GORE VIDAL'S PULP: THIEVES FALL OUT

Thieves Fall Out is a pulp thriller Gore Vidal wrote under a pseudonym in 1952, and is reprinted now for the first time, for the first time under his own name. Apparently, not so long before he died, Vidal took a another look at what he'd written so long ago, didn't like it much, and so turned down a request to publish; it was his estate that gave permission to Hard Case to go ahead.

The early 1950s were a rough time for young Vidal. His 1948 novel The City and the Pillar, with its portrayal of homosexuality, had shocked much of America, including the books pages of the New York Times. Three novels in the next two years attracted little attention, and when they did he was generally criticised for being too prolific. But he needed money, being almost as profligate as prolific, so rather than slow down, he created pseudonyms.

His third novel published in 1950 was A Star's Progress, published in hardback by the reputable EP Dutton, as by Katharine Everard (Everard being the name of a gay club in New York). A racy look at Hollywood, it was reprinted in paperback,titled Cry Shame. It's A Star Is Born story, which draws somewhat on The City and the Pillar for one of its characters, and it's relatively frank, for the times, about ambiguous sexuality. Two years later, Vidal would publish another novel under his own name, The Judgement Of Paris, a modern re-working of the story from the Iliad, whose Paris is remarkably passive sexually. At the same time he began what became a trilogy of mystery novels writing as Edgar Box. The Box novels, also published by Dutton, are classic cozy mysteries in the Agatha Christie tradition, the amateur sleuth who's a PR man and former reporter, and a dashing hetero man about town. Once Vidal's novels became best-sellers, the identity of Edgar Box, which had never been a closely-guarded secret (Vidal wrote a cover blurb for an early Sixties paperback reissue of the series) became open knowledge.

His third novel of 1952 was Thieves Fall Out, published under the name Cameron Kay (who was a great uncle who'd been a politician in Texas). It was done as a paperback original for Gold Medal, the best of the pulpy crime publishers, and it's a competent enough effort. Vidal keeps the story moving, but the writing is utilitarian. The sex is probably more restrained than his mainstream novels, but there's enough to provide a cover artist with something to go on. The most interesting thing is that the book is set against the backdrop of the 1952 coup led by General Nasser, which unseated King Farouk and brought Nasser to power two years later, but you really wouldn't know it. Apart from creating some chaos around which the book's denoument can become more difficult, most of the politics is an offstage matter. It enters only because the hero, Peter Wells, falls instantly in love with a German woman who's reputed to be Farouk's new favourite mistress. But that doesn't actually come into play either.

I don't think you would make a link to Vidal, except in retrospect, but from that perspective there are few interesting things about it. Vidal scholars have noted that the novel begins, as many of his early books do, with Wells shaking off the effects of the night before, which sets the scene nicely. Wells is hired to do some shady business by an Englishman, Hastings and Helene, who may or may not actually be the Comtesse de Ratignac. There is a local gangster, and a more or less corrupt cop, and it's all very Casablanca. You can see Vidal having a little bit of fun with that, and especially with the breathless coup de foudre Wells finds with Anna Meuller, daughter of a Nazi war criminal.

Knowing it's Vidal, Wells' character is most interesting, because he's so different from Philip Warren, the Paris figure in that novel, or Peter Sargeant, the hero of the Box novels. There's nothing flippant about him; he's Robert Mitchum in Macao, but Vidal gives him more than just the half-track mind film noir tough guys often have. Helene is so transparent a femme fatal that Wells is wary, and Anna becomes the blonde not-so-virgin, unlikely as that seems.

But having fun with the genre doesn't make for a compelling read. You can see why Vidal wanted to leave it buried; Thieves Fall Out would not make anyone's list of the greatest Gold Medal books from that period, and there are some great ones. It's a curiosity, and Hard Case were right to bring it out. Those of us who admire Vidal's historical novels may wonder what he might have done had he taken the history more seriously, or indeed, taken the noirish pulp more seriously. But that wouldn't have been Vidal. And interestingly, the book is published with a juicy retro-Gold Medal cover by Glenn Orbik, five pages of blurb quotes about Gore's books (none of which apply to the novel in question) and no copyright details!

