Gored

Gore Vidal came to London: it must have been his last visit. He was promoting his final collection of essays.

A select group assembled in the basement of Bush House, where he was interviewed by James Naughtie. That's a bit presumptuous in itself: Vidal was never greatly to be confined by the limits of an 'interview', and pontificated in his usual acerbic generality.

I have collections of Vidal's essays here; but that's not my topic here.

8. Gore Vidal: Narratives of Empire

The curse of being an acclaimed American writer is the chimera of The Great American Novel. Nobody has ever successfully planted the flag on the top of that prominent peak; but generation-after-generation they keep trying.

Vidal went for this extended novel sequence, which developed into a heptology, seven of them,. Any one of which could stand here (and do squat, all in paperback, on the seventh shelf down behind me). The tattered state of my Burr (570-odd pages plus an afterword) shows it has been with me since the 1970s — so that was when I started on this exploration:

The publication sequence was:

• Washington DC, 1967 — but slots in as the sixth in chronology.  It is thinly-disguised autobiography of Vidal's family and youth, against the presidencies of FDR, Truman and Ike.
• Burr, 1973, was the secon in publication, but the first in chronology. Vidal, like a dog with a lamp-post, marks his territory by dedication the book to his nephews, inclding one, Burr.
• Bi-centenary year, 1976, was marked by 1876. Gore exploits that through an elaborate analogy on social divides and elctoral mayhem. This is the third in both publication and chronology.
• Fourth in publication, but second in the chronology, was Lincoln, 1984.
• For the fifth,  Empire, 1987, Vidal entered the world of the great capitalist families of the McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt era. A particular focus is the burgeoning media power of William Randolph Hearst.
• That leads naturally into the sixth, the mutual exploitation of media and government in the WW1 years and after: Hollywood, 1990. I expect many, taken by the character of Caroline Sanford, would mark this one as the pick of the litter.
• Finally, The Golden Age, 2000. Vidal takes on the then-fashionable notion that FDR manipulated US entry into WW2. Which led into the world-power era of the Cold War. Vidal gives himself a walk-on part.

As I said, anyone of those could deserve an entry in this choice.  The first and last of that order above are, arguably, the nearest to 'great literature'; and The Golden Age is Vidal's mature shot at 'The Great American Novel'. However, I'll go for Lincoln as my personal pick.

A classic starter for any fiction is the stranger moseying into town or, in Chaucer's Tales (don't worry — I'll get there!) two and a half dozen on their way out of town.

That's how Vidal gets Lincoln going. Try this:

Elihu B. Washburne opened his gold watch. The spidery hands showed five minutes to six.

“Wait here,” he said to the driver, who said, “How do I know you’re coming back, sir?”

At the best of times Congressman Washburne’s temper was a most unstable affair, and his sudden outbursts of rage — he could roar like a preacher anticipating hell — were much admired in his adopted state of Illinois, where constituents proudly claimed that he was the only militant teetotaller who behaved exactly like a normal person at five minutes to six, say, in the early morning of an icy winter day — of the twenty-third of February, 1861, to be exact.

“Why, you black—!” As the cry in Washburne’s throat began to go to its terrible maximum, caution, the politician’s ever-present angel, cut short the statesman’s breath. A puff of unresonated cold steam filled the space between the congressman and the Negro driver on his high seat.

Heart beating rapidly with unslaked fury, Washburne gave the driver some coins. “You are to stay here until I return, you hear me?”

“I hear you, sir.” White teeth were quickly bared and unbared in the black, cold-puckered face.

Washburne buttoned up his overcoat and stepped carefully onto the frozen mud that was supposed to be the pavement of a stately avenue leading to the squalid train depot of Washington City, capital of thirty-four United States that were now in the process of disuniting. He fluffed up his beard, hoping to better warm his face.

Washburne entered the depot as the cars from Baltimore were rattling to a halt. Negro porters were slouched along the sidings. Huge carts stood ready to be filled with Northern merchandise to be exchanged for Southern tobacco, raw cotton, food. Currently, the Southerners were saying that Washington City was the natural capital of the South. But they did not say it, if they were wise, in Washburne’s irritable Western presence.

Just past the locomotive, the representative of Illinois’s first District stationed himself in front of an empty gilded wagon whose sides were emblazoned with the name of Gautier, the town’s leading caterer, a Frenchman who was, some claimed but never he, the lost Dauphin of France.

As Washburne watched the sleepy travellers disembark, he wished that he had brought with him at least a half-dozen Federal guards. Since the guards were just coming off night duty, no one would think it odd if they should converge, in a casual sort of way, upon the depot. But the other half of the semi-official Joint Congressional Committee of Two, Senator William H. Seward of New York, had said, “No, we don’t want to draw any attention to our visitor. You and I will be enough.” Since the always-mysterious Seward had then chosen not to come to the depot, only the House of Representatives was represented in the stout person of Elihu B. Washburne, who was, suddenly, attracted to a plainly criminal threesome. To the left, a small sharp-eyed man with one hand plunged deep in his overcoat pocket where the outline of a derringer was visible. To the right, a large thickset young man with both hands in his pockets—two pistols? In the center, a tall thin man, wearing a soft slouch hat pulled over his eyes like a burglar, and a short overcoat whose collar was turned up, so that nothing was visible between cap and collar but a prominent nose and high cheekbones covered with yellow skin, taut as a drum. In his left hand he clutched a leather grip-sack containing, no doubt, the tools of his sinister trade.

As the three men came abreast of Washburne, the congressman said, “Well, you can’t fool me, Abe.

The small man turned fiercely on Washburne, hand half out of his overcoat pocket, revealing the derringer’s barrel. But the tall man said, “It’s all right, Mr. Pinkerton. This is Congressman Washburne. He’s our welcoming committee.”

Warmly, Washburne shook the hand of his old friend the President-elect of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, a fellow politician from Illinois, who was supposed to be murdered later on in the day at Baltimore.

Were I back teaching, I'd be using that as a casebook example. There's the essential racial theme established, the sense of menace, and critcal foreshadowing. Along with strong depiction of the context, and considerable characterisation lready.

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