Chez Madame Verdurin: the view from Chester Square

Gore Vidal

Vladimir Nabokov affected a perfect indifference when his novels were ?raised or dispraised; but attack his learn- ing, 'and I reach for my dictionary'. In this at least, I am much like the late Black Swan °f Lake Leman. What others think of one's ttOvels is their business; but what they have t° saY about the substance of one's essays continues to be the writer's business. The latest collection's* peculiar reception in England, England, began, actually, in New York 'Iagazine where Mr Auberon Waugh was !llow°ecause? — ed to review the book. Although — Mr Waugh is unknown in the United States, he managed to create quite a Stir. At the time the review was published, I Ivas a candidate for the Democratic Mination for the United States Senate r°rO California. Polls showed that I had, Potentially, 30 per cent of the vote. Since there were 11 candidates in the field, I had a chance of winning. Suddenly, Mr Waugh's ;view was being passed around the state. bie°Ple were startled to read that my pro- s'ero 'is really very simple: that he prefers de)( with his own gender, and most people private Since I have never discussed my vilvate life in public, how could Mr Waugh possibly know what I prefer? Exactly how srch damage he did me in the election I „all leave to the courts to determine. I s'sPect a good bit. Although I did come se- °Ild with more than half a million votes, I got less than 30 per cent of the vote. kAfter this intrusion upon an election, Mr e08h then tried to discredit — a word he withs me as a critic. `Vidal's obsession homosexuality has made him not only `f.` Unreliable witness but also a bore. Thus, disci Gore Vidal, Edmund Wilson is dokreclhed as a critic because he once ,.. whether a homosexualist [at least or Waugh 40,. Waugh has taken to using my ugly As'llfa] could ever be a great literary artist.' ken r as I know, Wilson was never on `',rd as saying that no homosexualist ,111d be a great writer; nor do at any 117,19t discredit Wilson in an essay where I 'Ise him as our greatest critic. wi, did write: `It is disquieting to find Arson, in the Thirties (having admired ra'Ttst and Gide) quite unable to accept the „that a fairy could be a major artist.' Wsorte KeY Phrase here is 'in the Thirties' (a of diary that he kept in that decade as as the title of the book that I was iTrTtled The Second American Revolution 4i riI h e US but Pink Star and Yellow like in the UK 'because Brits just don't reading about American politics'.

writing about). Although Wilson had been going on and on about fags, I then describe in the next sentence, omitted by Mr Waugh, how Wilson came, most admirably, to the defence of Thornton Wilder when he was being smeared as a fag by one of the Auberon Waughs of the day.

Mr Waugh is a parochial English writer (tautologies gush from my pen!) who has made his little name with a cheerful lowbrow column in Private Eye where he treats actual figures as if they were characters in fiction. This can be good fun when he puts on motley and bells; and is granted fool's licence. But when he tries to get above his cheery station in, for example,

these cheerful pages, it is plain that Mr Waugh does not know much about anything. He simply has Opinions. Worse, he has managed to combine the reckless in- solence of his parvenu father with the literary art of his sainted mother. The result is an on-going public failure of a sort that enchants the English quite as much as it mystifies the American observer. He is cur- rently involved in a libel suit in England. Once he is free of that case, I shall sue for libel in America.

What has gone wrong? In the Forties, when I first appeared on the literary scene, England was roughly divided between the cavaliers at Horizon and the roundheads at Scrutiny. As a foreigner, I did not take sides. I was also delighted that books tend- ed to be reviewed as books. Where the American reviewer has always wanted to

know if the author of the book is really a Good Person (if he is, the book is good; if not . . .), the English reviewer just tried to describe the book that he had read.

