Jay Parini

Speaker I think Gore’s primary primarily a novelist of history.

Speaker Although I love the inventions, as he calls them, books like Myra Breckinridge, Myron, this is the Smithsonian Institution, I think Gore is really at his very best in books like BRX 1876, Lincoln, even Washington, D.C. I think this is where Gore’s vision of America really is going to make him a writer of lasting value. He’s going to give America a take on itself that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. I think looking back 100 years from now, something like Myra Breckinridge will look like a bit of a curiosity, I suspect. I think it spoke powerfully to its moment and it really is an astonishing book and that it gives us the unconscious of the American culture. But what Gore Vidal so good at is giving us the conscious of American culture. And in the American sequence, he’s really taken us into the parlors of the high and mighty in a way no serious novelist ever has before. There were always a lot of tacky American historical novelists, bad names we don’t even remember anymore. But Vidal was very brave and taking on a genre of historical novel, really reinventing it in his own voice, in his own way, becoming a postmodern American historical novelist, obliterating the genre and giving us a kind of a visionary sequence about our politics and our life. And I think a hundred years from now, people will look back and say that’s what America was, or at least that is a very vivid portrait of America.

Speaker That’s great, that’s just that’s that’s choppy, but I’ll get that. I mean, just yes, we might want to circle back to that because once I just need to get my motor trolley.

Speaker I know what it was like within five minutes of talking, something that gives you a sense of, man, I’m rolling. Right. OK.

Speaker Well, that, in a way, maybe you’ve answered this question.

Speaker I don’t want to say something July until. So I think that’s one these great books. I agree.

Speaker Your favorites are my favorites.

Speaker In fact, why don’t we just take that from the top where I was? Can I just do just let it over again? Because that was just I totally get my voice going, so to speak, again.

Speaker So for what writing or will do you think Gore Vidal will be remembered?

Speaker And what is the strength of his writing?

