By Ron Capshaw
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Moments after his infamous televised dust-up with Gore
Vidal during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, William F.
Buckley Jr. encountered a livid Paul Newman. Newman told Buckley that his
calling Vidal a “queer” on national television was the most disgraceful thing
he’d ever seen. The actor’s rage was not lessened even when Buckley reminded
him that Vidal had started the incident by calling him a “crypto-Nazi.”
“That was political,” Newman replied. “Yours was
personal.”
In the years that followed, both Vidal and Buckley would
frequently defy their political labels. Buckley, the supposed reactionary,
would often display a surprising openness. He would generously state that even
though he did not like Vidal, he would “never call him a bad writer.” In the
1990s, Buckley would conclude that he should have supported the 1964 Civil
Rights Act. And in the 2000s, while neo-conservatives were beating the drums
for the war in Iraq, Buckley opposed it.
Meanwhile, Vidal, the supposed progressive, would behave
as a reactionary. To him, Buckley’s politics were disgusting, which made his
writings disgusting too. Around the time of their televised exchange, Vidal had
the epiphany that America was a “fascist security state.” He claimed that the
military–industrial complex had kicked into high gear during the presidency of
Harry Truman, whose Cold War containment policies he saw as part of an effort
to bolster the economy by maintaining a permanent state of war.
Vidal would cling to this worldview no matter the
counter-evidence. Like Oliver Stone, Vidal would argue that the very lack of
proof of a military–industrial cabal was evidence enough of its existence and
its control over American lives. Vidal viewed every unpredictable event through
this prism. The Soviets’ invasion of Afghanistan was the result of the American
military–industrial complex’s goading them into this venture in order to bleed
them dry and, by doing so, remove them from the running for the
military–industrial-complex sweepstakes. Vidal believed that these
maneuverings, not ordinary people’s desire for freedom, led to the Soviet
Union’s collapse.
Jay Parini’s new biography, Empire of Self: A Life of
Gore Vidal, doesn’t shy away from reporting such open paranoia or any of the
other unsavory aspects of Vidal. It is advertised as a look “behind the scenes
at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death.” And the book
lives up to the hype of being very different from previous biographical
efforts. Fred Kaplan was so nervous about offending Vidal that one can
practically feel the eggs he was tip-toeing around. There were certainly good,
although not admirable, reasons for such timidity. Vidal was as lawsuit-happy
as Tom Cruise; he responded to every slight and reveled in hateful feuds, the
longer the better.
Unlike the one with Buckley, these feuds did not always
have a basis in political antagonism. And the bi-partisan nature of them
reveals just how ego-driven and petty Vidal could be. He responded to fellow
leftist Norman Mailer’s assertion that he was intellectually dishonest by
reminding readers that Mailer had once stabbed his wife. But in the light of
his own comments about women, Vidal was a hypocrite. When asked about the
attacks on director Roman Polanski for raping an under-age girl in the 1970s,
Vidal asked, “Am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as
though she’s been taken advantage of?”
With Vidal safely buried, Parini pulls no punches. For a
figure who always proclaimed he didn’t care what people thought of him, Vidal
spent considerable time and energy constructing a “Rosebud”-like explanation
for his sexual coldness (he had a penchant for anonymous sex to the point that
he didn’t want to know his partner’s name or history). Parini is part of a
growing consensus that disputes Vidal’s stories to the effect that this was
traceable to the death of his only love, Jimmie Trimble, during the Pacific
campaign in World War II. (Parini even disputes that Vidal had a homosexual
relationship with Trimble.) But these tales do double duty in accounting for
Vidal’s dislike of Asians (with the Soviet Union near to imploding in 1986,
Vidal urged that the Soviets and the U.S. link up to fight the Japanese empire)
and his belief that FDR maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor in
order to let him take the U.S. into World War II. Like Christopher Isherwood,
Vidal believed that the war was not worth the life of a true love.
Nor does Parini accept Vidal’s oft-repeated assertion
that he was bisexual. For Parini, Vidal was strictly homosexual and displayed a
detectable self-loathing about this.
Parini still regards Vidal, in spite of his flaws, as one
of the best essayists of the 20th century. He had a lively wit and could
combine personal anecdote — it seems as if Vidal knew everybody worth knowing,
from Amelia Earhart to Orson Welles — with literary and historical themes. This
was especially remarkable given that Vidal did not go the Ivy League route to
becoming a writer: Once upon a time he was so patriotic that he enlisted in the
army rather than attend Harvard or Yale. However, by reading to his
grandfather, a U.S. senator who had gone blind, Vidal had got a kind of
education that was too rare even then. And his connections — his father was the
director of the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Air Commerce under FDR —
assured that he would not have to pay his dues as a writer.
In later years, Vidal was the epitome of the limousine
liberal. He lamented the plight of the poor while enjoying all the creature
comforts an Italian villa could provide, and he lived up to his belief that one
should never pass up the opportunity to “have sex or appear on television.” He
thundered on Larry King’s show that the U.S. was a fascist security state, but
he remained unmolested by the all-powerful U.S. “gestapo,” all the while being
feted by its media “mouthpiece.”
There is a moment in a documentary on him that shows just
how unashamed he was of being a parlor — actually villa — radical. He sits at
an impressive dinner table, waited on by his servants, in the company of Hollywood
liberals Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon. The actors have the good sense to look
embarrassed in such opulent surroundings. Vidal, however, expresses nothing of
the sort.
And any praise he received as a writer he regarded
as deserved. Conservatives, whom he loathed almost as much as he did
conventional liberals, often bypassed his Bizarro World politics and were able,
unlike himself, to appreciate talent. Thomas Mallon published in National
Review a paean to Vidal’s writing — another example of Bill Buckley’s
generosity. Despite Vidal’s hoping after Buckley’s death that his deceased
antagonist would “burn in hell,” Buckley’s son still praised Vidal’s talent as
an essayist. Newt Gingrich, the kind of inside-the-Beltway politician Vidal saw
as rotting the country, would not allow any criticism in his presence of the
author of Lincoln; when this was reported to Vidal by Christopher Hitchens (who
would jettison his early admiration of him because of his opposition to the War
on Terror), Vidal responded, “That is how it should be.”
Like Hemingway, Vidal was a great writer in spite of
being a bastard. Parini shows him warts and all. Empire of Self is an excellent
biography.
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