His “pansexuality” stopped him getting into politics, he was punched by Norman Mailer, described Truman Capote’s death as “a good career move” and he never quite hit the same literary orbit as some of his peers (Updike, Bellow, Roth et al), but Gore Vidal was a stunning essayist, a brilliant speaker and a glittering wit. The following comes from his obituary in The Guardian, but if you’re interested, read the one in Time too:
For as long as democracy lasts, people will quote the most brilliant of his many epigrams – “Politics is just showbusiness for ugly people” – and, for as long as competitive endeavour exists, will parrot his cruel but psychologically astute observation that: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” It is rare for a week to pass without one or both of these remarks being quoted approvingly somewhere.
He was open to the charge of namedropping, but claims of famous acquaintance were never faked: he had been a friend and relative of the Kennedys and, when I went to interview Vidal at his breathtaking clifftop villa on the coast of the Amalfi coast, there were photographs of him with Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, who were reputed to have taken refuge there during one of the presidential scandals. However, though distantly related to Clinton’s vice-president, Al Gore, Vidal delighted in declining to meet a branch of the family he regarded as dull, grey sheep.
As often with Vidal, the remark about politics compensating the plain was double-edged. Famously attractive as a young man, he would have been a beautiful politician but, with the American electorate reluctant even now to back for most high offices candidates known to be gay, he was surely doomed to fail in the profession of his influential grandfather, Senator Gore of Oklahoma, who, being blind, relied on the newspapers being read to him by a group of assistants who included his grandson[…]But, even had he been straight, a mainstream political career would likely have been undermined by the savagery of his analysis of America. Politically, she was a corrupt and failing empire with a government that ruled through paranoid invocation of national security, he felt. However, he liked to reassure people that there was no risk of American culture dying – because it had never existed.
Despite the extremity of these opinions – and the fact that early novels such as The City and the Pillar (1948) and Myra Breckinridge (1968) were censored and banned because of their sexual content – Vidal later achieved mainstream bestseller and Book of the Month club status with a fictional sequence designed to correct what he saw as the deficient historical knowledge of his fellow Americans.
The Narratives of Empire books, from Burr (1973) to The Golden Age (2000), combined fact, gossip and waspish commentary in the most entertaining and subversive history lessons until the advent of David Starkey, whose style somewhat echoes Vidal’s.
These popular works and lucratively paid but cheaply produced screenplays for projects including Bob Guccone’s Caligula permitted Vidal to live in some splendour in Italy and California, while writing the essays on politics, literature and culture. They were premiered in periodicals and later preserved in book-form and had the feel of his true vocation. It was in one of these pieces that he characteristically claimed to have sneaked a gay sub-text into the screenplay of Charlton Heston’s Ben-Hur.
A walking rejection of the claim that America has no class system, Vidal had the manner of an aristocrat. During the BBC coverage of the 2008 election, he spectacularly blanked David Dimbleby, whom he seemed to feel was pulling rank on him. Often, while interviewing Vidal, it struck me as a minor tragedy that no director had ever cast him as Lady Bracknell, for no actress has ever managed the levels of hauteur that this author could summon.
A few years ago, when I mentioned a passage in his memoirs that admits to being unable to express any open distress after the death of Howard Austen, his supportive partner for almost 50 years, he drawled: “Have you seen that film with Helen Mirren? The Queen? Our class are brought up not to show emotion.”
This effortless identification with one of the highest-born figures in history was very Vidal: both in its social self-confidence and the fact that a question about emotional evasion was itself emotionally evaded through a provocative aphorism.
With a writer who was such a brilliant speaker and a natural entertainer, it is fitting that he has left a more durable record on film than most writers do: through occasional acting turns such as the arrogant senator in the political satire Bob Roberts. That part was a vision of another life he might have led. But anyone who relishes elegant and incisive writing and speech will be glad that Vidal was fated to explain, rather than practise, politics.
“The planet Venus, a circle of silver in a green sky, pierced the edge of the evening while the wintry woods darkened about me and in the stillness the regular sound of my footsteps striking the pavement was like a the rhythmic beating of a giant stone heart.”
