How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV: The Lessons of Gore Vidal

Public Planet Books

by Marcie Frank

Novelist, television personality, political candidate, and maverick social commentator, Gore Vidal is one of the most innovative, influential, and enduring American intellectuals of the past fifty years. In How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV, Marcie Frank provides a concise introduction to Vidal’s life and work as she argues that the twentieth-century shift from print to electronic media, particularly TV and film, has not only loomed large in Vidal’s thought but also structured his career. Looking at Vidal’s prolific literary output, Frank shows how he has reflected explicitly on this subject at every turn: in essays on politics, his book on Hollywood and history, his reviews and interviews, and topical excursions within the novels. At the same time, she traces how he has repeatedly crossed the line supposedly separating print and electronic culture, perhaps with more success than any other American intellectual. He has written television serials and screenplays, appeared in movies, and regularly appeared on television, most famously in heated arguments with Norman Mailer on The Dick Cavett Show and with William F. Buckley during ABC’s coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention.Frank highlights the connections between Vidal’s attitudes toward TV, sex, and American politics as they have informed his literary and political writings and screen appearances. She deftly situates his public persona in relation to those of Andy Warhol, Jacqueline Susann, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and others. By describing Vidal’s shrewd maneuvering between different media, Frank suggests that his career offers a model to aspiring public intellectuals and a refutation to those who argue that electronic media have eviscerated public discourse.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Juliana Maximiano Torres Carneiro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not sure I understood the thesis of this book and very little is actually discussed on Vidal’s strategy to make himself a “tv intellectual”

[Gail · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh dear. I've been reading Gore Vidal since my early youth, and while I've come to question many of his conclusions in his essays and pampleteering, I still love his wit, his ability to bring together widely disparate facts and ideas into a coherent whole, and his almost unbelievable inventiveness.

Too bad that even one of these qualities isn't present in this book. Ms. Frank gives us what seems to be a doctoral thesis gone badly wrong. Although I paid close attention and re-read many passages for clarification, at the end of the book I was still unsure of what the premise of the book was supposed to be. Her overblown, excessively obscure, almost unreadable prose didn't help get her ideas across.

In addition, the author dismisses Vidal's American Chronicles series as "historical romances"; of his 1500 or so pages of essays, 7 experimental novels, assorted pamphlets, and other odd lots of work, she picks a very few pages of essays and the two least successful of his novels, "Myra Breckinridge" and "Myron", to point up her theory and generalize to his enormous body of work.

Don't waste your time with this. If you want to know how to be an intellectual in our modern age, read the man himself: he'll show you the way.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this for Gore Vidal's name. The book has nuggets of interest but as I was reading I had the feeling of padding. Words piled on words to fill space, ten where Gore would have used one. Having read a number of Vidal's books in recent weeks, the contrast between his clean, easy to read prose no matter how dense the information he is purveying and this attempt at erudite writing is clear. Frankly, large sections bored me as I struggled to wade through the molasses to the nuggets that were the actual point of the exercise.