38
GORE VIDAL
noticed that the one book of mine the young read voluntarily
is
Messiah,
largely because
it
has the look of science fiction as well as
dealing with what might be the next world religion.
Significantly the only dead writer much admired today is Her–
man Hesse, who is forever journeying to the East, translating Zen
for the West, and creating protagonists who are young, troubled,
marked in a way that only the initiated can see - and what sensi–
tive young person in a suburb of Cincinnati does not believe that
he, too, has been singled out, and finds reassurance in Hesse's pages
that there are others - though not too many -like himself?
To serve the solipsism of youth has always been a short cut to
glory. But though Hesse is not as much to my taste as Thomas
Mann (no longer read at all as far as I can determine), he was at
least authentic and authenticity is the most one can ask of a writer.
Certainly lack of authenticity has made most contemporary work
unbearable. When William Styron asked me what I thought of the
short stories in the first issues of the
Paris Review
I said, unkindly
but accurately, "They are rejects from
The Saturday Evening Post."
At the time I thonght it funny - but now think it sad - that
after our war so lllany nicely-brought-up boys would w.ant, for a
time at least, to play at being Artists and start little magazines in
Paris, because isn't that what they
all
did at the end of the First
War? Yes, they did. So why not do something else?
Looking back, one can now see that a whole generation set out
to imitate an earlier generation, a very strange thing to do - and
not just the untalented: even our good writers deliberately put on
the masks of their predecessors while those who chose to be them–
selves, like John Horne Burns, had a bad time of it. Yet whenever
I think of the authentic I think of the clumsy but passionate Burns
or the meticulous Paul Bowles creating his own landscape and peo–
pling it with characters never seen before in our literature. One
feels that those two needed to do what they did - and for that
matter Hesse, Tolkien, Golding are equally authentic and, like them
or not, this wholeness is what literature is all about, and something
quite remote from
all
those portentous renderings of The American
Experience when wife went to bed with best friend on a campus
last summer and, oh, the pain and wonder of being Jewish!
I will not adapt
Slaughterhouse Five,
I decide, crumpling the
