Gore Vidal Pages

Gore Vidal: The United States Of Amnesia (screened at Tribeca 2013) :: EDGE New York City

A "mix of Mark Twain and Henry James," Vidal skewered religion as a "born-again atheist," and, when many other journalists shied away, held politicos in the 80s, 90s, and aughts accountable due to his "great shit detector."

Vidal’s political predictions have come true with a vengeance, such as the unchecked rise of American empire that has united the Muslim world against this country, and that George W. Bush was a "goddam fool, answering to his boss Cheney." He also foresaw the termination of the Republican Party (fingers crossed).

The film [Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia] skillfully weaves a half-century of interviews and stills, notable quotes, and conversations with acolytes including Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, actor Tim Robbins, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

Gore Vidal worried "We learn nothing because we remember nothing." Watch this documentary to stave off our collective amnesia.

Read Louise Adams' review in full at www.edgenewyork.com

Don't forget the documentary's Kickstarter campaign! Help fund the archival and post-production costs and get mentioned in the credits of the final version of Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia!

JFK, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams go shooting

Twitter is a bit atwitter with the photo, via @BeschlossDC, of JFK shooting with Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams.... Alas, no Beschloss mention of The Glorious Bird's aside to Vidal about JFK's nice a**. Vidal told Tennessee that he can't cruise the next president of the United States. That was probably meant to egg him on. From Gore Vidal's Palimpsest: A Memoir, 1995, photo caption:

Jack was shooting at a target when we arrived at the Kennedy house. Abesently, Tenn took the rifle and shot three bull's-eyes, to Jack's consernation. "And that," said the Bird, "was with my blind eye."

Great Fire of New York City, December 17th, 1835

Most of lower Manhattan and the Financial District were burned down on the freezing night of December 17th, 1835. In Gore Vidal's meticulously-researched novel, Burr, the protagonist Charlie Schuyler, the morning after the great blaze, describes the destruction during the previous night:

Like everyone else in the city, I was awake the whole night. Half the First Ward has burned down.

It was Dante's Hell: ice and fire together. A horrible racket of bells pealing, of fire-engines clattering, of houses collapsing. At midnight the sky was like a red dawn. Today every New Yorker who knows how to read mentions The Last Days of Pompeii.

I am thankful that I won't be required to describe what I saw. Memory too crowded with fiery images. Wall Street in flames. A freezing wind full of fire--an anomaly.

Suddenly the new Merchants' Exchange vanishes in a long wave of flame. A moment later I was able to see through the walls to the statue beneath the dome of Alexander Hamilton [in the church graveyard.]

From nowhere, a half-dozen young sailors raced into the building and tried to save the statue. They pulled the figure off its pedestal but then the police forced them out of the building just in time for with a hissing sigh the dome fell in and Hamilton was seen no more (his would-be rescuer was a young officer from the Navy Yard--a banker's son, who else?).

A group of Irish approached [Leggett and me] and said, "They'll be making no more of them five-per-cent dividends, with they now?".... Leggett grinned and gave [the speaker] a thumbs-up.

In the side streets the shopkeepers were gloomily digging among the ashes to see what the fire had spared. In Pearl Street there are miles of scorched cloth stacked on the side-walls. In Fulton Street furniture. Nearly every street like an open bazaar of ruined good. The poor steal whatever they can, particularly food...as do the pigs, who have declared themselves a national holiday and are now rampant.... The only contented sound in the city is their squeaking and snorting as they turn up delicacies where once were taverns, grocery shops, homes."

via www.gorevidalpages.com

Image (click to enlarge) - View of the Great Fire in N.York, Dec. 16th & 17, 1835, as seen from Williamsburg (sic), by Nicolino Caly,&nbs

via citizenship.typepad.com

Most of lower Manhattan and the Financial District were burned down on the freezing night of December 17th, 1835. In Gore Vidal's meticulously-researched novel, Burr, the protagonist Charlie Schuyler, the morning after the great blaze, describes the destruction during the previous night:

Like everyone else in the city, I was awake the whole night. Half the First Ward has burned down.

It was Dante's Hell: ice and fire together. A horrible racket of bells pealing, of fire-engines clattering, of houses collapsing. At midnight the sky was like a red dawn. Today every New Yorker who knows how to read mentions The Last Days of Pompeii.

I am thankful that I won't be required to describe what I saw. Memory too crowded with fiery images. Wall Street in flames. A freezing wind full of fire--an anomaly.

