Gore Vidal - RIP.

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Gore Vidal reached amazing heights but missed out on main ambitions

The writer was thwarted in his political goals and failed to become the pre-eminent writer of his time



Although he achieved considerable wealth and fame and a secure place in dictionaries of quotations, Gore Vidal failed in the two major ambitions of his life.

Intended by his family to be a senator or even president, he opted out of politics in his prime because of his homosexuality and was beaten in two later bids for office in California and New York.

Setting out instead to become the pre-eminent writer of his time, he was judged by most measures to fall behind rivals such as John Updike, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. He had to settle for being the greatest essayist of his age – a distinguished calling, but a devalued one – and the most brilliant talker of his times: an increasingly fashionable skill but far inferior, in Vidal's opinion, to literature. He was, though, an astonishingly entertaining conversationalist, in public and private, with some claim to be the most consistent wit since Oscar Wilde.

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 wasopen 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.

An instinctively competitive man who pursued, with inventive invective, long feuds with numerous rivals, Vidal will doubtless have taken some pleasure in being the last survivor among the formidable group of men including Norman Mailer (The Naked and The Dead), Joseph Heller (Catch-22) and Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-5) who came back from the second world war and re-energised American fiction. Vidal's service on a naval destroyer inspired his debut novel, Williwaw (1946) and the title and some content of a late-life memoir, Point to Point Navigation.

Vidal and Mailer had a lifetime dislike of each other, a dispute which some have attributed to divergent sexuality, although this seems unfair as Vidal was just as happy to fuel disputes with another gay writer, Truman Capote.

Vidal sometimes claimed to prefer the term "pansexual" rather than "gay" or "bi": possibly because he considered the more common categories a cliche. 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. And, although Vidal would have rejected the idea of market strategy, he also cannily wrote one of the few American plays guaranteed a major revival every four years: The Best Man, a deft drama set during a presidential nominating convention, has duly just been produced again on Broadway ahead of the 2012 vote.

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.

Asked why he was so dismissive about Al Gore and that Tennessee clan, he drew himself up and hissed: "We were the Gores!"

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.


::::Tips hat::::
 
RIP
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