Gore blimey! Was Vidal a pesky copycat?
Looking through a new edition of the Journal of Jules Renard, i came across this remark, which Renard wrote on February 26, 1894. ‘To succeed, well and truly, requires firstly that one gets there oneself, and secondly that others do not.’
Three months later, on May 16, Renard offered a variation on the same idea. ‘it is not enough to be happy: it is also necessary that others not be happy.’
Both these sayings rang a bell. A few years ago, a biography of the American wit gore Vidal was published with the wordy title, Every Time A Friend Succeeds Something in Me Dies. The author also credited Vidal with having said: ‘it is not enough to succeed, others must fail.’
Andrew Martin, the editor of the best c o mp e n d i u m of humorous quotations, states that Vidal first said, ‘Every time a friend succeeds something in me dies’ in a TV i nterview with Da v i d Frost in September 1973.
Martin also attributes the related quotation — ‘it is not enough to succeed, others must fail’ — to Vidal. But i f you change one or two words, it is exactly what Jules Renard wrote, 79 years earlier.
oddly enough, W. Somerset Maugham has been credited with r oughly t he s ame witticism. ‘now that i have grown old,’ he said on his 85th birthday in 1959, ‘i realise that for most of us it is not enough to have achieved personal success. one’s best friend must also have failed.’
Some might say that Vidal’s borrowing was coincidental, but Vidal always kept a keen eye on Maugham. ‘By 17 i had read all of Shakespeare; all of Maugham,’ he once recalled. The two writers had much in common, not least a capacity for envy, and for bringing their rivals down a peg or two.
in conversation with critic kenneth Tynan in 1957, Vidal complained about the way in which Maugham belittled greater writers than himself. indeed, he could have been talking of himself. ‘observe how cleverly Maugham . . . will chop off a head here, a pair of legs there, a couple of feet, or arms, as suits his purpose so that finally only a certain short, wizened man of letters, Maugham himself, is standing erect; whole and complete, towering over them all.’
Did Vidal s t eal Maugham’s aphorism? or did they both steal it from Jules Renard?
Maugham was certainly a fan of Renard’s journal. ‘it is extremely amusing. it is witty and subtle and often wise,’ he once wrote. Vidal was also an avid reader, once describing it as ‘ one of the great delights of world literature’.
i was going to conclude this Poirot- style investigation by condemning Maugham and Vidal as the copycats, and attributing the original saying to Jules Renard. But then i read a piece by the late Miles kington in The oldie Annual 2021, an enjoyable selection of pieces from The oldie magazine.
in 2007, kington wrote that when he had first read gore Vidal’s r e mar k , he wa s reminded of ‘ another writer people don’t read much any more, the Duc de la Rochefoucauld . . . Didn’t he make some remark about how watching a friend drown was not a totally tragic experience? Well, he may have done, but i have not unearthed it. The nearest to it i s his remark that, “We all have strength enough t o help us endure the misfortunes of others”. ’
The Duc de la Rochef oucauld was born more than 400 years ago. He is best known for his Maxims, observations on human nature that are as sharp and pithy today as when he first wrote them: ‘ nothing prevents us from being natural so much as the desire to appear so’; ‘Self-love is the greatest of all flatterers’; ‘Everyone complains of his memory, but no one complains of his judgement.’ And so on.
WEll, i’m happy to have unearthed the de la Rochefoucauld quotation that Miles kington half-remembered. ‘in the misfortune of our best friends,’ he wrote, ‘we always find something not altogether displeasing to us.’
Being an educated Frenchman, Renard would undoubtedly have read this, though, like kington, it had probably slipped his memory.
At the moment, Vidal is praised for coming up with the witticism, but it’s unlikely that the chain will stop there. in a few years, another writer will say something very like it, to great applause. After a further few years, another writer will follow, and so on, each of them enjoying his brief moment in the sun.