P 056 INTERVIEW W-NS GORE VIDAL A-DW

THE OUTRAGER The Stop Smiling Interview with Gore Vidal

BY NILE SOUTHERN PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAN WINTERS

“We are beyond law, which is not unusual for an empire. Unfortunately, we are also beyond common sense.”

— Gore Vidal, 2007

Gore Vidal is seething. His outrage is genuine, his dismay com- Vidal stands between many worlds: his Washington “insider” plete. In an age when anyone with a laptop can share, lob or world (a grandfather in the Senate, family links to Jackie O and otherwise spew their instant opinions on politics, sexuality, war Al Gore), his heavy-duty literary world (Lewis Lapham, Italo and America’s raison d’être, one pines for the eloquent, reasoned, Calvino, Anäis Nin, Kenneth Tynan, Paul Bowles and my father, take-no-prisoners prose that is Vidal’s trademark. Indeed, Gore Terry Southern, to name a few), and the film world (Paul Vidal has spoken out with informed, blistering vitriol on Newman, Tom Hanks, Grace Kelly, Orson Welles). Such lineage America’s devolution into “a seedy empire led by frat boys,” puts him in a regal cultural position from which to hurl literary and has asserted himself as America’s most uncompromising bricks at the Establishment — and to do so with credibility and critic. His outrage borders on the outrageous: He has often perfect pitch. Vidal has written over 20 novels and hundreds of called for reconvening the Continental Congress — which orig- essays, prompting John Keates to pronounce him the 20th inally gathered in 1774 to respond to the “Intolerable Acts” century’s “finest essayist.” The Boston Globe declared him instituted by Britain against America. America’s “greatest living man of letters.”

Not since Montaigne, creator of the “essai” form, has a writer so As novelist, screenwriter, playwright and essayist, Vidal has artfully displayed such insights on human nature — using a free- produced an impressive range of work. His breakthrough novel, wheeling mélange of historical allusions, classical Greek and The City and the Pillar (1949), was considered scandalous for Roman texts and personages to shape his arguments. Recently, its naturalistic portrayal of homosexual characters. An unforgiving in the tradition of Tom Paine’s Common Sense essays, Vidal New York Times refused to review his next five novels, prompt- has written “counterrevolutionary” pamphlets with titles such ing Vidal to pursue screenwriting in Hollywood, where he as “It’s Time to Take Action Against Our Wars on the Rest of worked on such films as Ben-Hur, Suddenly, Last Summer and the World” (Counterpunch) and “The Enemy Within” (The Is Paris Burning? His hit transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge Observer). Indeed, since the Bush administration’s reaction to (1968) sparked a renewed flurry of literary output, including a 9/11, Vidal has been documenting the “collapse of the Republic” series of satirical novels that included Myron (1974) and wildly in a series of books: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How dystopic visions such as Duluth (1983) and the hilarious Live We Got To Be So Hated (2002), Dreaming War: Blood for Oil from Golgotha (1992). and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2002) and Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004). Some of Vidal’s life’s work has been the telling of America’s “narrative of his essays have been censored in the US. One of them, “The End empire” from its inception until the present, offering an histori- of Liberty,” was written for (and killed by) Vanity Fair. In that article, cally informed, often jaundiced view of many of the republic’s Vidal concludes: “The awesome physical damage Bin Laden most cherished leaders. His efforts to correct historical misper- and company did us on Dark Tuesday is as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties,” and that “the Bush administration, though eerily inept in all but its principal P 057 Gore Vidal in Hollywood, CA 2006 task, which is to exempt the rich from taxes, has casually torn up most of the treaties to which civilized nations subscribe.”

P 058 INTERVIEW W-NS GORE VIDAL A-DW

ceptions have advanced on a variety of fronts: through his Gore Vidal: Everything is breaking up now in the country. And historical novels (which some call the “American Chronicles”), I don’t know how it could have happened, unless there is such including Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), a mood of disgust in the land. This is not the country I was Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990) and concluding brought up in. with The Golden Age in 2000; his prodigious essay writing, public talks and radio addresses, and his appearances in documen- SS: Martin Luther King once said that America was the “greatest tary films, including Why We Fight, Inside Deep Throat and The purveyor of violence in the world today.” Do you think this kind U.S. vs. John Lennon. Master of deadpan, Vidal appeared in of apparently random shooting is an effect of war waged in the Bob Roberts as a senator, and in Family Guy — as himself. name of “freedom”?