Speaker From my point of view, Gore’s best books are Julian and Burr. I think those are the places in his fiction was absolutely at his peak as a craftsman. And I think he said, I speak as a visionary writer there to the vision of Rome and the vision of America as the new empire. I think this is in that I think we can’t look at Gore’s Vidal’s American Chronicles without also thinking about him as a writer who could envision Rome in a real way. He understands the whole notion of Rome. Monitus. I mean, when we think about Gore fleeing from America in 1960 after his loss and running for Congress, he’s had a long period now, six, seven years, which was absent from writing fiction. He goes back to Rome. What does he choose to do? But right, Julian, to plunge himself into the 4th century A.D. and to write in the voice of the Emperor Julian, the apostate, who was a voice very close to the DA himself. Whenever I read Julian, I say, this is Gore Vidal and he understands Capitol Hill. I mean, in Rome, they talked about Monds capital Lorem write the Capital Hill of Rome. And Gore understood that these were the centers of power Rome had transferred to Washington, D.C. And I think in reading Gore Vidal, one has to always be aware that here’s a man who understands the intersection of power and sex history and current events. He understands how past and present play into each other and his vision of Rome and Julian and his vision of the American capital in Washington, D.C. and Hollywood, which is the kind of counter capital. I mean, here we have Gore Vidal going to the centers of power and understanding what it’s like. And so Gore’s great work is Julian. Looking back at ancient Rome and the American Chronicle, there’s no doubt about it. He’s done major work in the books that go from BR through 1876, Lincoln and then Empire, which is actually one of my very favorite books of his and Hollywood, which is an extension of an unfolding from Empire. And finally with the golden age. I mean, it’s a magnificent visionary take on the American republic turned empire. And 100 years from now, readers will look at this and say, this is what America was. Or at least this was an important glance at America, an important interpretation of American history. It’s interesting to think that the all began writing the American sequence with Washington, D.C., he published that in 1967, just as the 60s, late 60s, when the counterculture was coming into full swing. This was the moment in American modern history when people realized that there was a difference between the official version of events and what was really going on, the Vietnam War. We realized that there was the public narrative and there was something going on behind the public narrative. And Gore in many ways applied for the countercultural generation, a counter narrative to American history, which took you get looked at the public story, the facts, and then went to lot the facts and showed you what was really happening behind the scenes. Suddenly, Gore is really an analyst of power and this is what he understands better than any American novelist ever has before. He understands power. He understands power because he grew up in the center of power. Washington, D.C. There was his grandfather, Senator Thomas Prior Gore, one of the masters of politics in American history, a ruling leader of the leader of the Democratic Party. Gore grew up in that little house in Rock Creek Park. You know, looking at Huey Long, Alice Roosevelt, Longworth, Eleanor Roosevelt, he was in the presence of powerful people from an early age. He is had amazing access to the scene. So he understood this weird connection between power and and history. And he’s had that right from the beginning. He used to sit in his grandfather’s seat in the actually in the Senate offices and hear senators talking among each other. Most American writers would have to fantasize about what that talk might sound like. But he said at the dinner tables of the high and mighty from a very early age. And he’s had unique access, frankly, throughout his entire life. I mean, how is it possible that one man has been in so many places in his own lifetime? In many ways, the doll is, you know, are representative man in the 20th century because he has understood Washington, D.C., He’s understood Hollywood. He’s been a politician himself. He’s been an intellectual who has, you know, rubbed shoulders with, you know, men like John Kenneth Galbraith, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. He’s known all these people as friends or enemies. He’s understood the world of television. There he was at the birth of the golden age of television, participating to the hilt. I mean, he did write over 50 teleplay in that period. He adapted Barn Burning by William Faulkner. He adapted The Turn of the Screw by Henry James on and on. So there is more present at the creation in Washington, D.C. at the time of Roosevelt. There he is present at the creation with the golden age of television. There he is in the 50s, which was the heyday of Broadway. And there’s Gore Vidal on stage himself with a visit to a small planet and the best man, the toast of Broadway. There’s Gore Vidal working for MGM in the 50s and working on films like Ben-Hur, writing screenplay after screenplay, getting to know the Hollywood stars, getting to know people like Billy Wilder. Wherever you look, there is Gore Vidal. You know, you go to London and there’s Gore Vidal, friend of Princess Margaret, sitting in the halls of the of the British upper class, hearing what they speak like. There’s Gore Vidal in Russia talking to Gorbachev. You know, there’s Gore Vidal, of course, in Italy. I always think of Gore as a kind of Roman emperor in exile, sitting in Ravello. He sits there in this great house, Leron Denyer, Swallow’s nest perched on a cliff hundreds of feet above the Gulf of Salerno. And he presides over Western European culture. As I always say, he’s he’s exiled emperor Emperor Gore sitting there grandly serving master of all his surveys. And his eye has a tremendous he has a Panopticon vision, synoptic vision. He looks all over the same history. I mean, it’s not just what’s going on now, but he sees depths below depths. It’s not for nothing that he entitled his autobiography, Palimpsest Gore’s whole life has been about putting a text in place and then wanting to go below the text, wanting to erase the text, put a new text over it, superimpose one story over another story, and therefore he understands how history is. Many stories layered upon many stories. And so when we read Julian, we really are reading late 20th century America through that mirror of the lens of fourth century Rome, when Gore doesn’t when he writes this amazing novel creation spoken from the point of view of Cyrus Fatema, who’s a half Greek, half Persian wandering diplomat. I mean, that incredible synoptic vision is present there. Fifth, this is fifth century B.C. Yet it feels like Gore Vidal is somehow examining our present state of spirituality. He’s weighing alternatives. He’s making decisions, and he’s offering us up again and again a mirror to our own lives. That’s why historical fiction is so important. It’s not really about the past, but as much as it’s about the present and Gore’s novels, of course, historical novels are really ways of reading the present. They offer us a window into ourselves in a way of understanding who we are by understanding where we have been. That’s what’s so crucial. One of my favorite moments in all of the doll, which explains him as a novelist and historian, is that final moment in empire when President Teddy Roosevelt is having a little tete a tete conversation with William Randolph Hearst. And Hearst says to Roosevelt, Well, you know, we make it all up and Roosevelt is a little bit furious and says, what do you mean? You make it all up? And Hearst says, Oh, I thought you were smarter than that. Don’t you understand that true history is the final fiction? If one sentence is going to explain all of the dolls work at that sentence. True history is the final fiction.

Speaker And I think what that. Understand? The writer is sorry. Yes, I keep rambling on here. Well, you have a new battery. Let’s go.

Speaker Let’s start with that one. OK. One of my favorite moments in adult fiction, possibly the most important moment in all of his American sequence, possibly in his whole work, is that beautiful moment when Teddy Roosevelt is having a little tete a tete conversation with the great, you know, ruler of newspapers, William Randolph Hearst, the founder of modern journalism, especially yellow journalism and Hearst Roosevelt. Well, you know, we do make it all up in newspapers. And Roosevelt says shocked. He says, what do you mean?

Speaker You make it all up about telling lies, are you? And and Randolph Hearst says, don’t you understand? The true history is the final fiction.

