In a world more to his liking, Gore Vidal might have been president, or even king. He had an aristocrat’s bearing — tall, handsome and composed — and an authoritative baritone ideal for summoning an aide or courtier.
But Vidal made his living — a very good living — from challenging power, not holding it. He was wealthy and famous and committed to exposing a system often led by men he knew firsthand. During the days of Franklin Roosevelt, one of the few leaders whom Vidal admired, he might have been called a “traitor to his class.” The real traitors, Vidal would respond, were the upholders of his class.
The author, playwright, politician and commentator whose vast and sharpened range of published works and public remarks were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, died Tuesday at age 86 in Los Angeles…
His works included hundreds of essays, the best-selling novels “Lincoln” and “Myra Breckenridge” and the Tony-nominated play “The Best Man,” a melodrama about a presidential convention revived on Broadway in 2012. Vidal appeared cold and cynical on the surface, dispassionately predicting the fall of democracy, the American empire’s decline or the destruction of the environment. But he bore a melancholy regard for lost worlds, for reason and the primacy of the written word, for “the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action.”
But he was widely admired as an independent thinker — in the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked to call it, “the birds and the bees.” He picked apart politicians, living and dead; mocked religion and prudery; opposed wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three saddest words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates.” (The happiest words: “I told you so”)….
He adored the wisdom of Montaigne, the imagination of Calvino, the erudition and insight of Henry James and Edith Wharton. He detested Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and other authors of “teachers’ novels.” He once likened Mailer’s views on women to those of Charles Manson’s. (From this the head-butting incident ensued, backstage at “The Dick Cavett Show.”) He derided Buckley, on television, as a “crypto Nazi.” He was accused of anti-Semitism after labeling conservative Norman Podhoretz a member of “the Israeli fifth column.” He labeled Ronald Reagan “The Acting President” and identified Reagan’s wife, Nancy, as a social climber “born with a silver ladder in her hand.”…
…[A]ge and illness did not bring Vidal closer to God. Wheelchair-bound in his 80s and saddened by the death of [long-term companion] Austen and many peers and close friends, the author still looked to no existence beyond this one.
“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge,” he once wrote, “all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. “Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”
Vidal, especially as he became older and lonelier, made quite a few indefensible statements — neither anti-Semitism nor 9/11 trutherism can be explained away as just a hardening of long-term positions against particular individual enemies. But he was pro-human-equality, anti-military-industrial-complex, and loudly suspicious of the literary world’s inordinate tendency towards courtierism at a time when just being an admitted “homosexualist” could have cost him his freedom, much less his career. He was probably as close to a Renaissance man as the second half of the twentieth century produced, and I suspect some of his work (“The Best Man”, some of his literary criticism, Lincoln) will be read long after his more self-controlled peers and opponents have been forgotten.
And while he would certainly have read his every obituary with close attention, I doubt he expected nil nisi bonum. This was how Vidal closed his gleeful shredding of William F. Buckley’s pious postmortem in 2008:
… The unique mess that our republic is in can be, in part, attributed to a corrupt press whose roots are in mendacious news (sic) magazines like Time and Newsweek, aided by tabloids that manufacture fictional stories about actual people. This mingling of opinion and fiction has undone a media never devoted to truth. Hence, the ease with which the Republican smear-machine goes into action when they realize that yet again the party’s permanent unpopularity with the American people will cause them defeat unless they smear individually those who question the junk that the media has put into so many heads. Anyone who says “We gotta fight ‘em over there or we’re gonna have to fight ‘em over here.” This absurdity has been pronounced by every Republican seeking high office. The habit of lying is now a national style that started with “news” magazines that was further developed by pathological liars that proved to be “good” Entertainment on TV. But a diet of poison that has done none of us any good.
I speak ex cathedra now, ad urbe et orbe, with a warning that no society so marinated in falsity can long survive in a real world.
Water balloon
My all time favorite writer. He started to lose it in his last years, but if you haven’t read his collection of essays “United States” or novels Lincoln, Julian, Judgement of Paris, Washington D.C, you’re really missing out on one of the best writers of the last century.
Just a couple of months ago I saw his play “The Best Man” on broadway and loved it. Very sad.
Water balloon
Also, as this obituary mentions, he turned me on to some other great writers, most notable Calvino, so I can always thank him for that.
Tehanu
I always liked his stuff and now I’m even more impressed. Sorry he’s gone.
WereBear
I liked his off-the-cuff obituary of Buckley even better: when asked about how the afterlife was treating Buckley, he replied, “I hope it’s not too hot.”
geg6
@Water balloon:
Me too. With the exception of Myra Breckinridge, of course.
Whenever he was on a talk show, I would tune in, just to hear him shred some pompous politician and/or pundit. Mailer and Buckley hated him, which, in my book, made him just about perfect. I can only chalk up his trutherism to old age and terminal contrarianism, so I forgive it.
