Gore Vidal: Puritan Moralist

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This interview with Gore Vidal was originally published in the February / March 1981 edition of The London Magazine alongside an essay by William Boyd and poetry by Derek Mahon.

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We all know Gore Vidal. Or imagine we do. How could we not? More often quoted than many political candidates, more frequently interviewed than any actor or rock star, an habitué of the late night talk shows which shape the public consciousness at its most elemental level, Vidal is one of few serious writers whose names are recognised in Europe as well as the United States. Even people who have never bought a book – especially people who have never bought a book – express vehement opinions about him.

Yet in spite of the perfervid emotions he provokes, and in spite of his apparent ubiquity, Gore Vidal has divulged little about himself. If he ever experiences doubt or indulges in self-pity, it is not with interviewers. Perhaps there are occasions when he discusses secrets from his past or reveals his innermost self, but he doesn’t do so on talk shows.

A certain remote and impersonal – not to mention imperious – attitude may be integral to Vidal’s psychology. But he has accentuated this detachment for professional reasons. As he admits in one of his essays, he refuses to use himself as a subject of analysis either in interviews or in his fiction on the ‘ground that since we live in a time where the personality of the writer is everything and what he writes is nothing, only a fool would aid the enemy by helping to trivialize his works’.

However, such aloofness can be dangerous. While Vidal insists like some Biblical prophet that only by his works shall ye know him, he realises that a radically different scale of values guides most literary critics. To them, ‘What matters is not if a book is good or bad (who, after all, would know the difference?) but whether or not the author is a good person or a bad person‘. Thus, since Vidal’s character has always been suspect, his reputation as an artist has suffered, and much as he may call for attention to his work, far more attention will focus on him.

Commercially this has been to his advantage. For he learned early that although he couldn’t control what reviewers said, he was a talented self-publicist and could sell books. The result: millions of dollars in royalties which rose in value when he converted them into Swiss francs and deutschmarks – as a protest against the war in Vietnam, he claims. (‘Civic virtue can be surprisingly rewarding.’) He owns a brownstone in New York City and a house in Los Angeles, and he rents a penthouse apartment in Rome and a villa overlooking the Amalfi coast.

Critically, however, Vidal has ridden a dizzying roller coaster, having been called ‘our greatest living man of letters’ just about as often as he has suffered personal attacks as ‘a bad piece of work’. There is no doubt that his image has done much of the damage, confusing some readers, infuriating others. In a supposedly democratic age, he has played the contemptuous patrician. During his frequent public appearances, he has come across as altogether too wry, too acerbic and glib – suspicious behaviour in the eyes of those Book Chat writers who value earnestness over everything. When the vogue was for two-fisted writers of irreproachable masculinity, he said he was, ‘like everyone else’, bisexual. When fashion changed and homosexuality might have been in Vidal’s favour, he said he was bisexual. But perhaps worst of all, he made his most difficult achievements look easy. And he had the temerity to put his finger on why he is so often resented. ‘Americans prefer their serious writers obscure, poor, and, if possible, doomed by drink or gaudy vice’ – all the things which Vidal is not.

Few people know much about Gore Vidal.

One might expect more perspicacious critics to make a distinction between Vidal’s image and work, between the public’s notions about him and what he actually produces. But even in the recent Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing there are indications that authors are judged as much by their personae as by their books. While granting that Vidal’s career ‘has embodied perhaps the most concerted effort of any postwar novelist to establish himself as a “man of letters” on the European model, equally at home in a variety of forms’, the Guide remarks that his ‘hothouse beginning may have caused his public self-creation to lag somewhat behind the creation of his works. In that interaction between working author and public person that Mailer has made so central to his career, Vidal works with a certain clumsiness and ineptness, his mandarin narcissism an intriguing contrast to Mailer’s struggling self-obsession.’

A curious comment, indeed. In his eagerness to catalogue what he takes to be Vidal’s flaws as a performer, the critic has overlooked certain inconvenient facts. For instance, after high school Vidal enlisted in the Army as a private; Mailer went to Harvard – speaking of hothouse beginnings.

But then, perhaps the critic shouldn’t be blamed. As already mentioned, few people know much about Gore Vidal.