Speaker I thought you understood that. That’s the exact quote. And I think this explains a lot about Vidal. He understands that true history is the final fiction. And I think what he means by that is and this explains what he’s doing in his fictions, he’s trying to give us a vision of the past, which will reflect in some way and help us to interpret our present, to help us understand who we are by telling us where we’ve been and where things that we now see, the forms that are generated before us, what their origins are. So we’re not just walking around in this silly little bubble of the present. That’s why the dollar is so valuable to us. He tells us where we’ve been and what the connections are between the American imperium and the Roman imperium. And so true history, which is how history has to be different from past history. I think with Fidel suggesting here that the true historian is able to look at the facts, the agreed upon facts, and Fidel never fudges the agreed upon facts. You know, if he has a red moon rose over the harbor of New York when Teddy Roosevelt was standing on the docks, you can be pretty sure that there was red only what got it from a diary so that the agreed upon facts are as they are. But history is really history as a discipline is all about the arrangement of facts and the arrangement of facts had to do with fiction. What is fiction? If you look at the Latin word Ciccio, it simply means to shape. And so what Gore Vidal has done is take from the zillion trillion billion facts in the universe, a finite number of facts and have given us an arrangement of those facts that help to explain them. He’s cut a path with his narrative through American history and before that through Roman history. And in cutting these various paths, he’s given us the invaluable lesson, history lesson about ourselves. We know where we came from, who were our founding fathers, what were the motives of these people? You know, usually we just have these soapstone portraits of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, William Burr. We suddenly have a shocking new vision of these people. We see George Washington as a rather bumbling but very wealthy landowner who’s quite happy. Thank you. To have Alexander Hamilton give us a vision of America which is going to make America safe for the landowning class. He was himself a millionaire in 18th century terms, and he understood that. And the dollar weakens us up to the founding fathers. What some of their real motives are. And I’m not going to suggest I think this is a misreading of the doll that he’s always attacking and undermining. Now, the doll is trying to understand situation, true facts, true history, as it really was. But he’s giving history and narrative shape so that we can understand it, so that we can see the story that leads to our present story. And so he tracks American history with Burr, which I do think is probably his finest moment as a writer. He spent many years on that novel and there’s an astonishing vision of New York in the 18th century and the founding fathers and the incredible duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. The duel scene, 18 for 18 or 04 is beautifully done, very beautifully dramatized, because Gore is a natural playwright as well. But, you know, Burroughs written in the mold of Escalus and the great, great tragedies. And so the resonances are always there in the middle, if you know what he’s referring to. And he tracks us right through with his marvelous hero. NARRATOR Charlie Schuyler, an invention. This is another thing about the doll. He’s able to blend fictional characters with real characters seamlessly. And in doing so, he makes the fictional characters, you know, he makes the nonfictional characters. People like Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Burr, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, real because he animates them, and so Charlie Schuyler has been there, talk to these people. The conversations seem so lively and there’s a feeling of you are there and for those books. But he takes us from 18th century, the founding fathers, the origins of the American republic. And even at the beginning, he kind of hints that there’s something amiss somewhere, that it’s not simply American history. As all you know, we were oppressed by the British and therefore we rebelled. No, we the American Revolution was for suggests really about preserving the country, making it safe for capitalism, making it safe for people to own the land.

Speaker Justice was never one of the real issues among the founding fathers. Even Thomas Jefferson, who’s something of a sacred cow, really gets a very multidimensional portrait. And the. I mean, there’s some very amusing stuff in Burr about Thomas Jefferson. And we’ve lately come to understand that Jefferson was himself, of course, a slave owner, had an affair with one of his slaves and so forth. Always Inverdale. I find he’s got to he’s he’s a bit of a prophet. Things that are shocking when Fidel first writes about them eventually become truisms. This has been true of his politics all along. You know, now the right has taken up many of the things that 20 years ago Vidal talked about. It seems shocking and left wing now they’re just taken as taken for granted.

Speaker The business of, for instance, that he constantly in the 60s and early 70s was saying the war on drugs, the only thing we have to do is take out the profit motive here, legalize drugs. Well, now we have the Republican senator from New Mexico proposing the same thing. William F. Buckley has proposed the same thing.

Speaker I mean, always Gore is being taken. His ideas, which seemed original at the time and were original, become truisms. So Gore takes us on a grand march in this American Chronicle through our history, beginning with the founding fathers of the Revolutionary War and Burr through 1876, which is another marvelous book. This is the book that takes us gives us a tour of the Gilded Age. And it’s not for nothing that Mark Twain appears in the book of Mark Twain, of course, himself wrote the book The Gilded Age, a rather tacky version of the same period. But Gore is writing 1876, remember publishing it in 1976, America’s great bicentennial. And Gore comes out with 1876, which of course, lands him on the cover of Time magazine in a kind of Founding Fathers outfit himself. I always love that picture of Gore on Time magazine. But what I think about this for a moment, what Gore is doing is going back in 1876 to the moment in American history when, again, there were a lot of strange things and discrepancies going on, the controversy between President Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden.

