First published in 1968, Gore Vidal’s novel Myra Breckinridge was designed to tititate, shock and be provocative and it’s a novel that relishes in it. It’s sequel, Myron, seems to get the shorter end of the stick however: it didn’t get the movie treatment, didn’t sell a million copies in paperback and even now, seems comparatively forgotten. Were it not for this two-in-one copy I found used (Vintage Contemporaries, 1987) I don’t know if I’d even know it existed.
Myra Breckinridge is a loud, riotous novel, one where someone obsessed with movies - and thinks they’ve been going downhill since the late 40s - runs amok at a training ground for actors located just west of Hollywood. She runs afoul of Buck Loner, her uncle and owner of the training ground, and goes about demolishing a young actor named Rusty Godowski and seducing his girlfriend.
It’s all fun and games and scheming until it takes a weird turn in the back end and Myra sexually assaults Rusty, which the novel implies turns him into a sexual sadist, a move that may have been shocking in 1968 but has aged like milk. I won’t lie, that scene took me out of the novel - Vidal almost describes with pleasure the way Myra goes over Rusty’s body - and it deflates any momentum the book’s got going for it in 2021.
It’s a little obvious that Vidal didn’t do much research, either: Myra asserts that taking hormones stops hair growth (I wish that was true), but that Myra needed implants to have breasts. It’s interesting that Myra never explicitly calls herself a transsexual, more implying she was always there, was always a woman just waiting for her moment in the spotlight, as it were. She’s certainly a unique kind of trans woman: assertive, dominant and one who goes out of her way to power over men, even as she shows no interest in them. Or, as she opens the book:
“I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess,” (pg 1)
Reese, she ain’t.
Read now, a good fifty-plus years after publication, Myra has lost its ability to shock and now has to stand on its own merits. And at this, it kinda/sorta succeeds? There are moments of humour and moments where she’s a bitchy sort of charming, but generally the book goes from scene to scene, intending to shock and tititate the reader with Myra’s goings on, right up to the climax when she reveals that she’s not Myron’s widow… She's trans! What shocked then - Time Magazine famously said “Has literary decency fallen so low?” - is mainstream now. Just look at the sales of Torrey Peters’s novel Detransition, Baby.
That said, the ending comes too quickly and puts her back in her place in a way that doesn’t just ring hollow, it feels forced, like Vidal is trying to show what happens when people rise up above their place.
In this sense, I was reminded of Raymond Kennedy’s Ride A Cockhorse (NYRB Classics, 2012), a similarly wild ride about a woman run amok. Where Myra takes on Hollywood, Francis Fitzgibbons rises from a meek loan officer to trying to take over her small-town bank, sleeping with a high-school drum major and just generally going wild. Like Myra, she shakes up everything in her wake in a world that’s dominated by men. And like Myra, she’s quickly struck down when she’s about to overthrow the men in charge and reduced to a meek person again - in Fitzgibbon’s case, she ends up working at a hair salon. There’s something to be said about this American way of looking at things, where it’s shocking when a woman rises to real power and threatens men on their own turf and how everything just works out for the guys, and the loud woman is quietly returned to her station in life. Something, well, hetronormative, which when coming from Vidal’s pen seems like a cop out.
Myron meanwhile takes place a few years later and it’s a weird duck. It’s a Watergate novel with a cameo from Richard Nixon, it’s a period piece about late 1940s Hollywood and it’s a novel where Myron and Myra struggle for control of the same body, and although their aims are ultimately the same, like a pair of siblings, they bicker and fight the entire time.
The conceit: it’s now 1973, Myron’s married and settles down, and he’s relaxing watching a movie, a crappy b-movie from 1948 called The Siren of Babylon, when he gets sucked into the television and finds himself on a Hollywood backlot. Although he seems stable enough, like anyone who’s trans, he’s struggling to keep things in check and Myra comes out. In alternating chapters, they struggle over the same body, wreaking havoc in Hollywood and generally confusing the hell out of everyone they come across.
It’s a nice build-up from Myra, where she viewed television as the enemy, and now she’s literally trapped inside one, forced to relive the shooting of a classic film over and over and over again. Of course, this is something like heaven to Myra, who recognizes stars on the street (she shrieks and chases a car), knows shooting schedules by heart and even has a preening hairdresser for a friend and ally. Her joy of being set loose in this world propels Myron to a wild finish, one where she attempts to rewrite history in her own words.
But Myron’s also a compelling character, too. He’s trying to find a way back to his own boring and mundane life as a caterer, to a woman he loves and where things are safe, predictable and boring. No wonder he’s a Republican. But his struggle to keep his head and the little ways he slips up here and there, not to mention his performative attempts at masculinity, remind me a little of Ames in Detransition, Baby, and the way he tries to be mascline in Torrey Peters’s novel. To wit:
“Although I wore a sort of raunchy cowboy outfit I bought last week and was careful to walk like some kind of bear with arthritis to show how deeply and sincerely butch I am…” (Myron, pg 327-28)
“In her heart, she doesn’t think Ames is a man. She just can’t believe Amy’s detransition is what it seems. How many times had she seen the way that Amy, even before detransition, used masculinity as a defensive cocoon?” (Detransition, Baby, pg 227)
Similar to Ames, who as Reese puts it, has a little “college bro” come out here and there, throughout Myron we find Myron affecting the posture and language of a fake-ass cowboy (“You got the wrong end of the steer,” he says at one point) as he struggled to assert his masculinity and shove Myra deeper and deeper inside himself. But she comes out anyway, like water leaking through a sieve.
Of the two novels, Myron’s both weirder and stronger. It relies less on being shocking and more on Myron’s struggle to be his boring, casually misogynistic self. At the same time, it builds on Myra’s crazed ideas about Hollywood, overpopulation and stardom, while also giving her a little more sympathy in the back end, finally giving her what she craves more than anything: a shot at the spotlight. It requires the backstory of Myra, but it’s the one I enjoyed the most. If you like Vidal’s more satirical novels - Duluth or Kalki - it’s worth a shot.