Gore Vidal
From Philosopedia
Vidal, Gore (3 Oct 1925 - )
Vidal’s original name was Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, the first two names being those of his father. Although his forte is history, he is better known as a novelist whose Myra Breckenridge (1968) was turned into a movie that starred Mae West, among other novels. Vidal, also a playwright and critic, shocked the public in 1948 when The City and the Pillar was published, its main character being a homosexual. His essay, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” (1976), is not so well known but illustrates his profundity.
Contents |
Vidal's Acerbity
Vidal is known for his acerbity; e.g.,
- America: The civilization whose absence drove Henry James to Europe. Truman Capote: Capote has made lying an art. A minor art. [Upon hearing about Capote’s death]: Good career move. Fame: Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television. Ronald Reagan: A triumph of the embalmer’s art. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the United States. Theology: Once people get hung up on theology, they’ve lost sanity forever. More people have been killed in the name of Jesus Christ than any other name in the history of the world.
Vidal's Blasphemy
In 1992, the gospel according to Gore Vidal was entitled Live From Golgotha, a Vidalian satire as blasphemous as anything Salman Rushdie might imagine. It describes an NBC camera crew that somehow is able to break the time barrier and photograph Jesus’s crucifixion, live from Calvary. The well-endowed bishop of Ephesus, the heterosexual Timothy, who is represented as having once been an acolyte and “love toy” of St. Paul, is the storyteller whose relationship with Paul is revealed. This leaves the telecasters certain the show will boost NBC’s fall ratings. “I’m really interested now.” Vidal stated in 1992, “in trying to destroy monotheism in the United States. That is the source of all the problems.” The novel was both praised and panned by Robert Gorham Davis in Free Inquiry (Spring, 1993):
- “Vidal can make his alter ego, the rascally slangy Timothy (with ‘the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor’), a charming though unlikely narrator. But Vidal’s satire on television moguls is too trite and predictable to teach us anything, and his travesty of early Christianity so outrageously broad as to be irrelevant to those holding present-day Christian beliefs and unilluminating to those who have already rejected them.”
About and By Vidal
The Essential Gore Vidal (1998), the title implying one really should read everything by the author, is an anthology edited by Fred Kaplan, one that spans five decades of his work. Kaplan’s Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999) contained few new facts about his subject. Kaplan cites Vidal’s affair with Anaïs Nin and mentions his being a regular customer at a Times Square gay hangout, the Astor Bar.
The Smithsonian Institution: A Novel (1999) includes a what-if plot; for example, what if key historical events had happened differently; e.g., if Mr. Lincoln had been rescued at Ford’s Theater, if there had been no Adolf Hitler on the scene in 1939; if Franklin Roosevelt had had only the Japanese to fight in the 1940s.
A revealing work, Sexually Speaking (1999), suggests that George Washington had a homosexual side, that a touch of Norman Mailer’s feminism is apparent, and that Eleanor Roosevelt had Sapphic tendencies.
The autobiograpy, Palimpsest (1995), remains one of his best works. It describes the major love of his life, a school-friend Jimmy Trimble, who was killed on Iwo Jima in 1945. He tells of his father’s fame as a football star, his success in aviation, and his having three testicles; relates stories about his grandfather, Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma; writes of his mother’s alcoholism and his decision when thirty-two to cut all ties with her; gossips about VIPs in Washington, D.C., including sexual references about President Kennedy; has stories about Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Princess Margaret, Christopher Isherwood, and numerous others.
Christopher Hitchens has made a shrewd observation about the wide variety in Vidal’s work, that his achievements as a writer
- . . . can recur to a favored subject many times without repeating himself. Three Vidalian commitments seem to undergird what he writes on any topic. The first is the curse of monotheism: enemy of pleasure and foe of rational inquiry. The second is the blight of sexual stereotyping. (He insists that acts, not persons, are homo- or heterosexual.) The third is the awful temptation of America to meddling and blundering overseas: imperialism, to give it the right name.
