Gore Vidal

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Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal in 2008 at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal
October 3, 1925 (1925-10-03) (age 82)
West Point, New York State, United States
Occupation Novelist, Essayist , Playwright
Nationality American
Genres Drama, fictional prose, essay, literary criticism
Literary movement Postmodernism
Influences
Influenced

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925; pronounced /ˌgɔər vɪˈdɑːl/ or /vɪˈdæl/) is an American author of novels, stage plays, screenplays, and essays, and the scion of a prominent political family. He is an outspoken critic of the American political Establishment, and a noted wit and social critic who wrote the ground-breaking The City and the Pillar (1948) that outraged mainstream critics as the first major American novel to feature unambiguous homosexuality.

Contents

[edit] Early years

Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal in West Point, New York, the only child of Lieutenant Eugene Luther Vidal (1895 – 1969) and Nina S. Gore (1903 - 1978). He was born in the Cadet Hospital of the United States Military Academy where his father was the first aeronautics instructor and was christened by the headmaster of St. Albans preparatory school, his future alma mater.[1] His second middle name honors maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, Democratic senator from Oklahoma.

Vidal's father, a "brawny, handsome" West Point all-American quarterback who was director of Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce (1933–1937) of the Roosevelt administration,[2] was one of the first Army Air Corps pilots, and, per biographer Susan Butler, was the great love of Amelia Earhart's life.[3] In the 1920s and 1930s, he was a co-founder of three American airlines: the Ludington Line (merged with others and became Eastern Airlines), Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT, became TWA), and Northeast Airlines (founded with Earhart), and the Boston and Maine Railroad. The elder Vidal was also an athlete in the 1920 and 1924 Summer Olympics (seventh in the decathlon; U.S. pentathlon team coach).[4][5]

Gore Vidal's mother was Nina Gore, an actress who had her Broadway debut in Sign of the Leopard in 1928.[6] She married twice after divorcing Gene Vidal in 1935; one husband was Hugh D. Auchincloss (stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) and, per Gore Vidal, she had "a long off-and-on affair" with actor Clark Gable.[7] She was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.[8] Vidal had four half-siblings from his parents' later marriages (the Rev. Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal Hewitt, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss Steers Straight) and five step-brothers from his mother's third marriage to Army Air Corps major general Robert Olds. Nephew Burr Steers is a writer and film director; nephew Hugh Auchincloss Steers (1963–1995) was a painter whose work is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Denver Art Museum.

Vidal was raised in Washington, D.C.; he attended Sidwell Friends School, then St. Albans School. Since Senator Gore was blind, the boy Vidal read aloud to him and was his guide; Vidal, thereby, walked the corridors of power.[citation needed] The senator's steadfast isolationism contributed a major principle of Gore Vidal's political philosophy, which is critical of foreign and domestic policies shaped by American imperialism.[citation needed] In 1943, on graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal joined the U.S. Army Reserve.

Although Vidal had a relationship with the bisexual writer Anaïs Nin, described in his memoir, Palimpsest and in her memoir The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vidal himself dismisses the idea of a romantic or sexual relationship in Palimpsest (pages 105-114 in particular). In his two autobiographical books -- Palimpsest (1995) and Point to Point Navigation (2006) -- Vidal described affairs with women such as actress Diana Lynn. For most of the late twentieth century, Vidal lived in Ravello, Italy, and Los Angeles, California. In 2003, he sold the 5,000-square-foot (460 m²) Italian villa, La Rondinaia (The Swallow's Nest) and moved to Los Angeles. In November 2003, Howard Austen, Vidal's companion since 1950,[9] died, and in February 2005 was buried in a plot for himself and Vidal at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C.

Vidal is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.[10]

[edit] Writing career

[edit] Fiction

Vidal, whom a Newsweek critic called "the best all-around man of letters since Edmund Wilson",[11] began his writing career at nineteen, with the publication of the military novel Williwaw, based upon his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty. The novel was successful. A few years later, The City and the Pillar caused a furor for its dispassionate presentation of homosexuality. The New York Times refused to review his next five books.[12] The novel was dedicated to "J.T."

