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| INTERVIEWER
What do you think generally about the writer engagé? Should a writer be involved in politics, as you are?
VIDAL
It depends on the writer. Most American writers are not much involved, beyond signing petitions. They are usually academics—and cautious. Or full-time literary politicians. Or both. The main line of our literature is quotidian with a vengeance. Yes, many great novels have been written about the everyday—Jane Austen and so on. But you need a superb art to make that sort of thing interesting. So, failing superb art, you’d better have a good mind and you’d better be interested in the world outside yourself. D. H. Lawrence wrote something very interesting about the young Hemingway. Called him a brilliant writer. But he added he’s essentially a photographer and it will be interesting to see how he ages because the photographer can only keep on taking pictures from the outside. One of the reasons that the gifted Hemingway never wrote a good novel was that nothing interested him except a few sensuous experiences like killing things and fucking—interesting things to do but not all that interesting to write about. This sort of artist runs into trouble very early on because all he can really write about is himself and after youth that self—unengaged in the world—is of declining interest. Admittedly, Hemingway chased after wars, but he never had much of anything to say about war, unlike Tolstoy or even Malraux. I think that the more you know the world and the wider the net you cast in your society, the more interesting your books will be, certainly the more interested you will be. |
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| Related Links |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| John Barth, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino, Jean Cocteau, Robert Coover, William Faulkner, E. M. Forster, John Fowles, William Gass, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Victor Hugo, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, William Meredith, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth, John Steinbeck, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Evelyn Waugh, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Apuleius, Brigid Brophy, Stephen Crane, Jim Farrell, Gustave Flaubert, Ford Madox Ford, André Gide, William Golding, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Juvenal, Thomas Mann, John P. Marquand, W. Somerset Maugham, Thomas Love Peacock, Petronius, Marcel Proust, Aleksandr Pushkin, George Santayana, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Calder Willingham |
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