United States - Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal.

I remember watching Gore Vidal on television, usually on one of those talk shows he seems to view with contempt. He seemed to be a living opinion. Switch him on and opinions stream out. But usually those opinions, though often partisan and colourfully stated, we’re always pertinent, well-informed and incisive, despite the fact that, verbally at least, he tended to play the Gore Verbose, often using five words where one would do. But what words they were.

In print, he is much more economical with language, and often delivers a point like a poniard stab. Succinct perhaps is a strange word to describe a book that runs just short of 1300 pages and around 600,000 words. But this is a collection of essays, criticisms and occasional pieces spanning forty years, 114 of them, loosely bound into three sections - State of The Art, State of the Union, and State of Being. Literary criticism forms the bulk of the material, with the politics the author became famous for largely intruding as asides and comments. There is very little here on the process of his own writing, so this is far from autobiography. When he does engage with his own work, it is often to answer criticism of what he wrote. In these instances, he does not pull the punches he throws.

The wit is certainly there, as are many of the super egos of US politics, media and literature, not to mention a sprinkling from Hollywood. But here Gore Vidal is mainly analysing the written word, both from his contemporaries and from the past. Here is my own selection of that wit.

On criticism. The best a serious analyst (of a novel) can hope to do is comment intelligibly from his vantage point in time on the way a work appears to him in a contemporary, a comparative, or historical light. 

On changing taste. The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century.

On education and Reagan. Obviously, there is a great deal wrong with our educational system, as President Reagan recently, and rather gratuitously, noted. After all, an educated electorate would not have elected him president.

On stars. In England, after Guelph-Pooters and that con-man for all seasons, Churchill, Bloomsbury is the most popular continuing saga for serious readers.

On Ford Madox Ford. Certainly, Ford never lied deliberately in order to harm others, as did Truman Capote, or to make himself appear brave and strong and true as did Hemingway, whose own lying finally became a sort of art-form by the time he got round to settling his betters’ hash in A Moveable Feast. Ford’s essential difference was the fact that he was all along what he imagined himself to be that latter day unicorn, a gentleman.

On attitudes. Today’s reader wants to look at himself, to find out who he is, with an occasional glimpse of his next-door neighbor.

On literacy. Having explained that rulers never wanted general literacy, on the grounds that it might provoke ideas of revolution. The more you read, the more you act. In fact, the French - who read and theorise the most - became so addicted to political experiment that in the two centuries sine our own rather drab revolution they have exuberantly produced one Directory, one Consulate, two empires, three restorations of the monarchy, and five republics. That’ what happens when you take writing too seriously. Happily, Americans have never liked reading all that much. Politically ignorant, we keep sputtering along in our old Model T, looking wistfully every four years for a good mechanic.

On empire. Historians often look to the Roman Empire to find analogies with the United States. They flatter us. We do not live under the Pax Americana, but the Pax Frigida. I should not look to Rome for comparison but rather to the Most Serene Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth, comfort, trade, and keeping the peace, especially after inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have inherited the wreck of the British Empire.

On ornithologists. To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

On a Moscow hotel. We had all met at the Rossya Hotel in Moscow. According to the Russians, it is the largest hotel in the world. Whether or not this is true, the Rossy’s charm is not unlike that of New York’s Attica Prison.

I confess I once stayed in The Rossya, and for more than one night. It was colossal and was demolished because its unimaginative glassed-in concrete box kept intruding into pictures of Red Square, Basil’s and the Kremlin. I was told not only which room to use, but also which entrance, with the qualification that “it might be difficult” if we use any of the other doors. Red rag to a bull… Yes, we accessed the place via one of those other entrances and we found that inside the place was a veritable rabbit warren, with floors in one part of the building not matching floors elsewhere. We got so lost that we had to find our way back outside and approach our room from our usual entrance.

