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Marcie Frank is Professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal.

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"While other literary-minded writers of his generation (Updike, Bellow, Baldwin, Roth) barricaded themselves in bookchat, Gore Vidal took the full plunge into the new media age. There is no comparable figure to suture the two worlds, or two epochs."--Michael Warner, author of "Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life"

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How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments...................................................xiIntroduction......................................................11 The Print Intellectual..........................................172 The Screen Intellectual.........................................413 A Fine Romance..................................................694 Sexual Politics in the Print-Screen Circuit.....................915 TV: Another Erogenous Zone......................................111Notes.............................................................143Index.............................................................151

Chapter One

It may seem strange to us that the paradigmatic intellectual was once so literary. It takes an effort to recall that the novelist sat at the top of this heap, especially considering that, for the most part, being a novelist today does not qualify you as a consultant on much of anything. But scientists like C. P. Snow, philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, and literary critics like Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling all wrote novels. Commenting on the fate of the novelist in the age of the screen in Screening History, the book that delighted Arthur Schlesinger, Vidal remarked:

Recently I observed to a passing tape recorder that I was once a famous novelist. When assured, politely, that I was still known and read, I explained myself. I was speaking, I said, not of me but of a category to which I once belonged that no longer exists. I am still here but my category is not. To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. How can a novelist be famous, no matter how well known he may be personally to the press, when the novel itself is of no consequence to the civilized, much less to the generality? (2-3)

Vidal has exploited electronic forms of publicity, from tape recorders to televisions, both to stay famous and to address the divergence of the categories literary author and intellectual. Even though he considered himself first and foremost a novelist, he realized "in the black winter of 1953 ... that the novel as a popular art form had come to a full halt, [that] the most colourful [of his fellow serious novelists] was writing unsuccessful musical comedies, the most talented had virtuously contrived to die, others had dropped from view, finding dim employment in anonymous journalism or in the academy, the cleverest ones ha[ving] married rich wives." Under these conditions, Vidal committed himself to writing for the camera.

Those of Vidal's literary contemporaries not struggling to uphold the primacy of print at all costs made forays similar to his into the newer media. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Jacqueline Susann, and Susan Sontag not only made television appearances on talk shows; they also wrote for the screen. Mailer and Sontag even ventured to direct their own films. None, however, has more ably negotiated the shift from print to screen than Vidal, even though some of these contemporaries have been held in higher literary regard. His success stems, in part, from his always appearing in print and on-screen in the most thinly disguised versions of his always recognizable self. Yet Vidal's embrace of the media of celebrity has not vitiated his political credibility; it would be difficult to come up with another example of a current writer with as much.

A brief comparison here is instructive. When Sontag went to Sarajevo in 1993, she directed a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Exerting her political commitments in the name of culture, she went, in other words, primarily as a literary or cultural figure. Her mode of political engagement was based on an older, print-based model of the intellectual, one familiar from the days of the Partisan Review, where in 1963 she had initially published Notes on Camp, her springboard into the public eye. Indeed, Sontag might have been the last of the breed whose print orientation permitted a double commitment both to cultural elitism (traditional standards, avant-gardism, and a celebration of high modernism) and to leftist politics.

Recent critiques of Sontag's political engagements as a writer-intellectual by Bruce Robbins, Carl Rollyson, and Lisa Paddock vent a fair amount of hostility toward her without registering the source of disappointment in the fact that the position of the writer-intellectual is no longer sustainable in the media age. Edward Said, for example, places Sontag in the company of the men whom Russell Jacoby dubbed "the last intellectuals," all a decade or more older than she, including Philip Rahv, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, William Barrett, and Lionel Trilling. Vidal is closer in age to this group than Sontag was, but simply to imagine him in this list is immediately to register the lack of fit: his groomed elegance is completely at odds with the rumpled tweedy look of those academic types who, moreover, disdain appeals to a televisual public. The gender difference displays itself in the difference between Vidal's flair, which would seem to be the very thing that disqualifies him as an intellectual, and Sontag's glam seriousness, which counted in her favor. But Vidal has been disqualified equally from the ranks of the pop intellectual by broadcasting issues of sexuality beyond the stylistic range of embodiment offered by Mailer's machismo, Capote's camp effeminacy, and Susann's drag queeniness.

Accounts of the decline of the public intellectual want to neutralize questions of style, but they remain in their thrall. Much as they bemoan the disappearance of a general mode of address, one that transcends style even though it is epitomized by print, and by the novel at that, they find causes for this disappearance in the university or television. They remain blithely unaware of the circularity of their own logic: the assumption that the venue for the intellectual must be print determines that the shift from print to screen has signaled the intellectual's demise. Their hostility to screen modes of publicity, particularly television, and to celebrity more generally, has made it difficult for them to recognize the persistence of intellectual possibilities in a career like Vidal's.

Vidal specified what he could achieve with TV writing in 1956:

With patience and ingenuity there is nothing that the imaginative writer cannot say to the innocent millions. [Television drama] is particularly satisfying for any writer with a polemical bent; and 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. (United States, 1158)

What he has understood about solving the world's problems is intimately connected with what he has learned about screen cultures-both film and TV screens-especially about their relations to print cultures. His use of the screen to transmit his views can make it appear that he has abandoned print and the novel, but this is not the case. Vidal's treatment of the decline of the novel reminds us that the general mode of address may simply have shifted from print to electronic venues. It is worth reconsidering both the narratives of...