His house in Los Angeles, a huge, whitewashed Spanish Provincial, stands behind a screen of foliage in a canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Vidal answered the door and led me through a dim hallway into the living room, which is brightened by red walls and many windows. Obviously done by a decorator, the room is a collision of Andalucia and the Orient. There are Moorish arches and banquettes, a Persian carpet, a rattan coffee table, a Japanese screen. The books and magazines scattered about – The Nation, William Golding’s novel, Darkness Visible, An Illustrated History of the Civil War, Jerry Brown Illustrated, a book of photos about China, a thick volume entitled L’Amour bleu – are as eclectic as the decor and seem to mark the outermost limits of Vidal’s wide-ranging interests.

‘Let me give you the tour,’ he said.

‘The tour’ consisted of a stroll through the yard, not through the house. He pointed out a patio where the swimming pool had once been. The new one was up a flight of steps, on a terrace. As we stood beside it, gazing at the red tile roof of the house, Vidal remarked that it reminded him of the setting of a Raymond Chandler mystery.

Although many assume that he spends most of his time in Italy, Vidal has always returned to America for promotional tours, and as co-chairman with Dr Spock of the People’s Party from 1970 till 1972, he spoke against the Vietnam war from one end of the country to the other. Since he never considered himself an expatriate – ‘The more I stayed abroad, the most intensely interested I became in the United States, the more clearly I saw it’ – it was no great shock when in 1976, due to a change in Italian tax laws, he bought this house and began remaining here more than half the year.

By the time we returned to the living room and had settled into our chairs, we still had not made eye contact. Was it conceivable after so many interviews that he suffered some vestigial shyness? Or did he avert his eyes because of what he imagined he saw in mine? It cannot be pleasant to know, as all celebrities must, that interviewers are apt to take their revenge in underhanded ways, i.e. focusing on a blemish rather than a beauty mark.

Beside Vidal in the chair lay Rat, a tiny dog which bears an alarming resemblance to its name. Rat showed no reluctance to look me in the eye, and under the dog’s implacable gaze I started with stock questions. When does Vidal write? Where? How?

The answers came out with crisp efficiency. In the morning. At a table. Longhand, on yellow legal pads (‘just like Nixon’) when he is doing fiction. Typewritten, when he’s working on an essay or film-script. He stays at it three or four hours a day and doesn’t let house guests or social commitments violate his schedule.

It is worth emphasising that although Vidal is portrayed by his critics as a kind of boulevardier who goes to too many parties and knows too many famous, non-literary people, he has produced an impressive body of work in the last thirty years. Its sheer bulk – nineteen novels, a collection of short stories, five plays, four collections of essays and numerous scripts for television and film – is all the more astounding when one considers its profusion of styles, genres and rhetorical devices. His fiction covers the spectrum from serious, conventional realism to comic, iconoclastic surrealism. His non-fiction ranges from general assessments of literary movements to deeply moving elegies, from profiles of presidential candidates to prophetic articles about America’s sexual mores, its relations with the Middle East and its economic prognosis.

As his historical novels Julian, Burr and 1876, demonstrate, Vidal is a meticulous researcher who – miracle of miracles – goes at it alone, unlike many popular novelists who hire a battalion of grad students to pillage the library stacks. Even when doing an hilarious essay such as ‘The Art and Arts of E. Howard Hunt’, he reads the man’s entire oeuvre. One may disagree with his opinion of the French nouveau roman or the American avant-garde novel, or of Yukio Mishima, Italo Calvino or Louis Auchincloss, but one cannot deny that he has done his homework.

‘I suppose I’m as egotistical as the next person. But narcissim? In what way?’

In short, his evenings with Paul and Joanne, Mick and Bianca (in the pre-split days) and Princess Margaret and Andy Warhol seem not to have affected the style or substance of what he writes each morning. ‘Why should they?’ Vidal asks. ‘Henry James and Edith Wharton led far more active social lives and it never harmed their work.’ And as he takes some pleasure in repeating, an occasional dinner party couldn’t possibly dry up a writer’s creative juices any quicker than a steady diet of teaching freshman composition, or of circuit-riding from one campus literary conference to the next, doing the academic novelist’s equivalent of a talk show routine.

