The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country—and we haven’t seen them since.
—Gore Vidal
I. “OUR COUNTRY’S BIOGRAPHER”
The last decades of Gore’s life were contradictory, with a few peaks and many valleys. He had become an international figure, a star. His name attracted attention on book covers in dozens of languages around the world. He was popular in far-flung places: Bulgaria, Brazil, Australia, Chile. He was in demand as a speaker, and could ask for large fees. Mostly he spoke for free at public forums of one kind or another and sought out television appearances eagerly, convinced that this medium remained the best way for him to maintain his profile. As ever, he wrote in the morning, even when hungover or jet-lagged. But the urgency of the fifties, sixties, and seventies had somehow vanished. Gore realized he could no longer hold center stage in the culture as when he debated William F. Buckley in prime time in 1968. The dynamics of the media had shifted in ways alien to him. Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett were gone, and the talk shows no longer wanted intellectuals as guests; they wanted celebrities, and while Gore could certainly pass as one, the younger generation no longer quite knew why anyone should pay attention to somebody who seemed old, pompous, and self-centered.
Yet Gore still found himself summoned to give talks, and sizable numbers of readers bought his books, especially the historical novels. He could draw large audiences whenever he appeared in public. Paradoxically, the man who detested academics and “school teachers,” as he referred to all professors, became professorial himself, delivering well-written lectures at a range of American colleges from Berkeley to Harvard. And he often seemed to court academics, prizing their friendship and approval. Increasingly, he saw himself as a radical historian on a mission: He would explain to the United States of Amnesia what had happened, how the promise of the early republic had turned into oligarchy, and how empire had begun in earnest with the acquisition of the Philippines. He would often, in lectures, focus on the postwar development of what he called the national security state, and derided the pretense of democracy in America, repeating his line that the Property Party had two wings, Republican and Democrat. As ever, the American passion for religion—going back to the Puritans and running through a variety of evangelical and mystical strains—concerned him, and he would address the subject in essays and novels. He would also campaign for the legalization of drugs whenever he could, arguing that “drug addiction is epidemic, particularly among the poor, while those who make and sell drugs are very rich indeed—and beyond the law.”
His views on sexuality also continued to evolve, although he never would allow for himself to be pigeonholed as gay, despite his obvious predilection for men. “I don’t care about sex anymore,” he often said. There was alcohol to blame for this, of course, but depression also played a role; Gore often seemed incredibly bleak as he moved into his sixties and seventies. His paranoia, always present, deepened as well—no doubt exacerbated by drink. “He just had a very very thin skin,” Jason Epstein noted. “He saw, and found, enemies everywhere.” This led him to make statements that could, in the later years, seem embarrassing. Increasingly he relied on friends for support and for confirmation of his views. (If you disagreed with him on anything, this would cause trouble, which meant that people tended to agree with him.)
Until his death in 2003, Howard remained the key person in his life, but Gore also talked on the phone with Barbara Epstein, Boaty Boatwright, Sue Mengers, Paul Newman, and others. He saw Roman friends less frequently, preferring Ravello as a base, but he stayed in close touch by phone with George Armstrong, Judith Harris, Donald Stewart, and others. His agent, Owen Laster, was a steady support. In personal dealings with friends, Gore was usually kind, open, and concerned about their welfare. His prodigious memory came in handy, and he never forgot the details of a friend’s life: family issues, work problems, plans. His gift for friendship is often neglected in discussions of his personality, and this overlooks a major aspect of the man, as his cousin Miles Gore points out: “I think one can’t emphasize enough how kind he was. My wife, Michelle, and I would visit him in later years, and he was unfailingly generous with his time, and he really listened and asked questions. That side of him is too often overlooked.” This aspect of his personality sits uncomfortably, perhaps, with his narcissism, although one could argue that he used his friends as reflectors. (I certainly felt this strongly whenever he would call. After a quick few questions about my life, we would turn to his, and he was desperate to get “news” of his reputation, to find out through someone else how “Gore Vidal” fared in the world.) His empire of self grew, but at considerable cost to him.
The mask of Gore Vidal, the one he wore in public, did him a disservice in many ways, as it occluded the shy man hidden beneath its rubbery texture. But what would Gore be without his mask? Not the dazzling public figure who could, with pluck and skill, debate Buckley or Norman Mailer or any number of opponents. The mask helped when he stood in front of a political rally, sat on a panel, spoke from a podium—often treating serious issues, bringing a perspective to the national discourse of the United States that is sadly missing without him. “We’ve become a culture of screaming ninnies,” he said, late in life. “I don’t see reasoned argument. The illusion of debate happens on cable channels. Try stepping outside of the allowed parameters of opinion and see what happens. Nothing happens. A voice is not heard.”
He took his work as historian seriously, becoming a man with a mission. “I had become our country’s biographer, retelling the story of a nation very close to me and my family,” said Gore. His public talks—becoming more frequent in the eighties and nineties—sounded more and more like witty lectures that detailed the history of the republic and a gradual loss of freedom for ordinary citizens. Moving about frequently, he was on CNN one night in the summer of 1990, the next day sitting on a panel sponsored by Fairness and Accuracy in the Media in Los Angeles, where he addressed the subject of censorship. He frequently used the same lines to warm up the crowd, who rarely needed much prompting: “I’m going to look up once in a while to give an air of spontaneity to my remarks. My mentor has always been Dwight D. Eisenhower, who always read his speeches with a great sense of discovery.” This line never failed him, although he might use it for Ronald Reagan as well, depending on the audience.
He deployed his lines with an impish glee, and once he had an audience in his hands, he transmogrified before their very eyes into Professor Vidal, hitting the high points of American history from the Founding Fathers through the dark years of Reagan and George H. W. Bush. His career as an essayist had by now blossomed, with a new range of publications open to his work, including The Observer in London, where many of his most ferocious pieces appeared. Another volume of essays came out from André Deutsch: A View from the Diners Club: Essays 1987–1991. This British-only collection found enthusiastic critics, from Hilary Mantel writing in The Spectator to James Wood in The Guardian. “The Brits,” said Gore, “were a reliable audience for my essays, but not so much for my novels. American history, in particular, bored them.” It helped, of course, that he often traveled to London to appear on television and radio programs.
