just continue. Nobody ever made any reference to the fact that Mrs. McKinley was had gone bonkers.
Speaker Someone for.
Speaker This was so interesting to me. Henry James says this to to Henry Adams, and it comes up again, I think, in the golden age. The league says the acquisition of an empire civilise the English, but what’s civilized, well, what civilized there might very well demoralize us even further. Do you agree with this? Can you.
Speaker Yes, I do agree with it. Well, Henry James thought he was an Anglophile and he was not a great enthusiast for the United States. Which I am no, I cannot sometimes conceal my disappointment in the way of our affairs have been conducted.
Speaker James thought that acquisition of an empire and starting early in the 18th century had proved a civilizing factor in British life, giving them a purpose, giving them something to do, something for younger sons to do to be trained for. But he knew we wouldn’t do that and we never I mean, we have a world empire as we speak. There’s nobody being trained to run it. There’s nobody being trained to do anything except make money on the Nasdaq or lose it. We don’t learn languages, we don’t know how to deal with other countries, we don’t know any history. Well, the Brits at least had a ruling class and they changed the ruling class to be rulers of India, whatever it is they happened to be in charge of. James understood the American venality, basically greed, interest, and in quick profits and no interest at all in other countries and cultures. So he said, where the British have been civilise by the possession of an empire. I think we will be further demoralized. And he even went on to say, and and what are we to make of the fact that we will be exporting Tammany Hall?
Speaker To the Philippines and to other countries that don’t deserve our form of government. He was very harsh. I remember somebody in the Washington star paper owned by. The Washington Times owned by the Moonies. Rothko’s Henry James said no such thing, Gore Vidal does no history does nothing about Henry James. And of course, I was quoting from a letter that James had written, his nephew.
Speaker Henry Adams.
Speaker Talks about history, says, I’ve I’ve I’ve done with our history, there’s no pattern to it that I can see, and that’s all I ever cared about.
Speaker I don’t care what happened. I want to know why it happened.
Speaker You know, Henry Adams was our greatest historian and his his books on the administrations of. Jefferson, Madison. Which is really about The Addams Family to. Our classic and. But he abandoned writing history after those volumes.
Speaker And became more interested in religion, but he said so he said, well, why did you quit writing history said, well, I was never interested in what happened. I wanted to know why it happened. Couldn’t find out quit.
Speaker What I’m interested in what happened. I know there is no way.
Speaker So you don’t think there’s a design to history?
Speaker No, of course not. How can anything human have a design? We are creatures of we’re reactive creatures, we’re reactive to climate, to all sorts of things which can’t be predicted. I think you see patterns, I think you see patterns in the country, and which is why I wrote seven volumes of narratives of Empire. I think I did grasp something about it. But no more, he wanted a mystical reason because he turned a mystic in later life, which I shall never do. And he thought he saw the polarities with the Virgin as a relic of the mother goddess and also of Christianity and the Dinamo. Which meant the modern world of machinery, and he was very, very impressed by it. I think it was the World’s Fair in St. Louis that showed a dynamo. And he saw these as the polarities, the human race instinctive. Gods and goddesses. And then the new machinery and what that was going to do. And he was trying to make sense of the two of them and in his later works and did not succeed.
Speaker You said that when you chose.
Speaker You know, your plot where you want to be buried in Rock Creek Park, that it would be halfway between you, Trimble and Henry Adams, halfway between heart and mind.
Speaker But I’d say that yes, I think so. I mean, is Henry Adams.
Speaker You know, someone that as a historian or as a kid, in what way you.
Speaker Find him to be so important.
Speaker Well, Henry Adams, not unlike what I’ve been saying about Burr, was at a sharp and realistic I.
Speaker He understood the great man being a grandson and great grandson of president.
Speaker He was well suited to be the historian of the republic, which he was for a time.
Speaker And his skepticism is refreshing. He was totally without hypocrisy. I mean, the education of Henry Adams is a very great book because he treats himself objectively. He makes no case for himself, anything he denigrates the character of Henry Adams. Henry Adams never really writes in the third person doesn’t did not realize what Such-and-such meant and. That was his power because most Americans do nothing but praise themselves. It’s just part of the advertising ethos of the country. So I really have had so little connection with other novelists, American novelists in my lifetime, so I don’t want to read about them. I’m not that interested in them. And they certainly don’t want to read about things like empires or republics. So I’m on a different wavelength while I’m on the same wavelength, I think, as Henry Adams, minus the mysticism which came to him late in which I think came out of aesthetics rather than religion.
Speaker When you were talking, you use the word realistic and also when you were talking about birth and describing how he was a realist and how in the kind of society you lived in, you know, that people found that very irritating.
Speaker I was thinking about you.
Speaker Well, people were irritated by burs realism, they’re certainly irritated by mine, I’m quite aware of that. I found over the years that anything of a truthful nature that I have to say about our political system is immediately denied. I had my problems with the Lincoln Brigade when I wrote Lincoln. True story after true story, which they knew to be true, they denied. Starting with the details, like his having syphilis, well, it.
Speaker For 17 years, he worked in the same room as William Herndon, his law partner, and earned it. If you don’t believe earned it, there is no Lincoln biography because he’s their only authority. And why would he lie? He adored Lincoln.
Speaker Lincoln right up to a month or so before he was assassinated. Still favored shipping the black slaves. That had been freed from the south out of the United States, preferably in Central America or Liberia. You can’t say that. Everybody, the court, the court, historians, as I call them, just a live. Oh, well, you say Ben Bitlis and Butler said so, but he couldn’t have seen him in March because there was an order. General officers couldn’t come to Washington. There’s no record. He came to Washington. You could get all this quibbling, quibbling, quibbling. When a certain mainlines are very clear.
Speaker And it’s exhausting now, you see, unfortunately, of being a novelist. They say, oh, well, he’s making it all up anyway. That’s what a novel is. You say, can’t be true. Can’t be true. I made a mistake by not inventing a new term. I know why I’ve called them narratives of Empire, which gets at least I’m not saying that I’m writing fiction. I have fictional characters, but my principles are real. And I’m as close to history is as I know how to be and certainly as close to history as the people that I borrowed from. After all, I have read more American history than anyone outside of an institution.
Speaker One of the I don’t know whether you got any flak for this, but I thought one of the incredible scenes between a real so-called real historical figure in FDR.
Speaker Well, they were both real people. But you invented a conversation between Hearst and Roosevelt with the line through history is the final fiction at the end of Empire?
Speaker Well, that conversation pretty much took place. It’s the right time and the right place, first it come to the White House. And he did denounce Theodore Roosevelt. And now forget what sources I used on it, but obviously biographies of each man include this collision. And. There’s no typescript of what they said, but if you know what the gist of what they had to say to each other and why they hated each other. And first, I have perhaps more perceptive than he was in real life about the goals of history and what history is, but he is the man who said if there is no news invented. Well, if that doesn’t cover inventing, if there is no history that conformed to your prejudices, invent that history, which is what most American historians like to do. So I think that’s perfectly in character for him. And Roosevelt was vanity was so great, I mean, he really thought that he was a hero of San Juan and so on and all he was doing that if I hadn’t written about you in my papers, you would not be here in the White House today as blood. Is that which is probably true.
