Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal
Vidal at a Union Square bookstore in 2009
Born	Eugene Louis Vidal (1925-10-03)3 October 1925 West Point, New York, U.S.
Died	31 July 2012(2012-07-31) (aged 86) Hollywood Hills, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Other names	Eugene Luther Vidal, Jr.
Education	Phillips Exeter Academy
Occupation(s)	Writer (novelist, essayist, playwright, etc.)
Known for	The City and the Pillar (1948) Julian (1964) Myra Breckinridge (1968) Burr (1973) Lincoln (1984)
Political party	Democratic
Movement	Postmodernism
Partner	Howard Austen (1950–2003; Austen's death)
Parent(s)	Eugene Luther Vidal, Nina Gore

Gore Vidal (/ˌɡɔːr vˈdɑːl/; born Eugene Louis Vidal; 3 October 1925 – 31 July 2012) was an American writer (of novels, essays, screenplays, and stage plays) and a public intellectual known for his patrician manner, epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing.

As Eugene Louis Vidal, he was born to a political family; his maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, served as United States senator from Oklahoma (1907–21 and 1931–37). As Gore Vidal, he was a Democratic Party politician who twice sought elected office; first to the United States House of Representatives (New York State, 1960), then to the U.S. Senate (California, 1982).

As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's principal subject was the history of the United States and its society, especially how the militaristic foreign policy of the National Security State reduced the country to decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other public intellectuals and writers occasionally became continual quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer. As such, and because he thought that men and women potentially are bisexual, Vidal rejected the adjectives "homosexual" and "heterosexual" when used as nouns, as inherently false terms used to classify and control people in society.

As a novelist Gore Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His polished and erudite style of narration readily evoked the time and place of his stories, and perceptively delineated the psychology of his characters. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), offended the literary, political, and moral sensibilities of conservative book reviewers, with a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship. In the historical novel genre, Vidal re-creates in Julian (1964) the imperial world of Julian the Apostate (r. AD 361–63), the Roman Emperor who used general religious toleration to re-establish pagan polytheism to counter the political subversion of Christian monotheism. In the genre of social satire, Myra Breckinridge (1968) explores the mutability of gender role and sexual orientation as being social constructs established by social mores. In Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), the protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect the national politics of the U.S.

Early life

Gore Vidal was born Eugene Louis Vidal in the cadet hospital of the U.S. Military Academy, at West Point, New York, and was the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal (1895–1969) and Nina Gore (1903–78). Vidal was born at the West Point cadet hospital because his first lieutenant father was the first aeronautics instructor of the military academy. The middle name, Louis, was a mistake on the part of his father, "who could not remember, for certain, whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther." In the memoir Palimpsest (1995), Vidal said, "my birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening [in 1939]; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names."

Eugene Louis Vidal was not baptized until January 1939, when he was 13 years old, by the headmaster of St. Albans school, where Vidal attended preparatory school. The baptismal ceremony was effected so that he "could be confirmed [into the Episcopal faith]" at the Washington Cathedral, in February 1939, as "Eugene Luther Gore Vidal". He later said that, although the surname "Gore" was added to his names at the time of the baptism, "I wasn't named for him [maternal grandfather Thomas Pryor Gore], although he had a great influence on my life." In 1941, Vidal dropped his two first names, because he "wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author, or a national political leader . . . I wasn't going to write as 'Gene' since there was already one. I didn't want to use the 'Jr.'"

Vidal in 1948

Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. was director (1933–37) of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration, and also was the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart. At the U.S. Military Academy, the exceptionally athletic Vidal Sr. had been a quarterback, coach, and captain of the football team; and an all-American basketball player. Subsequently, he competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and in the 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon, and coach of the U.S. pentathlon). In the 1920s and the 1930s, Vidal Sr. co-founded three airline companies and a railroad line; (i) the Ludington Line (later Eastern Airlines); (ii) Transcontinental Air Transport (later Trans World Airlines); (iii) Northeast Airlines; and the Boston and Maine Railroad. Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and had come to the U.S. with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann.

Vidal's mother, Nina Gore, was a high society woman who made her Broadway theatre debut as an extra actress in Sign of the Leopard, in 1928. In 1922, Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal, Sr., and thirteen years later, in 1935, divorced him. Nina Gore Vidal then was married two more times; to Hugh D. Auchincloss, and also had "a long off-and-on affair" with the actor Clark Gable. As Nina Gore Auchincloss, Vidal's mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.

The subsequent marriages of his mother and father yielded four half-siblings for Gore Vidal – Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss – and four step-brothers from his mother's third marriage to Robert Olds, a major general in the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), who died in 1943, 10 months after marrying Nina. The nephews of Gore Vidal include Burr Steers, a writer and film director, and Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–95), a figurative painter.