II. “THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CAMERA”
Gore’s passion for film never waned, and when Alan Heimert, a professor at Harvard, invited him to give the William E. Massey Senior Lectures in the History of American Civilization, Gore decided to talk about the movies. It was a prestigious series that had previously featured Eudora Welty, Irving Howe, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and Toni Morrison, among others. (David Herbert Donald, the Lincoln scholar and longtime Harvard historian, had urged the committee to choose Gore for these lectures, and they happily agreed, knowing he would draw an enthusiastic crowd.) After the war, Gore had given a reading at Harvard, and this stayed in his memory as a glorious early triumph. He told Steven Abbott that “lecturing his former Exeter classmates was one of the greatest moments in his life.” Now he felt ready for another visit to Cambridge, and these lectures became Screening History (1992), a wonderfully unorthodox blend of gossip, personal history, film criticism, and reflection on what he considered the primary art of our time. “Today the public seldom mentions a book,” he told the standing-room-only audience in Memorial Hall on the first night, “though people will chatter about screened versions of unread novels.”
As so often before, he circled back to his grandfather. Thomas P. Gore’s time in the upper chamber was Gore’s platinum credit card, and he pulled it from his wallet repeatedly, recalling his grandfather’s first archenemy, Woodrow Wilson:
It had been hard enough for Wilson to maneuver us into the First World War, as my grandfather believed that he had meant to do as early as 1916. We got nothing much out of that war except an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights in 1919 and, of course, the prohibition of alcohol. The world was not even made safe for democracy, a form of government quite alien to the residents of our alabaster cities, much less to those occupants of our fruited plains.
Gore meandered, but his crowd roared, clapped, and nodded. His evident delight in lecturing on hallowed ground was apparent. “The only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies,” he said, with considerable hyperbole, recalling his life as a boy in Washington, enthralled by Mickey Rooney’s prepubescent Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Prince and the Pauper, that marvelous Mark Twain story of two boys born on the same day but separated by circumstances. This was Gore’s first awakening to the harshness of the class system, and it stimulated in him a longing for a twin brother, for his lost half, later discovered in the highly eroticized vision of Jimmie Trimble.
A central thesis of the Harvard lectures is Gore’s perception that “in the end, he who screens the history makes the history.” As suggested in Hollywood, he embraced a conspiracy theory in which the film industry colluded with Washington to shape our sense of reality, creating fictions that took the place of experience itself, or distorting experience in ways that it was difficult to separate fantasy from reality. He discusses at length the British films of the thirties, which he regarded as nothing less than a media offensive: “The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate our entire culture, with all sorts of unexpected results. Since the movies were by now the principal means of getting swiftly to the masses, Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly influenced by British propagandists.” As in the period before the United States sided with Britain in World War I, in the thirties one had to choose: “On both sides of the Atlantic the movies were preparing us for a wartime marriage with our English and French cousins, against our Italian and German cousins.” He points to Fire Over England, a 1937 film about the reign of Elizabeth I, whose navy defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. This was useful propaganda for the British, of course, and Hollywood tilted in that direction.
The last of the three lectures dealt with versions of American history as played out on (and often distorted by) the silver screen. He lingers over Young Mr. Lincoln, a sentimental film by John Ford, which starred Henry Fonda as Honest Abe. Needless to say, Gore found this treatment of Lincoln far removed from reality, observing that depictions of Lincoln often avoided the treacherous war years (or observed those years from a Southern viewpoint). He himself had focused on these years, of course—on Lincoln’s complex negotiation of a national crisis. Taking his usual revisionist approach to history, Gore says: “In life Lincoln wanted to colonize the ex-slaves in Central America. During the 1960s this was not god-like; so a number of Lincoln priests in the universities were able to prove to their satisfaction that he had been not only an Abolitionist but an integrationist. In the god-business, it is Proteus who prevails.”
He concluded his lectures with a joke calculated to make his Harvard audience cheer: “Screen-writing has been my second career for close to forty years. By and large, my generation of writers did not become schoolteachers; if we needed money, we took a job at Columbia—the studio, not the university.” Once again, Gore managed to prick the balloon of academic pomposity, which buzzed around the room and flew out the window. For him, the writing of scripts now faded as an activity: He didn’t need the money and intensely disliked the tendency of young directors to consider themselves as auteurs. The quick cuts of contemporary films unsettled him. “I feel dizzy in the movies now,” Gore would say. “The camera never lingers, except for close-ups. And they do close-ups instead of building drama. And I don’t do car chases.” On the other hand, he liked what he called “the other side of the camera,” and looked for roles in films with surprising luck for someone who had never trained as an actor.
Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins would visit Gore whenever they came to Italy, and this friendship intensified in the late eighties. In 1991, Robbins developed a mock documentary called Bob Roberts, based on a character that he had played briefly on Saturday Night Live. The film, backed by Paramount and written by Robbins, chronicles the rise of a right-wing Senate candidate and folksinger. His foil is the incumbent Democrat, Senator Brickley Paiste, and Robbins approached Gore about playing the part. Needless to say, he leaped at the chance. “I didn’t have to act,” Gore recalled. “I played myself, with my own opinions. There was no script for my part. Just a space where I could act as myself, though I was of course acting and it was a character.”
The film is a brilliant piece of political satire that draws on earlier documentaries, such as D. A. Pennebaker’s classic Bob Dylan film, Don’t Look Back, or Rob Reiner’s 1984 This Is Spinal Tap, another mock documentary. Seen through the eye of a British filmmaker, the film follows Roberts on his campaign across Pennsylvania. Shot for only $4 million, it appeared in 1992, at the beginning of the Clinton era, and proved remarkably prescient, paving the way for films such as Wag the Dog (1997) and Bulworth (1998). A key scene in Bob Roberts features a debate in Pittsburgh between Senator Paiste and Roberts. Standing stiffly behind a podium, Gore looks eerily plausible in his three-piece dark suit and fluffy bow tie. Roberts accuses him of inappropriate behavior with a young girl, which Paiste dismisses with a wave of the hand, saying: “This is America. Virtue always prevails.” At the end, Gore parodies the summation moment in many political debates. “So let us be real together,” he intones, shaking his head gravely. “Thank you for your vote.” In another scene, Gore sits behind his desk and lectures in a weary fashion, playing himself as well as Paiste. “The film,” he said, “understood that the media creates our politics, that image takes the place of reality. It was a theme I’d been writing about for a long time, going back to Messiah.”
