Every time a friend succeeds, something in me dies.
—Gore Vidal
I. RETHINKING WASHINGTON
In 1996, Gore hosted a three-part series on British television called Gore Vidal’s American Presidency, treating the fortunes and misfortunes of White House occupants from George Washington to Bill Clinton. “I saw very little to admire in most of them,” he recalled, although he found James K. Polk “surprisingly intelligent if low-key.” In the past century, he saw the modern Oval Office as a stage set, where the president broadcasts on behalf of corporate constituents. “Mostly, the president’s backers get what they paid for,” Gore said.
Yet Gore regarded Washington, D.C., as home, and he often drifted back to Rock Creek Park in memory. He now conceived a short novel set in the Smithsonian—a fantastic romp through history with T., a thirteen-year-old boy who encounters a group of nuclear scientists in the basement of this fabled museum. The recursive effects of time travel would allow him, as in Live from Golgotha, to go back into history, encountering figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh, Grover Cleveland, and Eleanor Roosevelt. He had made notes toward writing this novel in 1996, and went full bore on the project the following winter in Los Angeles, finishing a draft in the spring of 1997 in Ravello.
As usual, he took on review assignments that interested him. In the fall of 1997 he reflected at length in The New Yorker on The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour M. Hersh—an explosive study of John Kennedy. Hersh saw JFK as a reckless man whose behavior nearly destroyed his presidency. Hersh was a relentless investigator and had done his homework. Gore writes:
For some reason, Hersh’s “revelations” are offensive to many journalists, most of whom are quick to assure us that although there is absolutely nothing new in the book (what a lot they’ve kept to themselves!), Hersh has “proved” nothing. Of course there is really no way for anyone ever to prove much of anything, short of having confessions from participants, like the four Secret Service men who told Hersh about getting girls in and out of Jack’s bed. But when confronted by these smoking guns the monkeys clap their hands over their eyes and ears and chatter, “Foul allegations by soreheads.”
He concludes: “In retrospect, it has always been incredible that someone as thoroughly disreputable as Joe Kennedy should have been allowed to buy his sons major political careers.”
Gore never lost the itch for public office, and still dreamed, however unrealistically, of running again. He did make it into Congress in the movies, playing a tiny role as Congressman Page in Shadow Conspiracy (1997), a political thriller that starred Charlie Sheen, Donald Sutherland, and Sam Waterston (Gore’s TV Lincoln). “It was among the worst films ever shot on celluloid, almost in a class with Myra Breckinridge,” said Gore. Made for more than $40 million, it grossed just over $2 million. “For that money, I could have got into Congress.” He also acted in Gattaca (1997), playing the head of a space program in this excellent sci-fi film written and directed by Andrew Niccol. This was Gore’s best performance on film, but these tiny acting jobs were amusements, a way of coming up out of a different hole every time, keeping his enemies off guard and his brand in mass circulation.
His serious journalism attracted a literate audience, as before, as when he published “Shredding the Bill of Rights” in Vanity Fair in November 1988. It opens with one of Gore’s drollest lines: “Most Americans of a certain age can recall exactly where they were and what they were doing on October 20, 1964, when word came that Herbert Hoover had died.” The piece runs through recent abridgments of American freedoms, ending with a note on Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Gore makes a genuine attempt to understand McVeigh’s criminal madness, although he says pointedly: “Nothing could justify the murder of those 168 men, women, and children, none of whom had, as far as we know, anything at all to do with the federal slaughter at Waco, the ostensible reason for McVeigh’s fury.” McVeigh inevitably read Gore’s piece and wrote seductively from prison. And Gore was intrigued. Although he condemned the murder of innocents, he regarded McVeigh as a kind of existential hero. (One recalls that Norman Mailer made the same mistake in 1981 with a murderer called Jack Henry Abbott, who, when extricated from prison with the help of Mailer and others, killed someone else almost immediately.)
In due course Gore somehow became convinced that McVeigh didn’t actually participate in the bombing. Responding to Gore’s sympathy, McVeigh invited him to witness his execution in Terre Haute. Still intrigued by this deluded young man, Gore agreed to do so, but the date of the execution shifted and he didn’t go. “I wish I had been there,” Gore said, “I don’t know why. It was a curious thing.” To him, McVeigh was another Billy the Kid, an outlaw who acted in violent and lawless ways yet wasn’t, at heart, a bad fellow. Gore had certainly been seduced by the tone of McVeigh’s letters, which were surprisingly intimate, as when he wrote to chide Gore about his preoccupation with getting old. “Not to worry,” McVeigh wrote, “recent medical studies tell us that Italy’s taste for canola oil, olive oil and wine helps extend the average lifespan and helps prevent heart disease in Italians—so you picked the right place to retire to.”