Vidal's Humanities-centered Humanism
In 1954 he wrote to Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism:
- I have put most of my attitudes into The Judgment of Paris (1952; revised, 1965), a comedy, and Messiah (1954; revised, 1965), a tragedy. I can think of no one label which particularly fits me, though some odd ones have got applied along the way! I should say, though, right off, that I am not interested in any of the theologies I have ever heard of, despite the indubitable charm of the divers sacred books of this world. I do not see any law to the universe though I am perfectly prepared to entertain the idea that one exists. Though I am no mathematician, I am reasonably confident that Einstein’s Unified Field Theory will prove inconclusive, to say the least. The origin of the universe is a fact not in the mind of man. Therefore, I doubt if it can be discovered at the far end of a syllogism, much less an equation. “We are all dullards in divinity; we know nothing,” as Anaxandrides put it. I have always thought the game of first causes amusing but pointless. The origin of the universe is mystery and its fate is a mystery. We know it is in a state of flux. We know it is changing. That is all we know, or are ever apt to know. In one short century we have discarded so many ‘undying’ truths that I suspect soon we will be able, a few of us at least, to get along without absolutes, other than those expedient ones we use to regulate society. I suppose I am closer to Lucretius and the Atomists than to any of the Christian divines or their philosophic antagonists in the last century, writers amongst whose works I have sniffed like a curious but not a hungry dog. I do not, very simply, believe. I have attitudes, opinions, and I observe but that is all. I attempt, through literature, to make order in the moral, the human sphere (and only in the human scale do our actions matter—the stars are inattentive, I suspect). I reject the idea, even semantically, of the supernatural because all is natural. We call supernatural only those events which are inexplicable or, worse, inconvenient. In human affairs, political affairs, I am continually at sea. Sometimes I incline toward benevolent tyranny, other times toward oligarchy in the Platonistic sense. I have even thought an enlightened Republic might work, but since I have never had the experience of living under any one of these governments I shall probably never know what I think. Finally, au fond, I have a sense of reality which prevents me from being either optimistic or gloomy. I can imagine vividly all the millennia when this world was uninhabited by men and I can imagine, with equal equanimity, a cold, dusty planet on which the race of man has long since perished, his entire history a brief instant in creation, his works and days all gone at least in that spiraling bright flux we call the universe. This sense of eternity (there is no better word), of unhuman duration makes it possible for me to live without too much agony in an unreasoning civilization where men seldom contain for long the predatory life force within which exists only by the displacement, the assimilation of other life. We are cancers: the body we prey on is the earth . . . and one another. The most one can do, that I can do, is to arrange my better daydreams so that they may prove communicable to others, decorating their solitude, relieving my own. I take pleasure in writing, and in the act indulge myself in a double vision hard to explain to others: realizing poignantly on the one hand that I and my race are nothing in eternity and yet aware, at the precise same moment, that, to me at least, literature, art together matter more than anything else, save kindness. The dogmatic, needless to say, cannot entertain two conflicting realities at the same time in their pursuit of certainty and its devilish accomplice power. I am more modest, less ambitious. I know we shall not endure. But the present is all time . . . and enough.
As for religion:
- I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam—god people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied, and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
- Christianity is such a silly religion." (Time, 28 September 1992)
Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Vidal declined, stating, “Thanks, but I already belong to the Diners Club.” In 1999, to the surprise of many, he accepted membership in the Academy but was not present on the date of the awards. In 2001 he wrote The Last Empire Essays 1992-2000), a work that was praised by friends and criticized by others.
In 1995, after leaving unanswered many offers to become listed as Humanist Laureate in the International Academy of Humanism, he was approached by Warren Allen Smith, whom he had never before seen.
“Mr. Vidal,” he was told in a dour voice, and brusquely, “you and I are in love with the same man!”
Conversation in the vicinity hushed. A publisher’s representative approached. The novelist was taken aback, looking quizzically ahead and wondering what was about to transpire. After a studied pause, during which Smith looked somewhat stonily into his eyes, Smith relaxed.
“Lucretius.”
“Oh,” Vidal laughed uproariously, “and Tiberius and Apuleius, too?”
The amused Vidal then accepted an envelope containing a copy of Free Inquiry along with a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a typed statement, “I agree to be listed as a Humanist Laureate,” under which was a “Yes” and a line for him to sign his name.
In Smith's mail two days later was the envelope, in which, indeed, was the signed agreement.
On 20 April 2009, Vidal accepted the title of Honorary President of the American Humanist Association.