It is an image that informs a review of this book, in that taken as a whole, it is a very long, arduous and at times repetitive read. I am sure that the publishers and certainly the author wanted these pieces to be read singly, and that way the ideas remain fresh.

Overall, we are reminded that the standard of debate, both political and literary, has declined since Gore Vidal left us these superb essays.

Billy Budd by Herman Melville

Billy Budd is doubly famous. He is the eponymous principal character of Herman Melville’s novella and, by adoption via E M Forster’s hand, also the eponymous hero a Benjamin Britten’s opera. The contrasting if not contradictory words ‘character’ and ‘hero’ are important in the context of these two masterpieces.

Like all good stories, it cannot be spoiled, because it is in the way the story is told that the real experience lies. Billy Budd is a young man, rather handsome in a simple, lower status, ratings way. He is recruited from a merchant ship called The Rights of Man to HMS indomitable and so joins the King’s Navy as a foretopman. The previous ship’s owner with its explicitly political title is mentioned in the book as owned by someone who sympathises with Thomas Paine and presumably the American and therefore the French Revolutions. This point is merely referenced by Forster and Britten, probably because it might provide an alternative political motive for the antagonism that develops, an antagonism that, in the opera, focuses on sexuality.

The Indomitable embarks on its mission during the Napoleonic Wars under the direction of Captain Vere and is policed by a master-at-arms called Claggart, whom Vere only met on the return part of his last voyage, indicating that exists no personal friendship between them. Melville tells us that Claggart is around thirty-five, an age he generally exceeds by a considerable amount in most productions of Britten’s opera.

Billy Budd is a genial sort of giant. Everyone notices his good looks, his youth, his athletic stature and his obvious strength. But it is also noted that he is naïve, perhaps overly trusting. An old hand tries to warn him that Claggart has taken against him, but Billy insists that he himself has never spoken ill of anyone, so there can be no problem.

Claggart conspires to pin an accusation of recruitment for mutiny on Billy. The name of his previous ship and presumably the political associations of its owner play an important part, as does the impressed status, equals kidnapped, of some crew members. Already I fall into the trap of labelling the ‘bad’ guy with a surname and the foretopman with a forename. But that is the reality. For whatever reason, Claggart is out to get Billy.

Billy has one severe weakness. He stutters. He stutters more when stressed. And when, in the company of Captain Vere, Claggart publicly delivers his accusation against the young man, Billy becomes so incensed that he cannot defend himself verbally. The words will not come and in frustration he strikes Claggart and kills him. Billy is tried, found guilty of striking and killing an officer and is condemned to death. He hangs.

At the trial, Vere presents his version of events in a cold hearted, matter of fact manner that will admit no nuance. In effect, he merely recites the rulebook. In the opera, Vere’s ghost, still troubled by conscience, admits he could have saved Billy Budd, but chose not to. In Melville’s original, things are more complex. Vere must enact the demands of his office and so he behaves as he does. Stability, loyalty to King and country and the rightness of superior social class trump notions of justice, fairness or compassion. The obvious injustice almost creates sufficient reaction amongst the crew to itself provoke a mutiny, but the anger dissipates, defeated by continued enforced subservience.

And, by the way, all of this applies to the opera, as well as the novella. Forster and Britten make more of Vere, paradoxically, than Melville, despite the novella spending much more time on the actual trial than the opera. Vere is torn by conscience, but he is the apparently unwitting possessor of a responsibility that trumps personal judgment. In some ways, Vere is more of an order taker than those whom he orders. And at the end of the opera, Britain illustrates how the aspiring middle classes, those promoted and paid to populate a buffer zone between protest and power, eventually protect the status of their social betters, but cannot salve a collective conscience, a conscience that in any case does not care.

A theme which becomes central but not rarely explicit in the opera is the suggestion that Claggart is homosexually attracted to Billy Budd. The antagonism generated within him towards Billy is thus the result of an inner purging of guilt and self-loathing that the attraction itself generates. There is the mere hint of this in Melville’s words. For obvious reasons, it was a theme that interested Britten deeply.

