Gore Vidal

Michael Blowhard has just finished reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln. I myself have read Lincoln, Burr and Myra Breckenridge, and most of the essays collected in United States. Lincoln is an expertly crafted piece of work, almost Jamesian in its sense of form, but Vidal seems more like a talented editor than a truly creative artist. The book is never less than fascinating, but it seemed to me to lack exuberance. Vidal is ultimately more of a talented journalist with a good subject, much like James Boswell, a writer of comparable aesthetic eminence lucky enough to have an even more entertaining subject, than a truly great novelist like Henry James.

There are few works of literature out there that I actively detest, but Myra Breckenridge is one of them. Vidal's treatment of Rusty is just plain cruel and his conversion to homosexuality is totally unconvincing. The book is not an even remotely accurate account of how an apparent heterosexual discovers his homosexuality; rather, it is the vicious revenge fantasy of a bitter, sadistic queen. If buggered brutally enough, Vidal insists, you too will acknowledge your secret desire for men, the same desire we all know you hold inside of you. Of course, this merely flys in the face of the facts. Michael Bailey's work on homosexuality has exploded Vidal's oft repeated insistence that there is no such thing as a homosexual person only homosexual acts. Gay men, from birth, really do have a distinctive personality type, which includes but is not limited to whom they are sexually attracted to. Gay and straight are not stations on a continuum, at least for men; they are distinct types.

Perhaps Vidal would be more tolerable if he did not clearly think himself the greatest writer who ever lived. What interests me most about Vidal's literary criticism is what is not there. In all his essays, I cannot recall a single reference to Shakespeare. His avoidance of the Bard's greatness seems almost pathological, as if he is avoiding the one writer he feels is his nearest rival. Of course, the comparison is preposterous. Put Vidal up against even John Updike and his thinness is apparent. In Vidal's political essays too, his belief in his own absolute greatness badly undermines his credibility; even among dispeptic left wingers, he is no William Hazlitt. Vidal is absolutely certain that he knows what is best for everybody. Strip away the sexual liberationism and the intellectual pretentions and what you are left with is a narrow petty little busybody. Lately, Vidal has been known for talking up Timothy McVeigh as some kind of martyr, much as Harold Pinter and Peter Handke have latched onto Slobodan Milosevic. Political murder, it seems, will never lack for cultured defenders. It should by now be clear that, by any standard, Vidal the political man is a complete nutbar. (Even the people of California had sense enough not to elect him Senator.) Fortunately, Vidal's peculiar political views never much make it into Lincoln. Still, the apparent balance of Lincoln and his other historical novels has given a sheen of respectibility to Vidal's nuttiness. A completely undeserved sheen of respectability. But enough of this. I think I'll just let Australian poet Les Murray have the last word on Vidal's kind of politics, "Brutal policy, like inferior art, knows whose fault it all is."

NOTE: I've said it before, if you want a sensitive and searching examination of homosexuality in a novel, there is no better place to begin than In Search of Lost Time. Eve Tushnet doesn't think Nocturnes for the King of Naples, by Proust disciple and biographer Edmund White, is half bad either.