Speaker It’s crucial that the center of that novel and I never have read that book without seeing until that the version of George McGovern. And I and I certainly see Tilden and I certainly see Hayes as a version of the bumbling Gerald Ford. I mean, we realize that, you know, the more things change, the more things stay the same. That’s another one of the messages, of course, novels we see the same scandals reenacted year after year, decade after decade. And so the scandals that beset the grand administration are eerily reminiscent of and foreshadowing of the scandals of the Nixon administration. And so we see capitalism in all of its ugliness and all of its power. We see sex playing a very crucial role in all of these novels and, you know, very predictive of what would have happened in the Clinton White House. I mean, anyone who’s read Gore Vidal American Chronicles could not have been surprised by the Monica Lewinsky affair. I mean, this is pure of a doll, but it’s just pure America.

Speaker This is what America is about, sex and power.

Speaker And again, one mustn’t read Gore’s American Chronicles in isolation that we was reading against creation and against Julian Fidel understood, especially in Julian, this connection between sex and power.

Speaker I always loved the Roman palindrome Roma sentence. Read this way, I’m sure read the other way. And the Romans were very aware that sex and power were intimately connected. Power is, you know, a nation’s desire to penetrate, to overcome, to overwhelm another society or one class in a society mastering another class, whereas sex is about can be about power. Relations among people, certainly in Vidal’s novels, sexism is an exploration of power, relationships between men and women, between men and men.

Speaker There’s a sense in which the American Chronicles represents the overt consciousness of American history. And Gore’s satirical novels represents the unconscious of the American life. I mean, as we have these rich and powerful people like presidents and senators talking and Lincoln and Burr and discussing the fate of the American people and Myra Breckinridge mirror, we see the underside of that. We have the common man, buck loner. I mean, if there’s ever a representative of the common man, it’s this small, you know, rodeo star Buck, a loner and his, you know, poor, poor son Myron, who becomes Myra Breckinridge. And Fidel is such a shocking writer, really. He’ll go anywhere. I think one of the great things about Gore Vidal is the fact that he’s afraid of nothing. He will go anywhere. Most of us are terrified and refuse to transgress, to go outside the boundaries of certain lines. What makes Gore such an astonishing creature, unlike anything else in American society, is that he’s willing to go anywhere at any time, imaginatively and in fact, physically. He will go anywhere. He will do anything and he will say anything if it seems to him true. And this, you know, lands him in outrageous situations in his own life, of course. But it does so in his fiction as well. But that’s why it’s exhilarating to read. I mean, to have had the guts to write Myra Breckinridge 1968, to explode so many sexual mythologies, didn’t have the guts to write BRX and to expose the, you know, the foibles of our founding fathers.

Speaker And then to have not only the the the guts, but the imaginative and intellectual energy to go on this amazing procession through American history, to take us by the hand and show us the 19th century slavery and to go to the heart of the 19th century in America and give us a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the hero of American culture. I mean, Lincoln has been appropriated by historians, schoolteachers and amateurs ever since he was shot about by you know, in the theater that night, Gore Vidal had the presence of mind, the courage and the wit to say, let’s take a fresh look at Abraham Lincoln. The Abraham Lincoln he gives us, first of all, it’s remarkably true to history, you know, David Herbert Donald, the great Harvard historian, told me that he’s astonished by its historical veracity. He says he called the major historian.

Speaker This is real hard, true intellectual history, but more so he imagines conversations between John Hay and Abraham Lincoln. We go behind the Lincoln administration. We understand what was we can think of another one to the margins, what’s happening at a cabinet meeting or what the conversations that might have taken place between Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln or Lincoln and his sons. Maybe he has a marvelous roving eye for history and he can take us anywhere but Lincoln, as you know, the great American tragedy. Harold Bloom, the critic, says that the doll presents Lincoln as a central man. He’s is the ultimate archetypal American leader, the man who sacrificed himself to make the union hall. I mean, that’s a dramatic it’s a religious story in its final analysis. And Fidel understands that Lincoln is presented as a quasi religious figure. He understands the dynamics of religion and the dynamics of celebrity and publicity.

Speaker And he understands that Lincoln would have been, of course, an ordinary man, an ordinary person like you, like me. Lincoln just happened to be, you know, historically placed in the right moment and have certain virtues, incredible tenacity, tremendous political wit. I mean, he chose Lincoln as a real conniver. And that’s what’s interesting. He would have had to have been a conniver to achieve what he achieved.

