October 3 marks Gore Vidal’s centenary.
Vidal came from political privilege which he acknowledged throughout his life. His grandfather was a blind senator from Oklahoma who opposed the entry of the United States in both World Wars and who, claims Vidal, was thwarted further political advances by FDR himself whom Vidal would label as America’s Augustus on a few occasions.
Vidal’s father was a rather famous athlete and a pioneer in the burgeoning airline system of the 1930s. Newsreel footage of the young Gore Vidal himself is available on YouTube wherein he shows how easy it is for even a child to fly a plane and that there may be a family plane soon in everyone’s garage, or hangar. Vidal’s father was romantically linked to Amelia Earhart despite rumours of an alternative sexuality of the aviatrix which the writer alludes to in a future essay that further suggests First Lady Elenore Roosevelt had her own infatuations with the tousled haired Ms Earhart.
Vidal’s mother did not fare well within her writer son’s memoirs. It would be easy to attribute their relationship as purely Oedipal but Vidal saw through his mother’s motives from a remarkably young age; she married for money and prestige, accumulating a number of names so that, when she passed, she was Nina Gore Vidal Auchincloss Olds. Through her second marriage, she married indirectly into the Kennedy clan. Vidal would often refer to Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis as a step half-sister, further proof of his traipsing with the higher echelons of Washington society in the middle of the twentieth century.
Vidal seemed to be rather gifted in writing and gabbing from the very beginning and was obviously indulged in as an only child, bouncing between living with his senatorial grandfather, his flying father and a mother he did not like much. He was educated at a number of schools, preparing him for a political career it would seem. He did service during the Second World War as a warrant officer.
After the War, he wrote his first novel and then a second. It was the third novel, The City and the Pillar, what was to seal his fate at the age of 22. During this brief time from the end of the War to the rise of the American Empire which Vidal called the Golden Age, this book where the characters are homosexual and positively portrayed, was a watershed for Queer Literature. The homosexual characters were not self-loathing, isolated creatures of pity or criminals as previous literature that depicted a character from Sodom. They were every day American men of the late 1940s who were in love with each other; hardly a revolutionary thing in our enlightened early twenty-first century but back then, this was groundbreaking. It effectively ended a serious future political career. Vidal often compared himself to a contemporary, Jack Kennedy and hints that he too could have had a similar path if he were a bit more conventional in his personal life as made public.
Blacklisted for this outrageous novel, Gore turned to writing pulp fiction and plays under a pseudonym and screenplays for TV and the movies. He became a talking head on television on the side of progressive politics, debating reactionaries (William Buckley), feuding with other writers (Mailer and Capote) and moving in circles of high political society, being part of the groom’s party for Jack and Jackie’s wedding.
Gore Vidal wrote a series of novels using the backdrop of American history- Burr and Lincoln are examples. He also looked at much earlier history using the novel form with titles like Creation and Julian, not so subtly veiled criticisms of monotheistic religions of the Abrahamic branch.
But it was the pamphlet and essay form of literature that Vidal excelled in. His prose is sharp with knowledge from his vast reading habits of years peppering his short works with insider experience of the very power structures he was familiar with and despised. He wrote of wanting to exit a system that many would bite and scratch to get into citing Capote as an example. He wrote of movie stars, leaders, political movements, gossip, history, literature and just about all sundry of topics that stood still enough for him to catch and expand upon. Such various giants like Ronald Regan, the Kennedys, Tennessee Williams, Susan Sontag, Johnny Carson, Princess Margaret and a fruit salad of others came under his sharpened pen with funny observations. He reflected upon his life with famous co-stars and bit players popping in and out of his narratives.
All this was with a bass sound of politics sounding in the background and coming front and centre very often. He defended the second wave of Feminism in its early days when, predictably, the patriarchy went full assault on it. He was forever writing of the American Empire and its eventual decay, predicting the rise of a Trump. He criticised religion in every form as a primitive throwback to fears and superstitions, and rightly so. Vidal observed international politics, declaring that the 19th century was European, the 20th American and the 21st a rising Asia with Japan being a taste of things to come before China took its place. This seems accurate.
Vidal sought office twice, more out of curiosity than any real desire to gain power. First in the Congressional elections of 1960 in an upper New York state seat and then as a potential Senate candidate in California in 1982, both as a Democrat. Yet he criticised the American two-party system as having two wings of the same ruling class and coined the phrase, the United States of Amnesia, troubled by American overseas adventurism or outright imperialism and the War on Terror. He singled Bush 43 out for particularly scathing attacks using the old fashioned pamphleteering form famous in the very early days of the Republic. Lucky for him but unlucky for us, Vidal did not live to see Trump weasel his way into the highest office of the land though he warned of a future despot waiting in the wings.
Vidal acknowledged the burgeoning realisation that sexuality was fluid and not as taboo as previous ruling generations would have us believe. The transexual romp, Myra Breckinridge and essays on sex come to mind as well as TV debates on the subject. His own sexuality was fluid with relationships with men and women, his openness about his own cruising exploits and a lifelong companion with whom he is buried next to in a Washington DC cemetery. He was criticised for not doing enough during the early Gay Liberation movement but at the same time alerted the public to the hidden depictions of alternative sexualities in early Hollywood. Similarly, he was admonished for not speaking out during the HIV/AIDS pandemic but he did ruefully remind us all that he was not a virologist.
Gore Vidal thrived on controversy but he did not deliberately seek it out, it came for him. He was really a voice piece for what his contemporaries were really thinking but far too afraid to write or speak about. Bobby Kennedy loathed him. Norman Mailer was threatened by him as a literary rival. William Buckley called him a queer and wanted to sock it to him on live TV. Truman Capote was made to look ridiculous by him.
His death in 2012 was one of those where you started missing him immediately. He said that we were all on own now watching the coffin of one of his heroes, Mrs Roosevelt pass by. The same could be said about his own passing.
For any who are not familiar with Gore Vidal, I recommend his essays first. They illustrate his breadth of knowledge, his accurate observation of power and society and are readable to anyone. His memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation are enjoyable with snippets of gossip and lost of speculation. I also recommend his shorter books, like pamphlets, written in the 2000s critiquing the contemporary political world in the shadows of a declining American Empire.
There are many interviews available online to watch his take of the world of the time, his famous sparrings and a somewhat saddening decline of his influence in a loud, obnoxious world of influencers and shrill opinion.
As we watch America become something very different with a trampled constitution, we can almost hear him saying his favourite words, “I told you so”.
Add comment
Comments