Gore Vidal Pages

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.

Call for Papers: Journal of American Studies of Turkey Gore Vidal Revisited

In keeping with its stated aims, the Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) is preparing a special Gore Vidal issue devoted to innovative pieces focusing on how his writing engages with American cultures past and present as well as with the rest of the world. Papers may include but are not limited to the following topics
* Gore Vidal’s Politics
* Literary reviews & Literary Criticism
* Historical Fiction
* Drama
* Gore Vidal in Hollywood (screenplays, adaptations written by Vidal)
* Filming Gore Vidal
* Gender Issues
* Sexuality
* Life Writing
* Gore Vidal in Translation
* Attitudes towards Vidal inside and outside America
* Vidal criticism past and present
* Gore Vidal as an outsider as well as an insider writing about America.

Here is more on the Journal of American Studies of Turkey's call for Gore Vidal papers. The journal published its first edition in 1995.

Essay on Gore Vidal's relationship with Harvard | Inside Higher Ed

Gore Vidal, who died in July, was one of our greatest novelists and essayists – and yet he never went to college. In a 2007 interview I asked him why not.

"I graduated from [Phillips] Exeter,” he explained, “and I was aimed at going to Harvard. Instead I enlisted in [the Navy] in 1943. When I got out, in '46, I thought, 'I’ve spent all my life in institutions that I loathe, including my service in the [Navy] of the United States.' I thought, 'Shall I go for another four years?'

Read the rest of the article at: www.insidehighered.com

Gore Vidal's 87th birthday

As today, October 3, 2012, would have been Gore Vidal's 87th birthday, it seems fitting to re-post here the list of some of the significant tributes and commentaries that marked his death this past July.

The Economist: Gore Vidal.

PHOTO GALLERY, The New York Times: Gore Vidal 1925-2012

The New York Times: Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer

CNN Opinion - Dick Cavett: Gore Vidal Hates Being Dead

The Hollywood Reporter: Why Hollywood Owes a Debt of Gratitude to Gore Vidal

San Francisco Chronicle: Gore Vidal, Celebrated Author, Playwright, Dies

The Telegraph: Gore Vidal - "The republic is over."

BBC News: US Author Gore Vidal Dies Aged 86

The Guardian: Gore Vidal, US writer and contrarian, dies aged 86

CNN: Chronicler of American life and politics, dies (and CNN "This Just In" blog: A dozen thoughts from Gore Vidal)

The Atlantic: Gore Vidal - A Salute to Self-Absorbed yet Selfless Genius

Word & Film: Remembering Gore Vidal - Cultural Polymath, Political Gadfly, and Social Butterfly

AntiWar.com: Gore Vidal - the Last Jeffersonian

HuffingtonPost: The Legacy of Gore Vidal

Myron (1968)

As part of his 100 top novels list as part of the run-up to the publication of his new novel The Interlude, Rupert Smith includes Gore Vidal's Myron, which he sums up as "the story of a power-hungry transsexual rampaging her way through a dismal American college, ravishing hot jocks and referencing 40s films on every page."

Read the rest of Smith's post about Myron here. 

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.
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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.

Gore Vidal overview

One of America’s great overachievers, Gore Vidal (b. 1925) is hard to categorize. He’s a novelist, social critic, playwright, essayist, mystery writer (as Edgar Box), pulp romance writer (as Katherine Everard), adventure writer (as Cameron Kay), screenwriter, ex-pat jet setter, literary critic, congressional candidate, political activist, and actor – for starters. He is cantankerous, opinionated, gruff and completely inflexible.
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Vidal entered the army during World War II while in his teens. Although he rose to the rank of sergeant, he has had no subsequent formal higher education. Because Vidal felt uncomfortable living in the U.S. with its homophobic attitudes and extreme conservatism, he lived mostly in Italy from the mid 1960s, from where he wrote many stinging rebukes about American hypocrisies. Vidal shared his life with his companion Howard Austen, who died of brain cancer in 2003. For 30 years they lived in a villa perched on a cliff in Ravello, Italy, high above the Amalfi coast. [Photo: view from the villa, La Rondinaia ("Swallow’s Nest")]
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Gore Vidal grew up in Washington, DC., so he has had an inside track on politics for his entire life. His father was a member of Roosevelt’s cabinet and his grandfather a senator from Oklahoma. Gore Vidal shared a stepfather with Jackie Kennedy.
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The City and the Pillar (1948), written when Vidal was just twenty-three years old, is the story of professional tennis player...who never outgrew his boyhood crush on his best friend. That men who enjoyed sex with other men could go undetected in straight circles was an idea that shocked and outraged many of the novel’s readers and critics. The New York Times was so put off by the forthright writing about homosexuals that it refused to review Vidal’s next five books. Although Vidal vehemently (and frequently) declared that there is no such thing as a homosexual identity because everyone is bisexual to some degree, The City and the Pillar was the first mainstream coming-out novel.
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In his book Point to Point Navigation (2006), he criticizes George W. Bush’s America as it sank deeper into war, debt and autocratic rule. The title refers to the dangerous feat of steering a ship without benefit of a compass, a nod to Vidal’s WW II military service.

via gayinfluence.blogspot.com

Liz Smith: Gore Vidal's astonishingly prescient play, "The Best Man"

In the matter of the revival of Gore Vidal's astonishingly prescient play, "The Best Man," I was unable to go to it until recently and what got to me after the fact, was that I had been totally taken in by some of the tepid reviews. Boy! Was I wrong and were these critics wrong, in my humble opinion.

First I was dreading sitting through the play and two intermissions. That seemed so old-fashioned. Most offerings nowadays, there is only one intermission, or none at all. But the night I went, the audience was SRO and the time simply flew by.

Gore's play about a liberal and a conservative vying in Philadelphia for their party's nomination for President is as fresh as a daisy, even though it harks back to the days of black and white TV when things were much simpler than now. And it's a cautionary tale about being unprincipled and unethical and making sacrifices and killing off your enemies with rumor and scandal. Sound familiar? It is. If you have been fascinated and dismayed by the current political carryings-on, you will be enthralled at this backward look at how it began. (Vidal's play, which debuted on Broadway in 1960. In 1964 it was made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson.)

I was unhappy when I read one critic who said that my pal Candice Bergen as the unhappy wife of the liberal aspirant was "miscast." (I suppose this is a critic who won't allow Ms. Bergen to act her age and is still insisting that she flaunt her considerable good looks and feisty manner as "Murphy Brown," instead of letting her exercise the right to be another type of character.) I thought she was absolutely perfect as "the wife" and I call THAT simply "good acting."

Every single cast member in this play is great and doing their damndest with Gore's writing brilliance and his perspicacity SP? as a political seer. It is especially thrilling to see the great, great James Earl Jones as a cynical heartfelt pragmatist of a president about to leave office.

The protagonists John Larroquette and Eric McCormack reflect onstage most of the demeanor and calculation that is going on now as we struggle through an election year. They are both perfect! Believe me, you will LOVE "The Best Man." Buy your ticket and cast your vote!

via www.huffingtonpost.com