Without some grand introduction, he was just another fat, disgusting person.
Goodbye to Gore Vidal | FrontPage Magazine
By Bruce Bawer On August 2, 2012
He was born at West Point to a prominent family, served his country in World War II, was made famous by his first novel (published at age twenty), and a couple of years later alienated book-review editors with his third novel, which, for 1948, was that most scandalous of things – a gay love story. Unwelcome in the New York publishing world, he proceeded to bang out TV plays, tinker with scripts at MGM, churn out pseudonymous potboilers, and get a couple of plays produced on Broadway – the grating, now impossibly dated Visit to a Small Planet and the well-made but preachy The Best Man(which, as it happens, is at this very moment back on The Great White Way for the third time).
His series of novels about American history – from Washington, D.C. (1967) to The Golden Age (2000) – help make him rich and led him to brag that he was America’s foremost historian, but these bulky, inert productions might fairly be described by borrowing a few words of criticism that his nemesis, Truman Capote, once directed at the work of one of Vidal’s sometime bedmates, Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Even worse, perhaps, than his history novels were his more off-beat fictional works, notably Myra Breckenridge (1968), which at the time passed for naughty and sensational but which has long since come to be recognized as an embarrassing, godawful bore.
If Vidal the novelist seems almost surely destined for the ash-heap of literary history, his essays were – very often – instant classics. He had two principal topics: literature and politics. If his novels (especially the history ones) often seemed the work of an industrious, indifferent hack who had happened upon a money-making formula, his essays were inspired and learned, crackling with conviction and sizzling with a wit that often shaded into withering sarcasm. On literature, Vidal – who never went to college – proved to be a supremely well-read arbiter who had exquisite taste and was gifted with rare powers of discrimination. “When he writes about literature,” I observed in a review a thousand or so years ago, “Vidal can be wonderfully sane and astute, scorning academic mumbo-jumbo and defending high aesthetic standards.” His literary essays, briefly put, were marvels of elegance, models of first-rate critical prose – and always a delight to read.
But the political essays were another matter entirely. Let me put them, briefly, in context. Vidal never tired of telling the same old stories – either in essays or in the guest chair on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show – about his grandfather, a distinguished senator from Oklahoma; his father, a top aviation official in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration; and his family connection to the Kennedys (he and Jackie shared a stepfather).
-more at link-
His series of novels about American history – from Washington, D.C. (1967) to The Golden Age (2000) – help make him rich and led him to brag that he was America’s foremost historian, but these bulky, inert productions might fairly be described by borrowing a few words of criticism that his nemesis, Truman Capote, once directed at the work of one of Vidal’s sometime bedmates, Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, that’s typing.” Even worse, perhaps, than his history novels were his more off-beat fictional works, notably Myra Breckenridge (1968), which at the time passed for naughty and sensational but which has long since come to be recognized as an embarrassing, godawful bore.
If Vidal the novelist seems almost surely destined for the ash-heap of literary history, his essays were – very often – instant classics. He had two principal topics: literature and politics. If his novels (especially the history ones) often seemed the work of an industrious, indifferent hack who had happened upon a money-making formula, his essays were inspired and learned, crackling with conviction and sizzling with a wit that often shaded into withering sarcasm. On literature, Vidal – who never went to college – proved to be a supremely well-read arbiter who had exquisite taste and was gifted with rare powers of discrimination. “When he writes about literature,” I observed in a review a thousand or so years ago, “Vidal can be wonderfully sane and astute, scorning academic mumbo-jumbo and defending high aesthetic standards.” His literary essays, briefly put, were marvels of elegance, models of first-rate critical prose – and always a delight to read.
But the political essays were another matter entirely. Let me put them, briefly, in context. Vidal never tired of telling the same old stories – either in essays or in the guest chair on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show – about his grandfather, a distinguished senator from Oklahoma; his father, a top aviation official in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration; and his family connection to the Kennedys (he and Jackie shared a stepfather).
-more at link-
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