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."
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
Excerpts
- Below are excerpts from some of Gore Vidal's 25 novels and 200+ essays.
Narratives of Empire
Other Novels
Essays
Essays [full text]
Satirical Novels
Great Fire of New York City, December 17th, 1835
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Gore Vidal's 87th birthday
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
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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.
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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.
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Simon Schama on How Gore Vidal Skewered Our Self-Deceptions - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
“Entering, as I am, the springtime of my senility”: these were the first words out of Gore Vidal’s mouth, uttered in his dark mahogany patrician drawl, when he began the wickedly smart William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard in 1991. Once published, they became one of his sharpest, shortest, and most outrageously enjoyable books, Screening History, a cameo-autobiography filtered through his encounters with the movies. Vidal never really turned autumnal, much less senile. Mellow fruits and ripeness were definitely not his thing, though toward the end, faced with what he considered the unshakably fatuous self-deceptions of a moribund American empire, his irony did develop a frosty rime at its bitter edge.
(Photo: Gore Vidal in Los Angeles, California,1981 (Tony Korody / Sygma-Corbis))
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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.
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Fulford: Of gods and opera
Brooding over the lowly status of the Greek gods sent me back to a remarkable book, Julian, Gore Vidal’s biographical novel about the brief reign of the fourth-century Roman emperor (355-363CE) whom Christians call Julian the Apostate. He decided that Constantine had embraced Jesus for crass political reasons and out of a weird attraction to “the mad haggling of bishops.” The world was “diseased by the quarrels and intolerance” of this radical Christianity business, Julian decided. He set about restoring the old gods — not, as fate would have it, a successful project.
Vidal’s biographer says he feared that in 1964 Christian disapproval would seriously limit the book’s sales. But even the Book of the Month Club loved it. Julian became a bestseller.
Vidal's Julian would be good material for an opera.
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Big Read: ‘The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,’ by Carson McCullers
From the National Endowment for the Arts, the Big Read presents an exploration of the themes and background in Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter for radio, narrated by Dana Gioia and featuring Gore Vidal, Blake Hazard, E. Ethelbert Miller, P.J. O’Rourke and Jim White, with readings from the book by Mary-Louise Parker.
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Gore Vidal Now up and running . . .
It looks like Gore Vidal Now (gorevidalnow.com) is live! Gore Vidal Now is Vidal's official website.
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Gore Vidal, P.I. - NYTimes.com interview
In the 1950s, Gore Vidal, writing as ‘‘Edgar Box,’’ knocked out a trilogy of pulpy mystery novels, which are being reissued this month by Vintage ($16 each). Now 85, Vidal explains here why he had to secretly slum it in the paperbacks.
via tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com
Gore Vidal is interviewed for The New York Times Style Magazine ("T Magazine") about the new reissuing of his three murder mystery novels he published in the 1950's under the pen name Edgar Box.
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