III. ATTACKING THE SKY-GOD
Increasingly Gore inhabited the role of public intellectual as a wide-ranging commentator on politics and society, including sexual politics and religion. He read and admired Noam Chomsky, whose tightly argued and well-documented essays on American foreign policy gave Gore lots of ammunition. He had learned a great deal about the history of American interventions in Southeast Asia from books such as American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), often saying that the essay in that book called “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” was one of the great tracts of our time. Chomsky saw that intellectuals were in a position “to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions.” His work on the Middle East, especially with regard to Israel and American foreign policy, fascinated Gore and he wanted very much to meet Chomsky.
In September 1991, I brought them together for a television interview in Boston, asking about their motivations for the kind of political work they did. Chomsky responded that “looking in the mirror in the morning and not being appalled” was what drove him. Gore said, “For me, it’s looking out of the window and not being appalled.” And Gore asked, “Why is empathy in such short supply?” He worried about the inability of some to “picture what it’s like to be other people. In my profession as a novelist I have to do that, but I’ve always had that tendency. I’m always startled when people start going on about the blacks or the Jews or gay people, and you suddenly see there is no ability to identify with anybody else except themselves. If I had a motivating thing it would be an overwrought empathy, an irritability with its absence in others.”
In November, Gore spent a week in New Hampshire as the 1991 Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, having been invited by Donald E. Pease, a cultural critic and professor of English. There he befriended James H. Tatum, a professor of classics. Tatum comments: “This was a prestigious fellowship program that the college established to invite public figures of all kinds, politicians, writers, poets, composers, scientists, anyone and everyone sufficiently distinguished to merit a visitor’s spot in the academic calendar.” With his partner Bill Noble, Tatum invited Gore and Howard to their home in Vermont for dinner during the week, and they were entertained by Howard’s singing. It was after a grand dinner “with copious drinks” when Gore asked Howard to show off his skills. Tatum elaborates:
Gore himself never seemed to me to be particularly musical, nor Howard. They lived in Italy but rarely if ever went to concerts or opera anywhere that I’d heard of. But Howard’s voice was another matter. He didn’t need accompaniment, and launched right into singing. And he was so good at it the effect was mesmerizing—like having Mel Tormé live in your living room. He sang for twenty minutes or so and, when he finished, Gore solemnly informed us that we had been present for a rare event. Howard might sing for him when they were alone, but rarely around other people and never in public. It was a touching moment, about as intimate as I ever witnessed Gore and Howard being. Many years later when I visited Gore in the Hollywood Hills, perhaps the last time I saw him before he died, I found him listening to recordings of Howard’s singing.
Interviewed at Dartmouth before a large crowd, Gore dropped more names than a phone book and, as an avowed atheist, railed against “the sky-God,” declaring that monotheism lay at the heart of “the American problem, the Western problem.” He said it was “that tedious text from the Bronze Age known as the Old Testament” that had troubled the waters. “From its pages we get Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the sky-god religions. They have not been bearers of peace.” It was a theme he would develop at length in “Monotheism and Its Discontents” on April 20, 1992, when he gave the Lowell Lecture at Harvard.
The fact that the premier American university had invited him back made a deep and favorable impression, and it played some role in his final choice of Harvard as the repository of his papers and, indeed, his entire estate. His lecture was an incendiary bomb aimed at “them,” the monotheistic religions:
Let us dwell upon the evils they have wrought. The hatred of blacks comes straight from the Bad Book. As descendants of Ham (according to Redneck divines), blacks are forever accursed, while Saint Paul tells the slaves to obey their masters. Racism is in the marrow of the bone of the true believer. For him, black is forever inferior to white and deserves whatever ill fortune may come his way. The fact that some monotheists can behave charitably means, often, that their prejudice is at so deep a level that they are not aware it is there at all. In the end, this makes any radical change of attitude impossible.
Not one inclined to modesty or half measures, Gore called for a nation “not under God but under man—or should I say our common humanity?”
During this same period he wrote “in a few months” a short satirical novel called Live from Golgotha. “Jason Epstein hated it,” recalls Gary Fisketjon, “and I think that his response to this book really ended their friendship. I would imagine Jason was stunned. He didn’t mean to have it end. But it did.” Gore’s next editor at Random House was Sharon Delano, whom he liked a great deal. “Sharon listens,” he said, probably meaning that she didn’t try to change anything in his books.
The novel opens with a flourish: “In the beginning was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine.” These words emerge from the lips of one Timothy, later an apostle and saint. The son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father who writes from his kitchen in Lystra, he speaks of his own good looks like a first-rate narcissist: “I have golden hyacinthine curls and cornflower-blue, forget-me-not eyes and the largest dick in our part of Asia Minor.” Timothy refers to Paul (who of course is gay in Gore’s vision) simply as Saint, and—as Bishop of Macedonia—he wants to get Paul’s version of the gospel out there before it’s destroyed by a computer hacker from the future, known simply as the Hacker, who has been feverishly erasing all versions of the gospel, hoping to seize control of the Christian narrative. Perhaps not unsurprisingly in this wacky book, a crew from NBC (Nuclear Broadcasting Company) slips into the past (computer software enables this reversion) with a plan to broadcast the Crucifixion live from Golgotha: a TV special to end all specials. Visitors from the twentieth century stream into the Holy Land to be present at the great event, including a couple of Gore’s favorite fakes: Mary Baker Eddy and Oral Roberts. His old friend Shirley MacLaine also appears on the scene, as she has a strong interest in spiritualism.