Raised in Washington, D.C., Vidal attended the Sidwell Friends School and the St. Albans School. Given the blindness of his maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, of Oklahoma, Vidal read aloud to him, and was his Senate page, and his seeing-eye guide. The reading of history and literature, coupled to the senator's isolationism, formed the principles of Gore Vidal's "America First" political philosophy, which ran counter to the contemporary geopolitical adventurism of the American Empire. In 1939, during his summer holiday, Vidal went with some colleagues and professor from St. Albans School on his first European trip, to visit Italy and France. He visited for the first time Rome, the city which came "at the center of Gore's literary imagination", and Paris. When the Second World War began (1 September 1939), the group was forced to an early return home; on his way back, he and his colleagues stopped in Great Britain, and they met the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, Joe Kennedy (the father of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, later the President of the United States of America). In 1940 he attended the Los Alamos Ranch School and later transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, in Exeter, New Hampshire.

In the article Gore Vidal: Sharpest Tongue in the West, Roy Hattersley said that "for reasons he never explained, he [Vidal] did not go on to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, with other members of his social class." Rather than attend university, the patriotic lad, Eugene Luther Vidal, enlisted in the U.S. Army. Having failed training as a military engineer, at the Virginia Military Institute, Vidal exercised his patrician privilege of nepotism, and asked an uncle, the commander of a fighter wing at Peterson Field, Colorado Springs, Colorado, to have him assigned to the USAAF, where he worked as an office clerk. In time, bored with rear-echelon clerical duties, Private Vidal memorized the elements of navigation, presented the examination to qualify as a first mate, and became a maritime warrant officer (junior grade) in the Transportation Corps, and served as first mate of the F.S. 35th, berthed at Dutch Harbor. After three years in service, Warrant Officer Gene Vidal suffered hypothermia, developed rheumatoid arthritis and, consequently, was reassigned to duty as a mess officer.

Career

Writer

The literary works of Gore Vidal were influenced by numerous other writers, poets and playwrights, novelists and essayists. These include, from antiquity: Petronius (d. AD 66), Juvenal (AD 60–140), and Apuleius (fl. ca. AD 155); and from the post-Renaissance: William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), and George Meredith (1828–1909). More recent literary figures by whom his work was influenced include: Marcel Proust (1871–1922), Henry James (1843–1916), and Evelyn Waugh (1903–66).

Regarding his reputation as a substantive writer, the cultural critic Harold Bloom has written that Gore Vidal believed that his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the literary community in the United States, but Bloom contends that such limited recognition owed more to Vidal writing in the unfashionable, plot-oriented genre of historical fiction, than with whom Vidal shared a pillow. Nonetheless, in 2009, the Man of Letters Gore Vidal was named honorary president of the American Humanist Association.

Fiction

Vidal at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, 2008

The literary career of Gore Vidal began with the successful publication of the military novel Williwaw, a men-at-war story derived from his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty during the Second World War. His second novel, The City and the Pillar (1948) caused a moralistic furor over his dispassionate presentation of a young protagonist coming to terms with his homosexuality and a male homosexual relationship. The novel was dedicated to "J.T."; decades later, Vidal confirmed that the initials were those of James Trimble III, killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on 1 March 1945; and that Jimmie Trimble was the only person Gore Vidal ever loved.

Critics railed against Vidal’s presentation as natural, in The City and the Pillar, of a lifestyle viewed generally at the time as unnatural, and immoral. Vidal claimed that New York Times critic Orville Prescott was so offended by it, that he refused to review, or to permit other critics to review, any book by Vidal. Vidal said that upon publication of the book, an editor at EP Dutton told him: "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it."

In response, Vidal assumed the pseudonym "Edgar Box", and wrote the mystery novels Death in the Fifth Position (1952), Death before Bedtime (1953), and Death Likes it Hot (1954); each featured Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist-turned-private-eye. The Edgar Box genre novels sold well, and the black-listed Vidal secretly earned a living. That mystery-novel success then led Vidal to write in other genres, and he produced the stageplay The Best Man: A Play about Politics (1960), and the television play Visit to a Small Planet (1957); two early teleplays were A Sense of Justice (1955) and Honor. He also wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym "Cameron Kay" but refused to have it reprinted under his real name during his lifetime.

In the 1960s, Vidal published three novels: (i) Julian (1964), about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (r. A.D. 361–363), who sought to reinstate polytheistic paganism when Christianity threatened the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire; (ii) Washington, D.C. (1967), about political life during the presidential era (1933–45) of Franklin D. Roosevelt; and (iii) Myra Breckinridge (1968), a satire of the American movie business, by way of a school of dramatic arts owned by a transsexual woman, the eponymous anti-heroine.

After publishing the plays Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972), and the novel Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir (1970), the playwright and novelist Gore Vidal then concentrated upon the essay, and developed two types of fiction. The first type is about American history, novels specifically about the nature of national politics. About those historical novels, the critic Harold Bloom said that "Vidal's imagination of American politics . . . is so powerful as to compel awe." In the event, the historical novels formed the seven-book series, Narratives of Empire: (i) Burr (1973), (ii) 1876 (1976), (iii) Lincoln (1984), (iv) Empire (1987), (v) Hollywood (1990), (vi) Washington, D.C. (1967), and (vii) The Golden Age (2000). Besides U.S. history, Vidal also explored and analyzed the history of the Ancient World, specifically the Axial Age (800–200 B.C.), with the novel Creation (1981). The novel was published without four chapters that originally were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher; years later, Vidal restored the chapters to the text, and re-published the novel Creation in 2002.

