Life out loud
As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal was snobbish and hypersensitive, but so eloquent
Aug 22nd 2015 | From the print edition
Fine viewsEmpire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal. By Jay Parini. Penguin Random House; 480 pages; $35. Published in the UK as "Every Time A Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal". Little, Brown; £25.
"NEVER lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television" is a familiar Gore Vidal quip—and, as Jay Parini notes in a marvellous new biography, Vidal enthusiastically followed his own advice. The sex was almost always homosexual; invariably "on top"; and usually in the afternoon, to allow for disciplined writing in the morning and extravagant socialising in the evening. For Vidal, television meant a show of eloquent punditry projected on both sides of the Atlantic, but most memorably—as any trawl through YouTube will confirm—in the form of confrontations on American chat shows with William Buckley, editor of the conservative National Review, and with a pugnacious fellow writer, Norman Mailer.
Vidal died in 2012 at the age of 86. He wrote so many novels, screenplays, television shows, literary commentaries and essays that he ought to defy pigeonholing. Yet that prolific versatility is precisely the reason that often he is dismissed as a social-climbing, publicity-seeking gadfly when, in his own view, he was a groundbreaking novelist superior to contemporaries such as John Updike. Vidal was always ready to give criticism but loth to take it—and was especially angered by the New York Times, which primly refused to review "The City and the Pillar", his bestselling exploration of gay life in America that was published in 1948.
Given Vidal's sensitivity to any slight, real or imagined, Mr Parini wisely declined an offer that he write his story during his lifetime. The wait has allowed the author, whose friendship with Vidal began in the 1980s, to produce a portrait that is both affectionate and balanced. Vidal, knowing everyone who was anyone (from Princess Margaret to Rudolf Nureyev), was certainly a snob. He was also delighted to be rich, having as a young man not known "where the next bottle of champagne might come from," Mr Parini writes. It mattered immensely to Vidal that he could live well, whether in huge homes in America and Italy or in comfortable suites at the best hotels in London, Paris and Bangkok.
Yet Mr Parini's Gore Vidal is a man hiding his shyness with a mask of suave sophistication and with viper-like scorn for his enemies (he called Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" in one TV clash, and said Truman Capote's death was "a wise career move"). Though Vidal accused Buckley of being a "closet queen", this was not the retort of a militant homosexual: Vidal, a "pansexual", always saw "homosexual" and "heterosexual" as adjectives, not nouns.
History, as Mr Parini points out, will give its verdict on Vidal the novelist. What is already beyond doubt, though, is Vidal's importance as a "public intellectual" with a wonderfully contrarian instinct. For Vidal, who failed twice to win elected office and follow in the footsteps of his politician grandfather, his country was "the United States of Amnesia" and there were no longer two political parties: Republicans and Democrats were wings of the "Property Party". Vidal's sympathy for Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, may be hard to accept, but far fewer eyebrows will today be raised by his opposition to the Vietnam war (hence the clashes with Buckley), his scorn for Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush, his hostility to American policy in the Middle East, or even his view that America is an empire always in search of an enemy (following the demise of the Soviet Union, "one billion Muslims and the Arabs in particular" would, he said, "make a fine new evil empire to oppose").
The obvious parallel is with Noam Chomsky—and in September 1991 Mr Parini brought both Mr Chomsky and Vidal together for a television interview. Asked what motivated them, Mr Chomsky replied: "Looking in the mirror in the morning and not being appalled." Vidal, as so often with words, went one better: "For me, it's looking out of the window and not being appalled."
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