In his post-execution piece on McVeigh in Vanity Fair, Gore quotes excerpts from these letters, explaining that McVeigh had been outraged by the siege of Waco, Texas, where federal authorities (responding to reports of child abuse) raided a religious community and killed more than eighty members of a cult known as the Branch Davidians. Members of this eccentric Christian group were burned to death with their leader, David Koresh. At this time, McVeigh denied knowing there were children in the Murrah Federal Building—as if this mitigated his crime. “Bombing the Murrah federal building,” McVeigh told Gore, “was morally and strategically equivalent to the US hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations.”
Gore’s thinking about McVeigh anticipates later misjudgments that would cause many to dismiss him as some kind of crank. Even Howard found Gore’s obsession with McVeigh a bit extreme and possibly dangerous for his reputation, but Gore dug in his heels. In mid-August 2001, for example, he gave a speech at the Edinburgh Festival where he called McVeigh “a Kipling hero, a boy with an overdeveloped sense of justice.” The audience hissed loudly, but Gore overrode them, even comparing McVeigh to John Brown, the fiery abolitionist who was captured in a raid at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, in 1859. The most embarrassing moment came when, onstage, Gore declared: “I am about to drop another shoe. I have been working with a researcher who knows at least five of the people involved in the making of the bomb and its detonation. It may well be that McVeigh did not do it. In fact, I am sure he didn’t do it. But when he found out he was going to be the patsy, he did something psychologically very strange. He decided to grab all credit for it himself, because he had no fear of death.”
II. DREAMS OF WHOLENESS
Gore was also upset by the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton. Charged with perjury and obstruction of justice, the president was officially impeached by the House of Representatives on December 19, 1998, although the Senate overturned both charges on February 12, 1999. During this period, Gore gave a blistering talk at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. Michael Lind recalled that occasion, as Gore wandered off script in an obvious state of rage:
I found myself as uncomfortable as the other members of the auditorium audience, when, during his speech, Vidal launched into what sounded like a defense of Timothy McVeigh, the far-right would-be revolutionary whose bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 was the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil before the al-Qaida attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. While not exactly condoning McVeigh, Vidal told us that a violent reaction was inevitable, given the way that the federal government was oppressing American farmers.
I could sense that others in the audience shared my disquiet. The farmers? What the hell is he talking about? As his speech degenerated into a tirade, his accent changed from mid-Atlantic to a distinctive upcountry Southern twang. Before our eyes the polished, patrician public intellectual metamorphosed into a ranting backwoods populist politician.
The Smithsonian Institution appeared soon after. The book was, Gore noted, “a story that kept pulsing in my head, a novel about a boy lost in the fun house of a museum, who needs desperately to change the course of events.” The central character in his twenty-third novel is T., a thirteen-year-old who resembles Jimmie Trimble as well as Gore at that age. T. (like Gore and Jimmie) is a student at St. Albans when the story opens on Good Friday in 1939. The plot thickens as T. discovers that World War II is coming, realizing with a shudder that either he or his clone at St. Albans will perish in that war, much as Jimmie Trimble did at Iwo Jima on March 1, 1945. This larky fiction is set at the venerable institution that lends its title to the book. Gore knew the Smithsonian Castle well, with its “dark dried-blood crenelated towers and wide moat.” He had wandered among its waxwork exhibits as a boy, much like his hero, a young genius who heeds the call to adventure, immersing himself in the various worlds of these historical figures. T. encounters an Iroquois tribe; Lindbergh’s airplane, Spirit of St. Louis; a number of well-known nuclear scientists; and, of course, assorted presidents of the United States, such as Grover Cleveland (whose young wife is captured by the Iroquois tribe here). Lincoln presides over the waxworks in the basement, and—in a superbly comic turn—happens to be reading Carl Sandburg’s sentimental, six-volume biography. Alas, this Lincoln is not himself, or he would be reading Lincoln by Gore Vidal. (The bullet from the gun of John Wilkes Booth has turned Lincoln into a ghoulish halfwit.)
T. spins through time, covering many bases, as when he loses his virginity with an Iroquois squaw (who in the intersecting realities of this fictional simulacrum turns out to be Mrs. Cleveland). “Like most teenage mathematical geniuses,” writes Gore, “T. had read the dirty part of a lot of forbidden books and now he understood the cataclysmic nature of what he had done with the white squaw.” Needless to say, none of this is politically correct or especially tasteful. The novel blends veiled counter-autobiography with sci-fi fantasy, creating a fairly light but entertaining mélange of genres. Gore had been here before, of course, mixing time zones and realities, as in Kalki and Live from Golgotha. Yet the radical edge of satire is missing here. The impetus of the novel was Gore’s longing for T., his lost “other half,” and this endows the narrative with an almost tender feeling.