The second type of fiction is the topical satire, such as Myron (1974) the sequel to Myra Breckinridge; Kalki (1978), about the end of the world, and the consequent ennui; Duluth (1983), an alternate universe story; Live from Golgotha (1992), about the adventures of Timothy, Bishop of Macedonia, in the early days of Christianity; and The Smithsonian Institution (1998), a time-travel story.

Non-fiction

In the U.S., Gore Vidal often is identified as an essayist, rather than as a novelist. Even the occasionally hostile literary critic, such as Martin Amis, admitted that "Essays are what he is good at . . . [Vidal] is learned, funny, and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

For six decades, Vidal the writer applied himself to many socio-political, sexual, historical, and literary subjects. In the essay anthology Armageddon (1987) Vidal explored the intricacies of power (political and cultural) in the contemporary U.S. His criticism of the incumbent U.S. President, Ronald Reagan, as a "triumph of the embalmer's art" communicated that Reagan's provincial worldview, and that of his Administrations, was out of date and inadequate to the geopolitical realities of the world in the late twentieth century. In 1993, Vidal won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for the anthology United States: Essays 1952–92 (1993).

According to the citation, "Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience and the persuasive powers of a great essayist."

A subsequent collection of essays, published in 2000, is The Last Empire. He subsequently published such self-described "pamphlets" as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, and Imperial America, critiques of American expansionism, the military-industrial complex, the national security state and the George W. Bush administration. Vidal also wrote a historical essay about the U.S.'s founding fathers, Inventing a Nation. In 1995, he published a memoir Palimpsest, and in 2006 its follow-up volume, Point to Point Navigation. Earlier that year, Vidal also published Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories.

Because of his matter-of-fact treatment of same-sex relations in such books as The City and The Pillar, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation. In the September 1969 edition of Esquire, for example, Vidal wrote:

We are all bisexual to begin with. That is a fact of our condition. And we are all responsive to sexual stimuli from our own as well as from the opposite sex. Certain societies at certain times, usually in the interest of maintaining the baby supply, have discouraged homosexuality. Other societies, particularly militaristic ones, have exalted it. But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime ... despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word 'natural,' not normal.

In 1995, Jay Parini was appointed as Vidal's literary executor.

In 2009, he won the annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, which called him a "prominent social critic on politics, history, literature and culture".

Screenplays

Anonymous script doctor

In 1956, the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio hired Gore Vidal as a screenplay writer with a four-year employment contract. In 1958, the director William Wyler required a script doctor to rewrite the screenplay for Ben-Hur (1959), originally written by Karl Tunberg. As one of several script doctors assigned to the project, Vidal rewrote portions of the script in order to resolve ambiguities of character motivation, specifically to clarify the enmity between the Jewish protagonist, Judah Ben-Hur, and the Roman antagonist, Messala, who had been close boyhood friends. In exchange for rewriting the Ben-Hur screenplay, on location in Italy, Vidal negotiated the early termination (at the two-year mark) of his four-year contract with the MGM movie studio.

Thirty-six years later, in the documentary film The Celluloid Closet (1995), Vidal explained that Messala's failed attempt at resuming their homosexual, boyhood relationship motivated the ostensibly political enmity between Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd), that Boyd was aware of the homosexual subtext to the scene, and that the director, the producer, and the screenplay writer agreed to keep Heston ignorant of the subtext, lest he refuse to play the scene. In turn, on learning of that script-doctor explanation, Charlton Heston said that Gore Vidal had contributed little to the script of Ben Hur (1959), the very successful third version of the religious novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (1880), by Lew Wallace. Despite Vidal's script-doctor resolution of the character's motivations, the Screen Writers Guild assigned formal screenwriter-credit to Karl Tunberg, in accordance with the WGA screenwriting credit system, which favored the "original author" of a screenplay, rather than the writer of the actual filmed screenplay.

Elsewhere, that profitable defeat soon was countered by public acknowledgement; two plays, The Best Man: A Play about Politics (1960) and Visit to a Small Planet (1955) were, respectively, theatre and movie successes. Moreover, Vidal occasionally returned to the movie business, and wrote historically accurate teleplays and screenplays about subjects important to him. Two such movies are: (i) the cowboy movie Billy the Kid (1989), about William H. Bonney a gunman in the Lincoln County War (1878), occurred in the New Mexico territory, and later an outlaw in the Western frontier of the U.S.; and (ii) the Roman Empire movie Caligula (1979), from which Vidal had his screenwriter credit removed, because the producer, Bob Guccione, the director, Tinto Brass, and the leading actor, Malcolm McDowell, rewrote the script, and added extra sex and violence in order to increase the commercial success of a movie based upon the life of the Roman Emperor Caligula (AD 12–41), which is the fourth biography in The Twelve Caesars (AD 121), by Suetonius.