The novel swirls around Gore’s recent obsessions, including his hatred of monotheism. The real object of his scorn, however, is mainly Saint Paul, the author of two famous letters to Timothy. With the “greatest story ever told” being erased and refashioned by the Hacker, Timothy has to scramble. The plot thickens as Chet from NBC tries to persuade Timothy to act as the anchorman for the Crucifixion—rather a plum job. But interference occurs from a range of sources, many of them fantastic, futuristic, and perhaps unbelievable. “I got carried away,” Gore said, “and probably outdid myself.”
The Hacker (whose name is Marvin Wasserstein) is scary. “If he has found some way of entering my mind,” says Timothy, “then I must find a way of keeping him out.” The true nature of Wasserstein will be revealed in time, with plenty of anti-Zionist vitriol, which Gore can’t keep a lid on: The wounds from the print battles with Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz remained open, and they stung, and he unfortunately allowed himself to vent here. Gore’s dislike of Zionism doesn’t just obtrude; it overwhelms the narrative. Saint Paul says, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.” That remains, as they say, biblical. But one gets a Vidalian twist here: “Saint’s formula, which pleased the Roman administration, was never understood by the Romans. To the dedicated Zionist, Palestine was not Caesar’s country but God’s. So what sounded like a nice acknowledgment of the separation of Church and State was really a secret Zionist war cry. I don’t think Saint actually thought it up, but he is always given credit for it in Bartlett’s.”
In all of this, Jesus seems the least of it: a hapless figure whose real message (at least in Gore’s estimate) seems difficult to grasp. He has a terrible weight problem, which Timothy repeatedly refers to as a “glandular problem.” Indeed, he “weighs more than a Japanese wrestler, more than Orson Welles even.” He’s not even Jesus, as it happens, but a substitute. Wasserstein is the “real” Jesus, and he winds up crucified in the end, thus allowing history to proceed as usual.
Unsurprisingly, the novel puzzled reviewers, many of whom thought Gore had gone over the top. “Readers were far and few between,” Gore recalled. For the most part, Live from Golgotha slipped by without notice, attracting none of the attention that had greeted Myra Breckinridge or any of the novels in the Narratives of Empire. Its theme harks back to Messiah: the need for a religion to control the story in order to survive. In trying to control the message, of course, the media comes into play, and Gore understood these dynamics as well as anyone, having made himself a master of the airwaves (at least in the sixties and seventies). The sexual fluidity of Timothy fits nicely with another persistent theme in Gore’s work. Its linguistic texture, too, is obviously Vidalian, with its mix of high and low, serious and inane. Sometimes these blend in attractive ways, as when Timothy visits Rome with Saint:
Saint and I stared at everything like a pair of yokels. It was a hot summer day, and I was all for heading for the baths that are Rome’s glory, but Saint wanted to see his lawyer, Zenas, first. So, we got lost in the Forum. If it weren’t for the sight of the two hills, the Palatine, which is covered with the emperor’s place—several acres of offices and porticoes and gardens—called the Capitoline Hill, where the temples of Jupiter and Juno brood over the Forum like—like two rundown temples—you would never find your way to anywhere because something like a thousand statues and monuments have been jammed together in the Forum, which isn’t that large to start with.
Such well-developed scenes are few and far between, and it’s likely that the sloppy casualness that blurs the writing on too many pages arose from its hasty composition. Gore didn’t trouble over the prose in this novel, and he allowed his pet peeves and obsessions to poke through the cracks in the narrative pavement. As a result, the novel failed to find many admirers, and it marks a low point of his work in this decade.
IV. THINKING ABOUT SEX
As the nineties began, Gore found himself sleepless at night and anxious during the day. He traveled too much, saw too many people, and did too many interviews. He often turned to whiskey for solace, drinking half a bottle without much trouble. “I sleep better when I’ve drunk a great deal,” he said. “Scotch is mother’s milk to me. Soothing.” Needless to say, Howard worried about him and thought he should cut back on everything: travel, socializing, drinking.
Friends were also in decline, including Rudolf Nureyev—a good friend and luminous performer in the world of ballet and modern dance who spent a good deal of time on the Amalfi coast, in Positano, where he had bought a handful of small islands. He liked to visit Gore in Ravello, though by the early nineties he seemed desperately ill. “He was a ghost of himself,” said Gore, “and he could barely walk on his last visit with legs like sticks. He had to lean on me to get up the stairs.” HIV had turned into full-blown AIDS, and the extent to which Nureyev’s once perfect body had withered upset Gore terribly. The wages of sex, as he saw, could be death.
Gore had been trying to come to terms with sexuality for decades, moving toward acceptance of his own “degeneracy,” as he called it. In 1991, he wrote “The Birds and the Bees” and, seven years later, “The Birds and the Bees and Clinton.” Both of these often silly yet occasionally brilliant essays appeared in The Nation, where Gore took cover when he wished to say something that could not fit easily in mainstream pages, such as Vanity Fair, Esquire, or The New York Review of Books. In the first, he comments on a recent book where Americans “tell the truth” about their sexual desires. “A majority of men and women like oral sex,” Gore notes. This was their deepest desire, and next to that “was sex with a famous person.” Gore observes: “Plainly being blown by George or Barbara Bush would be the ultimate trip for our huddled masses.”
Wearing the mask of Professor Vidal, he gives readers a lesson in sex ed. “First, the bad news: men and women are not alike.” Moreover, they are “dispensable carriers, respectively of seeds and eggs.” The purpose of sex, as our wise teacher explains, is to procreate. He reduces this activity to its most clinical: “The male’s function is to shoot semen,” and the woman’s job “is to be shot briefly by a male in order to fertilize an egg, which she will lay nine months later.” It’s simple arithmetic: Man plus Woman equals Baby. Gore strips away anything sentimental about relationships, rummaging in his own past: “In the prewar Southern town of Washington, D.C., it was common for boys to have sex with one another. It was called ‘messing around,’ and it was no big deal. If the boy became a man who kept on messing around, it was thought a bit queer—sexual exclusivity is odd and suggests obsession—but no big deal as long as he kept it quiet.” He notes that Kinsey in his report said that 37 percent of men had “messed around.”
