Gore Vidal’s vision of Love in the Modern Era
Gore Vidal is an American novelist, playwright, screen writer, short story writer,
essayist and critic. He had mastered almost every genre, except poetry. His fictional subjects
are often drawn from historical and political sources. In his work Vidal examines the plight of
modern man, whom he sees as a victim of a valueless society and its corrupt institutions. His
work in all genres is marked by his brilliant technique and urbane wit.
The best among the eight novels which Vidal published from 1946 to 1954, is
The Judgment of Paris, a remarkably sound work, written when he was twenty - five. Of
great scope and frequent depth, The Judgment of Paris is successful because in it the
author combines delight in satire and in perfect sentences with several interesting literary
conventions. The framework of the novel is a retelling in modern terms of the Greek
myth of Paris, who was asked by Zeus to choose the most beautiful of three goddesses
- Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. The hero is an American “innocent” touring Europe to
complete his education and to be polished by the older culture, a device found in such
works by Henry James as Daisy Miller (1879) and The American (1887).
Moreover, the style of The Judgment of Paris is seemingly appropriated from two
nineteenth - century British conventions: as in the brief novels of Thomas Love Peacock,
characters are assembled for no other purpose than to talk together interestingly; and, as
in the novels of Anthony Trollope, the author addresses his audience in the “dear reader”
asides that invite participation in the actual building of plot, character, and theme. These
elements are united in a novel that operates successfully on two levels - the serious, on
which the story is worked out ; and the comic, on which the entire theme is mocked.
Philip Warren, the modern Paris, is enjoying one year of leisure in Europe before
he must return to the United States with his vocation and the pattern of his life
irrevocably determined. Philip, twenty - eight and handsome, is not very innocent about
life after having endured the effects of World War II as a junior officer and three years in
the Harvard Law School. From these years he has a butterfly tattooed on his thigh and a
degree in law. About Philip’s mind the author confesses: “What sort of man or boy or
youth is Philip Warren? Well, it is much too early to drawn any conclusions about his
character since he is hardly yet revealed” (17). The device used to reveal the hero’s
character is to have him meet as many diverse “characters” possible during his year in
Europe. Revelation must come through encounters with a motley corps of secondary
characters. Lord Glenellen and his friends offer boys and exotic political intrigue, but
Philip confesses an addiction to girls and old-fashioned American power-seeking.
When Philip meets the first woman to tempt him as Hera, the figure representing
Power, tempted Paris - he is in Rome.
[Where] the avenue widened and there before him, illuminated by several
floodlights, was the Coliseum, far higher than he’d ever imagined it to be,
solemn in its age. He paused, awaiting revelation. None came, however ……
he was aware only that his legs were rather tired from walking and that
his left shoe was pressing too tightly against his little toe. (38)
As Philip enjoys his vision of himself “… he was dedicated to the idea of a
classic detachment and he was wary of any involvement which might threaten this high
cool mood,”(57) Regina Durham speaks to him in the dark Coliseum. In keeping with the
queenly connotation of her name, Regina is the wife of Rex Durham, the power behind
all American politicians; only a congressman himself, he mysteriously controls all
Presidents and lower powers.
When the Durham’s try to interest Philip in becoming one of “their people” by
promising him in all seriousness the American presidency in exchange for merely
accepting their control, Philip becomes Regina’s lover; but he scoffs at her political
inducements. In describing their love - making, Vidal parodies the various kinds of
pornographers who describe in suggested details the whole act of sex:
Now, to be frank, one hardly knows how far to go in describing precisely
what happened. There is the brutal school, which use any number of squalid
words to get to the point. Then there are the in credibly popular lady
novelists, who titter and leer, describing the hero’s great, rough (yet
sensitive) hands and the back of his bronzed neck (for some unaccountable
reason, the back of the neck has become, in the male at least, an erotic
symbol of singular fascination).