But the opera’s amplification of the theme is justified. Melville distances himself from anything sexual. The topic clearly exists in the lives of the sailors. But Melville apparently refuses to enter the establishment, let alone the bedroom where implied acts take place. There is a clear reference to Claggart’s attraction, but the author also wrote of the highly ambiguous relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg at the start of Moby Dick. There is evidence enough of the author’s reluctance to enter the bedroom, even when he declares himself explicitly in attendance!

Perhaps the most moving experience in Billy Budd is to read the epilogue, which is a sailor’s poetic retelling of the story. Personally, I find it impossible to read these words without also singing Billy’s almost proud but frank lament from the opera. The story is, undoubtedly, a double masterpiece.

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

I heard an author interviewed on the radio. He described a character he had invented, a fellow called Quichotte (that’s key-shot, by the way), who himself had been invented by another character in the same book (Quichotte), who had already been invented by the author. The characters have families, each having one son, one imaginary, the other – well - imaginary, but at least in possession of a formal and formally imagined birth, the other a product of parthenogenesis.

All these people, both the real-imaginary and the imaginary-real, live in the United States, amongst other places, a country which, as places go, is regularly imagined and sometimes described. The author’s point, if it might exist in the singular, is that it was time to update the idea of Miguel de Cervantes, who four hundred years ago imagined a character called Quixote (key-ho-tay) emerging from the pages of a discarded Arabic text discovered on a rummage through a second-hand stall on Toledo’s market. That’s Toledo, Spain by the way (population 84,282, occupying 232.1 square kilometres and 89.6 square miles, if you are so inclined). Or so we are told. But he made it up, alongside the said Quixote’s (key-ho-tay’s) popular culture-driven madness that demanded he set off dressed as a film star to do good in the world. Geddit?

Quichotte proceeds in a parody of said key-ho-tay back and forth across the United States, accompanied by his real-imagined and imaginary-real playmates, old flames and the not wholly imagined but apparently unattainable beauty, Salma R, among them. They get up to some good, but predominantly they observe and relate. They relate to their relatives, who are mainly from Bombay, and to their acquaintances, who as often as not abuse them on the basis of their skin colour, which is brownish, and as a consequence accuse them of being terrorists, bombers, jihadists or merely general extremists before pulling their guns. This causes our characters, both real-imaginary and imaginary-real to suffer significant but mild crises of identity. More accurately, their identities would be in crisis if they could ever find them or even define what they were looking for in their continual search for said qualities. Rule one: carry a gun. Self-defence. Get the retaliation in first. Rule two: read the book.

As I sit here in my room (population one), I imagine my rather privileged position. There cannot be many reviewers of a Quixote parody who can also claim to have written one. In his search, Donald Cottee, my own imagined key-ho-tay, examines his identity and origins from the perspective of a second-hand Swift Sundance parked on a campsite in Benidorm. In his radio interview Salman Rushdie, from here on called ’the author’, talked about his own origins.

The author went to Rugby public school - for our American friends, here public means its exact opposite, private - blame the English - and sang Christian hymns with his Muslim voice at school assemblies. Also, for the Americans again, rugby with a capital R is a town (population 100,500) and should not be confused with the sport of the same name, team population 13 or 15 depending on social class, whose name is in fact often capitalised, which was first invented in the same establishment, the school, population 802, established 1567, not the town, origins debatable, but probably iron age. It has progressed.

But he and his family, the author Rushdie that is, and therefore their combined roots, were also from Bombay, if you are English or perhaps Portuguese, which most English don’t appreciate, or Mumbai if you are Indian, but there is no such language as Indian, so this term must apply to residency. But of course the author Rushdie was not resident in Mumbai-Bombay at the time, hence his presence in Rugby (public school, where public equals private) where he tried to work out where and who he was.

