Gore Vidal (1925–2012)

Myra Breckinridge repeatedly claims that she is a purely self-created person. Of course, it’s not true; Gore Vidal created this outrageous, unforgettable transgender character. She arrives in Hollywood, claiming to be the widow of a pretentious, unsuccessful film critic, Myron. It’s common to refer to one’s mate as one’s “better half,” but this takes it further. The female side of Myron has taken over and been surgically recreated as Myra. Although in the case of Myron/Myra, show more it’s debatable which was the male side, since Myron got his kicks by coercing heterosexual males to penetrate him, while Myra is as thirsty for power as any dictator or CEO.
Whether Myron or Myra, they are convinced that all movies made there between 1935 - 1945 were the highest artistic achievement of mankind. But that era has passed. All the talent and creativity go into creating television ads.
Myra arrives with a mission: to destroy traditional manhood and realign the sexes. All in the service of reducing world population to a sustainable level. Myra’s ambitions are purely altruistic, if only in her own mind.
Alongside this is an unabashed pleasure in the male body as an object of desire. This, as well, is a carryover from Myron, although whereas Myron took the role of being abused, Myra sees to it that she is the abuser. Ultimately life, including sex, is a power struggle, she maintains. Romantic love is a fantasy, existing only in the celluloid world Myra prizes.
Some readers will be put off by the hungry gaze at the male form in both books, even though they first appeared when there were no limits to the depiction of male desire for the female. That didn’t bother me, but I did find the graphic description of Myra’s rape of Rusty disturbing.
Somehow, Myra’s schemes appear to succeed, fitting for a Hollywood tale, but then the conclusion of the first book disappointed me. It was like those “it was all a dream” denouements in films and novels that can’t think of another way to end a tale of fantasy.
All the better, then, that there was a sequel. Unlike many sequels, I enjoyed Myron more than its predecessor, with its slapstick struggle between a domestically-tamed Myron and a more preposterous than ever Myra. The two sides of this split personality battle it out inside the set of a movie shot twenty-five years earlier. The entire tale depends on the premise that one can be pushed inside a television (a precursor of Purple Rose of Cairo). Myron finally makes it home, comforted by the belief that Myra has been thwarted. A mistaken notion; as in the first book, Myra has succeeded in what she set out to do, albeit with unintended consequences.
In both volumes, Vidal applies his sardonic wit to many aspects of contemporary politics and culture. My amusement was tempered, however, by how often his satire was prophetic. For instance, Myra observes of the male students at the acting and modeling school: “they are . . . quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support.”
One aspect of Vidal’s writing I savored was his habit of deconstructing and reformulating the cliches that infect our writing. One example: “But nut-wise he is harder to crack than I thought.” Most of all, I liked the ironic distance Vidal created by making Myra, in all her delusional self-importance, the mouthpiece of many of the author’s views. Vidal rejected the notion of strictly binary gender. Here he illustrates this in a narrative that, at the same time, subverts common assumptions of what could be labeled the male or female aspects of one’s makeup. show less

Gore Vidal seems to have written himself into a corner. That's the only sense I can make of his final novel, The Golden Age, which reprises the central characters and a good part of the time covered in an earlier novel, Washington, D. C. As such, they form ill-matching bookends around his Narratives of Empire heptology.
I doubt whether Vidal planned the earlier book to be the curtain-raiser for an epic spanning two centuries when it appeared in 1967. It's not even clear that when he published show more Burr in 1973, he would make the main characters of the earlier book the descendants of Aaron Burr. This may be one reason why Vidal revisited the later era to conclude the series.
The do-over allows Vidal to revisit Clay Overbury, the Kennedy-esque ambitious young man in the earlier book. Certainly, the Kennedy clan recognized the resemblance, and that book deepened Vidal's estrangement from the clan (fun trivia fact: Vidal and Jackie Bouvier shared the same step-father, although Vidal only first met her years later through Jack). Vidal always denied he'd written a roman à clef. Now, in The Golden Age, Vidal muddies the water by introducing JFK into the narrative alongside Overbury.
Vidal introduces many more historical figures as well, which is, to me, one of the weaknesses of the book. Bringing the series into events of Vidal's own time has allowed him to name-check many people he knew personally. It may have been meant generously, but the result feels cluttered; many individuals appear without being useful, much less essential, to the plot. In addition, serving as it does to wrap up a series, there is a lot of "previously in Narratives of Empire . . ." detail, especially in the opening chapter.
For a book from an author as prodigiously learned as Vidal — he's been called the great autodidact of the twentieth century — this book is also curiously careless about details. Many of these are due to the intricately intertwined family trees Gore has created to lead from Aaron Burr to the latter-day Sanfords and Days, the main fictional characters in this book. It seems even Vidal has trouble keeping then straight. At one point, a character is designated as another character's father, when grandfather is meant. Another character refers to her half-sister, who was actually her half-cousin. Yet the errors of detail extend beyond family relationships. At one point, he mentions Iceland, when I believe he meant Greenland. At another, he mixes up All Saints and All Souls. I don't fault the author alone; clearly, his editor at Doubleday lacked vigilance.
Especially in the last third of the book, both dialogues and narrative sections often read like Vidal's caustic political essays. America, he repeatedly claimed in many essays and interviews, has been on a permanent war-footing since 1950. Parallel to this has been an erosion of personal freedom in the name of security. Vidal may be right, but that's no reason to allow the prose of a novel to be so didactic.
An aspect of the book that fascinated me is the closing chapter. Vidal resolutely produced historical novels at a time (pre-Hilary Mantel) when they weren't considered "literary." The Golden Age, and with it, the entire septet it culminates, closes with a final chapter in which the narrator switches from an anonymous third person to an "I," who turns out to be named Gore Vidal. Vidal engages with the other characters, who seem to know they are the fictional creations of the author. The shift is signalized by the fact that this chapter isn't numbered, as are the others, but bears a title ("On Air" — a nice double meaning). It's an interesting conceit and coming at the close of his fiction-writing career, it's as if Vidal is saying that he could have written fashionable modern literature, but chose not to. At the same time, the shift seems to subvert the genre of historical novel. Delicious.
I realized that I've mainly described aspects of this book that I consider faults. Yet there was much to savor in this book. Although it is far from Vidal's best, I enjoyed reading it. show less

