The Moronic Inferno Part 4

It is all delivered with mechanical verve, and with only a few stumbles and slips of the tongue - 'welfare', for instance, has a habit of getting mixed up with 'windfall'. You watch and listen to Ronald Reagan much as you do to Jimmy Carter, marvelling at their spectacular uneasiness in the realm of ideas, language and conviction. As front-runners, all they have to do is avoid, or minimise, the horrendous gaffes that seem ever ready to spring from their mouths. It is as if they can only just stop themselves from yelling out - 'I hate blacks!' or 'Who is Anwar Sadat?' Reagan is justly famous for his howlers, blind spots, mangled statistics and wishful inaccuracies. Each time he goes up to speak, you sense that the pollsters are reaching for their telephones, the aides for their aspirins.

Reagan likes to end his sessions with a bit of down-home give-and-take with his audience - 'You, the American people'. He points to each raised hand with a jerk of hip and shoulder, like a man drawing six-guns, and he listens to each question with his head shyly inclined. The more personal the question, the more he enjoys his own reply. 'Of all the people in America, sir, why you for President?' Reagan grins. 'Well, I'm not smart enough to tell a lie.' Laughter, applause. 'But why do you want it, sir?' Reagan flexes his worn, snipped, tucked, mottled face. "This country needs a good Republican and I feel I can do the job. Why? I'm happy. I'm feeling good.' Here he turns. 'And I have Nancy to tuck me up at night.' Laughter, applause, hats in the air. Right on! Hot d.a.m.n.' You got it!

Then you realise: they love this actor. And I don't mean 'ex-actor'. I mean actor. He would have been one anyway, with or without Hollywood. He may not be smart, but there is plenty of cunning in him; and his ambitions are as tangled and c.u.mbrous as anyone else's. 'I am one of you' is his boast, and the American people blush at his flattery. Watching him talk, his off-centred smile, his frown of concentration, his chest-swelling affirmations, you feel moved in that reluctant way you feel moved by bad art - like coming out of Kramer versus Kramer, denouncing the film with tears drying on your cheeks. Reagan is an affable old ham, no question. He would make a good head waiter, a good 6utlins redcoat, a good host for New Faces. But would he make a good leader of the free world?

This is serious. How did it happen?

Reagan grew up in respectable poverty in rural Illinois, the second son of stoical Presbyterian parents. His father Jack worked in a shoe shop; his mother Nelle worked in a dress shop. During the early years of the Depression, the young Ronald attended little-known Eureka College, a Christian Church establishment near Peoria; he moonlighted to supplement his modest scholarship. Reaganites often boast that their man is the only candidate with a degree in economics. Reagan himself sometimes cautiously mentions this fact too. But he was no scholar, to put it mildly (even today his reading consists entirely of the Bible, Reader's Digest and a.s.sorted press-clippings). When Eureka gave him an honorary degree in 1957, Reagan cracked, 'I always figured the first one you gave me was honorary.'

Eureka saw the emergence of the early radical vein in Reagan's political thinking - if that isn't too exalted a phrase for the gruff simplicities he now trades in. When there was talk of a cut-back in the academic courses offered by the college, Reagan organised a student strike. Like his father, Reagan was at this time a faithful devotee or Roosevelt and the New Deal. (He remains an admirer or Roosevelt - and of Ike and Coolidge, partly because they didn't work too hard. 'Show me an executive who works all the time', Reagan is fond of saying, 'and I'll show you a bad executive.') Reagan continued to be a registered Democrat well into his forties. Towards the end of his Hollywood heyday Reagan led another successful strike: as president of the radical Screen Actors Guild. And during the days of the McCarthy witch hunts, he made a tough, shrewd stand against the Committee of Un-American Activities.

Reagan worked his way into films through sportscasting (for the World of Chiropractic station in Des Monies, Iowa) and through his own natural good fortune. He signed for Warner Brothers in 1937, at the age of twenty-six. He made about sixty films. They include Cowboy from Brooklyn, An Angel from Texas, Sergeant Murphy, Swing Your Lady, Brother Rat, Brother Rat and a Baby, Bedtime for Bonzo (about a baby chimp: Reagan refused to star in the sequel, Bonzo Goes To College - 'Who could believe a chimp could go to college? Lacked credibility,' said Reagan sternly), h.e.l.lcats of the Navy, She's Working Her Way Through College, The Winning Team, Law and Order, All American. Towards the end of his career Reagan's looks cragged up and he started playing villains. It was time to quit.

During the war Reagan served as a captain with the US Air Force, a.s.signed mainly to the production of training films. In 1948 his eight-year marriage to actress Jane Wyman ended. Her career was just taking off at this point, with The Lost Weekend (1945); Reagan was her second husband and she went on to have two more. Reagan was luckier. In 1952 he married another of his leading ladies, Nancy Davis. They met through SAG. Nancy was accused of Un-American Activities and turned to her Guild President for help. It looks as though Nancy might have turned Reagan rightwards, perhaps simply by re-sanctifying the domestic verities. She is well known to be the woman behind the man, but her contribution seems to involve nothing more sinister than tireless idolatry. There is no hint, as yet, of the manipulative power that Rosalyn Carter is said to exercise over the wretched Jimmy.