After a magazine published rumors about J.T.'s identity, Vidal confirmed they were the initials of his St. Albans-era love, Jimmie Trimble, who was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on June 1, 1945; later saying Trimble was the only person he had ever loved.[citation needed] Subsequently, as his novels sold less, he wrote plays, films, and television series as a scriptwriter. Two plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were both Broadway and cinema successes.[citation needed] Moreover, in the early 1950s, as "Edgar Box", he pseudonymously wrote three mystery novels featuring public relations man "Peter Cutler Sargeant II".[citation needed]

In 1956, Vidal was hired as a contract screenwriter for Metro Goldwyn Mayer.[citation needed] In 1959, director William Wyler needed script doctors to re-write the Ben-Hur script, originally written by Karl Tunberg. Vidal collaborated with Christopher Fry, reworking the screenplay on condition that MGM release him from the last two years of his contract. Producer Sam Zimbalist's death complicated the screenwriting credit. The Screen Writers Guild resolved the matter by listing Tunberg as sole screenwriter, denying credit to both Vidal and Fry. This decision was based on the WGA screenwriting credit system which favors original authors. Vidal later claimed that in order to explain the animosity between Ben-Hur and Messala, he had inserted a gay subtext suggesting that the two had had a prior relationship, but that actor Charlton Heston was oblivious.[13] Heston denied that Vidal contributed significantly to the script.[14]

In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three highly successful[citation needed] novels. The first, the meticulously researched[citation needed] Julian (1964) dealt with the apostate Roman emperor, while the second, Washington, D.C. (1967) focused on a political family during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era.

Vidal's third novel in the '60s was the satirical transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968), a variation on familiar Vidalian themes of sex, gender, and popular culture. In the novel, Vidal showcased his love of the American films of the '30s and '40s, and he resurrected interest in the careers of the forgotten players of the time including, for example, the late Richard Cromwell, who, he wrote, "was so satisfyingly tortured in The Lives of a Bengal Lancer."

After two commercially unsuccessful[citation needed] plays, Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972), and the largely unappreciated[citation needed] novel Two Sisters (1970), Vidal focused on essays and two distinct strains in his fiction. The first strain comprises novels dealing with American history, specifically with the nature of national politics. Critic Harold Bloom wrote, "Vidal's imagination of American politics...is so powerful as to compel awe." This series' Narratives of Empire titles include Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990), The Golden Age (2000), and another excursion into the ancient world Creation (1981, published in expanded form 2002).

The second strain consists of the comedic "satirical inventions": Myron (1974, a sequel to Myra Breckinridge), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), Live from Golgotha: the Gospel according to Gore Vidal (1992), and The Smithsonian Institution (1998).

Vidal occasionally returned to scriptwriting cinema and television, including the television movie Gore Vidal's Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer, and the mini-series Lincoln. He also wrote the original draft for the controversial film Caligula, but later had his name removed because director Tinto Brass and actor Malcolm McDowell re-wrote the script, changing the tone and themes significantly. The producers later made a futile attempt to salvage some of Vidal's vision during post-production.[citation needed]

[edit] Essays and memoirs

Contrary to his wishes, Vidal is — at least in the U.S. — more respected as an essayist than as a novelist.[citation needed] The critic John Keates praised him as "[the twentieth] century's finest essayist." Even an occasionally hostile critic like Martin Amis admits, "Essays are what he is good at...[h]e is learned, funny and exceptionally clear-sighted. Even his blind spots are illuminating."

For six decades, Gore Vidal has applied himself to a wide variety of sociopolitical, sexual, historical, and literary themes. In 1987, Vidal wrote the essays titled Armageddon?, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America. He pilloried the incumbent president Ronald Reagan as a "triumph of the embalmer's art." In 1993, he won the National Book Award for his collection of essays, United States (1952–1992),[15] the citation noting: "Whatever his subject, he addresses it with an artist's resonant appreciation, a scholar's conscience, and the persuasive powers of a great essayist." A subsequent collection of essays, published in 2000, is The Last Empire. Since then, he has published such self-described "pamphlets" as Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta,and Imperial America, critiques of American expansionism, the military-industrial complex, the national security state, and the current administration. Vidal also wrote an historical essay about the U.S.'s founding fathers, Inventing A Nation. In 1995, he published a memoir Palimpsest, and in 2006 its follow-up volume, Point to Point Navigation. Earlier that year, Vidal also published Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories.