It is no secret that for half a century, Madame Verdurin has been the constant muse of American book-chat. In her crowded salon, no one knows who or what anything is. Good writers are thought bad; bad writers good and whatever can be got wrong is got wrong. Publicity is the only measurable coin of this realm — along with coin of the realm. Now, to my horror, Madame Verdurin has set herself up in London. Where there was once a more or less agreed-upon hierarchy for cavaliers and roundheads alike, there is now Verdurinian confusion. Worse, there seem to be no new literary editors capable of bringing up short the ambitious book-chatter who will begin a review (as one did in the US some years ago): 'Although Bernard Shaw is a bad playwright, some of his musical criticism is good.' In fact, any provocative statement need not be submitted to the test of true or false or moot. All is assertion; nothing is demonstration.

Now let us take a tour of Madame Ver- durin's `tastefully appointed' London salon in — where else? Chester Square. Here comes Mr Duncan Fallowell* with the canapes or is he — are he? the canapes?

Private Eye calls him 'creepy'. He has some biographical chat to tell the company: Vidal's 'first novel Williwaw appeared in 1946. The equally flaccid The City and The Pillar . . .' Let us stop here. We are being assured that Williwaw and The City and The Pillar are much alike in tone, and that

each is 'flaccid' (wanting vigour and energy, limp, feeble). At the risk of causing Mr Fallowell to perjure himself — or read two books rather quickly — it is plain that he has read neither. One of the first of the

World War H novels, Williwaw is about as flaccid as Stephen Crane's The Open Boat, which had influenced its composition. Or as that old meanie John Coleman wrote when this 'classic' was reissued a few years ago (I quote from scarred memory): 'It is not deceptively simple, it is simple.'

The City and The Pillar is written in the standard American prose of that era -

gray, spare, literal. Although I don't think

much of the book, it has more than passed Cyril Connolly's ten year test: The City and The Pillar has been in print for 34 years and, a few months ago, there was a new French translation — flaccidity does not en- joy this sort of longevity. Perhaps Mr Fallowell would be more at home with the adjective 'tumescent'. The canape-bearer then quotes what he would lead us to believe is a statement either from me or the publishers or both to the effect that the book is 'the first American work to deal sympathetically with homosexuality, etc'; actually, this was from a review in the New York Herald Tribune by Steven Marcus at the time of the revised edition of 1965. Al- though the book is said to have had a succes de scandale in 1948, 'one never comes across anyone having heard of it at the time'. Could it be that One doesn't know anyone who could read and who was around at the time? True, Alice didn't hear of it because she was into, as she'd now say, astrology for most of '48; but I promise you that both Bruce and Chuck were successfully scan- dalised. Actually, if One just glances at a few more or less current memoirs and col- lections of letters (Chips Channon, Anais Nin, Harold Acton, Tennessee Williams, John Lehmann — the book's English publisher, Noel Coward), one will learn that in 1948 the author was more than 'a young American who wandered around Europe with a tennis racquet'. Giggles at the far end of the salon. Madame Verdurin smiles; and makes a mental note to order from Hatchards, Hill The Collected Poems of Colin Wilson, another Forties favourite, about to stage a come-back in Chester Square.

In a recent pontification, Norman Mailer adverts to the three young literary stars of 1948 (Other Voices, Other Rooms, The Naked and The Dead and The City and The Pillar were among that year's best-sellers), and he describes how people tended to be a lot more interested in Mailer, Capote and Vidal than we were in them. He now thinks that this was not good for us as writers. Mailer is not always wrong.

One now hits his stride. 'He turned pro- perly to novels for the first time in 1964 when it dawned on him that script-writing for films and television, which in the Fifties was all he had been doing (plus the odd review), would not guarantee him the im- mortality he rather thought he was entitled to.' This sentence should be rather savoured.

Not only does One get all his facts wrong but he has done what no reviewer should ever do: he affects to know motive. There is no earthly way for anyone — even Madame's all-knowing One — to know whether or not anything 'dawned on me' or whether or not the return to the novel was inspired by a desire for immortality. The first rule of criticism is never to impute (no, not impugn, impute) motive. You can't know anyone's motive; and to speculate is idle. But we are now in fiction-land. In the real Fifties, I was best known in the United States as a playwright. Visit to a Small Planet (which Alice loved) and The Best Man (which Bruce and Chuck never miss whenever the movie version is shown on television) ran for years on Broadway, and were produced all round the world, except in England. 'Too American, Gore dear,' said Binkie. 'Couldn't you just change the setting from — what is it? a political con- vention; the English loathe American politics! — to, let's say, a board meeting of some, you know, international company?'