At this point Reagan was freelancing with several studios, playing steadily smaller and less attractive parts. His career was temporarily revived by television. After a three-year stint as host of the 'Death Valley Days' Western anthology series, Reagan worked for eight years as MC and occasional guest-star for 'General Electrics Theatre of the Air'. To earn his annual $125,000 he was also obliged to tour the country giving uplift lectures to GE employees. Reagan's high-point was his televised speech in praise of GE's latest product, the nuclear submarine. A trio of rich businessmen were attracted by the way Ronnie carried himself on screen. With their backing, Reagan threw himself into Goldwater's disastrous presidential bid against Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Showing his usual talent for survival, Reagan came through the debacle and in 1966 emerged blinking into the light - as Governor of California.

'I'll run on my record,' says Reagan these days, and points with pride to his achievements as two-term Governor of the richest state in the Union. 'In real terms California is the eighth richest nation in the world,' he points out, failing to add that California never had much in the way of foreign policy. 'When I took office in Sacramento, California was like America is now: bankrupt!' He fixed things there, he claims, and 'I believe I can do all that on the national level too.'

How good is Reagan's record? True, Reagan was Governor for eight years, and California was still there when he left. But one thing is clear: Reagan's record is nothing like as good as he keeps saying it is. His chief contentions are that he cut taxes, reined in a profligate government, and reformed welfare. The facts are as follows. Reagan doubled the per capita tax burden - $244 to $488 - and then softened the blow with tax rebates and credits. Similarly, there were 158,404 government employees when he took office and 203,548 when he left. As for the crucial issue of welfare, Reagan says he saved $2 billion with his reforms, turned a 40,000-a-month increase in recipients into an 8,000 decrease, and raised benefits for the 'truly needy'. Several legislators now maintain that the real saving was closer to $40 million. The welfare load was reduced, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, by the economic boom, with parallel effects nationwide. And the benefits Reagan claims to have increased had been static since 1958. They rose - after liberal federal pressure - two years behind the deadline mandated by Congress. Reagan stonewalled with a series of court actions, and Washington remained conveniently lax. 'I remember it very well,' says Elliot Richardson, who was Nixon's Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare at the time: 'It was made quite clear to me that we should be nice to Reagan. The 1972 election was coming up and Nixon didn't want to upset him.'

Statistics, of course, are malleable - as Reagan himself has frequently demonstrated. But his governmental style is clear enough. Despite liberal aberrations like ecological control bills, conjugal visits for prison inmates, and a wide-open abortion law (which he now thinks of as his worst legacy), Reagan in California showed steady indifference to the poor, the sick, the dissident - and to the tragic mess of the inner cities. The cities are not his base, as he well knows. And while Reagan is no racist (his remark about 'bucks' in welfare queues can be matched by Carter's gaffe about 'ethnic purity'), he has made no progress whatever in winning the confidence of the blacks. As black leader Aaron Henry said recently, 'With him, any black that can crawl will be finding a place somewhere to vote against him.' The question of Reagan's age may have disappeared as an issue; but his ideas still look very elderly. He is a throw-back, and an undistinguished one.

Americans are, perforce, getting used to the idea of President Reagan. Wary at first, big business is getting to like him; he is even finding a base in the trade unions. As this piece goes to press, Reagan is ten percentage points ahead in the polls. The force of John Anderson's independent candidacy remains unpredictable: so does John Anderson. As Gore Vidal has pointed out: 'Compared to Carter and Reagan, Anderson looks like Lincoln. Compared to Lincoln, he looks like Anderson.' At this stage of things, ex-President Gerald Ford is being held up as a Bismarck, a Napoleon, an Alexander. The year 1980 has seen the unchallenged ascendancy of the politics of faute de mieux. If Reagan wins this autumn, we will all know where to put the blame: on the b.u.mbling, canting presidency of Jimmy Carter. Carter gave us Tehran. He gave us Afghanistan. He may yet give us President Ronald Reagan.

Sunday Telegraph 1979 * * *

Postscript Governor Reagan prospered. Indeed, he is now floundering through his second term. And they still love him.

I have nothing new to say about this phenomenon. Two lines in American life, not quite parallel, were moving towards each other: Ronald Reagan and television. And then they met. In retrospect, it is not entirely frivolous to view the 1980 election as a vanished Reagan Western, a lost outline for 'Death Valley Days'. Carter was the prosing weakie who kept the store. Anderson was the gesticulating frontier preacher who just held up the action. But Ronnie was the man who came riding into town, his head held high, not afraid to use his fists - well prepared, if asked, to become the next sheriff of the United States.

What is this televisual mastery of Reagan's? It is a celebration of good intentions and unexceptional abilities. His style is one of hammy self-effacement, a wry dismay at his own limited talents and their drastic elevation. We feel the discrepancy too - over here in this Prime Target. For President Reagan is not just America's keeper: like his opposite number, he is the keeper of the planet, of all life, of the past and of the future. Until 1988, old Ronnie, that actor, is the Lord of Time.

Mr Vidal: Unpatriotic Gore

Novelist, essayist, dramatist, epigrammatist, television polemicist, controversialist, pans.e.xualist, socialist and socialite: if there is a key to Gore Vidal's public character, it has something to do with his towering immodesty, the enjoyable superbity of his self-love. No, this is not infatuation; this is the real thing. 'I can understand companionship. I can understand bought s.e.x in the afternoon, but I cannot understand the love affair,' Vidal has said; perhaps love is blind after all. Indeed, Vidal's paraded auto-crush has a way of summoning the most wistful refrains. It is a love whose month is ever May. Here is a man, you feel, who would walk a thousand miles for one of Gore's smiles.

