Gore Vidal Has Passed Away at Age 86

[Nawth Chucka]

Author Gore Vidal has died at age 86 of pneumonia. I remember after I read Myra Breckenridge wondering, WTH was that? I'd never read anything like it.
We should all live so long. RIP Mr. Vidal.

[Smapti]

And he kissed more boys than Lisa Simpson ever will.

[Duckster]

http://www.nbcnews.com/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1726666.html

[mhendo]

He was one of America's great essayists. His United States collection contains some fabulous work. I also liked his memoir Palimpsest quite a lot, and i'm a fan of his Narratives of Empire series of historical novels.

He lost it a little bit in his last decade, and his arguments became rather unintelligible and disjointed at times. I was especially disappointed when he defended Roman Polanski, and referred to Polanski's victim as a "young hooker."

I've heard a few people argue that his sometimes bizarre statements coincided with the period after the death of his long-time partner Howard Austen. I'm not sure if Austen's death was the cause of Vidal's decline, but it seems like a plausible explanation.

Anyway, i liked his writing, and i liked his politics, and i think he was a great American man of letters.

[Don Draper]

RIP.

I read his "City and the Pillar" when I was a closeted 15 year old. Made me get up the cajones to go out and search for fellow "gays."

[Sampiro]

He has gone to live with Jesus now. Which means one of them is going to be very pissed off.

I wish I had photographic evidence, but, years ago G.V. was the subject of a long interview on a British show (The South Bank Show) that aired on Bravo. I CLAUDIUS was also running at the time, and that night was episode 6, the episode entitled "Queen of Heaven" (the one in which Livia makes Claudius swear to make her a goddess).

So the commercial read=

Tonight on Bravo:
GORE VIDAL
QUEEN OF HEAVEN

E. L. Gore Vidal was, I must admit, somebody I liked the concept of far more than the man. He was so briliant but so... what's the word- actually it's several- in fact bitter, bitchy, mean, miserable, and vicious all crouch for employment.

He died a literary Norma Desmond, long since forgotten. ("Myra Who-enridge? Oh man, that was edgy... forty years ago.") He wrote some brilliant essays, I own a shelf full of his non-fiction, but whatever fiction of his is still in print probably won't be for long, and it's not just age- it just didn't last.

Unlike Truman Capote's.

Ultimately Gore was Salieri (in the Shafferian sense rather than the historical [an aside reminiscent, if not worthy, of GV's own] to Tru's obscene manchild. Capote had a gift Vidal never had, and that was the ability to breathe life into his characters- Gore ALWAYS wrote like somebody who isn't human trying to envision how humans act and emote and talk. I think this is the reason he hated him: both could chisel one hell of a statue, but while Tru could waltz his Galatea all around the room Gore could never get one of his to so much as halfway wink at him. Holly Golightly will be buckdancing long after Myra/Myron and the whole populations of WASHINGTON D.C. and HOLLYWOOD from 1876 to the end of CREATION are being recycled for use as confetti.

But, otoh, Gore was very very rich, knew everybody who was anybody from Amelia Earhart to...oh, Johnny Carson anyway- and even those who had never read his works respected him even if they weren't sure why. So, rest in whatever passes for peace, you vicious old queen (of heaven).

[Sampiro]

The saddest part of his legacy is that in his final decade he descended from provocateur to moonbat conspiracy theorist. I detested the Bush Administration, but Vidal's comments and writings on it were just damned near silly and frankly unworthy of him. When he wrote- at length if unconvincingly- of how that eloquent and articulate young prince among criminals Timothy McVeigh was at most only an accessory to Oklahoma City, if that (he knew this you see because he'd written to him and visited him) it was bad enough, but after 9-11 he was one of the foremost Kool Aid swillers.

[Sampiro]

Great line: Well, the Constitution has not yet been pregnant.

[handsomeharry]

I think he was the greatest American writer since Mark Twain.

RIP.

