I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.One day I picked up a collection of Gore Vidal's essays, The Second American Revolution, and his historical novel of our American Judas, the eponymous Aaron Burr, at the public library. I had just been charmed by part of a television documentary about Vidal, showing interviews with himself, his Malibu roommates Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and excerpts from the awful 1968 debate between him and William F. Buckley Jr.; Vidal accused Buckley of lying about his military record and being a crypto-fascist, and Buckley called Vidal a pornographer and threatened to punch him in the nose. Well, not their finest hour. And rare it is that I can find mention of the other in eithers' works, even when writing on the debate. Vidal did bring him up in his memoirs, Palimpsest, for an entire, whole aside on Buckley's perceived celebriphilia. Understandable, really. Who in the world has a cordial relationship with his evil twin?— Gore Vidal in interview collection.
Cultivated, cosmopolitan, pre-Stonewall gay men like Gore Vidal were the real revolutionaries. They lived in the world and accepted and advanced cultural history, the heritage of gay and straight alike.
— Camille Paglia, Vamps & Tramps, 85.
This documentary seemed to be the opening shot of a small, that is, noncelebrity-sized, wave of publicity about Vidal, promoting his new essay collection United States. Either that, or I feared the event being pre-publicized was his imminent death by presumably natural causes; similar to the cable television phenomenon where, when an important person such as Frank Sinatra or Robert Mitchum is on his or her deathbed, all their old movies are trotted out on the many alphabet soup cable movie channels, and A&E dusts off the near-dead celeb's personal episode of Biography for a last hurrah. More on this later.
I have nothing to say, only to add.Our author was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal on October 3rd, 1925 at West Point, New York, U.S.A., to Gene and Nina Vidal. He was raised in Washington, D.C., when it was a sleepy southern town and not yet the capitol of the Western Empire. His father would serve under Franklin Roosevelt as a civilian aeronautics advisor; his maternal grandfather was FDR's thorn in the side, U.S. Senator Thomas Pryor Gore (D-Oklahoma). In later life Gene would shorten his name, run twice for Congress, plot campaign strategy with Eleanor Roosevelt, and befriend his successor Auchincloss stepchild Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and her husband. Politics was his earliest love, before literature, and Vidal is still a bit of a polygamist: in 1992, though Vidal's favorite candidate, Jerry Brown, was defeated in the primaries, he fraternally continued providing campaign speech material to the new Democratic front runners, distant cousin Al Gore and his friend Bill Clinton. Vidal's life has been unique in postwar American literature, and his writing reflects it: politics is not abstraction or ideology, but persons and actions, and important.— Gore Vidal to James McDonald
After serving in the army as a ship's navigator, which strikes me as perfectly illogical, Warrant Officer (j.g.) Vidal published Williwaw only months before another war novel was published: fellow warrior Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead. Thus both launched careers off the same great media campaign, the Second World War, that would make them, briefly, famous, infamous, enemies, and, finally, more or less obscure.
Vidal has lived in Italy for many years, though he maintains a home, citizenship, and income tax liability in America.
Since I caught that documentary, I have read perhaps half of Vidal's fiction, and almost all his essays. I have doubts I shall get to the rest of his corpus soon, as he has in effect set me a reading list which partly obscures himself. Vidal is perhaps the most ferociously well-read popular author of the post war, and the last writer, he thinks, anyone will read in a future given over to movies and manga. Although Vidal declared himself not to be his own subject, is sternly literate and coldly regards the sentimental and juvenile audio-visual world of movies and comic books, he has been intimately connected with television, Hollywood (uncredited screenwriter for Ben-Hur), and the Broadway stage. Worse, he wrote Two Sisters, a novel in the form of a memoir, which may be a joke, and in fact is a memoir in the form of a novel, unless, of course, I have it the other way around. Which I do: my first edition's dust jacket says "novel in the form of a memoir" and the title page has it the other way around. Vidal has deliberately played us, and, in fact, George Santayana's The Last Puritan, is subtitled "a memoir in the form of a novel." And again--the book is dedicated to his maternal half sister, Nina Gore Auchincloss Steers Straight. The book's Eric, is described as Jimmie Trimble. Did Nina and Gore fight over Jimmie? Did Gore declare Nina off-limits? Nina was described as a virgin until marriage (Palimpsest, 7-8). The head reels. Paranoia creeps in. Is Vidal playing Sphinxian riddles with someone's scandalous name as the solution, or prize; or worse, merely a game with no prize at all? No, I will not reach for this gauntlet: my own sex life has been complicated enough. I turn for relief to Pynchon and The X-Files.
His English and construction are so finely woven the reader feels he simply sat down and poured them out, perhaps proofreading for simple typos. Needless to say, this is the most difficult writing to do. Vidal is best when writing about literature, sex, and manners, the last in meaning closer to mores than Emily Post's subject, but I write "manners" because Vidal is not so much concerned with ethics or morals (not that he lacks them, or interest in them) as with folkways or customs, again, not theory but practice. Although he does write often on politics, for example, he is never so much concerned in his essays with particulars such as bills as with how we supposedly govern ourselves.
