"He'll be shot, though, that's his problem..." (Gore Vidal on Obama)


Voice of the people

A life in books

Gore Vidal: 'This country is finished. But, with a new republic like this, if you missed being here at the beginning, the next best thing is to be here at the end'. Interview by James Campbell
James Campbell
Saturday May 24, 2008

Guardian
Gore Vidal's collected essays, United States, a hefty volume incorporating the work of four decades in the form in which he is a modern master, won the US National Book Award for 1993. "It is the ugliest prize ever given to me," says the author, gesturing with a brandy snifter towards the room in which the unloved object stands. "It's two bronze cubes, my name is not on it, there's no identification of what it is. It's just like the country that gave it to me. Blank."

Conversation at Vidal's table has a tendency to flow towards the state of the union, no matter what the source. In America, he is admired - and more highly valued than he likes to admit - for an unorthodox liberalism that puts individual preference at the heart of everything, from sex to tax. For 60 years, through novels, plays and miscellaneous non-fiction, Vidal has preached the message that government is not only pervasive but corrupt; that while there are may be two political brands, Democrat and Republican, there is only one party: business.

At the start of the Democratic presidential nomination, Vidal had favoured Hillary Clinton (a photo in his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, shows Mrs Clinton visiting him at home in Italy), but recently he switched to "the other side". Not John McCain, of course. "McCain is the village idiot. He is very, very stupid, even by American standards." Barack Obama has begun to impress him - "but only to a point. He doesn't have much to say. I'd rather see a woman as president, if we're going to go in for minorities, but Hillary lost her nerve."

He believes that Obama will be the next US president. "He'll be shot, though, that's his problem. If Jack [Kennedy] knew he was going to be shot, a black boy must know it too." Invited to suggest a motive for Obama's persistence, Vidal offers "Curiosity. Even - dare I use a word never used in American political life any more? - honour. Mine was the last generation to have believed in such a concept." The brandy glass completes its voyage to the mouth, permitting a whispered exclamation of disgust. "I cannot believe the trashiness of this country."




Despite this detestation, Vidal left his fabled Italian villa, La Rondinaia, at the beginning of the century to return to his native land. The house is situated on a precipitous cliff, overlooking the islands of Ischia and Capri. The declining health of his companion, Howard Austen, and his own unsteady knees, made it impossible to remain. Among the revelations of Palimpsest was the news that not only was their 50-year partnership platonic, but that Austen had "more heterosexual than homosexual interests". Austen died in 2003. Now Vidal lives in the Hollywood Hills, in a house purchased in the 1970s as a pied-a-terre for visits home. At 82, he is dependent on a wheelchair - he taps a knee: "pure titanium" - but the corrosions made by age on his once impossibly fine features are less severe. He is dressed in jogging pants held up by braces over a comfortable sweatshirt, and a baseball jacket with numbers stitched on to the sleeves. "This house is the typical abode of a Hollywood hack writer for television and the movies in the 1950s." The decor is California gothic: fake beams and plaster arches provide shelter for muscle-bound oak furniture and oil paintings in ornate frames transported from La Rondinaia. Assisted to the dining table by his Filipino butler, he settles into one of a set of repro-renaissance chairs. "I bought these in the market in Rome. The dealer pretended they had been built for a maharaja: 'Ah, signore, cinquecento ... antico ... signore ...' I said, 'No they're not. They come from the set of the movie Ben-Hur. I wrote it.'"

Vidal has always loved the cinema, despite continued protestations to the contrary. He has devoted a short book to the subject, Screening History, as well as many essays. The self-projection of his multi-faceted, dual-gendered heroine Myra Breckinridge was inseparable from her encyclopedic knowledge of screen lore. In the early 1950s, not yet 30 and the author of several successful novels, Vidal took time off from books to become a contract writer for MGM (the last to be hired). He has screen credits on Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Katharine Hepburn, and Is Paris Burning? (1966), with Orson Welles and Simone Signoret, though not on Ben-Hur, for which he did much of the work with his English co-writer, Christopher Fry. In both his volumes of memoirs (the second, Point to Point Navigation, was published in 2006), and repeatedly in conversation, Vidal makes the claim that he was forced into writing for big and small screens, and for the stage, because of a deliberate campaign on the part of the New York Times to obliterate him as a novelist. The policy began when he revealed himself to be what he ironically calls "a degenerate", by writing The City and the Pillar (1948), one of the first American novels to have homosexual longing - Vidal's preferred term is "same-sex" - at its centre.

"If you didn't appear in the daily New York Times, you were non-existent. Every other journal, including Time and Newsweek, followed its lead. And that is what drove me into television, Broadway and the movies. It is fascinating how few people believe that the Times would do such a thing." Norman Mailer, he says, suffered a similar neglect. "That's why we were friends at the beginning, though we didn't remain so. I think he affronted them much more than I did, because it is a Jewish newspaper and he was one of the glories of Jewish literature at that point. But they were so prissy. They just savaged him." Vidal got his own back by writing three popular mysteries under the name of Edgar Box, "that were glowingly reviewed in the Times".