Point to Point Navigation, a follow-up to his 1995 memoir, GV: Well, it’s a very strange country. There’s no template for Palimpsest, is an immensely readable account of a life lived what the United States has become. I mean, after all, what is it knowing the movers, shakers and history makers of 20th century based on? Consumerism. After 9/11, the president says “keep arts, letters and government: From Charles Lindbergh to “Fred” on shopping, keep on shopping” — keep the coffers filling with Fellini, from JFK to Eleanor Roosevelt, many of the most valu- your hard-earned money. And what is consumerism based on? able players of the last century walk on and off Gore’s lively Advertising. What is advertising? Deliberate untruths designed mindscreen — and if Gore doesn’t know them, he has them to get you to buy something. And it is applicable, of course, to pegged. Vidal’s elegant and astute character studies (and the selling of candidates. assassinations) sum up lives with a savvy, world-weary elo- quence. From castles in Rome to the halls of power in SS: What do you make of the differences, if any, among the Congress and royal Ascot lawn parties, Vidal gives us his pro- current candidates? foundly witty, and often moving perspective on those with beauty and power. About Queen Elizabeth’s sister, Princess GV: Some are brighter than others, but my God, you have to Margaret, whom Gore adored, he describes her reading aloud parse them pretty hard to find any concrete meaning in any- a “graphic” passage from his novel Duluth: thing they say. The best McCain can do, like Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush — the best he can do is: “If we don’t fight them over As PM shut the book, she said, “I don’t know what there is there, we’ll have to fight them here!” This is such a palpable lie! in me that is so low and base, that I love this book.” I can How are they going to get here? There is no Greyhound bus answer that now that years and death have separated us: that can go over the Atlantic Ocean that I know of. She was far too intelligent for her station in life. She often had bad press, the usual fate of wits in a literal society. SS: I much prefer what your grandfather said, “I shall not rob your children’s cradles …” Vidal also reflects on his own personal absurdities, as in his memory of film producer Sam Spiegel, for whom Vidal wrote GV: “… to feed the dogs of war!” It needs a Mississippi accent. (with Tennessee Williams) Suddenly, Last Summer: SS: Speaking of war profiteering, you’ve been writing a lot Everyone asked why I did a second film since with Spiegel about the Bush administration. What are your latest thoughts there was always trouble about payment or credit or both. on Bush’s legacy? My cheerful response was, “I couldn’t believe it the first time.” Also, I had grown morbidly fond of Sam with his GV: I did a play on Broadway called Romulus the Great. He was vast appetite for food and hookers. the last Roman emperor, and he becomes emperor of Rome in order to liquidate it. Perhaps W has a secret plan, like Romulus. Vidal has lived for much of his life in Los Angeles and, until the Perhaps, by appointing someone who hates the UN to the UN death of his partner Howard Austen five years ago, in Ravello, in order to destroy it, someone not competent to run the World Italy. Tucked away in one of the oldest of Hollywood’s hills, Bank, like Wolfowitz. As he goes about these selections, which, Gore sits up in his grand drawing room, a vast low table yawn- one by one, wreck the Constitution, and as he fights an illegal ing before him, bedecked with books, magazines and foreign war in order to wreck the American Army, which is what’s hap- editions of his work. Couches and chairs fan out around him — pening. I speak now as somebody born at West Point and, like furniture that has seated many a guest — in Italy as well as most people connected to the military, I like nothing about what Tinseltown. Sometimes the phone rings and he’ll pick it up he’s doing. No, it is a royal mess. And I’m just saying there is mid-interview, often helping out some author with a publisher behind it, as there was in Romulus, a small intelligence, longing — or vice versa. On the morning of our interview, news of the for disaster. I think it’s malicious. Virginia Tech shootings had just broken out on CNN. SS: Is Bush as capable as the last emperor of Rome? Stop Smiling: What’s going on in America today? P 059 W-NS A-DW