Avoid admirable writers. Avoid writers. (Palimpsest)
His anecdotes throw a cold, biting and comic light on his contemporaries and himself. Reviewing Anthony Burgess' autobiography, Gore begins with his first encounter with A Clockwork Orange's author and his wife:
She said in a loud clear voice, "You," and then I ceased to understand her, "chung cheers boog sightee Joyce yearsen roscoe conkling." I am certain that I heard the name of the nineteenth-century New York senator, and I turned to the man—the senator's biographer?—and saw, like infected buttonholes, eyes I dare not meet in dreams. "Tchess." He took up the refrain. "Boog Joyce venially blind, too, bolder." I had been drinking, but not that much, while the tall man appeared sober. Obviously, I was having my chronic problem with English voices: the low rapid mumble, the urgent wheeze, the imploding diphthong, vowels wrongly stressed, and consonants long since gone west with the thirteen colonies. (United States, 404.)The finest, and funniest, essay in the collection was "Yellow Star and Pink Triangle," (11-14-81) which appeared ten or so years before Richard Plant's book "The Pink Triangle." ACT UP has since made the pink triangle ubiquitous; was its existance commonly known before or were Vidal and Plant more informed than others? But Vidal's essay concentrated mostly on a Mrs. Norman Podhoretz's article on homosexuals in which, discovering that gays, tho
I never pass up an opportunity to have sex or appear on television.So, to the library. The Second American Revolution seemed to promise shock and controversy, so I picked up that and Burr, his novel on the American Revolution's Judas Iscariot. The Second American Revolution is a collection of essays on literature ("Thomas Love Peacock: the Novel of Ideas" and "The Oz Books"), politics (American and Italian) and sexuality. The finest essay in the collection was "Yellow Star and Pink Triangle," which appeared ten or so years before the book on Hitler's policy of identification of concentration camp prisoners' crimes on their sleeves (focusing particularly on gay (sex crime) inmates) came out. Er, was released. Um, was published? But Vidal's essay concentrated mostly on a Mrs. Norman Podhoretz's article on homosexuals in which, discovering that gays, those glittering, soft, unnerving foofs, were suddenly trading in chintz for posterboard nailed to sticks, she comes to the conclusion that they are in fact teaming up for a final end run on the defensive position of the family values folks.— Gore Vidal's most oft-cited remark.
As a gay figure he certainly could have critiqued the rise of this very pernicious feminist theory which I think is damaging the cause of feminism. We needed someone like Vidal present in the country all the time, attacking it and satirizing it from the point of view of the left. But it has been left to the Jesse Helmses--the far right. And that is not good. Vidal was at his most seditious with Myra Breckinridge. It pushed the power base in ways that haven't even been assessed yet.... He is a true gay role model, a man of culture and learning and style who represents the best of a worldliness that is conspicuously lacking today. With his courtly manner, Vidal is a patrician throwback. I love his acerbic, waspish style. His fearlessness. The bold attacks.
—Paglia quoted in Out magazine article "Vintage Vidal," Fall 1992. (V&T, 470.)
This article manages to rehash ninety-nine out of the hundred stereotypes
and misconceptions about gays. Vidal, in relating the contents of her
article, repays the favor with a brilliant literary device: being of an old
money, upper class family himself, he proceeds to note Mrs. Podhoretz's
faults--which are, oddly, all stereotyped as the faults of the (Jewish)
nouveau riche--power and status obsessions, liberal pretensions, body
hair, all of it. Not to mention all the personally insulting material he
oh-so-advertantly throws in her face; but so daintily, really, as a Persian
cat would hunt a particularly slow mouse. Vidal makes clear he is equating
one hatred (homophobia) with another (anti-Semitism), but the effect of his
style is not to say this equation, but to subtly, bitchily demonstrate it.
As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anaïs [Nin] in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt. (Palimpsest, p. 108.)I have not gone out and borrowed copies of Nin from my friends, but I do find this chain of vocal echoes being borrowed across generations interesting. For some surprising information on Myra, or rather, the writing behind her, Harry Kloman, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, put his interview with Vidal on his Web page. (Warning: Plot Spoilers in Aforementioned Interview!) The interview is not only a fair capture of Vidal's informal forensic style, it also manages to hit most of Vidal's favorite subjects. Another whole, unexcerpted fair sample that doesn't involve me breaking copyright laws is Vidal's Lowell Lecture at Harvard, which was later rewritten, I believe, as his essay "Monotheism and Its Discontents."
What we see in Myra Breckinridge, I believe, is a literary classicist who, at his party, has finally had it up to here with the heterosexual dictatorship. He has heard one too many venerations of Holy Motherhood, Venereal Womanhood; one too many guests have wondered aloud what must be wrong with him that he would, could, turn his back on all womankind, especially American womankind, and all the essentials only they can offer. He turns. Stripping his fashionable clothing, he whips on a shamanic skin mask, a body costume similar to those described in Frazer's Golden Bough, Frankenstein-stitched from the skins of several women who have crossed swords, and tongues, with our literary, leonine hero before.
Nin and Nina combine with vertigo and nausea as our once gracious and civilized host dances about the room, shaking his fist in the faces of his guests, acting out a cunning morality play of these women's self-importance, their holy martyrdom to their particular caricature of masculinity, their even greater martyrdom to their own femininity. "I am Anaïs Breckinridge whom no man will possess!" he screams as he launches into a ballet of self-abasement, manipulating his–Her! victim-lovers of the Goddess into feeding Her ego. He shakes his war rattle in his audience's face again, chanting the words from a medieval anti-love formula as the bloody menstrual rags that festoon his rattle, like chivalry's ribbands, jerk on their strings, "Such! Such is your love!"
He summons strength for the Big Finish: "Let's face it," he shrills, "Womanly women like me always get the short end of the stick!" He bows. Sweating, shaking, eyes glittering with adrenaline, he pulls off the skins with tired arms. He sees his public, stiffens. They are aghast. They are horrified. They are quite thoroughly repulsed. The rooms begins, at the edges, to empty. Our hero is confused. "What?" he cries. "What's wrong? Don't you get it?" The center know of guests begins to unravel as people bleed into the night from the edges. The party is definitely over. "It's funny!"
More on Vidal later. (That means "Under Construction.")
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