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Through the Looking-Glass With Gore Vidal
| Article
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12115 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1987 |
6,995 Words |
| Author
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
Is there no way to end the brutal warfare between fundamentalist and secular humanists? I have a suggestion. Let each camp name a paladin to confront his opposite number in single combat, the victor to carry off the laurels, the vanquished to skulk away in silence. This has been tried before, notably in the Scopes trial, when William Jennings Bryan squared off against Clarence Darrow. The results were inconclusive: The clash between two ignorant and foolish men served only to confirm each side in its ignorance and foolishness. It behooves us to make a fresh start.
I would tap Jimmy Swaggart to represent the fundamentalists, Gore Vidal the secular humanists. Lock them together in a bare room in the Ramada Inn in Sioux City, Iowa, the door to be unbolted only when one warrior shrieks, "Enough!" Swaggart would be permitted his Bible, Vidal a volume of the collected works of Krafft-Ebing or, if he would prefer, a copy of The Connoisseur's Guide to Polymorphous Perversity. How to spot the winner? Either Reverend Swaggart would swish out, simpering and mincing, to announce that he was abandoning the ministry to become an interior decorator--score one for the secular humanists. Or Vidal would stagger out--exquisite Italian suit torn and soiled, hair disheveled, eyes popping with a prophet's ecstasy--screaming, "Jesus is coming! The end is near! Repent!"
Why this particular duo? In Swaggart's case, the answer should be obvious: He is the most ferocious fundamentalist abroad in the land; by comparison, the Ayatollah purrs like a neutered tabby. And Vidal? Simple: The essays collected in Homage to Daniel Shays and The Second American Revolution disclose a hatred of Christianity equal to Swaggart's abhorrence of secular humanism--a classic case of "deep calls to deep."
I
I leave Swaggart to those who have the stomach for that sort of thing; besides, he is not nearly as much fun as Vidal. To God-fearing folk, Gore Vidal is a monster; Jimmy Swaggart might even dub him the Antichrist. Even the devil deserves his due, so one must be fair to Vidal. Part of the problem is that there are two Gore Vidals, self-denominated in an essay in Esquire as "Public Self" and "Private Self." Public Self fumes and fusses about the evils of America; the other Vidal repairs to the workshop and fashions novels that--at their best--rank him among the leading artisans of his craft in America today.
The boisterous Public Self has snatched headlines, hogged
...
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