One can agree or disagree with his views on this or that American novelist very profitably, for he is a professional, but he is on richer ground when he is writing about the supreme American fiction: political history and the political families. Here he has festive powers of candor and detection, in his studies of the ruling class and the rich, and done from the insider's alcove. He loves family history—especially its dubieties. His "West Point" with its theme of America as a garrison is caustic, and he has some vanity in going romantically into action with one socialite arm tied behind his back. His accounts of the continuing story of E. Howard Hunt, the Bay of Pigs, and Watergate, and on what Robert Moses did for and to New York City leave a foreigner like myself wondering why anyone should worry about the fate of the novel when politicians can, every time, outpace the art novel in fantasy or the best seller in its deep faith in the spurious emotion.

As a Matter of Fact, Gore Vidal is a Beautiful Person who chooses his drawing-rooms with care. He hobnobs with the rich and powerful. He hobnobs also with the talented, but they tend to be those among the talented who hobnob with the rich and powerful. He likes the rich and powerful as a class. He hates some of them as individuals and attacks them with an invective made all the more lacerating by inside knowledge. For that we can be grateful. But we can also wish that his honesty about his own interior workings might extend to his thirst for glamour. Speaking about Hollywood, he is an outsider who delights to pose as an insider, Speaking about the ruling class, he is an insider who delights to pose as an outsider. In reality he is just as active a social butterfly as his arch-enemy Truman Capote. But in Vidal’s case the sin is venial, not mortal, since his writings remain comparatively unruffled by the social whirl, whereas Capote has become a sort of court dwarf, peddling a brand of thinly fictionalized tittle-tattle which is really sycophancy in disguise. Vidal reserves that sort of thing for after hours.