Speaker That’s a very important thing in Empire and developed in Hollywood as well about the role of the press in and what’s history, what’s news, who’s creating which and well, who.
Speaker It was with hers that it became official that if you didn’t have any news, you’d invent it. If there was no war, you would try and get the United States into a war. And that the historians are going to follow you. I mean, remember, you know, Hirst’s almost got Adolf Hitler to write for him. I think he got Mussolini. And he really was within an inch of getting Adolf Hitler because he offered so much money and Hitler, like everybody else was interested in, you know, Germany was pretty poor and all their money was going into getting ready for war. I don’t think he got Hitler to write for them. Well, I know he didn’t, but I mean, I don’t know what what broke it off, but I think Mussolini did right for him. Winston Churchill was always writing for Hearst. And church was very funny on Hurston’s as a boss. And he said he’s a sad, wise child, was Churchill on first, George, I have not used in the books. But first created this whole thing, that news is whatever you can get away with. Then history historians, quite correctly want to go to primary sources, what’s the primary source newspaper? I asked Arthur Schlesinger after he had his little job in the White House, after he had been at it for a while, Bobby Kennedy got him and not Jack Kennedy, but he was allowed to watch things. And I said he’d been there about a year. And I said, well, what? What now, as you’ve been writing about presidents all your life, what do you find working for one in the White House? That you didn’t expect, and he said primary sources as a historian, we depend religiously. On primary sources like Newspapers of the Day, he said, I read The New York Times and it bears no relationship at all to what is going on in this house. I said, well, we must find other ways of writing history. I did not propose the novel to her.
Speaker How are you doing? Can we just do a little bit of.
Speaker Well, there was a scene and actually this scene occurs, I think, both in Hollywood and with Wilson talking about getting preparing for going to war and his speech first. First, there’s a scene where Bleys observes Wilson is very, very good.
Speaker And I wondered where you know, how you came up with that.
Speaker You’ve forgotten, but I don’t remember the scene.
Speaker Then he’s watching Wilson give this speech.
Speaker And he talks about his tragic step. And the world must be made safe for democracy and Blase wonders, what is democracy?
Speaker Well, a lot of people wondered what Wilson meant by that. What do you think?
Speaker It’s rhetoric, you know, Wilson was a preacher. And the world must be made safe for something, and we had been brought up in America, dislike Kaisers and kings and monarchies. And we thought that a country once that had free elections was going to be a democracy. Well, we’ve never been a democracy, and I don’t know why we expected suddenly the Weimar Republic to be a democracy in which it wasn’t. We weren’t very good at seeding in democracies across the world. But Wilson was a very persuasive speaker. I remember my father marched in the West Point parade, the first inauguration of Wilson. And he’d heard a lot of presidents what he said Wilson was the greatest orator that he’d ever heard. And the records of him is extraordinary voice. But it’s it’s that of a preacher. And the great sort of, you know, cloudy images, and he’s not very precise. I don’t think he would have, but it’s what Henry James was talking about, exporting Tammany Hall to conquered Germany.
Speaker Is this a good thing to do? We have seen the regime of Helmut Kohl is the result of an American Tammany Hall that we gave the Germans after 1945.
Speaker So our exports and the political line have not been very successful.
Speaker They’re a little bit on Washington, D.C.. What was James Burgundy’s moral dilemma?
Speaker Well, it was to take money in order to run for president because he regarded a third term for Roosevelt as the end of the republic. He hated Roosevelt. Politically and morally.
Speaker And all he had to do was absent himself from a committee meeting. And he paid off.
Speaker For his campaign for the presidency in those days, 200000, like 200 million. And so he sold out the Indians. And this guy was puts up the money for him, in a sense, can blackmail him. But what his moral problem is, he should never have done this. Moral problem, is it better in a sense to take a 200000 dollar bribe that may make you president? And keep us out of the Second World War. Which you believe is an important thing to stay out of.
Speaker Or is it better to not take the bribe and let FDR get in and get us into the war?
Speaker I find that an exquisite moral problem.
Speaker And it ruined him.
Speaker Can you give me a first sentence without using his name, the character’s name, we use the white whale?
Speaker Well, the tragic figure in Washington, D.C. is James Burton, days senator from. Somewhere out in the. Southwest. And he very much wants to be president. He regards Roosevelt as a potential dictator. Which indeed, he did become for a while, as Lincoln had before him, and more important, he wants us to stay out of the European war. And he realizes that. He is a possible candidate, he has many admirers. Will Roosevelt run for a third term or not, and if he does try to run, could he be knocked off? Huey Long thought he could, but Huey. Was done in.
Speaker So the only way he can be a viable candidate is to raise the money and the only way he can do that is some oil men.
Speaker Not by doing anything active, but by being inactive and going off to Canada. I think it was on a trip when a certain vote came before his subcommittee.
Speaker And the Indians were.
Speaker We’re done in yet again, and he had his money to run.
Speaker And this presented him with a great between I alone can stop Franklin Roosevelt in the U.S. in the second war, but on condition that I sell out the Indians to get the money to run to stop the third term. I mean, this is really. Borrowed from from from Greek tragedy, from the Oresteia, you may one God, and you’ve just made the other one, you’re not going to win.
Speaker City and the pillar, who is J.T. and why is the book dedicated?
Speaker Everybody thought it was Jack Taylor who was a fellow editor with me and AP Dutton who suffered from aggressive psoriasis and was not a thing of beauty, and I saw how kindly I was with psoriasis. I would go out of my way to dedicate it to somebody else. We had to mask him when he went out in public.
Speaker The.
Speaker The city and the pillar was written. My third book. Much of it was written I had already bought a place in Antigua, Guatemala. My monastery, which cost me 2000 dollars, and I settled in seriously to write, I published worldwide, published in the word. And through my UNECE nine period, though, she came down to Guatemala to stay with me. And I finished the city and the pillar. Shortly after my 21st birthday. Which would have been October nineteen forty seven. It was published January 48. Publishers hated it, but as it was immediately a bestseller, they overcame their loathing in the interests of commerce, as they are prone to do.
Speaker And it was a.
Speaker A definite decision, otherwise, I would have gone straight into politics out of New Mexico. Whose governor was a protege of my grandfather and. I thought I’d go out to Santa Fe. I had a job at a newspaper if I wanted it.
Speaker And begin a political career.
Speaker Meanwhile, I had been so annoyed.
Speaker By the.