And so to the United States where he is lumped together with others whose skin is tinged, coloured (not orange or red, unless you are an Indian, but that’s another story) or brown - let’s call it Black - by another broad church (C sometimes) of people, who skin is pink, red, but not Indian, or even orange – let’s call them White, who, if they live in New Jersey, need regular check-ups to ensure they have not morphed into mastodons. Geddit?

Let’s stir into this heady mix a manufacturer of opioids, fentanyl for sublingual use, just to be accurate, a terminal cancer, several close shaves involving gun owners trying to retaliate first and lots of encounters with popular culture, Holly-Bollywood and the like, and you arrive at where you have been headed all along without ever consulting a map or making a plan. And we have not yet even mentioned a Dr Smile or a Mr DuChamp. Get it? Read the book. It’s splendid. Funny. Political. Perspicacious. Now there’s a word.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

This is a book that will live for ever. In it Khaled Hosseini has accomplished what many writers, most unsuccessfully, try to achieve. It’s the big stories, those turning points in history, which often attract us. They automatically have something to say, we might believe, something that needs to be aired, perhaps explained. So wars, revolutions, social upheavals, periods of turmoil, internecine struggles, ideological conflicts, all of these are the natural territory for the story teller. They are the backdrop that adds potentially unlimited drama, the context that can involve, inform and enlighten.

But often writers are not up to the task. The attraction of that big issue is greater than the powers of judgment needed to create the right balance when the smallness of the story’s detail is pitched against the vast potential dominance of its setting. The balance, therefore, is often a fine one and, because of the power of the setting, the story is often belittled or, more usually, appears merely trite against the overbearing importance and significance of the backdrop. In recent times I have read several books which have revealed the limitations of the writer’s concept by falling into one or other trap. Not so with The Kite Runner.

The plot is important, so suffice it to say that Amir and his family are in Afghanistan before the Russian invasion. Their life is described. The Kite Runner of the title is the label for the role of the kite handler’s friend, who runs to retrieve the kites that have been cut from the sky in combat. Finders are keepers and it is this booty that is mutually fought over.

With the arrival of the Russians, part of Amir’s family flees to the United States, Amir among them. He grows up there and we rejoin him years later, by which time he is well on the way to becoming a creative writer and is about to marry. But his life in the US has its imperfections, some of which are sourced in the guilt of memory. And so Amir returns to his homeland to rediscover some of those he left behind. But now it’s an Afghanistan destroyed by war and dominated by the Taliban. Amir desperately tries to uncover his past, to trace those he seeks, and he succeeds, but sometimes in ways that he least expected, ways that further complicate an already tangled tale.

As Amir’s country descends into chaos and then into new war, with the only hope apparently continued uncertainty, his personal experience becomes both painful, taxing and trying. He stumbles upon much that is unexpected, some of it perhaps not so surprising, but some of it terrifying in its threat. But, despite the suffering, there is hope, even if eventually it might arise out of the spoils of renewed conflict, perhaps just another severed kite to retrieve.

Where Khaled Hosseini succeeds in a simultaneously engaging and informative way is the blending of his drama with its context. His narrative takes the reader on a journey of self-discovery, where actions, memories, guilt are experienced at first hand, but also a journey where history unfolds in a way that includes, never merely instructs.

The Kite Runner is not a work of politics, and neither is it a history. It’s a novel, so any thought of criticism on the grounds that it lacks analysis or completeness would be misplaced. The novel does give a keen insight into the horrid and horrifying consequences of war without ever really trying to confront why it arose, or the motives of those who perpetrated the conflict. But this, again, is not in any way a criticism of what the novel achieves, merely a criticism in the literary sense, an attempt at description and contextualization of the work. If there is still anyone out there who thinks that conflict is about winning or losing, about one side fighting another until victory, then I would recommend The Kite Runner as a both essential and essentially moving experience that would both inform and educate.

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The Kite Runner