Many people have doubted Vidal's claims about the Times - one reason why he continues to make them - but a senior source connected with the literary side of the paper, who wished to remain anonymous, told me: "I think this particular claim of Vidal's - unlike many - is entirely plausible. All through the Rosenthal era [AM Rosenthal was executive editor during the late 70s and 80s], the Times did indeed pursue secret agendas when it came to writers, blacklisting some, unreasonably favouring others."

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was born on October 3 1925 at West Point, New York, into a family that was privileged, powerful and unhappy. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, who was blind, was a senator for Oklahoma. Vidal's father, a pilot and engineer, was Franklin Roosevelt's director of air commerce and a founder of TWA. A photograph on the table in the living room of Vidal's home shows the seated president with Gene Vidal standing behind him. Vidal's memoirs, and his grand series of novels covering two centuries of American history - Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Washington DC and others - are charged with the atmosphere of politics and bargaining (for business and votes), and also with the sour air of his parents' marital turbulence. He was partially shielded by his Gore grandparents from the break-ups, affairs and remarriages, and his mother's later life in expensive hotels in pursuit of "the perfect martini". When Vidal writes, early in Palimpsest, "I'm beginning not to mind looking into the past", he does not say "beginning to enjoy". It was, presumably, a painful process.

"It was painful in the sense that I was no longer aware of how much I'd erased." His memory, which he describes as "eidetic", capable of complex pictorial retention, had let those shattered images go. "I had so totally erased my mother in the last 20 years of her life . . . I never heard from her, except for her incessant cries for money, which I would always answer." After her son had appeared on the cover of Time, Nina wrote a letter to the magazine in which she denounced him for consorting with the Jewish Austen, among other crimes against good breeding. Time printed the tamer parts of it under the heading "A mother's love". Nina Gore died in 1978. In Palimpsest, he refers to her as "this virago", and his anguish seems as fresh now as ever. "I warned her that if she pursued certain roads . . . It was so ghastly . . . She was a bad egg." He kept no journals as a child or a young man. "Too painful. Just to deal with. And even if I had, I wouldn't have read them." The brandy glass is extended for a topping-up of what he calls - without discernible irony - "mother's milk".

Truman Capote, once a friend but later despised, described Vidal as "cold and distant". With a look of distaste, he says of Capote: "Everything he said was a lie." Tennessee Williams, whom Vidal admired a great deal, called him in a letter "not likeable", but also applied the more complimentary tag, "honest savage". In Palimpsest, Vidal makes the hard-to-like disclosures that he does not believe in love, and has never had a desire to give sexual pleasure, only to receive. The poet and novelist Jay Parini, whom Vidal has appointed his literary executor, admits that he often appears to be difficult. "I think that, in fact, he's a very shy man, and his shyness often comes across as haughtiness. Those who know him well frequently remark on how kind he is, how gentle and considerate he is with his friends. He always asks me about my children. Far from 'unlikeable', he is actually very sweet and kind - something those who only see him on television or read him will probably not understand."

In the early 1960s, Vidal stood for Congress and was narrowly defeated. He refers often to the event, but Parini believes that had he been successful, "he would have hated it. The boring daily grind of compromise would have worn him down. He has been more useful to the republic as an essayist and a critic, on the outside, casting a cold eye on the scene. His eye is very cold indeed." In the wake of his electoral disappointment, Vidal returned to fiction, first with Julian, set in fourth-century Rome, then with Washington DC, a story of American political life involving his own "peculiar family". The novel is centred on the two houses in which he grew up: one, that of Senator TP Gore, swaddled in fond memories; the other, of his stepfather, cloaked in unhappiness. The latter house he refers to as "the ill-named Merrywood".

Vidal has stepsiblings so numerous that he has never met some of them, and does not know the names of others. Among them is one whose name is mentioned frequently, Jacqueline Bouvier, "who married a man who was elected president only to have his head shot in as the two of them were driving through Dallas". Washington DC was Vidal's first attempt to write straightforward political fiction: one character is based on the blind senator, another on John F Kennedy, whom Vidal appears to have held in affection, while some are pure invention. Without being aware of it, he had laid the foundation for the seven-volume series of historical novels now called Narratives of Empire. An eighth instalment is at the "making notes" stage.

"I learned how to write historical fiction from Sir Walter Scott." He has an unfashionable liking for Scott's medieval Tales of the Crusades, and has written a novel about Richard the Lionheart, A Search for the King (1950). Like Scott's sprawling sagas, Vidal's historical novels give the word "facility" a good name. He takes a story by both hands and drives it confidently to the finishing post, kicking up a rich atmosphere along the way. It doesn't matter much if some of the characters in Burr and Lincoln sound not unlike the Roman aristocrats in Julian. Burr, which recounts the life of the roguish 19th-century politician Aaron Burr (he killed the presidential hopeful Alexander Hamilton in a duel), was published in 1973. It was followed three years later by 1876, another 500-pager. In between, he wrote one of his semi-surreal satirical "inventions", Myron, and assembled his first collected essays.

