[AMENDED MON 19/11/2007]

STAINED GLASS TELLS OLD STORY

From "Lost New York", the first essay in The Last Empire. Gore Vidal is reviewing a novel called Many Mansions by Isabel Bolton, published 1952 and set in 1950:

The old lady finished her reading: 'If her book should fall into the hands of others addicted as she was to the habitual reading of novels, what exactly would their feelings be?' One wonders - is there such a thing now as a habitual reader of novels? Even the ambitious, the ravenously literary young Adam seems to have a suspicion that he may have got himself into the stained-glass window trade.

Of course, Vidal has been raising this question for all of his career, and continues to do so today. I think it's certain that there are fewer and fewer literary references in public discourse, and that people in general don't have a literary common ground (other than Harry Potter). When I was at university I met an old fella who told me his father would meet with friends of an evening to read aloud their favourite passages from Thomas Hardy, and that this wasn't at all an unusual pastime. But then I suppose Dickens was the TV of his day, and followed with the kind of unifying, street-emptying attention people would one day give to Z Cars.

*

In 1876 Vidal kind of provides his own answer, through the mouth of his narrator Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler:

My pen delays...Stops. Why write any of this? Why make a record? Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable. So at the end, as in the beginning, there is only The Word.

I don't quite agree with this, but it's a good answer. Not quite as pithy as the beginning of his answer to a long, rambling and (to judge by the reaction) irritating question I posed to him when he was on a book tour in 1998: "Writing is basically an extension of thinking."

*

I posted a little while back that 1876 was much taken up with the buying of American politicians, but despite the massive and widespread corruption which Vidal depicts, I wasn't prepared for the thrilling change of gear in the final section, when the presidential election goes to the wire. Up to this point, grand theft has seemed wrong but still sort of fun, committed by boring or jovial rascals; in any case, everyone does it, fortunes are there to be made in the Gilded Age and only the terminally unlucky or foolish suffer (we are talking here about the elect, the members of the American oligarchy which, of course, did not and does not exist - not the Civil War veterans who occasionally intrude on the narrative with their raggedness and missing limbs.) And then, having jollied and joshed us, Vidal gets serious, and it's like a slap in the face.

-- SPOILER ALERT 1876 --

The candidates are Governor Samuel Tilden (Dem, dry, highly intelligent but somewhat charmless, a reformer) and Rutherford B. Hayes (Rep, a man seemingly without qualities other than being the one candidate his party can unite behind). Tilden will neither take bribes nor buy favours; Hayes is no more corrupt than any of his peers, which is still saying a great deal. Tilden has already won the popular vote by a quarter of a million, has 184 electoral college votes, and one more will secure him the presidency; Hayes is on 165, and needs all of the 20 remaining votes from Oregon, Louisiana, South Carolina and - yes - Florida. The results from all four of these states are in dispute.

Tilden addresses the press:

With altogether too much delicacy Tilden referred to the current "subject of controversy," making the point that in the twenty-two previous presidential elections, the Congress had simply recorded the votes sent them by the Electoral College. But now the Congress must choose between two absolutely conflicting sets of votes sent them by four states.

Tilden reminded the audience that three years ago the Congress had declared illegal the present Government of Louisiana, whose Returning Board has just seen fit to reverse the state's popular vote. Tilden also spelled out the illegality of the South Carolina and Florida boards. But where he ought to have thundered his contempt for the most corrupt and now tyrannous Admininstration in our history and unfurled his banner as our rightful lord, he was throughout his address very much the dry constitutional lawyer and in no way the outraged tribune of a cheated people.

All the way through this final section, Tilden is almost, almost there, but not quite. It should be his, it must be...and yet he seems to be unable to clinch it, despite the egregious nature of Republican attempts to pervert the count. By the time I got to this part, I was already experiencing a serious case of deja vu:

During the week since the electoral commission was given the two (actually, because of a technicality, three) sets of Florida returns, things did not appear to go well for us despite the brilliance of Charles O'Conor.

For one thing, the commission has never seriously tried to examine any of the initial voting frauds in Florida. The Republican case is based on the fact that the Hayes returns are the only valid ones because they have been signed by the carpetbag Republican governor of the state, while those favouring Tilden were only signed by the state's attorney general. For a whole week the number of angels able to dance on that pin's head have been counted and re-counted.