I don't know how much One gets about the world but there is no produced English or American playwright so obscure that he is not known to audiences in Amsterdam and Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow; while there is no novelist so celebrated that much

of anyone has ever heard of him excePt, perhaps, in the Eastern bloc. So if you rather want immortality and you are a sue' cessful playwright, you will stay in the theatre. After all, there is no novelist in the world today as famous as Mr Harold Pinter, — or written about at such 'serious' and even serious length. On the other hand' there is no dramatist today who commands the attention of those ultimate auteurs of our sad era, Fellini, Bergman, and CO' pany. A highly successful playwright of the Fifties, with immortal longings, would have stayed in the theatre; or gone into fd.r°, direction, which I could have done but did not do — and poor Mailer did do. One does make a powerful point: 'He is, not at all comfortable on the emotional plane ... and this is his major, probably fatal weakness as a novelist.' This .1s devastating, of course. But I hope that 1° my new novel Duluth — a hymn to Mar" riage and the family and, yes, human goodness on the highest emotional CO' corde — I have at last broken through the restrictive ice and got to the cold wate', underneath. Oh, dear! Here comes one of Madame Verdurin's oldest habitues. Mr Alb', Symons is a hack journalist half as oldf time; he was a friend of one of Colley Cr. ber's friends, as Madame always rennt1° us. Permanent fringe to whatever is the C°,rs rent fringe, I believe that Mr Symons s competence is the detective storY.

Mr Symons reviewed my last collection °

essays in the TLS; he had good words for Only one piece, 'The Hacks of Academe', an attack on a number of American school teachers who write what they take to be literary criticism. I could not think why Mr Symons approved of this particular piece, which was every bit as bad as the others, until I recalled that it had first appeared in the TLS. Plainly, Mr Symons is not about to question the taste of any editor who allows him to write book-chat.

Now Mr Symons is on the attack again. He cannot fathom my political essays, of which there are six. He is not alone. Over the Years I have always found it startling that politics, economics, history and religion seldom if ever intrude in English book-chat. Essentially reviews of writers tend to be gossipy and personal just as the novels that they most admire tend to be gossipy too. In Mr Symons's first paragraph, he takes a deep breath and announces, 'Vidal is a lightweight ' Well, as the Duke of Well- ington said on a not dissimilar occasion of confused identity, 'Anyone who believes that will believe anything.' In Mr Symons's Second paragraph, courage mustered, as it were, he repeats: 'Vidal is, it must be em- phasised, a lightweight ....' Definitely, in tx°tal darkness, a nervous whistle. Then, as Symons stammers to a close, 'And like rlightweights, Mr Vidal relies on fancy °t"rk' etc.' Amongst primitives, repeti- tion is not only a surrogate for argument but, in time, truth itself. Actually, if Mr Symons were a less clumsy writer, he would five a number of examples of my so-called lghtweightedness and then, in the last line, deliver, for the first time, the surprise punch. Through assertion rather than demonstration, Mr Symons tries to make the case that I simply assert and do not demonstrate. This is transference with some kerigeance. 'He seems often less nowledgeable than knowing, deals in generalisations that might sound good on a Leelevision chat show, and chunters on Al",;(,i,lesslY about what he calls at one point 6,`" Conspicuous infelicity same-sex sex.' Of nineteen pieces, one chunters on about Pnosexuality (I suspect that Mr Symons `',,oes not know that the `homo' in homosexuality' does not come from the tri atin for 'man' but from the Greek for same') and New York's Jewish neo- hisnservatives. One discusses Isherwood and p,„,.kincl. One demonstrates that all sex is ouutics. And that is that. The subject which tio obsesses Chester Square does get men- pp, ned, in passing, when I deal with Fitz- gerald and Edmund Wilson because in of the books that I was reviewing the j2ciPal was often in a panic on the sub- -/314,, which I found more funny than not. P011,s leaves fourteen essays dealing with Dr inks, children's books, movies, the novel v deas. Topics that are non-starters chez erdurin. cleW„ hen I refer to American English bevartrnent novels (Serious Novels not to forread but taught), he writes, 'One looks names and titles ... but doesn't find them.' Now Mr Symons has read — or he has alleged that he has read — an essay of mine called 'American Plastic: The Matter of Fiction'. Admittedly this is a difficult piece for an English book-reviewer to grasp but if he was able to follow the argument, five of these Serious Novelists are examined in great (perhaps too great for Mr Symons) detail; and thirty-two books are analysed. Elsewhere, he wonders why I don't name some of the academic bureaucrats that I take to task. I do, of course — poor Pro- fessor Bruccoli is closely examined. But didn't Mr Symons get his fill in 'The Hacks of Academe', which he so much admired? I mentioned eighteen academic critics by name in that piece; and analysed the works of seven. Since the sort of essay that I write is part of an on-going dialogue with a cer- tain public, I don't find it necessary, with each piece, to reinvent the wheel.