[Captain Amazing]

They're both dead now, and William F. Buckley never got the chance to punch him in the face.

[The Second Stone]

Rarely do I disagree with Sampiro on the subject of writers. And I suppose the creation of characters thing is correct, but I love Vidal's writing. Not as much as I love Sampiro's writing, but certainly more than Capote's. Shit, Capote's typist was a better writer than he was.




Couldn't resist that last crack. Capote was a very good writer. I just enjoy Lee and her one book, TKAMB more than anything Capote ever wrote.

[BobLibDem]

I can't think of him without hearing Lily Tomlin's voice "Mister Veedle".

[Ellen Cherry]

Moved thread from MPSIMS to Cafe and merged. Slow traffic keep to the right.

[An Arky]

Originally Posted by Captain Amazing

They're both dead now, and William F. Buckley never got the chance to punch him in the face.

Yeah, well, he beat him to death, at least.

[salinqmind]

I remember watching him on talk shows (I was young and not college-educated, but I found him thrilling) and notably with Norman Mailer on Dick Cavett. Who offered to bring in more chairs "for Mailer's giant intellect". The feud between NM and GV eventually petered out and they reached the point (says Dick Cavett in a 2007 column) where they would pass on the street "like two old whores...'still at it, Norm?' 'yep, still at it, Gore'.) ...Oh, and my dad was a theater manager decades ago and our whole family often went to the theater he was currently in charge of to watch new movies, free. One of them being 'Myra Breckenridge', LOL! WTH was THAT? my mother kept saying all the way home, Seriously, WTF? (I got her the book and she declared after giving it a try that that was when her hair seriously went gray).

[Ranchoth]

Originally Posted by An Arky

Yeah, well, he beat him to death, at least.

You win.

Everything.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Sigh. You young'uns weren't there for the birth of modern political discourse. The Buckley references made below were made on live tv during the jolly 1968 police riot Democratic Convention. A good discussion can be found here. The actual exchange is not what people usually remember.

At the Aug. 28 debate in Chicago - the penultimate encounter in the series, with an estimated 10 million people watching - things began with relative calm. But it didn’t stay that way, and before long the men began exchanging words that one simply didn’t hear on TV at that time (see box below). Vidal called Buckley a "pro-crypto-Nazi," a modest slip of the tongue, he later said, because he was searching for the word "fascist" and it just didn't come out. Inflamed by the word "Nazi" and the whole tenor of the discussion, Buckley snapped back: "Now listen, you queer," he said, "stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in you goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered." Smith attempted to calm the exchange with "gentlemen, let's not call names," but the damage had been done. The two men, considerably subdued, met the following night for the last of their week of debates.

Now that's how they done it in the Good Old Days. Everything was better then.

Vidal moved throughout his life in circles of the rich, famous, and powerful than most of us will never encounter and he hated them with the implacable fury of someone who wanted to join but knew that he would always be subtly excluded. He also had the contempt bred by intellectual superiority for fools, who are all-too-easy to find around you if that's all you look for. Both goaded him to sharpen his tongue to a stabbing instrument.

His best fiction were similar knives. Burr, the first of his series on American history, is by far the best because he places his skunk hero on top of a pedestal from which to piss down on the sainted founding fathers. He needed a villain to deify and his fiction lacked dimension when deprived of it. He used himself as the villain in his nonfiction so at its best his venom sparkles and effervesces and far more of the essays achieve his goals.

After he exiled himself to Italy - for good reason, to be sure, from a society that treated gay atheists then like polygamist Muslims today - his hatred of America grew to an obsession that blocked his perception like a clot impeding blood to his brain. He diminished himself by it and aging and physical loss added pathos to his self-annihilation.

For the many decades in between, he was the apotheosis of intellectual gadflies: witty, cutting, perceptive, adventuresome, invulnerable. We have nothing like him now, because the culture that made him no longer exists to make another. In the greater scheme of things that's wonderful progress. The loss is small but echoing.

