Gore Vidal, 1925-2012
So Gore Vidal, once-famous novelist and preening, latitudinarian controversialist, has died, aged 86, of complications from pneumonia, the disease that in bygone years was called the old person’s friend.
I never had much time for Vidal — I found his novels unreadable (Burr, Lincoln) where they were not comically repellent (the jejune pornography of Myra Breckinridge), and his bad-boy polemicizing seemed to me to me barely distinguishable from simple hysteria.
My dislike hardened after I met and became friends with Bill Buckley, who had a long-running altercation with Vidal. The high-point (from the point of view of histrionics) was during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Vidal described Bill as a “crypto-Nazi” and for perhaps the only time in his career Bill lost his temper and threatened to “sock” him.
I know Bill ever after regretted losing his temper, though Vidal’s provocation was sufficient to test the most patient soul. Bill did not, however, alter his opinion of Vidal, and his long essay “On Experiencing Gore Vidal” in a 1969 number of Esquire provides what I regard as the last word on this curious specimen of self-absorbed, hedonistic fauna. Hillsdale college maintains a huge, downloadable archive of Buckley’s work and the essay is available in PDF format here. It has all you need to know about G. Vidal. RIP.
There is a short list of people upon whose death I wait. I do not pray for their death, and pray for them when they die, but I do not grieve. Mr. Hitchens was on that list and Mr. Vidal was near the top. Now he is gone. The earth is lighter for being free of his tread.
The story is young and the letters at the NYT site are generally reverential. Mr. Vidal was right. American civilization is dying and in my view he and his idolizers are both symptoms and causes.
RIP
Sorry, I cannot disagree more. Vidal’s Lincoln is superb, basically writing Lincoln’s story as if he were The Godfather, which sounds like a cheap switcheroo but instead allows for a superb exploration of a great enigma– how did this obscure regional figure turn out to be the canniest political operator of his time and the most far-sighted visionary for the reordering of the American concept? The moment when Seward, who had once dreamed of bossing him around, realizes that Lincoln is far tougher than he will ever be and is willing to take on dictatorial powers for the duration of the war, and is almost ravished by such a naked exercise of power, is magnificent.
And maybe you have to steeped in movie culture to totally get it, but Myra Breckinridge captures so much of what was happening in fluid sexuality in the time, in the worship and decline of Hollywood, in the invention of the camp sensibility– there is no great Hippie novel (they’re all lame) but somehow this even smaller, but influential, slice of the counterculture did get a great novel that defined something that was changing– or curdling– in our culture then.
Try Sandberg’s Lincoln (4 volumes) instead. Far more in depth and far less cloying, it explores in almost endless detail Lincoln’s passage as Civil War President.
Lincoln was anything BUT a godfather, and was quite the point of his entire Presidency, whether a nation could survive as a republican institution, his primary focus, not his individual power.
Vidal never understood this, not surprising as a dreamy eyed leftist who always thinks that somewhere out there is a benevolent dictator that will cure us all.
yeah; and then they project that power worship onto us.
The husk may have taken some time to be shed but Gore Vidal died long ago.
Vidal’s novels MESSIAH and JULIAN weren’t bad, but KALKI was so awful I swore off him permanently.
The passing of a single senescent dung beetle is of little consequence. The dung heap will continue to grow, smell and putrefy without him. But let’s be fair and give the man credit for sneering at the idea of gay marriage.
Gore Vidal – another preening liberal who loved living in an Italy free of the facist Nazi but thought it was evil to free Iraq of the facist Baath.
I saw that exchange between Buckley and Vidal. I was sorry Buckley didn’t beat him like a drum. Vidal deserved it. I strongly doubt he would have made that crack in private where he wouldn’t have been rescued from a whipping.
I read some of Vidal’s books later. Kalki was horrible. So was MB. Williwaw was boring. Burr was all right. Vidal was lionized by the left because he was a homosexual, not because he had any real talent. Now he’s gone. No loss. RIP? No, more like AMF.
Well said. His self loathing was transferred to America through his life and writings. Reading Vidal was like reading graffiti; immature scrawling designed to “shock” and PROVE how avant-garde he was. If Vidal wasn’t recognized as a homosexual, his writings would have been dismissed without a second thought, as they deserved. Sadly, his self loathing, culture destroying immaturity has become the norm.
To paraphrase band leader Artie Shaw’s reported comment in the wake of Glenn Miller’s death:
“All I can say is that Gore Vidal should have lived, and his writing career should have died.”
I would say the reverse. I have no idea what sort of a writer he was – never cared – but he had one thing in common with many great writers: he was a vicious, nasty, anti-semite. “Blessed be the Omnipresent who killed him.” Or, as George Washington said: “to bigotry no sanction”.