Speaker Attitudes toward same sexuality, we don’t even have a word for something which really doesn’t exist. Which I had encountered in nearly three years, the army where I met a cross-section of America. And realize that my countrymen. Country, Persons’. Were totally deranged on the subject of sex. There was nothing that they believe to be true that was true. They thought there was actually such a thing as a homosexual person. There isn’t. There’s a homosexual act. We know what that is. And the heterosexual act, we know what that is. There’s no such thing as a person. And I had learned as being fairly observant. And as a matter of fact, if you were. Quite young as I was going in, I was in from 17 to 20. You spent a lot of time dodging, particularly up in the Aleutians, you I’d go into a movie house. I always got myself in a corner wedged in because either on one side of you or on the other side of you, there would be somebody as there were no women around. There’d be somebody on the attack. You know, anybody. And there were a lot of slugging going on. And one was quite aware of the enormous powers. Of adhesion to use Walt Whitman’s favorite word taken from the phrenologists. Male to male. And with a marvelous excuse there being no females around, it was of an enormous intensity. So either that or going out with the Ravens, which populated the Aleutian Islands Ravens, by and large appealed intellectually to our boys, but not not sexually.
Speaker By the time I had finished my service in the Army, I’d realized a number of things. One is the total normality, naturalness. Among mammals of which we mischaracterize human beings. And others of their sex, whether it’s male, male, female, female.
Speaker And.
Speaker My annoyance. Became a kind of fury as I was confronting the world of New York as a writer and fairly successful, fairly young. And seeing I remember W.H. Auden was supposed to be on the cover of Time magazine and the cover was killed because the editor had been told that Auden was a fairy. And then I watched the witch hunts starring particularly in the theater. Tennessee Williams is a very you know, he’s sick. Time magazine did a series of 52 attacks on him and I in turn. One year attack, TIME magazine, piece by piece by piece, their attacks on Tennessee and I saw this, this won’t do. And I have one of those temperaments in which I feel I make the rules, I’m not terribly interested in the. What popular opinion may feel about things? So I said to myself, I’m going to show the normality of all this is going to be tragic. People say, well, that isn’t normal. At the end of it, they don’t have a fight. Two boys who had once been lovers and one kill the other or one nearly killed the other. And I said, yes, but in this society, they would have one had. Followed the usual course, been married and so on, and the other one comes back with the same feelings that he had originally. In a society as sick and as deranged of the United States was then and may I say is today. You would have a tragic ending, and I said also as a romantic, the story of a romantic temperament and may I say from Romeo and Juliet on, they don’t end terribly well. Those stories.
Speaker It was not about Jimmie Trimble to whom the book was dedicated, or rather just to us his initials, but he had been killed in the war.
Speaker And I thought about it and I thought, I’ll see him again when the war is over. And flying back from the Pacific, I stopped off in Jackson, Michigan, where I had an at. And some people came over to her house and one of the boys just out of the army said, you hear that Jimmy Trimble was dead? And that sort of jolted me. And I thought, oh, dear, what is that? What does that mean? Then I thought, what did that mean? That combined with my general rage about American sexual attitudes. Which continues to this day, I thought, well, I will give up a political career and my grandfather was crafting a beautiful one out there in New Mexico. I have a Spanish name or a name, Vidal, OK, which is a name that many Spanish people have Hispanics. Just a great help in a place like New Mexico and other places. Run by. Cronies of my grandfather and I could have had quite a career there and I thought, well, I am going to publish this book, even though Eppy Dutton, the editors, one editor, said to me, he said, you know. If you publish this thing, they will never let you forget it and you will still be attacked for it 20 years from now. And I said, well, if any book of mine is remembered in the year 1968, 20 years from now, I’m doing pretty well. Am I not? You said you won’t like it. I must say I didn’t like it. The attacks were formidable, and I never regretted for one minute that I couldn’t have a conventional political career or, as it turned out, a conventional literary career. This was the period in which Walt Whitman was just you could just begin to teach him in school. They had to invent something for his. His attitudes towards sex and so they invented a brand new adjective, homo erotic. He wouldn’t do anything. He’s a great poet, but he’d sort of daydream about it. And that’s what is don’t it’s not for real. It’s the only way they could sell Walt Whitman. They could get him to write. Then in January comes the city and the pillar, in March comes the Kinsey Report, and he reports that we now known as the Greatest Generation, we who would destroy the axis powers and conquered the earth, something like 37 percent of us had experienced a degenerate sexual act with another member of one’s own sex. Well, that toured the city and the pillar, which The New York Times would not take any advertising for it. Then comes the Kinsey Report, a scientific report coming much to my conclusion, they wouldn’t take any advertising of the scientific book either. And then the absolute shrieks that went on in the press and go on to this day, I think in many ways things are worse now than they were then. At least there was a lot of ignorance around. Now there’s everybody’s got opinions. And the fat people, as I like to think of my countrymen, the fat people are really hysterical about sex.
Speaker In a way that they were far less than because they had to make a living, they had to they had other things on their mind, they didn’t have the luxury of deciding who was a fairy and a good American and who is not. So that is the story of why it’s dedicated to jati that was in memoriam to the past, but why the book was written, it was to change attitudes.
Speaker Whether it did or not is not for me to answer. I shouldn’t think much, but it certainly contributed to the. To the discussion.
Speaker You mentioned your grandfather in the new book of essays, I had a chance to read it, my son, and talk to what was his reaction.
Speaker You know, he didn’t read it, didn’t have it read to him. Well, he was sorry. Because he he saw that I could have a considerable career in politics. I was perfectly designed for politics in this period. TV was just about to come in and TV became my medium, not only as a writer for television plays, but as a as a performer, as a. As a voice. So, I mean, if ever a period was it was built for somebody who then went right out and made certain that he could not have a conventional political career, I’d done it. He himself knew what I did was very Gore, or at least like I like to think with the proper line or the proper gauze, they take chances and they do things that are unpopular. My grandfather was against the First World War and it cost him his seat in the Senate. He got back. His cousin, Albert Gore in Tennessee, the father of the vice president, he lost his seat over the Vietnam War and he didn’t get back. I got no seat at all because of the city and the pillar and. Never regretted it for one minute, I mean, had it been one thing or the other, I would certainly have done the city and the pillar. If I could have managed both, I would have liked it and there were times, 1960, I could 64, I could have gone to the House of Representatives from New York, but I couldn’t have gone any further. And who wants to be? As Jack Kennedy said, the House of Representatives is a can of worms.
Speaker That can of worms has been going around in my head for.
Speaker Let’s go back and what’s the origin and significance of the title and related story? Well, it’s from the Bible Genesis, isn’t it?
Speaker Yeah. The city is the city of Salem. Which gets a bad rap. Actually, they were not rapists of males at all, and it’s not a. There are offering hospitality to some angels in the skies, but the 17th century translators in the English got it mixed up. And the pillar is Lot’s wife, and Saddam is being destroyed. She’s told if she looks back. She will be transformed into a pillar of salt. Well, my main character, Jim Willard, does not progress in life. He remains fixated with one erotic image, one love affair, one whatever word, one obsession.
Speaker And he never stops looking back. And in the end, he’s destroyed because he doesn’t move on past his boyhood friend. Hence, the city and the pillar.
Speaker Jim refers to unhappiness or loneliness as the of sickness.
Speaker Hmm, no roads were made of asphalt in Virginia back then. And as always, on a hot, desperate August days, we used to lease the garden to a gooey asphalt from the roads like chewing gum. And it did make you slightly ill and was always associated with eating and feeling rather depressed, and that was the tar sickness.
