Gore Vidal

“ I had not completely got over my first impression that Butler was an accomplished actor, sounding me out before the final victory of the Cavites, the necessary death and total obliteration of the person and the memory of Eugene Luther, now grown old with a false name in a burning land.
If he was an actor, he was a master. He thumped on interminably about America, John Cave and the necessity of spreading his word throughout the world. I listened patiently as the sun went abruptly behind the hills and all the stars appeared in the moonless waste of sky. ”

“ But now, as my private day begins to fade, as the wind in the desert gathers in intensity, smoothing out the patterns in the sand, I shall attempt to evoke the true image of one who assumed with plausibility in an age of science the long-discarded robes of prophecy, prevailing at last through ritual death and becoming, to those who see the universe in man, that solemn idea which is yet called by its resonant and antique name, god. ”

“ Clarissa chuckled. A fish leaped gayly in the still river; out in the channel a barge glided by, the muffled noise of its engines like slow heartbeats.
“But you think it good for people to follow Cave? you think what he says is right?”
“Nothing is good. Nothing is right. But though Cave is wrong, it is a new wrong and so it is better than the old; in any case, he will keep the people amused and boredom, finally, is the one monster the race will never conquer ... the monster which will devour us in time. But now we’re off the track. Mother love exists because we believe it exists. ”

“ I wanted a sign obviously: Constantine’s labarum occurred to me: in hoc signo vinces. Already ambition was stirring, and the little beast fed ravenously on every scrap that came its way for I was, in that patio, experiencing my own revelation, the compass needle no longer spinning wildly but coming to settle at last, with many hesitancies and demurs, upon a direction, drawn to a far pole’s attraction.
He smiled for the first time. I suppose, if I wanted, I could recall each occasion over the years when, in my presence at least, John Cave smiled. ”

“ Iris’s voice was high and clear. I did not look at her. All that I could do now was to force the climax.
“But sooner or later every act of human folly creates its own opposition. This will too, more soon than late, for if one can make any generality about human beings it is that they want not to die. You cannot stampede them into death for long. They are enthusiastic now. They may not be soon ... unless of course there is some supreme example before them, one which you, Cave, can alone supply. You will have to die by your own hand to show the virtue and the truth of all that you have said.” ”

“ Here on the top floor, in the penthouse which was itself a mansion surrounded by Babylonian gardens and a wall of glass through which the encompassing city rose like stalagmites, Cave and Paul, Stokharin and Iris and I all lived with our bodyguards, never venturing out of the building which resembled, during that time, a military headquarters with guards and adjutants and a maze of officials through whom both strangers and familiars were forced to pass before they could meet even myself, much less Cave. ”

“ With groups, with the masses, he was another creature: warm, intoxicating, human, yet transcendent ... a part of each human being who beheld him at such times, the longed-for complement to the common soul.
Yet though I found him, as a human being, without much warmth or intellectual interest I nevertheless identified him with the release I’d known in his presence and, for this new certainty of life’s value and of death’s irrelevance, I loved him.
On the third day I made up my mind to go back East and do the necessary writing in New York, away from Paul’s hectic influence and Cave’s advice. ”

“ I was of course interested in the movies, though they no longer had the same hold over the public imagination that they had had in earlier decades when a process of film before light could project, larger than life, not only on vast screens but also upon the impressionable minds of an enormous audience made homogeneous by a common passion, shadowy figures which, like the filmy envelopes of the stoic deities, floated to earth in public dreams, suggesting a braver more perfect world where love reigned and only the wicked died. ”

“ I had the brief sensation of a man drowning. “How do you know all this?”
“I have two eyes; also, Iris told me.”
“She knows too?”
“Of course she knows! Why else do you think she’s so anxious to get Cave away from this place? She knows Paul can have him killed at any time and no one would be the wiser.”
I grunted with amazement: I understood now what it was that had happened on the terrace. I felt a perfect fool. Of them all I alone had been unaware of what was going on beneath the surface and, in my folly, I had detonated the situation without knowing it. “He knows too?” ”

“ Death is there and he makes it seem perfectly all right, oblivion and the rest of it. And dying does rather upset a lot of people. Have you noticed one thing that the devoutly superstitious can never understand is the fact that though we do not accept the fairy tale of reward or punishment beyond the grave we still are reluctant to 'pass on,’ as the nuts say? As though the prospect of nothing isn’t really, in a way, without friend Cave to push one into acceptance, perfectly ghastly, much worse than toasting on a grid like that poor saint up north. ”