The world is a better place today. Rest in Pieces.
Vidal was not homosexual but quite actively bisexual, emphasizing the gay aspect for the shock PR value, which did work in an earlier day. A vicious anti-Semite? Is this why he lived for half a century with and chose to be buried next to a Jew, Howard Austen? And he said in one of his essays that his researches on the family name suggested the Vidals were probably Jews, a remark from which a good anti-Semite would recoil in shame and horror. There are lots of justifiably nasty criticisms to be made of him, but anti-Semite does not seem to be an accurate charge. Of course, now you could call him that great old canard, a self-hating Jew. And please don’t quote me his jibes at the Podhoretzes. That was standard Leftist vitriol with a touch of sneering wit.
If you think the self-hater is a canard, then you know nothing of Jewish history. A prime example is Karl Marx.
If one is enjoined not to speak ill of the dead then, as the Tractatus tells us, of Vidal one must remain silent.
Normally I really like to give it a week before I say anything negative (truthful?) about these famous leftists when they die, but my first thought on reading of Gore Vidal’s death was, “well, that’s a load off the world.”
I’m sorry for his family if they miss him, though. At least he won’t be a drag on our national healthcare costs, so there’s a bright spot he might have celebrated.
I don’t want to really go off the deep end so close to his death but I will mention; the man never showed any restraint when others died.
Hillsdale links don’t work.
If the Muse chose to create writers by political acceptability and sterling character, there would be many fewer great works to read. Say what you will of the final product, there is no question that Vidal was a serious writer working with serious issues, and that his writings interested and brought pleasure to a great many people. Mr. Kimball and some others here have, IMO, donned their own brand of political correctness as blinkers so far as Vidal was concerned.
Unfortunately, the linked pdf file of WFB’s article on his encounters with Vidal skips a couple of pages right near the beginning.
The left frequently stoops to a very low level by celebrating the deaths of conservatives. I will not do the same for Mr Vidal.
WASN’T THERE A MAILER-VIDAL EPISODE, TOO?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8m9vDRe8fw
I met Mr. Vidal when he was doing research for “Burr”. It was not a particularly pleasing encounter. The house was reportedly haunted, though in every previous visit I had never felt that it was. However, on that particular day the house seemed to be screaming “GET OUT”. It was the one and only time I sensed something off in the Hermitage.
The crypto-Nazi smear beat Alinsky (“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”) by a few years.
Vidal was certainly rude to Buckley, but history is on his side.
Buckley was wrong. Our adventure in Vietnam was an unfortunate immoral boondoggle.
No, it was the racist “anti-war” movement that was immoral. We tried to safeguard the personal (if not political) freedom of a group of people who did not look like us and who were of a different religion. I grew up expecting to fight in that war, and am ashamed we betrayed the people of Viet Nam by turning our backs on them.
If South Viet Nam had survived, it could have been like South Korea or Taiwan today. And we should renew the boycott.
If you are going to invade a country. ostensibly on behalf of one faction, then do the job right or stay home.
We left Vietnam a smoldering country full of resentment and unexploded ordnance. Minding our own business would have been the moral choice.
More to the subject, how many here cheer Buckley’s use of the word “queer” in a rabidly anti-homosexual time, followed by a threat of violence?
What an utterly laughable conceit. If history proved anything it proved that the North indeed waged a war of aggression against the South, and today keeps the country together only through oppression and despotism. Oh, plus the “domino theory” was proved absolutely correct.
Back in the day, as a teenager, I enjoyed some of Vidal’s books, notably “Burr.” I later figured out that the main premise of the novel was something Vidal made up (though it’s an educated guess, and not completely outside the realm of possibility) and that annoyed me a bit, but on further reflection I decided this was a *novel* and that things could be made up. “Lincoln” was more of the same, though frankly I’ve never found a novelist’s interpretation of Lincoln that I liked, and Vidal’s was sort of cynical (something I really disliked). “1876″ was my downfall as far as Vidal was concerned, just too cynical.
As an aside, it’s a sort of obscure point, but Gore Vidal, as a child, is portrayed in the movie “Amelia” with Hilary Swank, which came out a couple of years ago. Vidal’s father was a figure in early aviation, taught at West Point and served in the Roosevelt administration, and supposedly carried on a torrid affair with Earhart towards the end of her life, and that’s a central part of the movie’s plot.
And despite my eventual aversion to him as a novelist, he was a talented writer, and I have no animosity towards talented literary figures, even if what they write isn’t my cup of tea. RIP.
“Unfortunately, the linked pdf file of WFB’s article on his encounters with Vidal skips a couple of pages right near the beginning.”
Works for me. Re-try your download.
