Gore Vidal the Great
by
Graham Smith
Daily Mail
Celebrated
author, playwright and commentator Gore Vidal has died at the age
of 86, his nephew said today.
Burr Steers
said Vidal died at his home in Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills at about
6.45pm local time yesterday of complications from pneumonia.
Mr Steers said
Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for ‘quite
a while’.
The acerbic
Vidal was known for such best-selling novels as Burr
and Myra
Breckenridge, the play The
Best Man, and for essays on everything from politics and
literature to sex and religion.
In the 1960s
and 70s he was a fixture on talk shows and other television programmes
and feuded openly with Norman Mailer, William Buckley and others.
He also worked
on screenplays and appeared in several films, including Bob
Roberts and With
Honors.
Along with
such contemporaries as Mailer and Truman Capote, Vidal was among
the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities,
personalities of such size and appeal that even those who had not
read their books knew who they were.
His works included
hundreds of essays; best-selling novel Lincoln;
the groundbreaking The
City and The Pillar, among the first novels about openly
gay characters; and the Tony-nominated political drama The Best
Man, revived on Broadway in 2012.
Tall and distinguished
looking, with a haughty baritone not unlike that of his conservative
arch-enemy Buckley, Vidal appeared cold and cynical on the surface.
But he bore
a melancholy regard for lost worlds, for the primacy of the written
word, for ‘the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with
human society can be put right by human action’.
Vidal was uncomfortable
with the literary and political establishment, and the feeling was
mutual.
Beyond an honorary
National Book Award in 2009, he won few major writing prizes, lost
both times he ran for office and initially declined membership into
the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joking that he already
belonged to the Diners Club. He was eventually admitted in 1999.
But he was
widely admired as an independent thinker – in the tradition of Mark
Twain and HL Mencken – about literature, culture, politics and,
as he liked to call it, ‘the birds and the bees’.
He picked apart
politicians, living and dead, mocked religion and prudery, opposed
wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other,
once observing that the three saddest words in the English language
were ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ (The happiest words: ‘I told you so’).
The author
‘meant everything to me when I was learning how to write and learning
how to read’, Dave Eggers said at the 2009 National Book Awards
ceremony, when he and Vidal received honorary citations.
‘His words,
his intellect, his activism, his ability and willingness to always
speak up and hold his government accountable, especially, has been
so inspiring to me I can’t articulate it.’
Ralph Ellison
labelled him a ‘campy patrician’.
Vidal had an
old-fashioned belief in honour, but a modern will to live as he
pleased. He wrote in the memoir Palimpsest that he had more than
1,000 ‘sexual encounters’, nothing special, he added, compared with
the pursuits of such peers as John F Kennedy and Tennessee Williams.
Vidal was fond
of drink and claimed that he had sampled every major drug, once.
He never married and for decades shared a scenic villa in Ravello,
Italy, with companion Howard Austen.
Vidal would
say that his decision to live abroad damaged his literary reputation
in the U.S. In print and in person, he was a shameless name dropper,
but what names! John and Jacqueline Kennedy; Hillary Clinton; Tennessee
Williams; Mick Jagger; Orson Welles; Frank Sinatra; Marlon Brando;
Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.
He dined with
Welles in Los Angeles, lunched with the Kennedys in Florida, clowned
with the Newmans in Connecticut, drove wildly around Rome with a
near-sighted Williams and escorted Jagger on a sightseeing tour
along the Italian coast.
He campaigned
with Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Truman. He butted heads, literally,
with Mailer. He helped director William Wyler with the script for
Ben-Hur. He made guest appearances on everything from The
Simpsons to Rowan
and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Vidal formed
his most unusual bond with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The two exchanged letters after Vidal’s 1998 article in Vanity
Fair on ‘the shredding’ of the Bill of Rights and their friendship
inspired Edmund White’s play Terre Haute.
‘He’s very
intelligent. He’s not insane,’ Vidal said of McVeigh in a 2001 interview.
Vidal also
bewildered his fans by saying the Bush administration probably had
advance knowledge of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks; that
McVeigh was no more a killer than Dwight Eisenhower; and that the
U.S. would eventually be subservient to China, ‘The Yellow Man’s
Burden’.
Christopher
Hitchens, who once regarded Vidal as a modern Oscar Wilde, lamented
in a 2010 Vanity Fair essay that Vidal’s recent comments suffered
from an ‘utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire
absence of any wit or profundity’. Years earlier, Saul Bellow stated
that ‘a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things
Gore says’.
A long-time
critic of American militarism, Vidal was, ironically, born at the
United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, his father’s
alma mater.
August
2, 2012
Copyright
© 2012 Daily
Mail