“ The peonies were more opulent than usual and I walked slowly through the green light on the terrace above the white river, enjoying the heavy odor of peonies and of new roses rambling in hedges.
The Hudson was calm, no ripple revealed that slow tide which even here, miles to the north of the sea, rises brackishly at the moon’s disposition. Across the river the Catskills, water-blue, emerged sharply from the summer’s green as though the earth in one vivid thrust had attempted sky, fusing the two elements into yet another, richer blue ... ”

“ How wonderful life will be when men no longer fear dying! When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity that we have met life. No longer will children’s minds be twisted by evil, demanding, moralizing gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That’s it: life is the villain to those maniacs who preach reward in death: grace and eternal bliss ... ”

“ Paul looked suddenly disconsolate. “I’ve done what I thought best. I feel Cave should show us all the way. I feel it’s both logical and necessary to the Establishment that he give back his life publicly.”
“But he doesn’t want to.”
“That is the part I can’t understand. Cavesword is that death is not to be feared but embraced yet he, the man who has really changed the world, refuses to die.”
“Perhaps he feels he has more work to do. More places to see. Perhaps, Paul, he doesn’t trust you ... doesn’t want to leave you in control of the Establishment.” ”

“ Begin there, or even earlier with Plato or earlier yet with Zoroaster ... take the best ideas of the best men and should there be any disagreement as to what is best, use life as the definition, life as the measure: what contributes most to the living is the best.”
“But the living is soon done and the sooner done the better. I envy those who have already gone....”
“If they listen to you, Cave, it will be like the unlocking of a prison. At first they may go wild but then, on their own, they will find ways to life. Fear and punishment in death has seldom stopped the murderer’s hand. ”

“ I sank into a wicker chair even while Cave was pumping my hand. Iris laughed, “Leave him alone, John. He’s smothered by the heat.”
“No hat,” said Cave solemnly after the first greeting which, in my relief, I’d not heard. “You’ll get sunstroke.”
Paul was now in charge. The heat which had enervated both Stokharin and me filled him with manic energy, like one of those reptiles which absorb vitality from the sun.
“What a great little place, John! Had no idea there were all the comforts of home down here, none at all. Don’t suppose you go out much?” ”

“ The Latin countries, the seat of the old Catholic power which was itself the shadow of the Roman Empire, provided the world with a series of massacres remarkable even in that murderous century. Yet it was a fact that in the year of Cave’s death, Italy was half-Cavite while France, England and Germany were nearly all Cavite while only Spain and parts of Latin America held out, imprisoning, executing, deporting Cavites against the inevitable day when our Communicators, undismayed, proud in their martyrdom, would succeed in their assaults upon these last citadels of paganism. ”

“ Then, finally, I have never found it easy to tell the truth, a temperamental infirmity due not so much to any wish or compulsion to distort reality that I might be reckoned virtuous but, rather, to a conception of the inconsequence of human activity which is ever in conflict with a profound love of those essential powers which result in human action, a paradox certainly, a dual vision which restrains me from easy judgments. ”

“ After coffee and pills, those assorted pellets which seem to restore me for moments at a time to a false serenity, I put aside the nightmare world of the previous restless hours and idly examined the pages which I had written with an eye to rereading them straight through, to relive again for a time the old drama which is already, as I write, separating itself from my memory and becoming real only in the prose: I think now of these events as I have told them and not as they occur to me in memory. ”

“ Days of considerable activity, of visiting friends and acquaintances, of attending parties where the guests were precisely the same as the ones I had met at Hastings’ house: every one of them bent upon combating boredom with boredom, creating a desert in a dry land. But I was capable of evoking mirages which decorated for me their desert, made unusual (for myself at least) what, with familiarity, might become impossible.
I met Iris at the house where she was staying near the main beach of Santa Monica: a fairly decorous Spanish house, quiet among palms and close to the sea. ”

“ Clarissa smiled at me. “I will say, though, that you are the only one of the lot who has acted for an impersonal reason, and certainly none of them understands you except me. I am on your side, in a way. Voluntary deaths don’t alarm me the way they do you but this obsession which Cave has of death being preferable to life may have ghastly consequences.” ”

“ I always felt at a disadvantage with her.
“What we’re going to need for the big New York opening is a firm historical and intellectual base. Cave hasn’t got it and of course doesn’t need it. We are going to need commentary and explanation and though you happen to be a genius in publicity you must admit that that group which has been characterized as intellectual, the literate few who, in their weakness, often exert enormous influence, are not apt to be much moved by your publicity: in fact, they will be put off by it.” ”