Speaker And it a couple of questions about that character, just as each was able to sustain an illusion about the other, which is the usual beginning of love, if not truth.
Speaker What role is illusion, playing love, etc..
Speaker That’s a character in the book says that you.
Speaker I have long since forgotten.
Speaker But illusion is indeed part of what we think of as a love affair. When gets an illusion about another person, which often has nothing to do with the reality and vice versa. When two illusions confront each other, sooner or later somebody is going to wake up and somebody is going to be very sad at the Awakening.
Speaker That is the condition of the romantic temperament. So I think it was stating the obvious.
Speaker Can be romantic, temperament can be tough.
Speaker Well, I’ve encountered it, I don’t have one, but I’ve had my share of illusions over the years, but not as many as most people, not as many as honest needs say. I mean, she had total illusions about everybody. You can see it in her diary, she meets somebody, she falls in love, she has an affair, everything goes wonderfully well, and then she starts to pick quarrels and then gradually you see it all unravel. And she betrays them or they betray her or she feels she must betray them. They never live up to her expectations, which, of course, is the greatest delusion of all that anybody should ever live up to your expectation of them. Who are you to have an expectation of somebody else’s character? She was the perfect. She was almost a caricature of the romantic temperament. I learned a lot from her and what not to be.
Speaker Also in that I said to Thomas head. If it had an effect on him, he writes about you.
Speaker Well, that was very rather thrilling to me. When the book came out, I sent out two copies fishing for blurbs. So young writers do. I sent one to issue an. I don’t think much cared for, the book is too tough for him. He really was into the world of illusion, but he saw its value as a kind of document and as a statement of positions. He praised it, said under Thomas Mann. And he got back a polite letter with my name misspelled and thanking me for my noble work and that I thought, well, that’s that. And then a few years ago, I got a call from a biographer of Thomas Mann. He said, we’ve just opened up the Thomas Mann Diaries and Fisher is going to publish them in Germany. And he writes a great deal about the influence of the city and the pillar, which he read 875. Can you imagine Thomas Mann at The Age? I am now reading a book which I wrote at the age of 21 or two.
Speaker And.
Speaker I sent it to him in 48, he didn’t read it until 1950, and he made notes each day as he read it on his what he thought about it and the love scenes at the beginning. He’s wild about those he always went on about. He’s very guarded in the diaries. He goes on about his passion for young men, including, I think, his son. But nothing happens. And he even has sort of long since taken masterbation and he gives you a sense that he’s never really done anything, but that is all that he ever thought about, which you certainly can tell from reading them as stories like Tonya Kröger and. So he’s delighted with the way I handled that with the two boys at the beginning and then as the thing goes on, he admires it more and more. And toward the end, he says he doesn’t object to this famous tragic ending, which. The entire scene for a time faggot world of the day, to use the word use that was down on me for having portrayed a tragic ending, I said these endings are tragic. You know, I’m being I’m being realistic. And later, I change the text a bit, so it’s less melodramatic, but it still ends as badly as it would have done at that time. And then Thomas Mann, you remember, he was the first great influence on me and grown up influence on my writing. I remember I was reading him when I was at Los Alamos and I was 13 or 14, I was reading the Joseph series. And he’s writing about the biblical Joseph, and I realized that what he was doing is what I wanted to do. I wanted to do the novel of ideas. We don’t have a proper phrase for it in English, but. And put setting something in history gave you an opportunity to actually talk about something other than I’m going to divorce you or I want custody of the children are not paying alimony. The usual conversation and contemporary novels. So I was immediately attracted to his use of the past. I got all this. I think the subtext. Of homosexuality in this word. And then when it came time to write the city and the pillar, I use as a model for Jim Willett. A kind of mysterious and mystifying to many critics figure I used Hans Kasdorf, who is the protagonist of the Magic Mountain. It was largely an observer, but he’s listening and he is calculating and he’s figuring things out. But he doesn’t do anything very dramatic, I don’t. There’s a certain sort of. Protagonist who doesn’t need to do anything, he’s there to see things happen to others or to himself. And I was criticized for his not being more aggressive, this or that, but I thought he worked pretty well and. Thomas Mann thought he worked. Thomas Mann does not recognize that I have borrowed his protagonist from Magic Mountain. So this is the peculiar chain from Handcarts Store to my Jim Willard is one job. Thomas Mallon writes, I wonder if I could write a novel like this referring to the city in the. Am I too old, am I too remote from the world? Am I too have I been around enough? Traveled enough because I like the form of it? The openness and the way you can deal with many different things.
Speaker So I think I’ll look at an old take out an old short story calling the scoundrel something like that. Well, he did. And it became. I think is most charming novel, Félix Cruel.
Speaker And so Hans Kastrup becomes Jim Willard, Jim Willard becomes very cruel, and as I point out, how nice it was that Thomas Mann at the end of his life could write such a happy, useful book. And name the hero Felix, which is the Latin for Happy.
Speaker That’s great. I’m glad I am glad I got that.
Speaker Yes, and you need to know that.
Speaker That doesn’t necessarily relate to the. I’m curious to know what the origins of what we know is romantic love.
Speaker Ah, well, romantic love, Dennis Derangement and a book about it. Which came out was very popular, effective book back in the 1940s.
Speaker Who knows where it begins? What’s the difference between a novel of lust and obsession and a novel of romantic love? It’s generally thought that romantic love is we more or less think of it evolved in the 12th, 13th century. With the troubadours in the south of France in which they would idealize a lady, usually the wife of their overlord. And they would write love poetry to her. Without much sex and or without much hope of sex and in theory, anyway, as it was to the boss’s wife, in a sense, they were riding and there was a whole tradition of romantic love. Which had all kinds of rules and regulations. We get it in Japan to was safe for Nagin and Lady Morisaki and is another romantic tradition, but a very different culture.
Speaker And then the. Romantic ideal really starts about 13 hundreds. And then there’s a sort of gush of romantic poetry that. Goes on and on, we see bits of it in Shakespeare, you see it. The lake poet’s words worth. And there is a long line of it, it’s just the passion for another person, whereas a classic form would be the passion for your republic or for your tribe or for your nation or for your for your God. The idea would be for somebody else of the same sex or another sex.
Speaker Would have been pretty far out before. Thirteen hundred, although the Romans and the Greeks both. Wrote Love Poetry to. To their beloved, much of it to the great embarrassment of people teaching Latin and Greek to schoolboy’s. In the Western world.
Speaker We covered this a bit yesterday, but maybe you can explain some of them, are you moving off City Pillar?
Speaker I just wanted to. Well, yeah, so I was going to do one more. Don’t forget about the repercussions on what could be.
Speaker I think that’s important to talk about The New York Times.
Speaker Well, the fallout from the city and the pillar still goes on. And it has now been 54 years, 53 years since it was published. Now, the hysteria was very, very great.
Speaker And.
