Remembering Gore Vidal: playwright, novelist, essayist, critic

“To find someone writing in English, who, like Gore Vidal, distinguished himself as a historical novelist, a commercial playwright, a political activist, and a dandy, attracting controversy and opprobrium along the way, one would have to go back to Edward Bulwer-Lytton,” writes Laurence Senelick in The American Stage. Reviewing Vidal’s life and work in The New York Times, Charles McGrath also conjures with evocations of another era, describing “Mr. Vidal” as “at the end of his life, an Augustan figure, who believed himself to be the last of a breed. He was probably right.”

Vidal often weaved scenes and people from his life into his writing, and his close friendships with fellow playwrights, including Tennessee Williams, disinclined him to criticize plays. However, on those occasions when he wrote about theater, Senelick observes, he delivered “the elegantly styled responses of a discriminating and intelligent insider.” Here he traces the theater’s “beautiful circle of love”:

The desire to give pleasure is a fundamental characteristic of the popular artist. . . .The literary pleasure givers are happiest using the theater, loneliest in the novel. . . And it is understandable. A most tangible audience responds like a lover to pleasure given, and in his audience’s response the artist is himself ravished by what he has done. The result is a beautiful circle of love which at its truest has been responsible for much good art in the theater along with most of the bad.

Vidal joined the lonelier pleasure givers in crafting some twenty-five novels, the most popular being his series of scrupulously researched historical novels. By far the most popular was his lively portrait of our sixteenth president in Lincoln, published in 1984. In one scene, excerpted in The Lincoln Anthology, Lincoln and William H. Seward pay an unannounced visit to lame duck president James Buchanan at the White House in 1861:

Lincoln was staring at a pile of white marble blocks, at whose center the base of an obelisk rose. “They’ve still not finished that monument to Washington?” 

“No, sir. In fact, nothing is ever finished here! No dome on the Capitol. No street pavings. No street lamps. Nothing ever done to completion here except, sir, one thing.” The old man’s head now rested on his shoulder and the bad eye was entirely shut as, with a quiet joy, he pointed out the window. “There,” he said. “Look.” 

 Lincoln stared at a huge red-brick wall. “The one thing that the Executive Mansion has dearly needed since Mr. Jefferson’s time was a proper barn. . . . You don’ t know the pleasure it has given me these last four years to see this beautiful barn slowly rise from that swamp they call the President’s Park.”

“And watch the Union fall apart,” said Lincoln to Seward as the two men crossed the President’s Park . . .

McGrath writes in his obituary that in the opinion of many critics “Mr. Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on his essays.” Objections to America’s foreign policies permeate Vidal's political essays, yet, as Shelly Fisher Fishkin notes in The Mark Twain Anthology, “Any attempt to read Vidal’s blunt dissent from American pieties as anti-American is of necessity derailed by the fact that Mark Twain was there first.” Reveling in their shared antipathies to the course of American empire, Vidal wrote the introduction to an edition of Twain’s Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays.

[Twain’s] To the Person Sitting in Darkness was published as a pamphlet in 1901, a year in which we were busy telling the Filipinos that although we had, at considerable selfless expense, freed them from Spain they were not yet ready for the higher democracy, as exemplified by Tammany Hall, to use Henry James’ bitter analogy. Strictly for their own good, we would have to kill one or two hundred thousand men, women and children in order to make their country into an American-style democracy.

In other essays Vidal studiously reappraised and resurrected the work of writers he deemed underappreciated. When he declared Dawn Powell a “comic writer as good as Evelyn Waugh and better than Clemens” in The Antioch Review in 1981, he sparked a revival of interest in her work that led to many of her books returning to print and, eventually, to her inclusion in The Library of America. Six years later, he published an extensive title-by-title review of her fourteen novels in The New York Review of Books, (the review appears in full on The Library of America’s Dawn Powell website):

For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion. But despite the work of such dedicated cultists as Edmund Wilson and Matthew Josephson, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell never became the popular writer that she ought to have been. In those days, with a bit of luck, a good writer eventually attracted voluntary readers and became popular. Today, of course, "popular" means bad writing that is widely read while good writing is that which is taught to involuntary readers. Powell failed on both counts. She needs no interpretation and in her lifetime she should have been as widely read as, say, Hemingway or the early Fitzgerald or the mid O'Hara or even the late, far too late, Katherine Anne Porter. But Powell was that unthinkable monster, a witty woman who felt no obligation to make a single, much less a final, down payment on Love or The Family; she saw life with a bright Petronian neutrality, and every host at life's feast was a potential Trimalchio to be sent up.