Gore believed that he knew how things worked, not simply the way they worked for him. He could be funny in these pieces, and right, too: It’s obvious that sexual activity has a profoundly biological meaning. When he harks back to what happened in the prewar South, he is doubtless recalling the time when he and Jimmie Trimble frolicked on the banks of the Potomac—if indeed they did. But the self-referential aspects of the piece reflect an author trying hard to work out his own sexual predilections, and Gore’s were eccentric, with a desperate need not to allow such a thing as love to interfere with sex. Of course procreation had no place in the hydraulic work of homoerotic activity that once occupied him in the late afternoons after a day of writing. In “The Birds and the Bees and Clinton,” written after Kenneth Starr had published his full report on the sexual peccadilloes of Clinton on September 11, 1998, Gore continues in his role of sex-ed professor: “It was not until Mr. Starr published his dirty book at public expense that I realized how far off-track I have allowed these sad dummies to get. Simple truths about the birds and the bees have been so distorted by partisanship that blow jobs and hand jobs are now confused with The Real Thing.” That Clinton and Monica Lewinsky did not actually “have sex” was his point; they had “messed around.” His rage mounts as he writes, until at last he explodes: “Christian fundamentalists and their corporate manipulators seem intent on overthrowing two presidential elections in a Senate trial. This is no longer comedy. This is usurpation.”
V. RETREATS, ADVANCES
When the owner of the apartment in the Largo Argentina suddenly raised the rent in 1993, Gore decided to pull the plug. Ravello had become his base of operations by now, and many friends had moved away from Rome. So he and Howard gave up the lease, moving out on St. Patrick’s Day. It was the end of a major phase in their lives. Yet they traveled as much as ever. In July 1993, for instance, they went to Austria for a week at the Salzburg Global Seminar, attending the educational conference held every summer at the Schloss Leopoldskron—the mansion made famous as the home of Captain von Trapp and his family in the film version of The Sound of Music. Gore lectured on literature as a political force, and the audience, Alastair Reid recalls, “found him riveting and irreverent. He was afraid of nothing, and said things nobody was saying except him and a few others. He understood that politics and literature aren’t terribly far apart, and that writers too often play into the dominant narratives. Gore stood apart, as he’d done throughout his life, and he ruffled feathers in the room, as he did in the world at large.” Gore discussed his ideas about the “national narrative” on a panel with André Brink from South Africa, Nawal El Saadawi from Egypt, Victor Erofeyev from Russia, and the American writer Erica Jong. I was there, and recall sitting at dinner one night with Gore and Jong. Gore politely asked her what she was working on, and she said, “I’m writing my memoirs.” Not missing a beat, Gore responded: “At last, you’re trying your hand at fiction.” This was, in fact, an especially revealing moment, as Gore had begun to write his own memoirs, Palimpsest, which he would publish two years later.
He wrote to Judith Halfpenny about the manuscript that became Palimpsest: “I am doing my own memoir. I’ve just done a large chunk on a weekend with the Kennedys in Hyannis after the Berlin Wall went up and Jack is both scared shitless and longing for a war. I kept note of everything said, and as I transcribe them, he comes over as charming as ever but definitely creepy. Of course he was only alive thanks to drugs and so, perhaps, felt undead. Jackie comes out rather well, outraged at the men starting a war that would kill her children.”
Gore continued to travel frequently to the States, on one occasion taking on a small role in With Honors, a 1994 film. He played the part of a Harvard professor, which now seemed to come naturally. He also worked with Delano at Random House to assemble a volume of collected essays. Published on June 1, 1993, United States: Essays 1952–1992 marked Gore’s coronation as one of the country’s leading essayists of the century. It was an immense book that should have been published with a retractable handle and little wheels. Its thirteen hundred pages contained most of the work he had done in the essay form, though he had been so prolific that any number of pieces failed to make the cut. Its cover featured a 1958 painting of the American flag by Jasper Johns, with a handsome photograph of the author on the back by Jane Brown—Gore’s favorite picture of himself.
There are three sections in the collection, each with its own table of contents: State of the Art, State of the Union, and State of Being. But Gore’s essays didn’t fall into such neat categories, as he usually mixed memoir with literary criticism or political or cultural commentary. “Vidal’s essays go back to the nineteenth century of Bagehot, Carlyle, even Macaulay,” wrote Anthony Burgess in The Observer, adding that Gore’s essays “inform before they judge.” Other reviewers agreed. “Vidal is the master-essayist of our age,” declared Michael Dirda in The Washington Post Book World. John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books, noted that the essays are “unmistakably a performance—more of a self-celebration than a self-interrogation, and none the worse for that.” With few dissenting voices, this publication was a triumph, and Gore knew it when Harry Evans—then editorial director at Random House—informed him that he had won the National Book Award for criticism. “I had given a note for Harry to read at the dinner in the unlikely event that I should win.” This wry note, read by Evans in the author’s absence, said:
Unaccustomed as I am to winning prizes in my native land, I have no set piece of the sort seasoned prize winners are wont to give. Who can forget Faulkner’s famed “eternal truths and verities,” that famed tautology, so unlike my own bleak relative truth. As you have already, I am sure, picked the wrong novelist and the wrong poet, I am not so vain as to think you’ve got it right this time, either!
He went on to recall the winners of the National Book Award event he had attended some fifty years earlier, noting that he had been at that dinner with Dylan Thomas, who retired with him afterward to a bar in the Village. He could not, it seems, restrain the urge to suggest that he was there, always, before anyone else. Literary history, if not history itself, started in his mother’s womb.
