Djelloul Marbrook

When I consider my chutzpa in quibbling, as I intend to here, with anything Gore Vidal has to say I smile wanly at the absurdity of it. I harbor an unreserved admiration for his writing. He has delighted and even thrilled me over the years with the angle from which he comes at ideas and his elegant vision.

Vidal (inset) recently engaged in this exchange with Kera Bolonik of BOOKFORUM:

BF: A few critics have declared the American novel dead. GV: I don’t think the novel is dead. I think the readers are dead. The novel doesn’t interest anybody, and that’s largely because there are no famous novelists. Fame means that you are touching everybody or potentially touching everybody with what you’ve done—that they like to think about it and exchange views on it.

It’s possible, just barely, I’ve written some novels that could, with hooplah and luck, become best-sellers. We’ll see about that when they see light of day. But my view—not as much humble as painfully arrived at after a lifetime of study and prayer—is that if I’ve written anything that illuminates the mind of another soul, then I’m a writer, a novelist. Maybe not a famous one, but a blessed one, and worthy of the name.

I don’t conceive of success as a numbers game or a horse race. I see it as having given a damn and having shed a small light on a very dark path.

My view, unlike Vidal’s, is alchemical. And yet he’s no stranger to alchemy himself, having spent handsomely of his resources and spirit to transmute our base politics to gold with his elixirs of clarity and idealism.

His is a grand view, saddened by the squalid commercialism that has swamped us. Mine is that the work of the alchemist has never been to serve the masters of the universe, but rather to transform us one by one.

I don’t think Vidal would like to think of his splendid canon as having edified  but a few of us. Why should he? He has reached an immense audience and earned every member of it.

My ambition could be handily seen as the self-justifying of a remarkably neglected author. Some might even say deservedly neglected. But that too remains to be seen. I’m content to believe that a flash of light emanating from something I’ve written will someday reorder the synapses of someone’s brain for the better. That’s all the true alchemists ever wanted. The rest is market economics and grandiosity.

I’m sure this precarious state of grace, wherein my ambition frequently soils my gratitude, comes of conceiving my work as a writer as a continuous act of prayer and, yet again, a co-operative venture with the almighty to whom I pray and owe whatever craftmanship I have.