Gore Vidal Pages

Gore Vidal | polarimagazine.com

From the first sentence [of Myra Breckingridge,] I was transfixed, a convert, an acolyte, and I remain so to this day. “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess,” the novel begins. Myra’s voice was nothing like I had read before. “Frankly I can think of no greater pleasure than to approach an open face and swiftly say whatever needs to be said to shut it.” Touché.
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In talking about the rise of Christian fundamentalists in 1970s America, Vidal concludes, “The authors of Leviticus proscribe homosexuality – and so do all good Christers. But Leviticus also proscribes rare meat, bacon, shellfish, and the wearing of nylon mixed with wool. If Leviticus were to be obeyed in every instance, the garment trade would collapse.” This is the Vidal style through and through: a serious comment is followed by an ironic gloss.

Christopher Bryant writing about Gore Vidal, www.polarimagazine.com

Photo: Gore Vidal and Paul Newman, 1961, Greek isle of Delos; detail of collage from Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare, 2009.

Claire Bloom credits Gore Vidal with pulling her out of depression | Hollywood.com

The Clash of the Titans star wed film producer Elkins in 1969, but their marriage was short-lived and the couple split three years later.

Bloom, who reveals infidelity was the cause of the break-up, struggled to overcome the heartache and she admits the celebrated playwright stepped up to console her.

She tells Vanity Fair magazine, "I was horribly depressed when that marriage ended. I knew I had to do something, so I booked myself for a trip to Greece and intended to travel alone, by bus, throughout the country.

"When I told Gore about it on the phone, he promptly decided to come with me - cancelled the whole bus idea and booked cars for us to visit Athens, Delphi and everywhere else I wanted to do. And he was so funny about my terrible husband and his infidelity that by the time the trip was over, my depression had totally lifted."

Vidal passed away last year (12).

Also paying tribute to the late writer in the new issue of Vanity Fair, Susan Sarandon has opened up about how he helped her through pregnancy and childbirth when she became a first-time mum to daughter Eva Amurri.

via www.hollywood.com

The Economist: Hug a Republican (but we know they're a big part of the problem, too)

The Economist wants President Obama to hug a Republican, but they're clearly frustrated by the modern American GOP:

But what about the Republicans? Their script is depressingly easy to write. The party’s leaders will once again conclude that they lost because their candidate was not a genuine conservative, and vow to find the real thing next time.

If the Republicans do that they will be abandoning all electoral sense. They managed to lose an election again in a country where conservatives still handily outnumber liberals by lumbering Mr Romney with extremist positions, such as rejecting any budget deal involving tax rises even if spending cuts were ten times greater. Their obsession with abortion and gay marriage seems ever more out of touch with women and young people. And their harshness towards illegal immigrants cost them the growing Latino vote, 71% of which went to Mr Obama. Plenty of independent voters, and this newspaper, yearn for a more pragmatic Republican Party. Doing a deal on the deficit with Mr Obama would signal its rebirth.

In another article in the same issue, The Economist looks at the ''remaking of the president''

Mr Romney won the white vote by 59% to 39%—an improvement over John McCain’s showing in 2008. But in Midwestern swing states, that margin was narrower: just four points in Wisconsin, for example, and 15 in Ohio.
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Over the course of his presidency, [Obama] has pointedly unveiled policies designed to appeal to each element of this coalition.
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Perhaps the best illustration of Mr Obama’s campaign-by-niches is his wooing of gay voters. The 5% of voters who identified themselves as gay in exit polls opted for Mr Obama by 76% to 22%—enough to account for his entire margin of victory.

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 | The Economist

For all his stern rationality, sometimes he could not help calling out Jimmie’s name; and each time the wind seemed to rise and caress the cheek of the “last famous novelist” in America, and the last true Augustan in the world.

via www.economist.com

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

Reviews Are in for ‘Gore Vida’s The Best Man’: ‘Trillion Watt Cast,’ ‘Prescient,’ ‘You’ll Be Clapping a Lot’

“Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” officially opened on Broadway Sunday night, and the reviews are in. Reviewers from all the leading media outlets loved the show, except one. More about that in a moment. First, here’s a sampling of opinions that safely can be described as the consensus among all the reviews.

via www.gorevidalnow.com

Rick Santorum: "the dangers of contraception in this country"

"One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea ... Many in the Christian faith have said, 'Well, that's okay ... contraception's okay.'

via www.religiousrightwatch.com

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