Speaker The daily critic of The New York Times, Mr. Orville Prescott, said that he would never. Read much less review a book of mine in The Daily Times, and so seven of my books went unreviewed. In The Daily Times with rather nasty reviews in the Sunday Times. Time and Newsweek followed suit, so I was totally blacked out. Luckily, I had England. So I was built up a fair reputation there and audience, but it’s a small country. So I was driven into television, which they didn’t bother about to reveal. So I was safe from attack and then I went to the theater of the movies and so on. And by the time I came back to the novel. I had to quit for 10 years, I quit in 54 with Masire, and I didn’t come back with a novel until 64 with Julian, that was 10 years of doing everything, which was kind of fun, but. That would have been essential years for me as a novelist when I was not allowed, I was blacked out. This often happens in America, but you’re not supposed ever to mention it and you’re not supposed to survive it. I think it hurt many people’s feelings that I did survive at.
Speaker John Horn Burns was who wrote the gallery the best of the war novel. He was driven out of America by the reviewers. Took to drink and died in Florence, and I couldn’t give you many, many cases like that. It’s a venomous machine. But if you survive it, you become a lot tougher than they are. And I went on and I paid no attention. And did things in my own fashion.
Speaker And attracted largely do I think, really to my presence on television and. And success in the theater, in the movies, I just had moved into another category. And which they could then dismiss as I was a popular writer and popular writers who are never any good, except, of course, when they are. And so I need not be taken too seriously. But by then, it was too difficult to ignore me that they could still be as they are to this day.
Speaker And the hysteria that the Golden Age inspired wasn’t just political. I was half of it.
Speaker The other one was we were going right back to the city in the bill that how dare someone like that criticize the greatest nation in the country as Spiro Agnew, I used to say.
Speaker You pay a heavy price. America is that sort of country, but if you survive it, you know. As the French say, Matthew. Watch out.
Speaker What brings Meyer to the academy and by the way, movies is the child of the movies.
Speaker And perhaps the film critic Parker Tyler. It was totally unknown at the time he was known to a very small group of dedicated movie lovers. And he wrote in the magazine called View, and he’d written a surrealist novel with Charles, Henry Ford is still alive. Call the young and evil. So she’s hipped on him and on the movies, and she has Uncle Buck loner out there who as the Academy of Drama Molly. And so she wants to go out and I think there’s some money involved in. And she really wants to soak herself in Hollywood and the great days and have a very good time and drive her Uncle Buck crazy. And it wasn’t till I was halfway through the book that I figured out she’d been a man, which added, I think. The word in the English departments used to be resonance, a certain resonance was added to the to the story. Then in Miren, which I think is even for me, rather funny, I admire. She comes, she’s a man again, but she then starts going, he is inhabited by Meira and Miren. And the to fight a battle for their common body, which I don’t even dare visualize what it looked like after her famous breasts have been removed in a car accident and. I just don’t dare think what she must look like. Myra wins, as she always does.
Speaker What is Meyer is a messianic mission?
Speaker Well, she wants to she’s bored with the two sexes, having been both herself and, you know, she found a plus here and a minus there as she drifted. Back and forth between the two, she she sort of was fun loving Amazons as what she really wanted and which was turning boys and girls. And she makes a couple of experiments along those lines, don’t turn out to her experiments, don’t work very well. I mean, we cannot say that her career as the creator of a new sex, a new world, a new human being, is not crowned with success. Her fun loving Amazons are terribly sullen and. Don’t in the least like what she’s done to them, but she’s she’s triumphant, she just rises above it. She is dear to. Who is Dr. Randall Spencer Montag, as well as one critic says Montag comes out to Sontag and the German language. If it isn’t Sunday, it’s Monday. He’s just.
Speaker Her dentist and metal therapist, I guess what the narrative is here, he gives her the assignment of this is her notebook.
Speaker Oh, I’ll need Dr. Montag is both. Her dentist and her mental therapist, and he says that she must write down. Her thoughts and a lot of the book on my part was a parody of the French new novel. Particularly Pingelly and.
Speaker Two or three others that I was sending up. In which the object was to be just totally absorbed and got round and round and repeated and repeated. And I love the series, the French new novel, because nobody could live up to them, but they would try. And it has a lot of levels to it.
Speaker When the book came, there was in marketing, it was the marketing plan.
Speaker Well, it was kind of overwhelming the response, knowing that The New York Times would go all out to destroy it. As they still were doing from time to time to me, even though the editor of the Sunday book section was a friend of mine. I made a deal with him, I said.
Speaker I don’t want you to review the book, and I had refused to write for the Times and they were always after me. I said, all right, something for you, this would be a trade off, so I reviewed on the cover Evelynn Wars military trilogy.
Speaker That was my pay off, their pay off would be that they would not review Myra Breckinridge.
Speaker I then said, let’s announce it for, let’s say, May. And bring it out in February. By the time they get around to reviewing it in May, it’ll be a bestseller and there’s nothing they can do to stop it, which is exactly what happened. But The New York Times, The New York Times, I was betrayed. They got two or three journalists in the house to get together to review or to attack the book. By which time it was number one on the bestseller list and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. So that was, I think, very successful marketing plan. Then there was on the cover of the book, there was a cowgirl holding a hat and sort of course, girl outfit. And she was actually a, I don’t know, 30 foot high statue in front of the Chateau Marmont Hotel to stay. On Sunset Strip, and she’s through all round and round the great site and Hollywood. So Jim Moran, who was a press agent, was hired by Bantam Books to take this on a truck, this huge statue. And go from state capital to state capital and present the statue of Myra Breckinridge to the governor of the state. Now, the governors of most states will do anything to get their picture in the papers. So every governor was standing in front of his state capitol saying, no, no, no, we don’t want this on our capitol grounds. So that was a plan that worked out very nicely. I had nothing to do with it, but I applauded it.
Speaker We check that out now.
Speaker And the movie do you want to talk about?
Speaker I have never seen the movie and I have no intention of seeing it. I had to watch about five minutes of it on television when the best man was out. I went on to a Fox program. And the woman. I decided that she was going to show some of my Brackenridge to show what a terrible writer I was, a terrible person. And there was a scene with. Mae West and I think Rex Reed, I had never seen and I’d read the script. Which I blacked out and suddenly I have to sit there waiting to go on and listen five minutes in which the word gay, a word I never use and was never used in the book or in the script, is used about eight times.
Speaker And winning and you meaning when you think I mean, it’s like listening to really Cretans in a madhouse.
Speaker I was reminded again of the sickness of my nation.
Speaker Meira has this cult following, and I think that after the movie got a late night TNT rerun, you gained many more meyrick and many more young multi-color and many ering.
Speaker I found out the essential blessings that flow from Cairo will wash away their sins.
Speaker How is Myra contradictory? You know what’s cool, but gentle.
Speaker Exactly.
Speaker Well, I think she comes to the conclusion, I suppose any fair minded reader, whether she is God and we all know what he’s like, pretty awful most of the time, but he has occasional good moments. He’s also absolutely an.
Speaker Unfindable down. Like Myra, you don’t know where her mind is going to take her next. She is she is a creative force. As we suspect, deity, he must be if we are the result of a creation. So she is everything.