Mr Symons would like the reader to believe that when I attack the F. Scott Fitzgerald Academic Industry, I am savagely attacking Fitzgerald. It is true that apropos the F.S.F. Academic Industry, I did make the point that since Fitzgerald is not a major writer, the whole enterprise is somewhat loony. Naturally, this caused distress in certain quarters. In fact, one of Madame's guests demanded, rhetorically, that if Fitzgerald wasn't a major writer when he was in Paris in the Twenties, then who was? Let me answer with some names of those who were more or less contem- porary with Fitzgerald and who were, more or less, in Paris at the time: Proust, de Montherlant, Gide, Sartre, Colette, Camus, Celine — not to mention the ex- patriate Mrs Wharton and the expatriate Mr Joyce and the expatriate Mr Ford Madox Ford, the best novelist in English of the first half of this century. Anyone who thinks that Fitzgerald belongs in that galere is outside literature. He is, also, chez Ver- durin, looking at pictures in an art gallery. Mr Symons notes that 'An article on Scott Fitzgerald's notebooks and cor- respondence says (what a verb!), with little charity and less acduracy, that Fitzgerald was "barely literate" and that The Great Gatsby failed and that was the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's true that Fitzgerald couldn't spell, but in no other way did he lack literacy (what a noun!), and Gatsby was a failure only in earning less than Fitz- gerald's two early novels'. Well, that is ex- actly what I said. But Mr Symons is not about to report me accurately. This is to be a smear-job; and gaily he smears away. I make three references to The Great Gatsby. First, `Scott's third and best novel, The Great Gatsby, did not make money.' So he had to write for the movies. Second, I am using a military metaphor, 'The Great Gatsby, a small but perfect operation, com- parable, say, to Grant's investiture of Fort Donelson.' Third, 'But when Fitzgerald finally wrote a distinguished novel, the au- dience was not interested. What, after all, is the moral to Gatsby? Since there seemed to be none, The Great Gatsby failed and that was the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald, glamorous best seller of yesteryear, bold chronicler of girls who kissed.' What is be- ing sent up here is not The Great Gatsby or Fitzgerald but the culture that had admired his two bad novels and then ignored his good one.

Whenever possible — and even I should have thought, whenever impossible — Mr Symons changes the meaning of my text. For instance, he tells us that 'in a piece about the movies, for which the author shows an affection rarely extended to the novel ...'. Since most of the literary essays are celebrations of fiction writers (Sciascia, V.S. Pritchett, Isherwood, Peacock et al.), he has again distorted meaning and overlooked a conclusion about movies, drawn from Mary McCarthy's comment that due to the absence of a spokesman or chorus in a film (as opposed to the recor- ding camera), 'for the first time, humanity has found a narrative medium that is in- capable of thought.' For someone who is making the case for the novel of ideas, this is not exactly a Valentine to the movies.