Then there are the sort to whom the
business is very beautiful and very fine, the center of the book, tender and
warm and serious, very serious. Much is described, as much is left to the
imagination. One is moved and, should the novelist be a good one, the
scene can have a remarkable immediacy. Yet, in this particular case, at
least, we must attempt another method. For Philip is not brutal nor is the
back of his neck bronzed nor is he in love with Regina. He finds her
attractive and desirable and it seems to him like a very pleasant way to
spend his first night in Rome. (59).
Regina never reveals why she must adopt Philip into her political plans; she is
always serene, controlled, and appropriately passionate, although the affair never becomes
over:
… now what he saw he like dispassionately and he could, he knew,
in time and if all went well, love or at least grow accustomed to her in
such a way that he might think himself in love: that grand nineteenth century passion which had never, at this moment in his life at least, touched
him with its burnished wing. (78 – 79)
While Philip is being tempted by Regina, Vidal introduces his hero to a startling
group of background figures who are necessary to his comedy. To illustrate the working of
political power on at least one level, Philip meets in Rome a group of royalists who are
conspiring to return the House of Savoy to the Italian throne. These are Clyde Norman,
“a director of the Fabian Trade Mission, otherwise unidentified”; Lord Glenellen, a
British citizen no longer welcome in England because of his “hobbies”; and the two men’s
royalist, homosexual associates.
Philip, understanding but not sharing in their sexual activities, undertakes a
mysterious trip to Amalfi as courier for the group, only to discover on returning to
Rome that most of the conspirators have become Communists. In Amalfi he meets two
American tourists:
Bella and May Washington were sisters, teachers of English and
Social Science, respectively, in the Bigelow Clapp High School of Dubuque,
Iowa. Both were unmarried, they hastened to say … and both were virginal, he
decided, sublimated to a degree that was scarcely human. (99)
And in Capri Philip attends a party given by Zoe Helotius, formerly a peasant but
now the incredibly rich widow of a fig merchant. She is famous for knowing, if at all
possible, the great men and women of the world:
The vulgarity of Mrs. Helotes was one of the few really perfect,
unrefined things in Europe; it was a legend and, unlike most highly
publicized phenomena, never a disappointment to the eager tourist who
(properly spoon soared) had got himself into any one of those five villas
which decorated the spas of fashionable Europe like rough diamonds, bases
for her considerable operations. (122)
Forsaking the company of these interesting people and demanding the exercise of
his year’s freedom of choice in order to decide on Regina’s offer of political power, Philip
leaves Italy for Egypt.
In The Judgment of Paris, Egypt is equated with knowledge, just
as Rome is equated with power. The Athena figure who tempts Philip Warren to
undertake the intellectual life is Sophia Oliver, who has returned to Luxor or pursue her
interests in archeology:
She was handsome, thought not pretty in a contemporary sense for her
nose was large, like a Julian portrait bust, and her skin was white, unpainted,
Yet her eyes were extraordinary, pale gray with long dark lashes, and here
hair was a fine auburn, drawn softly back from here face and gathered in
bun at the back. Her figure was good, but he could not tell if she were tall
or short. He suspected that she was tall and, thought not young, not old
either…. (171)
Sophia is never more closely described: she is meant to be as abstract as the idea of
Egypt or as the embodiment of all philosophy that is not demeaned by daily “getting and
spending.”
Sophia lectures to Philip on the antiquities they journey to see; but his reactions
are scarcely those of an intellectual:
Philip, thought he like her, found her positive assertions a little
trying; she never spoke tentatively, advanced an opinion as merely an
opinion and not a fact of nature. Yet, in general, he agreed with what she
had to say and, in any case, he had not yet been in a position to contradict
her with a superior knowledge on any subject. (177)
Sophia happens to know Regina Durham, whom she dislikes for meddling in the real
world of political intrigues. She lectures him on ancient history, remonstrates with him for
submitting to Regina Durham’s wiles, and offers her asceticism in contrast. They do not
become lovers, and Philip shies away from scholarship. Philip at times wonders at not
being sexually attracted to Sophia; he realizes, however, that her reaction to advances
would probably be no more than one of quiet amusement.