Thieves Fall Out by Gore Vidal (writing as Cameron Kay)

Titan/Hard Case Crime £16.99 ISBN 9781781167922

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

PETER MATTHIESSEN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer Peter Matthiessen is up at the Guardian's website now. You can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. I wrote it quickly, to a flexible word length. A few things were cut out, and some explanations added it, but mostly it is as I wrote it.

The most extensive loss was my second graf:

No less than his work, Matthiessen's life embodied the nature of opposites beloved in the Zen Buddhist philosophy he practised. Beyond the dichotomy of fiction and fiction, Matthiessen was able to found the pre-eminent literary journal, The Paris Review, while working for the CIA. And his journey to radical politics and alternative life-style never saw him abandon the elite New York society from which he came, right down to living in the smart east end of Long Island.

  

I felt the point about the Zen nature of his life was an important one to make, particularly because his final novel seemed so strongly to encompass opposites. And though some of the specifics are covered later in the obit (hence the cut) I actually would have liked to take a little more time to explore the contradictions in his atrician New York life style and his earthy proto-hippie explorer quality. It was something that is very American upper-class--another small item cut was my mention that while at Hotchkiss he withdrew his name from the family's listing in the Social Register; yet proceeded on to Yale, and continued to live the life-style of the elite. I also mentioned that he'd been at school with George Plimpton, a fellow founder of the Paris Review, and a close copy of Matthiessen, right down to writing for Sports Illustrated--Plimpton explored professional sports the way Matthiessen explored the natural world. They were both elegant in that strong patrician way, the kind of men who wear seersucker that never wrinkles. Perhaps my interest reflects all the time I have spent in this country!You can seen the connection when people compare those Americans to the same sort of English, more prevalent in the pre-Thatcher years than now, a sort of transcontinental Oxbridge centered on America's prep (ie: British 'public') schools and our Oxbridge of Yale and Harvard. Of course, if America were Britain, Matthiessen would have probably been presenting wildlife programmes, a la David Attenborough.

These were the men recruited for the CIA in its early days, and although the taint of having spied on his fellow expats never seemed to stick to Matthiessen, it was interesting the way he always moved to distance his magazine from his own work. Yet anyone following the funding dispersed by the CIA in that period could hardly doubt that some of it must have made its way to the Paris Review. The question inflames some people, like Elia Kazan informing on fellow-travelers, yet here it doesn't quite makes its way into Philby territory, perhaps another difference between the American faux-aristocracy and the British.

That life style is interesting too because Matthiessen's house on Long Island was a meeting place for New York's literary world, which was a potent mixture of WASPy upper crust and urban immigrant-types, mostly Jews. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, if you please. From this mix emerged the bright world of post-war American fiction. I seem to recall reading an Esquire piece about a highly competitive softball game organised out there, but I couldn't dig up the reference.

Mathiessen was quite funny about the way Timothy Leary ruined the world of LSD for everyone, by making such a fuss the government was almost forced to make it illegal. I wanted to include Matthiessen's take on Leary, but didn't; in the end, the single mention of him went too. His trip to New Guinea in 1961, which became Under The Mountain Wall, was made with Michael Rockefeller, who later would disappear, and appears to have been killed and eaten by cannibals.

I found it interesting too that his father was awarded an OBE for his camouflage designs for merchant convoys during the war (that was cut) and that his father's cousin was F.O. Matthiessen, the legendary professor of American Studies at Harvard, whose book, American Renaissance, was one of the first and still one of the classic looks at the great writers who seem to have in part inspired Matthiessen's fiction (I didn't have space for that rumination!). The Watson trilogy might be compared to Melville or Twain, you could also mention Faulkner, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, or James Carlos Blake.

But the important thing was Matthiessen's writing, and trying to explain the nature of its appeal, both to the most intense literary types and to casual readers of travel, exploration, and nature. A few British comparisons occur to me now, but although many are elegant, they are more concerned with the phenomenology of travel, not the dissection of the spirit of the natural world. In this, Peter Matthiessen was one of a kind.

GORE VIDAL: AN APPRECIATION

It has been fascinating watching reactions to Gore Vidal's death, because his is a career that will resist short and immediate summary. There are those, like my friend Michael Goldfarb, who lamented the way, in his words, Vidal 'went up his own arse' late in his career, and many others noted that he had not really fulfilled the promise of his talent, and similarly blamed it on a louche sort of self-indulgence. There were those who had always disliked his politics, particularly as they smacked of a kind of class-treason, and because Vidal was so capable of expressing his views with dismissive venom for those who disagreed.

