Gore Vidal, Anyone?

Vidal wrote more than two dozen novels, two well-received Broadway plays, a number of screenplays, works of memoir, and countless essays on literature and politics. But he seems to abide most vividly on YouTube, a venue best known for cat videos, home movies, and smartphone clips of teenagers singing karaoke.

Vidal’s online claim to fame rests in archival footage of a 1968 ABC television debate with William F. Buckley Jr., where they tangled about the Vietnam war. Vidal, a staunch opponent of the war, called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Buckley, who supported U.S. military involvement in southeast Asia, called Vidal a “queer” and threatened to “sock” him—a punch that might have been carried out if Buckley hadn’t felt compromised by a recent injury to his collarbone. The debate appeared to anticipate the coarsely confrontational sensibility of reality TV, which is why, one gathers, it endures in an eerie half-life in cyberspace. Google Gore Vidal, and his brawl with Buckley quickly surfaces among his greatest hits.

Suffice it to say that neither man fared well in the exchange. For Buckley, who died in 2008 at age 82, the episode was a rare lapse in a life defined by patrician gentility. He routinely invited liberals to his “Firing Line” public affairs show on PBS, where the talk proved spirited but genial. Buckley counted John Kenneth Galbraith and Norman Mailer, whose politics were reliably leftish, among his close friends. Vidal’s part in the dustup with Buckley, on the other hand, was standard operating procedure—the reflexive response of a man governed by a pattern of pathological extremes. Or so we’re reminded by Empire of Self, Jay Parini’s charitable if ultimately unflattering account of Vidal’s life and work.

Parini, an accomplished poet, novelist, and biographer, began a friendship with Vidal in the 1980s when they were both living in Italy. “It would be fair to say, in a crude way, that I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son,” he writes. “We had a good deal in common, including a passion for liberal politics, American history, and books.” Vidal asked Parini to write his biography, a job he agreed to do only if it could be published after Vidal’s death. Otherwise, “he would try to control what I wrote at every turn, driving both of us insane,” Parini tells readers.

Parini’s postmortem comes across as an affectionate but earnest stab at the truth about Vidal. It doesn’t seem, like Paul Theroux’s controversial biography of V. S. Naipaul, to be an attempt at score-settling by an apprentice grown resentful of his old mentor. Parini’s tone is more generous, as if he’s amiably tolerating a corrosively crazy uncle who’s come for Thanksgiving, his presence bearable because he brings good wine and even better stories. “He was usually kind to me, and to others in his surprisingly discrete circle of friends,” writes Parini. “He listened to my ideas for books and essays carefully, eager to respond in useful ways.” Parini also notes that Vidal was typically nice to the biographer’s family and always picked up the tab at restaurants.

Such testimonials don’t square with the gist of Empire of Self, which often resembles a running dossier of dyspepsia, drunkenness, dissolution, and diatribe. To get some measure of the darkness shadowing Vidal’s inner life, try a game of reading roulette with this biography, opening the book to any page to see if you can land on a passage in which Vidal is not acting the cad. Here’s page 113, where he writes to a friend about his budding career penning television scripts, admitting that “I am treacherous in all things; I sign contracts I have no intention of fulfilling.” The finger flips by chance to page 285, where Vidal, hired to front a breezy TV travelogue on Venice, decides it’s a perfect forum for denouncing Ronald Reagan’s policies toward the Soviet Union. On page 325, we find Vidal ditching longtime friend Jason Epstein because the usually supportive editor disliked Vidal’s moribund lampoon of Christianity, Live from Golgotha (1992).

A more systematic reading of Empire of Self suggests that Vidal drank too much, loved too little, and talked all the time. He seemed incapable of an unexpressed thought, even if it had yet to form into a lucid idea. He and his companion, Howard Austen, were together some five decades; but the great love of Gore Vidal’s life was obviously Gore Vidal, hence the title of Parini’s book. “If he could be petty and difficult, that was part of his total being,” Parini observes in a nonjudgmental, New Age formulation that dodges the moral consequences of Vidal’s character.

Vidal assumed that American civic life was as self-serving as he was, which is why his historical fiction, a big part of his literary production, offers such a jaundiced window on the national past. Burr (1973), his fictional account of the republic’s early days, casts George Washington as a hapless general and shrewd opportunist and Thomas Jefferson as a mediocre inventor lacking in ideals. Lincoln (1984), Vidal’s speculation on Honest Abe, is equally sardonic. If Vidal had gotten around to novelizing the life of Mother Teresa, she’d no doubt have come off as a sanctimonious schemer angling for a book deal.

Among members of the cultural elite who equate cynicism with sophistication, Vidal was often celebrated as a deep intellectual. He was a darling of Hollywood and a frequent contributor to Esquire and the New York Review of Books. “When Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, David Susskind, or anyone associated with the BBC called,” Parini writes, “he leaped to his feet, put on the mask of Celebrity Author, and stepped out smiling and waving to the audience.”

Vidal grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a troubled marriage that relegated him largely to the care of his maternal grandfather, a populist senator from Oklahoma. Those origins shaped Vidal’s politics, a peculiar blend of cornpone progressivism and crackpot conspiracy theories—William Jennings Bryan by way of Oliver Stone. He believed that Franklin Roosevelt facilitated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in order to ease American entry into World War II. He tried to implicate George W. Bush in similar allegations of skullduggery in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. As he aged, Vidal’s political views became even more depraved: He praised Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh as “a noble boy,” arguing that his actions were morally equivalent to those of George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower.

In his previous biographies of Robert Frost and William Faulkner, Jay Parini profiled literary figures with their own demons, although they possessed forms of genius that inclined readers to overlook their flaws. This naturally leads to the question of Gore Vidal’s lasting value. He was a jerk and a demagogue, but does the quality of his work make him still worth the trouble? Parini poses the issue this way: “Will anyone remember Gore Vidal in years to come? Will they read him? It’s not possible, of course, to answer such questions with certainty.”

Admirers have compared Vidal favorably to Oscar Wilde, another gay gadfly whose outsider status fed his literary ambition. But it’s hard to see how Myra Breckrinridge (1968), Vidal’s signature satirical novel about a transsexual afoot in Hollywood, will prove as memorable as Wilde’s comic confections. Vidal’s chief contribution to Wildean tradition seems more superficial: Like the flamboyant Oscar, he cultivated his celebrity as intently as a bonsai gardener, and like Wilde, he searched tirelessly for the zinger bon mot that tended to confuse cleverness with wisdom.

Parini correctly concludes that Vidal was best in his essays. His senator-grandfather, unable to consult his massive library because of blindness, recruited the young Vidal to read to him. Books became Vidal’s refuge, and speaking them into life for his grandfather taught him that language, even when written down, lives most vitally as a form of talk. Vidal was a masterfully conversational writer, and United States, his 1993 doorstopper of an essay collection, shows a writer who, whatever his faults, was deeply conversant in the classics and could write beautifully about literature. What we get in Vidal’s literary essays is something all too rare in the rest of his work—and indeed, in the rest of his life—a sense of unalloyed happiness. In reading, Vidal always seemed to reconnect with the innocence of discovery he’d first found among his grandfather’s shelves.

For the most part, joy appeared to elude Gore Vidal, and Jay Parini suggests that, wherever his old friend now resides, he’s probably frowning. “He told me to say what I saw whenever I wrote about him, not pulling my punches,” he tells readers. “That is, of course, how he lived his life. I’d like to think he would appreciate my efforts, although I’m not looking forward to our meeting on the other side.”

Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.