When I saw a tweet late last night that Gore
Vidal had died, I gasped. Not because I
was surprised; he had been sick for awhile and he never really seemed to have
recovered from the death of Howard Austen, the man he shared his life
with.
His grandfather was the first man Oklahoma sent
to the US Senate. His father was West
Point nobility, went on to found what would become Eastern, TWA and Northwest airlines
and had a tempestuous affair with Amelia Earhart, was a two time Olympian and
served in the Roosevelt administration.
His mother was a socialite who had a long term affair with Clark
Gable. His step father would then go
onto to become the step father of Jackie Kennedy.
He attended the most prestigious private schools
in the country, Sidwell Friends, St. Albans, left to study in France, came home
during the war went to the Los Alamos Ranch School and finally Phillip Exeter. When the rest of his class was heading to
Harvard or Columbia he enlisted in the US Navy.
This smartest most clever of men, this literary icon never attended
college.
He had his first novel Williwaw published in 1946 when he was 19. This novel based on his
experience in the Navy burst him onto the national literary scene.
His third novel The City and the Pillar was published in 1948. This book would prove to change his life
forever and many years later would have an enormous impact on mine. It was one of the first novels to deal with
homosexuality in a manner that was not sleazy, negative. The gay and bisexual characters were not ashamed,
were not sick, they were everyday men going about the course of their
lives. This story line so scandalized
and offended the book critic of the New York Times that the paper would not review
another work by Gore Vidal for 5 more years.
When I was a young man trying to figure things
out I took The City and the Pillar
out of the community college library for some downtime reading and I was
transformed. I learned that what I
wanted, what I was feeling, what I was sensing about myself was not all that
strange. I learned that I was not dirty,
or emotionally stunted or mentally ill.
I learned that I was normal. I
learned all of this from a work of fiction.
A few weeks later I read Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, some pretty intense
reading for a 19 year old.
After reading The
City and the Pillar I was hooked.
His historical novels helped me to understand this nation’s history
better but his more odd fiction gave me the most pleasure.
Myra
Breckinridge; about a transsexual and so much more
Creation;
his spin on the how the world started
Duluth; he
makes up a city in the upper Midwest where people die and end up on TV
Live
from Golgotha; Jesus is not really crucified and he is in fact
a fat slob and Tom Brokaw and NBC news are transported back in time to cover
this major event
Palimpsest; His
memoirs that he could not guarantee were completely accurate but it was how he
remembered things
His essays and social commentary were often scathing
but never far from the truth, his TV debate with William F. Buckley is
legendary; look it up you will be transformed.
His play The Best Man may be
the best play about American politics ever writen and he was not above mocking
himself through his many appearances on television comedies.
Gore Vidal was the last of the great literary figures
that emerged as media superstars after World War II. Norman Mailer, John Updike, Truman Capote,
William F. Buckley and James Baldwin all died years before.
I’m not sure I read everything he has written but
I came pretty damn close.
But, if I had not read anything other than The City and the Pillar I would still be
mourning Gore Vidal.
I gasped when I learned of Gore Vidal’s death
because for a brief moment I realized that another of the post war “Best and
the Brightest” would no longer be here.
I would no longer be able to learn from him, I would no longer be able
to be provoked by him and I would no longer be inspired by him.
Thank you Gore Vidal. Thank you for making our lives much fuller
our culture more interesting and for the positive and meaningful impact on my
life. You are sitting on the pedestal next
to Reinhold Niebuhr.
