Gore Vidal - 1876: a novel

1876

The country reels from the scandals of the Grant administration, the privileged wallow in gross luxury, and dark intrigues mark the presidential election in that Centennial year.

Charlie Schuyler, Aaron Burrs unacknowledged son, returns to this flamboyant America after his long, self-imposed European exile. His finances depleted, but his literary reputation intact and his personal ambition grown massive, Schuyler hopes to arrange a suitable marriage for his beautiful, devoted daughter, a widowed princess. He plans to write about the Centennial celebration and the presidential election for the newspapers and to ingratiate himself with the favored candidate, Samuel Tilden.

Schuyler and his daughter soon find themselves at the centers of American social and political power in an astonishing year of fading ideals and growing empire.

GORE VIDAL

VIDAL IS SUPERB ... he writes so well that you find yourself holding your breath over something that is a foregone conclusion ... Vidals talent makes the bloated corrupters of Washington live in a way history books dont ... The performance is flawless!

BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

A LITERARY EVENT ... Vidals wit, sophistication, erudition, grasp of American values of the time make this novel as contemporary as Woodwards and Bernsteins political journalism. Vidal is the ideal historical novelist.

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

GORE VIDAL takes us back, with his accustomed bite and flair to the Centennial ...

The Bicentennial reader will have as clear a picture of the year 1876and of the election campaignfrom this book as he would be likely to get from the pages of actual history. And certainly more entertainment ... CLEARLY ONE OF HIS BRIGHTEST WORKS.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

SUSPENSEFUL AND EXTRAVAGANTLY DECORATED ... If you think politics are dirty now, you should have witnessed the goings-on a hundred years ago ... IMPOSSIBLE TO RESIST.

Cosmopolitan

PRICKLY, DROLL, PATRICIAN AND WONDERFULLY FUNNY ... This is history as few novelists could pull it off ... an exhilarating feat of storytelling.

Publishers Weekly

SUPERB ... SIMPLY SPLENDID ... A thoroughly grand bookmust, must reading for everyone.

Business Week

Other Books By Gore Vidal:

Williwaw

In the Yellow Wood

The City and the Pillar

The Season of Comfort

A Search for the King

Dark Green, Bright Red

The Judgment of Paris

Messiah

A Thirsty Evil (short stories)

Visit to a Small Planet (play)

The Best Man (play)

Rocking the Boat (essays)

Julian

Romulus (play)

* Washington, D.C.

Weekend (play)

Myra Breckinridge

Two Sisters

Homage to Daniel Shays (collected essays)

Burr

An Evening with Richard Nixon (play)

* Myron

* Published by Ballantine Books

Gore Vidal

1876

A Novel

BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK

For Claire Bloom

Copyright 1976 by Gore Vidal

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Ballantine Books of Canada, Ltd., Toronto, Canada. Originally published by Random House, Inc., 1976.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-34311

ISBN 0-345-25400-7-225

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Ballantine Books Edition: September 1976

Second Printing: March 1977

THAT IS NEW YORK. I pointed to the waterfront just ahead as if the city were mine. Ships, barges, ferry boats, four-masted schooners were shoved like a childs toys against a confused jumble of buildings quite unfamiliar to me, a mingling of red brick and brownstone, of painted wood and dull granite, of church towers that I had never seen before and odd bulbous-domed creations ofcement? More suitable for the adornment of the Golden Horn than for my native city.

At least I think it is New York. Perhaps it is Brooklyn. I am told that the new Brooklyn is marvellously exotic, with a thousand churches.

Gulls swooped and howled in our wake as the stewards on a lower deck threw overboard the remains of the large breakfast fed us at dawn.

No, said Emma. Ive just left the captain. This is really New York. And how old, how very old it looks! Emmas excitement gave me pleasure. Of late neither of us has had much to delight in, but now she looks a girl again, her dark eyes brilliant with that all-absorbed, grave, questioning look which all her life has meant: I must know what this new thing is and how best to use it. She responds to novelty and utility rather than to beauty. I am the opposite; thus father and daughter balance each other.

Grey clouds alternated with bands of bright blue sky; sharp wind from the northwest; sun directly in our eyes, which meant that we were facing due east from the North River, and so this was indeed the island of my birth and not Brooklyn to the south nor Jersey City at our back.

I took a deep breath of sea-salt air; smelt the citys fumes of burning anthracite mingled with the smell of fish not lately caught and lying like silver ingots in a passing barge.

So old? I had just realized what Emma had said.

But yes. Emmas English is almost without accent, but occasionally she translates directly from the French, betraying her foreignness. But then I am the foreign one, the American who has lived most of his life in Europe while Emma has never until now left that old world where she was born thirty-five years ago in Italy, during a cyclone that uprooted half the trees in the garden of our villa and caused the frightened midwife nearly to strangle the newborn with the umbilical cord. Whenever I see trees falling before the wind, hear thunder, observe the sea furious, I think of that December day and the paleness of the mothers face in vivid contrast to the redness of her blood, that endless haemorrhaging of blood.

(I think that a little mmoire in the beautiful lyric style of the above might do very well for the Atlantic Monthly.)

Emma shivered in the wind. Yes, old. Dingy, like Liverpool.

Waterfronts are the same everywhere. But theres nothing old here. I recognize nothing. Not even City Hall, which ought to be over there where that marble tomb is. See? With all the columns ...

Perhaps youve forgotten. Its been so long.

I feel like Rip Van Winkle. Already I could see the beginning of my first piece for the New York Herald (unless I can interest Mr. Bonner at the New York Ledger; he has been known to pay a thousand dollars for a single piece). The New Rip Van Winkle, or How Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler Sailed to Europe Almost Half a Century Ago ... And stayed there (asleep?). Now hes come home, to report to President Martin Van Buren who sent him abroad on a diplomatic mission, to compare foreign notes with his friend Washington Irving (who invented him after all), to dine with the poet Fitz-Greene Halleck: only to find all of them, to his astonishment, long dead.

Must stop at this point.

These pages are to be a quarry, no more. A collection of day-to-day impressions of my new old country.

Titles: The United States in the Year of the Centennial. Travellers Return. Old New York: A Knickerbockers Memories. Recollections of the Age of Jackson and Van Buren ... Must try these out on publishers and lecture agents.

At this momentmidnight, December 4, 1875I am somewhat staggered at the prospect of trying in some way to encompass with words this new world until now known to me only at the farthest remove. I can of course go on and on about the past, write to order of old things by the yard; and happily there is, according to my publisher, Mr. E. P. Dutton, a considerable market for my wares whenever I am in the reminiscent mood. But the real challenge, of course, is to get the sense of the country as it is todaytwo, three, four times more populous than it was when I left in 1837. Yet, contemplating what I saw of New York this afternoon, I begin only now to get the range as I sit, perspiring, in the parlour of our hotel suite while dry heated air comes through metal pipes in sudden blasts like an African sirocco.