Gore Vidal

Based on Wikipedia: Gore Vidal

The Aristocrat Who Despised America's Aristocracy

Gore Vidal was born in a military hospital and spent his life at war with his country. Not literally—though he did serve in the Aleutian Islands during World War II—but intellectually, culturally, and politically. He was that rare American creature: a genuine patrician who used his privilege not to defend the establishment but to eviscerate it.

The contradictions begin with his birth certificate. On October 3, 1925, at the cadet hospital of West Point, a baby was registered as Eugene Louis Vidal. The middle name was wrong. His father, a U.S. Army officer and Olympic athlete, couldn't remember whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther. This bureaucratic confusion would prove prophetic. Vidal spent decades revising himself, dropping names, adding others, until at fourteen he had stripped away everything but "Gore Vidal"—a name he chose because it was sharp, distinctive, appropriate for either an author or a national political leader.

He wanted to be both. He became one.

A Childhood Among the Powerful

Vidal's pedigree reads like American history. His maternal grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, a United States Senator from Oklahoma who happened to be blind. Young Gore served as his grandfather's eyes—literally. He read aloud to the senator, guided him through the Capitol, and worked as his page. This was Vidal's political education: not from textbooks but from leading a blind man through the corridors of power.

His father was equally remarkable. Eugene Luther Vidal Senior had been a quarterback and captain of the West Point football team, an all-American basketball player, and an Olympic decathlete. He competed in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Games, coached the U.S. pentathlon team, and later became director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under Franklin Roosevelt. He was also, according to Vidal, the great love of Amelia Earhart's life.

The father founded or helped run three airline companies that would become Eastern Airlines, Trans World Airlines, and Northeast Airlines. Aviation's golden age passed through the Vidal household.

His mother, Nina Gore, was a socialite who made her Broadway debut as an extra in 1928. She married Vidal's father in 1922, divorced him in 1935, and then married twice more—first to Hugh D. Auchincloss, and later to Robert Olds, a major general in the Army Air Forces who died ten months after the wedding. Through the Auchincloss connection, Vidal became step-related to Jacqueline Kennedy. Washington society was a small world, and Vidal was born into its center.

The Book That Made Him Infamous

Vidal's first novel, published when he was nineteen, was called Williwaw. A williwaw is a violent wind that strikes without warning in arctic waters, and Vidal had experienced plenty of them during his military service in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. The book drew on that experience and sold well. Critics noticed him.

Then he wrote The City and the Pillar.

Published in 1948, the novel told the story of a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality. What made it scandalous was not the subject matter alone—other novels had touched on homosexuality—but Vidal's tone. He wrote about it as if it were normal. There was no tragic ending, no moral condemnation, no apology. The protagonist was neither a monster nor a martyr. He was simply a person.

This was intolerable.

Vidal dedicated the book to "J.T."—initials he would later confirm belonged to James Trimble III, a classmate from St. Albans School who had been killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. Vidal called Trimble the only person he ever loved.

The critical establishment retaliated. Orville Prescott, the powerful book reviewer at the New York Times, was reportedly so offended that he refused to review any of Vidal's subsequent books—and prevented other Times critics from reviewing them as well. An editor at his publishing house warned him: "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it."

The editor was right. But Vidal had drawn a line. He would not pretend. He would not apologize. He would not hide.

The Secret Life of Edgar Box

Blacklisted from the literary mainstream, Vidal did what writers have always done when their own names become liabilities: he invented a new one. Under the pseudonym Edgar Box, he wrote a series of mystery novels featuring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist who moonlights as a private detective. Death in the Fifth Position, Death before Bedtime, Death Likes It Hot—the titles have the jauntiness of their era.

The Edgar Box novels sold well. They kept Vidal alive financially while his real name remained toxic. Meanwhile, he turned to other forms: theater, television, screenwriting. He wrote plays like The Best Man, a political drama that became a Broadway hit. He wrote teleplays during the golden age of live television drama. He moved to Hollywood.

The Hollywood Years

In 1956, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer signed Vidal to a four-year screenwriting contract. He was good at the work—clever, fast, professional. But the job that would follow him forever was one he almost didn't get credit for at all.

