Happy Rockefeller -- RIP

Happy Rockefeller
(Image: wikipedia.com)

Happy Rockefeller, whose marriage to Nelson Rockefeller became a Sixties cause celebre, passed away earlier this week at age 88. The New York Times' sympathetic obituary of the second Mrs. Rockefeller noted that she maintained an active, dignified life in New York's philanthropic circuits.

When then-Margareta Fitler Murphy (a/k/a "Happy") and Rocky dumped their respective spouses and became Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller, the nation (especially Republican voters) was scandalized. Divorce just wasn't done among respectable people and certainly not among people of quality. In a wholly unplanned and unwanted way, Happy Rockefeller led the way for women's emancipation. She quite ably worked political campaigns with her husband. She endured the philistine criticism of her martial choices. She maintained an active public life after Rocky dropped dead, allegedly in the arms of a paramour.

Shirley Chisholm
(Image: wikipedia.com)

Today, American women aspire to the highest political offices. Hillary Clinton found out the hard way in 2008 just how much misogyny exists in the American electorate (and that's among "progressive" Democrats!). Other women, such as Carly Fiorina, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann, have openly expressed their presidential ambitions. In the mid-1960s, none of these women (nor Mrs. Clinton) would have had a puncher's chance of being taken seriously as potential Commanders-in-Chief. (Ironically, African-American congresswoman Shirley Chisholm did run for the presidency in 1972, and did win votes.)

Happy Rockefeller's experience as a "political" wife seems like an afterthought in the annals of women's political advancement. Her marriage to the "Chase Manhattan Bank made flesh," as Gore Vidal once characterized Governor Rockefeller, entwined with Rocky's lust for the presidency, became a particularly dreadful form of American moral theatre. Smart minds like to assert the nation has "moved on" from those dim days. However, will America permit its presidential candidates. such as Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the right to moral privacy?

My Very Brief Encounter with Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal on the Amalfi Coast
(photo from the Guardian)

When I lived in Italy, I worked with a Canadian who spoke with Gore Vidal at a Roman dinner party. My colleague told me of a way to informally meet the celebrity writer. All I had to do was telephone him; his Amalfi Coast home had a phone number listed under the name of his companion, Howard Austen.

I admit I didn't have the chutzpah to make the call. The situation was saved when the Puccini scholar Deborah Burton simply picked up the phone and inquired if and how a meeting could be arranged. Austen said he and Vidal would be in Ravello (see photo) and they typically took a walk in the early evening. We could meet them on the street.

And that's what happened. Vidal was taller and bigger built than I had anticipated; I stood on a curb to look him in the eye. Greetings were exchanged. I expressed my admiration for his work. He and Mr. Austen thanked us, wished us well, and walked away. No paparazzi, no socially ambitious hostesses, no publicity handlers. Just two men out for their evening passegiata in a provincial Italian town where they, of course, were well known.

No, it was not a big deal from any rational perspective. Yet, seeing the flesh-and-blood people responsible for outstanding literature is, and remains, very special for me. There's nothing rational about it. And make no mistake, Vidal's essays stand among the best in American writing.

When giants move on, we sense its significance. Gore Vidal's passing leaves American belles lettres without a dominant, defining, defiant personality.

The Auction of Dawn Powell's Diaries

Dawn Powell
(photo from Library of America)

Dawn Powell was an American writer whose work few people have read. I am among the many who have never started or finished a Powell novel. However, her name would occasionally occur in essays on American writers that got my attention. One of them was by Gore Vidal. My trust in his literary taste and admiration for his prose led me to read his essay about Powell's life and work. I admit I kept reading Vidal and never got around to exploring Powell's oeuvre. Others have, including current keeper of the Powell flame, author and critic Tim Page.

Today's online editions of The New York Times includes a piece about Page's attempted Internet auction of Powell's diaries. The piece notes the melancholy and praiseworthy aspects of this episode. Page became aware of Powell's output from an Edmund Wilson review, which inspired him resuscitate interest in her work. Page admirably succeeded in this enterprise, to the extent that he edited and annotated the two-volume Library of America reprint of Powell's writing.

However, according to the Times story, the Internet auction has not yet met Page's expectations. His financial valuation of the Powell manuscript has apparently not been shared by the institutions and private collectors who would be likely bidders. Viral marketing, on which Page assumed this small, specialist world would learn of the auction, did not generate sufficient interest on its own merits. Powell's name, while known within the literary world, just didn't have the clout.

Powell's work, if one is to believe Page, Vidal, and Wilson, is worthy of a permanent place in America's literary heritage. Yet, despite those efforts, destiny may consign Powell a fate more merciless than her final interment in a potter's field (yes, that really did happen) would suggest. Powell's original diaries may very well end up buried in some academic library, while her prose slowly disappears from our collective cultural memory. The erratic, remorseless force known as "the judgement of history" offers little consolation for that unjust vanishing.