Vidal's daunting career has encompassed 24 novels, 11 essay collections, six plays, two memoirs and countless occasional writings. This new collection is an entry point into this literary giant's work for a new generation of readers, offering some of Vidal's most famous and entertaining essays from the past 50-odd years. Compiled and introduced by Parini (The Last Station), Vidal's literary executor, the pieces range across Vidal's far-flung areas of expertise, resting most frequently and contentiously on literature and presidential politics of the past and present. His assessment of "The Top Ten Bestsellers" of January 7, 1973, is a savagely meticulous dissection of middlebrow American taste, while "American Plastic" tacks in the opposite direction, skewering the academy-approved, theory-based fiction of Donald Barthelme and William Gass with derisive glee. Vidal's comfort in puncturing conventional wisdom with his wit and analysis is fully displayed throughout, most notably in his discussion of the battle over the Kennedy legacy in "The Holy Family" and the controversial "Black Tuesday," which condemns the Bush administration for its alleged imperial ambitions in the wake of September 11. (June 17)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Gore Vidal-novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist-is America's premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.
This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. It will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.
Gore Vidal-novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist-is America's premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.
This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. It will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.
![The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
Narrated by Jeff Cummings
Gore VidalUnabridged — 19 hours, 56 minutes
![The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
Narrated by Jeff Cummings
Gore VidalUnabridged — 19 hours, 56 minutes
Overview
Gore Vidal-novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist-is America's premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.
This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture, and, occasionally, unfettered score settling. It will stand as one of the most enjoyable and durable works from the hand and mind of this vastly accomplished and entertaining immortal of American literature.
Editorial Reviews
Parini, Gore Vidal's literary executor, has judiciously selected 21 of Vidal's essays from the 114 previously gathered in the unwieldy United States: Essays 1952-1992, as well as added three more recent essays. Despite this drastic reduction in quantity, there is no corresponding loss in quality. Regardless of what one thinks of Vidal, what Vidal thinks is never in doubt in these 24 essays, divided here into two groups: literary criticism and historical or cultural commentary. His writing is clear, sharp, and disciplined, and his approbation of William Dean Howells and Italo Calvino are as finely tuned as his excoriation of John Updike and Herman Wouk. Vidal is the grandson of Democratic Sen. Thomas P. Gore and the son of Eugene Vidal, who worked for FDR, so one might assume he'd follow in their tradition. But, as these essays show, Vidal has little faith in the politicos of either party and suggests our country has become more oligarchy than democracy. If your library does not already have the aforementioned 1400-page behemoth, this slimmer volume would be an excellent choice.
Anthony Pucci
A splendid, savvy distillation of the best from the veteran novelist and essayist. This lively volume's raison d'etre is the inclusion of recent politically charged commentary, but most readers will huddle happily with its several golden oldies. For example, the included non-literary essays conclude with "Black Tuesday," a reaction to the events of 9/11 that draws the mordant conclusion that "each month we are confronted by a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us." Fair-and true-enough, but lesser mortals have made such observations. It took a writer of Vidal's prodigious gifts to deflate the godlike reputations of the Kennedy clan ("The Holy Family") and America's most ebulliently macho chief executive ("Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy"), and to examine tax inequity and activism during our early history ("Homage to Daniel Shays") and the late unlamented 1970s ("The Second American Revolution"). Elsewhere, in a clutch of literary essays, Vidal honors such critically embattled contemporaries as Tennessee Williams, Edmund Wilson and the now-rediscovered Dawn Powell. He's rougher on others, such as the purveyors of "new fiction" led by maverick innovators Pynchon and Barthes ("American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction") and university-based scholar-critics who overexplain and obfuscate the obvious ("The Hacks of Academe"). But Vidal strolls through many arenas, offering an affectionately incisive guide to Italo Calvino's whimsical complexity and a brilliant analysis-really, it's almost beyond praise-of the industrious and honorable William Dean Howells, whom Vidal has the good sense to admire almost unreservedly. Nearly six decades' worth of eloquent bile,dispensed with unmatched craft and wit.