The director William Wyler was making Ben-Hur, the biblical epic that would become one of the most successful films ever made. The original screenplay had a problem: the enmity between the Jewish hero, Judah Ben-Hur, and his Roman antagonist, Messala, made no sense. They had been close childhood friends. Why did Messala suddenly become so determined to destroy Ben-Hur? The script offered politics as an explanation, but politics alone seemed insufficient for such passionate hatred.

Vidal was brought in as one of several script doctors. His solution was elegant and unspeakable: Messala's hatred stemmed from rejected love. The two men had been lovers as boys. Messala wanted to resume the relationship. Ben-Hur refused. Messala's subsequent cruelty was the vengeance of a spurned lover.

According to Vidal, Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, understood and played the subtext fully. Charlton Heston, who played Ben-Hur, was kept in the dark. Vidal claimed that the director, the producer, and the screenwriters all agreed this was the wisest approach. Heston, a political conservative, might not have cooperated if he had known what his scenes actually meant.

The film won eleven Academy Awards. Vidal got his MGM contract terminated early, which was what he had negotiated for in exchange for the rewrite. He returned to his real work: the essay, the novel, the public feud.

Narratives of Empire

Starting in the 1960s, Vidal began constructing what would become his most ambitious literary project: a seven-novel series spanning American history from the founding through the mid-twentieth century. He called it Narratives of Empire.

The novels did not appear in chronological order. Washington, D.C., about political life during the Roosevelt years, came out in 1967. Burr, about Aaron Burr and the early republic, followed in 1973. Lincoln arrived in 1984. 1876, despite its title, was published in 1976—a bicentennial offering. Empire covered the 1890s and Theodore Roosevelt's America. Hollywood took on the 1920s. The Golden Age concluded the sequence in 2000.

The series had a thesis: the American republic had become an empire, and empires always corrupt themselves. Vidal traced the rot from the beginning. Even the founders—especially the founders—were self-interested schemers who cloaked their ambitions in noble language. The Civil War president who saved the union was a cunning manipulator. The twentieth-century presidents who "saved the world" were building a permanent warfare state.

The literary critic Harold Bloom, who was not generally kind to Vidal's fiction, made an exception for the historical novels. Vidal's imagination of American politics, Bloom wrote, was "so powerful as to compel awe."

The Essayist's Empire

But Vidal's true métier may have been the essay. For six decades, he produced cultural commentary for the nation's most prestigious magazines: The Nation, The New Statesman, The New York Review of Books, Esquire. He was learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even hostile critics admitted this. Martin Amis, who could be vicious, conceded that essays were what Vidal was good at.

His targets were various: American militarism, sexual hypocrisy, religious sanctimony, political corruption, literary pretension. He attacked Ronald Reagan as "a triumph of the embalmer's art"—a man whose provincial worldview was inadequate to the geopolitical realities of the late twentieth century. He attacked the national security state that had grown up since World War II. He attacked what he called "perpetual war for perpetual peace."

In 1993, his essay collection United States: Essays 1952–92 won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. By then he had been writing for forty years, and he would continue for nearly twenty more.

The Public Feuds

Vidal's wit was a weapon, and he used it freely. His debates with William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative intellectual and television host, became legendary—and eventually litigious. During a live broadcast at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the two men nearly came to blows on camera. Vidal called Buckley a crypto-Nazi. Buckley called Vidal a queer and threatened to punch him. The exchange haunted both men for the rest of their lives.

He also feuded with Norman Mailer, with whom he shared a combative temperament and a complicated relationship. At a party before a television appearance, Mailer allegedly head-butted Vidal. On the subsequent broadcast, Mailer was so erratic that the host, Dick Cavett, suggested he needed two more chairs—one for each of his personalities.

Vidal collected enemies the way some writers collect awards. He considered it a sign of effectiveness.

Julian and the Uses of History

Among Vidal's historical novels, one stands apart from the American series: Julian, published in 1964. Its subject was the Roman Emperor Julian, who ruled briefly from 361 to 363 A.D. and is known to history as Julian the Apostate.