Public intellectual

Politics

As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal was identified with the liberal politicians and the progressive social causes of the Democratic Party. In 1960, he was the Democratic candidate for Congress, for the 29th Congressional District of New York State, a usually Republican district on the Hudson River, but lost the election to the Republican candidate J. Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent. Campaigning under the slogan of You'll get more with Gore, Vidal received the most votes any Democratic candidate had received in the district in fifty years. Among his supporters were Eleanor Roosevelt, and Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, friends who spoke on his behalf.

Vidal and ex-senator George McGovern at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, 26 August 2009

In 1982, he campaigned against Jerry Brown, the incumbent Governor of California, in the Democratic primary election for the U.S. Senate; Vidal correctly prophesied that the opposing Republican candidate would win that election. That foray into senatorial politics is the subject of the documentary film Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No (1983), directed by Gary Conklin.

In a 2001 article, "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh", Gore undertook to glean why domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He concluded that McVeigh (a politically disillusioned U.S. Army veteran of the First Iraq War, 1990–91) had destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building as an act of revenge for the FBI's Waco massacre (1993) at the Branch Davidian Compound in Texas, believing that the U.S. government had mistreated Americans in the same manner that he believed that the U.S. Army had mistreated the Iraqis.

In Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta (2002), Vidal drew parallels about how the U.S. enters wars, and said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt provoked Imperial Japan to attack the U.S. in order to justify the American entry to the Second World War (1939–45). He contended that Roosevelt had advance knowledge of the dawn-raid attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941). In the documentary Why We Fight (2005), Vidal said that, during the final months of the War, the Japanese had unsuccessfully tried to surrender: "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs. . . . To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war."

As a public intellectual, Gore Vidal criticized the political harm to the nation and the voiding of the citizen's rights by passage of the USA Patriot Act (2001) during the Bush Administration (2001–2009). He described Bush, himself, as "the stupidest man in the United States"; and said that Bush's foreign policy was explicitly expansionist. He contended that the Bush Administration, and their oil-business sponsors, aimed to control the petroleum of Central Asia, after having gained effective control of the petroleum of the Persian Gulf in 1991.

Vidal became a member of the board of advisors of The World Can't Wait, a political organization who sought to publicly repudiate the foreign-policy program of the Bush Administration (2001–2009), and advocated Bush's impeachment for war crimes, such as pre-emptively launching the Second Iraq War (2003–2011) and torturing prisoners of war (soldiers, guerrillas, civilians) in violation of international law.

In May 2007, while discussing 9/11 conspiracy theories that might explain the "who?" and the "why?" of the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., Vidal said:

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I'm a conspiracy analyst. Everything the Bushites touch is screwed up. They could never have pulled off 9/11, even if they wanted to. Even if they longed to. They could step aside, though, or just go out to lunch while these terrible things were happening to the nation. I believe that of them.

In a 30 September 2009 interview with the London Times Vidal said that there soon would be a dictatorship in the U.S. The newspaper emphasized that Vidal, described as "the Grand Old Man of American Belles-lettres", claimed that America is rotting away – and to not expect Barack Obama to save the country and the nation from imperial decay. In the interview, also up-dated his views of his life, the U.S., and other political subjects. Gore had earlier described what he saw as the political and cultural rot in the U.S. in his essay, "The State of the Union" (1975), writing:

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party . . . and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt – until recently . . . and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.

In the American Conservative article, "My Pen Pal Gore Vidal" (2012), Bill Kauffman reported that Gore Vidal's favorite U.S. politician, during his lifetime, was Huey Long (1893–1935), the populist Governor (1928–32) and Senator (1932–35) from Louisiana, who also had perceived the essential, one-party nature of U.S. politics; and who was assassinated, by a lone gunman.

Despite that, Vidal said, "I think of myself as a conservative", with a proprietary attitude towards the U.S. "My family helped start [this country] . . . and we've been in political life . . . since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country." Based upon that background of populism, from 1970 to 1972, Vidal was a chairman of the People's Party of the United States. In 1971, he endorsed the consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader for U.S. president in the 1972 election. In 2004, he endorsed the Democrat Dennis Kucinich in his candidacy for the U.S. presidency (in 2004), because Kucinich was "the most eloquent of the lot" of presidential candidates, from either the Republican or the Democratic parties, and that Kucinich was "very much a favorite out there, in the amber fields of grain".

Cultural politics

The Truman Capote–Vidal feud

In 1975 Vidal sued Truman Capote for slander over the accusation that he had been thrown out of the White House for being drunk, putting his arm around the first lady and then insulting Mrs. Kennedy's mother. Said Capote of Vidal at the time: "I'm always sad about Gore – very sad that he has to breathe every day." Mutual friend George Plimpton observed: "There's no venom like Capote's when he's on the prowl – and Gore's too, I don't know what division the feud should be in." The suit was settled in Vidal's favor when Lee Radziwill refused to testify on Capote's behalf, telling columnist Liz Smith, "Oh, Liz, what do we care; they're just a couple of fags! They're disgusting."

