Myra the Messiah

MYRA BRECKINRIDGE by Gore Vidal. 264 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

"It began upstairs when he tore my clothes off in the closet. Then he raped me standing up with a metal "clothes hanger twisted around my neck, choking me. I could hardly breathe. It was exquisite! Then one thing led to another. Those small attentions a girl like me cherishes ... A lighted cigarette stubbed out on my derriere, a complete beating with his great thick heavy leather belt. . . All the usual fun things."

Is the Olympia Press alive and publishing in Boston? Has literary decency fallen so low--or has fashionable camp risen that high?

This novel brings up such questions because Gore Vidal is a reasonably serious writer: his credentials, if haphazard, are all in order. Although he has taken time out to run for Congress as a Democrat in 1960 and to haunt television panels as a sort of sexy Schlesinger or political Capote, he has always been primarily a working novelist (Julian), playwright (Visit to a Small Planet), and critic (Rocking the Boat).

Nothing in the versatile Vidal's past will quite prepare the reader for Myra Breckinridge. Vidal and his publisher, insisting that the sexual problems of the title character represent a suspense element vital to the novel's enjoyment, coquettishly plead that the book not be reviewed at all. However, anyone who has been to far-off, murky Venice--or just down to the local fag bar--will recognize Myra's true gender long before Vidal coyly pronounces the paradigm. And in all conscience it can be reported that the key to Myra's sexual-identity crisis is about as crucial as the sound track to a stag film.

Power Play. Which indeed the plot resembles. Myra is actually a Myron who has had a Christine Jorgensen-type operation and is passing through Hollywood, trying to rape havoc upon unwary heterosexual males. To Myra, sex involves power play, with more power than play; the book's most harrowing scene is Myra's cruel seduction and humiliating buggery, with an artificial penis, of an all-American male.

What makes the novel a little more than a flighty drag is Vidal's stylish and erudite sense of humor, his sharp pokes at intellectually provocative themes, and his spoofing of literary forms: the book, he says, is really "a send-up on the nouvelle roman." In that vein, he offers metaphor after metaphor based upon far-out late-show conceits ("I whispered like Phyllis Thaxter in Thirty Seconds over Tokyo"). And he makes it Myra's thesis that the flicks of 1931 to 1945, if not the high point of Western culture, were certainly the most formative influence upon anyone who came of age during that "post-Gutenberg and pre-Apocalypse" era.

Bogey to Norman. This is Vidal's personal notion as well. He firmly believes that the screen, not literature, shaped his generation of writers. "Without Bogart," he says, "there could be no Norman Mailer. Without George Arliss," he adds with a Disraeliish gleam, "there wouldn't have been me."

The idea produces a nice, satirical swing in Myra. An even wilder swing, about which Vidal may or may not be serious, is the image of Myra as the symbolic solution for the population explosion. "She is a kind of messiah," says Vidal. In other words, the remedy for overpopulation might be homosexuality.

The novel's subject matter has already produced advance sales of more than 40,000 copies. The thought has even occurred to Vidal that it could make a movie. "I showed Myra to Jane Fonda," he says. "She read it four times, and then said, I don't think I know how to play it.' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.