Chez Verdurin there is a tendency to transfer one's own faults to others. Mr Symons finds my 'passion for generalisa- tion which will not stand five minutes' con- sideration, is apparent throughout, whether Vidal is saying that "the tone of the Serious Novel is always solemn ... irony and wit are unknown" (Bellow, Greene, Powell, Waugh?)'. Mr Symons knows that when I write, in context, about the Serious Novel (carefully capitalised for the dummies), I am referring to the sort of middlebrow novel that appeals so much to our hacks of academe, none of whom, incidentally, regards as serious Greene or Powell, and only recently have they begun to fathom Waugh. But let us continue with those `Your wife claims that you have been sexually harassing her.' generalisations that he will not give five minutes to : 'or that the young in 1980 watch, discuss and dream movies rather than read novels'. This is not a generalisa- tion. This is a fact, to which any American teacher will glumly testify. 'Or that American housing has become so expensive that it is no longer possible for three genera- tions of a family to live in the same house.' Due to the high cost of mortgages, only 6 per cent of the population can now afford to buy housing of any kind; while the ma- jority of the rising generation will not have the money to rent, much less buy. 'One of the more strikingly ludicrous suggestions is that Theodore Roosevelt, Churchill and Mussolini were all as much journalists as politicians.' I thought that I demonstrated this 'suggestion' nicely, if briefly. But even if I did not, the journalist-politician aspect of the three deserves more serious con- sideration than Mr Symons's fatuous Peter Simplicities — of the 'Winston Churchill is the Greatest Englishman' sort. To which the cruel American answer: 'Of course, he is.'

T n The Times there was the headline: 1 'Soft-hearted All-American Boy'. 'What does this mean?' asked a polite Russian zoologist as we dined on goat in the Gobi Desert (someone had sent him a copy of The Times from Ulan Bator). I said, `Nothing.' The reviewer, Mr Peter Ackroyd, found the essays 'run-of-the-mill stuff. Ah, England's bright angelic mills! Apparently I go on far too long about L. Frank Baum, author of the Oz books. I don't think so. But it is true that most English reviewers were bored by the piece because they were not brought up, as Americans were, on those books. Personal- ly, I read carefully anything about the children's books that are popular in any country at any time: understand them and you will begin to get the range of the natives. It is no secret that the skeleton key to the current generation of English writers is to be found in the works of Miss Enid Blyton.

To Mr Ackroyd, I am 'a wholly American writer.' (Surely, no news to anyone.) 'He has, for example, the American habit of wearing whatever learn- ing he possesses upon his sleeve, his coat, his entire wardrobe.' Here he contradicts Mr Symons who would have the reader believe that I display no learning at all. `There would be nothing wrong with that, of course, if he were another Pound. But his is not knowledge but rather know- ingness, a flip cleverness, which shows no signs of being earned.' This is the Verdurin transference: the merely knowing Mr Ackroyd must transfer to me his own super- ficiality; certainly, it is startling to find that a reviewer of my novel Creation thinks that its author is merely knowing. Whatever the book's value, it is a thorough — even wear- ing — scholarly enterprise. Doubtless, Mr Ackroyd has already forgotten the book that he reviewed but did not, perhaps, read. Anyway, this cleverness 'is easy, and therefore vulgar.' When a journalist uses the word 'vulgar', one cannot help but think of a certain object never to be men- tioned in the house of a hanged man. 'He is very much a native writer, too, in his ap- propriation of European culture — really, on occasions you would think he had in- vented Italy ....' Really, Mr Ackroyd, if you ever get around to reading me, you will find that except for a paragraph in a picture book, I have never written about Italy ex- cept in the essay on Sciascia which you found 'mercilessly dull'. But something is now beginning to emerge in all this confu- sion. It would appear that, chez Verdurin, there is plainly a resentment not only of the current American hegemony but also of the American writer who can 'appropriate European culture' in a way that British writers seldom wanted to do in the past and now cannot do at all because England has drifted too far outside the world's orbit of power. Actually, I have made no such 'ap- propriation'. On the other hand, I do have listening-posts all over Europe and at the risk of creating a panic in London, I know that Madame Verdurin is thinking of spen- ding the next few seasons in Oslo.

