Gore's rosebud

[Rodney Welch]

> Murthy Yenamandra makes a couple of points regarding my defense
> of Gore Vidal as a critic. In my own dim way, I will try to answer him.
> 
>         Yenamandra: "The fact that Vidal is a good
> enough writer is the major reason we take his criticism seriously enough
> to debate it. When a critic knocks someone for being an academic writer,
> it's only fair to enquire what his idea of a good non-academic novel is
> (presumably including his own novels which we all seem to agree are not
> that great)."
> 
>         Me: I guess the best answer is in Vidal's essays. Vidal is
> something of a Luddite, you might say, as well as a fatalist. He has said
> any number of times that it's all over for literature -- thanks largely
> to television, rock and roll, the forward march (?) of Adams' Dynamo,
> etc. I think, too, he yearns for the 19th Century literary tradition. I
> think he favors writers who were very involved in their own times and
> took pains to interpret it -- and I think he sees himself that way. Vidal
> would have nothing in common personally, perhaps, with William Dean
> Howells -- but he would probably see him as a kind of model of sorts. (He
> has written quite elegantly about Howells in the past.) The same goes for
> James and Adams.
>         I don't pretend to be a Vidal expert, only a fan -- my take on
> his whole academic novel rant is that the university has taken the novel
> out of the community and centered it in the anthills of academe, where
> books are no longer interesting stories but just coded messages from one
> nerd to the next.
> 
>      Yenamandra: "Neither Vidal's brilliance as a writer nor his dullness
> as a novelist is an indicator of his literary judgment, but if one counts
> then the other counts as well."
> 
>         Me: Hell of a sentence. Read it again, and tell me what you mean.
> RW