Julian was the last pagan emperor. He had been raised Christian but converted to the old Roman polytheism and attempted to restore it throughout the empire. He believed that Christianity was a cultural threat—a force that would destroy the classical civilization he loved. He failed. Christianity triumphed. Julian died in battle against the Persians, and paganism died with him.

For Vidal, Julian was an irresistible figure: a cultured man fighting a losing battle against rising barbarism disguised as faith. The novel recreated the ancient world with scholarly precision and told Julian's story through a frame narrative of elderly philosophers reviewing the dead emperor's memoirs. It became one of Vidal's most acclaimed works.

Myra and the Mutability of Everything

Then there was Myra Breckinridge.

Published in 1968, the novel was a satirical bomb lobbed at American sexual hypocrisy, Hollywood mythology, and the very concept of fixed gender identity. Its protagonist, Myra, is a transgender woman who runs a school of dramatic arts and pursues an elaborate scheme of revenge and domination. The novel is outrageous, deliberately provocative, and frequently very funny.

It was also, in its way, prophetic. Vidal argued that gender roles and sexual orientations were social constructs, not biological destinies—ideas that seemed radical in 1968 but would become mainstream discourse fifty years later.

The sequel, Myron, appeared in 1974. It was stranger still.

The Roman on the Amalfi Coast

For much of his adult life, Vidal lived in Italy. He bought a villa on the Amalfi Coast, above Ravello, and made it his primary residence. From there he could look down on the Mediterranean and reflect on the fate of empires.

The choice was deliberate. Vidal had visited Rome as a teenager in 1939, just before the war, and the city had lodged itself in his imagination. He returned as often as he could. Italy offered what America could not: an unbroken connection to antiquity, a reminder that civilizations rise and fall, a perspective that his countrymen lacked.

He was an American who found America provincial.

The Political Candidate

Twice, Vidal sought political office. In 1960, he ran for the United States House of Representatives from a district in New York. He lost, but he ran ahead of the Democratic ticket in a Republican area. John F. Kennedy, who won the presidency that year, allegedly told Vidal he could have any ambassadorship he wanted. Vidal declined. He preferred being a writer to being a diplomat.

In 1982, he tried again, running for the United States Senate from California. He came in second in the Democratic primary, behind Jerry Brown. It was as close as he would ever come to elective office.

But in a sense, he had a political career anyway. Through his essays and television appearances, through his debates and feuds and provocations, he shaped political discourse for decades. He just did it from outside the system, where he could say things that no candidate could say and survive.

The Humanist's Twilight

In 2009, the National Book Foundation awarded Vidal its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The citation called him "a prominent social critic on politics, history, literature and culture." That same year, the American Humanist Association named him its honorary president.

He was eighty-three years old. He had been writing for more than sixty years. He had produced novels, plays, screenplays, essays, memoirs, political pamphlets, and countless interviews and debates. He had feuded with nearly everyone worth feuding with. He had been right about some things and wrong about others. He had never apologized for being himself.

Gore Vidal died on July 31, 2012, at his home in the Hollywood Hills. He was eighty-six years old. He had outlived most of his enemies and all of his illusions about the country he loved and criticized in equal measure.

The Uses of Cynicism

What do we make of Gore Vidal now?

He was a snob who championed democracy. He was an aristocrat who attacked privilege. He was a moralist who despised moralism. He was an American who lived abroad, a patriot who called his country an empire, a writer who wanted to be a politician, and a politician manqué who became one of the most influential writers of his time.

His cynicism was not nihilism. He believed that the republic could be better than it was—indeed, that it had been better, before the national security state and the permanent warfare economy corrupted it. His attacks on American hypocrisy came from disappointed love, not indifference.

And he was funny. This matters more than critics sometimes acknowledge. The wit was not decoration; it was argument. To make people laugh at sacred cows was to weaken those cows' hold on the public imagination. Vidal understood that humor was a form of power, and he wielded it accordingly.

He was, in the end, exactly what he set out to be at fourteen: a man with a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an author and a national political leader. He got to be the author. The political leadership he exercised was unofficial but real.

Few writers have been more American, and few Americans have been more skeptical of America. That tension was his subject and his fuel. It never resolved, and perhaps it never should have.