The Last Word on Vidal

[Rodney Welch]

Rodney Welch wrote:
> 
> Oh Andrew, for heaven's sake -- this thing has gotten way outta
> hand. My point, as I recall, was this:
>         Gore Vidal has some interesting and insightful things to say
> about Pynchon. What? you ask. What do you want me to do -- recite the
> entire essay? You can read as well as I can. The essay is called
> "American Plastic" and it is included in Vidal's book United
> States. It is an answer of sorts to Donald Barthelme, who had made
> a list of some of the most important writers of the day (mid-70s),
> including Pynchon. Vidal's essay serves as one man's take on those
> writers.
>         What impressed me about the essay -- what, indeed, impresses me
> about all of Vidal's essays -- is that once you get past his churlishness
> and his spite and his knee-jerk paranoia there's a great deal of honesty.
> I think the key to writing a really good essay is this: telling the
> absolute Emersonian truth without sounding like an asshole. Or
> perhaps just telling the truth at the risk of sounding like an asshole,
> even at the risk of alienating yourself from the crowd.
>         Vidal didn't say anything especially shocking in his essay, but
> he did appear to me as someone who had read fairly closely in the (at
> that time) three Pynchon texts. He thought the prose, by and large, was
> kinda ordinary -- but he also rather liked the scale of P's
> ambition. He confessed that he didn't fully understand all the
> entropy-heat death stuff, eventhough he gave a solid-sounding layman's
> precis and knew its source in Henry Adams and beyond. (Didn't P.
> himself say in the Slow Learner intro that his initial foray into
> entropy was based on "second-hand" knowledge?) So -- to your question,
> why do I think what he says needs to be taken seriously? Because I think
> there's something vital about any sincere, honest attempt (which is what
> the word essay actually means) to come to grips with a difficult, complex
> and puzzling work, particularly one that goes against the crowd. There
> is nothing easier, I think, than to write an essay in praise of Pynchon
> -- it takes balls to read the full ouevre and say, as Vidal did, look,
> I'm just not as impressed as the rest of you and here's why.
>         In the end, he was clearly successful -- the essay is two decades
> old, and it still draws blood from Andrew Dinn, whose only response (and
> he is not alone) is to say that Gore Vidal can't write worth a shit
> anyway. As he puts it, "their structure is formulaic; the scale of their
> ambitions is ... that of an apprentice piece, a miniature exercise in the
> carpentry of ideas; the flow of the narrative is like an apprentice's
> piece - all the rough joints on display; and the prose is clumsy and
> contrived; a great expense for the purchase of such small witticisms
> and satires as Vidal manages."
>         In other words, the same kind of fill-in-the-blank crap people
> say about authors they don't know, don't remember, but are sure they
> don't like -- especially if said author has hurled a poison dart at
> one's own personal sacred cow. RW