Suddenly the new Merchants' Exchange vanishes in a long wave of flame. A moment later I was able to see through the walls to the statue beneath the dome of Alexander Hamilton [in the church graveyard.]

From nowhere, a half-dozen young sailors raced into the building and tried to save the statue. They pulled the figure off its pedestal but then the police forced them out of the building just in time for with a hissing sigh the dome fell in and Hamilton was seen no more (his would-be rescuer was a young officer from the Navy Yard--a banker's son, who else?).

A group of Irish approached [Leggett and me] and said, "They'll be making no more of them five-per-cent dividends, with they now?".... Leggett grinned and gave [the speaker] a thumbs-up.

In the side streets the shopkeepers were gloomily digging among the ashes to see what the fire had spared. In Pearl Street there are miles of scorched cloth stacked on the side-walls. In Fulton Street furniture. Nearly every street like an open bazaar of ruined good. The poor steal whatever they can, particularly food...as do the pigs, who have declared themselves a national holiday and are now rampant.... The only contented sound in the city is their squeaking and snorting as they turn up delicacies where once were taverns, grocery shops, homes."

via www.gorevidalpages.com

Image (click to enlarge) - View of the Great Fire in N.York, Dec. 16th & 17, 1835, as seen from Williamsburg (sic), by Nicolino Caly,&nbs

Adversaries - summing up Washington's situation

For the past generation or two, Washington has been the not so hallowed ground for a political war. This conflict resembles trench warfare, with fixed positions, hourly exchanges of fire, heavy casualties on both sides, and little territory gained or lost. The combatants wear red or blue, and their struggle is intensely ideological.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in official Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

To Phyllis Schlafly and the New Right, this consensus amounted to liberalism, and in the nineteen-seventies they began to use guerrilla tactics--direct mail, single-issue pressure groups, right-wing think tanks, insurgent campaigns. By the nineties, conservatives had begun to take over the institutions of government. Liberals copied their success: the Heritage Foundation led to the Center for American Progress, the Moral Majority to People for the American Way, Bill O'Reilly to Keith Olbermann. The people Washington attracts now tend to be committed activists, who think of themselves as locked in an existential struggle over the fate of the country, and are unwilling to yield an inch of ground.

Meanwhile, another army has invaded Washington: high-priced influence peddlers working on behalf of corporations and the wealthy, seducing officials of both parties and daily routing the public interest. The War of Organized Money goes on almost unnoticed outside the capital, but the War Between the Colors reflects a real divide in the country, the sorting of Americans into ideologically separate districts and lives. From time to time, a looming disaster--such as the upcoming budget crisis--leads to negotiations and a brief truce. But the fighting never really stops.

-- George Packer, "Adversaries," The New Yorker, Oct. 29 & Nov. 5, 2012, p. 88.

Inside the Mind of Gore Vidal

Caleb Pirtle III on Gore Vidal:

He was a writer with great style and elegance, and Vidal moved easily and often from the back rooms at the White House to the bedrooms of Hollywood. Women. Men. It didn’t make him any difference. He thought of himself as the last of a breed, and he was probably right. As he once said, “I’ve tried everything but folk dancing and incest.” The New York Times wrote, “Few American writers have been more versatile or gotten more mileage from their talent.” Vidal even admitted, “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
.....
Gore Vidal was born into a world of politics and could never escape it.  His father was Franklin Roosevelt’s director of air commerce. His maternal grandfather was the Senator Thomas Gore. His mother divorced his father and married the financier Hugh D. Auchincloss, who in turn divorced her and married Jacqueline Kennedy’s mother, which created a rather twisted connection between Vidal and the Kennedy White House. Vidal exploited the relationship and moved into Camelot every chance he had. He had many and made the most of them.

via venturegalleries.com (Venture Galleries is a "marketing and publishing house that showcases, promotes, and markets the works of talented Indie authors and artists who are building a niche in the marketplace.") Note the comment left by Thomas P. Gore II, who shared with Gore Vidal "the grandparenthood of Sen. T. P. Gore and 'Tot', our small grandmother."

Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. - differing types of American exceptionalism - NYTimes.com

Buckley and Mr. Vidal both subscribed, though in very different ways, to the ideal of American exceptionalism — with its suggestion that even as the nation stood apart from or above other nations, it was susceptible to foreign infection. Mr. Vidal feared the evils of empire building (a continuous theme in his historical novels) and warned against the decline that had overtaken other civilizations brought low by imperial hubris.

