3 replies to this topic

[NBooth]

The Gore Vidal facebook page is announcing that he has died. He was 86.

I've not read Vidal's novels--I have several on docket, including one of his pseudonymous mystery novels--but I recently devoured a good chunk of The Selected Essays. Like him or loathe him, the man had a wicked way with words. His interviews are pretty entertaining, too...and his confrontation with William Buckley is the kind of thing legends are made of:



Unfortunately, not many of his essays seem to be available online. "Tarzan Revisited" (1963) is a good sampling, though. Better examples,I think--certainly more provocative--would be "Pink Triangle and Yellow Star" (1981) or--especially--his take-down of the Kennedys in "The Holy Family" (1967)--neither of which are available online, afaik.

EDIT: Here's the official announcement at Vidal's website. Nothing more than a date, at this point.

EDIT EDIT: Here's an interview with Vidal from last year:



EDIT X3: LA Times has an obit. So does SeattlePI:

Quote

Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills at about 6:45 p.m. of complications from pneumonia, Burr Steers said. Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for "quite a while," he said.

Along with such contemporaries as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities — fixtures on talk shows and in gossip columns, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who hadn't read their books knew who they were.

[I found both of these via BoingBoing, which also links to a Gore Vidal fansite]

Here's our thread on Ben Hur, a movie for which Vidal was one of the screenwriters.

Edited by NBooth, 31 July 2012 - 11:47 PM.

[Darrel Manson]

I enjoyed his Burr series of historical novels. Read Myra Breckenridge, but was neither impressed or disappointed.

I may take a look through Netflix to see if any of his golden age of TV stuff is around.
Edit: Nope, can't find any of the TV stuff. All that good stuff never quite got saved.

Edited by Darrel Manson, 01 August 2012 - 09:43 AM.

[NBooth]

Slate pushes back against the Vidal love:

Quote

Vidal was a paradigmatic, almost stereotypical representative of the traditional American elite—WASP lineage, prep schools, money, connections. Fashioning himself a latter-day Henry Adams, a valiant upholder of a civilization under siege—he compared America to Rome in its decadence—he repeatedly denigrated those arriviste groups he considered less than fully American.

Of course, as other bloggers have pointed out, it's a bit more complicated than the Slate piece implies.

Meanwhile, Salon suggests that Vidal and Buckley weren't so different. This article's also critical of Vidal, but it strikes me as far more fair-minded than theSlate piece:

Quote

Vidal would have been appalled by the suggestion, but he and Buckley had more in common than being celebrity intellectuals with snarky styles, cult followings and failed campaigns for public office that were successful as publicity stunts (Bill for Mayor of New York, Vidal for a New York congressional seat and the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from California). Both Vidal and Buckley came from rich arriviste families with deep roots in the American South. Both inherited their political worldviews — Vidal from his grandfather the Oklahoma senator, and Buckley from his father, the South Texas oil man Will Buckley. Both had audiences on the fringes of the political consensus — Vidal among the leftist readers of the Nation, Buckley among the right-wing readers of the magazine he founded and edited, National Review.

Most important of all, both Vidal and Buckley represented strains of the Jeffersonian reaction against mid-century liberalism that was gathering force in the U.S. in the middle and late 20th century.

Edited by NBooth, 03 August 2012 - 01:35 PM.

[NBooth]

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova shares some thoughts on Vidal from the journals of Anaïs Nin, recorded after she met Vidal at a lecture and struck up a friendship. Vidal was twenty:

Quote

We slide easily into a sincere, warm talk. He dropped his armor, his defenses. ‘I don’t like women. They are either silly, giggly, like the girls in my set I’m expected to marry, or they are harsh and strident masculine intellectuals. You are neither.’ Intellectually he knows everything. Psychologically he knows the meaning of his mother abandoning him when he was ten, to remarry and have other children. The insecurity which followed the second break he made, at nineteen, after a quarrel with his mother. His admiration, attachment, hatred, and criticalness. Nor is it pity, he says. He is proud that she is beautiful and loved, yet he condemns her possessiveness, her chaos, her willfulness, and revolts against it. He knows this. But he does not know why he cannot love.

[…]

He moves among men and women of achievement. He was cheated of a carefree childhood, of a happy adolescence. He was rushed into sophistication and into experience with the surface of himself, but the deeper self was secret and lonely. ‘My demon is pride and arrogance,’ he said. ‘One you will never see.’ I receive from him gentleness and trust. He first asked me not to write down what he would say. He carries his father’s diplomatic brief case with his own poems and novel in it. He carries his responsibilities seriously, is careful not to let his one-night encounters know his name, his family. As future president of the United States, he protects his reputation, entrusts me with state secrets to lighten his solitude. Later he wants to write it all down, as we want to explore his secret labyrinth together, to find the secret of his ambivalence. To explore. Yet life has taken charge to alter the situation again. He, the lonely one, has trusted woman for the first time, and we start the journey of our friendship, as badly loved children who raised themselves, both stronger and weaker by it.