1876 by Gore Vidal

Mrs. Sanford, learning in the process that she and her husband are building a house in Fifth Avenue, that they have a cottage at Newport, Rhode Island (plainly the most fashionable of the summer places, since the Apgars pointedly prefer Maine), and that Mr. Sanford enjoys yachting, owns race horses, and does —as they say here—nothing, as far as I could tell from her conversation.
    All subjects were touched on. Oh, yes, she knew Mrs. Mary Mason Jones! Such a character! And dear old silly Ward McAllister!—with his “don’t you knows.” We got on famously, passing various names back and forth to establish one another’s place in the scheme of things. I found her delightful; but still had no clue to the source of the Sanford fortune—was it his or hers?
    After several mediocre courses, including fried oysters, which will one day be my happy death, I turned to my neighbour, who introduced himself (as if he needed an introduction to a fellow author). Although the celebrated Edmund C. Stedman is a Wall Street broker by profession, his passion, more or less requited, is for literature and for the making of taste, a sort of rustic Sainte-Beuve (whose name he did not appear to recognize—more of this cultural difference later). Last year Stedman published two volumes on (of?) Victorian poets as well as a volume of his own poetical works which I—yes, all dark things are to be confessed here—told him that I had read and admired. Actually, I did hold the book in my hand at Brentano’s, and listened to the clerk’s description of the author, who regularly visits the shop, presumably to encourage the clerks to sell his works.
    I was rewarded for my mendacity with yet another invitation to address the Lotos Club, as well as with the assurance that I alone of all living historians of the present (sic?) have been able to make clear for Americans the internecine struggles of immoral old Europe. I confess that this encomium made me seem to myself like one of those seedy pitchmen at a side show, showing off for a penny the swallower of swords, the eaters of glass and of fire.
    Since Stedman knows Bigelow, I tried to get the subject onto politics and the day’s scandal, but once again I found myself confronted by this strange New York wall of—indifference? No, I cannot believe that they are indifferent to the ubiquitous corruption.
    I can understand the gentry preferring not to acknowledge the hell that their puritan society has become even as the devils piously continue to mouth puritan nostrums. But for a man like Stedman to shy away from any discussion of the Grant Administration is very odd indeed. After all, Stedman was a celebrated supporter of Lincoln. Provisionally, I take this reluctance to be a form of embarrassment at what they—I can no longer write we—have become. More to the’ point, the noble new party that freed the slaves and preserved the Union is the very same party that is now in cahoots with the crooked railroad tycoons and with the Wall Street cornerers of this-and-that, thus making it hard for a noble creature like Bigelow—like Stedman?—to confess to the bankruptcy of what only ten years ago was the last or latest, best or better, hope or dream of an honourable system of government.
    “I much admire Bigelow’s pieces from Germany. Not on a par with yours, of course ...”
    I was modest. Pressed on. “Now Bigelow goes to Albany. Is this wise?”
    Like a diviner, Stedman tentatively touched a complex aspic with his fork. “It is odd, certainly. After all, we are Republicans. But then Governor Tilden is certainly—respectable. Not long ago I had the most interesting conversation with him about airships.”
    It took me some moments to make sense of this last phrase. When finally I did, I realized that I was in the presence of a most amiable monomaniac. “Man must fly through the air, just as he now travels across the earth at thirty or forty miles an hour and almost as swiftly over the seas.