He was the first atheist I ever saw and that influenced my own evolution to atheism as a teen. Since neither of us were believers, I won’t say rest in peace. Just thank you.
hep kitty
That clip is awesome. That was back in the day when journalists and commentators were typically “civil,” at least on the teevee, so it’s delicious to watch, esp. Buckley threatening to bitch-slap Vidal, priceless.
bob h
It turns out I have a ticket to “The Best Man” on Broadway today. What a loss.
Sal
One of the best writers and thinkers of the 20th century. Kalki was a favorite of mine, also a large book of collected essays, forget the title. Intelligent and entertaining to read,
Scott
He was one of a kind. Extremely intelligent, witty, blunt, and unafraid.
And as an atheist myself, I think you can say RIP without it necessarily relating to religion.
NancyDarling
One of my favorite Vidal stories I posted on another thread last night:
I just saw that Gore Vidal has died. He infamously feuded with Norman Mailer and once (maybe on a Dick Cavett show) they were doing their usual verbal jousting when Mailer lost it and decked him. From the floor, Vidal said, “Words fail Norman, once again.”
Why doesn’t our society produce interesting characters like that any longer?
gogol's wife
@hep kitty:
I saw this when it happened! I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was so cool.
Bruno Blumenfeld
I am not familiar with Vidal’s “anti-semitic” comments, but is it really necessary to equate “9/11 Trutherism with that vileness? “9/11 Truthers” are posing questions about the most cataclysmic event of our age, questions that go unanswered a decade later because the establishment media bans any discussion of them. That sort of inquiry does not bear mentioning in the same sentence with anti-semitism.
Svensker
Calling Norman Podhoretz part of a “fifth column” is not anti-semitism. Please don’t catapult that particular piece of propaganda, AL.
hep kitty
@gogol’s wife: Wow! What was that show, btw?
Soonergrunt
@Bruno Blumenfeld: It certainly does merit mentioning in the same breath as anti-semitism. In fact, it’s more closely correlated with the kind of unthinking paranoiac meanderings that underlie most anti-semitism than just about anything else, save for those other thoroughly wrongheaded, thoroughly debunked flights of fancy typical of underpowered brains, fake moon-landing conspiracies, and JFK assassination bunkum.
Those who traffic in such poisonous nonsense should only ever be treated with the respect they are due, which is to say heaped with scorn and contempt and then pointedly ignored.
gogol's wife
@hep kitty:
It was during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, some kind of talk panel during the convention coverage. In general, that convention was some gripping TV!
geg6
@Svensker:
Agreed. There is nothing anti-semitic about it.
Thomas F
@Svensker: Smearing prominent Jewish figures as potential traitors to one’s country has a good track record in the 20th century. Thank you for being a force of reason and discretion in this discussion.
Hungry Joe
I interviewed Vidal once, about 20 years ago, and I don’t think I stopped laughing the whole hour. He told a story about Edward VIII that I’ve been telling ever since, but I can’t tell it an eighth (as it were) as well as he told it to me.
One of things that impressed me was the way the staff (the interview took place at a chi-chi spa) fell all over themselves to accommodate me — as the guy who came to interview him — and Vidal himself. It was obvious that they liked and respected him, and that he treated them very well.
He did turn into something of a conspiracy crank in his last years, but arteries do harden, after all.
Kerry Reid
@Water balloon: Dawn Powell for me — she is one of my absolute favorites and Vidal’s essay on her in the New York Review of Books is where I first heard about her.
Native New Yorker
Anti-semitism is anti-intellectual by design. Questioning the official history of an event that has never been adequately investigated or explained is an intellectual pursuit, one you are free to attack at considerable length, with an ostentatious display of your vocabulary. It might be more useful to engage the actual claims of the conspiracy theories you are so eager to “scorn.”
Spatula
@Bruno Blumenfeld:
Sorry. You’re not allowed to question the government-approved 9/11 narrative, complete with magic flame proof passports, on BJ. Watch the George W Bush/Dick Cheney protectors here attack you like frothing jackals if you dare.
Quite…strange, actually.
Spatula
@Soonergrunt:
See? Here comes Soonergrunt, who at the mention of Official 9/11 Narrative doubters, comes completely unglued.
His behavior is notable for its vitriol. I mean, what’s with the hateful bile? What’s the emotional investment in protecting the Bush/Cheney 9/11 Narrative?
Spatula
@Hungry Joe:
Nice.
Douche.
ETA: Also too: There are not, nor were there ever, any conspiracies of any kind in the history of the world.
Keith G
in most cases, old age is not a friend how to clear and rational thinking. in his fading years, Gore said some things which were done right indefensable. Nonetheless, this voice has been important to our politics and our society.
RIP, my friend.
Native New Yorker
Strange indeed.