Granada, 1980, 138 p

In an unspecified Central American country, a group of men are planning a revolution to restore General Jorge Alvarez to the Presidency. He had been allowed back in to the country after his successor, a mathematics professor named Ospina, decided to curry favour with the US and so promised elections.

The main conspirators are the General, his son José, his friend Peter Nelson, not long ago court-martialled from the US Army (a fact he doesn’t wish to conceal but also doesn’t advertise,) a Frenchman called Charles de Cluny, Colonel Aranha, and priest Father Miguel. They have the backing of the Company of Mr Green, a US citizen whose son George is engaged to the General’s daughter, Elena. Without that support and the implicit promise of US approval the revolution would not be possible.

Elena attracts Nelson’s interest. She decries his description of her father as a former dictator, saying he did good things for the country and the people. She in turn takes a fancy to Nelson, who contemplates sex with Elena thus, “The beast with two backs had still two brains and two identities and it was neither possible nor desirable to fuse them, to lose identity. The act made a momentary union, an instant of sharing, of identification, but this passed in a single second to be recalled later as pleasure and little more. The religion of union was a female doctrine, a false dream, possible only at the risk of sanity: a hypnotic state where reality was replaced for a time by a destructive vision.” (I did wonder if this line of thought was occasioned by the author’s homosexuality.)

Nelson is charged with the training of General Alavarez’s army (rudimentary training at best.) The revolution goes ahead in the country’s second city and Nelson is involved in the fighting. While that goes well enough news from the capital is not so good, with betrayal on top of betrayal and the influence of the Company not what the conspirators had hoped.

Vidal is here explicitly critiquing the US Government’s tendency to interfere in other countries’ affairs; not necessarily to their benefit.

Pedant’s corner:- “General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’ house (General Jorge Alvarez Asturias’s house; or maybe even ‘General Jorge Alvarez’s Asturias house’,) “‘You can see if from the street’” (‘see it from’,) a missing comma – or full stop – before a piece of direct speech, gulley (gully; as it was spelled later,) “(I’d even been in school with them, danced with some of them!).” (an exclamation mark doesn’t need a full stop following it,) a gap between a colon and the preceding word (x 2.) “José unbuttoned his shirt and lay in the sun, eyes shut. A small scapula glittered on the dark pink chest” (how can a shoulder blade lie on a chest?) “Aristophanes’ The Birds” (Aristophanes’s,) an end quotation mark follows a paragraph of speech which is carried on on the next line. The convention is no such mark is required in those circumstances.) “‘Then what do you think about our chances.’” (is a question and so requires a question mark,) two lines of the text were transposed. “‘They wanted to get back him’” (wanted to get him back.) “She shut here eyes” (her eyes,) de rigeur (de rigueur,) “sounded strange on his own ears” (in his own ears.)

21 Publishing Ltd, 1998, 71 p.

Complete with cover flap comments from David Bowie and Gore Vidal attesting to its subject’s importance this is an account of forgotten US artist Nathwell ‘Nat’ Tate, whose final artistic act was to burn as many of his works as he had managed to lay hands on (“perhaps a dozen survive”) before committing suicide by jumping off the Staten Island Ferry. The usual biographical conditions apply, obscure origins, father unknown, mother died young, adoption by her rich employer (emphatically not Tate’s father but an avid admirer and buyer of his work,) an influential teacher at Art School, chance viewing of his work by the founder of a gallery, socialising with other artists, the development of his style – aslant to that of his contemporaries and details of which Boyd provides – descent into alcohol, meetings with Picasso and Braque, disillusionment. The text is interspersed with photographs of three of the surviving paintings and various important stages of Tate’s life, four of which depict Tate but in only one is the adult artist the sole subject. Boyd gives us a convincing, if short, portrait of an artist and his life.

Yet the story of Tate is of course entirely fictitious. Not fictional, such biographies imagining the circumstances and lives of real people abound, but fictitious. Tate never existed. He is a total invention by Boyd.

On the book’s publication in 1998 the cover picture, containing as it does a cropped version of that black and white photograph of the adult “Tate” obviously photoshopped over a coloured one of New York, might have provided a clue to those not in on the joke but anyone at all familiar with Boyd’s work coming to it post hoc would be immediately aware of its confected nature on its first mention of Logan Mountstuart, protagonist of the author’s 2002 novel Any Human Heart. Boyd would also employ photographs to an equally verisimilituding end within the text of his 2016 novel Sweet Caress.

A hint of Boyd’s purpose in writing this book (apart from sending up the hagiographic artistic biography of the forgotten genius) may be gleaned from the passage where there are speculations on possible reasons for “Tate”’s destruction of his work and his suicide. “Tate was one of those rare artists who did not need, and did not seek, the transformation of his painting into a valuable commodity to be bought and sold on the whim of a market and its marketeers. He had seen the future and it stank.”

Pedant’s corner:- “the layers of white turps-thinned paint that was repeatedly laid over them” (Boyd treats this as if paint is the subject of the verb laid; that subject is in fact layers, hence “were laid”,) swop (swap.)

I must mark the passing of Gore Vidal.

As I have only read two of his novels, Myra Breckinridge and Julian, I knew him mostly from his appearances on television which were always entertaining and informative and in which he showed himself to be an unusual citizen of the US (at least from the perspective of this side of the Atlantic) since he was sharply critical of many aspects of his native country’s political and cultural life – a stance which is arguably more patriotic than that of someone who accepts and follows unquestioningly. He dubbed the US the United States of Amnesia, bemoaning the lack of historical knowledge the majority of his countrymen have of their own political system. He was in a position to know, having been brought up right in the heart of government when as a twelve year old he acted as guide to his blind grandfather – the first ever Senator for Oklahoma – through the corridors of Congress.

It is probably as a novelist dedicated to illuminating that history his countrymen are too blindly unaware of that he will be best remembered though various of his television and other appearances remain to give a flavour of his wit and perspicacity.

Most of his books from that US historical cycle are somewhere on my TBR shelves. So many books, so little time.

Eugene Louis Vidal, Jr. (Eugene Luther Gore Vidal) 3/10/1935 – 31/7/2012. So it goes.

I suppose a seventieth anniversary is something special but perhaps it is more so when it involves an almost iconic event.

7/12/2011 marks seventy years since the Pearl Harbor attack, the event which turned relatively localised war into World War. “7^th December 1941: a date which will live in Infamy,” – FDR.

It is sobering to realise that the Second World War lasted less than four years after that. The US and UK have now had troops dying in Afghanistan for much longer than that; and in Iraq for not much less time. Not so many troops dying admittedly, but dying nonetheless.

I vaguely remember Gore Vidal saying something to the effect that the difference between Pearl Harbor and the September 11^th attack was that no-one saw the latter one coming. He had a personal reason to blame the US authorities for the war with Japan, though. His lover died in the Pacific fighting.