Speaker But she transcends the merely you and I mean, the human is just a layer for her. So she’s pre-Christian. You’d have to think of her as something that was working its way around Mount Olympus or possibly Shiva.
Speaker The destroyer.
Speaker I wondered if you could talk about the parallels between Washington, D.C. and Hollywood and the connections.
Speaker Washington, D.C. and Hollywood, aside from being. Two titles of books in my narrative of Empire series. There is a. Symbiotic relationship. And it goes back a long time, a long time, as long as Hollywood’s been around. Woodrow Wilson at the time of the First World War saw the uses of Hollywood. He had pretty much an isolationist country must remember, one thing about our wars is the American people have never wanted to go to war with anybody. We didn’t want to go into World War One. We didn’t want to go in World War Two. We didn’t want to go on the Korean affair. We didn’t want to go into Vietnam. This is all done by our rulers. And they in turn, do it for the banks, they do it for corporate America, they do it for the defense industries and so on. So most of politics during my lifetime has been. The rulers of the country getting the people excited enough to go to war and get killed so that Standard Oil can collect their royalties in Costa Rica or wherever. Well, it was hard going for the rulers to get people to go fight in Europe in a war between France and Germany. What were we doing in that war? That’s World War One. Suddenly, Hollywood appears and everybody on Earth is watching the movies, the peasants in China who don’t can’t speak any language but the dialect understand Charlie Chaplin as well as the intellectuals in Paris. Here is an instrument. I don’t know who first grasped it, but I know the first president to use it was Woodrow Wilson. He was hell bent on getting us into World War One. He was up against an isolationist press, Congress people. He got hold of a great PR guy called George Creel, and he sent him as a sort of unofficial ambassador to Hollywood. With instructions and all kinds of carrots and sticks to the movie makers to make movies, demonizing the Huns, the Germans who were eating babies and raping nuns and were subhuman people. And Krio was good at it, and we turned out so many films demonizing the Germans and glorifying the French, the English. That he really started Wilson, Woodrow Wilson himself appeared in two of these movies as Woodrow Wilson, these were all silence, you know, but there is Woodrow Wilson shaking the hand of the hero or heroine. And then you see, you know, a title. I am I am President Wilson. I am happy to greet you and that you are going to fight for freedom against the. So he got his war. Which is the object of the exercise. Well, nobody looked back after that when they realized radio, of course, was a great medium, so they still were newspapers, but Hollywood was irresistible.
Speaker The movies were irresistible. They were universal.
Speaker And it was only natural, then comes election time comes our era movie stars have a lot of money. Movies have a lot of money. They can finance campaigns. Politicians are such hicks. I mean, they’re so thrilled to meet movie stars. I can remember when Frank Capra used to come to town to open one of his sentimental political films in Washington, D.C. You know, everybody so thrilled movie stars in our town and everybody went crazy over them, didn’t like the movies because we thought his pictures were silly. But we certainly like the glamour and the attention. And it worked both ways. You saw the Clintons, they couldn’t keep their keep away from Hollywood. First, it was money for for them to raise for campaigning and it was attention. Barbra Streisand, with one concert can raise a million dollars for you and attract the attention of the country. So it was perfectly logical that that one would use the other and each would use the other. And finally, it came down to after a series, our rulers picked up a series of duds for president. Lyndon Johnson did not turn out terribly well, even though he was potentially was a great president, but he got bogged down in the war. Nixon was plainly certifiable and a great embarrassment to the nation. Carter could not set a foot, right? And they finally just hire an actor to play the president. And they got Ronald Reagan, who, contrary to propaganda, was a great actor, he’s not a great actor. He was one of the top five box office stars in the country. When he went into the army, which meant that he didn’t go overseas, he went from Burbank at Warner Brothers over to MGM in Culver City. That was his war duty and made training films. And then 13 years of flacking for General Electric saying the communists are coming. Same speech he gave for eight years as president. And that scientist summed it up, so here I am with two books, Hollywood and Washington, D.C.. And I know all this, but I haven’t quite put it together because Ronald Reagan hasn’t come along yet to.
Speaker To put, as it were. Panache on it. Meaning a plume.
Speaker Isn’t there a line that I read that where you tell us that Reagan was asked, somebody said something about how can how could an actor be a president?
Speaker And didn’t Reagan say, well, no, Reagan was you know, he did. He’s very smart. He’s not wasn’t he knew no history. He read no books. He thought no thoughts, really. But he was an intelligent operator and a great careerist. And somebody said, how on earth could an actor know how to be president? And he said quite correctly, he said, if you don’t know how to act, you cannot be president. And I think everyone from George Washington on would say, amen. Washington being one of the greatest actors we ever had. He was majestic when you just don’t come by that because you’re born that way, it’s because you work it out, you work out a performance, which Washington did. Lincoln did. Lincoln was the greatest stand up comic probably that we’ve ever had. And most of them have great histrionic gifts, but here was somebody just out of acting who showed how easy it was to be plausible, to be plausible and sound sincere. Helen Hayes, first lady of the American Theater.
Speaker She was always called from Washington, D.C.. Nice woman. Lifetime Republican, very, very right wing, she voted against Reagan and somebody said, go to hell and he’s just what you want, you know, conservative. And so she said, yes, but he’s an actor and I don’t want an actor.
Speaker I said, well, what you of all people, the queen of the American theater, she said, look, we’re paid for one thing. To project sincerity. I don’t know who he is, nobody know who he is because I don’t know who’s writing the scripts when I play Queen Victoria. Everybody knows I’m not Queen Victoria, so I have to be convincing as Queen Victoria. And that is done for me by my by my author and my director.
Speaker I don’t know who’s directing Mr. Reagan and I don’t know who’s writing that script, and I’m voting for whoever it was who ran against him that year.
Speaker It was very shrewd coming from one actor to over another and giving the writer credit.
Speaker Well, that was she was in the theater she wouldn’t have in the movie.
Speaker Matter you hanging at the door there?
Speaker And speaking of comparisons like Washington, D.C. and Hollywood.
Speaker What about the American empire and the Roman Empire?
Speaker Well, that’s. People like to make analogies between the Roman Empire, the American empire, but I don’t see how you really. We’re the era of science mostly, and most of our history has been conducted in the great burst of scientific activity.
Speaker Which changed all travel, all communications. Everything has been changed. So I don’t know how you would begin to compare the two. Except things go faster now. Roman Empire had 500 good years. If we have another five or 10, I’ll be surprised, you know?
Speaker Henry James wrote, It is a complex fate to be an American.
Speaker Well, Henry James’s. Tended to be right about such things, he also tended to be not very specific. I would like to know more of the complexities that he had in mind. It depends on what kind of an American you want to be. He was an American who did not like the United States, I’m American who does like the United States. More or less as it was intended and as it was when I was growing up.
Speaker In the capital.
Speaker And as we thought it was at least through the Second World War.
Speaker And then since then, I can’t say that I really like anything about it. The governance of the country, I mean, it’s a lot has been lost and that is complicated.