Because of his matter-of-fact treatment of homosexual relations in such books as The City and The Pillar, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation.[citation needed] Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings, a representative sampling of his views, contains literary and cultural essays that document his long campaign to mock and subvert conventional American attitudes toward sex[citation needed]. Focusing on, in his view, the anti-sexual heritage of Judaeo-Christianity, irrational and destructive sex laws, feminism, heterosexism, homophobia, gay liberation and pornography, the essays frequently return to a favorite Vidal motif: the fluidity of sexual identity.[citation needed] Vidal argues that "although our notions about what constitutes correct sexual behavior are usually based on religious texts, those texts are invariably interpreted by the rulers in order to keep control over the ruled." In repudiating what he sees as rigid, narrow moralism, Vidal argues that "sex is a continuum" made up of "different phases along life’s way" and thus "everyone is potentially bisexual." He explains that "the human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy the sexual relations with their own sex, many don't; many respond to both. The plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about." Therefore, "there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts." Given the diversity of human desire, Vidal resists any effort to categorize him as exclusively "homosexual"—either as writer or human being—and instead celebrates this polymorphous eroticism as natural and inevitable.[citation needed]

[edit] Acting and self-promotion

In the 1960s, Vidal moved to Italy; he was cast as himself in Federico Fellini's film Roma. In 1992, Vidal appeared in the film Bob Roberts (starring Tim Robbins) and has appeared in other films, notably Gattaca, With Honors, and Igby Goes Down. Like his gruffer contemporary Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal is noted as a clever and tireless self-publicist[citation needed]. In an interview he stated: "[t]here is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise".[16] Vidal has voiced himself on both The Simpsons and Family Guy. On his 2007 lecture tour, Vidal claimed that the idea for the film Night at the Museum was taken from one of his writings.[citation needed]

In 2005, Jay Parini was appointed as Vidal's literary executor.[citation needed]

[edit] Political views and activities

Besides his politician grandfather, Vidal has other connections with the Democratic Party: his mother Nina married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., who later was stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Gore Vidal is a fifth cousin of Jimmy Carter, and a distant cousin of Al Gore.[17]

Gore Vidal in the 2005 film Why We Fight.
Gore Vidal in the 2005 film Why We Fight.

As a political activist, in 1960, Gore Vidal was an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress (running as Eugene Gore), losing an election in New York's 29th congressional district, a traditionally Republican district on the Hudson River, encompassing all of Columbia, Dutchess, Greene, Schoharie, and Ulster Counties to J. Ernest Wharton, by a margin of 57% to 43%.[18] Campaigning with a slogan of "You'll get more with Gore", he received the most votes any Democrat in 50 years received in that particular district.[citation needed] From 1970 to 1972, he was one of the chairmen of the People's Party,[citation needed] and with a half-million votes, he finished second to incumbent Governor Jerry Brown in California's 1982 Democratic primary election to the United States Senate.[citation needed] Vidal's Senate bid had the backing of liberal celebrities such as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.[citation needed] The campaign was documented in the film, Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No directed by Gary Conklin.

Although frequently identified with Democratic causes and personalities,[citation needed] Vidal wrote in the 1970s:

"[t]here is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."[19]

Vidal's political views are usually characterized either as liberal or progressive.[citation needed] Vidal has a protective, almost proprietary attitude toward his native land and its politics[citation needed]. "My family helped start [this country]", he has written, "and we've been in political life... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country."[citation needed] Vidal considers himself a "radical reformer" wanting to return to the "pure republicanism" of early America.[citation needed] As a prep school student, he was a supporter of the America First Committee.[citation needed] Unlike other America First Committee supporters, he continues in the opinion that the United States should not have entered World War II (though acknowledging material assistance to the Allies was a good idea).[citation needed] He has suggested that President Roosevelt incited the Japanese to attack the U.S. to facilitate American entry to the war, and believes FDR had advance knowledge of the attack[citation needed].

