The Last Patriots

Vidal’s historical novels (among them Burr, Lincoln, 1876, and Empire) are more conventional than Mailer’s: fat, elegant books that are gently prescriptive. He devoted a great deal of literary energy to setting the record straight. At times Vidal the essayist is heard in these novels, usually a welcome moment. When his third novel, The City and the Pillar, was published in 1948 with its homosexual theme, America was publicly chaste and virtuous, and Vidal was viewed as controversial. Now it is America that is controversial, and the atheistic, pan-sexual Vidal has become the calming voice of morality, democracy, and reason.

Imagine Margaret Atwood stabbing her husband, lobbying for the release of a convicted murderer who is then released and kills again, running for mayor of Toronto on the platform that it separate from the hick province that surrounds it, and appearing on The National, visibly drunk, telling Peter Mansbridge that Alice Munro lacks the balls to write long. This was Mailer at his most Maileresque.

In his contemporaneous novels, Mailer was able to capture the rhythm of a place through language, whether it was the menace of Harlem in An American Dream (1965) or the menace of Texas in his stylized, stream-of-consciousness dialogue in Why Are We In Vietnam? Certainly, menace is a fixture. If Vidal is America’s most articulate critic and its curiously attenuated conscience, then Mailer is America itself: ambitious, excessive, violent, expansive, and a sucker for self-mythology.

Mailer’s first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was a huge success, and, at the age of twenty-five, he was immediately famous. His second, Barbary Shore, was panned as immoral, making him infamous. What better combination for a young writer? His third novel, The Deer Park, met with tepid reviews, and uneasiness set in.

America was his subject, and when he stepped outside its generous bounds (and outside the contemporary), he was on less sure ground. Ancient Evenings, The Gospel According to the Son, and his most recent book, The Castle in the Forest, are a curious combination of daring and ponderousness. There is a palpable, occasionally oppressive ambition in these books. Ancient Evenings is set in ancient Egypt; The Gospel According to the Son tells the story of Jesus in the first person; The Castle in the Forest is Hitler’s youth narrated by a devil. All of them are long. Mailer’s historical works are towering in the way of a stranger’s genealogical tree, a discouraging web of aunts and precedents. They also limit his greatest gift — language. The awkward, broadly vilified Bible-speak of The Gospel According to the Son is stilted, perhaps necessarily so. But Mailer’s is a relentlessly modern voice, and reading his historical work is like watching a boxer use only his left jab throughout a fight.

Mailer has been most interesting and most effective as a journalist, especially if his true-life novels like The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song are included on the list. The form imposed parameters on his work but allowed his language, which is opulent and muscular, free rein. His two greatest subjects were America and himself, but now his country appears to have a waning interest in both.

Vidal began his career with Williwaw (1946), a modest success, and in the next four years there were four more novels, including The City and the Pillar (1948), which described the odyssey of a gay man and was predictably scandalous. When he published Myra Breckinridge (1968), the satirical story of a transsexual who hates men, it was also scandalous, but by then the public was embracing scandal, and it became a bestseller. Myra Breckinridge was also made into a desperately campy film, with Vidal listed as one of the screenwriters. He wrote thirty or so teleplays in the 1950s and has occasionally appeared onstage and in films. Television is his second home (“Never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television,” he once remarked), and film is a fixture in his life. In his new memoir, the opening line is, “As I move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.”

Film seduced Mailer as well. He starred in and directed three experimental movies and played an architect in Milo Forman’s Ragtime. As writer James Baldwin noted of Mailer, “One of the irreducible difficulties of being an American artist lies in the peculiar nature of American fame. . . . It’s very difficult . . . not to become show business.” That was then. Both Mailer and Vidal embraced show business. They drank with celebrities and wrote of celebrity (Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe, Vidal’s Hollywood essays). They sought fame, rolled in it, ate and shat it.

Now, of course, show business has pitched its tent among the hoi polloi. Reality has overtaken us all, and, in the extended YouTube of modern life, writers have become peripheral.

Vidal argues that the category “famous novelist” no longer exists, that it has become as abstract as “famous speedboat designer.” He writes, “How can a novelist be famous — no matter how well known he may be personally to the press — if the novel itself is of little consequence to the civilized, much less to the generality? ” What has replaced novels, in terms of what is being discussed in the agora, is, of course, movies. Vidal writes that Francis Ford Coppola was the first “film generation” person he had met. “For him the written culture had passed into the night.” Vidal’s sense of the demise of the serious novel, and with it, literary fame, is a consequence of the loss of history.