When I brought up the Harvard Guide and his ‘hothouse beginning’ and ‘mandarin narcissism’, Vidal tilted his head to one side, stared down his nose and smiled the frosty smile he flashes on TV when he is about to take disciplinary action against a rightwing politician – in his eyes, any American politician.

‘Strange,’ he intoned in a calm, rich voice. ‘I suppose I’m as egotistical as the next person. But narcissism? In what way? With the exception of Two Sisters, I’ve never drawn on my life for fiction. I sometimes talk about myself in essays, but only as a way of confessing my point of view. On television and in interviews I talk about politics or the state of the world. Frankly I don’t find it very interesting to analyse myself.’

Vidal’s acquaintances confirm that although he may, by sheer force of intelligence, dominate a conversation, he isn’t self-absorbed. He asks questions, is surprisingly receptive to the strangers who drop in on him and is always eager to learn something new, be it a tidbit of political gossip, the name of a rising novelist or the symptoms of an exotic disease. (From my observation there is much discussion of medical lore chez Vidal.)

During TV appearances he is less likely to discuss his books than to expatiate on his current obsessions, which tend to concern the commonweal. Several years ago on the Johnny Carson show he astonished insomniacs around the country by coming on with the model of a new toilet system. It was during the long drought in California, and Vidal demonstrated how gravity flush toilets could conserve thousands of gallons of water. It is hard to imagine any other American writer wasting precious air time when he could be plugging his work.

‘As for my “hothouse beginning”,’ Vidal continued, ‘I guess I was born with certain advantages. But I wasn’t raised in a belljar, I wasn’t pampered. I’ve supported myself – and others – since I was seventeen. And I didn’t inherit my money, as some people think. Everything I have, I earned.’

I interrupted to ask whether, considering his socialist beliefs, he felt guilty about his wealth.

‘Why should I? I’ve never exploited anyone. I give fair value for what I get.’

Still, when he received million-dollar advances, didn’t that leave less for young novelists and poets?

‘Well, there’s no such thing as unilateral socialism. I work within the system we have … and it’s hardly a hothouse,’ he circled back to the original subject. ‘When you look at my interests – politics, public affairs.’

The phone rang. It had a row of buttons, and Vidal pressed the lighted one, then picked up the receiver. A reporter wanted his reaction to the Supreme Court decision in which novelist Gwen Davis was successfully sued by a doctor who claimed she had based an unflattering, fictional character on him.

Mentioning ‘the chilling effect’ this would have on novelists – ‘It’ll be a nightmare. They’ll have to vet every book. Does this rule out all satire?’ – Vidal began to speak more precisely, anxious to be quoted correctly, breaking his words into distinct syllables, pausing at commas, stopping at periods.

The reporter inquired about Vidal’s own libel suit against Truman Capote.

‘That’s a different matter. You simply cannot tell lies about a living person and get away with it.’

The suit, which remains unresolved, was prompted by Capote’s story in Playgirl that Vidal had been thrown out of the Kennedy White House for drunkenness. Vidal has demanded an apology, exemplary damages of one dollar, and payment of his legal expenses, which amount to approximately $40,000.

While he was still speaking to the reporter the phone rang again. Vidal said a hasty good-bye and pressed another lighted button. When a lengthy business conversation ensued, I jotted down what he was wearing. Scuffed brown shoes. Blue Lacoste socks with green alligators. Rumpled grey flannel slacks and a blue blazer.

Over the years I have seen Vidal on dozens of occasions, and he always seems to be wearing a blue blazer and rumpled grey slacks. Friends say he cares little about his personal appearance and depends on Howard Austin, his long time companion, to advise him about clothing.

Howard claims Gore has excellent taste and prefers conservative English tailoring. It’s just that he hates to shop and tends to wear the same things over and over. The first time I met Vidal at a cocktail party, he sat down and crossed his legs, revealing on the sole of one shoe a hole the size of a a silver dollar. I took this as evidence that despite his reputation for narcissism, he isn’t overly concerned about his image.

Not that he can’t also play the Grand Man. Since his prep school days at Exeter he has been a gifted self-dramatiser. His classmates called him the Senator, partly to mock him, partly because his grand-father, T. P. Gore, was a Senator from Oklahoma, but also in deference to Vidal’s debating skill.