Speaker And when you think the novel begins on that wintry morning in 1861, when when Lincoln is ushered into Washington, D.C., guarded by Pinkerton and various guards and a man who could be assassinated at any moment, talk about the sense of drama. I mean, from the beginning, Lincoln is presented as a man under threat, a man who was willing to sacrifice his body and his soul to the nation. That said, he doesn’t romanticize Abraham Lincoln. He treats Lincoln as he was a fairly moderate Republican who was by no means an abolitionist. And that was shocking to many readers. I mean, again, the doll is telling us our true history here with the great tragedy of this nation is the suppression of, first of all, the Native American race. There would almost what does amount to genocide of Native Americans and then slavery where millions upon millions died in slavery. Numbers vary, but it’s tens of millions of African Americans died in slavery. And the doll is willing to go there and understand Lincoln as not an abolitionist, but somebody who understands that that’s what he’s going to have to do to save the homeless of the nation and also those willing to go in and take a little historical hint and push it further than many people would be willing to take it. For instance, Lincoln’s sexuality is one of the dark veins running through Lincoln. Lincoln perhaps had syphilis and perhaps passed it along to Mary Todd and his sons. And this is not this is where the novelist takes off from historian and goes places where perhaps an historian wouldn’t feel free to go back one second.

Speaker OK, I think of the gumption that Fiddlehead and taking on Abraham Lincoln. Here’s an American icon so frozen in history, he’s like a figure up on a mountain peak already. And to actually put flesh and bones on this creature to show us a man who had sexual longings, a man who had suffered from perhaps venereal disease, a man whose marriage was not quite where we would look to the outside, a man torn by self-doubt doubts a moderate Republican, as I said, who was not an abolitionist yet, who had to suddenly seize the abolitionist banner because he saw that this was going to be one way of getting enough people in the north behind him to make it possible to win the civil war. Think of imaginative guts it took for it all to take on the civil war itself. You know, one of the most heartrending, brutal, astonishing moments in America. I wish it were a moment periods in American history. Fidel takes the whole thing off imaginatively and intellectually, you know, it’s a riveting narrative of that era. And finally he pictures, you know, he gives us the death of Abraham Lincoln, powerfully done. And there’s an amazing meditation by John Hay on the meaning of Abraham Lincoln’s life. I love the coda when he goes to France and he’s meditating on what Lincoln meant to the American people. Brutally realistic, unromantic. And one thing Fidel is not ever is a romantic. This is what separates Gore Vidal from so many of the writers of his generation. Many ways, you know, Updike, Norman Mailer, the whole crew of post-war writers are really writing romances of one kind or another. Fidel is an anti romantic. Fidel is a hard bitten classicist. Who are his models? I mean, Thomas Love, Peacocke Voltaire. These are the people that Gore Vidal admires, mostly Jonathan Swift. I mean, a brutal satirist. And Vidal, you know, stands from with a from his lower helicopters view of society often. And, you know, I often think of those lines from William Butler. Yates cast a cold eye on life on death, Horseman passed by. And Gore Vidal has that kind of lofty view, unsentimental. And he goes places where most amazing so many readers have been willing to follow him there. Gore Vidal is very at home in the 19th century, by the way, I love the parts of Burr that deal with the 1930s and the parts of 1876 where he deals with the Gilded Age. He loves that period and pushing on into the 80s, 90s and empire, of course, very at home in the 19th century. And he gives cameo portraits, not just cameos to Mark Twain and Henry James, both in 1876 and Empire Empire. You remember, it begins with a marvelous dinner party in England, deep in the English countryside where the American ambassador is playing host to lots of wealthy, powerful Americans and some British. But Henry James is, I guess, the dinner party and that marvelously clear, acerbic, lofty, vivid presence. Henry James, very important for Gore Vidal. When Gore got in his study right behind his desk, the New York edition of Henry James and James is really one of the founding texts in Gore Vidal does work. You wouldn’t have Gore Vidal without James, but interestingly enough, you wouldn’t have Gore Vidal without Mark Twain either. In some ways, I see Vidal as a writer at the culmination of the two very opposite strands in American literature, sometimes described as the Redskin versus the pale face. The pale face would be Henry James, the Redskin, Mark Twain or the Dole has these two sides to himself, even has them in the strands of his fiction, meaning certainly very, very wild and redneck strain. And Myra, Myron Kalki, these wild, crazy, visionary books which explore, interrogate the American unconscious. But we have the sophisticated Henry James inside the European abroad and in so many other Vidal novels. And that came from reading Henry James in the early 50s as when Fidel went to school by reading the novels of Henry James. We see the first fruits of that in the In The Judgment of Paris, 1952, the flowers again in The American Chronicles. I mean, that’s really where we see the Jamesy and I the perspicacity looking from left to right, up and down, and being able to portray society and people in power and in a way that we see that what they’re saying is not necessarily what they mean. I mean, Gore Vidal is really more about what’s not said than what’s said in the American Chronicles. The real narratives of empire are in the margins are in invisible footnotes. I mean, what one says is not what gets.

