to honoring the dead by cleaning their final resting places and offering them a gift of communion from the living.”
The recovery of abandoned cemeteries and neglected graves is a noble act of African American cultural patriotism evident today in, for instance, the Negro Leagues Grave Marker Project. Among the grandest such efforts was the 1973 journey of Alice Walker to a weed-choked cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida, burial ground of the great novelist and folklorist (and Taft Republican) Zora Neale Hurston, whom Ernest Gaines says is “the only Black writer who has influenced my work.” (Hurston, who called FDR “the Anti-Christ” and Truman “the butcher of Asia,” had spirit and she had genius, which is why no one still knows quite what to make of her.)
“I was born in the South, I have lived and labored in the South, and I expect to be buried in the South,” said Booker T. Washington.
He was. So was the resplendent Zora, and so was Miss Augusteen Jefferson, whose unmarked grave is in the cemetery her great-nephew tends. Mr. Gaines is receiving the Cleanth Brooks Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Fellowship of Southern Writers this spring—for his novels, to be sure, but his homecoming and ancestral piety merit awards all their own.
The Last Republican
The American Conservative, 2008
The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, edited by Jay Parini (New York: Doubleday), 458 pages, $27.50
“Gore Vidal is America’s premier man of letters,” says Jay Parini in his introduction to The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, and if after reading Vidal on William Dean Howells, Tennessee Williams, various dead Kennedys, and “American sissy” Theodore Roosevelt the reader denies it—well, hie on back to the MFA prison.
The Selected Essays were written over the course of a half-century (1953–2004), or almost one-quarter of the lifespan of the republic that is Vidal’s primary subject—though it might more accurately be said that Vidal has been a contumacious patriot of the Old Republic for nigh the entirety of the post-republic era. As such he is a man out of time in the United States of Amnesia, as he calls his native and beloved land.
What a pleasure these essays are. One imagines Gore Vidal at his writing desk, hint of a smile creasing his mouth as he mints Saint-Gaudens gold piece-quality-witticisms with Lincoln penny-like frequency. Here he is on Ohio’s greatest novelist: “For a writer, Howells himself was more than usually a dedicated hypochondriac whose adolescence was shadowed by the certainty that he had contracted rabies which would surface in time to kill him at sixteen. Like most serious hypochondriacs, he enjoyed full rude health until he was eighty.”
“It should be noted that Vidal is conservative in many respects,” writes Parini. “He stands behind individual choice, the limitation of executive power, and preservation of the environment. Like his grandfather, he dislikes the empire . . . He would return us, if possible, to the pure republicanism of early America.”
That grandfather, the blind Senator Thomas P. Gore (D-OK), was a first-rate populist foe of war and FDR. He was a peace Democrat, which is why no one has ever heard of him. Vidal’s education owed more to home than academy, as he read aloud to the senator, from whom he inherited an isolationist opposition to foreign wars, a populist suspicion of concentrated capital, a freethinker’s hatred of cant, and a patriot’s detestation of empire.
Like Mencken, Ray Bradbury, Hemingway, and other original Americans, Vidal escaped a college sentence. He is the scourge of sciolism, of credentialed arrogance. As he writes of his friend’s mistreatment while speaking to snotty drama students at Yale: “Any student who has read Sophocles in translation is, demonstrably, superior to Tennessee Williams in the unruly flesh.”
The foaming and thoroughly ideologized haters of Vidal are simply incapable of writing prose anywhere near as tautly conversational, as confidently but never pedantically erudite, as amaranthine as the master. Vidal commits an unforgivable sin in our age of the national Hall Monitor: humor. Is it any wonder they hate him? Vidal inevitably gets the best of the carpers in any exchange, because he is funny and they are not. Or in his words, “I responded to my critics with characteristic sweetness, turning the other fist as is my wont.”
His best essays are often sympathetic readings of such forgotten or undervalued American writers as the Ohio (Ohio again!)-bred satirist Dawn Powell (who “always knows how much salt a wound requires”); Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs (a talented action writer who was “innocent of literature” but as a drifter, cowboy, gold miner, and railroad cop was, like Vidal, “perfectly in the old-American grain”); and Tennessee Williams, “the Glorious Bird,” whose work Vidal assesses with affectionately critical eye. The personal anecdote he deploys expertly. Of a dinner with Williams and his magnificently termagant mother:
Tennessee clears his throat again. “Mother, eat your shrimp.”
“Why,” counters Miss Edwina, “do you keep making that funny sound in your throat?”
“Because, Mother, when you destroy someone’s life you must expect certain nervous disabilities.”
One of my favorite Vidal essays is his appreciation of William Dean Howells, who brought Ohio into the Atlantic Monthly and championed the new realists and regionalists of the late Gilded Age. He is a man after Vidal’s own heart: “Since Howells had left school at fifteen he had been able to become very learned indeed.”
Howells was barely of shaving age when he wrote a campaign biography of Lincoln. Precocious, “an ambitious but not insane poet,” he obtained a consulate in Venice thanks to his connection with Salmon P. Chase, the Free Soil Buckeye and constitutionalist who as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is one of those men, like Robert A. Taft and Bob La Follette, who really ought to have been president.
Howells later wrote another campaign biography, this time of Rather-fraud Hayes, for whom the 1876 election was stolen from Samuel Tilden, the pornography connoisseur known in real-estate circles as “The Great Forecloser,” but Howells’s legacy was one of the truly great American novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Again, the subject is vivified through a close reading of the novels and perfectly placed anecdotes.
There is, I suppose, a sense in which a eulogist often is singing a song of himself. We laud in others what we perceive, or hope for, in ourselves. Vidal says of Howells that he “wrote a half-dozen of the Republic’s best novels. He was learned, witty, and generous.” Just so with the eulogist.
Likewise, Vidal is fond of his kindred spirit Edmund Wilson, also a proprietary patriot. The country was founded by such as Vidal and Wilson, their people shaped it, and they will not let it go without a fight, which is why in its collapse they turned withering fire upon its enemies. Wilson and Vidal were brave, though it was really a sense of patriotic duty, I think, that impelled their lonely stands against the empire that was erasing their ancestral republic.
Wilson (“the most interesting and the most important” critic of midcentury) was a polymathic old American autodidact (Princeton years excluded) of the Vidal school: “When he died, at seventy-seven, he was busy stuffing his head with irregular Hungarian verbs.” Vidal appreciates Wilson in his late autumn, when he really hit his stride with Patriotic Gore (whose introduction, comparing Lincoln to Lenin and Bismarck, got the energetic Bunny expelled from the warren), The Cold War and the Income Tax, Upstate, and Apologies to the Iroquois.
Also like Wilson, Vidal regards federal taxes as confiscatory and the fuel by which an anti-American war machine is run. “Why,” he asks in his 1972 essay “Homage to Daniel Shays,” “do we allow our governors to take so much of our money and spend it in ways that