The Buckley-Vidal feud

In 1968, the ABC television network hired the liberal Gore Vidal and the conservative William F. Buckley, Jr. as political analysts of the presidential-nomination conventions of the Republican and Democratic parties. Their strong commentaries led to Buckley threatening Vidal with physical violence. After days of bickering, their debates degraded to the vitriolic, to ad hominem attacks. In discussing the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, the public intellectuals argued about the freedom-of-speech-right of American political protesters to display a Viet Cong flag, when Vidal told Buckley to "shut up a minute", after Buckley had interrupted him, and, in response to Buckley's reference to "pro-Nazi" protesters, said: "As far as I'm concerned, the only sort of pro-crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." The offended Buckley replied, "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face, and you'll stay plastered." Their quarrel was interrupted by the ABC News anchorman-moderator Howard K. Smith, and they controlled their mutual hostility, and returned to providing the political analysis and commentary for which they had been hired. Later, William F. Buckley said he regretted having called Gore Vidal "a queer", yet said that Vidal was an "evangelist for bisexuality".

In 1969, in Esquire magazine, Buckley continued his cultural feud with Vidal in the essay "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" (August 1969), in which he portrayed Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality; Buckley said, "The man who, in his essays, proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher." The essay is collected in The Governor Listeth: A Book of Inspired Political Revelations (1970), an anthology of Buckley's writings of that time.

In turn, also in Esquire magazine, Vidal responded to Buckley with the essay "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr." (September 1969), and said that Buckley was "anti-black", "anti-semitic", and a "warmonger". The offended Buckley sued Vidal for libel; at trial, the judge said, that the "court must conclude that Vidal's comments, in these paragraphs, meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal, from Buckley's [earlier editorial] statements, cannot be said to be completely unreasonable."

Moreover, their feud continued, and, in Esquire magazine, Vidal implied that, in 1944, William F. Buckley, Jr., and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in Sharon, Connecticut (the Buckley family hometown) after the wife of a pastor had sold a house to a Jewish family. The offended Buckley again sued Vidal and Esquire for libel; and Vidal filed a counter-claim for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Myra Breckinridge (1968) as a pornographic novel.

The court dismissed Vidal's counter-claim. Buckley accepted a money settlement of $115,000 to pay the fee of his attorney, and an editorial apology from Esquire magazine, in which the publisher and the editors said that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertions. Yet, in a letter to Newsweek magazine, the publisher of Esquire said that "the settlement of Buckley's suit against us" was not "a 'disavowal' of Vidal's article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them."

In Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), Fred Kaplan said that "The court had 'not' sustained Buckley's case against Esquire . . . [that] the court had 'not' ruled that Vidal's article was 'defamatory'. It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine, as a matter of fact, whether or not it was defamatory. The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented 'only' Buckley's legal expenses. . . ."

In 2003, William F. Buckley, Jr. resumed his complaint of having been libelled by Gore Vidal, with the publication of the anthology Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing (2003), which included Vidal's essay, "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley, Jr." (1969). Again, the offended Buckley filed lawsuit for libel, and Esquire magazine again settled Buckley's claim with $55,000–65,000 for the fees of his attorney, and $10,000 for personal damages suffered by Buckley.

In the obituary "RIP WFB – in Hell" (20 March 2008), Vidal remembered his nemesis William F. Buckley, Jr., who had died on 27 February 2008. Later, in the interview "Literary Lion: Questions for Gore Vidal" (15 June 2008), the New York Times reporter Deborah Solomon asked Vidal, "How did you feel, when you heard that Buckley died this year?" Vidal responded:

I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins, forever, those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.

The Mailer-Vidal feud

On 15 December 1971, during the recording of the The Dick Cavett Show, with Janet Flanner, allegedly, Norman Mailer head-butted Vidal when they were backstage. When a reporter asked Vidal why Mailer had knocked heads with him, Vidal said, "Once again, words failed Norman Mailer." During the recording of the talk show, Vidal and Mailer insulted each other, over what Vidal had written about him, prompting Mailer to say, "I've had to smell your works from time to time." Apparently, Mailer's umbrage resulted from Vidal's reference to Mailer having stabbed his wife of the time.

The rights of German Scientologists

In 1997, Gore Vidal was one of thirty-four public intellectuals and celebrities who signed an open-letter addressed to Helmut Kohl, the incumbent Chancellor of Germany, published in the International Herald Tribune, protesting the treatment of Scientologists in Germany. Despite that stance as a dispassionate intellectual, Gore Vidal was fundamentally critical of Scientology as religion.

National self-preservation

In 1999, in the lecture "The Folly of Mass Immigration", presented in Dublin, Vidal said:

A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open to those in search of safety, or even the pursuit of happiness. But now, with so many millions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy. Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 to 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather not take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species.

The Polanski rape case

In The Atlantic magazine interview, "A Conversation with Gore Vidal" (October 2009), by John Meroney, Vidal spoke about topical and cultural matters of U.S. society. Asked his opinion about the arrest of the film director Roman Polanski, in Switzerland, in September 2009, in response to an extradition request by U.S. authorities, for having fled the U.S. in 1978, to avoid jail for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl in Hollywood, Vidal said, "I really don't give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she's been taken advantage of?"

