Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America. Bill Kauffman
He patriotically detests the National Security State, which hijacked the country circa 1950 and has not given up the controls yet. In the late 1980s Vidal called for a “neo-Clayite” candidate to campaign on internal improvements and avoidance of foreign quarrels. I wish he had run the race himself. But by 1992, three such men were running: Ross Perot, Jerry Brown, and Pat Buchanan, in the most interesting political year of the post-republic era. Each, in his particular way, appealed to heirs and offshoots of the old Thomas P. Gore/Bob LaFollette/America First populist tradition. Vidal sensed a “potentially major constituency—those who now believe that it was a mistake to have wasted, since 1950, most of the government’s revenues on war.” He scorned Buchanan’s Catholic understanding of sexuality but conceded that “he is a reactionary in the good sense—reacting against the empire in favor of the old Republic, which he mistakenly thinks was Christian.”
Every now and again the reader is reminded that Vidal’s bloodlines run south. He chides G. William Domhoff, who is “given to easy liberal epithets like ‘Godforsaken Mississippi’” even though “except on the subject of race, the proud folk down there are populist to the core.” So is Vidal. He is with Shays, with Bryan, with the America Firsters. He envisages an alliance of the “not-so-poor” and the poor and predicts that the “politician who can forge that alliance will find himself, at best, the maker of a new society; at worst, in a hole at Arlington.”
While his subject has been America and the push-pull debate over its empire, Vidal rejects novels “which attempt to change statutes or moral attitudes” as “not literature at all” but arid propaganda. Thus he is capable of the greatest fictive rendering of Abraham Lincoln in all of American literature—the novel Lincoln (1984)—despite being largely out of sympathy with Lincoln’s politics. For Vidal desires the president to be cut down to constitutional size, and Lincoln, he writes, “levied taxes and made war; took unappropriated money from the Treasury; suspended habeas corpus.”
Yet Lincoln, that most confounding of presidents, was also thoughtful, wise, and an erstwhile critic of expansion. His old law partner Billy Herndon claimed that Abe never read a book straight through, but at least he did not make fun of book-writers. The contrast with the current warmaker in the White House reflects well on the nineteenth century, or poorly on us.
And so I must end with a lovely and poignant passage from Vidal’s Howells essay. It is the kind of vignette that would appeal only to a man with a country:
For some years I have been haunted by a story of Howells and that most civilized of all our presidents, James A. Garfield. In the early 1870s Howells and his father paid a call on Garfield. As they sat on Garfield’s veranda, young Howells began to talk about poetry and about the poets that he had met in Boston and New York. Suddenly, Garfield told him to stop. Then Garfield went to the edge of the veranda and shouted to his Ohio neighbors, “Come over here! He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!” So the neighbors gathered around in the dusk; then Garfield said to Howells, “Now go on.”
Today we take it for granted that no living president will ever have heard the name of any living poet. This is not, necessarily, an unbearable loss. But it is unbearable to have lost those Ohio neighbors who actually read books of poetry and wanted to know about the poets.
Thus speaks Gore Vidal, America patriot.
How I Met Eldridge Cleaver
The American Conservative, 2012
When I was barely forty I wrote a memoir of sorts (Dispatches from the Muckdog Gazette). I was rather young for that, but one man’s chutzpah is another man’s megalomania. The book cut awfully close to the bone, though to my everlasting gratitude my hometown chose to fete rather than lynch me. I remain astonished.
In writing about the living—maybe the dead, too?—the ideal is bracing honesty tempered by solicitude for the subject’s (or his survivors’) feelings. This ideal is impossible to achieve, so one errs on the side of honesty or human decency—take your pick. Ruth or ruthlessness?
The question came up while reading William Dean Howells’s recollection “My Mark Twain.” The native Ohioan Howells, author of a great American novel (The Rise of Silas Lapham), served as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and dean of post-Civil War American letters, but his posthumous reputation went into an eclipse whose totality occurred when Sinclair Lewis gibed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that Howells had “the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight was to have tea at the vicarage.”
I thought of Lewis’s crack as I read that Howells agonized over whether or not to relate the shocking fact that Mr. Clemens had once been drunk. Howells chose circumspection on the grounds that “to say a man has been drunk is to say a thing from which the reader instinctively recoils.” (Less reticent, Twain remarked of Howells’s chatterbox wife Elinor that when she entered a room “dialogue ceased and monologue inherited its assets and continued the business at the old stand.”)
I don’t want to pick on Howells, whom I read with respect, if not ardency. (Gore Vidal’s appreciation “William Dean Howells” is superb.) Howells lived for a time under the Buckeye Sun in Columbus, as did Phil Ochs, who wrote: “I’ve been all over the country/But I don’t believe I’ve had more fun/Than when I was a boy in Ohio.” (Howells preferred Boston, but to each his idyll.)
William Dean Howells was a friend of Twain’s and others he profiled; for the most part, I have been not friend but interlocutor of the almost famous, which carries a less burdensome set of obligations. I’ve been lucky to have conducted lengthy Q&A’s with several dozen writers and politicians and historians and even football coaches (Joe Paterno: I liked him, so no Sandusky jokes) over the last quarter century.
The only person I’ve ever interrogated while he was in his cups was my old boss Pat Moynihan, during a memorably bibulous lunch shortly before his death. Among my favorite interviewees was novelist and Civil War epicist Shelby Foote. I showed up at his stockbroker-Tudor home in Memphis about noon. Foote, long-haired, wearing ratty pajamas, answered the door and drawled, “Ah wuz jes’ fixin’ ta go ta thuh whiskey stoah.” He had more cool in one grey hair than every Southern expatriate writer in Manhattan combined.
My first interview was back in 1985, when Lynn Scarlett, an engaging New Leftist who wound up in G.W. Bush’s subcabinet, and I traveled to Berkeley to spend the day chatting with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver for Reason. When Eldridge—a loquacious and fascinating guy—got up to take a whizz, we glanced at his files. The two I remember were devoted to “Sperm” and whether Jim Morrison was extant or extinct.
I also interviewed a one-time Panther sympathizer, Clarence Thomas, who impressed me as friendly and intellectually curious. I liked the Booker T. Washington-Marcus Garvey-Malcolm X self-help streak in Thomas, then EEOC chairman.
Ted Kennedy later used that interview in the Thomas hearings to paint the nominee as a radical libertarian. If only! (In fairness, Senator Kennedy was kind to me when as a callow legislative assistant I had to explain to him some long-forgotten—and surely profligate—amendment. The two most polarizing members of the 1980s Senate—Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms—were so much more genial than abrasive “moderate” jerks such as Lowell Weicker, Joe Biden, and Arlen Specter.)
My single-day round trip record was to and fro San Angelo, Texas, where I had lunch with Elmer Kelton, whose The Time it Never Rained is among the finest Western novels. We went to a steakhouse, San Angelo being cattle country. I have very few eccentricities—ask my wife!—but I disdain forks. For an instant I considered whether to eat that steak with knife and spoon, but I took one for the tine.
I have many more interview memories, but nothing as scandalous as Samuel Clemens getting tipsy. I suppose I should hustle over to the vicarage. Maybe via the whiskey stoah.
Friendly Ghosts
The American Conservative, 2009
Ours is an October house, shrouded by spreading maples. Its creaky floorboards of pine and chestnut were hewn in the 1830s, as Upstate New York was ablaze