One of Madame Verdurin's current favourites is Mr Ian Hamilton, who now knows every widow of the late poet Robert Lowell. This sort of distinction gives him pride of place, as it were, at Chester Square, displacing even the friend of Cib- ber's friend. Yet Mr Hamilton is very much of the Symons school whose ancient school motto is : What ought to be true is true. An example (The Sunday Times): 'It is ge- nuinely engaging at the outset to hear this well-educated journalist (he means me) direct a sneer or two at literary academics — he calls them "squirrels", "essentially fact-collectors" '. Let us stop there. Here is what I wrote: 'But today's literary scholars (in America) are essentially fact-collectors, scholar-squirrels for whom every season's May.' Mr Hamilton carefully breaks the sentence in two (and detaches 'squirrel' from 'scholar') in order to make it sound as if I were an enemy of true scholarship when I am simply opposed to the meaningless ac- cumulation of trivia about minor writers or major writers, for that matter. Now that the Thatcher terror is decimating the island's English departments, many book- chatterers are looking to the west for jobs. Could it be that some of them think that they might curry favour with American Academe by attacking me? Could it be that they are right?

Mr Hamilton continues: 'and holds up for ridicule some dim professor who has toiled for years to collect, say, Scott Fitz- gerald's humblest jottings. The joke here, as Vidal tells it, is that Scott Fitzgerald apart from maybe one novel — wasn't any good.' As earlier demonstrated, none of this reflects what I wrote — as opposed to what I ought to have written. Now Mr Hamiltbn tells us that 'knocking professors is one of his big party-pieces ... We also find out that Vidal has it in not just for scholars ...'. Let us stop there. Of all con- temporary novelists, I am the one who is most obliged to traffic with scholars. I have spent a good many years threading my waY through the past, from the origins of Christianity to those of the American republic. Scholars are quite aware of nlY highly public debt to them. So it is peculiar- ly gratuitous for Mr Hamilton to pretend that my amiable disdain for the scholar- squirrels of the American English depail- ments is a disdain for scholarship itself. But there is nothing like an ill-educated jour- nalist in full cry. `On the matter of scholarship, it is noteworthy that whenever Vidal does a bit of it himself (which isn't very often) • • • The books to one side, what does he think that an examination of Sciascia or of the American constitution is if it is not scholar- ship? In 'The Second American Revolo- tion',. texts by Hamilton, Madison, Jay' Morris, John Adams, Marshall, Jefferson and Lincoln are examined. M°de,„filf, scholars from Tugwell, Burnham to Jensen are quoted; as well as von Herder and MY beloved Herzen while three Supreme Onit decisions are analysed, and • • • Unfor- tunately, no English reviewer would drearnr of taking on so difficult an essay IA,,f Hamilton continues: 'he gets into a state."' excitement which he would find gun! ludicrous in one of his loathed squirrels', Not now the heavy use of adjectives: `ludicrous' for a satirical account of a. search I made for a Fitzgerald screenPlqi; also, note how the 'squirrels' — ag,te separated from the word 'scholar', ' whole point — are by me 'loathed'. ,°

Mr Hamilton is now ready to start telling

Mr

in earnest. 'Elsewhere, Vidal's sch.olea

r, ship is largely a matter of "The last orndeal saw W.H. Auden ..." There is a go°d

of name-dropping and after a bit it begins to grate ....' A few more amples might have been usefulg.raritullitgrr 7