In 1968, ABC News hired Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. as political analysts of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions, predicting that television viewers would enjoy seeing two men of letters engage in on-air battle.[citation needed] As it turned out, verbal and nearly physical combat ensued. After days of mutual bickering, their debates devolved to vitriolic, ad hominem attacks. During discussions of the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, the men were arguing about Freedom of Speech in regards to American protestors displaying a Viet Cong flag when Vidal told Buckley to "shut up a minute" and, in response to Buckley's reference to "pro-Nazi" protestors, went on to call Buckley a "crypto-Nazi." The visibly livid Buckley replied: "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." After an interruption by anchor and facilitator Howard K. Smith, the men continued to discuss the topic in a less hostile manner.[20]

Later, in 1969, the feud was continued as Buckley further attacked Vidal in the lengthy essay, "On Experiencing Gore Vidal", published in the August 1969 issue of Esquire. The essay is collected in The Governor Listeth, an anthology of Buckley's writings of the time. In a key passage attacking Vidal as an apologist for homosexuality, Buckley wrote, "The man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher."

Vidal responded in the September 1969 issue of Esquire, variously characterizing Buckley as "anti-black", "anti-semitic", and a "warmonger".[21] The presiding judge in Buckley's subsequent libel suit against Vidal initially concluded that "[t]he court must conclude that Vidal's comments in these paragraphs meet the minimal standard of fair comment. The inferences made by Vidal from Buckley's [earlier editorial] statements cannot be said to be completely unreasonable."[citation needed] However, Vidal also strongly implied that, in 1944, Buckley and unnamed siblings had vandalized a Protestant church in their Sharon, Connecticut, hometown after the pastor's wife had sold a house to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire for libel. Vidal counter-claimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel Myra Breckinridge as pornography.[citation needed]

The court dismissed Vidal's counter-claim; Buckley settled for $115,000 in attorney's fees and an editorial statement from Esquire magazine that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertion[citation needed]. However, in a letter to Newsweek, the Esquire publisher stated that "the settlement of Buckley's suit against us" was not "a 'disavowal' of Vidal's article. On the contrary, it clearly states that we published that article because we believed that Vidal had a right to assert his opinions, even though we did not share them."

As Vidal biographer, Fred Kaplan, later commented, "The court had 'not' sustained Buckley's case against Esquire... [t]he court had 'not' ruled that Vidal's article was 'defamatory.' It had ruled that the case would have to go to trial in order to determine as a matter of fact whether or not it was defamatory. [italics original.] The cash value of the settlement with Esquire represented 'only' Buckley's legal expenses [not damages based on libel]... " ultimately, Vidal bore the cost of his own attorney's fees, estimated at $75,000.

In 2003, this affair re-surfaced when Esquire published Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing, an anthology that included Vidal's essay. Buckley again sued for libel, and Esquire again settled for $55,000 in attorney's fees and $10,000 in personal damages to Buckley.[citation needed]

After Buckley's death on February 27, 2008, Vidal succinctly summed up his impressions of his rival with the following obituary on March 20, 2008: "RIP WFB—in hell." [22]

Vidal has stirred controversy by his contact with Timothy McVeigh. The two began corresponding while McVeigh was imprisoned; Vidal believes McVeigh bombed the federal building as retribution for the FBI's role in the 1993 the Branch Davidian Compound massacre in Waco, Texas.[23]

Vidal is a member of the advisory board of the World Can't Wait organization, a left-wing organization, which demands the impeachment of George W. Bush and the charging of his administration with crimes against humanity.[24]

During an interview in the 2005 documentary, Why We Fight, Vidal claims that during the final months of World War II, the Japanese had tried to surrender to the United States, but to no avail. He said, "They were trying to surrender all that summer, but Truman wouldn't listen, because Truman wanted to drop the bombs." When the interviewer asked why, Vidal replied, "To show off. To frighten Stalin. To change the balance of power in the world. To declare war on communism. Perhaps we were starting a pre-emptive world war." Though Japan did sue for peace, the surrender to which Vidal referred was not the unconditional surrender after the bombing of Nagasaki, but a status quo ante bellum surrender that would have averted, among other things, military occupation.[citation needed]

Vidal has contributed an article to The Nation in which he expressed support for Democratic Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, citing him as "the most eloquent Democratic candidate of this race" and that Kucinich is "very much a favorite of audiences that he's spoken to around the country."

