With The Golden Age Gore Vidal completes an epic seven-volume
chronicle describing the simultaneous rise and fall of the American Empire.
On the one hand his story is that of America’s triumph in becoming a global
economic, military and cultural superpower. But since the natural bent of Vidal’s
imagination, like that of his great precursor Henry Adams, is pessimistic, the
same story is also one of Imperial decline and betrayed republican ideals. With
Adams, Vidal looks at a nation that dreamed itself "Athens reborn"
while it "doggedly recreated Rome." For all of its sustaining myths, The Golden Age
questions if
America has ever been a free democracy.
The Golden Age covers the American political scene from 1939 to 1954.
The main characters are affluent, well-connected journalists with close access
to the players in the American political establishment who were making history
at the time. In working on this material Vidal found himself "unusually
situated", since he had lived through the period and known many of the
people he describes (in fact, Gore Vidal even appears as a character). His
critics, always eager to find fault with his version of history, will have to be
wary of this insider’s edge.
And there will be critics. The question of how closely a historical novel
should adhere to what we know of the historical record is one that has grown
increasingly vexed in these politically correct, relativistic, and revisionist
times. No stranger to controversy, Vidal has always felt free to speculate and,
as a self-congratulatory Afterword points out, he has given as well as he has
received in these debates.
The big, controversial speculation in The Golden Age is that Franklin
Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and may
have let the American fleet be destroyed so that he would have an excuse
for dragging his reluctant nation into war. Whether this was really the case is
a point that may never be settled now, but Vidal obviously feels that it is a
plausible scenario. From a novelist you can’t ask for much more.
But controversy aside, The Golden Age is a disappointment. Vidal has
most of the tools necessary to be, as he puts it, his country’s biographer. He
is one of America’s finest living essayists, an admirably outspoken political
commentator, and a delightful author of experimental fiction. None of this,
however, is enough to make him a successful historical novelist.
The Golden Age doesn’t work as fiction because it is missing a plot
and fails to create a single interesting character. The fictional characters we
meet, as well as many of their real counterparts, are mere counters with names,
placed on the spot to observe history and recycle bits and pieces of the author’s
own opinions.
We know they are Vidal’s opinions because the best part of the book is an
unnecessary repetition of arguments found in his essays. This includes
everything from an acknowledgment of intellectual influences (the shadow of
Henry Adams, the familiar idolatry of Eleanor Roosevelt) to pedantic points like
the fact that FDR wore his pince-nez in imitation of Woodrow Wilson. If you don’t
make it to the Afterword there is even a swipe in the novel at stupid academic
reviewers who won’t admit that Jefferson may have strayed from the code of a
southern gentleman.
Then there are the sissies. In case you didn’t know that Vidal considers
Theodore Roosevelt to have been an "American Sissy" the accusation is
repeated here. In fact, The Golden Age gives us three sissies for the
price of one since Harry Truman is called a "four-eyed sissy" and
Hemingway a "consummate sissy" in turn. From a writer like Vidal we
should expect better. His name-calling is the equivalent of raping history with
Myra Breckinridge’s dildo, a weapon aimed at removing "the last vestigial
traces of traditional manhood from the race." The result is a fiction
interested only in scoring flaky political points.
Points that have not only been expressed elsewhere, but expressed better. Why
does Vidal’s style, so sharp and full of wit in experimental
fiction like Myra Breckinridge, become so dull and clichéd in his
historical writing? In his essays Vidal skillfully mocks the kind of
bestseller-quality prose that The Golden Age wallows in. Take this
description of people sitting in a newsroom:
They sat in silence while the various clock faces on the wall recorded
different times from around the world. History was rapidly moving no matter how
still they sat.
Really? And just how rapidly was history moving, Gore? Faster than the
clocks? Faster than the people sitting in their chairs? Was Herman Wouk ever as
banal as this?
As a historian Vidal is not to be underestimated. His perspective is almost
always provocative, insightful and well-informed. But for whatever reason - a
lack of interest in the inner life of his characters, an inability to structure
a narrative in any way more advanced than chronology - he has never been a very
successful novelist. At its best, as with the reportage surrounding the
pronouncement of the Truman Doctrine, The Golden Age has an interesting,
on-the-spot documentary feel. But the rest, which is to say most of it, is more
stale goods than gold.
Notes:
Review first published November 18, 2000.