Hamilton does bring up an interesting Point. Apparently, it is not name-dropping hich. Norman Mailer, Tennessee Williams, pawl Bowles, Jack Kerouac and Anthony '01.411 to write about me in their journals and memoirs (to note, at random, some un- bound gifts from publishers) but it is name- droPping if I mention them. This is fatuous. It also presupposes an equality between the reviewer, Mr Hamilton, and the reviewed, myself. There is none. Although literary merit is difficult to deter- !Tune (I should say in Verdurin's England, lroPossible), literary fame — small potatoes the real world — is a fact. When one "II-known writer chooses to record a ,Tteting with another well-known writer, it usual for scholar-squirrels and writers of bock-chat to pay attention. If that's not their job, what is?

oY and large, Edmund Wilson liked the ' ogli sh not at all. He thought the literary ones lazy, shallow and 'knowing'. I tiSagreed. I thought that at their jour- alistic best (Cyril Connolly, say) they com- pensated for their insular sloth with a way Dof writing which beautifully took the place v, thought. He would have none of it. He whited to know — as I do — everything airf they only want to know what they ei;"1dY know and nothing more (this t;:aracteristic is by no means exclusive to Ne writers of the Faery Queendom of the ts(3rth Sea; the Butch Republic to the West \yiquallY rich in fools). In any case, both eb"son and I found fascinating the English ssin with class. Once, we even worked (47 the basis for all English humour; some- tr,..e tries to get above his station either t7211Y or intellectually or sexually and is .TY Put in his place. oar Hamilton milton now plays the class card; hett. t° my 'regular reminders that he is o - stock,' older by far, certainly, than Sines °f his upstart intellectual adversaries.' In -;;_the Phrase 'old stock' does not appear re,ue bookr , there are no 'regular' qiitiders. Mr Hamilton does quote a ehn, ge in which tick off a number of neo- 4,;ervative Jewish publicists in New York Cla,,,,have termed themselves 'The New q is (Mr Hamilton's context implies that kt.wbo labelled them); The New Class F41Ps Israel, the Pentagon, and the a11 .and they launch constant tirades 1nlul homosexualists who are not only hut, but, worst of all, promiscuous. In that 'al, I made a little joke to the effect teiltilheterosexual members of AMerica's t°2' :cldruinling` class go in for promiscuity, secrets but I must not give away the tlass of the old class or the newly middle ` go into shock.' Elsewhere, in my s reference to Auden, I describe how iten1),,,encl an evening lecturing Hannah .t andcl e me on how he was 'upper mid- he 'as because my father was a doctor'. trtin, Was Puzzled. I was amused; and "Ded f h on, as described in the book. So Nate °I- 'regular reminders' of my high ate What Mr Hamilton means is that • As °48ht to Knowsg, o on about the subject, I I don't. Equally, I ought to 'enjoy revealing, or at worst hinting, that (`glamour' authors) were secret homosexuals'; therefore, Mr Hamilton asserts that I do. But, of course, I don't. Mr Hamilton can provide no exam- ple of these darks hints or revelations because there are none. Since Mr and Mrs Fitzgerald themselves go on and on about whether or not Scott is a fairy, a reviewer cannot ignore the subject any more than he can omit Wilson's homosexual fantasies which he describes at length in his report on a nervous breakdown in The Thirties. But that's that. When it comes to this sort of smear job, one must step respectfully aside and allow the school of Private Eye and The Spectator to take over. My interest in homosexuality is neither literary nor per- sonal but political, as I demonstrate in two

of the essays. But then I write in a foreign country; and of another language.

Ordinarily, I would dismiss the Opinions of Chester Square as nothing more than a crude demonstration of The Aristides The Just Effect. For a quarter-century my essays have been praised by English reviewers. Therefore, it is quite understan- dable that revisionists should now want to prove wrong their predecessors. Since I am a compulsive revisionist myself, I can hard- ly complain. But there is something more sinister at work here. There is bad faith. If writers do not even try to describe accurate- ly what they have read, literary standards will cease to exist; and that will be the end. Well, tant pis, as Madame Verdurin likes to say. She never much liked books, anyway.

© Gore Vidal 1982