The novel’s multilayered story unfolds over a bizarre weekend, moving from Good Friday to Easter Sunday, and it duly ends with a kind of resurrection. But it’s not a happy Sunday as James Smithson (the British scientist who left his money to a nephew who founded the museum that bears his name) talks with T. near the end, fielding the boy’s worried question about what comes next in history. “The human race will kill itself. That goes without saying. The virus—us—will kill our host the earth, or at least make it uninhabitable for us.” These dire echoes of Kalki coincide with Gore’s previous visions of destruction—a consistent motif in his work for many decades. But it’s a game, at least in this tale, as Smithson reminds the suddenly not-so-innocent boy.
The Smithsonian Institution completes Gore’s cycle of fantastic novels or “inventions,” as he called them; it does so gently, without the savage quality that permeates his better novels in this vein, such as Messiah, Myra Breckenridge, or Kalki. On the whole, the reviewers were kind; they scratched their heads and nodded, seeing this as a form of light entertainment. “It didn’t sell much,” said Gore, “but nobody expected it to sell. It spun off from Palimpsest, I think: I thought about my early days in Washington, at St. Albans, and my lifelong run through history. I was bringing so many aspects of my life together here, wondering if I could rewrite the past, redo it, fix it. But you can’t. I couldn’t.”
III. ELDER STATESMAN
Enjoying the role of elder statesman, Gore offered regular “State of the Union” addresses to audiences from the National Press Club in Washington to college campuses—mostly in California. He was a frequent guest on talk shows, although it upset him that none had the broad reach of programs from earlier decades. He missed Johnny Carson, in particular. “I could never find the right venue,” he recalled. “The television culture had changed, with a younger and even more ignorant audience, and my sort of commentary didn’t play. You couldn’t even trust the hosts anymore. Even the morning shows turned away from guests with serious opinions.”
His preferred format for appearances in his last decades was that of the interview, where an interlocutor would ask him questions. I performed this role numerous times—at the 92nd Street Y or other venues in New York, at the Key West Literary Seminar, at the Writers Block in Los Angeles, on various stages in Salzburg, London, Rome, and Naples. Gore was a natural improviser, a ham with perfect timing. My job was to lob softballs for him to knock out of the park. He liked to riff on familiar topics, such as the metastatic growth of the American empire since Teddy Roosevelt, the spread of the national security state after World War II, the erosion of the Bill of Rights, the need to decriminalize drugs, or the various insults to good sense by such presidents as Reagan and—in later years—George W. Bush. He did his usual pitch-perfect impressions of Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan.
His command of history was obvious, but when challenged by someone in the audience, he could reply with deadly ferocity or sarcasm. Often, when asked about the future of the nation, he responded with a world-weary nod of the head, as at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills on March 19, 1998, when he declared: “The system has worn out. I don’t know what’s next. They keep trying to persuade us that if we get a nice man for president, all will be well. But we don’t have nice corporations.” When asked about the American political system, he said, in typical fashion: “Everyone knows it’s a con game. We have only the one party.” Someone asked him about attacks on American interests around the world and our need to defend ourselves. He waved a dismissive hand: “You can’t go on treating people like dirt and not get kicked in the face with it sometimes.”
As the millennium drew to a close, Gore wrote a major essay for The New York Review of Books, based on a 1995 lecture he had given in Oxford for Amnesty International. In that piece, he reflected on the ideas of Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century philosopher and political theorist who opposed all manner of reductionist thought, arguing famously that truth is something made, not found—a precursor of what is often referred to as constructivist epistemology. Vico predicted an age of chaos, to be followed by a new theocratic age. This gloomy forecast appealed to Gore, who argued that “as the curtain falls on our dismal century and ungraspable millennium,” everywhere one could see “signs of religious revival.” Once again, his thoughts proved oddly prescient.
IV. REVIEWING THE LIFE
At seventy-three, Gore had already lived a long life, moving from the passionate young man who stepped onto the national stage with a novel about the war, followed soon by one of the first mainstream novels on a gay theme. He dug into history and religion, struggling to define himself as he shifted into work for Hollywood and Broadway, often with eye-popping success. He turned overtly political as the sixties approached, running for office, writing The Best Man, becoming an essayist who fearlessly addressed political and social themes, a talking head on popular American and British talk shows, a gadfly at times, an American dissident. Then he returned to the novel, reaching back to the ancient world in Julian and Creation, extending his Narratives of Empire to six novels, with a seventh on the way. In the meantime, he wrote anarchic satires of American life, from Myra Breckinridge to The Smithsonian Institution—half a dozen novels that challenged the French nouveau roman as well as the American postmodernists for inventiveness, drawing on a range of genres, from the sci-fi thriller to the dystopian novel, often with a comic edge that was purely and potently Vidal: arch, droll, and anarchic.