GV: No. Remember, the president is somebody who’s never SS: How does the recent use of the term homeland make worked a day in his life. He has no profession, he has no job; you feel? he’s a frat boy, and they decided to use his name — his father’s name — to get him elected. It’s a very cold-blooded coup d’ GV: It’s rather shocking. Remember, the United States is at the état. Meanwhile, his greedy cronies are ripping off the United end of the road — our powers are pretty much gone. The States, and we are being destroyed. So, whereas the emperor power to do damage to others is still sitting there, and it will is doing it out of a sense of virtue (to redress the crimes that certainly be used more and more. The power to do damage to Rome has done to others), Bush wants to create more crimes. our own people — those are infinite powers. So we must be on And therefore, he’s going to eliminate the republic of Franklin guard here — in the homeland. Imagine, I was born into a Roosevelt. All these right-wingers are still screaming about how country, and now I live in a homeland. It was an expression much they hate Social Security and labor unions, and this and never used by Americans — it was a Hitler phrase — one highly that. … And so the emperor of Rome, at the end of this piece, suitable for what our rulers have in mind. dissolves the empire. Peace, for a moment, is declared. SS: How is living abroad different from living in the US? SS: How can an empire be dissolved? Would we notice? GV: Well, you’re not faced with people telling lies all day. You GV: Well, we haven’t really noticed because we have no media. can’t turn on the television here without people telling you a lot How is the American public ever going to find out what these of lies like “Give us your house — and we’ll give you some gangsters have done to us? The press is part of the scam. The change to pay off your credit cards.” People fall for that every

Certainly Hemingway and Fitzgerald were no good at all. They were parasites basically. Hemingway never wrote a good novel. Think of that.

press is very much part of it. The New York Times is collusive day. It’s very tiring to be lied to all the time. It’s one of the rea- with the crimes we now have to deal with. sons that we’re now in chaos politically. Internationally, we’re now a pariah because we’re known to be liars, we’re known to SS: How has Bush been devastating the country? be violent and rather stupid, because we’re totally uneducated. What they’ve done to American history — and I’ve been acting GV: You don’t appoint the worst person to do every given job as a corrective for the past 30 years — is pretty awful. That’s in government, from looking at pet food to looking at weaponry. all a nation has got — its history. And with once useful public ser- I’m saying it’s no coincidence. This is a sort of super-conspiracy: vants — all you want are people who will analyze the situation “Does it really mean he said that?” No, it doesn’t really mean and give you the truth. They come up immediately with a lie. that, Jane! It really means that the instincts of Bush are to The swiftness with which they do it — and the joy … the real wreck a country in which he has no place! He couldn’t get joy when Cheney can tell a big whopper: “Saddam Hussein, we through school, couldn’t get a job. He went around hustling oil know now, was involved in 9/11 with Osama bin Laden.” Well, stock, to the horror of the people he hustled and who went we know now they didn’t like each other — they hated each along with it because his father had been president. other. But you don’t tell them the truth, because it doesn’t con- form with the lies you’ve earlier told. SS: How much of that seems to be a frat-boy mentality as opposed to malevolent planning? SS: Now this is in contrast to a European country like Italy or Greece, where people are more skeptical and read a variety of GV: Frat boys have malevolent plans as well as any other — but newspapers, as opposed to a McNews. I’m making no case for the state of his mind. I’m making a case against what he has done, and I see a pattern in it. To go from GV: Oh, well listen, to this day, if I want to learn what’s going Bolton to Wolfowitz to Gonzales? Each a known enemy to the on in American politics I’ll read Corriere della Sera before I’ll entity to which he is supposed to be the head of. read the New York Times, which is just a lie machine for the Republican Party. P 060 INTERVIEW W-NS GORE VIDAL A-DW P 060 Gore Vidal drinks tea as he sits in an armchair in his home, Edgewater, on the Hudson River, Barrytown, New York, April 1960. (Photo by Leonard McCombe/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

