Marcie Frank,
How to be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal.
Duke University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0 8223 3640 5
176pp
US$17.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
The City, the Pillar and the Cathode Ray
We know we’re off to a good start when right at the top author Marcie Frank quotes Gore Vidal’s killer quip “Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” Hard to imagine Vidal passing up either. But while a full accounting of his sexual conquests remains to be written (though Vidal biographer Fred Kaplan takes a passing stab at it) it’s safe to say that after Frank’s slim but pithy volume no one need deal with the great writer’s exploration (and exploitation) of television any further.
As Frank notes none other than perpetual Vidal piñata Richard Nixon recalls the writer’s contretemps with William F. Buckley Jr. at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as a “great debate.” It was nothing of the kind. But that august moment, when Vidal called Buckley a “pro-or-crypto-Nazi” and the editor of the National Review retorted with “Now listen you queer!” set a standard the likes of Jerry Springer have been trying their best to live up to to this day. It was this “cool medium’s” hottest moment, until it was trumped in 1971 by an equally contentious Vidal joust with Norman Mailer on the “Dick Cavett Show.” But as Frank shows, Vidal was scarcely unprepared for either occasion. He knew how to take it because he knew how to dish it out.
After the “scandal” of The City and the Pillar (the first seriously regarded American novel to deal with what Cole Porter called “the urge to merge with a splurge”), Vidal was declared persona non grate by the “New York Times” – thus rendering his career as a novelist and Broadway playwright moot for several years. In that time Vidal found both employment and socio-political perspective by writing for TV. It was the so-called “Golden Age” – whose most celebrated gilder, Paddy Chayefsky, enacted his revenge against a number of years later in Network. Less temperamentally discombobulated, Vidal saw television as an ideal form for cross-cultural dissemination. thus he became a frequent guest on David Susskind’s talk show “Open end” – even doing a stint as “guest host” on it. This in turn was followed by appearances on the “Tonight Show,” “Dick Cavett,” and other quasi-“serious” talk shows whenever a new Vidal work appeared. Crafting his personality to fit the medium Vidal performed the character called “Gore Vidal’ so well that a passing reference to him as a “guest” in Martin Scorsese’s excoriating satire The King of Comedy (US 1983) is enough to signify the importance of that film’s fictional “Jerry Langford Show”. And that’s not to mention Vidal’s performance as himself on “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” – Norman Lear’s celebrated soap opera satire, that’s right up the intellectual alley of the writer of Duluth.
“Vidal’s classicism consists of a universalizing understanding of both sexuality and publicity accompanied by a strong sense of history that registers changes in the status that has been accorded to each,” Frank notes. And that’s precisely why Vidal not only recognized television’s importance for publicity purposes, but why he saw it as the primary disseminator of contemporary “reality” – as demonstrated in Myron and Live From Golgotha, both of which take place inside of television sets. And its thought that in this ability to navigate such a complex presentational field that Vidal’s sexual radicalism flourishes.
“Vidal has made no secret of his sexual practices, yet he claims not to be a homosexual (because no such thing exists). To the extent that the closet indicates a sexual secret, Vidal cannot be said to be either properly in or properly out of it. The position that he would occupy is beside the closet. His sexual openness, so often expressed in, on, and through TV, offers an alternative view of sexual definition and sexual liberation, allowing us to see the closet as a powerful historical structure that sublimates sexuality into cultural capital of various forms (most notably camp, but also other forms of wit) that only retrospectively come to be recognized as gay.”
Thus while declaring a rhetorical distance from “gay”, television forces Vidal back onto it – much as Myra pushes Myron into the set the better to merge with Maria Montez.
So where can Vidal – and television go from here? To quote the ineffable Merv, “We’ll be right back. . .”
David Ehrenstein,
USA.
Created on: Friday, 10 November 2006