The Last Word on Vidal

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Rodney Welch writes:
> Oh Andrew, for heaven's sake -- this thing has gotten way outta 
> hand.

Yeah, I just thought that having brought the pail to the bull I ought
to try and milk it.

> 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.  

Good, that stops me having to establish the background.

> 	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.

Not sure Vidal always avoids that `sounding like an asshole' problem.
But then I regularly suffer from the same problem. I agree entirely
with you though that telling it like it is (more general than telling
the truth, because it also embraces the possibility that you invent a
new truth) is the essence of a good essay.

<snip + paste>

> 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?)

I find V's comment that the prose is `kinda ordinary' something of a
critical shot in the foot. To me Pynchon's prose is extraordinary in
the extreme. The entropy stuff is neither here nor there. If Pynchon's
work really depended upon it don't you think he would have done more
than sketch it out based on second hand knowledge? Entropy only came
to prominence because i) he published a (relative to his other works)
bad book which gave it undue prominence and ii) it's easy for critics
to grasp at and build theories on, rather like LudWit's notion of
`family resemblance' was blown out of proportion by later
philosophers. A critical appraisal imbalanced enough to promote this
theme as central suggests to me that this is one critic who really has
not `got' the idea at all.

> . . . 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.

Yes, it takes balls but that does not justify arrival at this
conclusion, sincere or not.

> 	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."

If drawing blood from me is your measure of Vidal's success I suggest
you have had to stoop pretty low to make your case. And I didn't
*only* claim that he writes like shit. I also said that his comments
revealed little insight and thence I concluded he had not read Pynchon
very well.

> 	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.

As to `fill-in-the-blank crap' I don't think so. Those are fairly
precise descriptions of the flaws I believe mar novels I well recall
reading, Kalki, Myra Beckinridge and Myron.


Andrew Dinn
-----------
And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.