VI. IN THE WIDENING GYRE
There were other milestones and turning points now. For a start, Gore began to repair his relationship with Norman Mailer in earnest. Gay Talese recalls: “They’d never been enemies, not in any real way. But they battled in public, and sometimes took different sides on issues. They insulted each other on television. They could be fierce, battling in private, too. But there was a grudging respect. Mailer and Gore had been rivals out of the gate, in the late forties. But they came together to perform Don Juan in Hell from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman at a benefit for the Actors Studio at Carnegie Hall.” That was on February 15, 1993, when Gore joined Mailer, Talese, and Susan Sontag onstage for this benefit performance. It was a glittering occasion, with numerous movie stars and wealthy entrepreneurs in the audience (tickets ranged from $500 to $1,000), along with a few writers as well. Gore was in terrific form that night, in a dark blue suit with a blood-bright vest. When it ended, he crossed the stage, grasped both of Mailer’s hands, and said in the loudest stage whisper he could manage, “You have always understood me, Norman.” The audience loved it, giving a standing ovation to the foursome.
In June 1994, Gore accepted an honorary degree from the University of South Dakota, motivated by his father’s connections to that state. When he returned to Ravello, he planned to write what he knew would be the final volume in his Narratives of Empire, The Golden Age—the title had lodged in his mind some years earlier. But life kept intervening. That summer, he welcomed an array of visitors, including Hillary Clinton and her daughter, Chelsea, who came down from Naples (where President Clinton was attending an international conference). The visit went well, and Gore would soon find himself invited for an evening at the Clinton White House, although he declined, preferring to dine privately with Hillary and Paul Newman at a nearby hotel. In October, he was back in England for the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he appeared with Kurt Vonnegut, who had become (with his wife, the photographer Jill Krementz) a friend, although they were never close. Afterward, he came back to Oxford with me for a few days, where I took him to dinner at Christ Church College with Iris Murdoch and, the next day, Isaiah Berlin. One morning I found him staring into the mirror in his hotel room, noting the puffiness around the eyes, the double chin. “Who would have thought I’d become an Old Master in my own time?” he asked, talking to himself.
Gore hoped that Walter Clemons would have delivered his biography by now, but rumors floated in from various quarters. Clemons, who suffered from both diabetes and writer’s block, would fail to complete the assignment, and Gore knew it. At sixty-four, Clemons collapsed at his house in Queens one morning. I was staying with Gore in Ravello at the time and recall his profound feeling that nothing in his life ever went according to plan. Over lunch he asked me if I would take over from Clemons, as I had recently edited Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, a kind of Festschrift. Gore thought that, as a novelist myself, I could manage a long book of this kind. I knew, however, that the job would prove impossible, and that nothing I wrote would ever meet his expectations.
I told him, not untruthfully, that I had a contract for several books in hand and couldn’t possibly get to his biography at the moment. One day, I told him, I would write about him at length. (He once introduced me in London as “his dear friend, Jay Boswell.”) Meanwhile, I spoke to Fred Kaplan, whom I admired as a biographer. He had written thoughtfully on Henry James and Mark Twain, among others, so he could put Gore’s life and work in its proper literary context. Kaplan soon took over the project, producing a sturdy and intelligent biography in 1999, one that did not please its subject. How could it? It remains, however, a considerable work, a skillful biography that puts forward the facts of Gore’s life without pulling too many punches.
Gore had begun to find a new rhythm of travel, shifting regularly to California to get out of the worst of winter on the Amalfi coast, which can be horribly damp and gray, with a slicing wind. So January and February were times for a visit to Thailand or to La Costa, Gore’s favorite health spa in Southern California. Howard liked returning to the Hollywood Hills, where he had a circle of friends. As before, Gore found himself in demand for talks at universities and colleges in the States, although he turned down most of these offers. Wherever he went now, a camera crew from BBC’s Omnibus followed him, as a major documentary was under way. (It would run over two nights in 1995.)
That same year Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward threw a small but elegant party for Howard’s sixty-fifth birthday in New York, at their penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park. Among the twenty or so guests that night were Mailer and his wife Norris Church, Joan Didion, and Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. After dinner, one of Newman’s daughters sang, then Gore rose to toast his partner of more than four decades. “You all know him, which is why you’re here,” he said, “and I know him better than you do. He’s a wonderful friend, and he makes life possible. He could have had a career in music—everyone has heard him sing—but he put that to one side. So, Howard—here’s to you.” Howard smiled and wiped tears from his eyes, then blew a kiss to Gore.
Gore’s nephew Hugh Steers died in March 1995—an event that seemed to hit Gore especially hard. Hugh’s death from AIDS brought the disease close to home. Until this moment, in fact, Gore had managed to push it away, saying that only foolish people got AIDS. Absurdly, as noted earlier, he believed that he could never get it himself, as he didn’t go in for anal penetration.
Gore had also become fond of Hugh’s younger brother, Burr—a tall, willowy, good-looking young man who had bumped around in the world of New England prep schools. Burr recalls: “I think he saw me as a kind of son he never had. I had been kicked out of my schools, and he liked that sort of thing. I was a rebel. I looked up to him, and he responded to this affectionately.” Burr would please his uncle by taking up a career in film, as a director, and Gore played a small part in Igby Goes Down, a coming-of-age film about a young man who is trying to escape from his upper-crust family and the oppressive world of snobbish prep schools. “It was a marvelous script,” said Gore, “and beautifully directed by Burr, and it showed a world that most people don’t know about.” This was a world that not only interested but obsessed Gore, who now recalled fondly his time at Exeter. “He actually hated Exeter,” said Howard, “but he talked about it now like it was heaven.”
Another obsession was Franklin Roosevelt and his world, so he readily agreed to a request from Barbara Epstein to review Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley by Geoffrey C. Ward. Gore had met Suckley, known as Daisy, and his tender review of this book allowed him, once again, to link himself with the old-money inhabitants of big houses along the Hudson. He writes in this piece: “Fear of class war is never far from the River mind.” He knew, deep inside, that he didn’t belong in this class, although he had lived among them, or beside them, for twenty years. He heard them talking and could mimic these voices that echoed in his head. But he understood that the grandson of a senator from Oklahoma could not really match a Roosevelt, an Astor, or any descendant of the great families who lived downriver from Edgewater in towns like Hyde Park, Rhinebeck, or Rhinecliff. “I was an outsider from nowhere,” he confessed, in a rare moment of frankness on the subject of class.