Then, as today, he had a reputation for being arrogant and vain. But friends say he has always had the saving grace of being able to make fun of himself. Once known as the handsomest man in Rome, he now describes himself as a classical ruin.

In fact, for a man in his mid-50s, Vidal looks remarkably well. His hairline has receded a bit, but this has only emphasised the brainy prominence of his forehead. As his waistline waxes and wanes with the season – holiday dinner parties and lecture tours take their toll – he tries to exercise and watch his diet. Then, just before embarking on a major writing project, he goes ‘into training’, checking into a hotel for complete privacy, giving up liquor, fasting for a few days and generally clearing his head. ‘I’m no romantic,’ he says. ‘To write what I do, I have to be able to think.’

After Vidal hung up, the discussion turned to his family. By now everybody knows Jacqueline Onassis and he had Hugh Auchincloss for a stepfather – at different times, it should be added. But his real father, Eugene Vidal, Sr, appears to have been a more interesting figure. A star athlete at West Point, Eugene, Sr, later returned to coach the Army football team and serve as the first instructor in aeronautics. Born in the cadet hospital, Gore was named Eugene Vidal, Jr. But then his father resigned his commission, and the family moved into the Washington home of his maternal grandfather, Senator Gore. When his parents divorced, Vidal remained with his mother and in his early teens began calling himself Gore.

When I asked why he dropped his father’s name, Vidal acknowledged nothing more complicated than practical motives. He had wanted to ease out from under the double burden of being called Eugene and Junior, neither of which he liked. Furthermore, from an early age he had harboured political aspirations and believed that the name Gore would waken in voters memories of his grandfather.

Perhaps noticing my scepticism at this explanation, Vidal stressed the seriousness of his political ambitions. At one point he had considered moving to Oklahoma and using Senator Gore’s home base as his own. But when he did run for office, it was in upstate New York, in 1960, and although he lost his race for Congress, he received more votes than any Democratic candidate in that district in the last fifty years.

Bluntly I asked if he had liked his father. Just as bluntly he said he had.

Then there was another ringing interruption – the doorbell this time – and Vidal and Rat went to answer it. A delivery boy had brought a package.

I decided it was pointless to press him about his family unless I intended to indulge in a lot of loathsome penny psychology – which I didn’t. I had heard rumours that Vidal had had a strained relationship with his mother, but they don’t bear repeating. On balance, it seems more significant that he has spoken fondly of his father.

I have the sense that Vidal is frequently accused of cruelty when, in fact, he is simply being candid.

John Gregory Dunne, the novelist husband of Joan Didion, tells of a dinner party at which Vidal mentioned that he had just met David Eisenhower. Given his opinion of Ike – ‘the Great Golfer’ – and Nixon, the assembled guests expected a barrage of withering criticisms. Instead, Vidal observed that he and the young Eisenhower were probably the only two men in America who had been born at West Point and had gone on to Exeter. Somehow this prompted a nostalgic reverie about Eugene Vidal, Sr.

‘It was something quite rare,’ Dunne recalls. ‘You don’t often hear men of Gore’s age talk about their fathers the way he did that night. You could sense the genuine affection he had for the man. More than just affection. Love.’

Once Vidal and Rat had settled back into the chair, we started again, stuttering along as before, interrupted every few minutes by the telephone. There were calls from friends, editors, film directors and producers. But I didn’t mind. In fact, I preferred it this way, since it gave a more accurate idea of Vidal’s afternoons than I would have got if he had left the phone off the hook.

More important, however, these interruptions prevented Vidal from finding his rhythm and turning the conversation into a performance. Having watched him on television and at parties, having read many of his interviews, I knew he had a memory-bank full of canned answers, quips and well-turned epigrams. True, he delivers these lines with a panache that suggests spontaneity, but one winter in Rome as I heard him over a period of months polish a remark about Ted Kennedy – ‘Every declining culture deserves a King Farouk’ – I realised just how much work goes into his supposedly extemporaneous wit, just how much care it takes to appear insouciant.

I fed him no straight lines until I mentioned Norman Mailer and asked if he had read The Executioner’s Song.