In December of 2007, he endorsed Dennis Kucinich for president of United States.[citation needed]

[edit] Views on September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States

Vidal is strongly critical of the George W. Bush administration, listing it among administrations he considers to have either an explicit or implicit expansionist agenda.[citation needed]

He claims that for several years, the Bush administration and their associates have aimed to control the oil of central Asia (after, in his view, gaining effective control of the oil of the Persian Gulf in 1991). Specifically regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks, Vidal writes how such an attack, which American intelligence warned was coming, politically justified the plans that the administration already had in August 2001 for invading Afghanistan the following October.[citation needed] He even claims that American intelligence even put into writing "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S."

Vidal derides NORAD's purported delay in mobilizing fighter airplanes to intercept the hijacked airliners.[25]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Essays and non-fiction

[edit] Plays

[edit] Novels

[edit] Screenplays

[edit] Under pseudonyms

  • A Star's Progress (aka Cry Shame!) (1950) as Katherine Everard
  • Thieves Fall Out (1953) as Cameron Kay
  • Death Before Bedtime (1953) as Edgar Box
  • Death in the Fifth Position (1952) as Edgar Box
  • Death Likes It Hot (1954) as Edgar Box

[edit] Appearances and interviews

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 245.
  2. ^ "Aeronatics: $8,073.61", Time, 28 September 1931
  3. ^ Booknotes
  4. ^ "Eugene L. Vidal, Aviation Leader", The New York Times, 21 February 1969, p. 43.
  5. ^ South Dakota Sports Hall of Fame Profile: Gene Vidal.
  6. ^ "General Robert Olds Marries", The New York Times, 7 June 1942, p. 6.
  7. ^ Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation, New York: Doubleday, 2006, p. 135.
  8. ^ The Political Graveyard: Index to Politicians: Aubertine to Austern
  9. ^ "What I've Learned", Esquire, June, 2008, p. 132.
  10. ^ National Secular Society -- Gore Vidal
  11. ^ http://www.clairviewbooks.com/pages/perpetual.html
  12. ^ Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation (New York: Doubleday, 2006), p. 245
  13. ^ Ned Rorem. "Gore Vidal, aloof in art and in life", Chicago Sun-Times, December 12, 1999, p. 18S. 
  14. ^ Mick LaSalle. "A Commanding Presence: Actor Charlton Heston sets his epic career in stone -- or at least on paper", The San Francisco Chronicle, October 2, 1995, p. E1. 
  15. ^ "Gore Vidal Winner of the 1993 NONFICTION AWARD for UNITED STATES:ESSAYS 1952-1992" at nationalbook.org
  16. ^ "At the Helm with Gore Vidal", The Oxonian Review of Books, Spring 2007
  17. ^ "The other Gore", Salon, Sept. 20, 2000
  18. ^ clerk.house.gov 1960 election p.31
  19. ^ Gore Vidal (1977). Matters of Fact and of Fiction: Essays 1973–1976. Random House, p. 268. ISBN 0394411285. 
  20. ^ William Buckley/Gore Vidal Debate. Retrieved on 2008-02-28.
  21. ^ "A Distasteful Encounter with William F. Buckley Jr.", Esquire, September, 1969, p. 140. 
  22. ^ http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080320_gore_vidal_speaks_seriously_ill_of_the_dead/
  23. ^ Gore Vidal, "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh." Vanity Fair, September 2001.
  24. ^ World Can't Wait Advisory Board. Retrieved on 2002-07-29.
  25. ^ Gore Vidal Interview with Alex Jones Infowars, October 29, 2006 Texas Book Fest

[edit] External links

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Persondata
NAME Vidal, Gore
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vidal, Eugene Luther Gore
SHORT DESCRIPTION American author
DATE OF BIRTH October 3, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH West Point, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH