Free The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal Page B

Bagoas’s side because of Alexander’s permanent attachment to his boyhood friend Hephaestion, not to mention the wives he picks up en route.
    The effect of the book is phantasmagoric. Marvelous cities, strange landscapes, colliding cultures, and at the center the golden conqueror of the earth as he drives on and on past the endurance of his men, past his own strength. Today when a revulsion against war is normal, the usual commercialite would be inclined to depict Alexander as a Fag Villain-Killer, but in a note Miss Renault makes the point: “It needs to be borne in mind today that not till more than a century later did a handful of philosophers even start to question the morality of war.” Alexander was doing what he thought a man in his place ought to do. The world was there to be conquered.
    The device of observing the conqueror entirely through the eyes of an Oriental is excellent and rather novel. We are able to see the Macedonian troops as they appeared to the Persians: crude gangsters smashing to bits an old and subtle culture they cannot understand, like today’s Americans in Asia. But, finally,
hubris
is the theme; and the fire returns to heaven. I am not at all certain that what we have here is the “right” Alexander, but right or not, Miss Renault has drawn the portrait of someone who
seems
real yet unlike anyone else, and that divinity the commercialites are forever trying for in their leaden works really does gleam from time to time in the pages of this nice invention.
    As a fiction,
August 1914
is not as well managed as Mr. Wouk’s
Winds of War
. I daresay as an expression of one man’s indomitable spirit in a tyrannous society we must honor if not the art the author. Fortunately the Nobel Prize is designed for just such a purpose. Certainly it is seldom bestowed for literary merit; if it were, Nabokov and not the noble engineer Solzhenitsyn would have received it when the Swedes decided it was Holy Russia’s turn to be honored.
    Solzhenitsyn is rooted most ambitiously in literature as well as in films. Tolstoi appears on Novelists and Critics of the 1940s and Tolstoi hangs over the work like a mushroom cloud. In a sense the novel is to be taken as a dialogue between the creator of
War and Peace
and Solzhenitsyn; with the engineer opposing Tolstoi’s view of history as a series of great tides in which the actions of individuals matter not at all. I’m on Solzhenitsyn’s side in this debate but cannot get much worked up over his long and wearisome account of Russian military bungling at the beginning of the First World War. The characters are impossible to keep straight, though perhaps future volumes will clarify things. Like
Winds of War
, this is the first of a series.
    The book begins with dawn on the Caucasus, towering “so vast above petty human creation, so elemental…” The word “vast” is repeated in the next paragraph to get us in the mood for a superspectacle. Then we learn that one of the characters has actually met Tolstoi, and their meeting is recalled on Tarzan Revisited. “‘What is the aim of man’s life on earth?’” asks the young man. Tolstoi’s reply is prompt: “‘To serve good and thereby to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth.’” How? “‘Only through love! Nothing else. No one will discover anything better.’” This is best-seller writing with a vengeance.
    In due course we arrive at the Mirror Scene: “She was not even comforted by the sight of her naturally rosy skin, her round shoulders, the hair which fell down to her hips and took four buckets of rain water to wash.” The Nubile Scene: “She had always avoided undressing even in front of other women, because she was ashamed of her breasts, which were large, big and generous even for a woman of her build.” Wisdom Phrases: “The dangers of beauty are well known: narcissism,