When Sophia finally invites Philip to join her in intellectual contentment, her terms
are so anti-humanistic that Philip has no trouble rejecting them. Sophia advises:
… You should withdraw from what repels you, turn to some thing that
does please you. Music. Ideas. Excellence. Perhaps even the vain schoolboy
hunt for “first principles” or, better yet, you like the poetry, not the post ….
Then love the idea which is real, more real than the man who made it, who
invented the stories long ago, almost before there were sufficient words to
describe the sun and the wind and the earth, love and anger, virtue and
wisdom. That’s why I have spent my life among the ruins, reading history,
learning, avoiding always men and women …. Not that I’m a recluse: far
from it, but I never touch them and they never touch me. (199)
The comedic background to the philosophical discussions of Sophia and Philip
includes a hotel keeper who speaks an English idiom amalgamated from various cheap
American movies; Mr. Briggs Willys, so rich and fat who is extremely obese and longs for
death; and
Mrs. Fay Peabody, American author of innumerable detective novels. When
Philip suggests that the master of all criminal behavior help the suffering, fat Willys out of
his misery, Mrs. Peabody reluctantly tries to do so. Of course, her ingenious schemes
completely fail; and Mr. Willys finally dies voluntarily, having just decided that he probably
wants to live.
The Aphrodite figure who tempts Philip Warren to award here the prize of his
devotion is Anna Morris, wife of an American businessman who is in Europe to negotiate
steel contracts. Although she and Philip first met in Cairo, it is in Paris, traditionally the
city of love, that their passion is consummated. They do not demand too much of each
other, and prove admirable companions. Neither the power nor the intellect enjoyed by
Regina and Sophia interests Anna. She is really no more than a good lover, the reflection
of Philip Warren’s idea of woman. Her one virtue is not forcing the young man to devote
himself to her love.
Having never loved before, Philip yearns for the grand passion that supposedly moves
all creation; yet, being a realist, he accepts the individual moments of love as all that he
can ever have. Regina admits that her need is for any man who will let her control him,
Sophia thinks and lives alone, and Anna accepts intuitively the fact that Philip loves her
and will leave her. Philip satisfies himself that he has known love, and may build his
life from there. “Having loved” seems, finally, to be the desirable solution to Philip’s
problem.
The setting for this decision brings together in Paris most of the comic creations
from the scenes in Rome and Egypt. They join characters from Vidal’s early novels,
who are revived for unexplained reasons: Robert Holton from In a Yellow Wood has
joined the State Department, Jim Willard from The City and the pillar is now a “kept
boy” and drug addict in Paris, and Charles do Clunky from Dark Green, Eight Red is
wandering around Europe playing courtier. As in Rome, most of the new creations are
homosexuals - contented American lovers, rich trans vestiges, and worshippers of
Augustus - Augusta, “the only functioning hermaphrodite in Paris.”
Against this comedic background, Philip chooses Anna, as Paris in the Greek
myth chose Aphrodite. The derision to devote himself to capturing moments of love is a
young man’s optimistic solution to the problem of finding a center in life. Considering
this solution several years after first publishing The Judgment of Paris, Vidal remarked in an
interview by Claudia Dreifus, “I am not at all sure a decade later that I would still give
Aphrodite the prize, but my younger self did so without hesitation, and I still honor that
commitment” (9).
But the significance of Philip Warren’s commitment remains valid, even if the
occasion of the choice does not. Given the hypothetically “permanent” choice among
power, intellect, and love, only a commitment to love is humanly possible - “humanly” in
the sense of “humanistically.” For The Judgment of Paris is the working out of a
devotion to the concept of man as a being more worthwhile in and for himself than as an
object of manipulation or abstraction. The idea of the quest is better handled in The
Judgment of Paris than in
In a Yellow Wood or The City and the Pillar, where the
youthful heroes never forego the pleasure of taking their quests seriously. Philip Warren is
closer to Blondel in A search for the King in questioning the validity of his quest, or to
Peter Nelson from Dark Green, Bright Red in seeing the irony in his half - hearted
search for meaning.