I just tried it twice, and both times 2 pages are omitted. Specifically, article page 285 (pdf page 3) is followed by article page 288 (pdf page 4). In other words, article pages 286 and 287 are not in the pdf.
I forgot to add: I’d notify Hillsdale College directly, but the only contact info on the Buckley Online website is to Cumulus, who appears to be the website host and/or software providers.
Sometimes you just feel a weight lifted off of the world when you see an obituary. This was one of those joyous moments. One of the last times I had occasion to see anything of his was when I had purchased a special edition DVD of Ben Hur. In the added videos he explained how he tried to make Judah Ben Hur into an old lover in a sexual way of his nemesis Massala. That’s the kind of guy he was: he felt his greatest contribution to a Christian epic was to “queer” it up. Good riddance.
Williwaw, The City and the Pillar, The Judgment of Paris, Washington, D.C., and Julian are excellent novels, his best work IMO. R.I.P.
Vidal hated America, hated Americans, hated pretty much everything aside from the male anus. RIP, but I suspect your new home is a great deal warmer than the Amalfi Coast.
Unlike many of the posters here, I prefer Mr Vidal’s fiction and essays (most of them) to Mr Buckley’s (especially his later, more orotund style). Politically, of course, it is the opposite. I don’t trust artists’ political opinions: they don’t really study these things.
Creation is a good novel, once one gets past the few Vidal-isms therein. (Martin Amis noted that one must write “disinterestedly” to make good art, which is why self-inserting authors, or their opinions, go down so poorly so often, and why Vidal’s political novels and later work suffer.) You may be offended by Myra Breckinridge; certainly, if homosexuality squicks you, I don’t recommend you read it, any more than I would advise someone who faints at the sight of blood to watch a Hammer Dracula film. Christopher Isherwood, Vidal’s close friend, wrote to Vidal that he thought MB was a kind of self-portrait: when I compare Myra Breckinridge with the sequel, Myron, I can see the change in Vidal’s outlook: Myron is an angry, negative polemic.
Kalki was a great, downer-ending science-fiction story: properly speaking, the only SF Vidal ever wrote. Messiah was also very good, as were The Judgment of Paris, Julian and 1876, especially since there were fewer real figures in the last (historical) novel, so less temptation. (Vidal’s crush on James A Garfield is rather amusing.)
Palimpsest was a good memoir, though it cribbed much of his own previous writing on himself and his acquaintances, but it cribs well.
For the essays: basically, anything Vidal wrote on Art is worth reading. His prose could achieve a kind of water-clear transparency at those times, something he could never do with politics.
p.s. One normally calls this clarity “limpid” or “pellucid,” sadly, those words so abused I leave them out here.
Vidal was a fine writer and a bad man. He said himself that he was cold and selfish. That doesn’t make him much different than many of those captured in “Lives of the Novelists,” a new book from Yale University Press. “Lives of the Swine” would have worked just as well.
Politically I loathed Vidal, and from everything I’ve read about him from those who knew him or encountered him, he was not someone I’d have wanted to hang around with. But I liked his novels his historical novels (LINCOLN, CREATION, BURR, 1876 and EMPIRE very much). The man knew how to tell a story, and had a beautiful prose style.
Please, let’s leave the political correctness to the progs. Vidal wrote a beautiful line of English. His essays are some of the wittiest, most entertaining in the language. He wrote a handful of superb novels. I don’t have to share a man’s politics to appreciate his talents.
http://takimag.com/article/gore_vidal_pleased_to_leave_you_taki/print#axzz22GtxMCIb
I assumed that Mr. Vidal had died long ago. From a literary perspective, he was among the lightest of lightweights. His public attitude was snotty, arrogant and condescending.
May he rest in peace.
Another thing I liked about Vidal’s novels: he was not afraid to be popular. He wrote popular fiction that was intelligent and even elegant. He once disparaged “academic fiction:” fiction written by academics, for academics, and frequently about academics. He said that popular fiction was the contemporary only fiction dealing with “the big issues”–not about “some academic’s adulterous love affairs>’
50 years too late. A man full of bitterness, hatred and vituperation. This mediocrity’s only true talent was his famous seething waspishness
Reflecting on Vidal’s work and life, I’m reminded of this quote by Chateaubriand:
”One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.”
I would kiss Mr. Kimball and the commentators here if I could. I thought I was losing my mind because all over the web conservatives and just plain normal people were giving this crank accolades.
Vidal was not smart. Like many of those of his generation and stripe he baffled with BS. He used shock and awe as a poor substitute for intellect. As the writer points out he called Buckley a Nazi. To what purpose was that? To shock not only Buckley but an audience. It had the dual benefit of knocking Buckley off of his game and duping the audience into thinking audacity was smart and brave. In reality it is what cowards do when they have run out of intellect.