This collection of forty-four essays, arranged in chronological order, permits one to see the author develop over the course of two decades. Vidal hits his stride when he and The New York Review of Books connect in 1964, shortly after it began publishing.
As is inevitable in a collection like this, some of the entries have a dated feel, but a surprisingly high percentage repay reading now, a half-century on. Vidal is one of the few writers equally at home in literature, history, and politics, show more and if one shares his triad of interests, there is much here to savor. But others, particularly those—now the majority of the living—too young to remember President Eisenhower or Mort Sahl, might content themselves with the one-volume anthology, United States, which culled the best of three essay collections up to 1992 (a fourth collection appeared in 2001). Completists like me, however, will want to read them all. One discovers many recurring themes, such as that the heyday of the novel as a popular art form is over, replaced by the movies, or his assertion that the U. S. became an empire in the years between Lincoln and T.R., but is now in irreversible decline. Vidal also maintained that there is no genuine two-party system in the country. Since the adoption of the Constitution, it has been governed by the Property Party, which has two wings, the reactionary (currently the Republicans) and the moderate (as of now the Democrats), and that the elected representatives of both are profoundly corrupt.
A few highlights of the collection: his lengthy report of a chat with Barry Goldwater from 1961 (after it ran in Life, Henry Luce paid it the compliment of informing his editors that he never wanted to see a piece like that again in his publications), his appreciative and insightful essay on Eleanor Roosevelt, and a review of a handful of books by Women’s Liberationists that shows how little the resistance to equality (Vidal characterizes it as Miller-Mailer-Manson man) has budged since 1971. Speaking of Henry Miller: the fact that Vidal has no moral qualms about pornography as an art form makes his skewering of Sexus all the more effective.
Admittedly, Vidal can’t hide his condescension for those not as cultured (in his opinion) as he, but he expresses his contempt in such elegant aphorisms (“the contemporary public plainly prefers mirrors to windows,” p. 170), that the reader smiles and feels exempt from the charge. Rightly or wrongly. show less

In this, the fifth of Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series, the author explores the impact of World War I and its aftermath on the fabric of the American nation. This is the era when the U.S. came into its “century” and immediately pulled back from the implications. Vidal aficianados will recognize much here: the naked ambition and pervasive corruption of public life, and the ease with which Americans accept assaults on First Amendment guarantees and allow their passions to be stirred show more against the wicked (first, the “Huns”, then the Bolsheviks).
Continuing the pattern of earlier novels, Vidal interweaves the fortunes of two fictional families (in part putative descendants of Aaron Burr), the Sanfords and the Days, with a cast of historical characters. For these, Vidal offers his usual mix of insightful portraits and juicy gossip in a manner reminiscent of his literary heroes, the two Henrys, James and Adams. Along the way, there are some convincing insights, such as the way Woodrow Wilson’s childhood in the Reconstruction-era South may have given him foresight into the effect victor’s justice would have on Germany and led to his call for peace without victory. Vidal’s portrait of Harding is surprisingly sympathetic, reminiscent of his treatment of Grant in the earlier novel 1876, who presided over an earlier corrupt administration. And it was uncanny, given that I read this in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, how well Vidal portrays media boss William Randolph Hearst in Trumpian tones.
The title might surprise some, since much of the novel takes place in Washington, D.C., but Vidal skillfully makes the point that a new power center arose at that time, ending his tale with events on both coasts that eerily parallel each other.
Since I want to be sparse in awarding five stars, I’ll reluctantly withhold one from this to indicate that if one were to read only one from this series, it should be Lincoln. Or maybe Burr. Or … At any rate, this is a very good read. show less