It could be argued, of course, that Gore Vidal has a lot to be self-loving about. Gore Vidal has certainly argued as much. 'My critics resent everything I represent: s.e.x, wealth and talent' is a remark attributed to him. Vidal is, for a start, preposterously well-preserved for someone who, according to my records, will soon be fifty. Whereas early photographs of the growing Gore are almost embarra.s.sing to behold (who is this strapping exquisite?), he even now resembles a pampered heart-throb cruising easily into mid-career. Unpleasant rumour has it that Vidal's pulchritude owes as much to the cosmetic surgeon as it does to natural health and proportion - one hears talk of face-lifts, lid-tucks, teeth-capping, etc. But those vigilant, ironic brown eyes, together with his mellifluous, patrician voice, are the energy-centres of Vidal's person, and age will not wither them. They strongly contribute to his immediate, knowing, slightly foxy charm.

The gates to Vidal's Ravello villa are released by a hidden electronic device. With a shy smile, Vidal operates the powerful current to allow us entry, and explains: 'Kidnappers... I'm not big enough for them really - but someone might be dumb enough to think I'm Jackie Kennedy's brother." He saunters on down the path, his hysterical terrier, Rat, patrolling the steep terraces.

Approached from the side, the villa seems impossibly narrow, wedged into the Mediterranean cliff-face. But once we were within, the white pa.s.sages spanned out impressively in unexpected directions. A courteous if uneffusive host, Vidal parked me in his wood-and-leather library, seated himself opposite and began to talk, dividing his l.u.s.trous gaze between me and our photographer (who cavorted acrobatically round him throughout the afternoon, to Vidal's occasional unease). 'That's my bad side,' Vidal would say. 'My left side is my good side.'

Vidal's looks, in common with everything else about Vidal, are dear to Vidal's heart. He minds about them: they are a source of both exhilaration and anxiety. The same applies to his varied talents and the extent to which society honours them with grat.i.tude and rewards. This is not a love affair built on complacence: it is one grounded in ceaseless rea.s.sessment ('Am I really that great? ... Yes' is how the soliloquy probably goes). Vidal is perhaps one of the best-selling serious writers in the world, and certainly one of the most prolific; in addition, he has shone brightly in several careers (politics, television, theatre, cinema), any of which might have satisfied a less restively arrogant man. And yet success has not brought serenity: although he has little of the paranoia worryingly frequent among well-known writers, he is someone who delightedly cultivates the envies and rivalries of his peers; although he is a.s.sured of his eminence, he has no desire whatever to be above it all. Why?

A recent much-publicised punch-up with his rival Norman Mailer is illuminating in this respect - and highly entertaining, let me say. Vidal's eyes flood with dissimulated pleasure as he prepares to tell the oft-told story; he is looking forward to coming well out of it.

The scene was a New York party, thrown by Lally Weymouth for publisher Lord Weidenfeld (freshly arrived Amba.s.sador Peter Jay was among the startled guests). Vidal was talking to a group of people, when he felt an agitated hand on his shoulder. It belonged to Mailer. The two men had been wary friends for years; but their polarities grew intolerable after Mailer's The Prisoner of s.e.x, and they nearly came to blows on a d.i.c.k Cavett television show in 1971.

'It was Norman, looking small, fat and out of shape. "Gore," he said, "you look like an old Jew."

'"Well, Norman," I said in my witty way, "you look like an old Jew, too."' (Mailer, by the way, is Jewish. Gore is, if anything, oppressively Aryan in appearance and ancestry.) 'Then he threw the contents of his gla.s.s in my face, and punched me gently on the side of the mouth. It didn't hurt. Then I pushed him. Norman has always hated die fact that, apart from everything else, I'm much taller and stronger than he is. He went flying backward six or seven feet, landing - to our alarm - on top of the man who invented Xerox.'

Order then laboriously re-established itself. But Mailer is said to have gone round the room attempting to enlist an anti-Gore faction and demanding that the hostess eject him. She refused. Dourly, Mailer reapproached his foe. It is at this point that the tale turns brutal.

"'Come outside," he said to me. His mouth was working and you could smell the fear. "Norman," I said, "you can't go on this way. You're too old for all this." At that point, my friend Howard [Howard Austen, Vidal's aide/secretary/companion for the past twenty-eight years] turned on Norman. Howard is Jewish; he grew up on the same streets as Norman; he knew what Norman was doing. Howard advanced on him steadily, saying, "You flea! Get out, you f.u.c.king a.s.shole loser, you f.u.c.king a.s.shole loser." That was it. No more Norman. The next day he was on the phone to the gossip columnists, convincing them that there had been a fight, that he was some sort of - what's his word? - "existential hero".'

According to the press reports, Vidal had the last word: 'Once again, words failed him.' All Mailer could manage was: 'Vidal? He's just a mouth.'

Mailer had had an early word, though, which goes a bit nearer home. It's the sort of he-man dismissal one would expect from an existential hero; but there may be something to it. 'Vidal', said Mailer once, 'lacks the wound.'