Asked for elaboration, Vidal explained the cultural temper of the U.S. and of the Hollywood movie business in the 1970s: "The [news] media can't get anything straight. Plus, there's usually an anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing going on with the press – lots of crazy things. The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel, all in white, being raped by this awful Jew Polacko – that's what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now [2009] from what it was then [1970s]. . . . Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski. He was also a foreigner. He did not subscribe to American values, in the least. To [his persecutors], that seemed vicious and unnatural." Asked to explain the term "American values", Vidal replied: "Lying and cheating. There's nothing better."

In response to Vidal's opinion about the decades-old Polanski rape case, a spokeswoman for the organization Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, Barbara Dorris, said, "People should express their outrage, by refusing to buy any of his books", called Vidal a "mean-spirited buffoon" and said that, although "a boycott wouldn't hurt Vidal financially", it would "cause anyone else, with such callous views, to keep his mouth shut, and [so] avoid rubbing salt into the already deep [psychological] wounds of (the victims)" of sexual abuse.

Vidal the Humanist

In April 2009, Vidal accepted appointment to the position of honorary president of the American Humanist Association; he succeeded the novelist Kurt Vonnegut.

Actor and pop-culture figure

Actor

In the 1960s, Vidal migrated to Italy, where he befriended the film director Federico Fellini, for whom he appeared in a cameo role as himself in the film Roma (1972). He acted in the movies Bob Roberts (1992), a serio-comedy about a reactionary populist politician who manipulates youth culture to win votes; With Honors (1994) an Ivy league college-life comedy; Gattaca (1997), a science-fiction drama about genetic engineering; and Igby Goes Down (2002), a coming-of-age serio-comedy directed by his nephew, Burr Steers.

Pop-culture figure

In the 1960s, the weekly American sketch comedy television program Rowan & Martin's Laugh-in featured a running-joke sketch about Vidal; the telephone operator Ernestine (Lily Tomlin) would call him, saying: "Mr. Veedul, this is the Phone Company calling! (snort! snort!)". The sketch, titled "Mr. Veedle" also appeared in Tomlin's comedy record album This Is a Recording (1972).

In 1967, Vidal appeared on the CBS documentary, CBS Reports: The Homosexuals, in which he expressed his views on homosexuality in the arts.

In the 1970s, in the stand-up comedy album Reality . . . What a Concept, Robin Williams portrayed Vidal as a drunken shill in a Thunderbird wine commercial.

In 2005, Vidal portrayed himself in Trailer for the Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula, a video-art piece by Francesco Vezzoli included to the 2005 Venice Biennale and part of the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Moreover, Vidal provided his own voice for the animated-cartoon versions of himself in The Simpsons and the Family Guy programs. Likewise, he portrayed himself in the Da Ali G Show; the Ali G character mistakes him for Vidal Sassoon, a famous hairdresser.

In the biographic film Amelia (2009), the child Vidal was portrayed by William Cuddy, a Canadian actor. In the Truman Capote biographic film Infamous (2006), the young adult Vidal was portrayed by the American actor Michael Panes.

In 2009, Vidal was the narrator for a production of Mother Courage and Her Children (1939), by Bertolt Brecht, staged by the Royal National Theatre, London.

Private life

In the multi-volume memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931–74), Anaïs Nin said she had a love affair with Vidal, who denied her claim in his memoir Palimpsest (1995). Vidal also said that he had an intermittent romance with the actress Diana Lynn, and alluded to possibly having fathered a daughter. Yet, regarding Nin, in the online article "Gore Vidal's Secret, Unpublished Love Letter to Anaïs Nin" (2013), author Kim Krizan said she found an unpublished love letter from Vidal to Nin, which contradicts his denial of a love affair with Nin. Krizan said she found the love letter whilst researching Mirages, the latest volume of Nin's uncensored diary, to which Krizan wrote the foreword. Moreover, he was briefly engaged to the actress Joanne Woodward before she married the actor Paul Newman; after marrying, they briefly shared a house with Vidal in Los Angeles.

Vidal as a young man

In 1950, Gore Vidal met Howard Austen, who became his life-partner in a 53-year relationship. He said that the secret to his long relationship with Austen was that they did not have sex with each other: "It's easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part, and impossible, I have observed, when it does." In Celebrity: The Advocate Interviews (1995), by Judy Wiedner, Vidal said that he refused to call himself "gay" because he was not an adjective, adding: “to be categorized is, simply, to be enslaved. Watch out. I have never thought of myself as a victim. . . . I've said – a thousand times? – in print and on TV, that everyone is bisexual."

In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1969, Gore said: "Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality. Notice I use the word natural, not normal." Commenting his life's work and his life, he described his style as: "Knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn."

