A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.

-Gore Vidal

Jay Parini’s biography of legendary American writer, wit, and agent provocateur, Gore Vidal, published in the U.S. as Empire of Self, takes as its British title one of Vidal’s famous quips: Every Time A Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies. This delicious riposte, made in a characteristic attitude of cool detachment encapsulates what America remembers best about Vidal: the savvy TV personality and late-century patrician figure—an arrogant, acid-tongued, gorgeous, hyper-literate commentator and novelist who was born into the highest circles of what he referred to as the American Empire.

Never has a writer been so close to the center of American power. Raised by his blind grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, in the halls of the Capitol, he spent his childhood reading Senator Gore the Congressional Record and Roman and American history. Vidal’s father, Eugene, was an aviation pioneer, and worked in the Roosevelt administration. Vidal became an extended family-member, by his mother’s second marriage, with Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy); an inveterate bon vivant, Vidal was chum and erstwhile confidant of her husband, the president; cherished for his wit and good looks, he was elbow-rubber of the most ecstatic and eminent characters of the 20th Century (Italo Calvino, Tennessee Williams, Anaïs Nin, Paul Newman & Joanne Woodword, George Santayana, and Norman Mailer, to give the briefest sampling)—all this, while at once remaining a steely-eyed observer and critic of power, privilege and pomp.

British writer Peter Kemp considered Vidal a “modern Suetonius,” a reference to the Roman historian who wrote revealingly about the Caesars. This is an apt comparison, as Vidal (a lifelong autodidact who never attended college) was an assiduous student of history, both ancient and modern. With his series of novels (including Lincoln and Hollywood), which came to be known as Narratives of Empire, he implanted into readers’ understanding his conceptions of the motives of American imperialism, how they are couched in the personalities of great characters. “Even with the historical novels,” Parini writes, “there was an urge to comment on the moment indirectly, to find a usable past, as in Washington, D.C. or Julian or Burr.” Emotional distance and intellectual perspicacity were highly individualized and idiosyncratic in Vidal, who famously said of himself, “Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.” This blithe quip was delivered by the same writer who declared that the best four words in the English language were “I told you so,” and the worst three were “Joyce Carol Oates.”

His commentary ranged from deeply considered views on domestic- and geo-politics (perhaps best summarized as populist isolationism), to the downright catty, gossipy, Hollywood-obsessed heart of American popular culture. Equally at home with Burbank studios, “book chat,” and national politics, Vidal thrived in, and fluidly combined, both the low-brow and the highfalutin of the last American century. This was a man whose extemporaneous banter often became new conventional wisdom, as when he said (and never tired of saying), “The Property Party has two wings, Republican and Democrat.”

His political play “The Best Man,” aptly timed for a Broadway debut during the 1960
election cycle, was a huge success, made into a film of the same name starring Henry Fonda. What is often forgotten about Vidal, and which is brought to life again in Parini’s new biography, is what an eclectic and multifaceted writer Vidal was; and what a generous friend. Parini, whom Vidal had once named his literary executor, met the author quite by chance while on sabbatical in Italy in the 1980s. Parini, a longtime professor of English at Middlebury College (where he was my advisor), is a poet, novelist, essayist, and editor. His novels include, The Last Station, a story of Tolstoy’s final years, which was made into a film starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren. Parini’s greatest work, however, may very well prove to be a powerful string of biographies, including lives of Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner. That Parini has turned to Vidal’s life is a natural culmination of their long friendship, which ended with Vidal’s death in 2012. A devoted friend, Parini refers to Vidal not by his last name, but intimately, as “Gore” throughout the book. Despite this heartwarming closeness and insight into Vidal the man, Parini’s depiction of him is unsparing. Absenteeism and alcohol were the main themes in Vidal’s pained relationship with his mother, Nina, and Parini parlays this maternal disaffection into grounds for certain nascent character flaws. “As with many adult narcissists, Gore’s affliction could be traced back to a sense of rage at his mother’s early defection. ‘I had no mother,’ Gore said, when I once asked him about Nina. ‘I prefer not to talk about her.” Delightfully, and uniquely, each of the chapters on Vidal’s life is interspersed with personal vignettes, usually a page or two in length. These vignettes record Parini’s many experiences with Vidal, some glorious, many star-studded, some wince-inducing as they detail Vidal’s propensity in later life for alcohol-induced back-biting and pettiness. “I have strong memories of our time together in such places as Rome, Naples, Edinburgh, Oxford, London, New York, Boston, even Salzburg and Key West…My vignettes were culled from my journals, in each case written soon after the event described.” We see Vidal’s egregious, often glaring faults (surface bigotry, contempt, utter rudeness, a bent for conspiracy theories) as amplifications, by-products, and ultimately collateral damage of the person who shocked, thrilled, and instructed so many observers. In his later years, Vidal was the psychologist America looked to for a second opinion. He was asked for his comment on any event of national consequence; yet his persona was not without personal costs.

“The mask of Gore Vidal, the one he wore in public, did him a disservice in many
ways, as it occluded the shy man hidden beneath its rubbery texture. But what
would Gore be without his mask? Not the dazzling public figure who could, with
pluck and skill, debate Buckley or Norman Mailer or any number of opponents.”

It is worth mentioning, considering its total pervasiveness in the biography, that Vidal’s sexual career is a matter of legend. While he avowedly dissociated sex from love, it was a regular part of his afternoons, taking place after a morning of writing. It was a pastime that spanned many decades and included both sexes, though he ultimately preferred men. While he slept with film icons such as Rock Hudson and Fred Astaire, and spent an unsatisfactory night in the Chelsea Hotel with Jack Kerouac, where Vidal “got a blowjob,” he mostly dealt in what he called “trade,” sex with youths picked up on the streets of Italy, Los Angeles, Thailand, and elsewhere. His loving and long-term relationship with Howard Austen was sexless after their second year together. The pair lived together for over fifty years, and Vidal believed that their policy of no sex is what guaranteed the success of their relationship. “For Gore,” as Parini writes, “he was an ideal companion: frank, unpretentious, bright.” Austen, who died in 2003, was also a marvelous singer.

Gore Vidal was the last of a dying breed of public intellectuals in an age when they still appeared regularly on network television. His famous feuds, as with William F. Buckley, Jr., helped to define progressive politics in the United States from the sixties onward. As a writer, he will be known to posterity for his historical novels, his socially-progressive (in some cases, groundbreaking) satires, and his magisterial essays. To the living he should be remembered for his unvarnished honesty, and for his dedication to dissecting history in terms of power, class, and empire. He wouldn’t suffer an ideologue or be bullied by a –phobe of any stripe.

Writer Harold Rosenberg said, “An artist is a person who has invented an artist.” In the
person of Gore Vidal, whom Parini calls “the true Zelig of his age,” we have a figure who has created a multi-polar artist, a historical novelist, a satirist, a postmodernist, a political commentator, a shadow President of the United States, a screenwriter, a wit, and a touchstone who reveals the quality (or lack thereof) for every substance with which it comes in contact. Parini, having assembled a fluid, propulsive take on Vidal’s life, one bound up with intimate, tender portraits from his own long relationship with Vidal, has proved that he is indeed, as Vidal considered him, the best man for the job.

In memoriam Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

-Allen Guy Wilcox

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