I can sympathise with those who feel Vidal at some point stopped being a man of letters and started playing one on TV, but it's going too far to call him a dilettante. Man of letters is indeed an apt description, and the problem is more that our society no longer has a place for men (or women) of letters, in the old sense, and instead has given their public platform to cable TV shouters and standup comedians, while reserving their intellectual platform for academics and privileged journalists.

Vidal came of age as a man of letters in a time when novelists were still figures of public profile, but also at a time when television was beginning to erode their standing. We can see in the clips of his famous TV encounter with Norman Mailer (and even those with William Buckley, though Buckley was far more the 'privileged journalist' than man of letters) the seeds of Vidal's self-reduction: he's put down by Dick Cavett, who's far more instinctive and comfortable with the situation. Vidal learned, but very quickly he (and Mailer, the more relentless self-promoter) were relegated to the fringes. Vidal and John Kennedy, related by multiple marriages, are a good match in the analysis of such considerations: Kennedy transformed our politics and got us Reagan (and Obama, in that sense) and pushed many of the figures of old-style machine politics out the back-doors of their smoky back rooms.

Like Truman Capote, Gore courted celebrity, but he was a far more prolific and active writer. As an aside, it's fascinating that Capote's best book, like Mailer's, is in the 'non-fiction novel' category; what they were doing was writing contemporary historical novels, where Vidal's best books were traditional historical novels, and he confined his contemporary work to straightforward non-fiction and broad, and less successful, satires.

The traditional historical novels were his best books, Julian, and four of his American (or Narratives Of Empire) septet (including the earlier political novel Washington DC) Burr, 1876, Lincoln, and Empire. I'd suggest Burr is the best of the six, because, as with Julian, Vidal works with a central character who is strong enough to overcome his own voice and push his own persona to the background, while still containing it. Lincoln may be the most interesting, because despite his evident desire to deflate the Lincoln myth he still can't help but be impressed with the man himself. These books made such a mark in good part because their re-interpretation of history was both factual and understated—with considerable sympathy for history's failed heroes, and with a perspective that still isn't being taught in American schools. His later efforts, like Live From Golgotha, or Hollywood in the Empire series, tried too hard to be shocking, too much in thrall to their own revealing of emperors and their new clothes, though Creation, which I enjoyed greatly, despite its treading much of the same ground as Julian with early Christianity, was entertaining in its audacious ultimate conspiracy theory, a sort of shaggy-dog finish worthy of Vonnegut.

Vidal's reputation was originally based on the scandal of his 'coming-out' novel, The City And The Pillar, though his first, Williwaw, a World War II novel is more interesting precisely because its so different in style, somewhat Hemingway-esque, from virtually all that followed. After that book, he preferred, it seemed, to approach sexuality as a side issue, as it were, or to have great fun with it, as in Myra Breckinridge. He also wrote mysteries, as Edgar Box, and I have to confess that I've never read any of them. My standards in crime fiction are rather different from the kind of thing I assumed Vidal might write, though I should probably give him the chance to prove me wrong.

There is a good study to be done of his early television work (though sadly most of those live dramas shown in the 1950s have not been preserved), his film work and his theatre. The Best Man is a considerable political drama, and has been revived, though it, like Washington DC, was bettered by others in the era. Vidal was in some ways too much an insider to craft more straight-forwardly exciting books about contemporary politics. His original screenplay for The Left-Handed Gun was remade as a TV movie called Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid, with Val Kilmer in the Paul Newman role, and the focus switched away from Freudian parental issues and more to Reconstruction-era politics. And of course that steamy scene with Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Ben Hur was famously Vidal's, and even more famously, beyond Charlton Heston's comprehension. What Heston would have made of Caligula is beyond all comprehension!