Vidal was a close friend of Richard Poirier, the founding chairman of The Library of America who died in 2009, and he dedicated the 1983 novel Duluth to him. He also served for many years on the board of advisors for The Library of America, and he closely followed the progress of the series, offering advice and suggestions and writing an introduction especially for a paperback edition of Lincoln’s writings and speeches. His presence, advice, generosity, and wit will be missed.

Related LOA works: The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner; The Lincoln Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Legacy from 1860 to Now; The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Works; Dawn Powell: Novels 1930–1942; Dawn Powell: Novels 1944–1962

Maxwell Perkins: editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dawn Powell, and Thomas Wolfe

Today is the 126th birthday of publishing legend Maxwell Perkins. In a career spanning thirty-six years as an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, Perkins discovered and published three of the giants of twentieth-century literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. He inspired a mostly unswerving loyalty in his authors. No editor has ever had more books dedicated to him—68 at the time of his death. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning biography, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius, A. Scott Berg explains why:

His literary judgment was original and exceedingly astute, and he was famous for his ability to inspire an author to produce the best that was in him or her. More a friend to his authors than a taskmaster, he aided them in every way. He helped them structure their books, if help was needed; thought up titles, invented plots; he served as psychologist, lovelorn adviser, marriage counselor, career manager, money-lender. Few editors before him had done so much work on manuscripts, yet he was always faithful to his credo, “The book belongs to the author.”

Perkins seemed to have known what he wanted from the start. In 1910, after a short stint as a reporter at The New York Times, the 24-year-old Perkins became an advertising manager at Scribner’s, esteemed publisher of the likes of Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, and Henry James. Within five years he moved up to editor; four years later he made his first career-making find. A manuscript, The Romantic Egoist, a first novel by a 22-year-old Princeton grad, arrived on his desk with negative comments from every other reader. But Perkins saw something he liked. He had to cajole F. Scott Fitzgerald into rewriting the manuscript twice before he could persuade Scribner’s to publish it. Perkins’s winning argument, as recorded by Berg, resonates with every editor who has ever pushed passionately for a book: “If we aren’t going to publish a talent like this, it is a very serious thing,” Perkins reasoned. Fitzgerald would find another publisher, young authors would follow him and, Perkins warned, “Then we might as well go out of business.”

This Side of Paradise was published on March 26, 1920 with advertising citing Fitzgerald as “the youngest writer for whom Scribner’s has ever published a novel.” It became Scriber’s biggest seller of the season, selling almost 35,000 copies in its first seven months. In The Smart Set H. L. Mencken hailed it as “a truly amazing first novel—original in structure, extremely sophisticated in manner, and adorned with brilliancy that is as rare in American writing as honesty is in American statecraft.”

Perkins was right that other young writers would follow. In 1924 Fitzgerald tipped Perkins off to a “young American living in France who wrote for the transatlantic review” and two years later Perkins would publish 27-year-old Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, The Sun Also Rises. Two years later Perkins would be the only editor in New York to discern in the hundreds upon hundreds of manuscript pages of O Lost the novel Scribner’s would publish as Look Homeward, Angel by 27-year-old Thomas Wolfe.

Many other authors benefited from the Perkins magic. When acid-penned novelist Dawn Powell left Farrar & Rinehart in 1939, working with Perkins led to her first commercially successful novel, A Time To Be Born, perhaps most notorious because its central character is based loosely on playwright-journalist-socialite Claire Booth Luce. Perkins was prescient about Powell’s staying power: when she died in 1965 nearly all of her books were out of print; then in the 1980s and 1990s she enjoyed a lively rediscovery.

In the course of his career Perkins would edit many other authors of renown: Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Taylor Caldwell, Marcia Davenport, Martha Gellhorn, James Jones, Ring Lardner, J. P. Marquand, Alan Paton, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Edmund Wilson, and more. Writers who worked with Perkins distinguish his approach from editors who rewrite or excise an author’s work. “He never tells you what to do,” Roger Burlingame explained to Malcolm Cowley for a New Yorker profile of Perkins. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

Perkins is soon due to return to the public eye in a major way: Sean Penn is slated to portray him in a new biopic based on Berg’s biography. And he continues to be the touchstone figure for what an editor can do for an author. Just last week Joshua Wolf Shenk invoked his example in his essay for Slate about the science of creativity.

Related LOA works: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels and Stories 1920-1922; Dawn Powell: Novels 1930-1942