Vidal would no doubt be happy to concur. 'My G.o.d, what a lucky life,' he confesses. 'I was born into Washington society. Both sides of my family were political. Money, fame, power - I was never in awe of any of that. It had no spell over me.'

His family was grand, but it was also scattered. His father, Eugene Vidal, was on F.D. Roosevelt's cabinet as the first chief aviation administrator. ('I was the youngest person ever to land a plane,' says Vidal, nodding proudly at a framed photograph of father and son in the c.o.c.kpit. One wonders, confusedly, whether he still is.) He spent most of his childhood, however, under the tutelage of his grandfather, Senator Gore, Oklahoma's first elected senator. Gore senior had been blind from the age of ten, and Gore junior often used to guide the old man to and from the Capitol (one summer Gore junior wore a swimsuit when he went to collect his grandfather; Gore senior was none the wiser, until he overheard catty speculations about the family's red-neck origins).

The Gores were Anglo-Irish, settling in America in the 1690s, the Vidals Alpine newcomers arriving'in 1848: Gore Vidal combined the family names in a melodious clinch, one that I take to be an indispensable ingredient of his glamour. At an early age little Gore acquired a further sprig to the family tree. His mother divorced his father and became the second wife of Hugh Auchincloss, a descendant of Aaron Burr, whom Vidal would eventually write a novel about. Mr Auchincloss was plainly a lucky man: his third-wife was the mother of Jackie Bouvier, who later became Jackie Kennedy, and who is now Jackie Ona.s.sis.

Vidal 'quit schooling' at the age of seventeen, and has been a tireless autodidact ever since. Recent reading includes Balzac and D.H. Lawrence: 'Balzac is giving me great pleasure. Lawrence - my G.o.d - every page I think, "Jesus, what a f.a.g. Jesus, what a f.a.ggot this guy sounds."'

As the war was petering out, Vidal saw peripheral service in the Aleutians. 'For all my generation, the war was just a great interruption.' He was committed to hospital in mid-service with premature arthritis; the break nevertheless allowed him to complete his first novel Williwaw, a cool look at war from the edges, at the age of nineteen. The book was a succes, but hardly a success. Sales were indifferent, and Vidal now found that he had to write a novel a year to stay alive. Contrary to popular belief, Vidal was no princeling: he got a handsome send-off when he came of age, but nothing since.

Between 1945 and 1949 he wrote six novels, living frugally in cheap countries like Guatemala. One of these novels was a notorious work called The City and the Pillar. It was enough to evaporate the little repute Vidal had.

'I took on the whole heteros.e.xual dictatorship of America at the age of twenty-three. Enough wounds were given and received in that battle to satisfy even Norman Mailer.' The City and the Pillar was about 'the essential naturalness, if not normality, of h.o.m.os.e.xuality'. It seems mild enough - even evasively cerebral - today; but all the closets were locked in the American 1940s, and the book scuppered Vidal as a serious novelist. A few more fictions trickled out until 1953 (including three detective novels under the quibbling name of Edgar Box - 'they took eight days each to write'), then Vidal put down his quill, opened his eyes and looked round about himself.

There followed a busy, public decade. Spreading his wings, Vidal became one of the last contract writers for MGM. 'It wasn't like working as a writer. It was like working for General Motors,' he admits coolly. One of his (uncredited) screenplays was for Ben Hur: 'By the time I arrived on the set, everything had already been built - including Charlton Heston.' He wrote plays for television and Broadway; he wrote essays and political pieces; Vidal embarked on his long career as a television pundit. At one point there was surprising talk of a romance and engagement between Vidal and Joanne Woodward. They ended up living a trots for a time in California, the third member of this curious menage being Paul Newman.

In 1960, he submitted to the old tug of politics and ran for Congress: he stood as a Democratic-Liberal candidate for a safe Republican seat in upstate New York. He lost, of course, 78,789 to 103,325, but he trebled the Democratic showing and won 20,000 more votes than John Kennedy - 'as I never ceased to remind him'. Two years later, he was asked to stand for the US Senate. Vidal pondered the offer carefully - then fled the country.

'Why did you give up politics?'

'I would never have gone far enough to be of any use. But I could have made it. I am just perfect for television, and that's all a President has to be these days. No - I would have become a drunken Senator who said something interesting once a year.'

'Why did you want to be President?'

'Why not? Admittedly I lack the character and wisdom of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. But the office itself enn.o.bles. Anyway, I left the country. I wanted to be a writer again.'

'Why couldn't you be that in America?'

'Because I didn't want to become an alcoholic, basically. They all are there, for some reason. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner are the cla.s.sic examples, but it didn't stop with them. Apart from the Jews, all American writers do seem to booze a great deal. After all, there's something to be said for being an alcoholic in America.

'Either that or they barricade themselves away, like Salinger. But I wonder how he pa.s.ses the time. It is very cold where he lives...'

Besides, Vidal had a specific novel to research and compose, and it was this that brought him to Italy. The book was called Julian: it turned out to be the start of a fresh track in Vidal's career as a writer. A study of the fourth-century apostate Roman Emperor, the new novel combined imaginative pa.s.sion (Vidal's suspended nostalgia for pre-Christian grandeur and chaos) with intellectual distance (a chance to be rigorous and erudite). Julian was his first fiction for ten years: it was a huge success, critically and commercially, and prepared the way for his equally redoubtable trilogy about the American political past, Washington, DC, Burr and (well-timed for the bicentennial year) 1876. These novels, together with the problematical Myra Breckinridge, have made him world famous - and a millionaire at least a couple of times over.