Vidal was astute as a social critic, but perhaps weakened by his natural aristocratic hauteur. He made much of his run for Congress in 1960, where he ran ahead of Kennedy's Presidential vote, but he knew he was never going to actually win the election in staunchly conservative Duchess County, NY--I think he secretly longed to be the sort of imperial president he saw Franklin Roosevelt as having been, and indeed, Eleanor Roosevelt was a major backer of his campaign. It was probably a more serious effort than Mailer's famous run for mayor of New York. Vidal understood the power of what might be called 'meta-politics', the entrenched interests for whom government becomes merely a tool, and he understood it both from personal experience and also from study of it historically—control of resources and trade was just as important for the Romans as it is today. Even in death he was roasted for his willingness to consider, and promote, 'conspiracy theories', which he sometimes seemed to be doing simply to get his audience to consider the possibilities. Evidently, he had been doing this since his school days: Vidal is supposedly the basis for the character Brinker Hadley in the novel A Separate Peace, written by his Exeter classmate John Knowles. One of my favourite Vidal pieces was an essay in the New York Review of Books some 40 years ago, in which he 'proved' to my satisfaction that the Watergate burglar and spy novelist E. Howard Hunt had in fact written the diaries of Arthur Bremer, whose wounding of George Wallace put Wallace out of the 1972 Presidential race, where he might well have siphoned considerable votes away from Hunt's employer Richard Nixon.

He proved it with literary analysis, something he did very well, and something which especially in recent years I found very interesting. Another of his most impressive essays was a long re-evaluation, again in the NYRB, of William Dean Howells. And it occurred to me when reading it, and more recently when trying to get back into Howells, that Vidal's championing of his talents lay as much in self-awareness as in retrospective championing. Howells, of course, was known in his time as The Dean Of American Letters, and as both editor and writer was a campaigning journalist and astute literary critic. He also championed the fiction of realism—as any students who have read The Rise Of Silas Latham, which is really the only one of his novels still in currency, will know. Howells wrote humour and farces, indeed some satire, and it was hard for me when reading the essay not to think that perhaps Vidal saw himself in Howells, and saw his fate to be remembered for one, or maybe a few, novels of historical realism. It also occurred to me how much different his career would have been in the 19^th century, where his status among society would have precluded his need to chase celebrity. I wonder whether, a century from now (assuming people are still reading), Burr or Lincoln will be read, whether they will be texts set in history classes, exist to be read solely in American Studies classes as artefacts, or whether it will be only Vidal's bitchy TV videos that will be available to a new generation. Yesterday I watched Vidal narrate a documentary on the growth of the National Security State, and realised how different Washington had become for him since his youth. It made me realise how much I had enjoyed his work, and how much I had learned from it. All the self-indulging egotism in the world can't take that away.

AN IRRESISTIBLE TARGET APOLOGY

The posts have grown few on the ground lately, but there is a very good reason for this: I am doing play by play commentary on Olympic basketball for the BBC, with the British former NBA player John Amaechi, and we are doing three games each day. Between the preparation, the actual time broadcasting, the fighting through the huge crowds channeled through a gigantic mall before they can get into the Olympic Park, and the trying to care for my grated larynx, there hasn't been time to actually clear my head and write.

If you'd like to hear the commentary, the BBC has shown quite a bit of it on BBC2 and BBC3, but every game is available online and usually via red button. Most of the games we do are also taken by the host broadcast feed, and thus are available to countries without their own commentators at the game. We are also being used by Channel 9 Australia for quite a few games live in Australia. And if none of that works, there are always ways in this wonderful age of the interweb.

I have discovered an unpublished article I wrote with some bitchiness about the reaction to winter olympic coverage ten years ago, and I may be able to publish that, and speaking of bitchiness, I would like to do an appreciation of Gore Vidal, when I have time to do him justice.

CHARLES COLSON: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Charles Colson, Nixon's hatchet man turned born-again evangelical and prison reformer, is up at the Guardian online. You can link to it here, and hope to see it in tomorrow's print edition.

If I'd had more space I would have liked to detail more of Colson's dirty tricks--the one that stands out involves the assassination of George Wallace. When Arthur Bremer shot Wallace, Nixon was taped asking Colson about Bremer's politics. 'Well, he's going to be a left-winger by the time we get through,' Colson told him, and explainedhow Bremer might be framed. 'Good, keep at that,' exclaimed the President. One of the key elements of evidence against Bremer was his diary. In a long review of E. Howard Hunt's oeuvre in the New York Review of Books, Gore Vidal pointed out similarities between Hunt's spy novels and Bremer's diaries and argued convincingly that Hunt was their author. Of course, it was Colson who had brought his college friend Hunt into the White House in the first place. The pattern of creating a false leftist identity echoed Lee Oswald, while the diary was a major element of the case against Sirhan Sirhan. Just saying.

