Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer

By CHARLES McGRATH

 


 


The cause was complications of pneumonia, his nephew Burr Steers said by telephone.
Mr.
Vidal was, at the end of his life, an Augustan figure who believed
himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few
American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from
their talent. He published some 25 novels, two memoirs and several
volumes of stylish, magisterial essays. He also wrote plays, television
dramas and screenplays. For a while he was even a contract writer at
MGM. And he could always be counted on for a spur-of-the-moment
aphorism, putdown or sharply worded critique of American foreign policy.
Perhaps
more than any other American writer except Norman Mailer or Truman
Capote, Mr. Vidal took great pleasure in being a public figure. He twice
ran for office — in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional
candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and in 1982, when
he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate — and though he
lost both times, he often conducted himself as a sort of unelected
shadow president. He once said, “There is not one human problem that
could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
Mr.
Vidal was an occasional actor, appearing, for example, in animated form
on “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” in the movie version of his own play
“The Best Man,” and in the Tim Robbins movie “Bob Roberts,” in which he
played an aging, epicene version of himself. He was a more than
occasional guest on TV talk shows, where his poise, wit, looks and charm
made him such a regular that Johnny Carson offered him a spot as a
guest host of “The Tonight Show.”
Television was a natural medium
for Mr. Vidal, who in person was often as cool and detached as he was in
his prose. “Gore is a man without an unconscious,” his friend the
Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: “I’m
exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my
cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”
Mr.
Vidal loved conspiracy theories of all sorts, especially the ones he
imagined himself at the center of, and he was a famous feuder; he
engaged in celebrated on-screen wrangles with Mailer, Capote and William
F. Buckley Jr. Mr. Vidal did not lightly suffer fools — a category that
for him comprised a vast swath of humanity, elected officials
especially — and he was not a sentimentalist or a romantic. “Love is not
my bag,” he said.
By the time he was 25, he had already had more
than 1,000 sexual encounters with both men and women, he boasted in his
memoir “Palimpsest.” Mr. Vidal tended toward what he called “same-sex
sex,” but frequently declared that human beings were inherently
bisexual, and that labels like gay (a term he particularly disliked) or
straight were arbitrary and unhelpful. For 53 years, he had a live-in
companion, Howard Austen, a former advertising executive, but the secret
of their relationship, he often said, was that they had never slept
together.
Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist — in
theory, anyway — but he was not convincing as one. Both by temperament
and by birth he was an aristocrat.
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr.
was born on Oct. 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy at West
Point, where his father, Eugene, had been an All-American football
player and a track star and had returned as a flying instructor and
assistant football coach. An aviation pioneer, Eugene Vidal Sr. went on
to found three airlines, including one that became T.W.A. He was
director of the Bureau of Air Commerce under President Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Mr. Vidal’s mother, Nina, was an actress and socialite and
the daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, the Democratic senator from Oklahoma.
(Mr. Vidal was distantly related to former Vice President Al Gore.)
Mr.
Vidal, who once said he had grown up in “the House of Atreus,” detested
his mother, whom he frequently described as a bullying, self-pitying
alcoholic. She and Mr. Vidal’s father divorced in 1935, and she married
Hugh D. Auchincloss, the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis — a
connection that Mr. Vidal never tired of bringing up. After her
remarriage, Mr. Vidal lived with his mother at Merrywood, the
Auchincloss family estate in Virginia, but his fondest memories were of
the years the family spent at his maternal grandfather’s sprawling home
in the Rock Creek Park neighborhood of Washington. He loved to read to
his grandfather, who was blind, and sometimes accompanied him onto the
Senate floor. Mr. Vidal’s lifelong interest in politics began to stir
back then, and from his grandfather, an America Firster, he probably
also inherited his unwavering isolationist beliefs.
Mr. Vidal
attended St. Albans School in Washington, where he lopped off his
Christian names and became simply Gore Vidal, which he considered more
literary-sounding. Though he shunned sports himself, he formed an
intense romantic and sexual friendship — the most important of his life,
he later said — with Jimmie Trimble, one of the school’s best athletes.
Trimble was his “ideal brother,” his “other half,” Mr. Vidal said, the
only person with whom he ever felt wholeness. Jimmie’s premature death
at Iwo Jima in World War II at once sealed off their relationship in a glow of A. E. Housman-like
early perfection, and seemingly made it impossible for Mr. Vidal ever to
feel the same way about anyone else.
