|
|
"A comprehensive, collaborative elections resource."
|
Making Gossip Into Gospel
|
|---|
| Parent(s) |
Candidate
|
| Contributor | Craverguy |
| Last Edited | Craverguy Sep 27, 2009 04:50pm |
| Logged |
0
|
| Category | Review |
| Author | Roger Sale |
| Media | Newspaper - New York Times |
| News Date | Sunday, December 31, 1972 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | On the jacket of Homage to Daniel Shays, the New Statesman is quoted as saying that Gore Vidal is America's finest essayist. This is hardly true, but one knows why someone who thinks writing essays is a matter of keeping cool and writing well might think so. There are 45 occasional pieces in Vidal's volume, and there isn't a clinker in the bunch. If that doesn't make one America's finest essayist, it sets one well apart from the run of the mill. Furthermore, it seems that Vidal is getting better. The early essays--on the postwar novel, on television and writing for television, on the Great Golfer called Eisenhower--all now seem brittle, monochromatic. The New York Review pieces of recent years, on the other hand, range from truly Olympian views of David Reuben and the battle of the sexes to an engaged, nostalgic and lovely picture of Eleanor Roosevelt. But the appearance may well be deceiving.
The trouble is that Vidal is always timely. Twenty years ago it was customary to wonder who were the best, the two or three best and half dozen best, American writers or novelists or whatever. So here is Vidal announcing that the best writers of the 1940's are Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams. It's not that Vidal backed the wrong horses, but that he thought of judging writers as a matter of backing horses. So, too, in the fifties people were seriously interested in television, preposterous though that may now seem, and here then is Vidal writing for and about television because the action was there, and Vidal never asks if he should always go where the action is. |
| Share |
|
|
2¢
|
|
| Article | Read Full Article |
|
| Date |
Category |
Headline |
Article |
Contributor |
|
|