The entry for Tilden on Wikipedia notes:

While the Republicans boldly claimed the election, Tilden mystified and disappointed his supporters by not fighting for the prize or giving any leadership to his advocates. Instead he devoted more than a month to the preparation of a complete history of the electoral counts over the previous century to show it was the unbroken usage of Congress, not of the President of the Senate, to count the electoral votes. [Bigelow v 2:60]

The italics are mine.

-- SPOILER ENDS --

I came to 1876 totally cold (apart from recognising the name of Rutherford B. Hayes), began it with mild trepidation, continued with pleasure, raced through the end, and put it down with real satisfaction. A thirty year-old novel about a one hundred and thirty year-old scandal, which shines a powerful light on America today. Yup, I'd say that's a vindication of the stained-glass trade.

*

It's accepted that the presidential election in 2000 was 'troubled', 'controversial' - that's to say, stolen. But no-one describes the 2004 election in those terms, which is astonishing given the number of complaints of irregularities. Gore Vidal wrote the introduction to Rep. John Conyers' report What Went Wrong in Ohio, which goes into these concerns in depth and is available as a PDF.

THESIS, ANTITHESIS

Well, here're two opposing points of view:

Interviewer: You have been a public relations man and an advertising man— Vonnegut: Oh, I imagine.
Interviewer: Was this painful? I mean—did you feel your talent was being wasted, being crippled?
Vonnegut: No. That's romance—that work of that sort damages a writer's soul. At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year on the writer and the free-enterprise system. The students hated it. We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book. Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks. Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature. There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.

The above from the Paris Review interview with Kurt Vonnegut. Volume I of the selected Paris Review interviews has (fairly) recently been published by Canongate.

Then this:

Doctorow, like Roth, came of age in the 1950s and belongs to what Joan Didion calls "the last generation to identify with adults", well-behaved, sternly educated young people who looked down on the hype and trivialisation of the publishing business because they believed in high culture, high principles and the moral authority of literature.

...not to mention clearly in need of a doobie. From Al Alvarez's introduction to the Penguin edition of Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.

Of course, both are right.

*

I read Vonnegut's Man Without a Country, which I enjoyed, a wonderful slice of Vonnegutania, that inimitable, humane, wry despairing voice, but £7.99 for just over 100 pages of wide-spaced text is pretty steep. It is basically a pamphlet, like Gore Vidal's Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War and Imperial America, the first two of which I've read and enjoyed and recommend, but which come in at £9.99 apiece.

About the worst offender for this practice is Verso, which publishes a lot of good leftist stuff, but at eye-watering prices - I finished one of these recently, Sara Paretsky's Writing in an Age of Silence - at £12.99 (hardback) for 136 pages it can hardly be described as being for the common man, which is a tremendous shame because it's excellent, and certainly written for the common man, and especially the common woman. Also, she's the only person I've come across citing Irina Ratushinskaya as a source of hope and inspiration.

THE AULD COMPLAYNT

Read this today, and laughed:

I tossed my imagination a thousand ways to see if I could find any means to relieve my estate: but all my thoughts consorted to this conclusion, that the world was uncharitable, and I ordained to be miserable. Thereby I grew to consider how many base men that wanted those parts which I had, enjoyed content at will, and had wealth at command: I called to mind a Cobbler, that was worth five hundred pound, an Hostler that had built a goodly Inn and might dispend forty pounds yearly by his Land, a Carre-man in a leather pilche, that had whipped out a thousand pound out of his horse tail: and have I more wit than all these (thought I to myself) am I better born? am I better brought up? yea and better favoured? and yet am I a beggar? What is the cause? how am I crossed? or whence is this curse? Even from hence, that men that should employ such as I am, are enamoured of their own wits, and think what ever they do is excellent, though it be never so scurvy: that Learning (of the ignorant) is rated after the value of the ink and paper: and a Scrivener better paid for an obligation, than a Scholar for the best poem he can make; that every gross brained Idiot is suffered to come into print, who if he set forth a Pamphlet of the praise of Pudding-pricks, or write a Treatise of Tom Thumb, or the exploits of Vntrusse [sic]; it is bought up thick and threefold, when better things lie dead. How then can we choose but be needy, when there are so many Drones amongst us? or ever prove rich that toil a whole year for fair looks?

From Pierce Penniless by Thomas Nashe. Date? 1592.