Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal: A Biography

By Fred Kaplan

Bloomsbury, 2000

850 pp, $24.95 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/23377

"Listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered!" No, this scintillating oratory is not taken from dialogue heard at the local pub around closing time, but from elite culture in the United States. On live network TV in 1968, Gore Vidal, novelist and essayist, was on the end of this tirade from William F. Buckley, the ultra-conservative political commentator.

The famous author, Norman Mailer, went one better in 1971 by head butting Vidal just before they were to appear on a TV chat show, backing up for a repeat dose six years later at a celebrity dinner party by punching Vidal in the face and cutting his lip.

That political reactionaries like Buckley, and homophobes and sexists like Buckley and Mailer, should be provoked beyond endurance by Vidal's homosexuality and liberal politics is to Vidal's credit (if not his personal safety). It is also a depressing comment on the state of political consciousness within US elite culture that Vidal's sexuality and leftish-tinged liberalism should arouse such fury.

This biography of Vidal by Fred Kaplan throws some light on Vidal and his impact on US society. Born into celebrity in New York city in 1925, the son of an important Roosevelt administration official and the grandson of a former senator (T. P. Gore, a conservative southern Democrat), Vidal discovered his three defining passions early in life — gay sex (a love affair with a 12-year-old athlete and schoolmate), books (school lessons and sport were dull compared with the world of the imagination) and politics (he excelled at school debates and was a feared "senator" in the mock parliament at his elite prep school).

Vidal wrote his first novel when only 20, still in uniform and with crewcut, at the end of the second world war, and cruised the gay bars and baths before writing his controversial best-seller, The City and the Pillar, about gay love based on his first adolescent homosexual affair. A career in politics, "the family trade", came a distant third to novels and sex at this stage and his early politics were quite conservative and conventionally anti-communist.

Vidal's 1950s were filled with more writing, including pseudonymous murder-mystery thrillers, and the new field of TV drama. He was also, however, moving some distance to the left politically. He now detested McCarthyism, saw President Eisenhower as "the political front for big business", was opposed to the nuclear arms race and saw anti-communism as a cover for US imperialism abroad and suppression of civil liberties at home.

Rounding the bend into the '60s in the full stride of fame, Vidal's literary talents were recognised by Hollywood (MGM salvaged their epic, Ben-Hur, with a Vidal rewrite of the script), radio and TV (which had a standing invitation for Vidal for their talk shows because he was articulate, irreverent, witty, well-read and well-connected to famous people) and John F. Kennedy's Democrats. In 1960 Vidal ran for Congress as the Democrat candidate for the 29th District of the state of New York.

The Democrats had not won this solidly Republican seat for more than 50 years and Vidal, who was not expected to win, was allowed some leftish license (advocacy of elimination of nuclear weapons, a smaller defence budget, anti-pollution measures and an end to capital punishment) by the party machine bosses. Despite media attacks on his politics and sexuality, Vidal received the best-ever Democrat result with 43% of the vote.

Despite his relative success and his guarded admiration for JFK ("a president who read books", he enthused, but one who was also a ruthless pragmatist and anti-communist zealot), Vidal put a political career on hold, realising that machine politics would restrict his literary work and his freedom to speak his mind. Indeed, he gave up voting after 1964, the year he had voted for Lyndon Baines Johnson in the belief that the Republican alternative, Barry Goldwater, was unimaginably worse only to see LBJ make the unimaginable real, particularly in Vietnam. Vidal turned to the political essay, satirical guns in full polemical fire.

Influential on the liberal left, lecturing to thousands, especially on campus, Vidal upset conventional political and social orthodoxy. The right-wing and the narrow-minded screamed "pornographer" about Vidal for his novel Myra Breckinridge, a gender-bending satire on Christian sexual mortality. Conservatives took constant political umbrage.

When Buckley defended the actions of the Chicago police in viciously crushing demonstrators at the Democrat National Convention in 1968, and Vidal criticised the action as that of a "fascist" police state, Buckley did not like the comparison and responded with invective and the threat of violence. "Pink queer", he described Vidal, who luckily wasn't Jewish, otherwise he might have been labelled with the trifecta of Nazi victims by Buckley.

The more the right turned on Vidal, the more left-leaning he became. Vidal was appalled by the use of state power in the service of corporate profits. With Republican and Democrat mere mirror images of each other, Vidal supported a "third party", the People's Party, formed in 1969 with Ralph Nader as 1972 presidential candidate. In 1982, with Reaganite neo-conservatism in full throttle, Vidal decided to storm the enemy from within by nominating for Democrat senator for California. Although scoring a respectable 15%, Vidal was never in the hunt for the Democrat spot, his program of corporate taxation and military budget cuts standing no chance in a party funded by corporations dining out on military contracts.

Jericho's walls had not fallen but not for lack of noise from Vidal's trumpet. His series of best-selling historical novels about American political, economic and military history brought the issues of elite power to a wide audience in a lively way. His essays have continued his role as acerbic liberal critic of US capitalism in a political environment where "liberal" is seen as a swear word.

In evaluating Vidal's life and work, this biography is not always helpful. Partly it is the anecdotal padding which muffles analytical precision. Vidal's world is the world of celebrities, and the sound of famous orbits crossing is so much white noise. Vidal playing backgammon with JFK, dinner-partying with Princess Margaret, having anal sex with Jack Kerouac, lunching with Gough Whitlam, dining and travelling with Anais Nin — the sound of heavyweight names being dropped from a great height is as loud as a building construction site.

The main problem, however, is Vidal's, and his biographer's, liberal politics. Vidal digs and digs into the corrupt flesh of the capitalist body, excising out a diseased organ here (anti-gay and other oppressions), a cancerous growth there (political vote-buying by the corporate sector) and other ills but his surgical skill in exposing the heart of the problem ("those who own the country rule it") is not matched by his prognosis. Capitalist society, he hints, could be made to work with the right political leadership — an expectation which is a triumph of liberal hope over the facts revealed by Vidal's political dissection, and a triumph of the class genetics of his establishment origins over radical, socialist democracy.