Gore Vidal's Gore Vidal Part Two Omnibus

DOORBELL RINGS

Well...here you are.

At the end of the road - literally! Come on in!

It's called La Rondinaia - the swallow's nest.

It was first built in 1925 -

the same year that I was built!

There was no approach to it. You had to climb a mountain.

350 steps up and 350 steps down.

Everything had to be brought in on people's backs - a highly expensive, insane thing to do.

That's from the first century AD, near Hadrian's villa.

Who are the photographs of?

Well...

My favourite dog, of course, is at the centre.

My mother, I believe, is among "the usual suspects"!

Amelia Earhart, my grandfather, Senator Gore, and I.

There's my father when he was in Roosevelt's cabinet.

I first came to Revellos in 1948, when I came up here in a jeep with Tennessee Williams.

We'd taken a tour - it was all torn up from the war - starting from Rome.

We then stayed in Amalfi and came up here one day.

It was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen -

particularly the gardens above.

Over the years, I used to come to work and get away from people.

I'd stay in a hotel.

Then, one day - 22 years ago - we saw there was a villa for sale!

We came, looked...

Actually, by the time I had walked down the cyprus alley,

I decided I would somehow try and buy the house.

This whole area here was sacred to the great god Pan.

There's a lovely story from the first, second century -

when Christianity finally infected the West.

A traveller,

obviously of the pagan persuasion,

was gliding along this coast.

And from the hills, the forest, he heard this voice say,

"The great god Pan is dead."

I think he's still lurking somewhere here.

I'm not in the worship business,

but if I was to select a deity, Pan is as amiable as one can think of.

It's Magna Graecia, this part of the world.

It's all Greek - everything from Sicily up to Naples.

Magna Graecia is to Greece, sort of like Texas or California is to the East of the US -

a bit too rich, a bit too vulgar and showy.

And that rather appeals to my American temperament.

HE READS IN ITALIAN

I picked another country because you're more concentrated in another language.

Also, if I'm in America, I'm going to be a politician.

I'm in such a rage, generally.

When I finish the New York Times

my blood pressure is so high that I couldn't concentrate on writing a novel.

Italy is Italy. I don't much care what happens.

Everything I've written from Burr on, has been written at this table

in long hand.

And, though I have visitors...

Tennessee came to see me - on the wrong day, naturally, at the wrong hour. Pure Tennessee!

And he said, "I think Gore has made more money than I suspected!"

He practically picked up things to see how much they'd cost.

I've never seen such an invidious, commercialite approach

from my great, artistic friend.

'But, people do come.'

THEY CHAT INDISTINCTLY

'There's a wonderful line of...

'It's a line of Horace that Flaubert used to quote.

'In English, "He stayed home and wrote."

'Which is what Flaubert did, and what Horace wanted said about him once he'd found his perfect house.

'And...I stayed home and wrote.'

-HOWARD:

-It was pretty close.

I liked his solution to the drug problem.

-WOMAN: Whose?

-Perot. His answer was, "It won't be pretty!"

That was a very substantive statement(!)

-Then there was the wake-up call!

-He wanted to have a 6am wake-up call?

Did you have to get up or could you go back to sleep?

You can see it, like sirens in the neighbourhood - aaeeeeee!

"Wake up, America!"

'I gave up politics when I was... In 1964.'

I would have been elected to the House and I said, "Do I really want to go to Congress?"

I'd sort of psyched myself into it.

I decided, "No, I'll write Julian and go back to novel writing."

The choice was Rome or Athens - I needed a good Classical library.

Athens was too hideous.

Rome was then, in the early '60s, a blissful city.

"Mastara sees great peril - no matter what I do.

"I sacrificed yesterday and this morning. There is still no sign.

"I prayed over an hour to Helios. I looked straight at him until I was blind. But, nothing.

"I have offended. But how? I cannot believe that my anger at the war god would turn heaven against me."

I began, like most writers, writing in "the national manner".

That was the grey, naturalistic writing

that most American prose had been since the late 19th century.

It's realism, naturalism.

I was very much in that style. I had no other models.

And then, I began to...

..hear my voices, I suppose.

I like to write in a voice different to my own.

Whether it's Myra Breckinridge or the tone of Duluth or the Emperor Julian.

And that's fun.

"Calderone shoves Darlene's legs apart.

"Darlene is too terrified to scream.

"She is also a tad - as they say at police headquarters - curious.

"She has never seen an erect okra. Will there be a surprise in store?"

Duluth just came booming into my head.