The Judgment of Paris reads smoothly because Vidal’s disquisitions on sex, death,
and love seem to belong to the characters who mouth them and because Philip Warren is s
satirized as thoroughly as he is given sympathy. In other words, Paris is “judged” before the
truism that the old gods have not died.
There is an abundance of both minor plots and minor characters in The Judgment of
Paris, certainly, none of which has much to do with the novel’s larger plot and all of which hang
rather shapelessly on the line – but each is in itself a marvelous bit of color, as it were.
In the first section of the novel, Philip becomes entangled with the homosexual dilettantes
Clyde Norman and Lord Ayre Glenellen and their mad plot to restore the Italian monarchy.
Acting as Glenellen’s reluctant courier, Philip tries to deliver a message to the eccentric signor
Guisardo, who affects animal masks as a disguise. Philip makes an appointment to deliver his
message in the ruins of a mountain chapel at midnight, but Guiscardo fails t keep ruins of a
mountain chapel at night, but Guiscardo fails to keep this Gothic assignation, and an animal
mask abandoned in the ruins is the only clue that some mysterious fate has befallen him. The
message entrusted to Philip is melodramatically cryptic: it is the single Greek word asebia,
which connotes a failure to worship the gods. Glenellen subsequently denies having sent the
message, of course, and in a dazzling turnabout abandons his campaign to restore the house of
Savoy and becomes, illogically, a communist. He surfaces again in the third section of the novel
as part of a ludicrous transvestite cult that revolves around an androgyne known alternately as
Augsta and Augstus.
The flip-flop inconsequence of all this is not without point. The string of incidents is
both a parody of spy fiction and a camp trivialization of homosexualist interests, and it is
ultimately an attack on the literary mystique of plot, inasmuch as the Norman-Glenellen axiz of
events succedds as a knid of plot despite its alogicla seriality.
Each of the two later sections of the novel has a string of events that similarly defies the
mystique of plot. The Egypt section introduces a man named Briggs Willys who is afflicted with
taedium vitae but cannot manage to organize a suicide despite several sincere attempts. He
therefore engages Mrs. Fay Peabody, a doyenne of detective fiction, to dispatch his very
considerable flesh. Regarding the assignment as a challenge to her plotting ability, Mrs.,
Peabody sets in motion a series of harebrained murder schemes that evoke the airier flights of the
locked-room detection novel. All of them, of course, fail dismally. The Paris section of the
novel deals not only with the cult of the androgyne, in which Glenellen’s plotting instinct finds
an outlet in a pseudoreligious vesting ritual, but also with the plots of a stupendously vulgar
hostess named Zoe Helotius to crash the royal house of Windsor. Mrs. Helotius is as mad in her
own way as Mrs. Peabody, Lord Glenellen and Signor Guiscardo, and such highly colored
characters throw Philip’s bland sanity into nice relief, just as their mad cap plots flatter the
understatement of the novel’s main plot.
Indeed, this understatement of the main plot allows Vidal to expend a wealth of invention
on minor characters without creating an aesthetic imbalance. Vidal’s understated plot allows
him to adorn the novel with a wealth of interesting asides, such as Philip’s speculation that
energetic mediocrity is politically more useful in a republican society than brilliance, wit, or
passion and Mr. Norman’s speculation that Europe’s old-world manners would have expired
long since had it not been for the unexpected applause of the Western cousins.
Even more important, perhaps, the understatement of the basic story line allows relatively
free rein to Vidal’s wit. He has a great deal of fun with homosexuality and spoofs the reputation
as homosexual novelist that The City and the Pillar had earned him. His joke is that Philip
Warren is relentlessly heterosexual, although homosexuals dominate the circles he moves in.