Gore Vidal is the master essayist of our age.” —The Washington Post Book World“Vidal is the best all-around American man of letters since Edmund Wilson.” —Newsweek “Wonderfully selected. . . . All classic Vidal essays are here. . . . [They] confirm Vidal's stature.” —The Buffalo News“Gore Vidal, essayist; so good that we cannot do without him. He is a treasure of the state.” —R.W.B. Lewis, The New York Times Book Review“Fearlessness and independence of mind are the strengths in this author’s arms, but his heart’s love is language and the richness of language.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review
None of these short essays are in Vidal’s own voice, that distinctively tart patrician voice so familiar to TV audiences half-a-century ago. Maybe that’s for the best. Jeff Cummings, who narrates several of Vidal’s other nonfiction works, frees these “occasional essays” from Vidal’s voice, and his overriding personality, and highlights their prose excellence, grace and wit, and fine writing. These are likely to be the enduring works from Vidal’s canon, and the subjects he dissects—including Montaigne, the life and career of his friend Tennessee Williams, and the neglected novelist Dawn Powell—are as fresh and engaging as they were 50 years ago, and will likely be 50 years from now. D.A.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940172293979 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Brilliance Audio |
Publication date: | 07/02/2019 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
Selected Essays of Gore Vidal
By Gore Vidal
Vintage
Copyright © 2009 Gore VidalAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780307388681
NOVELISTS AND CRITICS OF THE 1940s
It is a rare and lucky physician who can predict accurately at birth whether a child is to become a dwarf or a giant or an ordinary adult, since most babies look alike and the curious arrangements of chromosomes which govern stature are inscrutable and do not yield their secret order even to the shrewdest eye. Time alone gives definition. Nevertheless, interested readers and writers, like anxious parents and midwives, forever speculate upon the direction and meaning of current literary trends, and professional commentators with grave authority make analyses which the briefest interval often declares invalid. But despite their long historic record of bad guesses, bookish men continue to make judgments, and the recorded derelictions of taste and the erratic judgments of earlier times tend only to confirm in them a sense of complacency: they are not we, and did not know; we know. To disturb this complacency is occasionally worthwhile, and one way of doing it is to exhume significant critical texts from the recent past. Those of the last century, in particular, provide us with fine warnings.
For instance: “We do not believe any good end is to be effected by fictions which fill the mind with details of imaginary vice and distress and crime, or which teach it instead of endeavoringafter the fulfillment of simple and ordinary duty to aim at the assurance of superiority by creating for itself fanciful and incomprehensible perplexities. Rather we believe that the effect of such fictions tends to render those who fall under their influence unfit for practical exertion by intruding on minds which ought to be guarded from impurity the unnecessary knowledge of evil.” This was the Quarterly Review on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, and it is really quite well said: the perennial complaint of the professional reviewers and the governors of lending libraries (“enough unpleasant things in the world without reading about them in books”).
Or the following attack on preciosity and obscurantism (Blackwood’s Magazine, 1817): “Mr. Coleridge conceives himself to be a far greater man than the public is likely to admit; and we wish to waken him from what seems to us a most ludicrous delusion. He seems to believe that every tongue is wagging in his praise. . . . The truth is that Mr. Coleridge is but an obscure name in English literature.” [Coleridge was ?forty-five years old at this time and his major work was long since done.] “In London he is well known in literary society for his extraordinary loquacity . . .” And there follows a prolix attack upon the Biographia Literaria.
Or this excerpt from an 1848 Quarterly Review, deploring the pagan, the sexual, and the vicious:
At all events there can be no interest attached to the writer of Wuthering Heights—a novel succeeding Jane Eyre and purporting to be written by Ellis Bell—unless it were for the sake of more individual reprobation. For though there is a decided resemblance between the two, yet the aspect of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heatfield [sic], is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers. With all the unscrupulousness of the French school of novels it combines that repulsive vulgarity in the choice of its vice which supplies its own antidote.
Differently worded, these complaints still sound in our press. The Luce editors who cry for an “affirmative” literature echo voices once raised against George Eliot. When middlebrow reviewers deplore “morbidity” in our best writers, they only paraphrase the outrage of those who found the Brontës repellent. And the twitterings of an Orville Prescott when he has discovered a nice and busy book echo the same homely song of those long-dead reviewers who found in the three-volume novels of forgotten lady writers so much warm comfort.
