Gore Vidal passed away at the tender age of 86. The provocative novelist wrote twenty-five novels on social and historical issues. My favorite book was 1876 about the stolen election between Samuel Tilden and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, which harbingered the flawed 2000 election between GW Bush and Al Gore, whom was a distant relation. In 1968 I also read MYRA BRECKENRIDGE and was bitterly disappointed to not find a trace of pornography in it. At the age of 16 I was ready for the sexual revolution, for that year was a time of turmoil with Paris aflame, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinated by gunmen, the Tet offensive, the Olympic massacre in Mexico City, and the Democratic Convention in Chicago along with various other act of repression by the right.
Gore Vidal confronted his arch-adversery William Buckley during a commentary on ABC news, labeled the right-winger a crypto-Nazi to which Buckley called Vidal a ‘queer’. The two were more alike than they wanted to admit and I always suspected that they might have slept together in younger years. Buckley later apologized for the insult, but said that Vidal was an advocated for bisexuality. When William Buckley died in 2008 a journalist asked Vidal for his sentiment at his enemy’s passing, “I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.”
Never one to shy from controversy Vidal responded to Roman Polanski sexual abuse case by saying, “I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?”
Bruce Benderson wrote of his passing;
“Shut up, Gore Vidal, and rest in peace for once. I’m in awe that we’ve lived to see the demise of that energetic old whore, a Wife of Bath who lived as long as Methuselah and still coveted the limelight. A lousy novelist, because he refused to take second seat to his characters, as all novelists must do, and a provocative essayist, who put strategically sensationalist political commentary that he didn’t really believe in at the service of his narcissism and grandiosity–to the great delight of all his readers, including me. “’Gore is a man without an unconscious,’” his friend the Italian writer Italo Calvino once said. Mr. Vidal said of himself: ‘I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.’”
May you have the last laugh, you old curmudgeon, and finally get a little peace of mind.
The New York Times was a little kinder to this ogre of soliptic vanity and reported that “By the time he was 25, he had already had more than 1,000 sexual encounters with both men and women” according to his memoir “Palimpsest.” Many of those were during his war service in Alaska, which was an infamous dumping ground for suspected homosexual during WWII.
His longtime companion passed in 2003 and asked “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?”
“Of course it had,” Mr. Vidal wrote. “We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.” Mr. Austen was buried in Washington in a plot Mr. Vidal had purchased in Rock Creek Cemetery. The gravestone was already inscribed with their names side by side.
I applaud his long life.
It was worth the living.
To view the Buckley-Vidal 1968 conflict in Chicago please go the the following URL;