In the course of his life, Vidal lived and resided at various times in Italy and in the United States. In 2003, he sold his Italian villa La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest) on the Amalfi Coast in the province of Salerno, and he and Austen returned to the U.S. and resided in Los Angeles. In November 2003, Howard Austen died; later, in February 2005, Austen was re-buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, in Washington, D.C., in a joint grave meant for both Vidal and Austen. Beginning in 2010, Vidal began to suffer from Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, a brain disorder caused by chronic alcoholism. On 31 July 2012, the 86-year-old Vidal died of pneumonia in his house in the Hollywood Hills, California.

Legacy

Postmortem opinions and assessments of Gore as a writer varied:

Domestic obituaries

In "Gore Vidal Dies at 86; Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer",The New York Times described him as "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." In "Gore Vidal, Iconoclastic Author, Dies at 86", The Los Angeles Times said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language". In "Gore Vidal Dies; imperious gadfly and prolific, graceful writer was 86", The Washington Post described him as a "major writer of the modern era . . . [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters".

Foreign obituaries

In the "Gore Vidal Obituary", The Guardian said that "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism, rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style." In "Gore Vidal", The Daily Telegraph described the writer as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him". In "Obituary: Gore Vidal", the BBC News said that he was "one of the finest post-war American writers . . . an indefatigable critic of the whole American system . . . Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows; his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing." In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal", the Spanish on-line magazine Ideal said that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States", and described him as a "great American novelist and essayist". In "The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles", the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera described the novelist as "the enfant terrible of American culture" and that he was "one of the giants of American literature". In "Gore Vidal: The Killjoy of America", the French newspaper Le Figaro said that the public intellectual Vidal was "the killjoy of America", but that he also was an "outstanding polemicist" who used words "like high-precision weapons".

In memoriam

On 23 August 2012, in the program a Memorial for Gore Vidal in Manhattan, the life and works of the writer Gore Vidal were celebrated, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, with a revival The Best Man: A Play About Politics (1960). The writer and comedian Dick Cavett was host of the Vidalian celebration, which featured personal reminiscences about and performances of excerpts from the works of Gore Vidal, by friends and colleagues, such as Elizabeth Ashley, Candice Bergen, and Hillary Clinton, Alan Cumming, James Earl Jones, and Elaine May, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon, Cybill Shepherd, and Liz Smith.

Bibliography

Non-fiction

• Rocking the Boat (1963)
• Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)
• Sex, Death and Money (1969) (paperback compilation)
• Homage to Daniel Shays (1972)
• Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977)
• Views from a Window Co-Editor (1981)
• The Second American Revolution (1983)
• Vidal In Venice (1985) ISBN 0-671-60691-3
• Armageddon? (1987) (UK only)
• At Home (1988)
• A View From The Diner's Club (1991) (UK only)
• Screening History (1992) ISBN 0-233-98803-3
• Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) ISBN 1-878825-00-3
• United States: Essays 1952–1992 (1993) ISBN 0-7679-0806-6 – National Book Award
• Palimpsest: a memoir (1995) ISBN 0-679-44038-0
• Virgin Islands (1997) (UK only)
• The American Presidency (1998) ISBN 1-878825-15-1
• Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999)
• The Last Empire: essays 1992–2000 (2001) ISBN 0-375-72639-X (there is also a much shorter UK edition)
• Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came To Be So Hated, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002, (2002) ISBN 1-56025-405-X
• Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunder's Mouth Press, (2002) ISBN 1-56025-502-1
• Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003) ISBN 0-300-10171-6
• Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004) ISBN 1-56025-744-X
• Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir (2006) ISBN 0-385-51721-1
• The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (2008) ISBN 0-385-52484-6
• Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare (2009) ISBN 0-8109-5049-9
• Buckley vs. Vidal: The Historic 1968 ABC News Debates (2015) ISBN 978-1-942531-12-8

Plays

• Visit to a Small Planet (1957) ISBN 0-8222-1211-0
• The Best Man (1960)
• On the March to the Sea (1960–61, 2004)
• Romulus (adapted from Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1950 play Romulus der Große) (1962)
• Weekend (1968)
• Drawing Room Comedy (1970)
• An Evening with Richard Nixon (1970) ISBN 0-394-71869-0
• On the March to the Sea (2005)

