A few months ago I read Gore Vidal's 1995 autobiography Palimpsest, and discovered that on 3rd October of this year he will turn 80 years old. There seem to be no public celebrations planned. Why not? Perhaps because not much has happened to him lately. In fact, if you believe his autobiography, not much has happened to him since he fell in love with a schoolmate at the age of 16. The adored one was exceptionally beautiful but killed, alas, in the second world war. Vidal, on his own admission, never again knew love. Instead, he has gone to parties in the evenings and during the days has sat at a typewriter getting his own back on reality or on Norman Mailer or Truman Capote or whoever the enemy of the moment might be. Since he has never known love as an adult, he cannot exist without an enemy.
The other key figures in his life, his parents, were also exceptionally beautiful. His father, who looked like a hero out of Lermontov, taught football at the West Point military academy (where Vidal was born), but became increasingly distant after the parental divorce, when Gore, an only child, was eight. Vidal's mother remarried into the American upper class, her second husband being an Auchincloss. This made Vidal violently class-conscious. It also confirmed a breach with his mother who does seem to have been a chilling piece of work. The rest of Gore's life, employing the crampons of brazen self-admiration, was a campaign to climb higher than she had and annul her by outranking her. He couldn't succeed on quite those terms—he was homosexual and an outsider and eventually an expatriate—but it did turn him into the most stylish bitch in the US media. Thrice skewered by beauty by the time of his adolescence, Vidal loves to wound and has become a virtuoso of sadistic ridicule. Television made him famous, filmscripts made him rich, novels made him… what?
To consider Gore Vidal's literary talents I thought I'd reread Myra Breckinridge, which I'd devoured with glee as an undergraduate in 1968. My recollection was of Virginia Woolf's Orlando trashed in a Hollywood setting. This wasn't far off the mark. There's a lot wrong with the book. Vidal has no ear for prose-continuity, the ideas are outsourced, and the genital status of the central character is fudged. Yet it carries the manic zest of the 1960s, and in dealing with gender was at the cutting edge of sexual politics. The western world was still uptight and the novel's central, brilliant scene—the physical examination of the young hunk Rusty by his drama teacher Myra—was wrecked by British censorship. Vidal's regular British publisher, Heinemann, had rejected the book on grounds of distaste.
Social audacity is Vidal's great quality and the mad comic novel is probably his most appropriate vehicle after the chat show. But he has his pompous side—he is among other things a failed politician—and soon after Breckinridge he derailed himself into writing up American political history in fictional form. The result was a series of fat, unreadable novels sustained by his incapacity for self-criticism and sold by his celebrity. Their underlying thesis has been the ghastliness of the US as a politico-economic construct. He may have had point in the age of embryonic feminism, gay and black rights. But he has continued to denounce the hand that feeds him in the same unremitting tone, even though America has pioneered all those rights and others too. Of course, many of us looked down on American junk culture, even as Andy Warhol was mythologising it, and it was no doubt especially tempting to do so if you'd just had a lovely lunch at the Hotel Meurice or been pulling young men on the Pincio. And anyone concerned for the environment must admit that American junk has a lot to answer for. But America's not naff any more—particularly since 9/11—and Vidal's anti-Americanism is exposed as deeply inadequate. Where does every third world peasant dream of living? The US. Where is the first hope of anyone fleeing tyranny? The US. This is not an accident. It means something. In the 21st century, to wallow in freedom and prosperity while spitting on those who work hard to guarantee them begins to look like moral failure.
Loveless, his is life as combat and performance. Is there anything wonderful about it? I think so. Vidal was a figure in the great world before it became banal and has passed on a lot of the fun to lesser mortals; that toffee-apple smirk has dropped enough epigrams to keep us delighted and wary, and his essays have made reading the New York Review of Books a pleasure as well as a duty. The clean high flight was never vouchsafed him in art but wherever Vidal is has always been a lively, edgy space. The man's unapologetic gusto puts me in mind of Dr Johnson and, as with that cracked ornament of the 18th century, the best Vidal book will surely be the posthumous biography, warts and all. The question which now preoccupies me is: rich, successful and childless, to whom or what should he leave his money? The foundation of a Gore Vidal prize maybe—but a prize for what? Effrontery?