As the essential problems of life remain the same from generation to generation, despite altered conditions, so the problems of literary recognition remain, for contemporaries, peculiarly difficult. Despite the warnings of other times, the impetuous and the confident continue their indiscriminate cultivation of weeds at the expense of occasional flowers.
To consider the writing of any period, including the present, it is perhaps of some importance to examine the climate in which the work is done, to chart if possible the prevailing winds, the weather of the day.
Today there is a significant distinction between the reviewers for popular newspapers and magazines, whom no one interested in literature reads, and the serious critics of the Academy, who write for one another in the quarterlies and, occasionally, for the public in the Sunday supplements. The reviewers are not sufficiently relevant or important to be considered in any but a social sense: they reflect the commonest prejudices and aspirations of the middle class for whom they write, and they need not concern us here.
The critics, however, are significant. They are dedicated men; they are serious; their learning is often respectable. They have turned to the analysis of literature with the same intensity that, born in an earlier time, they might have brought to formal philosophy, to the law, to the ministry. They tend, generically and inevitably, to be absolutists. They believe that by a close examination of “the text,” the laws and the crafty “strategies” of its composition will be made clear and the findings will provide “touchstones” for a comparative criticism of other works. So far so good. They have constructed some ingenious and perhaps valuable analyses of metaphysical verse whose order is often precise and whose most disparate images proceed with a calculable wit and logic.
Unfortunately, the novel is not so easily explicated. It is a loose form, and although there is an inherent logic in those books we are accustomed to call great, the deducible “laws” which governed the execution of Emma are not going to be of much use in defining The Idiot. The best that a serious analyst can hope to do is comment intelligently from his vantage point in time on the way a work appears to him in a contemporary, a comparative, or a historic light; in which case, his opinion is no more valuable than his own subtlety and knowledge. He must be, as T. S. Eliot put it so demurely, “very intelligent.” The point, finally, is that he is not an empiricist dealing with measurable quantities and calculable powers. Rather, he is a man dealing with the private vision of another, with a substance as elusive and amorphous as life itself. To pretend that there are absolutes is necessary in making relative judgments (Faulkner writes better than Taylor Caldwell), but to believe that there are absolutes and to order one’s judgments accordingly is folly and disastrous. One is reminded of Matthew Arnold and his touchstones; it was his conviction that certain lines from a poet by all conceded great might be compared to those of lesser poets to determine their value. Arnold selected Dante as his great poet, an irreproachable choice, but then he misread the Italian, which naturally caused some confusion. Arnold’s heirs also demand order, tidiness, labels, ultimate assurance that this work is “good” and that work is “bad,” but sooner or later someone misreads the Italian and the system breaks down. In our time there are nearly as many critical systems as there are major critics, which is a pleasing anarchy. The “new critics,” as they have been termed (they at least dislike being labeled and few will now answer when called), are fundamentally mechanics. They go about dismantling the text with the same rapture that their simpler brothers experience while taking apart combustion engines: inveterate tinkerers both, solemnly playing with what has been invented by others for use, not analysis.
Today’s quarterlies are largely house organs for the academic world. They seldom publish imaginative work and one of their most distinguished editors has declared himself more interested in commentaries on writing than in the writing itself. Their quarrels and schisms and heresies do not in the least resemble the Alexandrians whom they occasionally mention, with involuted pride, as spiritual ancestors. Rather, one is reminded of the semantic and doctrinal quarrels of the church fathers in the fourth century, when a diphthong was able to break the civilized world in half and spin civilization into nearly a millennium of darkness. One could invent a most agreeable game of drawing analogies between the fourth century and today. F. R. Leavis and Saint Jerome are perfectly matched, while John Chrysostom and John Crowe Ransom suggest a possibility. The analogy works amusingly on all levels save one: the church fathers had a Christ to provide them with a primary source of revelation, while our own dogmatists must depend either upon private systems or else upon those proposed by such slender reeds as Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, each, despite his genius, a ritual victim as well as a hero of literary fashion.
But the critics are indefatigable and their game is in earnest, for it is deeply involved not only with literature but with such concrete things as careers in the Academy, where frequent and prestigious publication is important. Yet for all their busyness they are by no means eclectic. In a Henry James year not one will write an analysis of George Meredith. They tend to ignore the contemporary writers, not advancing much later than F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose chief attraction is that he exploded before he could be great, providing a grim lesson in failure that, in its completeness, must be awfully heartening when contemplated on the safe green campus of some secluded school.
