My friendship with Gore Vidal began in the mid-eighties, when I lived for a period on sabbatical with my wife and young children in Atrani, a village on the coast of southern Italy. We rented a small stone villa on a cliff overlooking the sea, with a view to Salerno to the south and Capri just out of sight to the north. The bay glistened below us, almost too bright to bear, with fishing vessels departing each morning in search of mullet, mussels, mackerel, tuna, and squid that would be unloaded in the afternoon and sold in wooden barrels by the dock. I went in the mornings to a café in Amalfi, walking into town along a stony footpath where a thousand cats seemed to prowl, where sturdy women carried groceries slowly up hundreds of steps and children kicked footballs in back alleys. The smells of laundry soap, cat piss, and wildflowers were ubiquitous.
We had a rooftop terrace, above which rose a lemon grove and limestone cliffs. A massive villa—alabaster white, clinging to the rocks like a swallow’s nest—loomed above us, and we wondered who lived there in such opulence. Some Italian nobleman? A local Mafia don? A film star? When I asked the tobacconist in town about its resident, he said, “Ah, lo scrittore! Gore Vidal. Americano.” He explained that the writer stopped by his shop almost every afternoon for a newspaper, then retired to the bar next door for a drink, where he would sit and read for an hour or so before taking the bus up the hill to Ravello.
I knew the work of Gore Vidal moderately well already. Having been an antiwar activist during the Vietnam era, I admired his political commentaries in Esquire and The New York Review of Books. I never forgot his fiery debates with William F. Buckley during the presidential conventions of 1968, especially during the siege of Chicago. He had held his ground, driving Buckley mad with his relentless logic and unflappable manner. I had read half a dozen of his novels, including Julian, Myra Breckinridge, Burr, and Lincoln. Needless to say, I wanted to meet him.
Responding to a note I’d sent, Gore pounded on my door one afternoon not long after our arrival, inviting my wife and me to dinner. I was terrified, as his reputation preceded him, and thought he might be tricky. But a friendship soon blossomed. I often met him for a drink or dinner, and a series of conversations began that lasted until his death in 2012. It would be fair to say, in a crude way, that I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son. We had a good deal in common, including a passion for liberal politics, American history, and books. We both loved Henry James, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, and Henry Adams—and we invariably found we had more to talk about than time allowed. We also shared a love of both Italy and Britain. By that time I had spent seven years in the British Isles, and it turned out we knew many of the same people. The literary world is, in fact, quite small—especially in Britain and Italy, where writers and editors often converge at parties and literary events.
In the decades that followed, we spoke on the phone every week—for periods on a daily basis. And I would stay with him in Ravello or, later, Los Angeles, meeting him often when he traveled. I have strong memories of our time together in such places as Rome, Naples, Edinburgh, Oxford, London, New York, Boston, even Salzburg and Key West. He proved more than helpful to me as a younger writer, reading drafts of my books, offering frank critiques and encouragement. We discussed his work at length, too—he would frequently send a typescript or galley for me to read.
His phone calls, in later years, often began: “What are they saying about me?” To a somewhat frightening degree, he depended on the world’s opinion. Once, in one of those memories that stands in for many others, my wife and I were sitting in his study in Ravello when he came in with drinks. On the wall behind his desk were twenty or so framed magazine covers, with Gore’s face on each one. I asked, “What’s that all about, those covers?” He said, “When I come into this room in the morning to work, I like to be reminded who I am.”
Over many decades he had built a huge empire of self, sending out colonies in various languages. “They love me in Brazil,” he would say. Or Bulgaria, or Turkey, or Hong Kong. I took his rampant egotism with a grain of salt. It was part of him, but only part. The narcissism was, at times, an exhausting and debilitating thing for Gore, as it proved impossible to get enough satisfying responses. He required a hall of mirrors for adequate reflection, and there was never enough. The nature of the narcissistic hole is such that it can’t be filled. At times, I wondered about how much money and time I spent in winging off to various far-flung cities to spend a few days with him, and my transatlantic phone bills reflected my own mania. But his flame was very bright and warm, and I was drawn to it.
He was usually kind to me, and to others in his surprisingly discrete circle of friends. He listened to my ideas for books and essays carefully, eager to respond in useful ways. He liked to know every detail in the lives of my children. He took an interest in my wife’s work as a psychotherapist and asked about this frequently. When we met in various cities, we had lavish dinners in good restaurants, and there was never any question about who would pay. “I’m very rich,” he would say, picking up the tab.
In the early nineties, Gore asked me to take over the biography that Walter Clemons was writing—or not writing because of writer’s block and diabetes (among other things that seemed to delay Clemons). My wife, perceptively, insisted that I decline, saying that I would have to choose between the biography and my friendship. I couldn’t have both. She understood that he would try to control what I wrote at every turn, driving us both insane. So I decided then to write a book that could only be published after his death, a frank yet fond look at a man I admired, even loved, and who had preoccupied me for such a long time. In the mid-nineties, I did edit a book about him, enlisting a number of critics to discuss phases of his career. I interviewed him then, and frequently in the years that followed, making it clear that one day I would write a book about him. He encouraged this Boswellian vein, and would sometimes say, “I hope you’re writing this down!” In fact, I did. And over the years, I interviewed people he knew, such as Anthony Burgess, Graham Greene, Alberto Moravia, Paul Newman, Richard Poirier, Frederic Prokosch, and many others. On several occasions I interviewed his companion, Howard Austen, a wry and congenial man with a big heart.
On one of my last visits with Gore, in the Hollywood Hills, he wondered if I would follow through and write a book about him. I said that I would. “So write the book,” he said, “and do notice the potholes. But, for God’s sake, keep your eyes on the main road!” In the course of bringing together thinking of nearly three decades about this complicated and gifted man, I’ve tried to take this advice seriously, emulating Gore himself, a writer who rarely lost sight of the road before him.
The reader will find brief first-person vignettes between the chapters, recollections of moments in our friendship that stuck in my head. In writing them, I thought of the suggestive vignettes between the stories of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time and how each positioned the reader to enter the next story. My vignettes were culled from my journals, in each case written soon after the event described. This is as far as I go in making this a memoir of a friendship. It’s not that. It’s the story of Gore Vidal’s extraordinary life and writing.
A passage from Gore’s 1959 essay on Suetonius, the father of biographical writing, comes to mind. He praised this great Roman biographer who, “in holding up a mirror to those Caesars of diverting legend, reflects not only them but ourselves: half-tamed creatures, whose great moral task it is to hold in balance the angel and the monster within—for we are both, and to ignore this duality is to invite disaster.” Gore certainly embodied both the angel and the monster, and he knew it. Over the decades, I witnessed more of the angel than the monster, although I saw him lash out at friends, and several times he said hurtful things to me, as when I got a fellowship at an Oxford college and Gore remarked, “They don’t let in wops like you, do they really?” I would always come back at him, saying he had insulted me, but he would usually pretend that nothing had happened, and I let it pass. I allowed him to speak rudely to me to maintain a sense of equilibrium between us—a fault of mine, no doubt. But one usually had a choice with Gore: Agree with him or leave. I valued our friendship for a variety of reasons, including his mentorship, and—perhaps more than most—have a lot of patience. I made the decision to hang in there.
My goal in writing this book has been to look at the angel and the monster alike, offering a candid portrait of a gifted, difficult, influential man who remained in the foreground of his times. Gore gave me full access to his life: his letters and papers, his friends. He told me to say what I saw whenever I wrote about him, not pulling my punches. That is, of course, how he lived his life. I’d like to think he would appreciate my efforts, although I’m not looking forward to our meeting on the other side.