Speaker We see people acting constantly, presidents, senators, people in power behaving and saying things in public and then acting very differently in private. We understand that it’s a very small group of people who have their hands on the levers of power. I mean, the origins, I mean, let’s talk about The American Chronicles for a moment about that, about how the sequence of all began with Washington, D.C., which, of course, start writing in the mid 60s. We begin with this marvelous scene outside. A storm is brewing and we’re on the lawns of a beautiful, wealthy person’s house outside of Washington, D.C. And it turns out that it’s Merrymount, the house where Gore Vidal grew up in for a period here. Mary would say, OK, to take that again. Washington, D.C. begins a stormy night, beautiful house outside of Washington where rich people, powerful people are gathered. And this is really Mary Wood, where Gore Vidal did spend part of his childhood when his when Gore was 10 years old, his mother divorced Eugene Lutherville and married Hugh the ocean class, a very wealthy, powerful man who lived in this great mansion, which would always cause a Philistine house. There were not many books in their. But that was that image of Mary Margaret, Mary Wood and the storm that I think was the initial image that got the whole sequence rolling. And then we have this astonishing portrait of the powerful senator, very conflicted in his life, Senator James Byrd Day. And this is obviously a version of Gore’s grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore. We see characters like Clay Overbury, who’s obviously a refraction, shall we say, of John Kennedy, who Gore Vidal knew very well personally. This is why the book is so exciting, because we know Gore Vidal has been there. He’s talked to these people. He sat at the table of John Kennedy many times and listened to him talk. He sat with his grandfather. He sat with all of these senators and congressmen and newspaper entrepreneurs. He knew what these people talked like, you know, what was on their minds, what the tenor of the conversation was, was able to reproduce it so perfectly in this novel. So Washington, D.C. was, I think, a big discovery for Gore. He knew he could actually mind his own personal history for the benefits of his fiction. He could somehow bring intellectual and artistic power to bear on what he already knew. Interestingly enough, he hadn’t done that much before this. This is the first time Gore is really using his own life properly, shall we say, as an artist. And then the sequence begins, the great American sequence. He didn’t I don’t think it was until he was writing BRX that he thought of this could be a sequence. And he begins piecing fictional stories together over many generations with with the lives of real people that began when he was writing BRX. And then I think it just blossomed from there, a book after book first that was going to be a trilogy, then a tetralogy. Now it’s the great sequence or narrative of empire stretching over many books, this tarnishing imaginative creation and portrait of our age. Someone once described a novelist as a mere walking down a road, and I think of that as the perfect description of the doll. There’s also a tape recorder walking down the road. And one of the things, Gore, is if you’ve ever spent much time with him, you know, he’s a marvelous mimic. I’ve spent hours in his company listening, listening to him imitate Roosevelt or Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan as Ronald Reagan is one of the best. You know, I love Gore and Ronald Reagan. He once called Reagan a triumph of the embalmer’s art and he can imitate these voices. But then you start reading his novels and you realize he does all these different voices. He can be Cyrus Bitola of creation, the half Persian, half Greek wandering diplomat, or he can be Julian the apostate or Julians, you know, elderly teachers. Or he can be Rusev of Teddy Roosevelt, or he can be Aaron Burr. He takes on all these voices and they’re all very different, rather astonishing. I was thinking about Gore when I was really Little Dorrit as a character, a Little Dorrit who in the Marshalsea Prison is famous for being able to imitate all the different policemen in London. T.S. Eliot was fascinated with that passage. Little Dorrit and in fact, the original title for The Wasteland was He Did the Police in Different Voices, which is taken from that line describing the character in the Marshalsea Prison in Dickens. You know, in our society. OK, where I left off to talk to them about these terrible Lincoln and you got off in the wasteland. Yeah, I was going to say I was going to add that, you know, in many ways you could just call it a title collected works. He knew the police and different voices. There is that for that joke maybe to over the heads of the audience. But let’s just take it back to Lincoln for minute then, and we’ll talk about the debt that is the aberration and one of the oddities of Lincoln. Of course, this is a huge novel and this was probably the most popular novel in the entire sequence as far as sales went and as far as critical acclaim went, there was a huge positive reception for Lincoln. You know, it was almost given the Pulitzer Prize. Three members of the jury voted for it. But for some reason, the Pulitzer committee refused to give the dreadful Gore Vidal the Pulitzer Prize. I think that’s one of the great travesties Lincoln should have gotten the Pulitzer Prize. Be that as it may, I think Gore has been a very innovative novelist as far as history goes. The traditional historical novel presents a group of fairly romantic fictional characters against this backdrop, the model for historical novels, someone like Sir Walter Scott. We’ve got a very rich historical setting, fictive characters prancing around their Fidel has done something very, very different here. He has said earlier, first of all, supplying America with its cover story. He supplied the countercultural moment of the 60s, 70s and 80s with an alternative vision of American history. So there is a strong driving political motive. And he’s showing real characters, dancing with fictive characters in a way that I’ve never seen before in fiction. Lincoln is a bit of a renaissance in a sense. He goes to such an extreme. It’s rare to have such a reversal where you take a major historical figure and foreground that figure. Abraham Lincoln. I mean, it’s interesting that he chose John Hay as a kind of narrator to give us some perspective on Lincoln very hard. You could never choose Lincoln as narrator That’ll be going too far. But Vardell did go that extreme route to some degree with Burr. And he makes Burs Journal fairly prominent expert telling his own story that was pretty gutsy and pretty original. You discovered the technique, of course, with Julian, where he takes a real person, the Emperor Julian the apostate, and makes his journal of his own story front and center. In the novel, Julian Silverdale is taking lots of risks as he’s rescuing the historical novel from the parlor where it was read by, you know, the ladies of the club. I mean, the truth is the historical novel in the 50s and 60s was in fair disrepute. No self respecting American novelist would go there. As we see from the doll’s early work, the first five, six, eight novels are pretty much in the vein of the Hemingway going out there and having real life reporting on it. The dole didn’t mess with the conventional historical novel and his novel about Richard, about the troubadour of Richard the Lionheart Search for the King. That’s a fairly conventional historical novel in its early eight novels. This is an astonishing fact about the dolto. Here’s a man for the age of twenty to the age of twenty eight, publishing eight novels and trying out every genre available. The thriller in Dark Green Bright read the conventional war story and Wallowa, the conventional historical novel and Search for the King. On and on. He’s trying out the various forms of fiction before he goes into this intense ten year silence as a novelist and then reemerges in the 60s with Julian. When he finally has found his own voice, he knows who he is. And then there’s that astonishing march through history, going back from for a fifth century B.C. with creation, fourth century A.D., Rome with Julian, the apostate on and on, right through the American Chronicles, eighteenth nineteenth century and finally into his own century. In some ways, you know, oddly enough, I think Vidal in many ways more at home in the past than he is in the present. I almost prefer Vidal further back. It’s not surprising, of course, many novelists, great novels of the past prefer to write about periods pretty much to themselves Tolstoy, George Eliot and so forth. They all wrote about historical periods and the has often pointed out that there’s really no such thing as fiction. That isn’t history. You know, even if you’re writing about what happened yesterday, you’re writing an historical novel, you know, you know, life is fiction and fiction is history of understands this more than anybody else. His job as a novelist has just always been to try and find the narrative, the shape, the skill to give us a shape to events. And so he does this marching through American history, Lincoln, 1876, and then bringing us into the 20th century in many ways, two of my favorite books of his or that sequence, they should almost be one big fat novel. Empire and Hollywood Empire begins in 1898 at this grand dinner table and deep in the English countryside. And this is when Henry James comes on and John Hay and everyone is discussing the advent of a change in American culture. We’ve gone from a republic to an empire. And here Fidel begins drawing on everything he knows about the Roman Empire, the making of an imperial.