[ralph124c]

A talented writer, but a miserable human being. I remember his verbal battles with the late W.F. Buckley.

[Cap'nReynolds]

Originally Posted by ralph124c

A talented writer, but a miserable human being. I remember his verbal battles with the late W.F. Buckley.

Curmudgeons sometimes enjoy being curmudgeons.

[joebuck20]

Originally Posted by Smapti

And he kissed more boys than Lisa Simpson ever will.

Girls, Smapti. Boys kiss girls.

[JohnGalt]

A month or two ago one of the cable channels showed his The Best Man showing Henry Fonda running against Cliff Robertson in the 1964 presidential campaign. The story was originally written for 1960 as a comment on Kennedy's run.

It's currently on Broadway (until September 9th) and I thought it was really thought-provoking, though a little talky, somewhat like Sorkin. It has some lines that are still appropriate today. The broadway production has some pretty big names: James Earl Jones, John Stamos, Kristen Davis, John Larroquette, Cybill Shepherd.

[The Second Stone]

He had a small speaking role in the movie Gataca.

[Lantern]

Originally Posted by salinqmind

I remember watching him on talk shows (I was young and not college-educated, but I found him thrilling) and notably with Norman Mailer on Dick Cavett. Who offered to bring in more chairs "for Mailer's giant intellect".

Fortunately this legendary encounter is preserved by Youtube for posterity.

Cavett writes a terrific blog at the NYTimes where he discussed this episode in detail.

They certainly don't make talk shows like that today.

[Sampiro]

Originally Posted by The Second Stone

He had a small speaking role in the movie Gataca.

He had a cameo as a priest (with a framed photo of George Bush on his wall) in Digby Goes Down, which was directed by his nephew Burr Steers.

[Siam Sam]

I've read several of his books and enjoyed them. I did think that whole Timothy McVeigh thing was weird. But RIP, Gore.

[Sampiro]

Gore and God know how I loathe being self referential, but this is my "Christmas Carol in the style of Gore Vidal" post from some years back.

[River Hippie]

I just watched Bob Roberts for the first time a couple days ago. Vidal played the Senator defeated by Tim Robbin's character.

[Icerigger]

Finally the crypto-nazi and the you-queer can duke it out in the afterlife.

[Sampiro]

Originally Posted by River Hippie

I just watched Bob Roberts for the first time a couple days ago. Vidal played the Senator defeated by Tim Robbin's character.

He was actually pretty good in that. Gore did that as a favor to Robbins'then-squeeze Susan Sarandon, probably his closest friend of the significantly-younger-than-himself Hollywood set. Robbins and Sarandon were frequent houseguests of his when he still lived in Ravenna and he was their's when he was in L.A. (where he owned property but kept it leased until he moved back).

Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were his closest Hollywood pals. He and Woodward were briefly 'engaged' = sorta kinda. I think his explanation was that Paul would not ask her to marry him because he was still marriage shy after his divorce, she got tired of waiting, so Gore asked her and somehow it got in the papers and forced Paul's hand.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Here's something about Vidal that won't get talked about much in his obituaries. In the very early 50s, after he made a splash with his first novel but wasn't yet making any money, he decided that he could write mysteries for some quick cash. He eventually wrote three, using the pseudonym Edgar Box. They're pretty good, deliciously bitchy as you might expect, and set in the worlds of politics and the rich, which are well portrayed as you would also expect. They were popular at the time, with several reprint editions, and have been collected under Vidal's name several times since.

What makes them especially interesting is the way they were written. They all have six chapters, of 10,000 words each. Vidal wrote a chapter a day for six days, rewrote them on Sunday, and sent them off.

How many patrician writers in their early twenties can pull that off?

[Sampiro]

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

How many patrician writers in their early twenties can pull that off?

The word 'patrician' brings up an interesting thing about Vidal: he was as closely connected to the American patrician class (old money, big money, politically prominent and monied, etc.) as one can be without being a part of it.

For those who don't know his genealogy:

His grandfather was Thomas Pryor Gore, the senator from Oklahoma, very conservative with public monies and briefly named in an Indian oil scandal that GV wrote quite a lot about later. Because Senator Gore was blind (the result of two different childhood accidents- one for each eye) his grandson walked him into senate hearings and served as his go-fer, thus exposing him to high level politics at an early age.

His father was Eugene Luther Vidal, a pilot and aviation enthusiast and military man who became superintendent of West Point for a while and then an aviation executive. Vidal Sr. wanted to make airplanes as much a part of the middle class family as automobiles were and to further this he developed a prototype for a personal plane that his son flew, on camera, when he was about 9 years old. (If you're wondering whether the "private plane in every garage" idea ever took off, I won't spoil it for you. ) Vidal Sr. was a close friend and most, including Gore, speculated a lover of Amelia Earhart.

When his parents divorced his mother, Nina Gore, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, an extremely wealthy patrician D.C. insider with family connections to Aaron Burr, whose portrait hung in Auchincloss's mansion and caused his stepson Gore to develop an early fascination for him. Nina and Hugh had two children, then divorced. (Gore detested his mother, made absolutely no secret of it before or after her death, and this seemed to be an opinion shared by a lot of people- coincidentally, both Vidal and his enemy Capote had alcoholic social climbing mothers named Nina.)

After Nina divorced Auchincloss- and here it gets a little complicated- Auchincloss married the mother of Jackie and Lee Bouvier. He was not, as often reported, the stepbrother of the future Mrs. Kennedy/Mrs. Onassis and Princess Radziwill- was no relation to them at all in fact- but they were stepsisters of Gore's half siblings, and through his half-siblings (whom he later became completely estranged from) and other common friends from his Auchincloss years he knew them well and continued to when JFK entered the picture, and he often visited the White House. (He later had a major falling out with RFK.)

However, he was basically the odd man out- no family fortune, no real connections of his parents, but was outside looking in. Made for some great stories and even by his own admission Washington D.C. and other stories were largely roman a clefs.

[CalMeacham]

Interesting piece by Dick Cavett: Gore Vidal Hates Being Dead

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/opinio...tml?hpt=hp_bn7

[Sampiro]

Two of my favorite Vidal novels were Messiah and Kalki. I remember wanting to discuss them when I finished but I seemed to be the only person who had read them (though in fairness both were written a long time before I read them and this was pre-Internet). Better in many ways, if only to me, than his historical fiction.

[Sampiro]

Originally Posted by CalMeacham

Interesting piece by Dick Cavett: Gore Vidal Hates Being Dead

http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/02/opinio...tml?hpt=hp_bn7

The two truest lines in that are "The fact that some feel his greatest work is in his collected essays should be a word to the wise. They're stunning."

I can think of many novelists who could touch or exceed him, but I would give three of my testicles and four of my kidneys for Vidal's ability at essay writing.

[Dave Hartwick]

The first time Gore Vidal ever made an impression on me I was watching the Tonight Show-- I think Carson was host-- and Vidal was a guest. I'd never seen such an interesting person on that show. He was urbane, smart, and a big ol' flaming liberal.

I tried reading some of his novels, naturally, and while I enjoy some historical fiction, I can't say I enjoyed his. Sure, it was amusing when Aaron Burr called George Washington a fat ass, but I don't remember even if I bothered to finish the book. As an author, he was a really good talk show guest.

[The Second Stone]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

The two truest lines in that are "The fact that some feel his greatest work is in his collected essays should be a word to the wise. They're stunning."

I can think of many novelists who could touch or exceed him, but I would give three of my testicles and four of my kidneys for Vidal's ability at essay writing.

If there is anyone on the dope who appears three balls and four kidneys short, it's you.

[Dr. Rieux]

A great American and writer and a big influence on me in my youth.
WhileI didn't always agree with him I always respected his intellect.
Farewell, Gore.