Gore Vidal, who died in 2012, was a ubiquitous figure on the cultural scene for more than 50 years. Not only was he a bestselling novelist, he was also friends with presidents John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton. His collected works add up to 25 novels, several Broadway plays and hundreds of essays. He won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction in 1993 for his collected essays United States. He feuded with a number of well-known American writers, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, with whom he famously came to blows, but he was also admired for his sharp mind and incisive opinions. Martin Amis described him as “learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted.” He appeared on television countless times to comment on the political issues of the day. His reputation as a serious thinker has been hampered by being labelled the American Oscar Wilde—witty and gay. I would argue that he was one of the most important writers of his generation—as a historical novelist and essayist, and a revisionist who offered a fresh critique of the established American narrative.
Take his astonishing sequence of seven novels about US history from the late 18th to the mid-20th century. These “Narratives of Empire” offer an insider’s view of the American imperial dream based on his experience as the grandson of a US Senator and as someone who knew many politicians well. Vidal ran for Congress twice—in 1960, in upstate New York, and in 1982, when he challenged California Governor Jerry Brown for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. He didn’t win either contest. At the time, it was impossible for anyone widely known as a homosexual and socialist to win a seat in either house. Amazingly, on both occasions, he won a fair number of votes.
Instead of working from the inside, Vidal turned himself into the biographer of the American republic. He had a deep appreciation of the Enlightenment ideals of the Founding Fathers, and he took the degradation of those ideals personally, decrying his nation’s slow descent into imperial fantasies—a slide that, he argued, began with the Mexican-American War, which followed the annexation of Texas in 1845. He was fond of saying that his job as a writer was to “supply memory” to the hapless citizens of “the United States of Amnesia.” His best novel, Burr (1973), opens the “Narratives of Empire” sequence. The brilliantly irascible Aaron Burr—Thomas Jefferson’s troubled Vice President—is at the centre of the tale, which also features Alexander Hamilton (whom Burr killed in a duel in New Jersey, on 11th July, 1804), George Washington and other well-known figures of American history. The narrative structure is complex, employing different first-person voices in a potent mix of fact and fiction. His famous cynicism about politicians permeates the novel. But it is also poignant. Burr prized the values of the original framers of the constitution. Lincoln (1984), the second novel in the sequence (by chronology, not date of publication) tackles the Civil War years of the legendary President, ending with his assassination. It’s a work of exquisite historical detail and cumulative force, though it seems more old-fashioned than Burr. The follow up 1876 (1976) offers a finely textured portrait of the Gilded Age, a period of excess when the American appetite for power turned voracious. The last four novels, Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), Washington, DC (1967) and The Golden Age (2000), chronicle the expansion of the American imperial dream into the 20th century, when Washington and Hollywood proved formidable in expanding US interests all over the world. In those works, Vidal wrote with an intimate sense of how power functions within the American political and economic systems.
As a student in 1968, I was fascinated by his electrifying debates with the conservative journalist William F Buckley on national television (the subject of a new film, Best of Enemies). Gore was lean, sharp-witted, knowledgeable and supercilious. Buckley was equally lean, sharp-witted, knowledgeable and supercilious. Neither had much difficulty in finding memorable language to express their opinions. They were perfectly matched and their strenuous combat made for excellent television.
In the 1980s, I had the chance to meet Vidal when I moved to Amalfi in Italy, where he also lived. I wrote him a note and a few days later he knocked on my door and invited me for dinner. We had much to discuss: American history and politics, movies and books. We admired the same authors: Henry James and Henry Adams, Anthony Trollope, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Italo Calvino. Gore pointed out that most American writers confined themselves to a single genre, which he thought was the result of the Industrial Revolution’s mania for specialisation. “So many of the great writers—Goethe, Emerson, Hugo, Mann, Lawrence, Gide—worked across many forms,” he said. “Their work in one genre fed their work in another.”
As a literary-minded young man, I found our conversations compelling. Yet anyone who met Gore would have been struck by his narcissism. I recall sitting in his study and gazing at the wall behind his desk covered by framed photographs of himself from various magazines. I asked him why he put them there. He replied: “It’s to remind me who I am whenever I come into my study.” He desperately needed external reassurance. The images on the wall made him visible to himself.
When I moved back to the US, he and I talked on the phone every week and sometimes every day. He would begin by asking: “What are they saying about me?” When I was younger, I could tolerate this kind of thing. Perhaps I was used to it, as my mother was also narcissistic. I knew instinctively how to make Gore feel better about himself, and this gave me a certain pleasure. But I had to work hard to contain my resentment. Once in a while, a brushfire would erupt, and we would withdraw from each other. These conflicts were usually short-lived and we found ourselves back conversing before long.