Speaker He begins to explore even deeper ways the connection between Roma and alaw, between the Capitol, Capitol Hill moans capitalism and sex power. These connections are intimately bound up in these novels about the Capitol in Washington and new capital in Hollywood. And Fidel was, of course, as a man very well placed to write about the intersection of power between Washington and Hollywood. I mean, his own life, he happened to be born and raised in the American capital, sitting at the feet of so many powerful people, having met so many senators and congressmen and presidents and presidents wives, he was so lucky, shall we say, or put himself in a situation to be at the Hollywood center in the 1950s when Fidel found he couldn’t make any money as a novelist to sustain his own vision of his lifestyle. He moved to television, The Golden Age and to Hollywood takes a contract with MGM, begins churning out scripts. And the one hand I wonder what Fidel really had in mind at the time. My guess is he just wanted to make money. I mean, he always said that he turned to writing scripts for the same reason that Henry Morgan, the pirate, turned to piracy and he didn’t need to make a living. But it’s got to have been a crucial part in his art education.

Speaker Talk about the education of Gore Vidal when when Gore arrived in Hollywood in the mid 50s. I mean, this is the golden age of the movies. I once went on a tour of Hollywood with Gore and I was astonished. You’d say, oh, yes, I remember being in that house with Clark Gable and Greta Garbo and all of these great Hollywood stars. And he had anecdote after anecdote. I mean, here’s a man upon whom nothing is lost.

Speaker Famous phrase from Henry James. He said, Be someone I know. Nothing is lost. Nothing has been lost. And Gore Vidal and he’s been in the situation have a lot pass over him. And he’s missed nothing. And so he’s understudies. Talk to Hollywood moguls. Jack Warner. He’s been on the lots of many movie sets. You know, he’s been behind the scenes. He was there at the creation of Ben-Hur, a great parodic moment in American film history.

