Invasion of the Literary Pygmies
James Wolcott is right. In his new Kindle Single The Gore Supremacy, Wolcott argues that with the recent death of Gore Vidal, American punditry and letters have entered a new era. The intellectual giants of both left and right have been routed by pygmies.
Wolcott's extended essay is about Gore Vidal, the great American writer who recently passed away at 86. Wolcott argues that with the passing of Vidal, American literature and journalism has been left in the the unoriginal hands of bloggers and wordy, writing-workshop soundalikes. Wolcott lists the major writers who passed away this year: Nora Ephron, Andrew Sarris, Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Helen Gurley Brown.
Who today can replace them? Ana Marie Cox? David Weigel? Toure?
I remember when I was in college and came across Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night. The book is a self-proclaimed attempt at "history as novel, the novel as history." It is Mailer's 300-page account of a 1968 anti-war march at the Pentagon. The book is grandiose, eloquent, bug angry, funny and often sloppy and self-indulgent. But it is bold. It has blood in its veins.
It's not the kind of thing that Ezra Klein, or any of the other overly cautious young punditry, would even attempt. Gore Vidal wrote essays, (large) novels, plays, speeches, and even appeared in a few movies. His face-offs on television with Mailer and William F. Buckley still make for amazing television (on YouTube).
How did the revolution of freedom that was provided by the digital revolution result in more cowed and cautious writers? To be sure, the Coulters and Krugmans are willing to say more outrageous things, and the political name calling can get nasty. But there's no real stretching, no Big, Important books or novels being published by these people.
The Internet seems to both foster freedom yet stifle growth and ambition. One of my favorite bloggers goes by the name Allahpundit. He writes for the popular conservative site Hot Air. Allahpundit often offers deeply penetrating political analysis, and his posts ring with wit. Fifty years ago he would not be anonymous. He also would be expected to eventually up his game, produce a book or even a novel, do attempt something grand. Yet in 20 years his posts may not look that different than they do now.
With the passing of Vidal, argues Wolcott, a particular creativity and set of skills has vanished:
Anti-intellectualism has become the pride and prejudice of some of our slickest Ivy League graduates, who have consecrated their brilliance into slumming upward in the entertainment industry (ensuring that those groin jokes in sitcoms really zing), and Slate/Salon wunderkinds who shy away from difficult art as if afraid their dicks might fall off....The bulging brains that segment producers prefer to book today are pop sociologists and techno-babblers who can hold TED audiences and corporate retreats spellbound, pundits who can condense the latest findings in political science or social research into Flintstone vitamins -- popularizers whose worldliness doesn't extend beyond the Amtrak corridor and whose sense of history began the day their were hatched.
I've been reading a couple new novels, Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue and Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding. They are both good novels by accomplished young writers. But they lack the largeness and creativity of the novels of Vidal and his peers. Forty years ago you knew when you were reading a book by Gore Vidal, or Norman Mailer, or Joan Didion or Philip Roth. They had flaws that were particular to the human beings who wrote them, but that made them human.
Reading Michael Chabon's Telegraph Avenue, I was dazzled by the linguistic virtuosity, but it seemed like it could have been written by any star pupil from America's better writing workshops. It was a brilliant juggling act that is missing a heart. Here is Esquire on Telegraph Avenue: "Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women."
I'm sorry, but I don't read novels to see circus acts. I'll take the over-the-top but crazy-inventive fiction of Tom Wolfe, whose new novel Back to Blood is being released in October.
It's not surprising that Wolfe, who at 81 is still a more compelling writer than people half his age, is a contemporary of Gore Vidal. Both men came from a time, postwar America, when the single sine qua non for a man of letters was individuality and creativity. These writers wrote huge novels, big books of essays, plays, poems, political speeches.
Call James Wolcott a grump, but who around today is Vidal's equal? Jonathan Franzen? Maureen Dowd?