Vidal's intention when writing the historical novels was to "show up the fucking historians. Because I thought the academics were wrecking history, and I was going to be as accurate as I could be with what historic figures actually did and said. Don't think I'm not making a fortune out of the horror of our public schools. American history is very badly taught." The observation returns him to his main preoccupation: "The country is finished. It's all over. But you know, with a new republic like this, if you missed being here at the beginning, the next best thing is to be here at the end." Parini's view is that "the Narratives of Empire are remarkable examples of the historical novel. But from Vidal's huge range, I think his strongest form is the essay, where he has a kind of originality rarely seen."

Vidal is unusual among contemporary novelists in revising his early work for new editions. There is scarcely a page in The City and the Pillar, to take but one example, in which the dialogue and description have not been reshaped. The story involves a relatively innocent same-sex relationship between schoolfriends Jim and Bob, who bear a loose relation to Vidal and his chum Jimmie Trimble, killed in the second world war (Vidal had a safe posting to Alaska, out of which experience he wrote his excellent first novel, Williwaw, at the age of 19). At the end of The City and the Pillar, as originally published, the pair meet again after many years. Jim makes a sexual approach to Bob and, when rejected with the charge "You're a queer", kills him. In the revised version, published in 1965, sodomy takes the place of murder, and Bob is merely left weeping. The first edition is dedicated "to the memory of JT". Half a century after Trimble's death, his spirit would come to dominate Palimpsest, in which he features in idealised form as the lost half of a perfect whole.

The novelist Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story and The Farewell Symphony, enjoyed The City and the Pillar in its original version "for its camp, bitchy dialogue. It seemed to me a real period piece about a time when gay men were all big camps running around after some straight 'trade'. Of course, I don't mean to suggest that books of the past should be judged by our own ideas of political correctness. It's the same world as reflected in James Baldwin's novel Giovanni's Room, published eight years later, but with some very amusing dialogue."

In Hollywood - "I have nothing to do with that part of it" - Vidal lives alone-but-not-alone. His young assistant occupies a separate apartment attached to the house. The butler is on hand to replenish the glasses. And people drop by, such as the film director Peter Bogdanovich, with whom Vidal is collaborating on a version of a play left behind by Tennessee Williams at his death, Masks Outrageous. "Gore is collating the four drafts and I'm coming back to the theatre for the first time in 40 years to direct it," Bogdanovich says. Cybill Shepherd, the former Mrs Bogdanovich, has agreed to play the female lead. "All we have to do now is find a theatre."

In addition to this and his sketches for an eighth volume of Narratives of Empire, Vidal is working on a stage play, his first for many years, involving General MacArthur and President Truman at Wake Island at the end of the war. He writes his novels in longhand, "but with a play or an essay I just type it, because you want to see what you're doing as quickly as possible". As for the satires, such as Myra Breckinridge and Duluth, "the only advice I gave myself was: make me laugh. I laughed all the way through these books. I don't know what others did." Myra was written in Vidal's Rome apartment in one month in 1968, without the author knowing at the outset - "I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess" - that Myra had once been Myron. To tell that story a sequel was required. It duly followed six years later.

In the bedroom, a large area of shelving is devoted to the work of Gore Vidal in several languages, with ample space for a complete set of Walter Scott. The wall on the left-hand side of the bed is taken up with photographs of both sets of ancestors ("The Gores are a disagreeable race; at least my mother's branch"), while a bedside table on the right supports happier images: Austen, Christopher Isherwood, La Rondinaia, a framed certificate bestowing the Freedom of Ravello. The most evocative photograph of all, however, is downstairs, in view of his usual chair in the living room. It shows a fair-haired boy with a shy, guarded expression, one arm draped around the shoulder of his seated grandfather, the blind senator for Oklahoma. From the age of 10 to 18, Vidal read aloud to TP Gore, political and legal reports, as well as poetry for pleasure. He suspects that the duty has been partly responsible for his poor eyesight in later life. "But I loved it. He taught me how to read."

Vidal on Vidal

I select as a turning point a time and place that is where we are, unhappily, situated today. A number of presidential candidates, with varying degrees of insincerity, never acknowledge the problem before us, which is the ultimate loss of the Bill of Rights, begun under Bush and still continuing as the presidential candidates speak with utter admiration, each for him- or herself; such a display of self love has never before been seen in the history of the republic or on such a scale. I am, as I should know best, a marvelous human being, as opposed to vegetable or mineral, each truly dangerous if incorporated into our constitutional system.

"I have often thought and written that if the United States were ever to have a Caesar, a true subverter of the state, (1) he would attract to himself all the true believers, the extremists, the hot-eyed custodians of the Truth; (2) he would oversimplify some difficult but vital issue, putting himself on the side of the majority, as Huey Long did when he proclaimed every man a king and proposed to divvy up the wealth; (3) he would not in the least resemble the folk idea of a dictator. He would not be an hysteric like Hitler. Rather, he would be just plain folks, a regular guy, warm and sincere, and while he was amusing us on television stormtroopers would gather in the streets."
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