Speaker You know, I know people have often said to you, you know, if you you know, they might even ask, you know, do you consider yourself an American writer? And if you consider yourself an American writer, why are you living in Italy if your subject is America?
Speaker And I’d just like to hear the answer that. Well.
Speaker I suppose there is an element of paradox that I am probably the most American novelist of my time and I mean that in the sense that my subject is the United States and it’s the whole thing. I mean, to include multitudes. And I even have at times I’m not terribly romantic, but I have a sort of Whitmanesque view of the country. And so it’s all there, but it’s in my head, I don’t have to live in it. You see the problem, you see the split. Anybody who’s watched this, much of this program can see that I am interested not. In myself and my career, I’m interested in the fate of the country and the civilization to which I belong, with the civilization that I would like to see develop in the country in which I was born. That’s in my head all the time, and that’s what I write about all the time. When you can see that if I lived in the United States, I would be I would never write a line. You’ve seen me out there with the crowds, I would be out speaking from one end of the country year after year until I drop dead. I live in Italy because I’m left alone and I have my library here, and that’s all I need the books. My head and to be left alone, if I’m in the United States, I don’t leave them alone.
Speaker What about the idea of psychic distance that James talked about? Do you feel you get a different perspective by being just a little bit.
Speaker Well, you get a perspective, certainly or not, but. It’s different from what it was in his day. I have CNN, I’m watching exactly that, I have the Herald Tribune, I am reading and watching exactly what I would if I were living in Omaha.
Speaker So where is the distance? I’m not distance. It’s right on top of me. Henry James could live in London and never see an American newspaper and there was no television and he wouldn’t have wanted it either.
Speaker He contemplated Americans in America, and he was brilliant on the subject from time to time. But he had to put them in a European context to dramatize them. So that’s where Europe was much more useful for him than it has been for me, except for the judgment of Paris. I don’t think I’ve ever written anything about Americans in Europe. And if I did, I would feel, you know, he always said, oh, the poor, innocent Americans. And I would say, oh, the poor, innocent Europeans, when we get loose among them.
Speaker Even in Washington, D.C., you have a character named Clay Overbury.
Speaker There are certain things about him that that resemble JFK.
Speaker Did you intend that or is it just a type of personality? And what was the reaction of Camelot?
Speaker Well, Clay Overbury in some ways is suggestive of.
Speaker Jack Kennedy, he’s but instead of having a rich father, he has a rich father in law. Who wants to make him president and he rises and rises? And gets rid of his wife along the way and there are aspects of Jack, but it wasn’t about him. If you’re going to do make Jack a protagonist of a novel, you’d have to start with the father and start with that family.
Speaker That’s the Kennedy story. That’s his background, Overbury has no family and he’s totally an independent operator. I had a letter from somebody from some very right wing magazine, Human Events. There’s something called that.
Speaker So I’m Ed, they’re saying how much he’d like these books and.
Speaker And particularly the character of Clay Overburdensome, he said, but of course, I’ve been covering Washington, D.C. all my life and I’ve met him 10000 times, so I don’t think it’s all that unique. I do know that when Ken Galbraith, a friend of mine and of course, Jack, made him ambassador to India. He reviewed Washington, D.C. for The Washington Post. So there will be those who say it’s a Romona land and it’s. Over resembles this one or that one, but he doesn’t carefully making sure that the reader would not identify him with Jack.
Speaker Nor would they, because Jack’s activities were not known that. In those days.
Speaker Forget the context, but you said Americans can’t understand me.
Speaker They want mirrors, I’m a window.
Speaker OK, Mom, I didn’t say it was not about Americans. I said that. There is a problem. That certain. Certain sort of reader has with me. Was my writing, is that. They’re used to writers who are mirrors so they can see themselves reflected. In the text. And I’m not a mirror. I’m a window. You can look out. Of the window and you’ll see some of the world that you hadn’t seen before. And that is my function, is to try and reveal as much of that world as I can. Those writers who write entirely about themselves. Seems to be about 99 percent. Are acting as mirrors. Assuming that their reader is going to be just as fascinated by them because the reader is fascinated by him or herself. That’s all I meant, is that anybody who’s. Going to show you something that you hadn’t seen before. It’s going to have a difficult time. Most people read just to have superstitions confirmed. It’s amazing how few people want to read anything that from which they might learn something. Our good friend, a brilliant woman. In the show business agent. And I gave her when I wrote it and she said. Will you give me that for. I don’t know anything about him. I said, well, you learn about him if you read it, I would say I don’t know anything about that period. As you have no curiosity, no, you know. Well, this attitude is we can thank our educational system for having. Made our people totally incurious about everything that. What they don’t already know, they do not want to know. Now, when you start out with that as an audience, you are going to have a very difficult time unless you write about five people, you can write about Judy Garland, you can write about Marilyn Monroe, we write about Jack the about five people that they’ve heard of. And you just tell them the same story. Oh, Daddy, tell me about Marilyn Monroe again and Joe DiMaggio. Oh, I love that story so much. Just tell me again about it. Like children wanting the same story over and over and over again.
Speaker It is interesting that we’ve made how movie stars have become our gods and goddesses, the only people anybody knows, you know.
Speaker Someone asked you, you know, what is it like to be Gore Vidal or do you have to be going down? And you said, well, I didn’t set out to be Gore Vidal.
Speaker And I wondered, how the hell did you say that? Well, I wanted to go into politics so I wouldn’t have been a writer.
Speaker I wanted a different a different career, but since I was stuck with the one into which I was born. The other I was born into, in a sense, I was part of a tribe family. And would be fulfilling family. Family obligations and being born a writer meant I was going to have to do something else. Which is far more interesting, basically in the long run.
Speaker I’ve noticed that justice seems to be a very important concept and an honor seems to come up. I mean, obviously power and power scheme.
Speaker The idea of honor comes up hardly an American theme, is it? And that, of course, was what attracted me to Arenberg. And, well, the idea of.
Speaker It’s sort of twin. Ideas that possessed me, it seems.
Speaker When I ponder the rare occasions, I think about what I’ve written and done, one is honor and what does it mean?
Speaker What do you do? At the sacrifice of your own interest. Which would be of use to your country or to others? And then justice, which really bothers me more than anything else in justice. I mean, the fact that six point six million people are in prison or in what they call correction three percent of the adult population, I wake up at night raging about that. I don’t think any other American bothers. So they bad luck or they deserve to be they wouldn’t be in prison unless they were bad people. Probably take drugs, you know, people take drugs to be killed. That’s the average American attitude. Well, mine is that nobody should be put in prison for taking drugs. Hospitalise, maybe, you know, give them therapy and help, but what right has the government to determine what I smoke, drink, inject? What government has this right?
Speaker None.
Speaker But it’s the means of keeping control over the people. Now we go back to power and now we get back to injustice, a totally injustice system. That a kid who was caught three times smoking marijuana, it can be life in prison without any hope of parole.
Speaker Whereas a serial murderer can get out after eight years or something like that, there’s a whole formula for him to escape. He’s dangerous. The person who smokes marijuana is not dangerous. It is tough, it is injustice like that that I find gets me going more than anything on Earth.
