Gore Vidal (1925 - )

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The Golden Age by Gore Vidal

Since 1967, when he published Washington, D.C., Gore Vidal has been assembling an artful, acidic history of the United States. The Golden Age represents the seventh and final installment of this national epic, covering the years from 1939 to 1954 (with a valedictory fast-forward, in its final pages, to the end of the millennium). As Vidal did in the earlier books, the author sticks pretty rigorously to the facts. Real-life figures--in this case, the likes of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and that ardent cold warrior Dean Acheson--do what they are recorded to have done. The author also ushers on a cast of invented characters, who are free to paddle in the historical backwash and comment upon their so-called contemporaries. It's here, of course, that fact and fiction begin to blur. But Vidal himself has often cited Tolstoy's famous jab--"History would be an excellent thing if it only were true"--and his reconstruction of FDR's wartime machinations, and the brief interval of Pax Americana, seem persuasively, even alarmingly plausible.

There's one key difference between this book and its predecessors, however. Vidal was alive and kicking in 1939, and thanks to his role as Senator Thomas Pryor Gore's grandson (and occasional seeing-eye dog), he met or at least observed many of The Golden Age's dramatis personae. This fact turns out to have a double edge. On one hand, it gives his portraits of the high and mighty an extra ounce of verisimilitude. Here (the invented) Caroline Sanford observes her old friend FDR at an informal White House mixer:

She felt for an instant that she should curtsey in the awesome presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a figure who towered even when seated in his wheelchair. It was the head and neck that did the trick, she decided, with a professional actor's eye. The neck was especially thick while the famous head seemed half again larger than average, its thinning gray hair combed severely back from a high rounded forehead.

Gore (Eugene Luther) Vidal

Excerpt:

Prolific American novelist, playwright, and essayist, one of the great stylists of contemporary American prose, who has been active in politics. Vidal made his debut as novelist with WILLIWAW at the age of 19, while still in US Army uniform.

"One understands of course why the role of the individual in history is instinctively played down by a would-be egalitarian society. We are, quite naturally, afraid of being victimized by reckless adventurers. To avoid this we have created a myth of the ineluctable mass ('other-directedness') which governs all. Science, we are told, is not a matter of individual inquiry but of collective effort. Even the surface storminess of our elections disguises a fundamental indifference to human personality; if not this man, then that one; it's all the same, life will go on." (from 'Robert Graves and the Twelve Caesars, in Rocking Boat, 1963)

Vidal grew accustomed at an early age to a life among political and social notables. He was born at the military academy in West Point, New York, where his father was an instructor. He was raised near Washington, DC, in the house of his grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, a populist Democrat senator from Oklahoma. Vidal learned about political life from him and when he was a teenager he adopted the first name of Gore. Vidal also spent time on the Virginia estate of his stepfather, Hugh. D. Auchincloss. After graduating from Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he served on an army supply ship in the Aleutian Islands, near Alaska. Much of his time in the Enlisted Reserve Corps he devoted to writing. Upon his discharge he worked for six months for the publishing firm of E.P. Dutton. From 1947 to 1949 Vidal lived in Antigua, Guatemala. His first novel, Williwaw, was based on his wartime experiences as first mate on Freight Ship 35 in the Alaskan Harbour Craft Detachment. The conventional seafaring story was written in the spirit Ernest Hemingway.

Gore's Wars

Salon Interview by Chris Haynes

Introduction:

Gore Vidal puts us at ease with history, probably because he has spent so much time at its elbow. Born at West Point and raised in Washington, D.C., the grandson of the legendary blind Sen. Thomas Gore and kin to Jimmy Carter, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and the current vice president, Vidal has woven his sitting room perspective of American politics into novels like "Burr," "Lincoln," "1876" and "Empire." It is his familial view of great people and events that makes them feel real.

Vidal's contributions to popular culture -- both as an early writer for television and as a Hollywood screenwriter -- expose human folly and frailty, in a more contemporary and occasionally picaresque mode. Compare, for instance, "Visit to a Small Planet" or "The Best Man" to "Suddenly, Last Summer" or "Myra Breckinridge." His forthcoming novel, "The Smithsonian Institution," returns to his favorite political and sexual themes.

In his aptly titled autobiography, "Palimpsest," the personal and the historical rub shoulders again. Jack and Jackie, Tennessee and Anaïs all wander across the playing field, without their political or literary raiments -- drunk, fragile, mendacious -- as if caught in the harsh, incontestable light of a Polaroid snapshot taken by a sober nephew or cousin.

Even better are the essays. Reading through the dozens of reviews, stories and editorials that compose "United States" (accounting for approximately two-thirds of his published articles), it becomes clear that Vidal's reputation as a polemicist is something of a bum rap. He is, at heart, a brilliant pragmatist, with a great sense of humor and irony. But Americans have never cared much for irony. Perhaps it's his extended exposure to the famous that allows Vidal not only to point out that the emperor's new clothes are not there, but that the emperor is actually an emperor and not just the prez (as he recently argued in Vanity Fair). It was Vidal's commentary on American empire and the Internet that inspired the following interview, conducted via fax, with Vidal at his villa in Italy...

The Gore Vidal Index

Excerpt from the Introduction by Harry Kloman:

Gore Vidal published his first novel, Williwaw, in 1946 at the age of 21. A precocious talent, he began writing poems and stories as a young teen-ager and took his first stab at novels before he was out of high school. He finally finished one when, as a 19-year-old aboard a World War II ship in the Aleutians, he began a story of men at sea and continued it while recovering in a hospital, the victim of rheumatoid arthritis. Critics received the book well, and Vidal - whose grandfather was a senator and whose father, a pioneer aviator, worked for the Roosevelt administration - set out on his own career as a novelist rather than the family career of politics and privilege...

Gore Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.

From the Knitting Circle

Excerpt:

He was born in the Cadet Hospital at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, where his father, Gene Vidal, was an aeronautics instructor. His father was a fearless aviator and a sporting hero. His mother Nina, had a number of affairs and was fond of drink. Gore Vidal spent much of his childhood in Washington with his blind grandfather Senator Thomas Pryor Gore of Oklahoma. Gene and Nina Vidal divorced in 1935.

Nina Vidal married Hugh Auchincloss, and hence Gore Vidal acquired a stepfather in common with Jacqueline Kennedy.

Gore Vidal was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy but was a mediocre student. He fell in love with a fellow pupil, Jimmie Trimble, who was later killed in action in 1945.

In 1943 Gore Vidal joined the United States Army Reserve Corps and served on army transports in the Aleutian Islands in World War II.

Army life gave him material for his first novel, Williwaw, (1946), which was published with some acclaim when he was just 19. The novel included an openly gay character. The success of the novel was helped by the support of Eleanor Roosevelt in her influential newspaper column...

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