Gore was a memoirist by nature, but Palimpsest (1995) was a more systematic treatment of his life than anything he had yet attempted. It’s a fine-grained and evocative book, in a genre that Gore both understood and valued. He frequently noted in conversation that perhaps the major strain of American writing was autobiography, reaching back to Benjamin Franklin, moving through Henry David Thoreau, Henry Adams, and any number of others. He had resisted writing this book for decades, being aware that memory plays one false, and that it’s impossible not to invent the past as much as recall it. He had endlessly retold the stories about his blind grandfather, his drunken mother, his Exeter days, his Edgewater and Hollywood capers, his troubles with The New York Times, adding and subtracting details, shaping each story like a piece of fiction. He had a cast of characters in his head who had become, in time, figures of monstrous proportion: Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Mailer, Buckley. Even Richard Nixon played a prominent role in his theater of the mind. And there were saints, too: Eleanor Roosevelt, Fred Dupee, “the most charming of men,” Paul Newman. Oddly enough, in Palimpsest one heard no mention of Gore’s usual circle of Roman friends, his real “family.” The names he would mention were those that added to his imperial self: fellow senators in their togas, adjacent faces on the cultural Mount Rushmore of his dreams.
The erotic passages about Jimmie Trimble stood out, and they surprised many of Gore’s friends, even Howard, who said with some bitterness: “I didn’t hear much about Jimmie for decades. Hardly a word. Suddenly he’s front and center in Gore’s mind. Where did he come from all of a sudden? What was that about?” At least in its explicitness, this was a fairly recent obsession, and perhaps a necessary fiction for Gore. Jimmie became an idealized figure in his mind, the young heterosexual male who would “mess around.” He was giving a local habitation and a name to something he had thought about, fantasized about, for much of his adult life.
Gore begins the memoir with the question in italics: A Tissue of Lies? He knew he would be accused of making everything up, but he had decided to put his stories together in the ways he remembered them. Serious readers were expected to understand that Palimpsest is a work of fiction, as in the Latin fictio, which means “to shape,” narrative as an arrangement of facts. And Gore worked hard to get the facts right: the dates and names, the places. But what he made of them was his own business as he returns, in memory, to the Hudson River valley, wondering if he did the right thing: “I have recurring dreams about Edgewater,” he says, “and sometimes I wonder if I should have given it up.” He dreams about a visit there. After saying hello to the old postmaster and storekeeper nearby, he steps into the house. It’s in disrepair. Looking out his bedroom window, he sees that the river “has eaten away most of the lawn. In fact, the water is alarmingly close to the house, while some sort of factory has been built on my nearby island.” Relief comes as he walks through the house and sees “a long vista of splendid rooms, with painted ceilings, like a Roman palace.” He has the same dream, over and over. What did it mean? Freud says that a dream of a house is usually a dream of the dreamer’s soul.
At seventy, Gore remained uncertain about his true place in the world. And he tried to second-guess himself. Should he have pushed on, leaving Edgewater, which he adored? The move to Italy had been a bold one, of course. But what about the beloved country left behind, the one he had written about so often, becoming (in his view) its biographer? With a subtle fondness, Gore circles the first four decades of his life, avoiding linearity, dipping into scenes from the past, summoning images, erasing them, building a palimpsest—a script where earlier erasures bleed through the present writing, not unlike the past itself, which colors the present, distorts it, informs it. Toward the end, Gore writes with startling insight into his process of self-creation:
While I’ve been here, I’ve also been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts—“palimpsesting”—all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what those first thirty-nine years were all about as we grew more and more ingenious in finding new ways of killing off the human race and its support system, the small planet that each of us so briefly visits. No, I haven’t found any pattern at all to life itself, but then there is probably none other than birth and growth, decay and death, something we all know from the start. As for who I was then as opposed to now…
The “I” gives way, halfway through this paragraph, to the collective “we” who destroy the world around the “I.” The writer creates a palimpsest before our eyes, searching for a pattern, falling back on the usual human story—birth, growth, decay, death. In some ways, the memoir itself substitutes for life; the voice lives beyond the words, lofty and bemused, world-weary, all-knowing, tentative, curious, embracing. It’s also very funny at times in ways that undermine the pomposity of the Self and celebrate and sing its accomplishments, as in the memory of a dinner for Gore in Washington where he sits next to Alice Longworth—the eldest child of Teddy Roosevelt—who says to him by way of compliment: “I loved Justinian.”
Toward the end of Palimpsest, Gore confesses that he has written not a ghost story but a love story, referring to Jimmie Trimble. But Trimble simply stands in for everything Gore wanted but could never quite have. This is a tale of self-love, dedicated to a mask: the carefully wrought persona that Gore could summon in a moment, the face that glowed in the dark of his imagination, but which in the mirror often sagged or, more frighteningly, disappeared.
The reviews of Palimpsest were largely positive, acknowledging its “unflagging brilliance.” Christopher Hitchens wrote at length in the London Review of Books, saying: “We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between literature and politics, America and the world, the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane.” In The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who reviewed many of Gore’s later books, observed with some truth “that much cruelty is present…on the author’s part, in varying degrees, toward most of the people he has ever known.” He adds that “none of this is gratuitous.” On the other hand, the name-dropping annoyed some reviewers, and one could argue—many actually did—that this memoir was an extended gossip column, with a litany of famous names in boldface. Certainly it delighted Gore that such luminous figures as Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Paul Newman, Johnny Carson, John Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, and Hillary Clinton had paraded through his life. It was a very big parade, a Mardi Gras of celebrity. But it was a dream as well. Each of these characters played a part in his psychic reconstruction, reflecting some aspect of himself.
While Gore was promoting Palimpsest in London, Michael and Linda Mewshaw met him for dinner one night at the Connaught, where he was staying. It surprised Mewshaw that, at seventy, Gore looked so “thoroughly dissipated,” with a bulging stomach and stiff knees that made it awkward for him to cross a room without wincing. Howard looked even worse, tired and pale, with a scarlet rash on the right side of his face. “We joined them in their suite, and Howard and Gore were already drunk before dinner,” recalls Mewshaw. “Room service sent up a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and a pot of caviar, much of which dribbled down Gore’s shirt front, along with hard-boiled egg yolk and toast crumbs. He razzed me that my hair was thinning.” Howard chimed in: “Look who’s fucking talking.” At dinner, Gore insisted on ordering for everyone: quail’s eggs, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, a new wine with each course, and spotted dick, a dessert he favored for the name alone. But he didn’t eat a bite of it, content to consume his sugar in liquid form.”