Speaker Why does it do it? Well, that comes the other one that comes out of a sense of honor that if you are in a position to speak out and to change people’s minds and you can take to the airwaves or write or do something, then you ought to do it. Most people, I find it try to get them to do anything they’re so terrified of, the government is so terrified of popular opinion, they don’t they want to speak out. And they become sort of anesthetized to their times. I often feel I’m just dealing with some of my best friends are zombies, moral zombies. Because they’ve been frightened to death.
Speaker But where do you think this comes from, you?
Speaker I don’t know, I’m not my subject. I don’t study myself.
Speaker If you were interviewing yourself, what questions would you ask?
Speaker If I were interviewing myself, as you suggest that I might do, what questions would I ask myself?
Speaker Why is it that when I ever I have a great success? At anything. I leave town. And one of the few people when he has a hit play on Broadway, I’m out of town next week. And don’t come back till it’s gone from theaters. Or a successful book or whatever.
Speaker I’d love to know. I can’t answer it. I would ask myself that. I think it’s a sense of completion or that ghastly word that they use on television all the time. Closure. It’s not the dumbest word. We have so many dumb words floating around, but I suppose it’s a it’s a desire for closure. All right, I’ve done this. I put the play on the thing is working or it’s failed.
Speaker I leave town when they fail to move on.
Speaker I’m guessing that’s why, but that’s the only thing that occurs to me that seems at all significant.
Speaker Perhaps you’re more interested in the process and the problem solving.
Speaker Well, I think that would be true of any artist. Or any reform or. Well, I first came to Rome in 1939 and.
Speaker As I’ve already described, I was quite. I felt I was home then I came back in the 50s to write Ben-Hur and I it was made time and I was cut Roman fever all over again, I thought I really got to live here again. Then went back and. By 1964, I could have been elected. To the House of Representatives from upstate New York, and I decided I didn’t want to run again.
Speaker This time for fear I’d win. And. I was going to go back to novel writing, I was going to go and finish the novel Julian, which had begun years before, so it was either Rome or Athens and Athens was far too hideous. The city, the modern Athens and.
Speaker So settle in and be a Julia and duly wrote Julian, and then I got an apartment and sort of settled in and began to go back to novel writing. And it was a place to be away from, I missed my house on the Hudson, but by 64 I think it was, I saw that. And then we got this place down here about 30 years ago because Rome got to be too noisy and crowded. And that is the story geographically.
Speaker Tell me about living in Rome, how you discovered village life.
Speaker Well, every quarter, certainly in those days, was a village you lived in. We had a small penthouse on top of an old palace. And it was a great democracy, the old Rome. In fact, it’s called vecuronium that section where I was, which is not far from the Pantheon. You would have shops at the street level. Then they call the first floor, we call the second floor is the piano, no, Billy. Which is where the nobles lived and they had the great painted ceilings in reception rooms and so on, then maybe two or three flight levels above that. Where you would have well-to-do lawyers and so on and the next level and above that would be merchants and above that would be workers who would be working in the markets and so on. So in one palace, you had every every class. And everybody mingled with everybody else, everybody spoke dialect.
Speaker And it really was village life all in one palace than if your quarter there would be five or six of these palaces and you’d have five or six little villages really.
Speaker And you got to know everybody quite well, you would meet at the chemists or you would meet in the markets and. Everybody kept an eye out on everybody else and. It was village life of a sort that. It was much cheerier, possibly because I was a foreigner, so they’re pleasant to foreigners. But much cheerier, let’s say, than Red Hook, New York. Which I live near at one point up the Hudson. Which was seething in a way, with all sorts of strange emotions. And I found the Roman life is much more natural and more human.
Speaker Can you tell me about the company Fillery in the mornings, well, paradise.
Speaker It’s full of kids on drugs. Now, I am told I haven’t been there in some years, but used to be you just came in, the producer came in, which would be generally Tuesday morning. Everything would be fresh and you wouldn’t you would shop and there were wine shops all around and you got to know a lot of people, friends indeed, would be shopping there, too. It was very convivial. I miss that part of. And every Sunday, I would walk along the course of Vittorio Emanuele across the Tiber, over to the Vatican side and go to Senator Telia. Every Sunday, there was a concert and great musicians. And I wouldn’t even buy a ticket, I just go around. Get whatever was available.
Speaker You said something about. Living in Rome, if you could cross the Capitol Hill each day, you would feel content or serene, would you tell us about that?
Speaker Forgotten saying it. I don’t know what I meant. Because we did some shots.
Speaker Well, the camera, Dolia, is a sign of eternal room. And it was always felt that as long as the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius was in place in that beautiful square designed by Michelangelo. That Rome was safe, Rome could not fall, and of course, they took it away to repair it. Now it’s back again and we’re all nervous. Has it been away too long?
Speaker And try to realize, well, that used to be wonderful until the buses stopped running, they stopped around 11, 30 or 12 and most of the ladies live in the periphery around the city. That’s when the palaces began to break up because they got gentrified. So only rich people moved into the palaces. So the waiters who all lived on the third and fourth floors had to move out of town, which meant that they shut up every restaurant around 11, 30 or 12.
Speaker And the old summer thing was sitting out in the square all night long. That ended. That was a sad moment when that happened.
Speaker Is it a conversation city?
Speaker Well, they talk a lot, they talk a lot, not like Washington, which Henry James called the city of conversation, conversation was always very important in Washington. A very high level and about real subjects.
Speaker Ruined life is. Bit more human, that more chatter.
Speaker Didn’t didn’t Henry Henry Adams call Washington, D.C., the world’s grandest zoo, did it?
Speaker It’s interesting. It’s got the city of conversation, but what comes up over, you know, time and again in your boxes, which is so James in two, is that it’s what’s not said, you know, could you?
Speaker Well, politicians, a secret of politics, at least as practiced in Washington, D.C., is no one says what he means. And if you’re about to make a deal, you’re a senator, you’re making a deal with another senator or with the president. You talk in code. Each knows what the other wants and each knows what he will give and what he won’t give. So be just something like all of is here. And I was Helen, you. You know, about, you know, that postal matter? Yeah, I know about that.
Speaker George. Yes.
Speaker Well, in what I’ve just said, a major post office has gone to a major politician, is now the postmaster of Omaha, Nebraska. And it goes like that, and no more said than that, nothing has put in writing, nothing is. No hands is placed upon the Bible.
Speaker So it is all in code.
Speaker What’s the club?
Speaker Well, I saw I referred to it in Washington, D.C. as a group, it’s a group of senators who run the Senate, the iron law of oligarchy.
Speaker In Washington, D.C., I refer to the club that runs the Senate and. William Cohen, who is now was secretary of defense and was a senator for a long time from Maine. I read an interview with him and he said he just read Washington, D.C. and he said one thing he really liked about it was that I referred to the club that runs the Senate and sees a lot of rather obscure older senators. And he said that Gore Vidal says, quite correctly, that though no one is quite sure who is a member of the club. Everyone knows who is not.
Speaker That was good literary criticism.
