It’s sad to see Hitchens, one of my favorite writers, take a pretty heavy shot at another of my favorite writers, Gore Vidal. It’s sad because much of what Hitchens says is on target: Vidal has indeed become a bit of a crank.
After 9/11 Vidal did make some funny noises about whether the Bush administration knew about the attacks and let them happen so they could build an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, a proposal, he intimated, that had been in the works for a long time. He didn’t directly accuse, he simply made a lot of dark suggestions, and asked arch questions, like why fighter planes didn’t launch as they were required to by law.
And, yes, as Hitchens mentions, Vidal has always held a dark view about what Roosevelt knew in advance of Pearl Harbor, although Hitchens makes slightly too much of it. To my knowledge Vidal has never said that Roosevelt knew about the attack ahead of time, but following William Appleman Williams, he suggests that everyone knew that economic isolation of Japan, led by the US, would force Japan into desperate and dramatic action—precisely what Roosevelt was attempting to engineer in order to enter the war and take on the Germans. There has, to be sure, always been a streak of the conspiratorial in some of Vidal’s observations; a streak which become enlarged in the last decade.
Finally, I happen to have been at the New York event which Hitchens mentions and where Vidal suggested that Hitchens identified himself as his heir. I knew the story behind this (the exact opposite happened), and was floored to hear it rendered in this way. Perhaps I was too surprised to notice the audience laughing all that much, and anyway the laughter seemed to be more directed at his self-deprecating age jokes. In any case, either deceit or poor memory generated that claim, and I suspect it wasn’t memory since I recall reading that Vidal had rescinded the offer. I’ve seen this before. Vidal pilloried his chosen biographer, Fred Kaplan, and claimed that after signing the contract he was disappointed to realize that this Kaplan was not Justin Kaplan, the man who had written about Mark Twain, but instead some second rater as Vidal was to discover in the midst of their time together. This seems like too vast a thing to get wrong to be believable.
It’s too bad to see this odd end to a tremendous and brilliant career where many of the above themes have always resided, but which were muted and under control. He now seems to be giving them full voice; a discordant aria to say the least.
These criticisms, however, are not to be taken up by Jonah Goldberg, who is, to trade in the cheap, an utter moron.
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Posted by: AP18Kristin | January 12, 2010 at 10:04 PM