Our book today is a clear, clean classic showing hardly any sign of floorboard decay, a good example of stages in a literary hack’s via dolorosa from griping underdog to griping Grand Dame: it’s Homage to Daniel Shays, Gore Vidal’s smashingly good 1972 volume collecting essays and book reviews from a neat 20-year span, from 1952 to 1972. This book is less than half the length of the career capstone United States, which came out twenty years later – i.e. twenty years closer to the ranting wine-soaked crackpot sage the author would become in his final decade or so.

That later Vidal wore his accumulated grievances like a body armor, every year more layered until, by the end, the man himself had all but vanished inside it. Anger-fueled alcoholic dementia didn’t help matters any – his resentments gradually morphed into a landscape, an alternate reality that struck him as eminently more sensible than the one he was so rudely forced to live in every day. His book won the Pulitzer – they just gave the award to somebody else. He won all the elections – they just gave the offices to somebody else. Throughout most of his life, he fought a successful rearguard action against his besetting mortal sin, envy, but sins are patient stalkers, and Vidal’s consumed him in the last fifteen years of his life, when he almost continuously showed the excruciating bad grace to be a very, very lucky man who whined to be luckier. Interviewing him became indistinguishable from psychoanalyzing him.

But during the years covered by Homage to Daniel Shays, there’s very little overt sign of that later Vidal. In fact, the closest hint comes right at the beginning, in the collection’s first words:

These essays are arranged in chronological order. The first was written twenty years ago, in another world; the latest was written a few months ago. Reading them from first to last, I had the sense of reliving month to month two decades not only of my life but of our most unserene republic turned empire, now turning into something else again. As themes come and go, are developed or abandoned, as politics replaces literature replaces politics again, there is a logical (and sometimes illogical) progression. There are also ironies. As the mandarin author of the first essay surveyed the state of American letters in the forties, he had no idea that he was about to give up the novel for a decade of television, theater, movies, criticism and politics, while the engaged polemicist of 1962 would have been appalled to know that he was soon to abandon actual politics in order to become again (what he had been all along?) a novelist.

You can already see the beginnings of the monumental vocational rifts that will later determine the tripartite structure of United States (the sad pun of the title being, of course, the fact that the various states of Vidal’s being were never united but rather constantly at war); the “mandarin author” (one of the only times anywhere that Vidal inches close to self-criticism, and even here, it’s not exactly meant in a negative sense, is it?) is shifting from one calling to another, brilliant in all of them but rootless, almost homesick. In these razor-sharp essays, Vidal could still use those inner longings, shaping them like a virtuoso into tools he could use to pry secrets out of the writers he examines (most of whom he knew), as in the “Writers and the World” piece he wrote in 1965 for the TLS:

To be outside the World is not necessarily a virtue. To be in the World does not necessarily mean a loss of craft, a fall from grace, a fatness of soul. William Faulkner’s thirty years as a movie writer affected his novels not at all. He could do both. Finally, it is truly impertinent to speculate as to whether or not the effect of this or of that on a writer’s character is good or bad. What is pertinent is the work he does. Mary McCarthy is not less intelligent a literary critic because she plays games on television. But even if her work should shown a sudden falling off, only the simplest moralist would be able to link her appearances as a talking writer to her work as a writing writer.

And slowly, incrementally, we know that the array of critical tricks at his disposal would concentrate and dwindle to one: himself. The Vidal of 1960 was still every bit as narcissistic as extreme good looks can make a man, but he was still very much capable of hustle in a piece, to say nothing of dutiful exposition. And he’s still capable of it a decade later, but he’s much less willing to be bothered, especially if the “review” at hand is one in which he can make himself the star, shoving the book in question off to one side for as long as possible. In “The Fourth Diary of Anais Nin,” which he wrote for the Los Angeles Times Book Review in 1971, Nin has an assiduous co-star:

Warning to literary historians. Deal warily with Anais’s “facts.” Small example: at our first meeting, she says, I introduced myself as Lieutenant Vidal. First, I would never have used a military title; second, I was plainly a Warrant Officer, in uniform. When I pointed this out to her in the bar of the Punt Royal, she laughed gaily. “You know I never get those things right.” Nor does she correct them. Best of the lines I was not shown (and the one most apt to give pleasure to the employees at Time): “Gore has a prejudice against Negroes.” Oh, dear. Well, I was brought up by my grandfather, a Mississippi-born senator. I have since matured. I now have a prejudice against whites.

It’s very much possible to read blissfully through Homage to Daniel Shays hitting isolated notes like these and willing yourself to forget that in time they would fuse into a grand symphony of solipsism. In these full-power years before United States, a whole variety of Vidals was still possible. The vibrant voice in these pieces might never have become shrill and querulous; the future might never have become the enemy; the past might never have become a forest of sharp-pointed lies and betrayals. As unlikely as it seems even in retrospect, this author might have aged gracefully.