The Eternal Gore Vidal

At 100, the ultimate man of letters still looms

Two interviews you won’t want to miss: I spoke with Tom Watters of the great Pilcrow, a new Substack dedicated to promoting serialized novels, about the media, politics, and my new novel, Glass Century. And I appeared with Daniel Oppenheimer, one of the best podcasters out there, to discuss baseball with the writer Alex Perez, who’s a real dynamo.

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Gore Vidal, who would have turned one hundred on October 3rd, is not always a man easily remembered. There is no simple canon to jam him inside, no well-meaning scholarly societies to huddle around and insist on holding extravaganzas in his memory or at least petitioning the local schoolboards to slip Myra Breckinridge or The City and the Pillar or Burr into the high school curriculums next fall. Politicos in both parties cannot find any comfortable ways to weaponize his memory. If they know anything about Vidal, they would come to understand he probably disdained them and what they were trying to do—unless, somehow, they possessed his withering, Augustan sensibilities.

Several years ago, on the tenth anniversary of Vidal’s death, I pitched a retrospective to The Nation, one of his old haunts, and was turned down. Instead, the editor asked me to write a piece on a local congressional race. I complied, because I wanted the byline and the money, but I confess I was rankled and it reminded me that Vidal, unlike many of his contemporaries, can never be readily contextualized. He is a man entirely outside of this time, yet wholly relevant to it; few thinkers grasped the megalithic quality of the United States better. Dead now for thirteen years, Vidal missed what would have been, to him, a kind of dark apotheosis: the election of Donald J. Trump as president. What I would have done to have slid around the timescales enough to have brought Vidal, in his intellectual prime, to late 2010s and 2020s America and set him loose. I do imagine, sometimes, Vidal casting a regal, cutting glance after I’ve asked him to say something about President Trump. “This,” Vidal may have offered, “is exactly what the United States deserves.”

Novelist, essayist, playwright, screenwriter—there was little Vidal, born to American nobility, could not do, and do extraordinarily well. His grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, was a senator from Oklahoma, and his father was an executive of three airlines, an Olympian, and possible paramour of Amelia Earhart. After his parents divorced, his mother married Hugh Auchincloss, the stepfather of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Preternaturally gifted as a writer—his first novel appeared at age nineteen—he was also, in his youth, strikingly handsome, like a film star out of the Golden Age. He openly slept with both men and women, and boasted, by his mid-twenties, of having had more than a thousand sexual encounters. Anaïs Nin, Christopher Isherwood, and Tennessee Williams all, at various points, courted him. When he was twenty-two, he published The City and the Pillar, an exquisite, and very frank, treatment of gay love and lust. “Boldy, Jim put his hand on Bob’s chest. The skin was as smooth as he remembered … Then, carefully, like a surgeon performing a delicate operation, he unbuttoned Bob’s shorts. Bob stirred, but did not wake, as Jim opened wide the shorts to reveal thick blond pubic hair from which sprouted the pale quarry.” Jim and Bob are lovers, but Bob is now married to a woman and prefers to think of himself as no longer gay. He punches Jim, calling him a queer, and Jim responds by forcing Bob down on the bed, beholding the “heaving body beneath him, the broad back, ripped shorts, long muscled legs. One final humiliation: with his free hand, Jim pulled down the shorts, revealing white, hard, hairless buttocks. ‘Jesus,’ Bob whispered. ‘Don’t. Don’t.’” Appearing in 1948, The City and the Pillar was not amusingly scandalous like Portnoy’s Complaint, which received scorn but also rapturous reviews and turned Philip Roth, for a period, into a major celebrity. Homosexuality, in 1940s America, was the ultimate taboo, and Vidal was effectively blacklisted, forced for a stretch of the 1950s to publish under pseudonyms. To make matters more challenging for his contemporaries and those who wish to resuscitate today, Vidal did not identify as gay. He also wasn’t closeted: he spoke proudly of sleeping with men, and saw no need to hide his sexual proclivities, even in a deeply homophobic era. He believed just about all human beings were inherently bisexual, and labels like straight and gay were beside the point. He wanted, without apology, to write novels that could reckon with the spectrum of human sexuality—and he wanted, above all, to move beyond sex, to not be defined by who he might want to take to bed.

