“The Greatest Pie Ever Baked By Arbitragers”: Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, The Lies of Empire & Other Sad Truths
On the occasion of each of the past two U.S. presidential elections I have written about Gore Vidal’s allusions to Mark Twain. In 2016, I discussed how, in the novel 1876 (1976), Vidal presented Twain as a clear-eyed cynic cursing two nadirs of U.S. electoral history: 1876…and 1968. In 2020, I unearthed Vidal’s profiles of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, whom he compares to Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, but also, vicariously, to his own dueling personas: Myra and Myron Breckenridge.
In 2024, I’m once again writing about a Vidal allusion to Twain, one of the most obscure in Vidal’s corpus, as it appears only in Italian.
As Vidal describes in his introduction to Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace (2002), after 9/11 U.S. publishers were so reluctant to be associated with polemics directed at the Bush administration and its “War On Terror,” even Vidal, one of the best-selling polemicists of the 20th century, could not find domestic buyers for some of his manuscripts until after they had proven their marketability abroad.
For several years, he made the habit of publishing his most scurrilous essays first in translation with the Italian imprint, Fazi Editore. Once they proved that they could sell – and would not incite world war – an American imprint (usually one much smaller than what Vidal had previously been accustomed to) would purchase the English-language original.
Such was the case with what would become Dreaming War (2002), but which began as Le Menzogne Dell’impero E Altre Tristi Verita (“The Lies of The Empire & Other Sad Truths”). The original title was abandoned for the U.S. edition from Thunder’s Mouth Press, but most of the body of the essay remained intact, even though it was incendiary stuff.
Vidal accuses what he calls the “Cheney-Bush Junta” of, if not collaborating in the 9/11 attacks, at least willfully ignoring warnings from U.S. allies and their own intelligence agencies, as well as inexplicably changing military protocols which might have reduced the number of civilian lives lost in New York City and Washington D.C. He speculates that 9/11 created a welcome pretense for already planned military forays needed to secure pipelines into Eurasia.
Recognizing that much of what he claims will be dismissed as kooky, tinfoil paranoia, Vidal’s essay also includes a critique of Americans’ native allergy to conspiracy theory. (As that allergy has since transformed into an addiction, this strain of the essay now sounds quite archaic.) At one point, Vidal muses, “Apparently, ‘conspiracy stuff’ is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.”
Much of what Vidal alleges in “The Lies of The Empire & Other Sad Truths” has since become part of the standard account of the Bush years, but it was treacherous stuff in the months after the collapse of the World Trade Center. Vidal was able to shoulder his essay through the fact-checking process under these hostile conditions by knowingly deploying a Twainian tactic – liberal quotation from multinational sources – as I’ll discuss momentarily.
So far as I can tell, only two censorious interventions were made by Vidal’s American editors. A lame joke about Pope Urban II, acceptable to the Rome-based Fazi Editore, was too risque for the “countercultural” Thunder’s Mouth. And, even more surprisingly, the U.S. edition axed Vidal’s epigraph from Mark Twain’s “To The Person Sitting In Darkness” (1901).
The quote, as it appears in Twain’s original essay, is
“And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one – our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”
As you can see above, Fazi Editore adapted Twain’s description into a cover design for the Italian edition, rightly indicating that Twain’s “To The Person Sitting in Darkness” is more than mere epigraph. It is the model for Vidal’s essay. And late Twain is the model for late Vidal, who a few years later, in the second volume of his memoirs, would describe himself as “something of an avatar of Mark Twain.”
In Vidal’s account of U.S. literary and political history, the annexation of the Philippines at the cost of 200,000 Filipino civilians is “the inspiration for close to a century now of disastrous American adventuring.” According to Vidal, Henry James and Mark Twain are the only American authors who recognized it as such, and Twain’s “erupting, all fire and lava” from his lofty cultural perch is the primary reason we can still identify the opening of the U.S. imperialist epoch, despite generations of propaganda intent on suppressing it.
“To The Person Sitting In Darkness” is, among other things, a conscious project of historicist documentation. As with many of his late-life anti-imperialist polemics – “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905), “A Defense of General Funston” (1902), etc. – it is organized around block quotations from other published works. The quotations are sometimes pages long, and the narrative is driven by how the narrator reacts to and synthesizes newspapers, political pamphlets, magazines, memoirs, and history books as he fictionally encounters them. The narrators of these works, even when ostensibly Twain, are characteristically unreliable. They are wont to respond with sarcasm, stupidity, and rage. They do not instruct readers on how to interpret the intertextual archive so much as how not to.
Though a notorious scrapbooker and bibliophile from the 1870s forward, Twain did not adopt this style of proto-modernist collage until after his 1895 global lecture tour. Some critics have dismissed it as motivated by his declining creative productivity in the face of overwhelming demand for his work. “Filler” from other writers allowed Twain to more rapidly produce longer works for publications which paid him top dollar.
But Twain’s collage works are also distinguished by the multinational archive they open for readers who otherwise might be ignorant of it. Partially as a result of his global lecture tour, Twain had become familiar with publishers and journalists on five continents. He regularly read books and periodicals which had little, if any, wider circulation in the U.S. His polemical collages are a means of sharing his unique access to global print culture with his populist readership, many of whom he knows will not appreciate this kind of generosity.
“To The Person Sitting In Darkness” invites American readers to reconsider how their violent “blessings of civilization” look to the rest of the world, including those who they believe to be “savage.” In his retrospective of Twain’s work, published in the same issue of North American Review, William Dean Howells, perhaps apologetically, preempts the outrage “To The Person Sitting In Darkness” would produce, by explaining that Twain was just “return[ing] to his own country after an absence so long as to form a psychological perspective in which his characteristics make a new appeal.”
Vidal certainly identified with Twain’s late-life cosmopolitanism, his semi-expatriation, and his anti-imperialist politics, but for him the form of Twain’s satiric multinational collage had the further advantage of protecting him from the litigious Bush administration. Any anti-Bush blasphemy which had been printed elsewhere in the world – Britain, Brazil, Canada, Germany, and Russia – Vidal could merely reprint at length, with a knowing wink and a few rhetorical questions appended: “Why weren’t we warned?”; “What is there in dismal dry sandy Afghanistan worth conquering?”; “Obviously, somebody had ordered the Air Force to make no move to intercept those hijackings until…what?”
To Vidal, Twain’s decision to “list who was stealing what from whom and when” was nothing short of “shocking.” It needed quite little literary embellishment, but the narrative voices which populate Twain’s polemical collages, however sparsely, are, to my mind, some of his most powerful creations.
Vidal subtly borrows another metaphor from “To The Person Sitting In Darkness” when he describes the United States as “the greatest pie every baked by arbitragers.” Twain explicitly refers to the extractive profits of imperial expansion as “pie,” but moreover, his narrator is an arbitrager. Above all else, that’s what makes Twain’s essay work even better than Vidal’s. The narrator of “To The Person Sitting In Darkness” does not object to American adventuring because of the carnage it leaves in its path, or because of its betrayals and hypocrisies. He objects to it on its own business grounds. The margins have gotten too thin. The benefit analysis has tilted too far towards risk. And too many competitors have entered this market.
Once all the nations know how to bake a civilization, what’s to keep us from becoming the pie?