“Hangovers are for sissy boys.”There were many compensations to being friends with Gore. I sent him drafts of my books, and he would call with extensive comments. I read versions of his books and essays, and we collaborated a few times: I edited his selected essays and ghosted introductions to his books when, towards the end, his mind had begun to fray. He helped me with an anthology on American autobiographical writing that I assembled, making countless suggestions for authors I must include and writing a preface.
His drinking was always a problem, but following the death in 2003 of his partner Howard Austen it became terrifying. When I stayed at his house in the Hollywood Hills (where he lived for his last decade), he would ask his faithful Filipino helper Norberto to bring him a double Scotch for breakfast. That was just for starters: he drank throughout the day. I would sit with him past midnight as he drank a bottle of Scotch by himself. Not being much of a drinker, I sipped wine through the evening and usually felt awful the next day. Not Gore, of course. “It’s mother’s milk,” he would say. “Hangovers are for sissy boys.”
Wherever he went, he checked into a five-star suite. In London, it was usually the Connaught in Carlos Place. In Paris, it was the George V. In New York, it was always the Plaza, though he moved reluctantly to the Ritz when the Plaza (for a few years) ceased being a hotel. His taste for well-known hotels and famous restaurants could be comical, and he took pride in knowing the names of the people who worked there (though he often got them wrong).
When I visited him in the Hollywood Hills, he insisted that we dine at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel—a place he had known since the 1940s, when his mother lived in a bungalow behind the hotel. (“She was having an affair with Clark Gable in those days,” he would invariably say.) But these dinners could be exhausting as he told the same old stories: the time Norman Mailer smacked him in the jaw, the annoying habits of Truman Capote, the evil deeds of Christopher Hitchens, who had joined forces with the neoconservatives in Washington. “Hitchy Poo has done it again,” he would say, summarising some article by Hitchens that had annoyed him. Quite often he simply called him “the Poo.”
In the late 1980s, Gore asked me to write his biography. I demurred, passing the task to a friend, Fred Kaplan. I knew Gore would hate any biography of himself. True to form, he hated Kaplan’s book. He had no interest in a mirror that didn’t distort the view to his advantage. I realised I would have to wait until he died to publish my own biography, which I had been working on for some years, accumulating interviews and material, reading and re-reading his work. Gore had given me a grand tour of his life, showing me his various haunts in Washington and Los Angeles, New York, London, Rome and Key West. He had introduced me to many of his friends and literary associates, from Graham Greene and Frederic Prokosch to Anthony Burgess and Alberto Moravia. We had dined with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, even sailed up the Amalfi Coast with Lenny Bernstein. Once I met him with Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag in New York. Gore seemed to know everybody.
But meeting famous people wasn’t what attracted me to Gore, entertaining as it was. I learned a great deal about writing from him. Once I asked him if I could have two characters in a novel talk about Søren Kierkegaard for 20 pages. He waited for a moment, then replied: “Well, you can do that, but only if these characters are sitting in a railway car, and the reader knows there is a bomb under the seat.” He was smart on book reviewing, too: “Just describe the book. Describe, describe, and describe. Your viewpoint will become apparent in the course of the review, if your description is accurate.”
“If I hadn’t been a same-sexer, I would have been President.”He could be impossibly difficult at times but, for the most part, refrained from insulting me. He kept asking me when I would publish my book about him, referring to me in public on several occasions as “my very own Boswell.” I always replied, “I’ll wait until you’re dead Gore, thank you very much.”
I have tried to give Gore his due. He mastered his world in ways that few had done before, writing from the inside as a child of privilege—although his homosexuality inevitably made him an outsider. “If I hadn’t been a same-sexer,” he once told me, “I would have been President.” His grandparents assumed he would occupy a high political office and so must have found his first major novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), somewhat embarrassing, as it dealt frankly with gay sex—one of the first mainstream American novels to do so. “My grandfather died soon after its publication,” Gore once told me, “perhaps even because of it.”
When I re-read Gore’s novels of American history or his shrewd essays on literature and politics, I find myself awed by his intelligence, his wide-ranging sympathies, his brash self-confidence and his deeply personal knowledge. He was a writer with great verbal gifts who looked on the world with a wry disdain, wishing it were somehow more humane, more civilised, more self-aware. As John Lahr said: “Gore pissed from an enormous height.” He will—I feel quite certain—be read in years to come as a visionary writer who re-imagined American history with ferocity and style.