SS: How do you account for the skepticism that seems to be empires — they mutate into aggression, into wars. We’re largely absent from American society? observing it right here — what’s happening to us. He said there are two types of revolution — one is a sort of class upheaval, GV: Well, they’re used to being told that the engine of their and the other, he said, is “revolution by stealth” — and that is society is consumerism, and the way that is presented and sold what we have suffered from. A bunch of the most greasy, in order to get people to consume is through falsehood. sleazy, oil and gas people from Texas have seized control of the Americans have never much loved the truth, and they hate state, with the aid of the New York Times, magazines and so people who tell the truth. So you’re going to have a hard time on. The media has never been more poisonous. And it hap- if you’re a truth-sayer in a country of liars. And it’s not that pened just like that. The speed with which they got rid of due we’re congenitally any different from any other people, but process of law, trial by jury, habeas corpus — I never thought we’ve been badly governed and we’ve been puffed up with these institutions were so fragile that they would go so quickly. laughing gas. Wham, they were gone in a week!

SS: You often cite the “United States of Amnesia,” whereas SS: Could Americans stage their own “revolution by stealth”? Europeans still remember whether it was the fascists versus the socialists — GV: Well, counterrevolution is just as good as revolution.

GV: — and Americans missed it all! What was World War II all SS: What about extraordinary rendition? about? Ninety percent of the people alive wouldn’t even know what answer to give. “There was somebody called Hitler. He GV: To avoid the draft — which may be coming back — it would was eeeevil.” “Why was he evil?” “He was just eeevil! We gotta probably be good to have an outside place to live where the fight evil people!” Feds can’t get you. Unfortunately, with rendition the Feds can get you anywhere. They respect nobody’s sovereignty. I can SS: Now what about the difference in political parties — having remember when the FBI sent over a bunch of agents to arrest more than just two, for instance, as most other countries do? alleged drug dealers in Italy. I told the Italians, “For God’s sake, remember you’re a sovereign nation! Don’t let these hoods GV: You have more choice, more alternatives. I always felt better wander around at random arresting people and taking them when there was a real Communist Party at work in Europe. The back to America for trial.” right-wingers were nervous that if they made too many coup d’états, they themselves were going to get chopped up. But SS: Does living abroad facilitate your writing? Or is it a state Communism crashed, like all things do. Aristotle points out very of mind? nicely that, in time, all republics, if they survive, mutate into P 061 W-NS A-DW

GV: Well, everything is a state of mind. Geography does not gave the order in 1953 to overthrow this government. “You make much difference for a writer, unless he’s trying to avoid cannot have a Communist government in Guatemala,” as if he being arrested or something like that, which was never any knew anything about what was going on. It was the same year problem of mine. You are wherever your head is — that is your he was inspired to overthrow [Prime Minister Mohammed] home. The true homeland is the brain, so keep it working. Mossadeq in Iran — the first kind of democratic figure there — very, very popular. Of course he was going to take back some SS: America is your subject in so many books and yet you’ve of the oil companies’ rights in the oil fields of Iran. And that is lived apart from America for many years. un-American and cannot be permitted.

GV: I’ve never lived apart for one second. I’ve had this house SS: How did you get a handle on America’s role in Guatemala that you’re sitting in for over 40 years. I’ve used it off and on for at the time? over 40 years. I also had a place for 30 or 40 years in southern Italy. GV: I come from a political family. All I have to do is pick up a phone and talk to the family to find out what’s going on in Washington. SS: When was it you realized you wanted to live in Italy? SS: Did that astonish you? GV: I didn’t really want to live here. I’d gone back to the novel after politics and I was writing a book about the Emperor Julian. GV: It startled me, yes. But I didn’t think that because of one I needed to be in a city that was not too uncomfortable, that would senator, we were going to go down and punish Guatemala for have a good classical library. Rome was it then. I went every day what proved to be several generations. They had nothing but a to the library of the American Academy and I wrote classical series of bloodbaths after our intervention. That’s the American history for a few years. From there I moved over into American way: If you’re bigger and stronger, you take what you want. history, largely over my disgust at the high school textbooks in the US. But I often thought I ought not to be doing that. Our SS: Now how is this different from the European mindset? educational system should be doing that. I’d like to be out there running with the other lads and lasses across the greensward GV: Europe has worked it out: If the workers are not happy instead of sitting here trying to figure out the terms of agree- they’ll revolt. If they revolt, then you’ll have no GNP, and then ment for the end of the Civil War. But fate chose otherwise. you won’t have anything.