Yet he had evaded serious attention from critics, with only a few monographs focused on his work. He was more a creature of publicity than literature—much to his annoyance. “The academy turned away from him,” said Richard Poirier, “probably because he was too popular. But he invited dismissal. His TV appearances didn’t help much. Hollywood charmed him, and he charmed them. His subjects or narrative strategies didn’t accord with the kinds of fiction that proved interesting to scholars or critics in the sixties and seventies, and so he never found a place on the syllabus.”
Critics had an opportunity to weigh in about Gore when, in 1999, Fred Kaplan published The Essential Gore Vidal, collecting many of his major essays as well as examples of his fiction. The problem was, of course, that most of this work—the essays in particular—were easily available in United States. The compendium reprinted large sections from the Narratives of Empire, especially Burr and Lincoln. The Best Man and Myra Breckinridge appear in full. There is almost nothing from the early Vidal except for a passage from The City and the Pillar. Messiah—surely one of Gore’s best early efforts—is missing entirely. It’s a curious publication altogether, and—as reviewers noticed—readers could easily acquire most of Vidal’s best work elsewhere.
Kaplan’s life of Vidal appeared at more or less the same time, allowing for a reconsideration of Gore’s career. As it were, Gore had pushed hard for this book, hoping to control his legacy in whatever ways he could. He had labored mightily to imprint the story of his life in the public mind, writing countless autobiographical asides in essays over five decades. He had recently published Palimpsest, his own lengthy record of the first thirty-nine years. And he had probably given more interviews to date than any author in the history of literature. A question arose on the lips of reviewers now: How did one compete with Gore himself in describing his life?
As it inevitably would, the biography infuriated Gore. Kaplan had delicately peeked through the veil of his sexuality. (Tim Teeman—an American-based British journalist—would rent the veil completely in 2013 with In Bed with Gore Vidal, a lively account of Gore’s sex life, where even the size and shape of the Vidalian penis gets some attention.) Kaplan avoided probing deeply into Gore’s sexual habits, but he revealed with patient genealogical research that this writer was not, as the public imagined, a blue-blood aristocrat but the son of a young man from South Dakota who had, by his athletic prowess, managed to get into West Point. Eugene Vidal had moved into the great world of Washington society by marrying the daughter of a U.S. senator. Yet this politician wasn’t a Roosevelt but a country lawyer from Webster County in Mississippi, a man who by grit and determination had found a perch in the Senate. Kaplan also revealed that Gore was not—as he often implied in conversation—a Kennedy insider but merely an onlooker. Nevertheless, Kaplan marveled at Gore’s energy, his brilliance and composure, his capacity for self-invention.
“Gore hated the book,” said Howard, “and threw it across the room. I never saw him like this before. He didn’t like mirrors.” Gore disputed nearly every fact about his family that Kaplan had unearthed, and loathed all references to his prodigious eating and drinking, his bloating waistline, the sense that his career had somehow faded. In repeated interviews he referred to “this dread biography which I’ve never read.” Yet Kaplan was a well-disposed and intelligent critic, and his book has a candidness that annoyed Gore but spoke well for Kaplan, who had plunged through the thicket of Gore’s unruly handwriting in the archives in Wisconsin (now at Harvard) and interviewed many figures of importance in Gore’s life. Nevertheless, reviewers found the biography lacking in narrative momentum and without an overarching theme; the caustic reviews by Richard Davenport-Hines in The Times Literary Supplement and James Wolcott in the London Review of Books confirmed Gore’s sense that he had chosen the wrong biographer.
V. THE GOLDEN AGE
Throughout 1999, Gore worked steadily on The Golden Age, the concluding novel in his Narratives of Empire. He kept to his usual routine, moving back and forth between Ravello and Los Angeles, with trips to New York and, for diet and relaxation, to La Costa. When he wasn’t writing or socializing or flying over vast territories, he was reading. “I rarely went to bed without a good book,” Gore said, and now he was rereading Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann’s retelling of the Faust legend in Germany in the decades before World War II, and The Golden Spur by Dawn Powell, a novel set in bohemian New York during the period when Gore and Powell moved in similar circles there.
