My beauty blinding them

Daniel Culpan on Glamazon Myra Breckinridge after fifty years

DANIEL CULPAN

FEBRUARY 20, 2018
“As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.” So begins Point to Point Navigation, the second and final instalment of Gore Vidal’s memoirs, published in 2006. It’s a classic Vidal flourish: at once elegant and imperious, freighted with a sense of melancholy beneath the famed hauteur. Vidal, who died in 2012, did not live to witness our present-day society of the spectacle, in which many of us play the role of both star and spectator in our own endlessly social-mediatized biopics; but it’s not difficult to imagine him appraising it with lofty scorn. Hollywood’s Golden Age, meanwhile, has rusted into a relic of the distant past, or been resuscitated as camp nostalgia.
Consequently, Vidal’s brand of cinephilia seems a quaint anachronism. Yet one of his more surreal and gloriously demented literary creations may itself have helped to usher in our screen-worshipping, hyper-visual age. This month marks fifty years since the publication of Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge – perhaps the most madcap of those works he described as “satiric inventions”. When the novel was originally published, against the backdrop of a febrile America experiencing both the Vietnam War and the countercultural revolution, divided between Hollywood liberalism and Republican retrenchment, it was received by critics with a mixture of bafflement and disdain. The New York Times dubbed it both “repulsive” and “brutally witty”; Brigid Brophy was slightly more generous when she called it a “masterpiece of bad taste”.
Re-reading the novel in 2018, it seems that Myra – the transgender, movie-devouring heroine of the novel – has aged with reckless disregard for the usual codes of propriety or decorum. And yet, given the contemporary zeitgeist of radically engaged feminism, queer and gender politics and a Tinseltown in moral free fall, the novel can also be credited with a strange kind of prescience. The plot is relatively simple. Myra, “whom no man will ever possess”, is a humourless, sexually voracious glamazon with a taste for high-falutin’ rhetoric and remorseless logic. After the apparent suicide of her husband, the film scholar Myron, she lands in Hollywood, renting a room opposite the infamous Chateau Marmont Hotel.
Myra soon winds up teaching at the film academy run by Myron’s uncle, the fatuous and swindling Buck Loner. It’s here that the feverish mechanics of the narrative, operating similarly to those of a 1930 screwball comedy, take hold – with Myra embarking on a series of improbable odysseys. The first is her self-proclaimed mission to destroy “the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing humanity for its next stage”. With a kind of maniacal absolutism, Myra sets out to annihilate the patriarchy and inaugurate a new kind of female independence. In one of her many stentorian disquisitions, Myra exalts “the feminine principle’s need to regain once more the primacy she lost at the time of the Bronze Age when the cock-worshipping Dorians enslaved the West, impiously replacing the Goddess with a god”. This voice – at once hyperbolic and slyly renegade – sets the tone for the rest of Myra’s self-narrated exploits. Her asides ricochet from highbrow references (the sociology of Lévi-Strauss; the birth of the French nouveau roman) to knowing kitsch, as when Myra turns her gaze on herself: “superbly shaped breasts reminiscent of those sported by Jean Harlow in Hell’s Angels”.
The second of Myra’s tasks is intended as an act of vengeance – both in the name of her dead husband and rightfully to seize what is hers: her inheritance, tied up in half of Uncle Buck’s film school. Meanwhile, there unfolds an array of mesmerizingly bizarre set pieces – including a Dionysian orgy in which Myra pins down the macho posturing of her paramours (“the young men compensate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather . . .”) and the “backstage” seduction of one of her jock students, Rusty Godowski, culminating in an infamous rape scene.
The twist in the tale of Myra’s bonkers evolution into “Woman Triumphant” would hardly surprise even the most casual reader – but then Myra Breckinridge is less about the End credits than the verbal pyrotechnics and shimmering, Busby Berkeley parade of acid observations and delirious camp that Vidal corrals in the service of getting there. Harold Bloom – himself no stranger to Orphic pronouncements – hailed Vidal’s novel as “the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neopornography can never go”, and added it to his contentious revision of the twentieth century’s Western Canon. But even today, the novel, in all its amoral daring and declarative dazzle, is almost too much: dissolving binary oppositions and leaving a kind of polymorphous anarchy in its wake – too prickly and contrary to be co-opted by any ideology.
Even before Vidal had pulled his transgender heroine from the closet, he had earned a reputation as a dissident from the sexual orthodoxies of both Left and Right. His novel The City and the Pillar (1948) was a coming-of-age story that described a gay male relationship against the backdrop of the Second World War, and was noted – at a time when the portrayal of homosexual men in fiction was largely confined to shrieking, doomed and pathologized stock types – for its sympathetic portrait of his central character Jim Willard: masculine, athletic, all-American. Vidal’s transgression led to censure. He was blacklisted by Manhattan’s literary establishment for the next six years, and forced to write pulp crime novels which he published under a pseudonym. The New York Times refused to review The City and the Pillar in its pages. But Vidal didn’t recant. Indeed, he spent much of his career elucidating, in various formulations, his theory that there is “no such thing as homosexual people – only homosexual acts”: an idea as evasive as it is revealing, and one that may sit uneasily even with our own modern, liberal sexual attitudes.
Indeed, today – when sexual identity politics have entered mainstream debate – Vidal’s position looks less radical than reactionary: an obstinate refusal of identity at odds with the current desire to classify, label or reach for a neat, off-the-peg persona. For Vidal, a professed bisexual who lived for more than fifty years with his partner, Howard Austen, his self-positioning was strategic. For this man of vast erudition, steeped in ancient Greek classicism, where a kind of universal bisexuality was assumed, anti-essentialism wasn’t a chic affectation. It seems unlikely that he would have had much sympathy for the Foucault-schooled gender deconstructionists who followed him. Indeed, there is a distinct disdain in the novel for any kind of pop intellectualism or philosophical cool – apart, of course, from Myra’s own. As she exhorts us: “No similes. Nothing is like anything else. Things are themselves entirely and do not need interpretation, only a minimal respect for their precise integrity”.
The novel moves at remorseless speed through a host of acerbic observations, skewering everything from the bovine idealism of 1960s radicals (“As for the theory of Communism, they have not a clue. In fact, the only book any of them has read is something called The Green Berets, a jingoistic work written in the spirit of Kipling with the art of Mickey Spillane”) and the traps set by structuralism (“Is it possible to describe anything accurately? That is the problem set us by the French new novelists . . . . The treachery of words is notorious”) to the reductionism of Freudian thinking, characterized by the doctrinaire dentist-psychoanalyst, Dr Ralph Montag. Like most of the novel’s bit players, however, Montag is little more than a cipher, often serving to reinforce a leery and suspect point. Christopher Hitchens, anointed by Vidal as his “dauphin” before they fell out, wrote in an essay for Vanity Fair of Vidal’s tendency, when railing against monotheism, to circle back to the “Jews”, and Myra’s asides about the “Law of Moses” and Montag being “that last resort of the rabbi manqué . . . a dentist from the Grand Concourse of the Bronx” seem to prove that unfortunate point. Similarly, cameos from two of Myra’s colleagues, “a Negro Queen” dubbed “Darkness at Noon” and Miss Cluff, a predatory lesbian (“for her the movies are simply a pretext for getting girls onto the back seat of her secondhand Oldsmobile”) leave a bad taste.
But then in Myra’s world, nothing is sacred. Even literature itself is disparaged as either moribund (“Nevertheless, I intend to create a literary masterpiece in much the same way that I created myself, and for much the same reason: because it is not there”) or betrayed by its audience (“Yet not even I can create a fictional character as one-dimensional as the average reader”). After a while, the levelling effect becomes somewhat deadening, as the laughs begin to thin: everything seemingly set up as a target for Vidal’s vitriol. Yet perhaps Myra’s disillusionment with the written word is due precisely to the fact that she has a vested interest. Myra is an autodidact with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinematic arcana. As she thunders with Vidalian authority: “in the decade between 1935 and 1945, no irrelevant film was made in the United States”. Herein lies her final raison d’être: she wants to finish a book – begun by Myron – about the now largely forgotten film critic of the 1940s, Parker Tyler.
Tyler was a contemporary of Greenwich Village literary radicals such as Djuna Barnes, and practised an idiosyncratic brand of criticism that fused psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes and a “film queen” sensibility (he was one of the first critics to write intelligently about gay representation in the movies); Myra praises his vision of films as “unconscious expressions of age-old human myths”. It’s a view unsurprisingly shared by Vidal himself, who liked to speak of the cinema’s ability to “screen history” – the title of a collection of his essays that argued just that. As the novel progresses, this identification – even symbiosis – between the novelist and his gender-warping alter ego evokes a strange kind of mirroring. It’s difficult to know who is behind the camera and who is in front of it.
Vidal’s intellectual resemblance to his heroine seems, in fact, almost total: so much so that Myra Breckinridge reads almost as Vidal’s own aesthetic manifesto. Jean Cocteau once posited that all great artists are psychological hermaphrodites – and in Myra, Vidal seems to have found the apotheosis of his own complicated literary persona. There has always been a division between Vidal the essayist and Vidal the novelist. At their finest, his critical essays are supreme examples of the form: learned and magisterial; august in their disdain; exercises in cultivated contempt. But his great strengths as an essayist – his didacticism, his preference for himself as his own favourite subject, his icy lack of empathy – hobbled his attempts to write imaginative fiction. Incapable of getting out of the way of his own voice, and unlike his contemporaries Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Vidal was fated to write only good, rather than great, novels. Mailer famously remarked that his literary nemesis “lacked the wound” to write fiction, but perhaps it was simply that, like Myra herself, Vidal enjoyed being the mega-star too much; the creation of his own indomitable will. He wanted top billing.
Despite Vidal’s learned command of his favourite subjects – history, power, sex, American culture – he was at his best when he was simply playing Vidal. Like any Golden Age starlet, he knew all his best angles. (Myra: “my beauty blinding them, as it does all men, unmanning them in the way that King Kong was reduced to a mere simian whimper by beauteous Fay Wray whom I resemble left three-quarter profile if the key light is no more than five feet high during the close shot”.) Did he, like Oscar Wilde, pour his genius into his life and leave only his talent for the work? For all his snarky maledictions about the death of the novel and the demise of serious literature that pepper both Myra Breckinridge and many of his essays, it could be argued that the preening, self-publicizing Vidal actually helped to kill the very thing he loved. Even at the height of his career as a literary pugilist, infamously sparring with everyone from Truman Capote to Jacqueline Susann, he seemed to bask in the sense that the “literary” was already being eclipsed by celebrity-obsessed soundbite culture and the fast, shallow world of television studios.
Vidal – via Myra – rhapsodizes about the hypnotic artistry of TV: “I was sufficiently avant-garde in 1959 to recognise the fact that it was no longer the movies but the television commercial that engaged the passionate attention of the world’s best artists and technicians”. The irony was that Vidal courted the medium even as he despised the message. In the later stages of his career, he became better known for his cantankerous television appearances (including a particularly puzzling and splenetic run-in with David Dimbleby), preserved for posterity on YouTube, than for his literary efforts. He gained popularity among 9/11 “Truthers” for his innuendoes about the Twin Towers attacks and his hastily written screeds on American foreign policy and the “United States of Amnesia”. Meanwhile, his Narratives of Empire novel cycle – perhaps his most obvious bid for literary posterity – gathered dust. Vidal the Writer had long since devoured the novelist. Ever searching for the spotlight, he became a part of the entertainment culture he so eloquently enjoyed eviscerating.
So where does that leave Myra Breckinridge as she moves into middle age? In its contrarianism, its unruliness, its waspish score-settling, the novel is vintage Vidal. And much like its author, there is an enigmatic quality to Myra’s rapid-fire musings; something fugitive and vulnerable beneath the armour-plated exterior. The novel’s irreverent attitudes seemed to alienate conservatives and renegades alike. Nothing and no one is spared Vidal’s gimlet eye. Although many of his later novels were ostensibly more dystopian, veering into Lynchian science fiction (Duluth, 1983) and parodies of America’s twin obsessions – religion and TV (Live from Golgotha, 1992), none comes close to Myra’s brand of comic nihilism. In it Vidal anticipates the sour, slackening coda of the great countercultural dream: “free love” being replaced by pornography; the avant-garde being killed by Warhol’s embrace of consumerist Pop Art; his own adored Golden Age Hollywood cannibalized by reality television. Insurrection curdles into an odd kind of conservatism. Even the novel’s final line strikes a deliberately wrong note: “it is a proven fact that happiness, like the proverbial bluebird, is to be found in your own backyard if you just know where to look”.
Moving with feline surefootedness, Myra went on to live second and third lives. In 1974, Vidal published a sequel: Myron. Another antic stew of hormonal turbulence, sex war, deranged theories of population control and time travel, the novel is cynical but light: a re-tread that, one senses, Vidal dashed off as a means of pricking the new puritanism of a decade that saw the crusades of anti-pornography feminists such as Andrea Dworkin. But Myra Breckinridge had already achieved its apotheosis as self-parody when it was adapted – of course – into a Hollywood film in 1970. Starring a hopelessly wooden Raquel Welch and late-phase Mae West decked out in a series of increasingly absurd costumes, the film incarnates much of the spirit of the Sixties, with its dizzying montages and zany energy hurtling to a bad end – without any of the novel’s pointed satire.
Naturally, Vidal hated it. Yet given the novel’s abiding obsessions with transformation and artifice, it is perhaps only fitting that it should have become the thing it had always been: a work of deep shallowness; a profound examination of the world of surfaces. As Vidal wrote, in a new introduction to the novel, twenty-five years after he first spawned his leading lady: “It is good to have Myra back. After all, this is her/his/their age”. A quarter of a century later, Myra’s imperishable star still endures.