36
GORE
VIDAL
American writers have ever wanted to appear intelligent. Many of
course were - and are - not. But those few who could compare
in civilization with their European counterparts chose, protectively,
to hide their wit as tribute to Demos. "Ahm just a farmer," drawled
Faulkner, while Stephen Spender tells of meeting Hemingway in
Spain during the Civil War and listening to him talk intelligently
of Stendhal until, realizing that he had been sounding literary and
un-American, he quickly reverted to his usual bullying baby talk.
Our writers are like city-bred politicians forced through gerrymander
to represent rural constituencies.
Part of Norman Mailer's craftiness was to assume early on the
Hemingway life style and manner because it was familiar to the
public (and since so little is known to the minority which reads
newspapers, an ambitious writer can hardly be faulted for wanting
to identify himself with a known archetype like Hemingway, Faulk–
ner, Fitzgerald). Consequently the public has been charmed that
the boozing, the brawling, the marrying, all that they have been
taught by the press to believe is the necessary behavior of a major
writer continues now in Norman, heir to Papa. Unfortunately,
Mailer's intelligence keeps breaking through and one senses that
beneath the mask he elects to wear there is a nice Jewish boy (his
own phrase) playing desperately at being a Goyisher slob, and
hoping that his liver - not to mention nerves - will survive the
strain. One wonders what Norman would have been like had he
been himself. Faced with much the same problem, Saul Bellow in
his first two books tried to write as if traditional English was entirely
natural to his ear, then, sensing perhaps that he was playing a
part, he shifted ground, began to use his Jewishness to make a lan–
guage and an art all his own.
Once, to annoy Norman, I asked him why Jewish American
writers wrote such bad prose (most of them do, not that anyone
cares). Norman took in stride my crude lumping together.
"Be–
cause," he said, "they hear such bad English when they're grow–
ing up."
Gide thought falsity of tone the one thing fatal to a writer.
Yet perhaps it is not possible to survive in a society which hates
the examination of anything except machinery without becoming a
clown, a monster, a performer willing to play any role in order to
