Gore Vidal's inconvenient truths

"The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal" reminds us that this combative political provocateur is also one of our finest literary critics.

By Louis Bayard

Read more: Books, Gore Vidal, Politics, Essays, Reviews, Book reviews, Louis Bayard

Joshua Lutz/Redux

Gore Vidal at his house in Malibu, Calif., in September 2006.

June 23, 2008 | "Is he still alive?" a friend asked me not long ago.

Casual observers might be excused for thinking of Gore Vidal in posthumous terms. A twilight pall suffused his most recent memoir, "Point-to-Point Navigation," which described the death of Vidal's longtime companion even as it ladled out retribution against longtime enemies. Many of those enemies have likewise passed on, and in recent appearances, Vidal has had to squeeze his proud, patrician figure into a wheelchair.

The old lion may be enfeebled, but he still has teeth. Doubters are referred to Deborah Solomon's recent New York Times Magazine interview, in which Vidal responded to the question "Were you chaste?" with a line that Groucho Marx might have coveted -- "Chased by whom?" -- and succinctly described his feelings on the death of William F. Buckley: "I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred."

In the course of what must have been a terrifying conversation, Solomon managed to ask Vidal why critics prefer his essays to his novels. "That's because they don't know how to read," he replied. By now he has schooled us in the dangers of conventional wisdom, but in this case, the conventioneers have it right. Vidal has never produced a great novel (though not for want of trying) because he was, from the start, an essayist manqué.

It was his misfortune, perhaps, to come of age in postwar America, when the novel was still the royal road to glory. His first book, "Williwaw," was published when he was still 19. Several more followed, among them the succes de scandale of "The City and the Pillar," one of America's first fictional depictions of homosexuality (and barely readable today). But the field-clearing fame that the young Vidal clearly hungered for, the kind his rival Truman Capote snatched up right out of the gate -- all this eluded him.

Vidal would later blame his arrested development on the homophobia of mainstream review outlets, especially the New York Times. (To this day, the Gray Lady remains high on his shit list.) But he would also write, revealingly, of William Dean Howells, who, unable to get his poems published, "went off the deep end, into prose." Something similar happened to Vidal. Unable to claim his seat in Valhalla by fictional means, he came at it subterraneously -- through the literary journal -- brandishing not a sword but a quiver of aphorisms, smeared at the tips with invective.

Vidal, of course, would go on to write a great many more novels, most of them historical, a good many of them bestsellers. What he could never do was convince us that we were reading about someone other than Gore Vidal. "Burr," to cite one of his best works, was lively and rebarbative, and yet there was no way to reconcile its cynical, astringent protagonist with the quixotic historical figure who leapt from folly to folly. Burr was, of course, Vidal. As was Lincoln, as was Grant. As was Myra Breckinridge (though, in retrospect, she might better be described as Vidal's countercultural alter ego, which may explain why she is the most persuasive of his fictional personae).

Vidal's essays, by contrast, have all the strengths of his novels with this additional grace: They don't have to make a show of inhabiting other minds. And so the qualities of the originating mind -- wit, phrasemaking, autodidacticism, a talent to inflame -- stand out all the more starkly.

For proof, we may call up "The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal," assembled by Jay Parini, the author's literary executor (more whiffs of the posthumous). That word "selected," of course, implies a certain amount of cherry-picking. Juvenilia, senilia, outmoded usages, casual tribalisms have all presumably been cast away. Or have they? To Parini's credit, more than enough remains to show why and how Vidal gets under people's skin.

There is enough, too, to show that Vidal was, in some respects, well ahead of his time. His defense of homosexuality as "a matter of taste" (in the midst of the '60s), his calls for limits on executive power, his attack on "the National Security State" ... these still walk the razor's edge of topicality. Mere weeks after the Iraq war was joined, Vidal was calling attention to the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Some 15 years before Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great," Vidal was declaring that monotheism was "the great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture."

He was not always so prescient. Taking his cues, probably, from Paul Ehrlich, he predicted that the entire planet would be overrun with famine by ... 2000. Some 28 years before that, he was declaring with great confidence that "the South is not about to support a party which is against federal spending ... Southern Democrats are not about to join with Nixon's true-blue Republicans in turning off federal aid."

But federal aid was the least of it. Southerners were breaking from the fold for cultural, not economic reasons, and American culture, in general, is one of Vidal's most notable blind spots. By his own choosing. Like Sinclair Lewis, he speaks of "our brainwashed majority," of the "hypocrisy and self-deception" that mark our "paradigmatic middle-class society." Unlike Lewis, he gives no signs of having actually lived there. The grandson of a U.S. senator, he was raised in privilege in Washington, D.C., and absconded as quickly as he could to Europe, sequestering himself for many years in a villa in Ravello, Italy, where he could get the right altitude on his native land.

But an aerial shot won't show you where all the bunkers are. No surprise, then, that wherever Vidal actually enters the bunker, his political reportage sparks to life. There's a deft analysis of Theodore Roosevelt that draws on conversations with Alice Longworth, and a wry and splendid take on his one-time pals the Kennedys ("The Holy Family," he calls them) that offers welcome ballast to the hagiographies of Schlesinger and Sorensen.

The old injunction to "write what you know" can be crippling for a writer of fiction, but for a writer of essays, it is close to an imperative. And there are clearly places Vidal hasn't been -- the corporate boardroom, for instance -- and things he doesn't know (though he doesn't always know it). His broad-brushed attacks on American power elites have earned him a reputation in many quarters for paranoia. In reality, he is simply vague (although vagueness is a prerequisite for paranoia). "The Few who control the Many through Opinion," he announces, "have simply made themselves invisible." A mercy for him, because he is excused from describing them at any length. He mutters darkly of "cash in white envelopes" and the "1 percent that owns the country" and the "elite" that is "really running the show." Beyond that level of signifying, he rarely ventures.

Next page: Vidal has a brain to match his self-regard