Novels

• Williwaw (1946) ISBN 0-226-85585-6
• In a Yellow Wood (1947)
• The City and the Pillar (1948) ISBN 1-4000-3037-4
• The Season of Comfort (1949) ISBN 0-233-98971-4
• A Search for the King (1950) ISBN 0-345-25455-4
• Dark Green, Bright Red (1950) ISBN 0-233-98913-7 (see "In the Lair of the Octopus" and Dreaming War)
• A Star's Progress (aka Cry Shame!) (1950) as "Katherine Everard"
• The Judgment of Paris (1952) ISBN 0-345-33458-2
• Death in the Fifth Position (1952) under the pseudonym Edgar Box
• Thieves Fall Out (1953) under the pseudonym Cameron Kay
• Death Before Bedtime (1953) under the pseudonym Edgar Box
• Death Likes It Hot (1954) under the pseudonym Edgar Box
• Messiah (1954) ISBN 0-14-118039-0
• A Thirsty Evil (1956) (short stories)
• Julian (1964) ISBN 0-375-72706-X
• Washington, D.C. (1967) ISBN 0-316-90257-8
• Myra Breckinridge (1968) ISBN 1-125-97948-8
• Two Sisters (1970) ISBN 0-434-82958-7
• Burr (1973) ISBN 0-375-70873-1
• Myron (1974) ISBN 0-586-04300-4
• 1876 (1976) ISBN 0-375-70872-3
• Kalki (1978) ISBN 0-14-118037-4
• Three by Box: The Complete Mysteries of Edgar Box (1978) ISBN 0-394-50117-9
• Creation (1981) ISBN 0-349-10475-1
• Duluth (1983) ISBN 0-394-52738-0
• Lincoln (1984) ISBN 0-375-70876-6
• Empire (1987) ISBN 0-375-70874-X
• Hollywood (1990) ISBN 0-375-70875-8
• Live From Golgotha (1992) ISBN 0-14-023119-6
• The Smithsonian Institution (1998) ISBN 0-375-50121-5
• The Golden Age (2000) ISBN 0-375-72481-8
• Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories (2006) The anthology A Thirsty Evil (1956), with the additional short story "Clouds and Eclipses"

Screenplays and teleplays

• Climax!: A Farewell to Arms (1955); Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1955) (TV adaptations)
• The Best of Broadway (1955): TV adaptation of Stage Door
• The Catered Affair (1956)
• I Accuse! (1958)
• The Scapegoat (1959)
• Ben Hur (1959) (uncredited)
• Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
• The Best Man (1964)
• Is Paris Burning? (1966)
• Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970)
• Caligula (1979)
• Dress Gray (1986)
• The Sicilian (1987) (uncredited)
• Billy the Kid (1989)
• Dimenticare Palermo (1989)

Pop-culture figure

• What's My Line? occasional guest (1960s)
• CBS Reports: The Homosexuals (1967)
• Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1976) appeared in 7 episodes, as himself
• Profile of a Writer: Gore Vidal – RM Productions (1979 documentary film)
• Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No (1983 documentary film)
• Weekend In Wallop (1984)
• Vidal in Venice – Antelope Films for Channel Four Television (1987 documentary film)
• Bob Roberts – as Senator Brickley Paiste (1992 film)
• With Honors – the pessimistic, arrogant left-wing Prof. Pitkannan (1994 film)
• The Celluloid Closet (1995 documentary film)
• Gattaca – Director Josef (1997 science-fiction film)
• Shadow Conspiracy – Congressman Paige (1997 political thriller)
• Igby Goes Down Schoolmaster (2001 film)
• The Education of Gore Vidal (2003 documentary film, by Deborah Dickson) broadcast by PBS in the US.
• Thinking XXX (2004 documentary)
• Da Ali G Show (2004 TV)
• Why We Fight (2005 film)
• Inside Deep Throat (2005 film)
• One Bright Shining Moment (2005 film)
• Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula (2005 spoof trailer)
• Foreign Correspondent – with former NSW premier Bob Carr
• The U.S. Versus John Lennon (2006 film)
• Family Guy episode: "Mother Tucker" (17 September 2006)
• The Simpsons episode: "Moe'N'a Lisa" (19 November 2006)
• Alex Jones radio show
• Jon Wiener's radio program in Los Angeles
• The Henry Rollins Show (2007 TV)
• Terrorstorm: Final Cut Special Edition (2007)
• Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra concert, 2 August 2007 – Narrated the Lincoln Portrait, by Aaron Copland, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.
• Lateline – ABC Television Australia Interview (2 May 2008)
• Democracy Now – interview: on the Bush Presidency, History, and the "United States of Amnesia" (14 May 2008)
• The South Bank Show (18 May 2008)
• HARDtalk – BBC News (22 May 2008)
• The Andrew Marr Show (25 May 2008)
• The US is Not a Republic Anymore (June, 2008)
• Zero: An Investigation into 9/11 (June 2008)
• Interview on the BBC's US Presidential Election Coverage with David Dimbleby (4 November 2008)
• "Gore Vidal's History of the National Security State" on The Real News Network (2008)
• "Writer Against the Grain": Gore Vidal in Conversation with Jay Parini, 2009 Key West Literary Seminar (audio recording 59:09)
• Real Time with Bill Maher (10 April 2009)
• Shrink (2009 film)
• "Gore Vidal's America" on The Real News Network (24 December 2010)
• Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia (2013 documentary)
• Best of Enemies (2015 documentary)
• "The McLaughlin Group"

See also

• Politics in fiction

External links

• Gore Vidal Index, by Harry Kloman
• Gore Vidal Pages
• Gore Vidal at IMDb
• Gore Vidal at the Internet Broadway Database
• Gore Vidal at AllMovie
• Gore Vidal at Find a Grave
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Documentary, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia"
  • Film web site
  • At Internet Movie Database
  • Interview with Director Nicholas Wrathall
• Gore Vidal – Obituary, New York Times