Vidal even sends Philip to a male brothel, where Glenellen purchases a handsome youth for him
and leaves him to his pleasure, very much to Philip’s embarrassment and Vidal’s arch
amusement:
It would be startling to report that the stalwart Philip succumbed to pagan
vice, that the habits of his maturity were in an instant undone by this classic figure
which against his will, he found himself admiring. But we must remain true to
the fact of Philip’s character and report, truthfully,that nothing happened. (254)
Each of the parts of The Judgment of Paris revolves about a major cultural center and its
tutelary goddess: Rome as a seat of Political power (Regina /Hera), Egypt as a source of
mysterious knowledge (Sophia/Athena), and Paris as the locale of grand love (Anna/Aphrodite).
Vidal explodes each myth by reducing the centers to guidebook stereotypes and the goddesses to
fraudulent women leading to death. Regina promises Philip a career in politics, but how she can
effect it is never clarified. Mythic creations have their own raison d’etre, which one does not
question. As Queen of Heaven and consort of the Sky God should have the solution to the riddle
of the cosmos; yet she speaks in riddles herself about the agon between the hanged gods and
their usurpers.
Philip tries to penetrate the inscrutable mysteries of Egypt through Sophia, the Athena
figure who offers him the wisdom her name implies. Philip has only intellectual commerce with
her; sex with Wisdom is an abstraction only a metaphysician can contemplate. Sophia has the
look of the Sibyl in her eyes, but she is enslaved to a prophet who foretells the coming of
messiah. When she requests further information about the savior who will dispel man’s fear of
death, the prophet rises abruptly and terminates the audience. The oracles are silent or cheat.
Sophia, like Regina, was a fraud. She was searching for knowledge herself, devoting her time to
interrogating mystics whose art of equivocation could not with stand analysis. Rome and
Regina, Egypt and Sophia have failed the hero. One more goddess remains: Aphrodite, whom
Philip encounters in Egypt but possesses in Paris.
Initially, Parts I and II, Rome and Egypt, seem unrelated, but they are linked by a
common motif – the plot that will turn the detached Philip Warren to engage with some work. In
Rome he became a messenger for a pair of mad Englishmen; in Egypt he agrees to procure
poison for the elephantine Mr. Willys who is anxious to shuffle off his mortal coil. In each case,
Philip’s first reaction was to hurl himself into the plot; any sort of commitment or lunatic scheme
was preferable to nothingness. But he reneged, and the task was entrusted to Fay Peabody, a
detective writer, who bungled her first two attempts. Willys finally got his wish and died from a
heart attack.
Mrs. Peabody’s theory of fiction is based on personal experience as opposed to “faulty
verisimilitude.” If there is one hallowed element of fiction absent in The Judgment of Paris, it is
Verisimilitude. Characters arrive and depart with the most tenuous motivation, and scenes
change like projections on a cyclorama. As a further extension of the literary enjoyment,
characters from Vidal’s other novels pop up with additions to their resumes: Robert Holton of In
a Yellow Wood has taken a position with the State Department; Charles de Cluny of Dark Green,
Bright Red has become a courtier without a court; and Jim Willard of The City and the Pillar is
hustling in Paris.
The devices he mocks are those he once took seriously – the solipsistic male, the hero
pursued by seducers of both sexes, the sirens with their songs of love, the “faulty verisimilitude”
of an American embroiled in a plot he does not even understand. Physical love, even when
practiced by men and women of good nature, is too much messy. Thus Vidal poeticizes it to
justify its existence in both life and literature.
Vidal maintained his focus on the nature of Western Civilization, the flaws which have
prevented the United States from achieving its democratic promise and how a free individual live
an intellectually fulfilling and ethically proper life in a corrupt society. From this novel, Gore
Vidal pictures the plight of American youth, their awkward behavior, which results in polluting
the society and themselves. It deals with the marred condition of a young hero opting for love.
Among the constant craving for power, intellect and love between human beings, it is only love
which is pure and all too humane among the three. Even physical love, when practiced by men
and women of good nature, is too much messy.
Reference
Primary source
Vidal, Gore. The Jugdement of Paris. London: Panther Granana pub., 1984.
Secondary sources
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