Writing About Emotion in USIH: Vidal, Buckley, and Tanenhaus

Sam Tanenhaus reflected yesterday, in The New York Times*, on the unexpected similarities between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. The piece caught my eye because I just finished a section in my manuscript on Mortimer J. Adler's multiple Firing Line appearances and his interactions with Buckley.

In writing about both figures a prominent theme in Tanenhaus' piece was elitism in U.S. intellectual history---the class solidarity that bound both.  He finds other parallels, which I will point out below. But I'm most interested in larger thing Tanenhaus is trying to do in the article: write about emotion in the context of U.S. intellectual history.

Before going there, let me relay the last third of Tanenhaus' article, particularly these passages on American exceptionalism in the context of the Vietnam War (YouTube link moved here from earlier in the story):


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Buckley and Mr. Vidal both subscribed, though in very different ways, to the ideal of American exceptionalism — ...[particularly its] susceptib[ility] to foreign infection. Mr. Vidal feared the evils of empire building...and warned against the decline that had overtaken other civilizations brought low by imperial hubris. 

For Buckley the threat came from global communism and “statist” domestic policies that would reduce Americans to servitude and weaken their connection to the moral values of Christianity.

It was this two-sides-of-the-same-coin idealism that led to the heated exchange in 1968. The actual topic that evening was the Vietnam War. Mr. Vidal opposed it. Buckley supported it. Again their reasons were parallel. For Mr. Vidal the war betrayed the tradition he was raised in, which sought to keep America untainted by the temptations of empire. For Buckley, supporting the war meant holding back the tide of communism. 

As their tempers rose, each seemed to be battling not so much the other as the distorted image of himself that his opponent represented. The terms they haughtily flung at each other were those other critics sometimes applied to them, only in reverse — Buckley, whose arch mannerisms were sometimes mocked as effete; Mr. Vidal, whose disdain for American vulgarity was tinged, some said, with anti-Semitism and dislike of the “lower orders.” 

Divided by so much, Mr. Vidal and Buckley were united in their iconoclasm, however uneasily.

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Again, I love the Vidal-Buckley parallels in relation to iconoclasm, elitism, American exceptionalism, cavils from critics (e.g. effete), and fears of distorted images. For me this says that the so-called conservative-liberal divide of the post-war period is more, among intellectuals anyway, of an intramural contest within liberalism.  That contest was about shades of American liberalism, not a rejection of the larger project of liberalism.

As a professional historian (but not as a person with feelings of disgust) I very much appreciated (loved?) the visceral dislike and passion in the YouTube clip. It's rare to see that kind of open emotion, on air or otherwise. But it's not surprising given the period. To paraphrase today's cool kids, "That's what Vietnam do."

It's hard to top the source when one is writing about events like that---hence the link to the clip in the NYT article. How are you, dear reader, capturing emotions in your USIH work? How does one write about emotions effectively, and concisely, in age of multimedia? How can a traditional media article (journal, newspaper), with its two-dimensional limitations, convey the essence of an event best remembered for the passion conveyed in three dimensions? It seems that a YouTube clip is worth a thousand words. - TL

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* Since it's only August 2, I'm going to assume that you can read the piece because you haven't used up your ten free online NYT viewings.

Gore Vidal, Master Polemicist

I have always loved a good polemic. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I selected the culture wars as the topic of my current research. The polemic is the genre of choice for culture warriors. Unfortunately, most of the culture wars polemics I read are bad; they are mostly, to phrase it generously, “inartful.” So much so that I have almost grown immune to the polemic. But every now and then I come across a master polemicist, someone like Gore Vidal. For anyone interested in learning the art of the polemic, his 1981 essay “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” should be compulsory reading. (The essay was originally published by The Nation [Nov. 14, 1981] but is perhaps easier located in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, 339-356.)

“Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” is a 17-page review of an article of about the same length, which might seem strange minus some context. Vidal’s essay was a scathing critique of Midge Decter’s infamous “Boys on the Beach” article—a vicious, anecdotal attack on the gay right’s movement—published in Commentary (Sept. 1980). “Boys on the Beach” was widely read and discussed in literary circles. In other words, Decter’s article merited the Vidal treatment.

Decter opposed the gay right’s movement in general, just as she opposed women’s liberation, and all the other movements associated with the Sixties. In this she was the typical, even prototypical neoconservative. But specific to her 1980 Commentary article, she framed her opposition to gay rights, and to homosexuality more generally, by way of her observations of the gays who populated Fire Island, a Long Island beach resort where Decter and her family spent their summers in the early 1960s. Among other slanders, Decter interpreted the homosexuality she observed on Fire Island as a flight from the responsibilities of women and children. She accused the Fire Island gays of flaunting their narcissistic behavior in the face of the straight men who duly went about their unexciting but meaningful lives but who nonetheless felt that the gays were flaunting their irresponsibility. The straight men Decter defended—men like her husband, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz—“feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as in substance, family men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose. In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment.” The upshot is that Decter believed the gays of Fire Island already had everything they wanted, so what need was there for a gay right’s movement?


Vidal cut Decter down to size on the merits of her argument, to be sure. As Vidal makes clear, Decter described the Fire Island gays as if they represented all gays, ignoring that plenty hid in plain sight due to social prejudices. And on the notion that gay men lived to torment the straight men around them, Vidal had this retort: “Although Decter’s blood was always at the boil when contemplating these unnatural and immature half-men, they were, I would suspect, serenely unaware of her and her new-class cronies, solemnly worshiping at the shrine of The Family.”

Vidal also went after Decter’s style, since, for the master polemicist, there is no strict division between style and substance. A small sample: “[Decter] writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known to those few who know her.”

Even more damning, Vidal questions Decter’s basic understanding of homosexuality, in response to her remark, a mix of wonder and disgust, that the bodies of the gays on the beach were seemingly always hairless. “It is startling that Decter has not yet learned that there is no hormonal difference between men who like sex with other men and those who like sex with women.”

But the icing on the polemical cake is the way Vidal framed his overarching argument. By titling his article “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Vidal called attention to Decter as a Jew, and to Commentary as a Jewish publication. “In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles.” In the context of Reagan’s election and with the newfound political visibility of evangelicals, Vidal reasoned that Jews and homosexuals, once again, had common enemies and should unite. And yet, to the contrary, “Mrs. Norman Podhoretz… has managed not only to come up with every known prejudice and superstition about same-sexers but also to make up some brand-new ones. For sheer vim and vigor, ‘The Boys on the Beach’ outdoes its implicit model, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion.”

This latter element of Vidal’s argument is the most suspect, at least, in terms of accurately judging the Jewish position in the United States. That many Jews have found common cause with evangelicals, and not just regarding Israel, has not constrained their freedom as Jews in the United States. Quite to the contrary, as George Nash convincingly demonstrates in “Joining Ranks: Commentary and American Conservatism,” a chapter from his latest book, Reappraising the Right, the conservative turn taken by the Jews at Commentary demonstrated that Jews were more mainstream than ever, and thus less threatened as a minority than ever. Nash writes: “In 1945, Commentary had been born into a marginal, impoverished, immigrant-based subculture and an intellectual milieu that touted ‘alienation’ and ‘critical nonconformity’ as the true marks of the intellectual vis-à-vis his own culture. Two generations later, Commentary stood in the mainstream of American culture, and even of American conservatism, as a celebrant of the fundamental goodness of the American regime, and Norman Podhoretz, an immigrant’s milkman, was its advocate.” Of course, perspicuity is not always a prerequisite for a powerful polemic, nor for a proper ethical stance.

Allow me to conclude by asking two questions of you, dear reader: What makes a good polemic? And who are some of your favorite polemicists?