Of course he got up the next morning and wrote for several hours. Work came first, even when traveling. He began a series of long personal essays and reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications, each of which might be considered an outtake from Palimpsest. These included an evocation of the Greenwich Village–based novelist Dawn Powell, his friend from New York in the fifties (and whose neglected fiction Gore exhumed and praised in two of his best critical essays) and a shrewd recollection of Clare Boothe Luce, “the recent widow of the founder of Time, in whose giggly pages both my father and I had so often been fictionalized.” He clearly adored her, saying: “After Eleanor Roosevelt, Clare was easily the most hated woman of her time—she was too beautiful, too successful in the theater, in politics, in marriage. Feminism as we now know it was a minor eccentricity in those days. Otherwise, she might have been admired as what she was, a very tough woman who had so perfectly made it in a man’s world.”
Gore had befriended a wide range of women in the course of his adult life. “I think people don’t realize how much Gore liked to be with women, enjoyed their friendship, their company. He loved women, and they loved him,” says Sarandon. In the late nineties, he began to understand fully that women were as marginalized as gay people. “To be a lesbian,” he said, “was to be sidelined even further.” He had warm friendships with Claire Bloom, Boaty Boatwright, Sue Mengers, and Barbara Epstein. And he liked Erica Jong, who first met him at the Salzburg Global Seminar in 1993. Jong recalls: “We had a friendship over the next decades. Once he sent me a note, very upset about something I’d written about Princess Margaret. He invited me to lunch at the apartment in the Largo Argentina—and I remember that he first said, ‘How do you like these chairs? I bought them from the set of Ben-Hur.’ He was very protective of Princess Margaret, and I apologized for saying something that, in his view, was slandering someone I’d never met. He was right about that. I found this protectiveness very touching.” Jong was also struck by his relationship with Howard, which “was intense, and loving.”
In the late nineties, he relied on Howard even more heavily than before, anxious about his whereabouts if his companion disappeared from the house for several hours without saying where he had gone. He also liked to complain to Howard about his health, as mortality had begun to knock loudly. Gore’s arthritis returned—the old problem that dated from his wartime experiences in the Aleutian Islands; now he had considerable difficulty walking any real distance or climbing stairs. He slept badly, drinking quantities of whiskey to soothe his nerves most nights: a form of self-medication that would, in due course, only aggravate his health problems. In the spring of 1996, five rectal polyps were removed at a hospital in Los Angeles, after which he flew straight to Naples, getting so drunk on the plane that he fell in the airport in Rome. Back in Ravello the next day, with a bad hangover, he swallowed five or six aspirins to deal with the pain. That night, he felt queasy and went to bed before ten. “I woke up in a pool of blood in the middle of the night,” he recalled, “and I thought it was over. Howard called the boys from the village, and they carried me into the piazza on a stretcher. An ambulance took me to a hospital in Salerno, where I nearly died.” It was the aspirin, of course, that had provoked the bleeding, and the Italian doctors told him to rest.
He lay in bed for days at La Rondinaia, reading proofs of a long article on John Updike’s career that he had written for The Times Literary Supplement before he fell ill. It had been commissioned by Ferdinand Mount, who got more than he expected. For a long time Gore had felt resentful of Updike, who had won every award that American authors can win—the darling of the establishment. But these accolades were, in Gore’s estimate, undeserved. “Although I’ve never taken Updike seriously as a writer,” he wrote, “I now find him the unexpectedly relevant laureate of the way we would like to live now, if we have the money, the credentials, and the sort of faith in our country and its big God that passes all understanding.”
“I could not understand how anybody could rebel against a system so clearly benign,” wrote Updike, in a line that was bound to set off Gore, who had never found the system “so clearly benign.” Updike writes of the Vietnam War that he felt “uncomfortable” with what had happened in Southeast Asia, yet he wonders “how much of the discomfort has to do with its high cost, in lives and money, and how much with its moral legitimacy.” Updike admits that he actually favored intervention in foreign countries with military power “if it does some good,” expressing a legitimate concern about the need for “genuine elections” in South Vietnam. Furious with such talk, Gore is all over him with the facts of history. “But the American government had stopped the Vietnamese from holding such elections a decade earlier,” he writes, “because, as President Eisenhower noted in his memoirs, North and South Vietnam would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh and ‘we could not allow that.’ ”
From here, Gore takes aim at Updike’s famous Rabbit tetralogy:
“At times, reading Updike’s political and cultural musings, one has the sense that there is no received opinion that our good rabbit does not hold with passion.” Then Gore goes to work on Updike’s style in his most recent novel, quoting from In the Beauty of the Lilies: “The hoarse receding note drew his consciousness…to a fine point, and while that point hung in his skull starlike he fell asleep upon the adamant bosom of the depleted universe.” Gore asks: “Might Updike not have allowed one blind noun to slip free of its seeing-eye adjective?”
Was Gore fair to Updike? Probably not. He ignores the lyrical early stories, which subtly evoke small-town life, the author’s countless insightful reviews in The New Yorker, the genuine allure of the Rabbit novels, and the deft portrait of the sexual politics of suburban America’s “post-pill paradise” in Couples. Gore’s piece was polemical, yet he performed a kind of cultural service, speaking his mind, drawing Updike’s career—especially his political views—into fresh focus. And his take on Updike influenced a number of younger critics, such as James Wood, who would suggest in a review a few years later that Updike “is a writer for whom different subjects have the same sensuous textures, whether a vagina, an air-conditioner or a petal. All is ‘more matter’ for his prose, all can be given the same beautiful finish, the same equalizing enamel.” Updike had been given a pass for too long, in Gore’s view.