SS: You bought a house in Guatemala in 1949. Tell us about SS: Well, that seems pretty straightforward. How do the Italians that. What drew you there? view America?

GV: I got out of the Army in 1946 and my first book was pub- GV: They’re kindly, but they’re more and more appalled. They lished, so I had some money. I started driving south, went down didn’t mind us being masters of the earth at all, then they through Mexico, went to Yucatan, got into Guatemala, went to watched us blow it. Antigua and found a 17th century monastery convent, which had been wrecked by an earthquake. I bought it for $2,000 SS: Starting when? and I used that as a headquarters to write my first barrage of American novels like The City and the Pillar. I didn’t know GV: Oh, Korea. That was the beginning of the downfall, quickly Spanish properly and I was very interested in what was happen- followed by Vietnam, which was an even further downfall, ing in the US of A. I’d never been not connected with American followed by the little madman being allowed to attack two politics, only now I had ammunition because I knew to what countries that could do us no harm, had done us no harm — extent the CIA had been ordered to destabilize the government. and he couldn’t think of a reason.

SS: I knew of nefarious efforts in the Seventies, but America SS: Do you think the rationale — the Project for the New was destabilizing Guatemala in the Fifties? American Century, for instance — set out plenty of reasons for maintaining perpetual war? China was an objective as well, GV: Oh, yes. At that time there was a guy called [Juan José] wasn’t it? Arévalo, and after his term was up there was an orderly election and [Jacobo] Arbenz — a sort of New Deal liberal type — GV: Yes, we had to contain China. I used to go on television, became president and demanded a tax from United Fruit, back in the days when the American media would let people which siphoned up all the money in the country and would pay like me go on, and criticize. We’re not allowed any longer — no tax. So he imposed a small land tax on them, which Henry except I can always get on Fox News, but it’ll mean I’ll have Cabot Lodge, a director of the United Fruit Company and a three people screaming simultaneously, which means you can’t senator from Massachusetts, said was Communism. Eisenhower be heard. I kept asking all sorts of employees of the president, P 062 INTERVIEW W-NS GORE VIDAL A-DW

“Could you explain why we are fighting in Vietnam?” the world.” We’re not. That’s why we don’t make enough money. Social services come first in civilized countries. We are “Well, of course, it’s very simple why we are fighting in not civilized, we are barbarian, so they come last, if at all. Vietnam,” they’d say. “We’ve got to contain China. After all, if Europeans cannot understand why we do nothing for the people. Vietnam goes, then Thailand goes, and if Thailand goes, Burma Nothing. We don’t educate them, we don’t doctor them, and goes, and if Burma goes …” All this nonsense. “Did you know,” we’re getting worse: more inbred, more greedy. I would always say, “that for 1,000 years the Viet Cong were China’s chief enemy?” I was talking to village idiots and my SS: Is that part of being a serious country — taking care of country was governed by village idiots. The rest of us were too your people? languid to get it together and replace the idiots with our own. GV: Well, realizing that the people are all you’ve got, and if SS: You’ve said that America is not a serious country. Do you they’re not well looked after, you don’t have a country anymore. recall that? SS: So what do we have? GV: Of course I do. It still isn’t. Nobody gives a goddamn about it. When we lost habeas corpus, you might think that lawyers GV: We have a plutocracy. We have the worst food in the world, would be distressed. It is a nation of lawyers for Christ’s sake. the worst clothes, the worst inventions. We lead in nothing except This is the bedrock of the legal system, and they believe in the prisons, which are the worst in the world. We have more peo- system if they don’t believe in law. Not a peep out of our millions ple locked up than any country on earth, including China. Two of lawyers — we have more lawyers than there are engineers in million two hundred thousand is the last figure I can remember. Taiwan. No, we’re not serious at all. And if you’re not interested in the republic, if you’re not interested in our laws, if you’re not SS: For years Europeans have dealt with terrorism. Why is interested in the structure of our government and the separa- America so special? tion of powers, go away! I would be in charge of a different sort of expatriate movement — just ex out of the country, assholes. GV: Every country has lived with terrorism and has roots of it in its own history. When the Basques feel their lives have been SS: What responsibilities does an expatriate have to his host shattered by the division between France and Spain, they feel country, and what responsibilities do they have back home? fully justified in being terrorists. I find it hard to believe, but it’s none of my business. Europe has always lived with terror. We GV: None. It depends on how much he cares about it. I care act as though it never happened anywhere on earth, and as quite a lot about the American republic, that’s what I write though it happens because we’re good people and we believe about. So when I see us losing our liberties here, I grow very in little lord Jesus and they don’t, and by God, we’re going to concerned even though I might be happily living in Ravello, Italy. kill them in the name of little lord Jesus, which is what we’ve I still feel responsible. But most people don’t have that feeling done over and over and over again. at all. They’ve been taught to be greedy, and they’re greedy. They’re taught to shop and to complain about not having SS: What is one thing Americans don’t know? enough money to buy the things they think they ought to have. GV: There are points of view that have never been expressed to SS: How important is it to speak the language of a country that us: That everybody should have a right to a proper education, you’re living in? straight up through the college level. Roosevelt tried to do that with the GI Bill of Rights in 1944, and that changed the whole GV: Better to. The more languages you speak, the more societies social structure of the United States. Kids whose fathers were you’ll understand. Portuguese fishermen ended up as head of English depart- ments at Harvard. SS: Would you advise people to get away from America to see how other parts of the world live? SS: It used to be that Americans would say they were Canadians when they traveled abroad. Do you think that will GV: Their eyes are opened when they go to a real country. I talk help them now? to Americans when I’m in the Netherlands, and they’re always stunned by the availability of pot. To them, that is the greatest GV: Well, it’s to stop very long, pointless conversations. thing on earth. I don’t give a damn about drugs, but the free- dom to have them is okay by me. When they see the educa- SS: What do you enjoy most about being outside of the US? tional system and medical system — they pay higher taxes per head than we do — and we think, “Oh God, we’re the top of GV: Having an opera house. I can’t imagine myself living too far P 063 W-NS A-DW

