Gore Vidal dans le Guardian

[Taranne]

Wit, but is there wisdom?

Stephen Moss

May 24, 2008 8:30 PM

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephe…g_wisdom_a.html

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal at Hay festival. Photograph: Martin Godwin

"Does age bring wisdom?" a questioner from the floor asked Gore Vidal? There was a short pause. "No, it brings senility." Cue a wave of applause from the vast audience that had come to touch the hem of the man Adam Boulton, who had the tricky task of interviewing Vidal, called "the greatest essayist since Montaigne".

That's a big claim, but not necessarily wide of the mark: Vidal's essays on politics and literature are magnificent and will live long after the weighty novels he is keener for us to read and remember are gathering dust.

The wind-lashed encounter with Boulton was a ramble - an old man (Vidal, not Boulton) peering into the nooks and crannies of a fascinating life - but, happily, it was punctuated by some memorable one-liners. Asked who his successor as the great contrarian would be, he said: "I'm not holding the door open." Lifting his walking stick and brandishing it like a mitre, he intoned: "I'm still the bishop of Rome."

His advice to young people - "Grow up." Questioned about his famous line that "when a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies", he insisted it had been a joke - the books of quotations may have to be rewritten. The Republicans he called "a mindset rather than a party - a group of like-minded people compelled by greed and with a capacity for character assassination." Asked by Boulton if Bobby Kennedy (who Vidal heartily disliked) would have made a better president than George W Bush, he replied: "You would make a better president than Bush!" Could an intellectual ever be elected president? "Well," said Vidal, "accidents happen."

The one-liners, if you could catch them above the howling wind, kept coming: Vidal's mind, which has a deeply ironic and subversive bent, is sharp, even if at 82 the body is frail. But are one-liners enough? There is substance in Vidal's worldview - the Jeffersonian belief in the autonomy of the states, the fear of centralised power, the opposition to US entanglements abroad (he even said US involvement in the second world war was undertaken for selfish reasons) - but these days it gets hopelessly lost. He has become a turn.

His ceaseless negativity is also wearing. Perhaps that is the prerogative of the old, but the attack on the US is so unremitting that he undermines his own assault. "America is a country where no one can be phoney enough" - it sounds good, but is it true? It seems phoney to me. This is the country, after all, he has chosen to return to after his long sojourn in Italy.

Vidal has things of value to tell us - that the US administration has used 9/11 to tear up supposedly inviolable personal freedoms, that America cannot be both republic and empire, that all US politics is based on money, property, business. It was a telling moment when Boulton mentioned the picture in Vanity Fair that linked Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, three octogenarians pitching against America's misguided, self-interested interventions in the Middle East. That got a large and deserved burst of applause.

Where were the voices of the younger generation was the implication? Is the art of engagement dying? Ironically, Christopher Hitchens, seen by some as a possible heir to the waspish Vidal, has engaged - but on the side of so-called liberal interventionism. Hitchens was in the audience and asked a loaded question - was it true Vidal had said the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming? Vidal shot back that he'd never said such a thing, and that in any case Bush - his questioner's hero - was too incompetent to have carried out so strategically devastating an attack.

Vidal avoided that trap, but the uncommitted observer was still left wanting a more coherent picture of what should replace Bush. Even old guys - and it is poignant that Vidal is now the last of that Vanity Fair trio alive - have to do more than mock the vanities of the world. And beyond welcoming an Obama presidency as a sign that the US might be growing up, Vidal has little positive to say. Bush is an idiot, McCain a dimwit - not even a war hero, because "all he ever did was crash his plane; he didn't even try to escape"; even Roosevelt wanted only to become "emperor of the west". Sorry, but I don't buy that latter point: there is a point where glib contrarianism becomes hollow and self-defeating; the enemy of thought.

Did he have any words of wisdom to offer at the dusk of a long life, asked a youthful member of the audience? Vidal had none, which seemed rather sad. It doesn't suggest senility - the mind is strong, the wit undiminished - but it does suggest that irony can only take you so far.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephe…g_wisdom_a.html