Hitchens bashes Welles's lunch partner

[Alan Brody]

mido505 wrote: "I thought Gore Vidal was going to win the Aging Ungracefully Award for 2010, but Thomson may just edge him out. Pathetic."

That would be a tough battle, mido. Gore Vidal has been, to my mind, probably the closest thing to an Orson Welles in today's world, and it's sad (and maybe even a bit funny) to see him going out the way is, including getting a lot of flack recently for referring to Roman Polanski's 13-year-old victim as a "young hooker". Funny that Thomson mentions having lunch with Vidal, who was Welles's lunch partner for several years in the late 70s/early 80s (wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall at those sessions?). Perhaps Thomson is trying to position himself to take over Vidal's mantle, as Vidal himself had sort-of assumed Welles's mantle after his 1986 essay, Remembering Orson Welles.

Anyway, here's Christopher Hitchens, another supposed Vidal successor, sticking it to him pretty good in this Vanity Fair article, although he does at one point describe Vidal as a modern-day Oscar Wilde, whose work Welles admired greatly and dramatized on several occasions:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... ens-201002

[mido505]

Thanks for the post, Roger, I read that Hitchens piece the other day, without pleasure, but nodding all the way through. We all have our pantheon of individuals who have helped form our personalities, for good or for ill, and Vidal is number 2 or three in my hierarchy. As an isolated gay man starved for intellectual stimulation during my boring college years, Vidal was a revelation. I read him for pleasure and for self-education; I would read a Vidal essay, then go to the works of the person he was writing about. As a young conservative (individualist, libertarian, Randian wing) appalled at the hypocrisy and failure of the Reagan Revolution, I appreciated Vidal's biting, idiosyncratic political commentary, which helped push me towards the left at that time. Like Hitchens, I was annoyed by Vidal's occasional pokes at Israel and the Jews, but it was not enough to get me riled up. And if Vidal's fiction had shown a general slackening off after the publication of EMPIRE in 1987, HOLLYWOOD and THE GOLDEN AGE were still entertaining if lesser works, and PALIMPSEST, his stunning memoir published in 1995 showed that the testy, biting old genius was still capable of being fired up. Then came 9-11, and Vidal unraveled. He's written almost nothing of interest since, and much that is less than interesting, except for the sections in POINT BY POINT NAVIGATION, Vidal's follow-up to PALIMPSEST, dealing with companion Howard Austens's illness and death, which are beautiful, moving, and emotional in a way that I've never seen before in Vidal's writing, except where he deals with boyhood love Jimmy Trimble.

Since 9-11, my politics have moved back to the right, and Vidal has moved...somewhere unclassifiable and unseemly. But it is not the politics that have turned me off my esteemed virtual mentor - it's the mean-spiritedness, and the lack of insight, and the hysteria, and the bitterness. He's like a left-wing Bircher now, if that's possible, and that is not a good place to be. I don't expect an aging Vidal to turn all warm and fuzzy, but can't he be a little more grateful for a life lived exactly as he wished it to be? Vidal always described himself as a cynic, but a true cynic would be placid in his dotage, secure in his knowledge that a debased humanity can never disappoint. But as the touching story of Vidal and Jimmy Trimble shows, Vidal was always a closet romantic. He created that biting, cold-as-ice persona, as a protective armor, but the armor has ended up smothering and killing what was best in him, the source of his huge talent. Orson Welles may have had problems with his self-created persona, but thank God that never happened...

[Alan Brody]

I find both Empire and Hollywood to be among Vidal's most interesting books, partly because William Randolph Hearst is an important character in both. Hollywood seems to dovetail nicely with his later short book Screening History, in which he presents the very interesting theory that the U.S. government, even during WWI, recognized the immense propoganda tool that Hollywood could be. I also like his observation that Orson Welles, as a born romantic, may have been purposely seeking a "poignant glamor in his own ruination". I haven't read Point to Point Navigation yet, but you're right that the Jimmy Trimble parts of Palimpsest are very moving, and perhaps go a long way towards explaining Vidal's sardonic attitude towards American politics in general. If Vidal ever completes the final novel in his American History series (said to be on The Mexican War), he might be able to erase some of the missteps of the last few years. But if that book does come out, you have to wonder to what extent it will reflect the impotent rage he has displayed since 9/11.

Ironically, Vidal would have been on the same page as Ayn Rand, that "high priestess of Darwinism", during the Reagan years, and undoubtedly would have concurred with her statement "I do not approve of Mr. Reagan's mixing of Capitalism and Religion. His anti-abortion stance is outrageous." Vidal himself made great sport of Reagan's belief in Hal Lindsay's apocalyptic book The Late Great Planet Earth, the film version of which was hosted by Orson Welles.

[The Night Man]

Ironically, Vidal would have been on the same page as Ayn Rand, that "high priestess of Darwinism", during the Reagan years, and undoubtedly would have concurred with her statement "I do not approve of Mr. Reagan's mixing of Capitalism and Religion. His anti-abortion stance is outrageous."

On the other hand, Rand's dismissal of Reagan's politics didn't stop The Gipper from appointing Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. And Greenspan's devotion to Randian laissez-faire economic theories led directly to our current economic mess, a point I'm sure Vidal would be more than happy to point out.

[Alan Brody]

Good point. Vidal would and has for most of his career pointed out the hypocrisy that exists in both political parties. You have to ask yourself: How the f*** could the U.S. Government have allowed any financial institution to become "too big to fail"?

'Peace cannot endure if economic war is waged between wars...in our profit system, maybe there's no such thing as having too much money, but there's certainly such a thing as having too much power. We'll have to wait until everybody has enough power before we decide whether it's all right for some of us to have a great deal more then plenty. It probably is...what's wrong with accumulated wealth is not the wealth, but the accumulation. "
Orson Welles

[Glenn Anders]

What a lively, truly informed, and fair discussion!

I profited from Welles' lesson about "accumulation," Alan, at the age of the age of nine upon seeing CITIZEN KANE for the first time. Of course, being "An American," I don't know how well I truly learned it. [I am, at present, literally preparing to sell the gold fillings out of my teeth!]

As for Gore Vidal, he is a very ill, grieving 84 year-old man in a wheel chair, evidently in some financial difficulty, if I read correctly between the lines at Truthdig.com, where he occasionally still holds forth. Age takes it out of you, believe me, mido505, as I hope you never find out when you reach his place in time. Aside from going over the line between criticism of Israeli policies into anti-semitism, I did not judge too much of the "evidence" Hitchens uses to justify his public flogging of Vidal to be all that damning. FDR probably did know that "something" was going to happen in the Pacific in 1941 or '42; his people just didn't know where. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the Plan B Boys of "The Project for a New American Century" WERE looking for an excuse to establish a "footprint" to bring "freedom and democracy" to the Middle East and beyond (read oil/natural gas pipelines skirting Russia, while ringing geopolitically Russia and China with Western Global Capitalism) -- they were just characteristically negligent in handling safeguards against the "Pearl Harbor" they seemed to wet-dream about -- and Osama bin Laden, I believe, shall be revealed in future years as more of a factotum than a Fu Man Chu. Then, oh yes, as The Night Man suggests, people in Reagan's White House [a few are still there] knew that "Supply Side Economics" was a crock (because it can never be effectively and publicly controlled or predicted), but they plunged on with it for three decades in both Parties because it profited hugely (up to 80% of the pie, according to the most recent survey) those in the upper four percent of the population. And now, as a result, we probably shall become subsidiary to the Chinese, following the much more devastating 9/11 of 2008! Vidal has a healthy respect for conspiracy, as does Hitchens when it suits him, for we all breathe together, increasingly so now. It is only that neither "history" nor "conspiracy" is so simple and neat as we like it made out to be when we grind our axes to whack at others politically.

If we read the 50-odd comments upon the always interesting but slightly outrageous Christopher Hitchens' attack, we note that all except about three find Hitchens much more distasteful than Vidal has ever been. In fact, perhaps the most forthright of the three in condemning Gore Vidal was the following:

"This may be off topic, but i feel vidal is more of an orson welles than an oscar wilde. 'burr' is his only decent book. a lot of wasted talent, but with absolute proof of brilliance." -- Posted 1/15/2010 by jmoran

OUCH! indeed.

I hope that was not from a secret Wellesnetter!

I was interested, too, in your political oddyssey, mido505. Your experience helps explain why you are such a sensitive and useful commentator here. We might all learn from you.

Bravo!

Glenn

[Alan Brody]

Thanks Glenn, I hadn't noticed there were so many responses to the article.

[Le Chiffre]

Who would have thought Hitchens would be the first of the two to go?:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/ ... story.html