Although there is almost total unanimity about Vidal's quality as an essayist, a.s.sessments of his fiction vary to an unusual degree. To some, Vidal's gifts are primarily a.n.a.lytical and expository. So long as his fiction is tied to argument - as in the historical novels - it has all the wit and conviction of his essays, with an added s.p.a.ciousness and poise, a sense of intimacy with the way the world works. Once freed from this reality, though - as in the satirical fantasies Myra Breckinridge and Myron - his imagination founders in a kind of puerile vivacity, mere low-campery. Auberon Waugh remarked of Myron that only humourless people seemed to find it funny. And such people would, on Vidal's admission, include a great many Americans.

While he forged ahead with his fiction during the Sixties, Vidal became, if anything, even more trenchant and ubiquitous as a commentator on the American scene. 'Living outside America helps: you see things more sharply and can say what you want.' Undiminished controversy shadowed his exile, In 1961 he launched his famous feud with Bobby Kennedy. 'Jack was tremendous company - really droll. But with Bobby... it was chemical. Put us in the same room and I'd want to kick him. He was a McCarthyite tough.'

In 1967, he wrote two remarkably clear-headed attacks on the Kennedy political machine, The Holy Family and The Manchester Book; he was later to say of Teddy's presidential aspirations, 'Well, he would have made a very good bartender.'

During elections he returned to gallivant round the US television circuit, eliciting on one occasion this lucid retort from William Buckley Junior: 'Listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-n.a.z.i or I'll sock you in your G.o.dd.a.m.n face.' During the 1970 election Vidal became co-chairman of Dr Spock's New Party, a wet-lib fringe group running on a collection of fashionable issues (a protest-vote, surely?). Two years later his play An Evening with Richard Nixon earned him an impressive bundle of death threats. ('Well-written death threats, too. They weren't just lunatics.') Vidal is, and will remain, an energetic, increasingly Parna.s.sian monitor of his homeland - 'a national treasure,' as one critic put it, 'one of the very few sane voices amidst the babble'.

'Oh to be in England, now that England's here,' drawled Gore when, on arrival ai my Ravello hotel, I diffidently telephoned his villa. I had reviewed Mr Vidal's work on two occasions, and with sufficient hostility to win his amused disdain, or so a common friend told me. I had met him once, last year, and he was geniality incarnate (later describing me, in a student-magazine interview, as 'a cute little thing'). Now Vidal is well known to harbour grudges, and for a moment I suspected that some small, patrician revenge might await me. A bit of lordly hetero bashing, perhaps, or at least several hours of Vidal's expertly decadent taunts.

Nothing - or very little - of the kind. He is excellent company and a superlative talker, aphoristic, funny, learned, with a delightful line in brutal mimicry (his Tennessee Williams is an unforgettable, croaky mixture of affection and savagery). There is that fundamental coldness in him, and occasionally one catches glimpses of it. But it is not something that a day-tripper would be permitted to inspect.

Vidal's life at present seems to be a masterpiece of order and productivity. He does most of his writing in the Ravello villa, an ivory palace slapped on the cliff-face, with occasional diversionary visits to his opulent apartment in Rome (it is there - if the late Tom Driberg was to be believed - that most of his startling socio-s.e.xual escapades take place. 'So Tom sang, did he?' said Vidal grimly). He has a living-out maid, and there is always the devoted Howard to mastermind the running of villa and estate. Among other things, they make their own wine. On the ground floor, between Vidal's bedroom and Howard's, is a well-equipped bathroom/sauna/ gymnasium, complete with dumb-bells, where 'I work out irreligiously every day". He looks fit. He is fit, as I discovered during a back-breaking walk down the cliff to Amalfi.

As I wheezed down the endless steps behind him, Vidal chatted melodiously on. The two-year debacle over his recent screenplay, Caligula, continues to vex him. The producer, Bob Guccione of Penthouse, intended to call the film Gore Vidal's Caligula; having seen some of the revised script, Vidal set a lawsuit in train to have his name removed from the t.i.tle. One of the stars, Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris), hardly an actress famed for her fastidiousness, quit the film rather than enact the s.e.x scenes required of her by the Italian director.

'Oh, it's hard-core all right. Nothing wrong with that, in itself. It's just that the director has no talent. As for the producer ...' Some exuberantly libellous comments ensued.

'Right, give me some gossip,' Vidal demanded, producing wine as I recuperated after the walk.

Vidal is on record as saying that he always perks up at news of catastrophe among his friends. And, as I did my best with tales of professional failure, neurosis and marital collapse, a new intensity began to invade his features. In a curious way, despite his ameliorist image, you feel that he wishes everything were worse than it is - America, the modern marriage, the trials of his friends. It would be neater that way, and more fun to think about. He has removed pain from his own life, or narrowed it down to manageable areas; and it is one thing he cannot convincingly re-create in his fiction. But his deeply compet.i.tive nature is still rea.s.sured to know that there is plenty of pain about.