‘No,’ said Vidal, his voice assuming its quotable cadences. ‘Life is too short and Mailer is too long.’ Pause. ‘I take that back. Mailer is short too. Isn’t it ironic that our would-be most masculine writer has come to resemble – in appearance, if not art – Colette?’

The doorbell rang. The same delivery boy had come back to ask for directions to the Valley. Patiently, with no trace of the asperity of his remark about Mailer, Vidal told him which road to take.

To Vidal’s detractors, few things are more offensive than his barbed comments about people. While it can be entertaining, if not always edifying, to hear him hold forth against his enemies, it is troubling to listen to him tag acquaintances with belittling nicknames and rub raw the nerves of old friends. But if on occasion he is gratuitously unkind, he more often than not hits the right mark. Personally I am inclined to forgive him his trespasses (behind my back he refers to me as Youngblood Hawke, Herman Wouk’s lumbering surrogate for Thomas Wolfe) because of his talent for deflating the pompous, unmasking the fraudulent and badly accusing the criminal. In this role as public scourge and defender of the rational, he is not attacking people and their personalities so much as their actions and ideas – a subtle, yet crucial, distinction.

I have the sense that Vidal is frequently accused of cruelty when, in fact, he is simply being candid, a quality not greatly appreciated in a literary community which tends to view all criticism as conspiratorial or personally motivated. Unlike so many of his fellow writers who are caught up in a frenzy of mutual backscratching, i.e. I reviewed your novel, now you blurb mine. I did an article on you, now give me an invitation to your literary conference – Vidal remains his own man and he can be austerely objective about his work, as well as that of his friends.

These same friends, however, maintain that Vidal’s generosity is as dependable as his sometimes painful candor. They cite examples of money quietly lent or donated, of hospitality graciously extended and of advice and help given to young writers. Though Vidal brushes aside questions on this subject, he has often intervened to insure that deserving articles and novels get published. And there are any number of needy actors and actresses who continue to find roles because of his influence with film makers.

But laudable as his personal charity may be, Christopher Isherwood believes that Vidal’s public stances are better indications of his generous spirit. ‘He has an admirably aggressive side.’ Isherwood observes, ‘and when he feels people’s rights are being abrogated, he takes action. I remember a time in Washington when he tried to stop some policemen who were beating a black man. But he didn’t let it go at that. He called the local newspaper, then did an essay on police brutality.’

In Vidal’s commitment to basic human rights, Isherwood feels that The City and the Pillar (1948) was a crucial landmark. ‘It was the first novel to portray homosexuality as something not sick and twisted. That was a very important step, not just for Gore, but for a great many people.’

Although The City and the Pillar became a best-seller, Vidal paid a high price for every dollar he earned. The Good Grey Geese of American literature, as he calls them, decided the book was morally corrupt and, therefore, unacceptable. For years afterward, Vidal claims, he wasn’t reviewed in some journals and could always count on shrill notices in others. As his next five novels disappeared into oblivion, his bank balance declined almost as rapidly as his reputation. In the late forties when he applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant, he was rejected in favour of the likes of E. Howard Hunt. Yes, the same E. Howard Hunt who later proved to be as bungling a spook as he was a spy novelist.

By 1953, Vidal admits, ‘I was on the verge of providing future thesis writers with a poignant page or two of metropolitan suffering, before I went off to Africa to run rifles.’ Rather than follow in Rimbaud’s footsteps, however, he supported himself by writing plays, movies and TV scripts. It wasn’t until the publication of Julian in 1964 that he could count on more than incidental income from his fiction.

Vidal succeeds in being most amusing when he is most serious, most imaginative when most provocative.

When Vidal returned, I asked about that difficult period of his career.

‘You have to keep in mind,’ he said, ‘that it wasn’t just the usual fag-baiters who were after me. During the McCarthy era I was viewed as a dangerously outspoken leftist – not only a threat to the sanctity of the American family, but out to destroy the Republic. When I began spending a lot of time in Italy, that inflamed suspicions all the more. I mean, what kind of real man and real American would want to live anywhere except the home of the brave and land of the free?’

But did he really believe he got bad reviews, or none, because of his politics and his sex life?

Again he inclined his head to one side and smiled his wintry smile. ‘When I was nearly broke and it had become clear to me I could not get a good review anywhere, I published several mysteries under the pseudonym of Edgar Box. All of them were favourably received. But just recently when they were reissued under the name Vidal, some of the same magazines which had praised the books were now quite negative, even nasty. What would you infer?’

