Gore Vidal is quoted as saying
“…American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like [Ernest] Hemingway and not seen the joke?” – from United States – Essays 1952-1992
What exactly did he mean by this? Hemingwayis (so far as I can tell) well regarded as a writer.
Hemingway himself would have dismissed Hemingway as bullshit, and would have gleefully disparaged all the high school English teachers who thought he was high literature.
Without going so far as to dismiss Hemingway as “bullshit” outright, I will note that his writing style has often been considered extremely mockable. The late Alan Coren’s Hemingway parodies are a case in point.
However, I’m not sure that American esteem for Hemingway can fairly be attributed to “humorlessness”. IIRC, for example, Dorothy Parker wrote admiringly of Hemingway’s works, and she was kind of known for having a sense of humor.
What it means is that Gore Vidal was a dick.
Tell him, “Don’t worry, it tolls for thee.”
Any “extreme” or even simply clearly identifiable style of art is ripe for parody and caricature.
Hemingway used his style to flatten out the narrative and try to reduce it to the Big Themes. Gore Vidal was all about multi-layered writing that was sarcastic, cynical, ironic and loaded with subtext. Easy to see why a bomb-thrower like Vidal would take shots at Hemingway.
Yeah, he also said of Roman Polanski’s rape of a child “I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s being taken advantage of?”
His grave is within a block of my house, I keep meaning to get my dog over there so I can take a picture of her shitting on his grave.
THIS^ I wouldn’t be surprised if Vidal was just reacting to some fans taking Hemingway too seriously, recall the parody copmmercials “most interesting man in the world”.
To be fair to him Vidal had some interesting insights and points of view, but a lot was just smug ivory tower intellectual crap.
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To be fair to him Vidal had some interesting insights and points of view, but a lot was just smug ivory tower intellectual crap.
[/QUOTE]
Though he hated academia and the intellectual elite as well. Other than Susan Sarandon and Joanne Woodward/Paul Newman I’m not really sure who he did like.
Vidal was a brilliant troll, but a troll no less. He seemed devoid of any kind of sentimentality or compassion and he loved any comment that would get a rise, whether it was 9-11 conspiracy or calling Hemingway a hack or Polanski’s victim a young whore or writing a “good riddance” obituary of his old enemy William F. Buckley and trashing the terminally ill Christopher Hitchens (who he had once been close friends with- they fell out over the Iraq War and the Clintons). He was just an incredibly bitter man all around, and by his own words “Whenever a friend succeeds, I die a little”.
His greatest vitriol was probably for Truman Capote, who he was briefly friends with, then frenemies, then all out enemies and later sued and trashed at any opportunity. When Capote died Vidal said “He finally made a good career move”.
In his last few decades Vidal was a literary Norma Desmond, rattling around his mansion and obsessed with his own greatness but pretty much forgotten by the public (Lincoln was his last really big bestseller). I’ve described his novels before as mechanically impressive and clever but without a soul. I think Capote’s few works will still be read long after Gore’s much bigger output is all out of print.
I think that there’s something that you should understand which goes beyond the fact that Vidal was a jerk. People tend to assume that if you look at the standard list of great works of art in any given artistic field (say, the top one or two hundred of them) and if you look at someone who has experienced all of them and can write deep, interesting commentaries on many of them (and we will refer to such a person henceforth as a critic), such a person will like all the items in that standard list of great works of art. In my experience, this is almost never true. It doesn’t work in any field of art - books, movies, poetry, painting, sculpture, whatever. What happens is that if you ask such a critic to name their favorite works of art in their chosen field, they will name many from the standard list. They will add some that are less well known which are more rarely considered great works (i.e., works with cult reputations). But they will leave a few items from the standard list of great works off. If you ask them why, they will admit (perhaps reluctantly) that they just don’t understand what anyone else sees in those works. Being a good critic doesn’t mean that you agree with the standard critical opinions about the standard great works. Some you will simply not like.
The only difference with Vidal is that he felt it necessary to trash anyone disagreeing with him.
There’s a new documentary about Vidal’s final years called The United States of Amnesia. I haven’t seen it (it’s still on the film festival circuit), but it’s gotten good buzz.
Well summarized, you crypto-fascist*.
*I think this is what Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. on live TV…obviously just kidding.
Vidal was eruditer than us, and pissy about it. His work walked a line.
Hemingway’s writing was not funny, by intent and by style. And Hemingway sought to embody an idea of Manliness. Both aspects would be part of a big red cape to a bully like Vidal.
More of Vidal’s one line lit-crit, quoted in this piece by Hitchens:
Few would argue that Buckley’s essays were those of a literary heavyweight (I don’t even know Buckley would have argued that), but Vidal dismissed Updike and to a degree Mailer (who he had a famously stormy personal past with) as well. Hitchens went on to say it well:
‘A sour old Queen’.
To borrow from his own style.