“He Never Admitted He Was Wrong”

Reviewing the new documentary, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia, David Schmader finds that the late writer’s literary achievements are “perhaps given short shrift” – but the politics are plenty:

Born into high privilege to a father who “dreamed of being the Henry Ford of aviation” and taught his son to pilot a plane by age 10, Vidal followed most naturally in the footsteps of his grandfather, a US senator who overcame his blindness by having his young grandson read him all necessary documents. Vidal came away with a lifelong fascination for the workings of the American political system, which he explored from the inside during two unsuccessful runs for office and investigated from the outside through a lifetime of ferocious writing and commentary.

As the subtitle suggests, [director Nicholas] Wrathall’s film focuses on the decades Vidal spent denouncing the American political machine, from a jarring critique of the presidency of his beloved friend JFK (whose photo Vidal kept framed in his office as a reminder to never again fall for a politician’s charm) to endlessly articulate screeds against the “American Empire” and beyond. (Forget 9/11—Vidal believed Pearl Harbor was an inside job.)

Hence the sad, twisted embitterment of an American scion. I’d like to admire Vidal – and his early novels are breathtakingly good. But the precious posturing, the all-too-defensive lambasting, and the cheap sneers always force me to keep my distance. As for Pearl Harbor, well, sheesh. And we’re supposed to admire someone for this conspiratorial nonsense? (My own review of his novel on the American mid-century, The Golden Age, is here.) Meanwhile, Ted Scheiman marvels at Vidal’s precocious early writing about homosexuality:

At 19, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, while convalescing in the North Pacific, where he served for three years during World War II. Writing in the Times in 1946, Orville Prescott gave a triumphalist review, and Vidal had arrived, terribly young, in the world of letters. The glittering accomplishments of Vidal’s youth are more impressive, even moving, when we consider that Vidal published The City and the Pillar just two years later, in 1948—an explicitly gay novel that the Times refused to review….

In his earliest television appearances, culled here with sensitivity by Wrathall, the young Vidal is remarkably composed and confident as he declares the difference between gay and straight to be “about the difference between somebody who has brown eyes and somebody who has blue eyes.” He was an outspoken pioneer on dangerous territory despite being—to believe Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor and the documentary’s M.C.—“really quite shy” at the time.

Except, of course, that he subsequently insisted that there was really no “gay” and no “straight.” My own direct experience of him on the matter was his steadfast opposition to marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s. Even the director of this fawning film, Nicholas Wrathall, notes Vidal’s crankiness on the subject in the years after The City and the Pillar‘s publication:

I think he felt that was a fight he fought at a different point in his life. He had written The City and the Pillar, and he had been outspoken at the time. He’d never been in the closet. He had a lifelong relationship with Howard [Auster], which was a sort of marriage in its own way. He has been criticized for not being at the forefront in the fight against AIDS and now, more recently, in the marriage equality situation. But I think he had let go of it a little bit and didn’t want to be pigeonholed—although it was a big part of his life—but I think marriage was something he didn’t have a lot of fondness for. His parents’ marriage had been a disaster. I asked him about marriage equality and he said: “Why shouldn’t everyone share in the misery of marriage.”

Zooming out, Tricia Olszewski wasn’t impressed as some with the documentary, calling it “hagiography”:

Archival footage of Vidal’s television appearances, photos of his mingling with 20th-century glitterati, and interviews with the man are punctuated—a little too often—with his Oscar Wildean bons mots. Every element showcases Vidal’s quick wit, eloquence, and astoundingly insightful, often prescient editorials on whatever hot topics the zeitgeist offered. There are also documentary-requisite comments from fans and colleagues (including Tim Robbins, literary executor Jay Parini, and, naturally, Hitchens) that tend toward drooling (except, naturally, Hitchens).

The cumulative effect is worship overload. Vidal was undoubtedly an impressively well-rounded and accomplished human being—though it should be noted that he was born into privilege—and he all but says so in the film. It would be surprising if he ever admitted he was wrong. And while such confidence may have drawn people—a lot of people—in, it’s nearly unpalatable here. Vidal spoke regally (a missile was a “miss-aisle”) and expected to be regarded that way, too.

Read our coverage of Vidal’s death, in 2012, here, here, and here.