There are a couple of things missing from what I wrote, partly because the paper wanted an extended explanation of his role in Watergate, which took away part of the space from details of the rest of his life. It was a shame not to include the acronym for Nixon's Committee To Re-Elect The President, the wonderfully apposite, CREEP.

I was fascinated by a couple of links. Colson's dad did work for the SEC, but attended law school at night, and the family moved around Boston peripatetically because his mother, nicknamed Dizzy, was a sprendthift. Eventually, his father practiced law, and Colson went to Brown & Nichols. But he later claimed to have turned down a scholarship offer from Harvard to attend Brown on Naval ROTC, which seems somewhat unlikely. Of course it was at Brown that he and Hunt first hooked up.

Colson's work on Saltonstall's 1960 campaign was his first major 'dirty trick', though he claimed to have learned the basics as a teenager working on Republican governor Robert Bradford's re-election. He formed a bogus committee to link Saltonstall (Massachusetts' Republican senator) with John Kennedy (the Democratic candidate for President against Nixon). He may have had Kennedy's connivance in this, although JFK was always going to win his home state. But Colson claimed to have sent the committee's literature to 'every Irish name in the phone book', and it worked. Saltonstall ran well ahead of Nixon and won re-election to Senate.

When he and a partner set up their law practice in Boston and Washington, one of their first clients was Raytheon, a major defense contractor, a connection likely made while Colson was working with Saltonstall. But they added Raytheon's former counsel to the firm, along with the former head of the SEC, whom Colson may have known through his father. These two partners were so important, that their names (Hannah and Gadsby) replaced Colson and Morin as the firm's name. Raytheon's chairman, Thomas Phillips, would be crucial in Colson's later conversion.

The paper was also strangely reticient in labelling Colson's biographer, Jonathan Aitken, a 'disgraced' former cabinet minister--even the Telegraph called him that. I wrote that Colson might have provided Aitken with a road map to redemption (and a cynic might say to non-profit profit). Aitken would have been well aware of Colson's life after writing his 1993 hagiography of Nixon, and he followed in Colson's footsteps--highly promoted prison memoir, non-profit Christian prison reform etc--so closely that his 2005 biography of Colson could be read as an exercise in self-justification, if not congratulation. I especially loved Aitken's revealing choice of the adjective 'maniacal' to describe Colson's energy.

I didn't get a chance to go into some of Colson's positions, the most interesting of which were his efforts to form links with conservative Roman Catholic groups--something which was anathema t0 many of his evangelical followers and partners. He never sought a high political profile, like so many of often-disgraced and unabashedly political Christian conservative leaders--but he did manage to express his disappointment with the Obama presidency, saying the President had turned into 'an ideologue'--something repulsive to fundamentalists. Among his 30 books was one he co-wrote about intelligent design.

Colson was always one of the more irritating of the Nixon flunkies, though, as Greg Marmalarde would say, each in their own way was outstanding. In Colson's case it was the horn-rimmed glasses and pipe, like a character from Mad Men, and the avuncular face full of contempt for outsiders. It was a Scandinavian face not unlike my father's at the same time, when he was getting jowly, and I found that disconcerting. Colson famously had a Green Beret saying mounted behind his desk: 'if you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow'. Like many of those who display similar bravado, when the crush came, he followed with abandon.

The big problem with writing this obit, and being respectful to the dead as I always try to be in print, is that a natural cynicism takes over. I tried to express that through Daniel Ellsberg's reluctance to forgive and forget (John Dean was more forgiving). Colson's conversion came at just the right time to make excuses for a plea bargain, and avoid giving testimony. He seemed to live pretty well in his world of non-profit 'ministries', much of the funding of which came from tax dollars--at one point courts ruled against public funds paying for prison programmes that excluded those unwilling to be born again, and one thinks of many of those joining such programmes in the same way hungry men sing hymns in Salvation Army soup kitchens. I wasn't about to denigrate Colson's work--but in many ways it seemed he was propagating the same ideological agenda as he had in the Nixon White House, with a kinder, gentler front, but, as we have seen from the attitude of those born-again to those who are not, a kinder gentler enemies list as well.