After leaving St. Albans in
1939, Mr. Vidal spent a year at the Los Alamos Ranch School in New
Mexico before enrolling at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He
published stories and poems in the Exeter literary magazine, but he was
an indifferent student who excelled mostly at debating. A classmate, the
writer John Knowles, later used him as the model for Brinker Hadley,
the know-it-all conspiracy theorist in “A Separate Peace,” his
Exeter-based novel.
Mr. Vidal graduated from Exeter at 17 — only
by cheating, he later admitted, on virtually every math exam — and
enlisted in the Army, where he became first mate on a freight supply
ship in the Aleutian Islands. He began work on “Williwaw,” a novel set
on a troopship and published in 1946 while Mr. Vidal was an associate
editor at the publishing company E. P. Dutton, a job he soon gave up.
Written in a pared-down, Hemingway-like style, “Williwaw” (the title is a
meteorological term for a sudden wind out of the mountains) won some
admiring reviews but gave little clue to the kind of writer Mr. Vidal
would become. Neither did his second book, “In a Yellow Wood” (1947),
about a brokerage clerk and his wartime Italian mistress, which Mr.
Vidal later said was so bad, he couldn’t bear to reread it. He
nevertheless became a glamorous young literary figure, pursued by Anaïs
Nin and courted by Christopher Isherwood and Tennessee Williams.
In
1948 Mr. Vidal published “The City and the Pillar,” which was dedicated
to J. T. (Jimmie Trimble). It is what we would now call a coming-out
story, about a handsome, athletic young Virginia man who gradually
discovers that he is homosexual. By today’s standards it is tame and
discreet, but at the time it caused a scandal and was denounced as
corrupt and pornographic. Mr. Vidal later claimed that the literary and
critical establishment, The New York Times especially, had blacklisted
him because of the book, and he may have been right. He had such trouble
getting subsequent novels reviewed that he turned to writing mysteries
under the pseudonym Edgar Box and then, for a time, gave up
novel-writing altogether. To make a living he concentrated on writing
for television, then for the stage and the movies.
Work was
plentiful. He wrote for most of the shows that presented hourlong
original dramas in the 1950s, including “Studio One,” “Philco Television
Playhouse” and “Goodyear Playhouse.” He became so adept, he could knock
off an adaptation in a weekend and an original play in a week or two.
He turned “Visit to a Small Planet,” his 1955 television drama about an
alien who comes to earth to study the art of war, into a successful
Broadway play. His most successful play was “The Best Man,” about two
contenders for the presidential nomination. It ran for 520 performances
on Broadway before it, too, became a successful film, in 1964, with a
cast headed by Henry Fonda and a screenplay by Mr. Vidal. It was revived
on Broadway in 2000 and is now being revived there again as “Gore
Vidal’s The Best Man.” Mr. Vidal’s reputation as a script doctor was
such that in 1956 MGM hired him as a contract writer; among other
projects he helped rewrite the screenplay of “Ben-Hur,” though he was
denied anofficial credit. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie
adaptation of his friend Tennessee Williams’s play “Suddenly, Last
Summer.”
By the end of the ’50s, though, Mr. Vidal, at last
financially secure, had wearied of Hollywood and turned to politics. He
had purchased Edgewater, a Greek Revival mansion in Dutchess County,
N.Y., and it became his headquarters for his 1960 run for Congress. He
was encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who had become a friend and
adviser.
The 29th Congressional District was a Republican
stronghold, and though Mr. Vidal, running as Eugene Gore on a platform
that included taxing the wealthy, lost, he received more votes in
running for the seat than any Democrat in 50 years. And he never tired
of pointing out he did better in the district than the Democratic
presidential candidate that year, John F. Kennedy.
In the ’60s Mr.
Vidal also returned to writing novels and published three books in
fairly quick succession: “Julian” (1964), “Washington, D.C.” (1967) and
“Myra Breckenridge” (1968). “Julian,” which some critics still consider
Mr. Vidal’s best, was a painstakingly researched historical novel about
the fourth-century Roman emperor who tried to convert Christians back to
paganism. (Mr. Vidal himself never had much use for religion,
Christianity especially, which he once called “intrinsically funny.”)
“Washington, D.C.” was a political novel set in the ’40s. “Myra
Breckenridge,” Mr. Vidal’s own favorite among his books, was a campy
black comedy about a male homosexual who has sexual reassignment surgery
and turns into a woman.