Speaker And he was himself, of course, a lover of movies from an early age when if you read the at the movies is deeply nostalgic. I mean, he is an encyclopedia, a walking encyclopedia of film history. And he understands especially American film history in a way that’s, you know, very few historians have yet come to terms with. But he understands how Washington was suddenly understood at the beginning of the First World War. You know, Woodrow Wilson, people like that understood that they must somehow get control of this new technology, the films that this could be used for propaganda purposes. And so Woodrow Wilson wants to get a hold of two things, the popular press, and he wants to get hold of Hollywood. And and so Gore invents this marvelous fictional creature, Caroline Sanford, who’s able to move easily between the Capitol and Washington politics and the capital of American cinema in Hollywood. I mean, she is has inherited a great newspaper empire and she becomes a movie star. It’s rather unbelievable. But be that as it may, Gore makes it work. Somehow he’s able to pull it off imaginatively. And so he shapes this astonishing narrative of empire where we’re using all the we have the great new industry of Hollywood and the great new industry of politics. And Gore understands how politics is a company.

Speaker It’s a club. Many people are outraged by Gore Vidal because he suggests that American power lies in the hands of a few people they don’t like. The fact that Fidel has simply noted that justice has not necessarily been foremost on our minds as a nation. And Fidel did grow up in a very privileged, privileged situation.

Speaker I mean, here’s a fellow born at West Point whose father was a director of air commerce from 1993 to 1937 under Franklin Roosevelt. Here’s a boy who lived in the home of his grandfather, Senator Thomas Prior Gore, a guy who went to Exeter Academy, especially at a time when it was training America’s elite to run the country. I mean, Gore Vidal matriculated at Phillips Exeter in 1940, and he was. One of the you know, this was when the best and the brightest were sent to places like Phillips Exeter to rule the country, you know, John Kennedy went to one of these schools, Choate and Videl knew the ruling class. He moved among them. He was destined himself to be, of course, a politician. And I think he always thought he’d become president of the United States. He became instead something far greater. He became one of the great unacknowledged legislatures of American history. I mean, the will have a lot more influence ultimately than say, oh, well, I don’t say that a president, but there is a sense in which we all understand that the presidents are public figures and why he’s so shocking to read. I think it’s exciting to read and offensive to so many people is he’s showing you how power really works and how the president is, no matter who the president or how talented and gifted the president has to align himself with the wealthiest elements of a society in some way or otherwise. He or she, if that ever happens, can’t get elected. So that all points to the obvious. He’s seen from the inside out that you cannot get anywhere in American politics unless you are essentially a black man. You have to know who’s paying your salary and if your salary is being paid by oil companies and your salaries being paid by, you know, large industry, you have a certain allegiance ultimately to those people who are paying the piper. Well, the dollar has explored this dark side of American democracy more seriously than any other writer I know. We’ve done this in the novels, The American Chronicles, right up through the Golden Age, where he really explodes the whole story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I mean, Gore Vidal certainly came under the heat for that, for suggesting that Roosevelt had may have known about the Pearl Harbor attack before it actually happened in May on some level, not of what has to happen, but have been willing to let it take place in order to bring the American people into the war, which is the place that Roosevelt felt we ought to go again. Gore is not telling us anything that historians haven’t told us before, but he’s to some degree popularizing, putting before the American public in dramatic and accessible form home truths that are there but, you know, somehow have been occluded. And that’s his great gift as a novelist and his gift to the American people. I mean, to give us back our history has been an astonishing gift and certainly has found a popular audience. That’s one of the most surprising things about the doll, that he remains a very austere intellectual creature, a person with remarkable gifts of history and visionary history. He can see into the past. He understands how to do historical research and how to find what’s relevant. As an artist, he knows how to shape a narrative and how to put in some events and leave out other events, if that’s what history is, history as a selection of events. And for the most part, history is what is written by the victors. The people who lose in society don’t get to tell their story. And so it’s a very rare thing for someone like the doll coming from the upper classes of society to choose to tell America’s history as she really sees it and as it really was. I mean, this is, again, the true history that becomes the final fiction and becomes a powerful supreme fiction in the end, because it’s telling us, you know, who we are and how we got to where we are. It would be a mistake, however, to think that Fidel is against Empire. I mean, I don’t think that he simply against Empire or I mean, it’s not as though Fidel is necessarily deriding everything he sees. I think that’s a somewhat mistaken do Fidel, that he’s simply a naysayer. I mean, I think he’s a humorist on some level, the satirist. And I think he enjoys poking fun here and there. But he simply wants to tell the story as he thinks it really happened. He’s not putting a negative spin on something.