Read Online The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal - Free Book Online Page B

“jolly aristocratic” speech patterns. I doubt if FDR would have called Pug “old top” (though when my father was in the administration the president used to address him, for some obscure reason, as “Brother Vidal”).
    Also, Mr. Wouk makes strange assumptions. For instance, FDR “wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt, and he also imitated his booming manly manner; but a prissy Harvard accent made this heartiness somewhat ridiculous.” The pince-nez was worn by a good many people in those days, but if FDR was consciously imitating anyone it would have been his mentor, the pince-nezed Woodrow Wilson. T. Roosevelt’s voice was not booming but thin and shrill. FDR’s accent was neither prissy nor Harvard but Dutchess County and can still be heard among the American nobles now, thank God, out of higher politics.
    With extraordinary ease, Mr. Wouk moves from husband to wife to sons to daughter, and the narrative never falters. His reconstruction of history is painless and, I should think, most useful to simple readers curious about the Second War. Yet there is a good deal of pop-writing silliness. We get the Mirror Scene (used by all pop-writers to tell us what the characters look like): “the mirror told her a different story, but even it seemed friendly to her that night: it showed…” We get the Fag Villain. In this case an American consul at Florence who will not give the good Jew Jastrow a passport because “people don’t see departmental circulars about consuls who’ve been recalled and whose careers have gone
poof
!” Sumner Welles is briefly glimpsed as a villian (and those who recall the gossip of the period will know why).
    Then, of course, there is the problem of Mr. Wouk and sex. Daughter Madeline rooms with two girls and “both were having affairs—one with a joke writer, the other with an actor working as a bellhop. Madeline had found herself being asked to skulk around, stay out late, or remain in her room while one or another pair copulated…. She was disgusted. Both girls had good jobs, both dressed with taste, both were college graduates. Yet they behaved like sluts….” But then to Madeline, “sex was a delightful matter of playing with fire, but enjoying the blaze from a safe distance, until she could leap into the hallowed white conflagration of a bridal night. She was a middle class good girl, and not in the least ashamed of it.”
    Incidentally, Mr. Wouk perpetuates the myth that the SS were all fags. This is now an article of faith with many uneducated Americans on the ground that to be a fag is the worst thing that could befall anyone next to falling into the hands of a fag sadist, particularly the SS guards who were as “alike as chorus boys…with blond waved hair, white teeth, bronzed skin, and blue eyes.” Actually the SS guards in 1939 were not particularly pretty; they were also not fags. Hitler had eliminated that element.
    Mr. Wouk’s prose is generally correct if uninspired. The use of the ugly verb “shrill” crops up in at least half the best-sellers under review and is plainly here to stay. Also, I suppose we must stop making any distinction between “nauseous” and “nauseated.” The book ends with Pearl Harbor in flames and…yes, you’ve guessed it. The stars! “Overhead a clear starry black sky arched” (at least the sky was overhead and not underfoot), “with Orion setting in the west, and Venus sparkling in the east…. The familiar religious awe came over him, the sense of a Presence above this pitiful little earth. He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief.”
    The films
Since You Went Away
and
The Best Years of Our Life
come to mind; not to mention all those
March of Times
in the Trans-Lux theaters of the old republic as it girded itself