Unpatriotic Gore

By * R.Z. Sheppard

HOMAGE TO DANIEL SHAYS: Collected Essays by GORE VIDAL 449 pages. Random House. $8.95.

Taps for John Horne Burns (The Gallery), burned out and dead at 36. A volley for Tom Heggen (Mister Roberts), a suicide at 30. Honorable discharges for Irwin Shaw, James Jones, John Hersey and James Michener. Of that generation of promising World War II novelists, only two have combined the talent, versatility, nerve, style and combative instincts to make it in the great big American way that joins the oakleaf cluster of durable celebrity to money. Obviously one is Norman Mailer. The other, not usually thought of as having been a young war novelist, is Gore Vidal. At 20 he published Williwaw, a taut, widely praised tale of life aboard a World War II Army tanker in the North Pacific.

Like Mailer's in recent years, Vidal's celebrity rests less on his novels than on his political and cultural journalism--to say nothing of his public feuding. There was that scrap with Robert Kennedy, the nasty split with stepsister Jacqueline Onassis. Then Vidal endured an expensive lawsuit by William F. Buckley Jr. that stemmed from a joint TV appearance in which Vidal called the conservative columnist a "crypto-Nazi."

But with all that, Vidal has been able to write a dozen novels, as well as find the time and energy to rewrite and republish a few of them. He is now into No. 13, a heavily researched historical novel about Aaron Burr, best known for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel but also the man who dreamed of establishing his own empire in Mexico. Vidal has completed the first draft, doing much of the work at his farmhouse in West Cork, Ireland. (It is an integrated neighborhood: just over the hill, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley is preparing a retirement home.)

Whether criticizing the "American Empire" or taking the burial measurements of Western culture, unpatriotic Gore thrives on repetition. Of the collected essays and reviews in this book nearly two-thirds have previously been bound in hard covers: Rocking the Boat (1962) and Reflections upon a Sinking Ship (1969).

For those who still care for polished English prose these 20 years of chronologically arranged essays can be read or reread as one would replay old records. There are such golden oldies as 'The Holy Family" (the Kennedys), "Nasser's Egypt," "E. Nesbit's Magic," "Tarzan" and "Writing Plays for Television," which offers a self-assessment yet to be equaled by Vidal's critics: "I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

Vidal believes (and who can argue?) that there is nothing more effective for a writer than having something intense to say. He is never at a loss, especially when scoring satirical bull's-eyes at three feet, as in his hilarious overkill of Dr. Reuben's split-level moralizing about sex. At his best, Vidal can turn an epigram with the wittiest of the 19th century. "The worst that can be said of pornography," he writes, "is that it leads not to 'antisocial' sexual acts but to the reading of more pornography."

But Vidal is also capable of delivering compact and provocative insight. On cliche analogies between the Roman Empire and the United States, for example: "I should not look to Rome for comparison but rather to the Most Serene Venetian Republic, a pedestrian state devoted to wealth, comfort, trade and keeping the peace, especially after inheriting the wreck of the Byzantine Empire, as we have inherited the wreck of the British Empire."

Scintillating pessimism and imperious disdain have always been Vidal's stock in trade. But in two previously uncollected pieces he demonstrates a humane, empathetic mastery of so-called personal journalism. In "The Death of Mishima," he blends his own acute sense of mortality with a meditation on the significance of the Japanese writer's grandstand suicide in 1971. In the end, it is not Yukio Mishima's writings that impress Vidal but the romantic act of conditioning his body for death. Ritual suicide is not Vidal's own cup of tea, though he is in poignant sympathy with the Japanese. "Worshiping the flesh's health and beauty," says Vidal, "is as valid an aesthetic--even a religion--as any other, though more tragic than most, for in the normal course half a life must be lived within the ruin of what one most esteemed."

Another esteemed ruin, as far as Vidal is concerned, is the 18th century radicalism of the Declaration of Independence. In writing of contemporary American piety, hypocrisy or corruption, he evokes the ghost of Daniel Shays, a veteran of the American Revolution who led a futile rebellion against the propertied founding fathers when they sought to replace the confederation of states with a central government empowered to collect taxes. Shays, says Vidal with obvious approval, sounding a little like a Dixiecrat, "did not want London to be replaced by New York." Still the Property Party, as Vidal calls those who rule the U.S., has also produced remarkable exceptions like Eleanor Roosevelt, the subject of one of the finest pieces Vidal has ever written. He turns what is ostensibly a book review (of Joseph Lash's Eleanor and Franklin) into one of the best thumbnail biographies since Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. To Vidal, F.D.R.'s widow is the finest example of the Christian Puritan aristocrat, dedicated to improving the lives of the masses. In recalling her funeral, he concludes with a passage that out of context seems embarrassingly sentimental but actually reveals a great deal about this "tremendous hater and tiresome nag": "As the box containing her went past me, I thought, well, that's that. We're really on our own now."

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