It is not just their own passing that is being anticipated in these books, or the novel’s, which has been said to be dead for nearly as long as it’s been alive. Vidal wonders where his books will be half a century from now. He has been critical of university English departments and is not found on reading lists with great frequency. Though, as he dryly notes, “If you miss one syllabus, there’ll always be another in the next decade.” Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead was on my American Literature course list in the 1970s. A check of the same list today finds him replaced by Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway still hang on.
The novel is surviving quite handily, it turns out, but the novelist isn’t faring as well, at least as public figure. Even the mystique of the Salinger/Pynchon model of never actually appearing in public is waning (though the famously reclusive Cormac McCarthy made an appearance on Oprah). The whereabouts of any novelist are moot. I wasn’t aware that Philip Roth was a recluse until I read about him in the New Yorker. Novelists are all in hiding these days, none more hidden than those who are out there shilling their work, reading in small (occasionally empty) rooms, appearing unperkily on Breakfast Television.
In his journalism, Mailer embraced the idea of the literary artist at the centre of current events (sometimes to a fault). It is what animated his political writing, most of which retains its vitality. The Armies of the Night, which described the March on the Pentagon, won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago reported on the Republican and Democractic conventions of 1968. Both books enjoyed a large audience. Mailer’s most recent political book, Why Are We At War? (2003), had little impact. Parts of it appeared first in speeches and interviews, and the 128-page paperback version reads like an afterthought. It doesn’t have the visceral and reportorial energy of Armies or Miami, but then there is little to report on in the current climate. Demonstrations are small, localized affairs these days, and political conventions are produced as television shows. Despite high production values and celebrity endorsements, they have failed to find a large viewing audience, another sign of disengagement.
In Why Are We At War? Mailer writes, “In a country where values are collapsing, patriotism becomes the hand-maiden to totalitarianism. The country becomes the religion. We are asked to live in a state of religious fervor: Love America! Love it because America has become a substitute for religion. But to love your country indiscriminately means that critical distinctions begin to go. And democracy depends upon these distinctions.” Debate has become less spirited in America, and this isn’t just because dissent is considered treasonous in certain quarters. Apathy is the bigger problem. There is little audience for critical distinctions or even for democracy. There won’t be any more Armies of the Night, unless they’re heading for a midnight madness sale at Wal-Mart.
Despite his recent public appearances, Vidal, too, is less of a political force these days. His latest essays are still trenchant, his wit intact, but his piece on 9/11 was turned down by his usual outlets, including The Nation, where he is a contributing editor. In-stead it became a short book that was sold internationally but not in the US. The polemic was eventually published in a paperback collection of essays, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got To Be So Hated (2002), by a small American press. In it, Vidal examines the reasons for 9/11 and for Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 innocent people. Vidal looked into McVeigh’s political motives, an unpalatable examination, but the unexamined democracy isn’t worth having, to paraphrase Socrates. It is more comforting to think, as President Bush continues to, in terms of good and evil, which despite his Christianity he presents as cinematic values rather than Biblical ones. They are a staple of the small and large screen, the simple verities that fill seats.
While Bush personifies the government’s retreat from democratic principles, he isn’t alone among US presidents. Vidal notes that it was Bill Clinton who signed into law the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which, among other things, weakened habeas corpus. In his essay “Truman,” Vidal vilifies Harry Truman’s administration, writing that, under his watch, “the American Republic was quietly retired and its place taken by the National Security State.” The end of the Republic and the beginning of Empire. As an essayist, he has few peers. His voice is droll and erudite, a comfort. In his eleven collections, Vidal outlines how the country has gone from democracy to oligarchy with little fanfare, beholden to corporations.
Democracy needs a viable electorate, and it also depends upon a collective historical memory. Engendering this has always been a hard sell. People tend to be complacent about freedom until it is seriously compromised. Then they rebel. But there is a wide territory in the middle, which we seem to be occupying. Perhaps this is why Mailer and Vidal felt compelled to write so many historical novels: to remind Americans what is at stake.
Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale (1995) dealt with one of America’s central political mythologies, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Harlot’s Ghost (1991) was a 1,310-page examination of the cia, a metaphor for the duality of America: on the one hand, a giant, benign International House of Pancakes; on the other, a sinister international bully. The book ends with the words, “To Be Continued.” The story has been continued, though not happily; the cia pursues its grey mission with mixed results.
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