(3 of 9)
The outcome dashes Schuyler's hopes. Tilden collects over 250,000 popular votes more than his Republican opponent, Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes, but outright frauds, payoffs and congressional deals make Hayes the victor by one electoral vote. Even the profoundly cynical Schuyler is shocked by the brazenness of the theft. A further jolt awaits him. His daughter catches a millionaire husband—and there is evidence that she may have abetted his first wife's death to do it. "Why write any of this?" a distraught Schuyler asks near the end. "Answer: habit. To turn life to words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round. Words translate and transmute raw life, make bearable the unbearable." It is the last refuge of the artist—or of the bitterly disappointed.
In the case of Schuyler's creator, the two may in fact be one and the same. For despite his advanced years and portly figure, the tremor in his right hand, rheumatic shoulder and incipient cataracts, Charlie bears an uncanny resemblance to Gore. If proof were needed of this connection, Vidal teasingly provides it. At one point in 7576, Schuyler meets "a most sensitive, wide-eyed, rather plump young man from, I think, Boston." Though Schuyler does not give his name, he is clearly Henry James. The young writer promises to send Schuyler his newly issued first novel (James himself had just published Roderick Hudson) and to live abroad "the sort of life you have led, Mr. Schuyler." Nabokovian mirror-images multiply. Vidal's puppet., Schuyler, prompts James to live abroad; Vidal has since followed James' example. The locale of this meeting is—also clearly—Edgewater; the handsome 1820 Greek Revival mansion on the Hudson River was once owned by the author of 7576.
The James-Schuyler scene is typically Vidalian: a bright, sparkling surface charged with the animus of estrangement. The same note echoes through all of his writings.
Affairs are in the hands of parvenus and thugs; the best and the brightest cannot bail out the sinking ship.
Vidal obviously numbers himself among this Sisyphean elite.
His tone is that of the seer scorned; yet he can hardly claim to be the prophet ignored. For 30 years he has been a cinder in the public eye: novelist, Broadway playwright, television dramatist, screenwriter, essayist, congressional candidate, actor, troubador to the Kennedy Camelot, talk-show regular, political debater and full-time nag. Millions who have never read him recognize his electronic presence: elegance bordering on narcissism, feline languor, throaty self-assurance.
He has never lacked a podium to argue his pet causes—and to infuriate great masses of his countrymen at will. He has mocked the "heterosexual dictatorship" in the U.S., championed the rights and pleasures of homosexuals, and called for a legal curb on human breeding. He has castigated America as "the land of the dull and the home of the literal" and repeatedly predicted the "smashup" of the "last empire on earth." Like many a gadfly before him, from Twain to Mencken, Vidal has won fame and wealth by biting the land that feeds him.