Gore Vidal Pages

Gore Vidal, prevailing American superstitions, and the public critic's rhetorical obligations -- Gore Vidal's Selected Essays

On Gore Vidal's essays as political actions:

Without ever saying so, Vidal also manages to suggest that everything is political, though in a very different, non-postmodern sense. The clarity and elegance of his prose, for example, make a political point: that a critic with public purposes has rhetorical obligations, above all transparency. More generally, to a sufficiently sensitive and knowledgeable critic, everything will appear intelligent or unintelligent, skillful or shoddy, graceful or graceless, truthful or mendacious. In each of these pairs, the latter is--not immediately, perhaps, but ultimately, in some measure--a threat to our common life, our res publica. Intellectual virtues are civic virtues; intellectual vices leave the citizens vulnerable to superstition and demagoguery. There is, of course, no more sense in trying to legislate the intellectual virtues than the moral ones. But one can propagate intellectual virtue, first of all by example. This is Vidal's abiding contribution to American politics.
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The prevailing American superstitions are: one, there is a Supreme Being, omnipotent and benevolent; two, some sexual predilections are more natural than others; and three, there is no class system in the United States. No one who denies any of these things can be elected to high office. As a patriot, Vidal naturally has no patience with this affront to our civic intelligence. Some of his most memorable onslaughts on our national delusions are included in Selected Essays.

Read more via www.thenation.com

Civic Virtues: Gore Vidal's Selected Essays | The Nation

From George Scialabba's essay on Vidal's essays:

Gore Vidal has known, or at any rate met, nearly everyone of literary, political or cinematic note during his lifetime. A great many of his essays feature anecdotes, always charming and often revealing, about his personal encounters with his subjects: Tennessee Williams, Dawn Powell, Christopher Isherwood, Norman Mailer, Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess, Italo Calvino, Amelia Earhart, Orson Welles, Frank Sinatra, the Roosevelts, Luces, Kennedys, Reagans and Gores among them.

Read more at: www.thenation.com

Scialabba is the author of Divided Mind and, most recently, What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament (forthcoming), both from Pressed Wafer.

The Nation's debut ebook is Gore Vidal's State of the Union

The Nation has announced the launch of eBookNation offering ebooks of the magazine's most notable contributors, and eBookNation's debut title is Gore Vidal's State of the Union, Nation Essays 1958-2005.

The essays collected here all appeared in The Nation magazine between 1958 and 2005. The early literary ones reflected Vidal's status as a rising young novelist of the postwar generation, and as he expanded confidently into nonfiction, his essays range widely over politics, religion, society, manners and morals. We see him emerge as the pre-eminent essayist of his generation, winning a 1993 Nation Book Award for a collection of nonfiction works.

Download it here for your tablet, smartphone or computer: www.thenation.com.

Gore Vidal's State of the Union includes some of his great Nation essays: "Some Jews and the Gays," "Requiem for the American Empire," "Monotheism and Its Discontents," "Notes on Our Patriarchal State," "Birds and the Bees" and "The Birds and the Bees and Clinton."

Gore Vidal's essay, "Norman Mailer's Self-Advertisements"

From "Norman Mailer's Self-Advertisements," by Gore Vidal, The Nation, January 2, 1960:

Where Hemingway was pretentious and external, Mailer is particular and works with gentle grace from within his characters.

He is at his best (who is not?) when discussing himself. He is a born defendant. The piece about getting The Deer Park published is especially good, and depressing for what it reveals about our society. But, finally, in every line he writes, despite the bombast, there is uncertainty: Who am I? What do I want? What am I saying? He is Thomas Wolfe but with a conscience. Wolfe's motive for writing was perfectly clear: he wanted fame; he wanted to taste the whole earth, to name all the rivers. Mailer has the same passion for fame but he has a good deal more sense of responsibility and he sees that the thing is always in danger of spinning down into meaninglessness.
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The human mind is in continual flux, and personality is simply a sum of those attitudes which most often repeat themselves in recognizable actions. It is naïve and dangerous to try to impose on the human mind any system of thought which lays claim to finality. Very few first-rate writers have ever subordinated their own apprehension of a most protean reality to a man-made system of thought. Tolstoi's famous attempt in War and Peace nearly wrecked that beautiful work. Ultimately, not Christ, not Marx, not Freud, despite their pretensions, has the final word to say about the fact of being human. And those who take solemnly the words of other men as absolute are, in the deepest sense, maiming their own sensibilities and controverting the evidence of their own senses in a fashion which may be comforting to a terrified man but disastrous for an artist.