Appearing at the Writers Bloc in Los Angeles on November 14, 1999, he spoke at length about the upcoming presidential election and, with unerring salesmanship, set the stage for his new novel. Insisting that FDR badly wanted to involve America in the war against Germany and Japan, he claimed that eight out of ten Americans in 1940 opposed intervention, forcing Roosevelt to manufacture their consent by whatever means he could. He noted that his novel would “deal with this subject at length.” Asked by a member of the audience where he got his inspiration, he replied, “I have an exaggerated sense of injustice.”
In mid-August 2000, the Democratic Party held its convention at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, and Gore liked being near the fun, especially since Al Gore would probably win the nomination. Although the two were not closely related, Gore enjoyed claiming kinship and often referred to him as “cousin Al.” The irrepressible Arianna Huffington, among others, organized a shadow convention at Patriot Hall, not far from the main affair. She invited Gore and Christopher Hitchens to respond to President Clinton’s convention address. “But a funny thing happened on the way to the fair,” recalled William Bradley, who also helped to organize the event. “We got shut down by the Los Angeles Police Department on a bomb threat.” Gore calmed nerves by recalling the Chicago riots in 1968, where he had debated Buckley on national television while chaos erupted on the streets. These very mild protests (and fake bomb threats) in Los Angeles were, by contrast, laughable.
The Golden Age appeared the following month. It was a palimpsest itself, a novel with another novel, Washington, D.C., lying beneath it, barely legible, its plot occasionally poking through the new narrative surfaces. The novel covers roughly the same period, beginning in 1939, when Americans wondered if the country would soon join the fight against Hitler. Of course Roosevelt, with his “amoral mastery of world politics and his ability to get what he wanted,” would use this crisis to guarantee an unprecedented third term for himself. Caroline Sanford—by now well-developed in both Empire and Hollywood—pushes to the forefront of the story, working the levers of power. Her nephew, Peter Sanford (who often looks and speaks like Gore), shares the influence wielded by Aunt Caroline as he works both coasts with skill, even founding a magazine, The American Idea—meant as an antidote to the corrupt press. Blaise Sanford, James Burden Day, and Clay Overbury reappear—figures from the earlier novel, and we meet a number of new people, such as Harry Hopkins, FDR’s right-hand man. But overlaps and echoes from Washington, D.C. confuse the narrative, and coherence evaporates in episodes where the author himself, Gore Vidal, appears in Ravello in conversation with Peter Sanford. It’s as if Gore simply had to meet his stand-in personally, in fictional time and space (with a touch of metafictional riffing). In Washington, D.C., Clay was obviously meant as a JFK figure; now, in The Golden Age, we get both of them, creating a tug-of-war between fact and fiction.
The novel has very little in the way of story. The fictional superstructure mainly opens a space where Gore can debate the pros and cons of America entering the war. In its last chapter, Aaron Burr Decker stands in for the reader, wondering why both Sanford and his double, Vidal, feel so passionate about the attack on Pearl Harbor. He refers to Day of Deceit by the historian Robert B. Stinnett, a book that had fired Gore’s imagination. Indeed, Gore adopted Stinnett’s view wholesale, believing that FDR had known in advance about Pearl Harbor but chose to do nothing to stop it because he wanted to push the United States into the war. Peter says testily about Roosevelt: “He did what no president has ever done. Set us up. To be attacked.”
Decker says, “But didn’t it all end well? We won the war. We got the world. We saved as many of Hitler’s victims as we could. So some old ships got sunk.” “Some three thousand men got sunk, too,” replies Sanford. “And died.”
The novel ends, as do most historical novels by Gore, with a moment of wan rhapsody, a cynical withdrawal from mere human history:
As for the human case, the generations of men come and go and are in eternity no more than bacteria upon a luminous slide, and the fall of a republic or the rise of an empire—so significant to those involved—is not detectable upon the slide even were there an interested eye to behold the steadily proliferating species which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else, since change is the nature of life, and its hope.
Few readers or critics considered The Golden Age one of Gore’s better efforts in fiction. Gore liked to compare himself with Aldous Huxley as a novelist of ideas, but this is a novel of lectures whose title gives away the game. As noted, “the golden age” as a phrase became Gore’s mantra for various things, most of them joyful: the golden age of television or Hollywood, for instance. But in this novel irony gives way to cynicism, and all gold seems more like tarnished silver as Gore reflects on American imperial overreaching in the aftermath of World War II. The transmogrification from republic to empire, traced in the course of the Narratives of Empire, needed a final statement, and Gore provided one. And despite an exceptionally thin plot, the novel has moments of high comedy and serious reflection. Peter Kemp, a shrewd English critic, called Gore a “modern-day Suetonius” who observed the wickedness and pettiness of those in power with a cool eye. In a vast, intelligent, persuasive review of the entire sequence of American historical novels, Zachary Leader in the London Review of Books offered a judicious assessment, recognizing the “enormous task” that Gore had set for himself in these books, though he often missed the mark.
