Interview with Gore Vidal
Essayist, novelist, playwright, congressional candidate, and excoriating social-historical critic, Gore Vidal is a queer pioneer who not only defined what it is to be gay but managed to escape the pigeonhole of that definition. The grandson of Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal is also related to the current vice president, Jackie O, and former President Carter.
The latest of his many works is The Smithsonian Institution, in which a thirteen-year-old prodigy is called from Vidal's own alma mater, St. Albans school, to the Smithsonian museum, where a secret project to create the atom bomb is taking place.
Humorous, touching, and insightful, the novel is one of Vidal's most accessible works and -- to borrow the title of Vidal's autobiography -- a palimpsest with many layers.
This interview was conducted just prior to Vidal's recent visit to Seattle.
Vincent Kovar: Where did the inspiration to write The Smithsonian Institution come from?
GV: I enjoy inventing alternative universes like Myra Breckinridge and Duluth and now The Smithsonian. These are intricate structures, and you must never cheat the reader. I started out with a premise: how could World War II have been avoided? Well, eliminate World War I and there would be no vengeful Germany falling for a psychopath like Hitler. So how to stop the First World War? Eliminate Woodrow Wilson as president. So my thirteen-year-old prodigy hero, installed as of 1939 in the Smithsonian to work on the atomic bomb, does just that. But things go wrong. That's the plot.
VK: Is the novel a metaphorical approach to any modern issues?
GV: This is not 1939. No collision of great powers is in the offing, despite what the military and their friendly politicians have to say at appropriations time. But it is clear that our military industrial political complex is longing for a major war with China. This will probably kill us all, but not before the few have made a great deal of money, our god.
VK: In previous interviews you seem to make the claim that the novel as a form is finished. Why do you think this is, and if the form is defunct what calls you to continue writing in it?
GV: I have never said the novel was finished as a form. What I said does seem impossible for most people to grasp. The audience for the novel is finished. It has been dwindling most of this century. Certainly the serious novel -- which usually means the most interesting ones, including the comic -- are nearing the estate of poetry. Airport fiction has the backing of conglomerate publishing and the chains, but he newest generations are brought up not on books, but on video games, while the average person, in need of narrative, turns to a videocassette. It has been estimated that perhaps two million Americans engage with a book on occasion. Out of a population of a quarter billion! As for our educational systems ...
VK: At the end of chapter four, the living display dummy, Tom, indicates that more than one of the former presidents made use of an all-male escort service "pretty regularly." Who might those presidents have been?
GV: You are prurient. It was said of lifelong diplomat bachelor Buchanan and of Franklin Pierce, in whose arms, in Plymouth N.H., Nathaniel Hawthorne died.
VK: You have described sexual orientation labels as adjectives describing acts rather than nouns describing people. Do you still feel this way?
GV: It seems so obvious that I no longer repeat myself other than to add that only in a so weirdly superstitious and sectarian a county as the U.S. could a personal identity be forged out of sexual desire, the most fluctuating of all transient emotion.
VK: Both presidential candidates Bill Bradley and Al Gore have shown support for domestic partnerships but have opposed outright gay marriage. What are your feelings on their stances and this issue in general?
GV: Monogamy is hardly normative in the male, particularly in youth. The marriage issue, however, is a great boon for homophobes because it lets them sidestep all the things that should be set right, from sodomy laws in various states to discrimination in the workplace. Also, marriage makes people think of God, who is so very important to our poor, bamboozled folks. The founders (and I) wanted God thrown out the window at Philadelphia, but the crazies breed like chiggers, and he keeps slithering back in.
VK: Do you have a stance on the topic of gay adoptions?
GV: For most Americans, rather than expose the young to love and, in due course perhaps, desire, it is far better to lock them up in prisons, subject them to torture, sexual abuse, and execution. That is the American way. We are famed in the civilized world as the most barbarous of nations in the treatment of our citizens. But I reckon God wants us like that, doing his work. 4.9 million Americans are in prisons, under detention, under surveillance, on parole. Now the privatization of prisons is proving a bonanza for some of our crooked citizens. George W. Bush exults in the fact that as governor of Texas, he has barbecued 100 people. Good American George, God loves him.
VK: You once wrote (in 1966) that "in a civilized society, law should not function at all in the area of sex, except to protect people from being interfered with against their will." And that "sex lives are of no consequence in civilized countries." What influences continue to make sex and sexual orientations such a controversy in America, and does this mean we are not civilized?
GV: As you may by now suspect, I don't think we are civilized. The media is obsessed with sex, particularly in the private lives of politicians, due to the fact that as we do not have a representative government (offices are bought and paid for by corporate America) we are not allowed to discuss real politics. This leaves us with nothing but private lives. What is politics? Who collects what money to pay for whom to buy what -- that's it, in one handy phrase. But corporate America observes omerta [the code of silence] on this delicate issue, so we never know what goes on in the Senate Finance Committee. And never will know. The corporate-owned media is happy to go along, smearing politicians who are, admittedly, of no great use to anyone in any case. The last time Congress was permitted to declare war was in 1941. In the 58 years since, we have fought a couple of hundred wars -- hot and cold and tepid -- and the people were never once consulted. No wonder they stopped voting! No wonder Montana is loud with the sound of gunfire.
VK: If something is wrong with the American system and society, what is it? Can it be changed, and how?
GV: In a normal country a new constitution could do the trick, but after three generations of non-educated citizenry, it is too late for that. Wait for the military to take over and learn how the high officers are all conservative Republicans living like socialists on the national welfare.
VK: What are you working on now?
GV: The Golden Age (1940-50), the last of my American chronicles.
The Smithsonian Institution
Lincoln
Burr
1876
Duluth
The American Presidency
Palimpsest: A Memoir
Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
Hollywood: A Novel of America in the '20s
Myra Breckinridge/Myron
Washington, D.C.
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