The 1964 to 2006 Memoir
In 2006, Vidal added to his long list of writings a 277-page Point to Point Navigation, a Memoir 1964 to 2006. A "me-moirs" like Palimpsest, it tells about the influence on him of his maternal grandfather, the blind Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma; his detested mother and his beloved father; and tidbits about individuals: Barbara Cartland ("an authority on the royal family whom she ceaselessly defends in the press even when they are not under attack"); his first love, Jimmy Trimble who died on Io Jima (he knew well that his fellow marines "were all being thrown away for no purpose other than the enrichment of war contractors"); Charles Lindbergh, who insisted on production of the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber ("Thanks to the Lindbergh reports, in the end it was our air power that won us the war"); and the Mafia (which he credits both with helping put President Kennedy in the White House and then taking him out of it).
A 2008 Interview
New York Times Magazine reporter Deborah Solomon interviewed Vidal 15 June 2008, in which he went on record as to some of his views in 2008:
Critics:
- [They] don't know how to read. I can't name three first-rate literary critics in the United States. I'm told there are a few hidden away at universities, but they don't print them in The New York Times.
Is Al Gore your cousin?
- They keep explaining it to me, and I keep forgetting.
How to live with a male companion for 50-plus years:
- People would ask, How could you live with someone for so long without any problems of any kind? I said, There was no sex.
Were you chaste during that companionship?
- Chased by whom?
Anyone in the 20th century you might have a kind word about?
- Yes, I liked Italo Calvino, and I thought he was the greatest writer of my time.
What do you think is your best novel?
- I don't answer questions like that. Ever. And you ought not to ask them.
Well, it was a great pleasure talking to you.
- I doubt that.
A 2010 Interview with The Humanist
David A. Niose and Jennifer Bardi interviewed Vidal for the January/February 2010 issue of The Humanist. He now had accepted the honorary presidency of the American Humanist Association.
{Read entire interview.}
Bibliography
Essays and Non-Fiction
- Rocking the Boat (1963)
- Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)
- Sex, Death and Money (1969) (paperback compilation)
- Homage to Daniel Shays (1973)
- Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977)
- The Second American Revolution (1982)
- Armageddon? (1987) (UK only)
- At Home (1988)
- A View From The Diner's Club (1991) (UK only)
- Screening History (1992)
- Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992)
- United States: essays 1952-1992 (1993)
- Palimpsest: a memoir (1995)
- Virgin Islands (1997) (UK only)
- The American Presidency (1998)
- Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999)
- The Last Empire: essays 1992 -2000 (2001)
- Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came To Be So Hated, (2002)
- Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, 2002)
- Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003)
- Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004)
- Point to Point Navigation : A Memoir (2006)
Plays
- Visit to a Small Planet (1957)
- The Best Man (1960)
- On the March to the Sea (1960 - 1961)
- Romulus (adapted from Friedrich Duerrenmatt's play) (1962)
- Weekend (1968)
- Drawing Room Comedy (1970)
- An evening with Richard Nixon (1970)
- On the March to the Sea (2005)
Novels
- Williwaw (novel) (1946)
- In a Yellow Wood (1947)
- The City and the Pillar (1948)
- The Season of Comfort (1949)
- A Search for the King (1950)
- Dark Green, Bright Red (1950)
- The Judgment of Paris (1953)
- Messiah (1955)
- A Thirsty Evil (1956) (short stories)
- Julian (Novel) (1964)
- Washington, D.C. (1967)
- Myra Breckinridge (1968)
- Two Sisters (1970)
- Burr (novel), (1973)
- Myron" (novel), (1975)
- 1876 (novel), (1976)
- Kalki (novel), (1978)
- Creation (novel), (1981)
- Duluth (novel, (1983)
- Lincoln (novel), (1984)
- Empire (novel)|, (1987)I
- Hollywood (novel), (1989)
- Live from Golgotha: the Gospel according to Gore Vidal (1992)
- Smithsonian Institution (novel), (1998)
- The Golden Age (2000)
- Clouds and Eclipses : The Collected Short Stories (2006)
Written Under Pseudonyms
- A Star's Progress (aka Cry Shame!) (1950) as Katherine Everard
- Thieves Fall Out (1953) as Cameron Kay
- Death Before Bedtime (1953) as Edgar Box
- Death in the Fifth Position (1954) as Edgar Box
- Death Likes It Hot (1954) as Edgar Box
{CA; CE; E; GL; Frank DiGiacomo, "Elitist Atheist Warren A. Smith Makes A-List - Who's Who in Hell", New York Observer, page 1, 14 August 2000; Christopher Hitchens, The New York Review of Books, 22 April 1999; TYD; WAS, 25 August 1954; WAS 12 October 1995.}