Perhaps without intending it, Mr. Vidal
had set a pattern. In the years to come his greatest successes came with
historical novels, especially what became known as his American
Chronicles sextet: “Washington, D.C.,” “Burr” (1973), “1876” (1976),
“Lincoln” (1984), “Hollywood” (1990) and “The Golden Age” (2000). He
turned out to have a particular gift for this kind of writing. These
novels were learned and scrupulously based on fact, but also witty and
contemporary-feeling, full of gossip and shrewd asides. Harold Bloom
wrote that Mr. Vidal’s imagination of American politics “is so powerful
as to compel awe.” Writing in The Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt said,
“Mr. Vidal gives us an interpretation of our early history that says in
effect that all the old verities were never much to begin with.”
But
Mr. Vidal also persisted in writing books like “Myron” (1974), a sequel
to “Myra,” and “Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal”
(1992), which were clearly meant as provocations. “Live From Golgotha,”
for example, rewrites the Gospels, with Saint Paul as a huckster and
pederast and Jesus a buffoon. John Rechy said of it in The Los Angeles
Times Book Review, “If God exists and Jesus is His son, then Gore Vidal
is going to Hell.”
In the opinion of many critics, though, Mr.
Vidal’s ultimate reputation is apt to rest less on his novels than on
his essays, many of them written for The New York Review of Books. His
collection “The Second American Revolution” won the National Book
Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982. About a later collection,
“United States: Essays 1952-1992,” R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The New York
Times Book Review that Vidal the essayist was “so good that we cannot do
without him,” adding, “He is a treasure of state.”
Mr. Vidal’s
essays were literary, resurrecting the works of forgotten writers like
Dawn Powell and William Dean Howells, and also political, taking on
issues like sexuality and cultural mores. The form suited him ideally:
he could be learned, funny, stylish, show-offy and incisive all at once.
Even Jason Epstein, Mr. Vidal’s longtime editor at Random House, once
admitted that he preferred the essays to the novels, calling Mr. Vidal
“an American version of Montaigne.”
“I always thought about Gore
that he was not really a novelist,” Mr. Epstein wrote, “that he had too
much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate
himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist.”
Success
did not mellow Mr. Vidal. In 1968, while covering the Democratic
National Convention on television, he called William F. Buckley a
“crypto-Nazi.” Buckley responded by calling Mr. Vidal a “queer,” and the
two were in court for years. In a 1971 essay he compared Norman Mailer
to Charles Manson, and a few months later Mailer head-butted him in the
green room while the two were waiting to appear on the Dick Cavett show.
They then took their quarrel on the air in a memorable exchange that
ended with Mr. Cavett’s telling Mailer to take a piece of paper on the
table in front of them and “fold it five ways and put it where the moon
don’t shine.” In 1975 Mr. Vidal sued Truman Capote for libel after
Capote wrote that Mr. Vidal had been thrown out of the Kennedy White
House. Mr. Vidal won a grudging apology.
Some of his political
positions were similarly quarrelsome and provocative. Mr. Vidal was an
outspoken critic of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians , and once called Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, and his
wife, the journalist Midge Decter, “Israeli Fifth Columnists.” In the
1990s he wrote sympathetically about Timothy McVeigh, who was executed
for the Oklahoma City bombing. And after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
he wrote an essay for Vanity Fair arguing that America had brought the
attacks upon itself by maintaining imperialist foreign policies. In
another essay, for The Independent, he compared the attacks to the
Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, arguing that both Presidents Franklin D.
Roosevelt and George W. Bush knew of them in advance and exploited them
to advance theiragendas.
As for literature, it was more or less
over, he declared more than once, and he had reached a point where he no
longer much cared. He became a sort of connoisseur of decline, in fact.
America is “rotting away at a funereal pace,” he told The Times of
London in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the
basis that nobody else can hold everything together.”
In 2003 Mr.
Vidal and his companion, Mr. Austen, who was ill, left their cliffside
Italian villa La Rondinaia (the Swallow’s Nest) on the Gulf of Salerno
and moved to the Hollywood Hills to be closer to Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center. Mr. Austen died that year, and in “Point to Point Navigation,”
his second volume of memoirs, Mr. Vidal recalled that Mr. Austen asked
from his deathbed, “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”
“Of course it
had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear
the happiness of mortals.” Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot
Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was
already inscribed with their names side by side.
After Mr.
Austen’s death, Mr. Vidal lived alone in declining health himself. He
was increasingly troubled by a knee injury he suffered in the war, and
used a wheelchair to get around. In November 2009 he made a rare public
appearance to attend the National Book Awards in New York, where he was given a lifetime achievement award. He
evidently had not prepared any remarks, and instead delivered a long,
meandering impromptu speech that was sometimes funny and sometimes a
little hard to follow. At one point he even seemed to speak fondly of
Buckley, his old nemesis. It sounded like a summing up.
“Such fun, such fun,” he said.