Gore vidal palimsest gay book club

Vidal was much taken with Gough, though he remarked that it was difficult to preserve the line between vanity and overweening vanity. The same could be said of Gore Vidal himself. Whitlam seemed the sort of politician Vidal imagined himself to be, potentially: club, patrician, and a convinced social democrat.

My connection with Vidal dates from the seizing of his novel Myra Breckinridge in by a zealous Sydney Gay customs official, which became the basis for a Council of Civil Liberties trial aimed at our then draconian censorship laws. Defending Vidal in court proved the basis for a long acquaintanceship, although one limited by my humble position in the literary pantheon.

Vidal was always a generous host, as long as he remained the center of attention. During a fifty-year partnership with Howard Austen that stretched from homes north of New York to Rome to Ravello to Los Angeles, he maintained a strict routine: writing in the morning, hunting for sex in the afternoon, dinner with friends in the vidal.

The routine was interrupted only by travel or by his two attempts to enter politics: his race for a seat in the U. Congress from New York seat inand his even more quixotic campaign for the Democratic primary for a U. Senate seat from California in Vidal claimed bitterly that he was ostracized by the literary world for that book, but I suspect he published it knowing full well that it would end his ambitions for a political career.

His public persona, with its mixture of charm and aggression, was in part a product of an inability to fully accept his own sexuality, and he fluctuated between denying he was part of the gay movement and occasionally speaking for it. We were once on the beach at Amalfi when he gave me hints on how to pick up two young Italians who were lounging nearby.

Vidal was a remarkably disciplined and hard-working writer, as is evident from the research behind his book works, not only the remarkable series about U. Palimsest wisdom claims that he was best as an essayist, though I suspect some of his critics are too lazy to have read most of his novels.

Not only was he a master of the historical genre, he also created some of the blackest gores of contemporary America, such as Duluth and The Smithsonian Institution. And Myra Breckinridge, which subsequently became one of the all time bad films, should be read as the founding text of queer theory, even if it is far too frivolous to appear on graduate school reading lists.

We agreed that I would only show Vidal the manuscript once it was ready for copy editing, and he could only correct factual mistakes. He must have read the manuscript four or five times, and clearly brooded on what he saw as insufficient recognition, but he did agree to appear at two events for the book at bookstores in southern California.

By then he was eighty, walked with difficulty, drank too much, and was still mourning the loss of Howard, who had died two years earlier.

Palimpsest: A Memoir

But the presence of an audience—and Vidal was still able to draw hundreds to bookstores—rekindled the old hunger for adulation. I learned much from Gore Vidal, not least that if one craves fame, one can never be certain that one is famous enough. On stage, Vidal was witty, imperious, and absolutely unwilling to share the limelight.

As he aged, Vidal grew increasingly bitter with what he saw as the failures of the U. His last few years were not happy ones, but he would have delighted in all the attention that his death occasioned—including, perhaps, this encomium in a gay and lesbian magazine. Your Name required. Your Email required.

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