For Buckley the threat came from global communism and “statist” domestic policies that would reduce Americans to servitude and weaken their connection to the moral values of Christianity.

It was this two-sides-of-the-same-coin idealism that led to the heated exchange in 1968.

via www.nytimes.com

(Photo: ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images)

Gore Vidal wrecks Ronald Reagan

From the televised debate between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal during the 1968 Democratic National Convention (Chicago, August 26-29, 1968). h/t

Gore Vidal’s ‘Burr’ Is Antidote to Tea Party Myths - Bloomberg

After winning control of the House in 2010, Republicans opened the next session of Congress by reading the Constitution. They were drawing on the widespread conservative sense that the U.S. under President Barack Obama was drifting from the principles of its founding leaders and documents.

The Tea Party, named for the most famous anti-tax revolt in American history, was the clearest expression of this Revolutionary nostalgia, and for many voters this year, 2012 will be an election about returning to what they see as the values of 1787.

In “All the King’s Men,” however, Willie Stark learns to dismiss the idealized portraits of the Founding Fathers in American history textbooks: “I bet things were just like they are now. A lot of folks wrassling round,” he scoffs. That line could serve as the epigraph to one of the most entertaining novels ever written about American politics, Gore Vidal’s “Burr.” Vidal, who died July 31 at the age of 86, published what many regard as his best novel in 1973, when Vietnam and Watergate were dealing Americans’ confidence in their government a series of blows from which it has yet to recover.
.....
What is left to admire is the sheer audacity and energy of the founders, their 18th-century scale and scope. They may have been scoundrels, Vidal suggests, but the country doesn’t even make scoundrels like that anymore. 

Read the rest of the article at www.bloomberg.com.

The reviewer, Adam Kirsch, provides a fair summary of Burr, and he's to be applauded for turning our attention to the novel in light of the hagiographic impulse many Americans have relative to the Founding Fathers.

However, Vidal modeled Burr the character less on himself than Kirsch suspects. As pointed out on HuffPost in "The Legacy of Gore Vidal," Vidal had an entire library of 200 books on Burr and his contemporaries and manuscript letters that Aaron Burr had written shipped from the US to Ravello, where Vidal was writing, to supplement standard editions. Much of the library and manuscripts he'd purchased as a lot from a rare manuscripts and books dealer. Vidal studied Burr's voice carefully, and the voice in the novel is certainly more Burr's than Vidal's.

And Kirsch arguably suggests that the novel's characterizations of the Founding Fathers are far-fetched. They aren't, especially given that Vidal rarely agrees completely with his narrators.

Kirsch cites Burr's description of George Washington as broad-bottomed. Well, he was, and it's rather obvious in the painted portraits of Washington, and contemporaries noted it. (Note a soldier's description of Washington being "broad across the hips.")

The Founding Fathers were indeed ambitious men on the make. It's painfully obvious, really. And why shouldn't they have been? The Revolution was in many regards more like a civil war fought against the British Empire so colonists might better craft an empire of their own. Colonists' compaints about lack of Parliamentary representation rested alongside their complaints that London's policies towards the Indians were too lenient. (Native Americans were under Crown Protection.) And only a few years before such complaints, American commentators were forecasting that the British Empire's capital, perhaps the throne itself, would move from London to America in due course. Empire was in the air...in America as much as in the halls of Westminster, and the Founders wanted a piece of the action.

John Cotter on Gore Vidal | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review

In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, poetical ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. When the air is clear, you can see across borders; when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.

Atypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. This is why he can be trusted. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. Vidal is not a romantic—his mind is empirical. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority.

Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing.

via www.openlettersmonthly.com

John Cotter's remarkable look at the essays of Gore Vidal was overlooked by The Gore Vidal Pages because...we don't check our email in-box often enough!

Open Letters Monthly is an arts and literature review, and for their 5-year anniversary, they featured in-depth essays on the last century's great belletrists--authors whose writing is valued most for their aesthetic qualities.

A small number of Vidal's essays are available to read on The Gore Vidal Pages.

U.S. Intellectual History: Gore Vidal, Master Polemicist

Andrew Hartman's examination of "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," Vidal's response to an essay by Midge Decter (photo)--

Unfortunately, most of the culture wars polemics I read are bad; they are mostly, to phrase it generously, “inartful.” So much so that I have almost grown immune to the polemic. But every now and then I come across a master polemicist, someone like Gore Vidal. For anyone interested in learning the art of the polemic, his 1981 essay “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” should be compulsory reading.

via us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com