The reviews of The Golden Age were generally negative, and this upset Gore, who had expected plaudits for this capstone of his career—as he saw it. He wrote to Thomas Mallon: “I have a hunch that my books must look to be written in some strange code for reviewers who have no notion that there is a USA with an interesting history that never ceases to bear down on us and so, in order to explain the increasing lumbago, we blame it on Mrs. Portnoy.” (He refers, of course, to Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint.) “I don’t mind that our literary people know nothing, but I do mind that they don’t want to know anything.”
So how should one judge the Narratives of Empire? The series is focused almost exclusively on life at the top, on those who rule the United States from Washington, New York, or Hollywood. The limitations of such an approach are obvious, and Gore offers a narrow lens through which the reader must view American history. Yet his easy knowledge of the periods at hand give them an authenticity and presence, and his familiarity with the governing classes is entertaining as well as revelatory in its way. “Gore liked, understood, and respected power,” says Matt Tyrnauer. “He liked watching people with power, too.” Gore also noticed the self-destructive tendencies of such people, grinning as they climbed the greasy pole and stepped on the heads of those beneath them. His disappointment in the loss of our early republic, with its lofty aspirations and Enlightenment values, is palpable throughout. Of course he tends to lecture readers rather than embody an argument, but this was the kind of fiction he himself enjoyed. In any case, he took pleasure in writing these novels, and—in Burr and Lincoln—hit his stride, working at the top of his form and re-creating the biographical novel as a genre. It’s a pity the final installment was, indeed, a rather tepid performance.
VI. STILL THE BEST MAN
As the presidential campaigns kicked into high gear in 1999, Gore was approached by Jeffrey Richards, a young American producer, who came to Ravello to talk about reviving The Best Man. Gore liked it that Richards understood how political conventions had lost their unpredictability, becoming stage-managed coronations. No attempt was made to update the script. Apart from a few voice-over recordings by Walter Cronkite, the play went on as before, now a period piece with a sturdy cast that included Chris Noth, Charles Durning, Elizabeth Ashley, and Spalding Gray. It was retitled Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, in case anyone walking along Broadway might wonder about the name of the playwright.
In the early summer of 1999, Howard began feeling sick, coughing more than usual and complaining of headaches and back pain. An extensive rash spread from his neck to his right cheek, and he seemed confused at times. Gore decided that Howard was drinking too much, insisting that he stick to beer, which he believed was less toxic than whiskey or gin. “I knew things were going downhill,” said Gore, “but how quickly, I couldn’t guess.”
In years past Gore had declined invitations to join the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Joining such an establishment group had seemed ridiculous to him, even though he paradoxically sought academic and cultural affirmation. “I don’t want to prance about with professors and academic writers,” he would often say, disingenuously. But his much-admired friend Louis Auchincloss urged him to relent, and in 1999 he did, flying to New York for the installation.
On this visit to New York, Gore met Gerald Howard, his new editor at Doubleday, the baton having been passed once again. (And Doubleday was still part of the Random House family.) A new agent, Lynn Nesbit, had taken over from Owen Laster, but she soon passed her fractious client along to Richard Morris, who lavished professional and personal attention on Gore in his later years in comforting ways. “The last of my U.S. chronicles [The Golden Age] goes to Doubleday,” he had written to Mallon, “with Gerald Howard as editor. He has actually read me over the years.” He added a characteristically sour note about Laster, saying he “gave up agenting for social climbing long ago.” He tells Mallon that he has begun to notice how “in this golden age of the historical novel—my re-invention in the twentieth century—I am never mentioned.” It was, indeed, a constant refrain now that nobody understood his contribution to the genre of historical fiction.
Gore and Howard stayed at the Plaza, and Gore drank more than usual after the installation dinner at the American Academy. At a late breakfast the next day he told me that Howard had been poisoned by the food the night before: “I never thought they’d sink that low.” Howard was indeed yellow the next day, and he complained about blurring vision and abdominal cramps while Gore kept insisting it had been the food the night before. “The salmon was a month old!” he shouted. In Los Angeles a few days later, Howard (having been properly examined by doctors) underwent an operation for appendicitis. As Gore later said, “Howard’s abdominal cavity was awash with poison.” Howard improved at once, much to Gore’s relief, and they flew back to Italy for the start of the new millennium.
They had a few good months, with the spring of 2000 being their last happy time in Ravello. Gore assembled his latest crop of essays, which would appear in 2001 as The Last Empire. But in May it seemed that Howard’s coughing had become more than simply a tiresome symptom of smoking since the age of twelve. On a visit to Los Angeles in late June, a lung X-ray revealed a significant tumor, and the surgeon explained to Gore that because Howard’s lungs had been weakened by decades of smoking, an operation might be dangerous. But Gore, ever imperious, insisted on surgery and Howard acquiesced. Gore later wrote: “As the nurse opened the door to the operating room where I could not follow, Howard turned to me in his wheelchair and said, ‘Well, it’s been great.’ Then the door closed behind him.” He waited for more than three hours, or so he imagined, for news of Howard. It was, he eventually learned, a successful operation, and the doctors told Howard that his lungs were cancer free, at least for the time being.
Back in Ravello, life continued much as before, with Gore writing in the mornings. In the afternoons, he answered mail or read books for review or research. Interviewers would visit, and he didn’t mind: It meant that the Great Eraser would have to work harder to catch up. He no longer walked into Amalfi—his arthritic knees hurt too much for that—but he still swam in the pool on sunny days. He and Howard went to the San Domingo in the evenings, where they met local friends, dining at one of the nearby restaurants. They rarely made it home sober, stumbling along the narrow path to the villa. Gore often leaned on Howard for support; somehow Howard, a square-built man with sturdy legs, held him up. Once, as Gore told me, they tumbled into a bed of flowers and woke up several hours later, covered in insect bites.
Unpleasant feelings about the response to The Golden Age continued to frazzle Gore. Critics had considered his ideas about FDR and Pearl Harbor conspiratorial, and he found this infuriating. He picked a fight on the subject with Ian Buruma—a well-known Dutch historian and fellow contributor to The New York Review of Books. In an exchange in the magazine, Gore pointed out that in 1948 Charles A. Beard had written President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, arguing that Roosevelt had provoked Japan into the war. Buruma strenuously objected. But the facts do present a challenge for historians who think Roosevelt was genuinely surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Gore noted some obvious points: Why had we anchored more than seventy ships in such an obviously vulnerable area, especially since American intelligence had broken the Japanese code? We knew about Japan’s warlike intentions, even if we didn’t know what the exact place and time of the first attack would be. Of course it’s possible that intelligence mistakes and miscalculations about Japan’s intentions led Roosevelt to assume—at the least—that any attack lay in the future, thus allowing time to make adjustments in U.S. defense positions.
Gore harped on the subject, arguing again in The Times Literary Supplement on December 1, 2000, this time in response to a provocation by Clive James, that Roosevelt knew the attack was coming. He noted that American intelligence had cracked not only the Japanese diplomatic but also the military codes, and that General George Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, had called a meeting with journalists just three weeks prior to Pearl Harbor, informing them frankly that “war with Japan would start sometime during the first ten days of December.” Only a few days later, Secretary of State Cordell Hull presented a ten-point proposal to the Japanese, demanding complete Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina. They were also asked to support the Nationalist government in China and, indeed, cancel their agreement with the Axis powers. “FDR had dropped a shoe,” says Gore. “Now he waited for the Japanese to drop the other. They did.”
When The Last Empire—effectively Gore’s last major collection of essays—appeared in the spring of 2001, the book was largely ignored by the mainstream press. “It was like the early days again,” he said, “without a review in the daily Times, although the Sunday paper attacked.” Paul Berman, a neoconservative critic, was perhaps not the ideal reviewer for this volume of provocative essays, many of which revealed an old man with many axes to grind. Berman writes:
Having scrutinized all these essays—on literature, American history and politics, in nearly equal portions—I have come to know Vidal’s manias, and to fear them. Apart from the horribleness of Lincoln (which is owing to Lincoln’s dictatorial behavior in the Civil War, which ruined America forever), they are, in no particular order, the perfidy of Franklin Roosevelt in regard to Pearl Harbor, the income tax and Harry Truman’s decision on Feb. 27, 1947, to put up a fight against the Soviet Union, thus replacing America’s republican traditions with a sinister American empire.
This review caricatures the style and substance of Gore’s writing. In fact Gore never touted the “horribleness of Lincoln.” He did, to be sure, question Lincoln’s obsession with holding the Union together and doubted the depths of his abolitionist feelings. In the opening essay of The Last Empire, a review of Edmund Wilson’s journals, Gore approves of Wilson’s reading of the pre–Civil War Lincoln: “Wilson questioned the central myth of the American republic, which is also, paradoxically, the cornerstone of our subsequent empire—e pluribus unum—the ever tightening control from the center to the periphery.” Gore could easily envision a less perfect union, less centralized and centralizing. On this and other topics, he called received American opinion into question.