Image: "Authors Gay Talese, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, from left, gather at a 1993 party after the Actors Studio's benefit production of George Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell" at Carnegie Hall in New York City." (AP/Los Angeles Times)

 

Gore Vidal's "Writers and the World" essay (1965)

From Gore Vidal's essay  "Writers and the World," Times Literary Supplement (London), November 25, 1965:

The obvious danger for the writer is the matter of time. "A talent is formed in stillness," wrote Goethe, "a character in the stream of the world." Goethe, as usual, managed to achieve both. But it is not easy, and many writers who choose to be active in the World lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. This is sad. Until one recalls how many bad books the World may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers turned Worldly. The romantic-puritans can find consolation in that, and take pleasure in realizing that there is a rude justice, finally, even in the best of worlds.

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

June 11, 2001: The Execution of Timothy McVeigh

Gore Vidal presented a more complete examination of McVeigh’s background and motives than the one-dimensional depiction of him in the media as, in Vidal’s words, “the personification of evil. Of motiveless malice.”

via www.gorevidalnow.com

Gore Vidal Now noted the 10th anniversary of the execution of Timothy McVeigh with a look back to Gore Vidal's essays for Vanity Fair, "Shredding the Bills of Rights" and "The Meaning of Timothy McVeigh."

Gore Vidal Now up and running . . .

It looks like Gore Vidal Now (gorevidalnow.com) is live! Gore Vidal Now is Vidal's official website.

Pink Triangle and Yellow Star

From "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star," The Nation, October 14, 1981:

Jews, blacks, and homosexuals are despised by the Christian…majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situations and that of the same-sexers.

At one level, the Jews are perfectly correct. A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact. Although sexual preference is an even more powerful fact, it is not one that creates any particular social or cultural or religious bond between those so-minded. Although Jews would doubtless be Jews is there was no anti-Semitism, same-sexers would think little or nothing at all about their preference if society ignored it. So there is a difference between the two estates. But there is no difference in the degree of hatred felt by the Christian majority for Christ-killers and Sodomites. In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexuals wore pink triangles. I was present when Christopher Isherwood tried to make this point to a young Jewish movie producer. "After all," said Isherwood, "Hitler killed six hundred thousand homosexuals." The young man was not impressed. "But Hitler killed six million Jews," he said sternly. "What are you?" asked Isherwood. "In real estate?"

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Mrs. Norman Podhoretz, also known as Midge Decter, [who writes for the conservative magazine Commentary]…. writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known indeed to those few who know her.

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Decter was disturbed by "the slender, seamless, elegant and utterly chic" clothes of the fairies [she saw on Fire Island]. She also found it "a constant source of wonder" that when the fairies took off their clothes, "the largest number of homosexuals had hairless bodies…. We were never able to determine just why there should be so definite a connection between what is nowadays called their sexual preference…and their smooth feminine skin. Was it a matter of hormones?" Here Decter betrays her essential modesty and lack of experience. In the no doubt privileged environment of her Midwestern youth, she could not have seen very many gentile males without their clothes on. Is she had, she would have discovered that gentile men tend to be less hairy than Jews except, of course, when they are not. Because the Jews killed our Lord, they are forever marked with hair on their shoulders--something that no gentile man has on his shoulders except for John Travolta and a handful of other Italian-American from the Englewood, New Jersey, area.

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Every now and then, Decter does wonder if, perhaps, she is generalizing…. But the spirit is upon her, and she cannot stop because, "one cannot even begin to get at the truth about homosexuals without this kind of generalization. They are a group so readily distinguishable." Except of course, when they are not…. To begin to get at the truth about homosexuals, one must realize that the majority of those millions of Americans who prefer same-sex sex to other-sex sex are obliged, sometimes willingly and happily but often not, to marry and have children and to conform....

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Decter says that once faggots have "ensconced" themselves in certain professions or arts, "they themselves have engaged in a good deal of discriminatory practices against others. There are businesses and professions" [which one? She is congenitally short of data] "in which it is less than easy for a straight, unless he makes the requisite gesture of propitiation to the homosexual in power, to get ahead." This, of course, was Hitler's original line about the Jews: they had taken over German medicine, teaching, law, journalism. Ruthlessly, they kept out gentiles; lecherously, they demanded favors. "I simply want to reduce their numbers in these fields," Hitler told Prince Philip of Hesse. "I want them proportionate to their overall number in the population." That was the early solution; the final solution followed with equal logic.

Copyright © by Gore Vidal