― Gore Vidal, Clouds and Eclipses: The Collected Short Stories
“Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”
“Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”
“Politics is just showbusiness for ugly people”
“You hear all this whining going on, ‘Where are our great writers?’ The thing I might feel doleful about is: ‘Where are the readers?'”
“A writer must always tell the truth, unless he is a journalist.”
“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”
“I suspect that one of the reasons we create fiction is to make sex exciting.”
“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”
“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.”
“The American press exists for one purpose only, and that is to convince Americans that they are living in the greatest and most envied country in the history of the world. The Press tells the American people how awful every other country is and how wonderful the United States is and how evil communism is and how happy they should be to have freedom to buy seven different sorts of detergent.”
“Never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.”
“[Professor] Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: ‘Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.’ Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News.”
“At a certain age, you have to live near good medical care — if, that is, you’re going to continue. You always have the option of not continuing, which, I fear, is sometimes nobler.”
“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”
“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.”
“It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.”
(on Norman Mailer) “You know, he used the word ‘existential’ all the time, to the end of his life, and never even learned what it meant. I heard Iris Murdoch once at dinner explain to Norman what existential meant, philosophically. He was stunned.”
“Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war because to be at war Congress has to vote for it. He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It’s like having a war on dandruff, it’s endless and pointless.”
“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”
“Anyone who sings about love and harmony and life [John Lennon] is dangerous to someone who sings about death and killing and subduing [Nixon]”
“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”
“In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.”
“I believe there’s something very salutary in, say, beating up a gay-bashing policeman. Preferably one fights through the courts, through the laws, through education, but if at a neighborhood level violence is necessary, I’m all for violence. It’s the only thing Americans understand.”
“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so.”
“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice like, Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they’re both just aspirin.”
“Envy is the central fact of American life.”
“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”
“In America, if you want a successful career in politics, there is one subject you must never mention, and that is politics. If you talk about standing tall, and it’s morning in America, and you press the good-news buttons, you’re fine. If you talk about budgets, tax reform, bigotry, and so on, you are in trouble. So if we aren’t going to talk issues, what can we talk about? Well, the sex lives of the candidates, because that is about the most meaningless thing that you can talk about.”
(on Ronald Reagan) “He is not clear about the difference between Medici and Gucci. He knows Nancy wears one of them.”
“I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”
“There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.”
“Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.”
“The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven’t seen them since.”
“Today’s public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can’t read them either.”
“Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.”
“We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.”
“Every four years the naive half who vote are encouraged to believe that if we can elect a really nice man or woman President everything will be all right. But it won’t be.”
“Never have children, only grandchildren.”
“Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an IQ of 60”
“The unfed mind devours itself.”
“A good deed never goes unpunished.”
“I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.”
“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.”
“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”
“Fifty percent of people won’t vote, and fifty percent don’t read newspapers. I hope it’s the same fifty percent.”
“Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.”
“The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return”
“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”
“If one starts with the anatomical difference, which even a patriarchal Viennese novelist was able to see was destiny, then one begins to understand why men and women don’t get on very well within marriage, or indeed in any exclusive sort of long-range sexual relationship. He is designed to make as many babies as possible with as many different women as he can get his hands on, while she is designed to take time off from her busy schedule as astronaut or role model to lay an egg and bring up the result. Male and female are on different sexual tracks, and that cannot be changed by the Book or any book. Since all our natural instincts are carefully perverted from birth, it is no wonder that we tend to be, if not all of us serial killers, killers of our own true nature.”
“Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!”
“The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes.”
“The four most beautiful words in our common language: I told you so.”
“Congress no longer declares war or makes budgets. So that’s the end of the constitution as a working machine.”
“We should stop going around babbling about how we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We are a sort of militarised republic.”
“As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.”
“Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.”
“Think of the earth as a living organism that is being attacked by billions of bacteria whose numbers double every forty years. Either the host dies, or the virus dies, or both die.”
“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.”
“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”
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He described Reagan during the 1980s as “a triumph of the embalmer’s art”. – Clarence
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Ireland’s Olympic coverage is hilarious
(by Francis Higgins, via The Poke)
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