ike a very large bird trying to take off on dry land, The
Smithsonian Institution radiates, for a hundred pages or so, an air of
slightly panic-stricken goofiness, the I-meant-to-do-that glare of the
albatross in grave need of member bounce.
A bit like Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby (1938, directed by Howard
Hawks).
The reason for this is not the usual reason. Gore Vidal, whose
26th or so novel this is, does not much resemble the usual mainline
writer--like P.D. James or Paul Theroux--whose attempts to write SF or
fantasy always collapse humiliatingly, because they treat the fields they
are embarking upon as slums in need of redevelopment.
What authors of this ilk find in slums is what, like any 19th
century bureaucrat of Empire, they take to them: the deflective blindness
typical of any "owner" who finds himself walking on thin ice and needs
not to know the score. When they write SF, or fantasy, or for that matter
crime novels or Gothics or westerns or Magic Realism (cf. John Updike's
dizzyingly estranged Brazil [1994]), they write as absentee owners
not makers. They are art realtors.
But--let us repeat--this is not what is going on here, though
there are a few ditzy moments.
To begin with, Gore Vidal has, for nearly 40 years now, been
writing novels that, one way or another, knowingly engage with the
fantastic.
Scherzo tomfooleries
His first SF novel, Messiah (1954), for instance, gravely
and slightly portentously unfolds an adagio portrait of the religious
impulse gone awry as it miscegenates with the secular world; and in this
prefigures some of the scherzo tomfooleries of The
Smithsonian Institution. Several of his later books--Duluth (1983) may be the
most successful--play vertiginously with various reality diseases of the
modern world, as does the new tale.
More importantly, Vidal's characteristic tone as a
writer--knowing, camp, savage, epicurean, grainy with fatigue--is the
tone of a civilized man caught in the coils of late Empire. He writes as
Epicurus wrote, or Petronius, or Lucian. He is a Late Roman, a
chronicler of events in the arena of the last days.
Within this frame of reference, The Smithsonian Institution is, being full of hope, a counter-factual.
Like many of Vidal's non-fantastic novels, it is a story about
Washington, home of the real Smithsonian Institution, which much
resembles the fantasy-like Edifice that dominates this story.
It is 1939, and war is imminent. Young T. (short, it turns out,
for Time), is summoned to the Smithsonian on Good Friday, where he is
asked to take part in a crash program to develop a nuclear weapon before
the Germans do.
Arguing with Einstein
But the Smithsonian Edifice is far more than a recruiting station
for geniuses--T. has the ability to visualize higher mathematics, and
spends some time attempting to persuade Albert Einstein that the quantum
universe is real, and that no general field theory is in fact
possible--it is also the locus of a series of experiments in the
manipulation of space and time, or space-time, or Time Travel.
Within the Edifice, Time moves or does not move in mysterious
ways. At night, the guards become wax and the dummies come to life,
including all previous Presidents and their wives. The effect is of
course spooky, just as it is in the alternate history worlds of writers
like Kim Newman; but it is also, at times, quite extraordinarily funny.
The most hilarious character is a brain-damaged Abraham Lincoln,
a version of the real Lincoln who was snatched just a fraction too late
out of the reality track that ends in Booth's assassination bullet; and
who tries to remember who he is through careful perusal of the works of
the flatulent people-poet Carl Sandburg, whose hagiographic multi-volume
life of Lincoln Vidal clearly despises.
Through thicks and thins
T. falls in love with Frankie, a dummy come to life who is
married to Grover Cleveland, who for complicated reasons doesn't mind T.
They screw a lot (not very persuasively, I thought), and stick together
through the thicks and thins of the time-and-reality dance that now
begins.
T. wishes to change the future, in order to avert World War II.
He does so by manipulating Woodrow Wilson, whom Vidal also has little use
for.
The new future is less bad than ours, but T. has forgotten Japan,
which causes the plot to thicken.
Or, more precisely, opens more passages in the labyrinth of the
story, and in the labyrinths within the Smithsonian itself. In the end,
as experienced readers of certain kinds of fantasy will have long
understood, both labyrinths are the same labyrinth, because The
Smithsonian Institution is a Godgame story--that is, a story of testing
and initiation, in which a master or Magus brings a young man and/or
woman through ordeals in order that they become fully empowered of
themselves. Mozart's The Magic Flute (1791) is a Godgame; as is
John Fowles's The Magus (1966), whose working title was precisely
"The Godgame."
The Magus is James Smithson
The Magus of this Godgame is James Smithson himself, the
historical figure who funded the original Institution. The Aspirant is T.
And, as we've noted, the labyrinth of Story and the labyrinth of World
that T. must trace to come into his heritage and to gain his true love
and to rule the world are the same: The Smithsonian Institution is the
story of itself.
The
Smithsonian Institution climaxes on Easter Sunday, ends in
marriage bells, donates us a redeemed world. It is a counter-factual,
like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988); a brilliant dawn song from an
old writer of great resource.
Underneath it all, of course, Gore Vidal knows the truth; and an
otherwise hilarious conclave of all the dummy Presidents within the
Smithsonian turns suddenly nightwards, as adults do, when Thomas
Jefferson begins to speak, saying to the dummies who followed him, and
who transmogrified the original States into an Empire, that we were no
longer a "virtuous republic" but an imperial European sort of power, bloodily
transplanted to a new hemisphere and bringing with us, we now see,
ancient poisons for which there are no antidotes in the Pharmacy of Time.
We are Rome, indeed, Conscript Fathers.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of both the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, was nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