I have never met an American so English in his irony. No issue is serious enough for him to resist its satirical possibilities, a habit that reinforces his stirring pessimism about the way the world is changing. 'As cheerful as a leper-bell,' was how Simon Raven described his prognosis, a verdict which Vidal prizes. But the phrase misses his grisly relish or human folly, the sense you get that his world-view is obedient to a personal rhetoric, a private enjoyment of the badness of things.

Postscript In agreeing to the interview Mr Vidal had armed himself with the stipulation that he would be able to see and check the piece before it was published. There was nothing sinister in this: naturally he wouldn't attempt to trim my opinions. Nevertheless I had the ticklish task of calling on Vidal at the Connaught in London and sitting there in his room while he inspected the galleys. In the first paragraph he changed 'h.o.m.os.e.xual' to 'pans.e.xual'. A little later he said, in his grandest voice, 'Now if you print that I shall most certainly sue,' and deleted a chance scurrility with a stroke of his pen. ('As one gets older', Vidal has remarked, 'litigation replaces s.e.x.') Thereafter he merely did a bit of gardening, corrected some misquotations ('No, that's not my style at all'), and inserted a new joke or two ('If you take that out, I'll give you this'). We haggled over a number of points; there were no real cruces. Occasionally, as he read on, he gave a reluctant laugh. 'Mm,* he concluded. 'A bit thin on the work.'

This was perfectly true. I had read Myra and Myron (with difficulty), some of Williwaw, half of The City and the Pillar and most of Julian; I had also spent three weeks reading three chapters of Burr. I cannot get through Vida!'s fiction. The books are too long. Life is too short. In the interests of balance I append a piece about VidaPs essays, where I am a little older and a little more forthright.

May I also take the opportunity here to pit Vidal's account of his fight with Mailer against Mailer's account of his fight with Vidal? Needless to say, at no point do they tally. When I asked Mailer for his version, he nodded, squared his shoulders, and spoke with solemn deliberation.

'Vidal had written things about me. I had resolved that the next time I saw him, I was going to hit him. You understand? The next time I saw him was at Lally's. I walked up and banged him over the head with a gla.s.s - a heavy c.o.c.ktail gla.s.s. He looked very scared. I asked him to come outside. Then his little friend started in on me.

"All right," I said. "Come on. I'll take out the two of yous." They stayed where they were. I walked away."

Perhaps, towards the end, I am guilty of importing the accents of De Niro's Jake la Motta; but that was it, in substance. One day I must triangulate the story with the version of an impartial onlooker, if any such exist. Whom to believe, though? In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.

Gore Vidal is probably the cleverest book-reviewer in the world. This needn't sound like faint praise, even to someone as exhaustively lauded as Mr Vidal. He is too clever to write effective Hollywood screenplays, too clever to be an effective politician (he flunked in the senatorial primaries in 1981), too clever, really, to be an effective novelist. Essays are what he is good at: you can't be too clever for them.

Vidal is the unchallengeable master of the droll stroll. Rightly indulged by his editors, who give their star performer all the rope he wants, Vidal saunters at his leisure through the books tendered for review, with many a delightful diversion, racy short-cut, startling turn of speed. He is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blindspots are illuminating.

Roughly half the essays in Pink Triangle and Yellow Star are literary, half socio-political. When writing about the real world, Vidal sounds like the only grown-up in America - indeed, his tone is that of a superevolved stellar sage gazing down on the globe in pitying hilarity. There are two reasons for this. First, Vidal was born into the governing cla.s.ses, and has never regarded them with anything but profound suspicion. In 1940, following the death of the virtuous Senator William Borah ('the lion of Idaho'), a large stash was found in his safety deposit box, causing uneasy speculation. Vidal approached his grandfather, Senator Gore, and asked him who had paid Borah off: 'The n.a.z.is,' came the reply. To keep us out of the war.' This is traumatic news, even now. Vidal must have been fifteen at the time. It is easy to see how such disclosures would have shaped and hardened his thinking.

The second and closely related reason for Vidal's bracing hauteur is that Vidal is incorrigibly anti-American. My, is Gore unpatriotic!

No pomaded Hanoverian swaggerer could have such natural contempt for that coa.r.s.e and greedy colony. Writing about the Framing of the First Const.i.tution, Vidal does not accept 'the view that a consortium of intellectual giants met in Philadelphia in order to answer once and for all the vexing questions of how men are to be governed'. He finds, rather, that their 'general tone is that of a meeting of the trust department of Sullivan and Cromwell'. In another essay Vidal resolutely fails to distinguish between American polity and the workings of the Chase Manhattan Bank: bureaucrats are 'tellers', voters are 'depositors'; and when Banksman Nixon goes to Peking or Moscow, he goes 'in search of new accounts'. As for the judiciary, and the moral code it enforces, Vidal claims that the prisons throng 'with people who get drunk, take dope, gamble, have s.e.x in a way that is not approved by the holy book of a Bronze Age nomad tribe as reinterpreted by a group of world-weary Greeks in the first centuries of the last millennium' - i.e. the Bible (or 'the Babble', as many of its adherents seem to call it). How true or 'helpful' all this is remains unclear. But the gleeful iconoclasm has the conviction of satirical truth.

Vidal's flag-scragging extends from public life through literary questions to social mores. In 'the land of the tin ear', where 'stupidity ... is deeply revered', where humourlessness is endemic ('what other culture could have produced Hemingway and not seen the joke?'), cultural conspiracies flourish unchecked. 'Americans will never accept any literature that does not plainly support ... a powerful and bigoted middle cla.s.s', a state of affairs inst.i.tutionalised by the universities, which are themselves torpid bureaucracies of preferment and tenure. Among the bigotries of this powerful middle cla.s.s is a deep and mindless 'h.o.m.ophobia', the American establishment being militantly heteros.e.xual. Vidal has written about this before, of course, but never quite so virulently. 'In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while h.o.m.os.e.xualists wore pink triangles' - hence the book's t.i.tle. The moral stakes could hardly be raised any higher; Vidal's tic nerveux has developed into an obsession, a crusade, and the effect on his writing is everywhere apparent.

In the opening essay, on Scott Fitzgerald's Notebooks, we learn that Fitzgerald makes 'rather too many nervous references to fairies and pansies'. In the second, on Edmund Wilson, we learn that Wilson's notebooks, too, 'are filled with innumerable references to 'fairies that range from derisive to nervous'. What does 'nervous' mean here exactly? Does it mean that Fitzgerald and Wilson are 'nervous' about being fairies themselves? Yes, because Vidal has always believed that heteros.e.xuals got that way purely through the conditioning of that powerful middle cla.s.s. The third essay, on Isherwood's Christopher and his Kind, ends with a plangent clarion call: 'one can only hope that thanks to Christopher's life and work, his true kind will increase even as they refuse, so wisely, to multiply'. A few pages earlier Vidal has called Isherwood 'the best prose writer in English*. This is a meaningless tribute anyway, but by now the nervous hets among Vidal's readers will be wondering whether the verdict is really a literary one. It sounds like a manic-depressive overpraising Sylvia Plath, a postmaster general making excessive claims for Trollope, a midget going ape for Pope.

Vidal expands his platform. The ruling cla.s.ses fear the gays because they aren't as easily dominated by the hen-pecked, ball-broken straights with their nagging wives and grasping children. Everyone - oh, happy day - is potentially bis.e.xual. This is a terrific plus because 'we have more babies than we know what to do with'. Finally, and clinchingly, 'the family is an economic, not a biological, unit'. Actually, of course, the family is both: how could a parent-child relationship not be biological? But what the family mainly is is a unit, w.i.l.l.y-nilly. To disapprove of this fact is as futile as disapproving of oxygen or bipedalism.

Besides, the whole line sounds rather - American, does it not, tending to reduce argument to a babble of interested personalities, an exchange of stricture and veto, with money as the bottom line? Well, if Vidal sounds unusually shrill, 'there is a good deal to be shrill about'. He sees his freedoms as being under particular threat, and maybe he is right. More likely, the stand just happens to suit his antic pessimism. 'Real stupidity does excite me,' he once said. America is the perfect rumpus-room for this witty invigilator. Meanwhile it should be stressed that the new book is a peach. It will give everyone many hours of nervous pleasure.

Sunday Telegraph 1977 and Observer I982

Too Much Monkey Business: The New Evangelical Right

'I call it Mickey Mouse mentality,' proclaimed Judge Braswell Deen, referring to the theories of Charles Darwin: 'monkey mythology methodology monopoly, mysterious musings and mundane dreams of all this monkey business!' The audience of 15,000 - most of them Baptists, Methodists, charismatics, fundamentalists, pentecostalists and journalists - applauded and whooped.

Elsewhere in the Reunion Arena, Dallas, Texas, a frowning Ronald Reagan told a press conference that he had 'a great many questions about evolution'. 'I believe schools should be even-handed on the issue,' he added. This was a nervous moment for gaffe-dreading Ronnie, in the week of Taiwan. And, sure enough, here was another howler jumping out of his mouth. But who cared? Perhaps this particular gaffe would win him 50 million votes.

Meanwhile, wearing a press badge that identified me as 'Marty Amis', I strolled the Reunion Arena concourses, sampling the pro-family propaganda on offer there. New in Dallas, I returned to the hotel restaurant and ate The American Way (hamburger and cottage cheese), plus an Elite Pastry. Beside my plate lay a stack of pamphlets. What was going on around here?

Some of the leaflets were simply illiterate hate-sheets; others were glossy and well produced. Why A Bankrupt America? explains how the Trilateral Commission is helping 'Russia Enslave the World!' When You Were Formed In Secret tells of the miracle of birth and the 'homicide of abortion'. The Family Issues Voting Index helps you to sort 'the good guys from the bad guys' ('The bad guys need our prayers. The good guys need our votes'). Is Humanism Molesting Your Child? urges you to 'examine your child's library for immoral, anti-family, and anti-American contents'. Your Five Duties As A Christian Citizen are as follows: Pray, Register, Become Informed, Help Elect G.o.dly People, and Vote... Then I found the pamphlet I was looking for.

Today the evolution controversy seems as remote as the Homeric era to inteHectuals in the East,' wrote the historian Richard Hofstad-ter in i?6z. But elsewhere there are still many Americans who, in the words of William Bryan, prosecutor at the Scopes trial of 192.5, are 'more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks'.

Are Evolutionary Scientists Like Three Blind Mice? is the pamphlet's t.i.tle. And, yes, apparently they are. Because evolution is 'a vicious lie!' There follows a sarcastic resume of the atheist argument, with the clincher: 'question: if G.o.d had to do all the work ANYWAY WHY DID HE STRETCH IT OUT OVER MILLIONS OF YEARS? SURELY THEY DON'T THINK G.o.d WAS TOO WEAK TO CREATE EVERYTHING in 6 days!' The last page carries special offers of anti-evolution T-shirts ($6.95) and creationist b.u.mper-stickers (40 cents). I finished my meal and returned to the National Affairs Briefing at the Reunion Arena to hear Reagan - Reagan, and his new champions, the electronic ministers of the air.

This is a good deal more serious than it may at first sound. The mobilisation of the Evangelical Right could influence the outcome of the 1980 presidential election and determine that of 1984 - though many of the new evangelists claim that a free 1984 election will not take place unless their man gets in this time. Their man, naturally, is the Republican nominee: the movement claims to be non-partisan, but it is about as neutral as Nancy Reagan. (Ironically, Nancy is the chief Evangelical reservation about Ronnie, who is a divorcee. According to them, the Reagans have been living in adultery for nearly thirty years.) By informing their congregations about the 'pro-family' issues, by setting up vote-registration booths in their aisles, the Evangelicals have already ousted left-wing inc.u.mbents in mid-term elections, have thwarted pro-h.o.m.os.e.xual and women's-rights legislation in key states, and have played a part in the shaping of the Republican platform. And these are early days.

Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter and John Anderson are all 'born-again' Christians. They are not alone. One in three Americans takes the lesson of Nicodemus in John 3: 'unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of G.o.d'. Reaching back to the Great Awakening of the early eighteenth century, the Evangelical faith is the most proletarian and anti-intellectual of the many mansions of American religion. It rests on a personal experience of the Saviour; it is Manichaean and eschatological; for all its hatred and rejection of modernity, it maintains that the Earth is only 6,ooo years old.

The latest surge in Evangelical activism is entirely new. Like so much else in America, it has to do with money, power and, above all, television. There are 36 wholly religious TV stations in America (and 1,300 radio stations). Jerry FalwelFs Old-Time Gospel Hour is seen on 374 stations nationwide, outstripping Dallas. Pat Robertson's daily devotional chat show has more viewers than Johnny Carson. The TV preachers turn over billions of tax-free dollars every year (Falwell alone raises more than a million dollars a week, $300,000 of which goes on buying more air-time). Their mailing lists are kept on guarded computer tapes. The electronic ministries have a combined congregation of 115 million people attending every week.

The political wing of the movement has developed only in the last fifteen months. Its names are legion: Moral Majority Inc., Religious Roundtable, Christian Voice, Christian Voters' Victory Fund, Campus Crusade for Christ, Christians for Reagan - all loosely grouped under the pro-family banner. American religion has always been popular rather than hieratic in character, concerned not with theology but morality; and it has always, until now, been politically quietist, with low registration and a tendency to vote for the inc.u.mbent. The Evangelical message is plain - 'out of the pews and into the polls'. 'Not voting is a sin,' says Falwell: 'Repent of it.'

'And the Lord turned to him and said, "My precious child, I never left you in your hours of trial. When you look back along the pathway of your life and see only one pair of footprints in the sand - why, that was when I carried you.'"

This wasn't the ghost of the Rev. Billy Sunday: it was a close-to-tears Ronald Reagan, winding up his address to the 15,000 Evangelicals (10,000 pastors, 5,000 lay people) at the Reunion Arena in Dallas. Reagan is taking these people seriously all right: he has hired a Moral Majority operative to liaise with the horn-again community. 'Religious America is awakening, perhaps just in time,' said Reagan hopefully. He praised the freedom-fighters of Poland and their leader, the Pope - 'just the son of simple farm folk'. He tied himself up in knots trying to p.r.o.nounce 'Sollsy Neetsin* and his friend, 'Archie Pelaygo'. He spoke of the dream of all true Americans to attain 'that shining city on the hill'. But this was mild, hammy stuff compared to the kick-'em-down oratory of the electronic preachers.

Reagan was preceded at the podium by Dr James Robison, the good-angel JR of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, whose TV show reaches ten million people (and has twice been taken off the air for its anti-h.o.m.os.e.xual virulence). Robison is six foot three of US prime, with a sensual, predatory manner and the tumbling unstop-pability of the natural demagogue. He strode onstage to a rock star's welcome - a deafening wall of whistles and wolf-howls. A-men! Ooh-hah! Wah-who! Ee-haw!

Robison brandished his Bible a good deal, and often seemed about to wrestle his lectern to the ground. His language was violent, even scabrous. He spoke, or hollered, about 'the cancerous visible sores' afflicting America, sores which Christians were obliged to 'fight'. Jesus was no sissy, no sir. 'You slap my cheek', said Robison, slapping his own cheek resoundingly, 'and I'll turn it. But you slap my wife or my children, boy, and I'll put you on the floor? (Dog-barks, coyote-calls. Why-haw! How-he!) 'Scientists', Robison believes, 'don't know what they're talking about.' The Bible, on the other hand, is 'more relevant than tomorrow's newspaper'. In his wind-up Robison advised 'the perverts to get back in the closet and not parade on Main Street!' Ow-wee! Who-how!

Aaa-mien!__Reagan applauded. Back in Washington, Carter must have been wondering about the size of the pervert vote. Perverts for Carter - that's all he needs.