"Duluth - love it or loathe it, you never can leave it or lose it."

"What does THAT mean?" I thought.

I remember, I was walking in Rome when that began to boom in my head.

What does it mean?

"She watches as three sets of trousers and drawers dropped to six pointy shoes,

"which are never removed voluntarily by illegal aliens during a rape or even a house call,

"due to the embarrassing, ubiquitousness of corns.

"Pablo, leering, okra in hand,

"now poises himself at the rim of Darlene's capacious honey pot."

Do you think Myra and Darlene...

Are they your interior voice, your alter ego?

Well, I don't know. I heard them.

"I am Myra Breckinridge who no man shall possess!"

That line came to me. I didn't know what it meant. I started to write.

I was one third into the book

before I realised that Myra was a transsexual. She'd been a man.

I didn't have that in mind at all.

I just wanted somebody obsessed with movies of the '30s and '40s.

Behind the comedy there IS a serious point.

Myra IS trying to restructure the sexual lives of the human race,

in order to create, in her case, fun-loving Amazons through castration.

This is quite a radical vision.

She's into...

pan-sexuality - mega-sexuality.

A lot of your characters don't really fit

into clear-cut, binary male-female.

-They transgress.

-Of course! They're fluid. They go back and forth.

And...I think most people do, given the chance.

But the chance between the taboos, the laws,

the nonsense that people are taught from the moment they are born...

If there's anything more unnatural than the family in this era, I don't know what it is.

Man and wife are to stay together for ever and neither is to cheat.

If they do, it's a source of... at least, novels.

I've stopped reading most novels as it's a subject I can't get interested in.

Did you never feel the urge to procreate, replicate...?

-How do you know I haven't?

-I don't.

-I know.

To be a member of a nuclear family - no, never!

Never, never.

I think that we're all constructed with a desire to...

I think we're programmed to bring up children,

to teach.

When I was about 40, I regretted I didn't have a son of 20

-that I could teach some of the things

-I

-knew to.

But he would be an engineer and be taking the hood of the car off,

so we'd have nothing to talk about!

Most men without children get a sense that they may have missed something.

It doesn't last long, however.

At the beginning of 1968 I published Myra Breckinridge,

and the war was going on and on and on.

I suddenly got a call from ABC television -

would I consent to about a dozen debates

with William F Buckley Junior?

First, at the Republican convention in Miami beach,

then at the Democratic convention at Chicago.

'Mr Vidal, wasn't it a provocative act to try to raise the Vietcong flag?'

You must understand some of the political issues.

Many people in the United States believe that US policy is wrong,

and that the Vietcong are right in wanting to organise their country in their own way, politically.

This is pretty much the opinion of much of the world.

If it is a novelty in Chicago that is too bad.

-I assume that the point of the American democracy...

-Some people were pro-Nazi...

-Shut up.

-No!

They were well-treated by people who ostracised them,

and I'm for ostracising people who egg on others to shoot US marines...

As far as I'm concerned, the only pro-Nazi I can think of is yourself!

-I'll only say...

-Let's not call names. >

Don't call me a Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddam face and you'll stay plastered!

Let the author go back to his pornography and stop making allusions of Naziism

-to someone who was in the infantry in the last war...

-You were not in the infantry...

'Was that a radicalising point?'

I was starting in the '50s - before I ran for Congress and before Jack was president.

I was working in television and I saw friends blacklisted as Commies.

If they had been, so what? And most of them had not been.

So it was a terrible time, and I realised we were losing our civil rights.

But I hadn't yet put together the national security state in my mind, nor the rationale.

It wasn't till '72 that it was revealed how, under an executive action of Truman,

we lost the Republic and became a permanently militarised economy -

to which Jack contributed hugely.

He will go down as one of our worst presidents because of that.

He wanted war, and he sacrificed the internal good for imperial adventures abroad -

specifically, Vietnam.

A distaste for Imperial America runs through your historical novels.

Is that what drew you to writing them?

I had an interest in my family and in why they were what they were.

Then I got interested in the country - why we were what we were.

Then I started to study the history with great horror.

Then I thought I had better do it.

If someone else had, I would never have bothered!

A book like Lincoln would take about four years of reading.

I would buy books and go through libraries in New York and Los Angeles, where I have a house.

I don't use a researcher.

It's like breaking rocks to...

You have a million facts for one of those books,

and you have to go over and over and over.

"A man on crutches approached the President,

"and, in silence, shook his hand.

"Others came forward, one by one, and each took Lincoln's hand.

"To each he murmured something that the man alone could hear.

"At the end, as Lincoln made his way, stopping to talk to those who could not move,

"half of them were in tears, as was Washbourne himself.

"In the last bed by the door, a young officer turned his back on the President,

"who touched his shoulder and murmured,

"'My son, we shall all be the same at the end.'

"Then, the President was gone."

I bring in fictional characters as counterpoint to the real ones.

When I'm with the real ones,

I keep it as close to what they said and did as I can.

I think one should be pretty meticulous there.

-<

-Would you like some, Mr Lincoln?

It's a speciality of the Willard.

I have enough on my plate, Mr Seward.

Indeed you have, sir. Six states gone from the Union.

Well, they gave us plenty of warning.

They said if I was elected they'd leave the Union. I was and they did!

We are well rid of those cotton republics with their slavery.

Our destiny is expansion in Canada and Mexico.

'With Lincoln, you really had a revolution.

'He reconceived what was a loosely federated republic,

'into a highly centralised federal republic

'with, I guess, the most powerful army and navy in the world by the time the civil war was over.

'This mystical notion of a Union did not exist anywhere except in the psyche of Abraham Lincoln.

'Then he made it possible for Theodore Roosevelt

'to make us a great Pacific power by seizing the Philippines.'

Will you carry on from Washington DC and cover...

Kennedy and Camelot would be the next in the series.

Well, the memoir's going to do all that I have to say about Kennedy.

I wouldn't have much good to say about the administration -

though I certainly liked HIM.

He had a great sense of humour, he was a superb gossip - there was nothing he didn't know.

He was the best company of any politician, and the least self-important.

Jack was restlessly firing away at a target

and he said, "Tennessee, would you like to try a shot at the target?"

-IN SOUTHERN DRAWL:

-"Well," he said. "I haven't shot a gun in some time!"

Tennessee picked it up and made four bull's-eyes!

Once, Tennessee was looking at Jack and said, "That boy's got a cute ass!"

I said, "Tennessee, that's the next president!"

He said, "He'll never be president. They're much too attractive for the American people!"

I remember one evening at the White House,

Jackie slyly said, "Oh, why don't we go to the horse show?"

Jack groaned. She said, "No, no, no! We'll JUST look in."

He groaned and moaned and complained, but he said all right.

"What shall I wear?" She went out and came back in a bright red dress.

He said, "No. Things are going too bad in Europe to wear red."

She made about three changes and ends up in a Chanel suit, I think it is.

So we're at the horse show for almost an hour,

and he is squirming and raging and gossiping with ME behind her back.

He's telling me the entire plot of an Edgar Wallace novel

about how a Prime Minister has been told that he'd be shot by midnight.

I said, "If they shot you here, they'd probably hit me!"

He said, "That's no great loss!" He was fun!

I could pick up later with Johnson, a more interesting figure,

and bring it up to the present.

I have a character in Washington DC who would be my age.

He would have lasted this long

and would have watched the empire go from its peak in 1945,

to fall on its face in Korea in 1950, '51,

and then just go RIGHT off the wall in the Vietnam War.

But do I want to write such a SAD book? I don't know.

So, instead, you turned to Golgotha.

Well, because that's a happy book with a happy ending.

A Japanese ending.

My tribute to the great empire to the west of us.

I love the inventions - they take my mind off everything.

You start in a world of "what could have been", "what might be".

"'Timothy! Bishop Timothy, I should say. Saint Timothy.

"'Tim boy!

"'I want to level with you.

"'Your Gospel is all-important to Christianity.

"'However, creative programming is all-important to General Electric

"'and its subsidiary, the network NBC.

"'We are getting ready for a big technical breakthrough in software.

"'We'll be able to get a crew back here and we'll be able to tape all sorts of historical events live -

"'as of then, anyway.

"'Which is where you come in.'

"I chuckled, a noise I do rather well. 'Shouldn't I get a lawyer?'

"Chet gave me a sick smile, I had struck pay dirt.

"'It's too soon to be talking deal, but here's the plan.

"'We're going back to Golgotha to shoot the actual crucifixion,

"'resurrection - the whole ball of wax - LIVE!

"'Because viewer identification is the name of the game,

"'we'll need in-depth interviews with the notables AND the man in the street.

"'I don't want to raise your hopes, but for anchor person, you're the frontrunner.'"

Gore's been saying unspeakable things about me.

He's been acting even worse than he usually does as a polemicist and er...

He's absolutely without character or moral foundation,

-or even intellectual substance.

-OK, um...

I mean, leave it to Gore to write a play about Richard Nixon - I'm going to end up liking Nixon!

'I first met Norman Mailer in 1950, and relations were always... quite friendly -

'until I criticised his book, The Prisoner Of Sex,

'because he had taken on, harshly, women's liberation.

'I attacked his attack on them.

'He took it very personally, got very upset and asked himself on the Cavett programme to attack me.'

There'll be a message and we'll be right back.

I met Gore back in 1950.

He said, "I'm gonna outlive you.

"Then I'm gonna write the history of our literary time." PEOPLE CHUCKLE

Implicit in that was,

"Mailer, mind your manners around me for the rest of your time!"

Gore and I have had our differences...

..they've been small and famous. LAUGHTER

But I wouldn't have come here tonight if I couldn't salute him!

I have to tell you that I have had the pleasure

of working with a great - if limited - actor!

Anyway, wherever you are, Gore - your health! Cheers!

WOMAN: Well done.

I am startled to read how venomous I am.

"Vitriolic!" "Vicious!"

I often ask journalists who say it,

"Could you quote something I said that was vicious or venomous?"

And they can't.

I may make a joke.

"Once again, words failed Norman Mailer - he threw a glass at me!"

I don't regard that as venomous!

'Now we have a great entry!'

-Oh, my Lord!

-Hello, Gore! How ARE you?

To think...some day, all this will be mine!

-How are you?

-Well. And you?

-Better for seeing you, as the Irish treacherously say!

-You were in New York.

-Yes.

-Being a movie star.

-Being a movie star.

-Why didn't you do that?

-You did not see me in Back To School.

-I was with Rodney Dangerfield and you missed it.

-That was my part. I turned it down!

-And they got you! Dangerfield came and I said...

-I'm sorry I came to England(!)

"..I draw the line at nudity.

"But I think Vonnegut is your man!"

The next thing I knew, you had my part!

I know I wasn't first choice, but I didn't know who the others were.

-They asked Mailer before you!

-No!

He's the wrong height!

Going back to Capote, did you say what I heard you had said when he died?

Well, I said it, but I said it in private to Jason Epstein, my editor.

He rang me from New York to say that Truman had ridden on ahead and crossed the shining river.

And I DID say, "Well, that was a good career move!" I did say it.

But not to the public.

Jason told everybody, so I got credit for being stony-hearted at the loss of a confrere

without price, the greatest jewel... the greatest zircon in the diadem of American literature!

Is it a relief from writing to be able to act in movies,

do the talk shows?

Yes.

It's um...

How to say writing is a lonely business without saying writing is a lonely business is impossible.

So I'll repeat it rapidly!

It IS a solitary business - which I quite like.

But there are times when you think, "What are other people doing?

"Why can't I be out romping over the greensward with the other lads and lassies?"

To make a movie, you get to know a lot of people quite intensly for a short time - that's perfect for me!

I have a short attention span.

It's very enjoyable to have two or three weeks with everyone working towards the same end.

It's er... It's collegial.

It's nice - rather better than being in the Senate, I would say,

where you have colleagues, but you end up not liking any of them.

-Is that still one thing you would like most, to be a senator?

-Not any more.

30 years ago, yeah. There was still some point to it.

Now the Senate has no power - or it has powers that don't interest me.

Like the power to funnel money from federal government to your friends.

This is not my idea of a noble activity.

No, it's much better telling stories...

..and being a flickering image on a screen.

It has a sort of ghostly afterlife to it...

..which is intriguing.

Good luck, Monty.

Less theatrical. Like, "Good luck." "Good luck, Monty."

'My generation was brought up on the talking film, which came in when I was four.

'I was 14 years old in the year of Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz -

'the great, classic films were made as I was growing up. And I saw them.

'So my generation was riveted by films.

'It's no accident - Norman Mailer, William Burroughs, Truman Capote

'all acted in movies.

'Not very well, most of them!'

-Good luck, Monty.

-That was so perfect!

'Movies are the lingua franca of the world - or WERE until TV.'

MAN: We were doing Mary Hartman -

we'd only been on air for about two months.

But Mary Hartman was different than the average weekly show.

It was on Monday through Friday, every night of the week.

Gore had heard about it, seen some tapes, and we got a letter!

He was coming to the States anyway, and could he guest on the show? Could we find a way to write him in?

And, er...of course we did.

I believe we wrote him in when Mary Hartman was about to, or had just had, a nervous breakdown

and was to be institutionalised.

Gore was covering the story, ostensibly,

for some major national publication,

and he came on as himself.

Nothing was the same!

So you REALLY want to write a book with me about you?

No, I want to write a book about me...by me about you.

-Oh, by YOU about ME?

-Yes.

-That is what I thought!

-Sometimes they try to trick you around here.

-I certainly see that!

Anyway, as I told you on the telephone from Rome, a book about you would be a book about America -

a book about emptiness, a book about promises unkept.

But it would also be, paradoxically,

a book about hope.

It would be a book about survival against pretty terrible odds.

I would LOVE to read that book.

Gore Vidal has his own place because he's such a part of popular culture.

He's so welcome as a literary entertainer

on the average talk show.

At the same time, he's more and more welcome in literary circles...

of great esteem.

I mean, to hear Gore talk, the intellectual part of American literary life has not found him.

To watch his amazing career is to understand that he's very well received.

But he's like few other writers - there's nobody else I can think of.

360 degrees of the culture seems to find interest in Gore Vidal.

There's Gore Vidal, the American writer. Let's ask for an interview.

Good evening, Mr Vidal. May we disturb you?

I suppose you're going to ask me why I live in Rome.

You could say I live here because it's so...central.

Centrale!

Mostly, I like the Romans. They don't care if you live or die. They're like cats!

What is your most successful movie?

The only time I ever got something of my own made in my own way, until Billy The Kid with Val Kilmer,

was The Best Man, a play of mine which ran for two years on Broadway.

It opened in 1960...

and it's a very good movie about American Politics

with Henry Fonda, Lee Tracy, Cliff Robertson.

It was a realistic, satirical play about American politics.

Why?

Bill, this isn't easy to say, but I came here to... support Cantwell for president.

I knew that this morning.

-Did you, now?

-I have SOME gift for politics.

I never said you didn't.

Tonight, you warned me about Cantwell's smear.

-That means you've changed your mind about him, doesn't it?

-Yes, I have.

He wasn't smart. He figured I was gonna back you when I wasn't.

You got my message. Joe didn't. That shows he doesn't understand character.

And then, this smear thing.

He fires off a cannon to kill a bug and that is just plain dumb.

So, I mean to knock him off.

Which means, I guess, that you are going to be our next president.

'Being born at West Point, whose motto is "Duty, Honour, Country."

'some of it must have rubbed off on me.

'I notice the recurring theme in my dramatic work, is honour and justice and duty.

'How to behave when the enemy comes. What IS honour?'

-You want to go on?

-It ain't what I want, it's what I have to do!

I guess you've gone and forgotten all the big talk. How we were gonna die for liberty and the rest of it.

Don't you remember the speeches, the talk, what you said in this room?

-"Our honour's at stake!" Remember?

-I didn't know...

Nobody knew, but that don't make any difference.

Now there are no more speeches.

There's nothing left but dying.

We still know how to do that! We've got a real calling for that(!)

'Do you side with those who compromised or with the idealists, however mistaken?

'I think people are what they are. I don't sit in moral judgment.

-'But you like putting them into a moral situation where they had to choose?

-Oh, yes.

'A collision of this sort involves life and death.

'What is honour? What is national honour? What is personal honour?

Let me go with you, I could protect you...

'The Billy The Kid character figures in several incarnations in your work.

-'Is he that same morally ambiguous creature?

-More the great god Pan!'

-This was my present to YOU.

-You gave me everything I own. I don't want nothing to happen to you.

'He's sort of Huckleberry Finn - the noble savage, the beauty of the wilderness,

'to escape civilisation.

'As Mark Twain has Huck Finn say, "To light out for the territory.

'Well, Billy, born in New York, lights out for the territory

'and creates himself.

'He was somebody who, again, believed in a personal honour and didn't much care for civilisation.

'He thought, "If you killed my friend, I'll kill you.'

GUNSHOTS

APPLAUSE

GORE ADDRESSES THE AUDIENCE IN ITALIAN

ITALIAN SOUNDTRACK

MAN: 'It's remarkable what happened

'because you saw a real American tragedy unfold.

'I talked to him later about it.'

He said, "My grandfather had lost his seat at this time of year,

"at my age - the age I am now.

"And I felt his...soul in me as I was doing this."

It entered into another realm.

He was sitting there talking with his grandfather's voice coming out.

Congress knows of the National Security Council and its functions.

The fact that this is a national security state

and less and less a representative one.

You know the story of the frog in the pan of cold water?

Throw a frog into hot water, it'll jump around, suffer greatly and die.