east of Zurich. I liked that, although I was a lousy skier. My leg was already gone.

SS: Is there a city you can imagine developing an expatriate scene today and what might come of it?

GV: Hard to tell. I find large gatherings of Europeans in good cities. Americans in good cities are a bad thing — bad habits, bad manners, dishonest at every level.

SS: Didn’t some good come out of the American expatriates abroad? Hemingway, et cetera?

GV: Certainly Hemingway and Fitzgerald were no good at all. They were parasites basically. Hemingway never wrote a good novel. Think of that.

SS: Ravello made you an honorary citizen. Tell me about that.

GV: Well, there was a big fiesta in the piazza, and the mayor gave me some sort of a medal. They had a lot of visitors, the world of culture in Italy was there, including Calvino and his wife, Luigi Barzini and the critic Alberto Arbasino. It was nice.

SS: What honor do you have in Los Angeles?

GV: Honorary citizen of Los Angeles. And guess which is most beautiful: the Ravello or Los Angeles?

SS: I can guess. You know, I’m thinking of moving to Greece with my wife and family. She’s from there and has a house.

P 063 GV: Well, I envy you. I would have loved to live in Greece, Gore Vidal as he poses beneath the bow of a large ship, April 1947. particularly in the islands. (Photo by Jerry Cooke/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) SS: Any advice?

away from one. Yes, to have music — which you don’t get in GV: No. I’ve got a great friend there you might look up. Niki America — unless you’ve got a big, big city with big, big spon- Papandreou. His father and grandfather were prime minister. sors. My life is reading and writing. Here I’ve got 10,000 books, He’s a brilliant guy. Very funny. out of order, driving me crazy. I like to look at buildings, see the sights. I’ve done Paris on foot about 10 times, the whole thing. SS: And how did you meet him, might I ask? It’s not very big. Just start out from the Arc de Triomphe and keep going. GV: How do I meet everybody? Because I’m me.

SS: My father once said that he lived abroad to get away from K overhearing clichés, and that in Europe you might hear a cliché and suddenly it sounds fresh and interesting.

GV: Yes, American ones particularly.

SS: Where else have you lived?

GV: London, Paris, Rome, Graubünden, which is in Switzerland,