On Gangsterism
To the Editor:
The theory I have about Gore Vidal’s article, “Literary Gangsters” [March], is that he started to write it as a paraphrase of the old joke whose last line is: “So it’s not a fountain.” He thereupon put together John W. Aldridge, Jr., John Simon, Robert Brustein, and Richard Gilman as his gangsters, whom he defines as “hit-and-run journalists, without conscience, forced to live precariously by their wits. . . .”
What was then supposed to happen in the joke is that a friend says to him:
Come on now, Gore, those fellows haven’t hit and run, here they are, right in America, they haven’t run anywhere. As for their consciences, it isn’t easy to judge consciences, you have to know people pretty well for that; that the four of them could be without conscience is a senseless thought, and their four consciences are probably above average. As for the way they live, it is by writing, teaching, lecturing, pretty much the way you live (your financial returns no doubt greater)
At which point Gore Vidal exclaims:
So they’re not literary gangsters.
But Mr. Vidal couldn’t write this joke because the punch line has the kind of intonation, inflection, which betrays what he calls in this article “. . . the incomplete assimilation of immigrant English into the old language (see Henry James’s remarks on the subject at Bryn Mawr, 1904).”
So instead of telling the joke, he chose to comment on a book by Richard Gilman (the same Gilman, Mr. Vidal tells us at the beginning of his article, who dispraised plays of Mr. Vidal shown on television in the 1950′s. It was the so-called Golden Age of television, and Mr. Gilman apparently thought that the playwrights of this age were not quite making Sophocles spin in his grave).
Among the criticisms Mr. Vidal makes of Richard Gilman’s book are: He uses moral exhortations; he uses adjectives in threes; he qualifies his judgments; he uses the editorial “we”; he may believe in Progress; he denigrates the importance of narration in fiction; he does not properly understand Robbe-Grillet; he uses the word “increment” too much; he has a wrong stand on the question of illusion; “. . . he seems not to have read Barthes, nor grasped semiology. . . .”
The very stuff of literary gangsterism.
“Ya sure ya don’t dig dis seemyology stuff? If ya lyin’, it’s coitans fer ya.”
I don’t have to see what Henry James said at Bryn Mawr in 1904. It was the year my father emigrated to America, and let me finish the joke for Mr. Vidal (“. . . incomplete assimilation of immigrant English into the old language . . .” and all):
So they’re not literary gangsters.
Meyer Liben
New York City
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