“ The recent advance in atomic research and in jet-propulsion had made the Western world disagreeably aware of other planets and galaxies and the thought that we would soon be making expeditions into space was disquieting, if splendid, giving rise to the not illogical thought that life might be developing on other worlds somewhat more brilliantly than here at home and, further, that it was quite conceivable that we ourselves might receive visitors long before our own adventuring had begun in the starry blackness which contains our life, like a speck of phosphorus in a quiet sea. ”

“ The banners were waved back and forth against the sky and I saw everywhere the theatrical hand of Paul Himmell.
The scene shifted to the House of Representatives entrance to the Capitol. Cave wearing an overcoat but bareheaded, stepped out of the limousine. He was alone. Neither Paul nor Iris was in sight. It was most effective that he should come like this, without equerries or counselors. He stood for a moment in the pillared entrance, aware of the crowd outside; even through the commentator’s narrative one could hear, like the surf falling: Cave! Cave! Cave! ”

“ Though my memory is going from me rapidly, the meaning is clear and unmistakable and I see the pattern whole at last, marked in giant strokes upon the air: I was he whom the world awaited. I was that figure, that messiah whose work might have been the world’s delight, and liberation. But the villain death once more undid me and to him belongs the moment’s triumph. Yet life continues, though I do not. Time bends upon itself. ”

“ Yet for all the glibness with which I spoke, I did not really believe that Cave would prove to be more than an interesting momentary phenomenon whose “truth” about death might, at best, contribute in a small way to the final abolition of those old warring superstitions which had mystified and troubled men for twenty dark centuries. A doubt which displayed my basic misunderstanding of our race’s will to death and, worse, to a death in life made radiant by false dreams, by desperate adjurations. ”

“ Ah, a letter from Iris.” Like a magpie she had seen the letter beside my chair and, without asking permission, had seized it and read it through quickly. “I admire a girl who types,” she said, letting fall the letter. “I suppose they all do now though it seems like only yesterday that, next to opening a tearoom, one typed, working for men, all of whom made advances. That was when we had to wear corsets and hatpins. One discouraged while the other quite protected.” Clarissa chuckled at some obscene memory.
“I wonder if Paul can keep Cave from wandering off to some impossible place.” ”

“ Look what Cave is doing. Of course making death popular is not so difficult since, finally, people want it to be nice: they do the real work or, rather, their terror does. In place of superstition, which they’ve nearly outgrown, he offers them madness.”
“Now really, Clarissa....”
“I don’t disapprove. I’m all for him, as you know. To make death preferable to life is of course utter folly though a perfectly logical reaction for these poor bewildered savages who, having lost their old superstitions, are absolutely terrified at the prospect of nothing. ”

“ I must warn you, Iris, that I’m not a believer. And though I’m sure that the revelations of other men must be a source of infinite satisfaction to them, individually, I shouldn’t for one second be so presumptuous as to make a choice among the many thousands of recorded revelations of truth, accepting one at the expense of all the others: I might so easily choose wrong and get into eternal trouble. And you must admit that the selection is wide, and dangerous to the amateur. ”

“ A garden very like the one where we first met in California. No, on the banks of the Hudson ... I must reread what I have written to refresh my memory. It is all beginning to fade rapidly.
In any case, we met in a garden in the late autumn when all the trees were bare. She was white-haired then, though neither of us was much over forty.
I believe that she wept a little: for we were the last who had been close to Cave, heirs both though now adversaries, she victrix and I vanquished. I never loved her more than at that last moment; of this I am sure. We talked of possible places of exile. ”

“ At one end of the table sat Clarissa, with Paul and me on either side of her; at the other end sat Cave, with Iris and Stokharin on either side of him; Iris was on his left and on my right and, early in the dinner, when the conversation was particular, we talked.
“I suppose we’ll be leaving soon,” she said. A sea gull missed the awning by inches.
“I haven’t heard anything about it. Who’s leaving ... and why?”
“John thinks we’ve all been here too long; he thinks we’re too remote.” ”

“ I am tempted to affirm that historic truth is quite impossible, although I am willing to accept the philosophic notion that it may exist abstractly, perfect and remote in the imagination. A windy attic filled with lovely objects has always been my personal image of those absolutes Aristotle conceived with such mellifluous optimism ... and I have always liked the conceits of philosophy, the more extravagant the better. ”