THE GOLDEN AGE
by Gore Vidal

For years now, the promise of a new Gore Vidal book has been something to get the blood running—or boiling. No other American writer has maintained quite such a radical, iconoclastic vision of his nation’s past. And nowhere has Vidal been more provocative than in what he calls his "narratives of empire," a series of historical novels tracing the American republic from its beginnings to what he sees as its degeneration into a global, quasi-totalitarian behemoth. Throughout these books, which include Washington, D.C., Burr, Lincoln, and 1876, Vidal punctured our every national pretension. At his best, he has pressed useful, troubling questions about our imperial ambitions, and the anti-democratic tendencies of our national security state.

No approach could be more welcome in this, our season of mindless triumphalism.

The Golden Age—which takes place from 1939-54—is Vidal’s seventh and last novel in the series. Part memoir, part novel, part history, The Golden Age completes the story of the Sanfords, fictional descendants of Aaron Burr, and their friends, lovers, and nemeses. Half-siblings Caroline and Blaise Sanford, once competing newspaper publishers, are leading lights in Washington high society. Blaise’s son, Peter, is an independent-minded young man and professional skeptic—a clear intellectual stand-in for Vidal himself. He is in love with Diana, the daughter of upstanding, old-fashioned Senator Burden Day—and someone who very much resembles Vidal’s own grandfather. The trouble is that Diana is in love with Clay Overbury, Senator Day’s unscrupulous aide, and Overbury is pursuing Peter Sanford’s beautiful but mercurial sister, Enid.

This may sound like a soap opera, but in fact it works very well as a story of love, betrayal, and overweening ambition. Or rather, it did work very well, in Washington, D.C., the first and best-written book in this series, in which Vidal tells the very same story. This is something that those who have read the earlier book will find annoying. Those who have not will find all but incomprehensible because the story is repeated, in the The Golden Age, in a much more hurried and slapdash manner.

Vidal muddies the waters of his plot still further when, more than halfway through the novel, he begins mixing in a curiously flat memoir of New York’s splendid cultural scene in the years immediately following World War II. This is the golden age of the title, when at last, he informs us, "the United States is going to have a civilization."

The sketchy, distracted quality of both Vidal’s fiction and his quasi-fictional memoir are the product of a greater problem with The Golden Age: his decision to subordinate everything else to a dubious political polemic.

Every golden age has its price—or rather, as Balzac put it, behind every great fortune lies a great crime. For Vidal, the crime was the emergence of the United States as a world power, in fact the world power—something, he maintains, that most of the American people did not want but was foisted upon them through the secret, illegal, even murderous machinations of our leaders, laboring enthusiastically on behalf of "the international banks and their lawyer-lobbyists."

For Vidal has now sunk into that Great Dismal Swamp of American history, the conspiracy theory. There was some foreshadowing of this in the previous book of the series, Hollywood, when he pulled out the hoariest old chestnut of the genre, suggesting that President Warren Harding did not die of a heart attack but was in fact poisoned by his wife.

I had thought that Vidal’s recounting of the old Harding rumor might be some subtle satire on what Richard Hofstadter so famously dubbed "the paranoid style" in American politics. But no—conspiracies cling to The Golden Age like tangler vines, and squeeze all the life out of it.

Early on, Vidal spends a couple chapters detailing a supposed plot to fix the 1940 Republican convention—one that hinges on the sudden "suspicious" death of one Ralph E. Williams, the seventy-year-old committeeman in charge of seating arrangements at the Republican convention. After his death, you see, Williams was replaced with a delegate loyal to none other than…Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate whose internationalist, foreign-policy views most closely reflected those of Vidal’s "international banks."

A grand plot to nominate Wendell Willkie? Even in the world of conspiracy theories, Vidal seems to realize this is a bit of a stretch. He soon moves on to the greatest crime of all—his charge that President Franklin Roosevelt alleged betrayed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor by withholding information about an imminent Japanese attack.

Vidal is obsessed with this—dropping his whole narrative thread for pages at a time to give us his "proof." It’s a sad thing to experience, like Lenny Bruce in his last years, reading the transcripts of his obscenity trials to the audience. Vidal has read a book, you see, on which the author has done "years of research" detailing the whole thing, and besides a cashiered admiral once said...

Why stake so much on this? For Vidal, the infamy at Pearl was the seed from which all later hoaxes, conspiracies, and banalities grew. He includes among these—in no particular order—the Cold War, NATO, Truman’s loyalty oaths, grants to universities and the humanities, liberal periodicals, the CIA, the Museum of Modern Art, the Americans for Democratic Action, high income taxes, "mega-socialism," the SATs and unnecessary airport security.

This sort of paranoia has a depressingly familiar sound to it, like some dusty position paper from the Goldwater campaign, ravingh about fluoridation of the water.

Everything has been a plot, perpetrated upon the perennially innocent American people by their masters in the halls of power. Yet Vidal’s grand conspirators seem rather incredible. FDR, whom he seems to have a sneaking fondness for, is repeatedly compared to Hitler. So is Truman, who is also depicted as "ignorant and hopelessly ineffective," not to mention a drunk. General George Marshall is compared to Benedict Arnold, and Dean Acheson is a warmonger, while Secretary of War Henry Stimson is "born senile." Senator Arthur Vandenberg is twisted around the little finger of a comely British spy.

Yet their various failings never impinge upon these establishment leaders’ general omniscence and omnipotence. By 1940, they already ‘know’ that that the Russians can handle Hitler without our help; by 1945, they already know that Stalin and Mao will pose no real threat to anyone else.