Vidal wouldn’t have minded being president. Fresh off the success of The Best Man, his Broadway play about two contenders for the presidential nomination, he ran for Congress in 1960 against a conservative Republican in the Hudson Valley. He lived alone, on the edge of the Hudson River, in a Greek revival mansion. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman stumped for him—by then, he had already found acclaim in Hollywood as an MGM contract writer, helping to rewrite Ben-Hur—and he told a somewhat befuddled New York Times reporter he wanted to slash defense spending, have a detente with Communist China, and increase funding for public education. “If this is subversive, all right, I am out to subvert a society that bores and appalls me,” he said. He did not win, but ran ahead of John F. Kennedy in the district, notching more than forty percent of the vote. It was a race, unlike Norman Mailer’s mayoral campaign, run with the utmost seriousness. In 1982, he would finish a (distant) second—but ahead of many other candidates—in a Senate primary in California, losing to Jerry Brown. Twice he set out his vision for the nation in “state of the union” addresses for Esquire, as if he were a shadow president. “We hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how,” he wrote in 1975. “We don’t know what our cage really looks like because we were born in it and have nothing to compare it to but if anyone has the key to the lock then where the hell is he?”

There were at least three Vidals: the novelist, the essayist, and the public intellectual. The novelist, largely, wrote a range of staggering works in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s that captured much of the sweep and grandeur of the nation and its empire, including Burr, Lincoln, and Hollywood. For Julian, he roved to Ancient Rome, meticulously researching the fourth century emperor who tried to convert Christians back to pagans. The historical novels were rich, gossipy, and contemporary, and iconoclasts like Aaron Burr could be the shining anti-heroes. When not writing, Vidal found plenty of time for television, a medium in which he was most comfortable; arch and delightfully snide, his bearing aristocratic—his tossed off asides never not scintillating—he gladly faced down the giants of his age. At the 1968 Democratic Convention, he repeatedly called William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi,” leading Buckley, plainly flustered, to declare Vidal a “queer” that he’d “sock in the face.” He likened Norman Mailer to Charles Manson, and Mailer headbutted him in the green room as they were set to appear on The Dick Cavett Show. They kept jousting, of course, on the show itself, portly Mailer fuming as Vidal, debonair and detached, never missed a beat. “I’m going to give you a line Degas said to Whistler—two celebrated painters—and Whistler was a great performer like Norman,” Vidal said to the author and the television audience. “Degas said, ‘You know, Whistler, you act as if you had no talent.’ You [Norman] present yourself as though you really have no talent at all.”

Vidal could be fascinated enough by the United States to dedicate most of his waking hours to swimming in the muck of the nation’s complexities and sins, giving himself over, time and time again, to its past, present, and future. And he could believe, publicly at least, it was fated for steep decline and ultimate destruction. He was, until the end of his life, a deep skeptic of imperialism and foreign wars, and he was sure, in the years after his death, this adventurism would unravel America for good. He warned of the imperial presidency, of ever-expanding executive power, of government by diktat. “The president is a dictator who can only be replaced either in the quadrennial election by a clone or through his own incompetency, like Richard Nixon, whose neurosis it was to shoot himself publicly and repeatedly in, as they say, the foot,” Vidal wrote in 1981. “The fact that we are living in an era of one-term presidents does not lessen, in any way, the formidable powers of the executive.” Presidents, in his view, were powerful enough to court disaster for their own destructive aims. He was sure Franklin Roosevelt knew of the Pearl Harbor attacks before they came, and that the Bush administration may have allowed 9/11 to happen. He predicted, accurately, the U.S. would be run out of Afghanistan. He disdained the bipartisan embrace of Israel. America, in his view, was rotting away “at a funeral pace.” In his final years, he predicted that “we’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.” There was, in the nation, far too much income inequality, corporations swollen with power, the private and public sectors equally unaccountable to the citizens they dominated. In Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, Vidal perceived a kind of aggrieved populist who was striking out against a system that offered little recourse for the alienated. McVeigh, Vidal wrote in 1998, “remained silent throughout his trial. Finally, as he was about to be sentenced, the court asked him if he would like to speak. He did. He rose and said, “I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’” Then McVeigh was sentenced to death by the government.”

“Those present were deeply confused by McVeigh’s quotation. How could the Devil quote so saintly a justice? I suspect that he did it in the same spirit that Iago answered Othello when asked why he had done what he had done: ‘Demand me nothing, what you know you know, from this time forth I never will speak word.’ Now we know, too: or as my grandfather used to say back in Oklahoma, ‘Every pancake has two sides.’”

Vidal, somewhat notoriously, had a public falling out with Christopher Hitchens. Once, Vidal had declared him his “dauphin,” a worthy intellectual successor, but then Hitch fell madly in love with American Empire. Vidal’s last decade was a lonely one: America was on the march after 9/11, waging its war on so-called Islamofascism, and Hitchens’ furious defense of the War in Iraq was the consensus view. America had been attacked, and now America must go to war. It was a civilizational struggle, and only a weak-willed liberal—or, as Hitchens described Vidal, a purveyor of “crank-revisionist and denialist history”—could believe otherwise. The Obama years were not much better for Vidal, who could sound like an addled, blustery old man when he continued, in the era of the first Black president, to bemoan American militarism. It was a triumphalist moment, and Vidal was not one for triumph. He was brilliant, uncompromising, and icily cynical. The liberal who brays today about Trump’s fascism could find much to like in Vidal, until they realize, once they linger on his essays for more than the time it takes Maddow to knock off one of her weekly segments, that he would not have viewed Trump as some sort of wild aberration or American cancer to be excised by the next Democratic administration; Trump, for Vidal, would not have been a black swan, and he would have snickered at those who saw his election over Hillary Clinton as the sliding door to democracy’s collapse. The erosion was already in progress, and our rights had been, in his view, circumscribed and violently ignored a very long time ago. “When Japan surrendered, the United States was faced with a choice: Either disarm, as we had done in the past, and enjoy the prosperity that comes from releasing so much wealth and energy to the private sector, or maintain ourselves on a full military basis, which would mean a tight control not only over our allies and such conquered provinces as West Germany, Italy, and Japan but over the economic—which is to say the political—lives of the American people.” We can date, Vidal added, the “gradual erosion of our liberties” to January 1950, when the postwar empire and the national security state came into bloom.

I do not subscribe to all of Vidal; few do, and I’m not sure Vidal hungered for many acolytes, anyway. There is a personal dimension to my admiration, since he was my father’s favorite writer, and he also served, as much as one can, as a model for my own career. I write novels and essays. I believe, wholeheartedly, in both forms. Like Vidal, I ran for office as a Democrat, and I like Vidal, I made an earnest go of it. Vidal’s closest brush with power came with the Kennedy White House, where he was something of an insider; mine, I suppose, would come with a potential Zohran Mamdani City Hall. Vidal, who ran twice, couldn’t quite quit politics, while I’d be content, were it not a decent way to pay the bills, to write on politics less in the future. I will never run for office again. And I am also less cynical than Vidal: I do not believe the American republic is going to die soon, even as Trump rampages onward. Enormous flaws do not mean terminal rot. I think we will keep having presidential elections. I think, on the balance, there can be improvements in ten or twenty years. The military adventurism that Vidal long decried is, truly, at a low ebb, and he might be pleased to know that. Trump, if a liar, won multiple elections by promising no new wars, and the Democratic Party, at the minimum, is losing its lust for Israeli-style apartheid. Even Trump, in 2025, can demand that Israel halt the bombing of Gaza. This does not mean the military-industrial complex will stop grinding human beings into dust or underwriting genocide, but it does beat the status quo of twenty-four years ago. American voters are wising up. The jingoism of the 2000s has leaked away. We are not quite out for blood as we once were. This is worth acknowledging. Yet still, for all we know—and as Vidal warned—an American Caesar might stand ready to terminate the democratic experiment for good. Is this Trump? Another Republican? A politician we don’t yet know? What will this country be like in another half century? Whatever form it might take, it should have a place for Vidal’s corpus. He still has much to tell us.