In Whit Stillman’s 1990 film Metropolitan, the young Tom Townsend remarks, "I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking." Something very similar must have been on my adolescent mind when I bought a fat paperback copy of Gore Vidal’s United States—a collection of his essays up through 1992, which is about the time he lost his last trace of lucidity. I read a decent chunk of it, too. To this day it sits on my shelves, pages yellowing under the influence of all of the acid, in every sense, concentrated between its covers.
The book has proved useful in numerous ways, and especially so recently, after a strange volume landed on my desk: Thieves Fall Out, a half-hearted attempt at a noir thriller originally published in 1953, and attributed at the time to the pen of a "Cameron Kay." It has recently been reissued, and the cover now proclaims the book to be "THE LOST PULP NOVEL BY Gore Vidal."
It’s not news that the young Vidal, blacklisted in some quarters over his depiction of homosexuality in 1948’s The City and the Pillar, earned needed cash in the ’50s by writing pulp fiction, in addition to going to work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He was proud of his cinematic hackwork (which included contributing to the script of Ben Hur) and ultimately admitted to the fiction, owning up to having written three crime novels under the pseudonym Edgar Box. But, as far as I know, he never publicly claimed Thieves Fall Out.
It’s easy to see why. Far less talented writers—workaday, grind-it-out genre practitioners for whom Vidal had little but scorn—have written far better books than this one. In fact, in 1973, Vidal wrote the definitive take-down of middle and lowbrow American literary taste, the gimmick for which was that he read all of the top ten novels on the New York Times’ bestseller list, and, with only the occasional gesture towards mercy, sliced them up in one long essay for the New York Review of Books—an essay collected in United States.
The controlling theme of the bloodbath was that the authors of bestsellers were not inspired by life or literature, but by the movies. Vidal makes a strong case for this, based on his own experience as a collaborator on studio screenplays. The essay had a classic lead, setting the scene with what one takes to be a composite character, The Wise Hack, ever exhausted by the antics of the young Quality Lit writers imported by the studio heads to give the product some class, proclaiming, "Shit has its own integrity." Much of Vidal’s essay is devoted to detecting the clichés of Hollywood in the pages of his victims, and it would have been awkward to admit that, twenty years earlier, he had written a novel employing virtually all of these clichés that, rather than being a gleeful, tight, tongue-in-cheek genre exercise, was just flat.
Observations in the 1973 essay can be read like a checklist for the elements of Thieves Fall Out. If "most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years," then Thieves Fall Out certainly reflects a certain interpretation of American noir films. Spiritually, it is pure Casablanca, seen through a glass, listlessly. Our patsy, young Pete Wells, a veteran of the war, tough guy, and sometime smuggler, wakes up in a brothel in Cairo, having been robbed. In short order and for no obvious reason, he gets mixed up in a plot to sneak a priceless ancient necklace out of the country for an international crime syndicate.
In a recent essay on Anna Karenina, Gary Saul Morson remarks, "Better than any other writer who ever lived, Tolstoy traces the infinitesimally small changes of consciousness." Reading Vidal on Pete Wells is like experiencing the opposite of this. Pete is the kind of rough fellow who, all reports indicate, was often the object of Vidal’s affections. We know he is dreamy because—in Vidal’s 1973 words—"We get the Mirror Scene, used by all pop-writers to tell us what the characters look like." In 1953, Pete stands combing his hair "in the dusty glass of the bureau," observing himself to be "almost tall, with lean hips and a deep chest acquired during his days in high school and in the Army, where he had been a divisional middleweight boxing champion … He was prepared to do almost anything to make a dollar, and in his life he'd done a lot of unusual things to survive."
Just as male writers so often struggle with writing plausible female characters, I suppose it shouldn’t surprise that Vidal also cannot make a plausible attempt at explaining why someone to whose type he is attracted does the things he does, or how anyone so obviously stupid—Pete constantly blabs to anyone who will listen about theoretically confidential elements of the conspiracy he’s engaged in—manages to muster the cunning to survive frequent attempts on his life. These attempts are often made by the arch Egyptian policeman, Mohammed Ali, who also is in the habit of making attempts on Pete’s virtue.
"You know what I’d like to do to you?"
"Something rash, I fear," said the policeman. "In this country though, I, the police, do the doing—if that is good English."
"Maybe you have a surprise coming," said Pete, controlling his anger carefully. He would have plenty of time later on to take care of him. Meanwhile he must find Anna.
"I hope there will be many happy surprises," said the policeman, and he put his hand gently on Pete’s knee.
"You’re so right," said Pete, lifting the hand off his leg. For a single moment there was a trial of strength. Both men strained mightily. Pete won and the hand was removed.
Mohammed Ali was quite pale and sweat beaded his forehead. "You are strong," he said. "I like that."
Mohammed serves in the role of what, in 1973, Vidal indecorously called "the Fag Villain… certain to arouse the loathing of all decent fiction addicts."
We have a good girl, Anna, whose father was a senior SS officer at Dachau and who now lives in a state of perpetual shame and sexual availability in Egypt. There is also a bad girl, who is French. Anna at one point is said to be attempting the assassination of King Farouk, an off-stage B-plot that serves no clear narrative purpose. At least her character is available to provide us with this memorable exchange:
"Let’s leave together. As soon as I see a man on some business here, I’ll have money, enough to get us out of Egypt, to Europe, maybe even home, to the States. We’ll be married."
"Married!" She said the word as though she had no idea what it meant. "You would marry me? Someone who… Ach, Gott!" and she began to sob. Pete held her close until the sobbing was over, the pain soothed.
There is a plot twist that isn’t very exciting, and Pete ultimately gets to slap up the bad girl for her troubles and shoot poor frustrated Mohammed, all amidst bizarre narrative oversights and howlers—like seeing the mountains of Libya from Luxor—which indicate that, when Vidal visited Egypt in the ’40s, he must not have retained much about the experience.
Or, more likely, he just didn’t care, and the howlers are there intentionally to show it. What comes across most from Thieves Fall Out is the withering contempt its author had for his readers. As the 1973 Vidal wrote about some now out-of-print novel by a man named Robert Crichton:
There is something drastically wrong with this smoothly executed novel [well, that doesn’t apply] and I cannot figure out what it is other than to suspect that the author lacks the integrity the Wise Hack insists upon. Mr. Crichton has decided to tell a story that does not seem to interest him very much.
The diagnosis here is aided by the fact that Vidal had once suffered from the same ailment. But the difference between poor, forgotten Mr. Crichton and the young author of Thieves Fall Out is that one of them thought hack storytelling was easy.