Whenever confronted by anyone, they cheerfully lay out their plans in the most bluntly amoral terms. Vidal’s bad guys do more talking about their evil schemes than James Bond villains. Even so, they are always able to impose their will upon the people—otherwise referred to here by such charming sobriquets as "the general sub-population," and "interchangeable citizens." For all their republican nobility, the old sub-pops are "always kept in the dark" and "Always do as they are told."

To read all this is to realize just how absent the people have actually been from Vidal’s narratives—even as he has posed as their champion. Almost none of the great, mass movements in American history have been depicted in this series and Vidal has largely skipped over the Great Depression. The travails of the labor movement, the women’s movement, the free soilers and the populists, the civil rights and anti-war movements—all are generally absent as well.

Even during wartime, the sound of the guns is kept well in the background. In The Golden Age, as in Washington, D.C., the leading veteran is a fake hero, a sort of Nixon-Kennedy composite who is using his alleged valor to launch an equally unscrupulous political career. War is something that anyone this side of a sub-pop can see through and evade. Hence, Diana Day announces "I can’t see how this war is worth the life of any of us."

Not worth the life of any of us—to stop Hitler? Even operating on Vidal’s own geopolitical level and believing, as he does, the worst of our motives, one must ask just what the United States was supposed to do in the 1940s. If the U.S. had refused to enter World War II, or to check Soviet and Chinese power after the war, the result would not simply have been some sort of power vacuum. What would we have had, then? At the very least, the world outside the Western Hemisphere given over to the Nazis? To Stalin or Mao, or the Japanese Empire, or some combination thereof?

Such simplifications abound in The Golden Age, and they are increasingly infuriating. Even Vidal’s golden age is absurdly reductionist. No American civilization before 1945? Sez you. How ’bout jazz, blues, and country music; the Harlem Renaissance, the Hudson River School, most of photography and film, William Faulkner, Thomas Eakins, Melville, Poe, and Whitman, just for starters? None of it counted, apparently, until abstract expressionism and musical comedy hit New York after the war.

Yet these sorts of sweeping generalizations are absolutely necessary, lest one is to admit that all those "interchangeable citizens" out there might have had something to do, for better or worse, with creating the America we have today. To be innocent, after all, is to be helpless, and it is always difficult to envision the American people as helpless.

Even Vidal lets his Senator James Burden Day—based loosely on his own grandfather—wonder if, "It is no accident that for three hundred years our people willingly, I believe—maybe even joyously—slaughtered their way across this continent, enslaved Negroes, drove out Mexicans, broke more Indian treaties than Hitler ever bothered to make. Then, for the last half century, we’ve made the countries of the Caribbean and Central America our property while occupying most of the islands of the Pacific including, after due incineration, our only Asian rival, Japan. Who are we to say that this was the work of a few war-lovers…?"

Who indeed, and it looks for one heady moment as if Vidal will provide us with a real debate. But all such speculations are quickly waved aside. Instead, Vidal—fully ensconced now as a character—leaves us with this positively Olympian benediction at the end of The Golden Age:

"As for the human case, the generation of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—are not detectable upon the slide were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope."

Well, this luminous-slided bacteria would like to set a few things straight before shuffling off to the great mutation. To deal with Vidal’s main charge in The Golden Age: Did Franklin Roosevelt and his leading aides and commanders knowingly allow the American garrison at Pearl Harbor to be surprised by withholding vital warnings of an impending Japanese attack? One, undisputed fact should suffice to torpedo all of Vidal’s wild distortions and outright lies.

On November 27, 1941, the commanders of the American forces at Pearl Harbor, Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short, each received their third, official, Washington warning that year against a possible surprise Japanese attack. This one began, "This dispatch should be considered a war warning…"

Such an advisory, coming from Washington, should be sufficient for any admiral or general worthy of the rank to take due precautions against a sneak attack. And if FDR were really trying to set up the Pearl Harbor garrison for such an attack by withholding warnings—why send this one? How could he or anyone else assume that Kimmel and Short would be such stupendous blockheads as to ignore, as they did, a dispatch headed "This is a war warning"?

It is disturbing to even have to refute this scurrilous theory about what went down at Pearl Harbor—one that is, incidentally, a blood libel against perhaps our greatest president. But by setting his whole novel—indeed, his whole series about the character of the American nation—to rise or fall on this sort of paranoia, Vidal gives one no choice.

The truth matters. The truth should matter to any writer of fiction, and it should matter even more to a writer of historical fiction, lest our history be reduced to no more than a collection of Holocaust deniers and ethno-propagandists.

By squeezing the universe into such a neat little ball, Vidal has become so cynical about the workings of power as to actually sound naïve. He seems unable to envision a world of any real complexity—a world where there is chance and bad timing, or where people are driven by mixed motives or hobbled by uncertainty. A world where, for a start, leaders are sometimes influenced by the people they rule, and where people and leaders alike are neither perfect dupes nor perfect villains. To deny, at every turn, this complexity, is not only bad history. It is bad writing.

But then, conspiracy theories are so temptingly simple—so conveniently disempowering. After all, if everything is fixed, if the ruling class is so impregnable, what responsibilities do we have to the truth or anything else? What hard choices are there to make?

Small wonder, then, that Vidal ends his great American epic in his spectacular Italian villa. He has spent his decades on the Gulf of Salerno, he informs us, collecting old prop furniture from the Cinecitta studios and helping "wean the bakers and their clients from using olive oil as shortening for leaden pastries; they now use butter."

Hey, we all do what we can. Perhaps it is unfair to imply that Vidal has lost his radical chops when he has, in fact, provided us with an answer to that oldest of radical questions, "What is to be done?" His reply, from up at the villa, is an ecstatic Nothing, nothing at all.

© Copyright The Los Angeles Times 2002

 

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