The Last Empire contains a few exemplary samples of Gore as literary critic, as in “Dawn Powell: Queen of the Golden Age,” a revisiting of an earlier interest in this still-neglected writer. He writes: “It was Dawn Powell’s fate to be a dinosaur shortly after the comet, or whatever it was, struck our culture, killing off the literary culture—a process still at work but no less inexorable.” Even better is the lengthy reexamination of Sinclair Lewis, a novelist who put his mark on American culture with such popular novels as Main Street, Babbitt, Dodsworth, and Arrowsmith. Gore observes wryly that this once-celebrated author “seems to have dropped out of what remains of world literature.” He puts the blame for this neglect on Lewis’s biographer, Mark Schorer, whose 867-page biography displayed a “serene loathing of his subject and all his works” that was nonetheless “impressive in its purity.” Gore reminds us that after a miraculous decade of productivity, the 1920s, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in 1930: “That was the period when the Swedes singled out worthy if not particularly good writers for celebration, much as they now select worthy if not particularly interesting countries or languages for consolation.” Looking at Main Street and Babbitt, he says, “There is a Balzacian force to the descriptions of people and places, firmly set in the everyday.”
His devastating essay on Updike is a piece of masterly deconstruction, a corrective to received opinion, which held that Updike was a great stylist and, possibly, one of the most important writers of the postwar era. Gore considered Updike’s meticulous and often poetic prose as mere “fancy writing,” and he dismissed Updike as a writer too narrowly focused on domestic life in the American suburbs, one far too wedded to a limited patriotic view of history and politics to create major fiction. He attacks Updike’s “blandness and acceptance of authority in any form.” Updike’s Christian faith also rubs Gore the wrong way, striking him as a passive form of piety.
Then comes a lengthy review of A. Scott Berg’s life of Charles Lindbergh—ever a subject of fascination to Gore, who had indeed sympathized with the America First movement (led partly by Lindbergh) as a schoolboy at Exeter. As ever, there is a loudly rung autobiographical bell: “Towards the end, he had come to dislike the world that he had done so much to create. First, he noticed the standardization of air bases everywhere. The sameness of food, even landscape. The boredom of air travel in jet liners. The fun was gone.” Gore ambles down memory lane, with the usual evocations of his grandfather and father, concluding that Lindbergh was probably “the best that we are ever apt to produce.” Now this lane has become crowded with figures such as Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, with JFK and Clare Boothe Luce, all ghosts of Gore’s past who rise again and again.
The last half of the collection fast-forwards to the present, with essays on Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tony Blair, and others. Reframing an old idea, Gore calls for a “People’s Convention,” suggesting it was time that the American people gathered to revise the U.S. Constitution, overhauling it to correct mistakes and update language that had become stale and, in some cases, misleading. This is late Gore at his most radical: “If we so choose, the entire Constitution could be rewritten. At this point I part company with the American Civil Liberties Union, who, for once, are more pessimistic about the people than I. The first thing they will get rid of is the Bill of Rights, the liberals moan. On which the answer is, first, I don’t think the people are suicidal and, second, what is the difference between losing those rights at an open convention as opposed to a gradual loss of them behind the closed doors of the current Supreme Court?” Other essays target familiar themes, often with a touch of barely controlled mania. In “Mickey Mouse, Historian,” he attacks Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.—a former ally who had, of course, devoted himself to the blessed memory of JFK in ways that rubbed Gore the wrong way. Schlesinger had recently criticized Gore’s three half-hour programs on the American presidency, and that was the last straw. No enemy could go unchallenged for long. “Shredding the Bill of Rights” is stronger than many of the political essays here, a survey of the loss of American civil liberties, with an emphasis on the rise of the surveillance state.
As the uncertain presidency of George W. Bush began, Gore was in an awkward position: less relevant, with a dwindling audience and, indeed, much of his writing career behind him. Ill health, his own and Howard’s, put obstacles before him that would be difficult to overcome, and his alcohol addiction didn’t help. Could he continue to work at the same level? Could he regain the spotlight? Did anyone really care about his critique of the American empire and its bulwark, the national security state? These questions would soon be answered, in fact. The coming wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would give him a lot to write about, and the excesses of the USA Patriot Act, enacted in the wake of 9/11, would present fresh opportunities for a man whose rhetorical skills had been blunted by age and alcohol but not destroyed.