Of the critics today, Edmund Wilson, the most interesting and the most important, has shown virtually no interest in the writing of the last fifteen years, his talents engaged elsewhere in the construction of heroic sepulchers for old friends like Fitzgerald and Millay, a likable loyalty but a not entirely useful one. He can of course still make a fine point during a Peacock flurry and he has been startling brilliant in recent essays on Grant and Lincoln, but one can search the pages of that book of his which he calls a “Literary Chronicle of the Forties” without coming upon any but the most cursory mention of the decade’s chief talents.
Malcolm Cowley, a good professional literary man, had some sharp things to say recently about the young writers. Although he made almost no reference to the better writing of the day, he did say some accurate things about the university-trained writers, whose work, he feels, is done with too reverent an eye upon their old teachers, the new critics. Cowley speaks out for a hearty freedom from university influence, citing his own generation (the men of the 1920s are loyal to their time if not to one another: everyone was a genius then, and liquor was cheap abroad) as being singularly independent of formal instruction. Yet McCullers, Bowles, Capote, etc. (like Hemingway, Faulkner, O’Neill, etc.) are not graduates of universities, and many of the other young lions have had enough war to wash them clean of academicism. Mr. Cowley, like most commentators, tends to bend whatever he finds to his premise. To him there is no single genius who can set the tone for a generation but one wonders if he would recognize that great writer any more than Lord Jeffrey, a century ago, was able to recognize his time’s greatness? For the Cowleys, the novel stopped at Gatsby. That Carson McCullers (whom he does not mention) has influenced many works, that Tennessee Williams has influenced the theater of the world, that Paul Bowles, among others, has reshaped the short story—none of these things impinges on him.
Mr. Cowley’s gloom is supported by the young John W. Aldridge, Jr. In his amusing novel After the Lost Generation he got onto the subject of “values” (by way of Lionel Trilling and perhaps V. S. Pritchett). After discussing a number of fictitious characters who were writing books (using real, if unlikely, names like Truman Capote and Gore Vidal), he “proved,” by the evidence of their works, that they had all failed of greatness because, except for “a pocket or two of manners” (the Army; the South; here and there in New England), there was really nothing left to write about, none of that social conflict out of which comes art, like sparks from a stone grinding metal. His coda indicated that a young writer of singular genius is at this moment hovering in the wings awaiting his cue. It will be interesting to read Mr. Aldridge’s next novel.
Yet Mr. Aldridge does have a case: the old authority of church, of settled Puritan morality, has broken down, and if one’s vision is historically limited to only a few generations in time it might seem that today’s novelists are not having the fun their predecessors in the 1920s had, breaking cultural furniture. But to take a longer view, one must recall that the great times for literature and life were those of transition: from the Middle Ages to modern times by way of the Renaissance, from dying paganism to militant Christianity by way of the Antonines, and so on back to Aristophanes. The opportunity for the novelist when Mr. Aldridge’s “values” are in the discard is fabulous: to create without wasting one’s substance in political or social opposition. What could be more marvelous! Neither Virgil nor Shakespeare had to attack their day’s morality or those in authority. They were morally free to write of life, of Henry James’s “the main thing.” There were certainly inequities and barbarities in sixteenth-century England and first-century Rome, but the writers, affected partly by convention (not to mention the Star Chamber), did not address themselves to attacks upon the government or the time’s morality, which, apparently, did not obsess them. Writers, after all, are valuable in spite of their neuroses, obsessions, and rebellions, not because of them. It is a poor period indeed which must assess its men of letters in terms of their opposition to their society. Opposition to life’s essential conditions perhaps, or to death’s implacable tyranny, is something else again, and universal; but novels, no matter how clever, which attempt to change statutes or moral attitudes are, though useful at the moment, not literature at all. In fact, if Mr. Aldridge were right in his proposition we would have not a barren, “subjectless” world for literature but the exact opposite: a time of flowering, of creation without waste and irrelevancy. Unhappily, American society has not changed that much in the last thirty years. There is as much to satirize, as much to protest as ever before, and it will always be the task of the secondary figures to create those useful public books whose momentary effect is as stunning as their literary value is not.
Continues...
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