By now we all know of Gore Vidal's death. He was an amazing novelist, political activist, and inspirational thinker.
Gore Vidal in 1948.
Photograph by Carl Van Vechten/Wikimedia Commons
Gore Vidal Was a Great Character—But Don’t Forget His Novels
By Liam Hoare
If a man’s legacy were to be gauged by the immediate response to his death, then Gore Vidal’s is very much in danger of being reduced to a succession of pithy and caustic sentences that will however rattle round the internet, and cheapened by the descent into hysteria that warped his political views in his final years. As quotable as he was—for good and for ill—it’s worth remembering Vidal the novelist, whose writing helped define the postwar American novel because his subject—whether he was writing about religious strife in ancient Rome or middle America as a gaudy soap opera—was always the United States itself.
Vidal’s most substantial body of work is his seven-book series “Narratives of Empire,” a chronicle of the United States tinged with the Vidalian view that the nation has morphed since its inception from republic to empire. Often, Vidal’s heterodoxy affected the quality of his work; as Christopher Hitchens noted in his attack on Vidal in Vanity Fair, by the time The Golden Age was published in 2000, Vidal’s obsession with conspiracy pertaining to Pearl Harbor had overtaken him.
But Burr—his novel on the founding of the republic—and Lincoln are unsurpassed in the field of American historical fiction. Ever the contrarian, Vidal made his Lincoln a leader with dictatorial tendencies who would suspend habeas corpusand lead the North into sanguinary conflict to keep the republic together. Vidal deployed verifiable quotations to make his case that the Great Emancipator did not care much for emancipation at all: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”
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Again, however, Vidal was coming back to the great subject, the one to which he devoted his life: the United States. In electing to tell a story of Roman decline and fall, Vidal was sending a warning shot, expressing his opinion that his country of birth was beginning to go the same way, abandoning its democratic and republican values for the sake of empire. He may not have always been right on this point, but his novels remain essential. Watch him battle Buckley and Mailer, and hear him trash Capote. But read the books—it is where the best of Vidal is to be found.
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The Prolific Gore Vidal: Always Ready for Intellectual Battle
Vidal may be most remembered for his political activism and razor-sharp critiques of American political culture on Television and in print. He characterized both Republicans and Democrats as virtually identical “Property Parties,” and even almost came to blows with conservative William F. Buckley Jr. while the two covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests. Vidal’s contributions to America’s cultural and literary life were such that Newsweek referred to him as one of America's best all-around men of letters.
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GORE VIDAL: REST IN PEACE
Courtesy of Marc Campbell at Dangerous Minds
Gore Vidal has died. He was 86 years-old and the cause of death was pneumonia.
In the next few days many words will be written about Vidal. He was the kind of bigger-than-life figure that polarized, provoked, angered and inspired his friends and foes alike.
Long before it became obvious to many of us that the USA was entering a kind of collective dark night of the soul, Vidal was vocal in his condemnation of the erosion of freedom in America, denouncing the imperialism that thrived under the political leadership of puppets controlled by the military industrial complex and giant corporations. But his cynicism regarding America’s future was balanced by a deep love for the revolutionary values this country was built on. He feared that we were losing our identity and freedom to the machinations of authoritarianism and greed.
The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.
In this historic television debate with William F. Buckley during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Vidal is absolutely right on in his criticism of the Chicago Police Department’s violent response to the the anti-war demonstrations taking place outside the International Amphitheatre where the convention was taking place. Described accurately as a “police riot,” the victims of the gestapo-like tactics of the cops included innocent bystanders, journalists (including Dan Rather) and even the Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey who was overcome by tear gas in his hotel room.
Vidal calls Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley responds by calling Mr. Vidal a “queer.” For a moment, the battle between the two men is a perfect distillation of what is occurring outside on the streets of Chicago.