If you put the frog in a pan of cold water, put it on the stove and heat it to boiling point,

the frog doesn't stir, he doesn't notice it.

At the end of it he's dead.

These things happen incrementally. We're complicit.

Are we revolutionaries? How do you do it, once you're here?

There ARE no Mr Smiths in Washington.

He's such an original. He's so American in that way.

He's clearly such a believer in the Republic in a very idealistic way.

It's strange to learn because you could think he was being cynical -

his way of speaking and he's so funny and so biting.

But, in fact, he...so believes in the purity of the Republic.

And, er... I think after his... after he wasn't able to successfully run for office

that it really...was devastating to him.

It's his family thing and you could tell that was a turning point, in some way, for him.

What would you have made of him as president?

Well, he's too smart to ever be elected.

He speaks too smart. I mean, he's just too intellectual.

He never... He would probably have had to go to a finishing school

and be re-done!

Does being gay affect my politics? I never said I was anything at all!

-I am ecumenical!

-LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

There is no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans.

We've all known that for a long time.

'I was co-chairman, with Dr Spock, of the People's Party until 1972.

'And in '72,

'Senator George McGovern of South Dakota

'appeared an irresistible candidate to get us out of the war.

'I realised what's the point of our party when we have a candidate to end the war?'

We must have a president who will summon this nation

to a higher standard, and rekindle the American purpose.

I believe you'll express it tomorrow in the privacy of that voting booth.

I believe we are going to prevail!

'I think part of Gore Vidal

'despises politics - the demagoguery,

'the hypocrisy.

'But an important side of him loves politics.

'Er...if there's any...professional tragedy in his life,'

it's that he never made it to the US Senate, or some high office.

Because, I think an important part of him covets and admires

the life of public service more than any other activity.

Which book do I like best? It's probably Burr.

APPLAUSE

And what am I working on now?

Getting elected!

'I've watched him handle audiences and deal with politicians.

'He does have a pragmatic quality that would have served him well.

'He would have had to discipline his tongue and his pen more'

if he'd been in public office, than as a writer, an intellectual.

The nice thing about empires is you end up with a great many rugs!

There's more rugs in the British Isles than anywhere else!

I first came here in 1939,

as a schoolboy.

On 2 September, I went to Downing Street to watch Neville Chamberlain come out,

on his way to tell the House of Commons that war was about to begin - which it did the next day.

I was staying in Bloomsbury, in Russell Square.

Oh, it was very exciting.

The crowd was odd. I remember this...exhalation - there were only about 50 people in Downing Street.

When he came out, looking VERY nervous...

..there was no applause, the crowd just went...

HE EXHALES

I'd never heard that sound from a crowd before, just exhalation.

And, of course, back to war again.

Racial stereotypes are irresistible -

particularly in wartime.

I know.

I was in the... I was an American soldier

in the great race war against Japan.

Before I left to go to the Pacific,

we were given an indoctrination course on how to tell our exquisite allies,

the Chinese,

from our brutish enemy, the Japanese.

So, on a stage like this, there was a life-size cutout

of a naked Chinese youth.

There was another one of a Japanese.

The Chinese was tall, slim and well-proportioned.

The Japanese was bandy-legged, buck-toothed, sub-human.

These details were pointed out very seriously to us

by an information officer with a pointer.

"But the principle difference," he announced, "as you can plainly see,

-"is the pubic hair."

-LAUGHTER

"The Japanese is thick and wiry. The Chinese is straight and silky."

I fear that I, alone, raised my hand to ask...

what sly strategies we were to use...

ROARING LAUGHTER

..to determine friend from foe.

'The British still read, I think, more per capita

'than the Americans do.

'They're also loyal if they ever liked anything by you.

'In America, you must have one hit best-seller after the other,

'and if you don't for a couple of books, you are counted out.

'Very Darwinian. The great Republic(!)

'Well, the serious novel seems to be pretty much at an end,

'as far as the general public goes.

'Television is now THE central fact in most lives.

'So, I would think that the great line of literature,

'starting with George Eliot and peaking with Proust and Henry James,

'is pretty much at an end.

'I love it when they say, "There are no great writers today!"

'Of course there are! There are just no great readers.

'You can't have a literature without people to read it.'

A bit of wisdom I learned 40 years ago on television.

When you think it's really gone very boringly, then you watch it -

which I don't any more, but if you DO watch it - it isn't boring.

Or you may have thought it was good, and it wasn't good either.

It's television. It just goes.

There's nothing to choose.

On that note, I'll leave you.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd