Two Valuable Voices Lost in One Week

It’s hard to think of a less likely pairing that Gore Vidal and Maeve Binchy, both of whom we lost this week. But I would happily recommend anyone to read Maeve Binchy’s superb novel ’Light a Penny Candle’ , and Gore Vidal’s tremendous historical novel ‘Lincoln’, in the same breath.  ‘Penny Candle’ is a fine piece of work which has great power to move, and lodges in the memory. It would be silly to dismiss it as an airport book r a light romance. I wish I had met Miss Binchy, who I am told by people who knew and worked with her was a lovely, kind and humorous person.

I’d also like to have met Gore Vidal, but long ago, before he became a bit silly (Craig Brown rather naughtily showed him up as knowing almost nothing about real politics some years ago, when he first began to set out his exaggerated conspiracy theories about the decay of the USA, which were not entirely justified by the facts. He thought Britain’s intelligence service was called ‘M Sixteen’). I had a lot of pleasure out of reading his novels in my twenties and thirties, though I never got round to his famous homosexual tale ‘The City and the Pillar’ and am not sure I can be bothered now.

His real strength was his intimate knowledge of Washington DC, his Southern political heritage and his mixture of an outsider’s observation (thanks to his sexual tastes) with an insider’s understanding. I would recommend his early, brief novel ‘Washington DC’ to anyone. As you read it, you are transported in that strange city’s humid, insect-haunted twilight and its endless scheming and betrayal.  He was always very conscious of its closeness to the South, where his own family came from – the great forests and swamps of the haunted Southlands that begin just over the Potomac , full of Civil War graves and ghosts, that reminder that, as John Keegan rightly says, America is a wilderness, whereas England is a garden. It was still just detectable, this feeling of being on the edge of the wild, when I lived in DC 20 years ago. But the city has now swollen into a megalopolis, and it is much harder to sense, anywhere much north of Fredericksburg.

I do hope that there will now also be a revival of the film that was made of his play ‘The Best Man’, about one the last proper American political conventions, when the nomination was not already sewn up by the time the delegates assembled.  Maybe I’d think differently now, but I thought when I first saw it that it was probably pretty truthful about how politics was actually done. But that was the old 19th-cenury politics of America, corrupt, often brutal , but at least not controlled by marketing men and billionaire donors, as they are now.

But the thing for which I think he will remembered is ‘Lincoln’, a historical novel of charm and power, which is also thrilling and moving. Many of my conservative American friends loathe Abraham Lincoln, and I can see why. But I can’t share their view. There is something about this wry, sad, gaunt, shrewd man that is terribly likeable (my view of him is influenced by the hilarious portrayal in George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman novel set in pre-Civil War America’ Flash for Freedom’. Lincoln is one of the very few people, real or frictional, in all the Flashman books, who ever sees through Flashman’s lies and bluster, and realises what he actually is – a lying, untrustworthy, lecherous coward. Yet Lincoln lets him off with a jest, and pretends to believe Flashman’s ludicrous tale about himself ,while making it clear he doesn’t really.’  I suspect this is a true picture. I like to visit the Lincoln memorial in Washington because it has, carved deep in the marble, the amazing words of the Second Inaugural Address, one of the most overwhelming pieces of political prose ever crafted in any language and full, incidentally, of a Bible Lincoln did not believe.

Vidal’s portrayal,of a man conspired against by his Cabinet and his generals, plagued by a wife on the brink of madness, fearful of her wild expenditure, devastated by the death of a beloved son, living in a rickety, insecure White House where there is no privacy, is very, very moving.  So is his account of Lincoln’s own grief at the deaths his war is causing. One night, sleepless again, he complains to his secretaries that he has had to ‘watch this room fill up with blood’. He is also constantly observant and funny about what a disease-ridden, insect-haunted swamp and dump the American capital was until very recently.

There is also a very touching scene where he visits wounded Confederate soldiers, so powerful that I sometimes pull the book form the shelves to find it, and am astonished by how brief it is. But then, Lincoln himself was most powerful when he was brief ,a s the astonishing Gettysburg address shows.

As for Maeve Binchy, I would be very proud to have written anything remotely as good as ‘Penny Candle’. She wrote good spare English, she knew how to tell a story in such a way that you longed for more, she created credible characters about whom the reader must care,  and her conversations rang true. She is also a great explainer of the Irish to the English, a job that badly needs to be done all the time, as we should get on so much better than we do. I can’t comment on any of her other books, as I rather suspected she wrote them to please her publishers, and had said what she wanted to say in ‘Penny Candle’. It was worth saying. And it is worth reading. And snobbery should never cause anyone to ignore her.