‘You think things haven’t changed then?’

‘Not much.’

‘Ever apply for another Guggenheim?’

‘Never. I’ve never won any literary award and today I don’t believe there’s one I would accept. For years I was nominated for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And every year friends who were in it told me I had been blackballed. Finally, in 1976, I was invited to become a member. But I sent a telegram: “The Academy does itself a belated honour. Unfortunately I cannot accept the invitation. I already belong to Diner’s Club.”‘

Perhaps it is this stringency, this self-sufficiency, which has allowed Vidal to survive and has, simultaneously, invited trouble. To be accurate, he has done more than merely survive. He has flourished. Yet he gives the impression in his writing and in person of someone perpetually embattled. Perhaps he likes this position; perhaps it galvanises him to do his best work. But it is misleading of him to imply he hasn’t been well reviewed. Each of his books is emblazoned with encomiums, one of them, amazingly enough, from Norman Mailer.

Still, there is no doubt that his pronouncements about sex – especially his insistence that it is nobody’s business what adults do in bed – have influenced people’s opinion of him and his books. This, as Vidal has stated, is perfectly congruent with the bizarre American notion that sex is the measure of all morality and that lust in the hearts of our political officials should loom larger as a campaign issue than inflation or foreign policy.

Given the general view that Vidal is a man of questionable morals, it is ironic that his most serious failing as a novelist is his tendency to try to infuse his fiction with the same ethical concerns, the same polemical intensity, the same didactic spirit which inform his non-fiction. But while his essays manage to be stylish and urbane, as well as instructive, his weaker novels are sometimes too manipulative, too eager to make a point. Impatient with the novelist’s task of moving by implication, Vidal depends too heavily on adjectives and adverbs to convey meaning which the reader would be better off discovering for himself. Instead of dramatising scenes, as one would expect of an experienced playwright and screenwriter, he occasionally makes the elementary mistake of telling, not showing.

But at his frequent best Vidal can smoothly integrate ideas into a story and voice his ideological concerns in the dynamic interplay of characters. He also succeeds in being most amusing when he is most serious, most imaginative when most provocative. Under different and fairer circumstances, he would be recognised as a novelist of considerable achievement and a cultural commentator of profound importance. Instead he is known best as a talk show performer.

After yet another interruption – a typist had arrived to pick up a script – Vidal made us each a cup of strong coffee. ‘This stuff has killed more writers than liquor,’ he said. ‘But I can’t live without it.’

When I asked what he was working on now, I got a good idea why he needs coffee. A synopsis of his current projects lasted more than ten minutes.

Within the past few months he had finished a long, ambitious novel, tentatively entitled Creation, which took years of research and required him to master the teachings of Buddha, Confucius and Zoroaster. Then exhausted and bored with Italy, he came to Los Angeles, feeling he needed a break from fiction writing.

So he did the film script for Dress Grey, Lucian Truscott’s novel about the murder of a homosexual cadet at West Point. Then he agreed to do a screenplay about Libby Holman who was indicted in the shooting of her tobacco-heir husband, Zachary Smith Reynolds, but was never brought to trial.

Meanwhile, in preparation for a six-hour teleplay he is scheduled to write for NBC, he has been reading all the available material on Abraham Lincoln. Now, he said, sounding slightly weary, his publishers are urging him to do a novel about Lincoln which would come out to coincide with the TV mini-series.

‘Why?’ I broke in. ‘Why keep working so hard?’

There was no pause for reflection. I had pressed a button, and out popped a line that has found its way into all his recent interviews. I had first heard it in rough draft as, ‘The mind that doesn’t feed itself eats itself.’ Now it had been polished into, ‘The mind that doesn’t nourish itself devours itself.’

Not content with this canned response, I insisted there must be more to it than that.

Vidal admitted that middle age can be a time of melancholy and boredom. To hold them at bay, he kept busy.

‘Would you feel guilty, would you be unhappy, if you weren’t working?’

‘Of course. After all,’ Vidal said with no trace of a smile, no echo of irony, ‘I’m a Puritan Moralist.’

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Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual.

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