Every Time A Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life Of Gore Vidal

Jay Parini

Little, Brown, £25

Reviewed by Alan Taylor

THOUGH he ran for public office on the Democrat ticket, the party to which Gore Vidal instinctively belonged – the Contrarian – did not exist. Gore, as Jay Parini refers to him throughout his riveting biography, never made any attempt to go with the flow. He was wired differently from most folk, as great artists tend to be. He viewed things from unconventional angles and interpreted them in a manner which countless Americans especially found antipathetical and, to a degree, traitorous. He was dismissed as a Jeremiad and conspiracy theorist, his glass always half empty, his faced fixed in a sneer, his eyebrows superiorly raised.

His mistrust of governments was bred in the bone and he had an instinctive loathing of establishments and elites. Big corporations gave him the heebie-jeebies and he believed there was no worse affliction than ignorance. To know where we are going he felt it was essential to know where we had been. For him, history was much too important to be left to historians. When he said, “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise”, he probably wasn’t even half-joking.

The roles his father and mother played in forming him were – by his lights – negligible and almost entirely negative. Gore reserved special contempt for his mother, a flighty dipsomaniac devoid of maternal feeling who was drawn to rich men as a hog is to swill. According to him, mother and son rarely conversed. “It was pointless. She didn’t see me. I wished I didn’t see her.” He got on rather better with his father who was an aviation pioneer and who put his son, aged 12, in control of a plane. This may have given Gore the belief that he could fly close to the sun without coming to harm.

The huge influence of his early years was his blind, maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas P Gore, from whom Gore inherited a love of books and learning, a fascination with politics, power and oratory, and an abhorrence of cant. He, too, was ostensibly a Democrat but opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal and was regarded as a reactionary. “He was the only senator from Oklahoma,” approved Gore, “not to die rich.”

Not the least of Parini’s achievements is the clarification he brings to Gore’s financial status. Contrary to received wisdom his family was not super-wealthy and he did not inherit the fortune which allowed him to do as he pleased. He was not an exceptional or popular student but once released from formal education he worked hard and earned well. His debut novel – The City And The Pillar, published in 1948, when he was 21 – shocked many readers because it featured an all-American, high-school athlete in a homosexual relationship. Inaugurating a feud that Gore would not allow to die until he did, the morally uptight New York Times panned it, which effectively killed its sales.

When its immediate successors proved no more successful – Williwaw, In A Yellow Wood, The Season Of Comfort – he sought lucrative refuge in Hollywood, writing meretricious film and TV scripts, and on Broadway. This afforded him in 1958 the wherewithal to buy Edgewater, a mansion in Dutchess County overlooking the Hudson River.

By then Gore was a man of substance in control of his own destiny. He often liked to boast that he did not seek commissions, preferring to write what he wanted and for whom. What is certainly the case is that the books he would now produce, starting with the sexually explicit Myra Breckenridge (1968), were not in thrall to God-botherers, conservative cliques, “silly-billies” and the denizens of “book-chat land”. “Has literary decency fallen so low?” asked Time. It had, as Myra’s position atop the bestseller list attested. All that stopped sales going stratospheric, Gore rued, was the film of the book starring Raquel Welch, which killed them stone dead.

Gore’s own sex life occupies a fair proportion of Parini’s book, as it must. Sex for him, as it was for Georges Simenon, was for a long time part of his daily routine, like dusting and hoovering. His understanding companion Howard Austen would find him partners though Gore was perfectly able to seek out his own. He also used pimps such as Scotty Bowers who would put him in touch with A-list celebs, such as Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton and Fred Astaire, with whom Bowers insists Gore “slept”. In Rome, to where he moved in the late 1960s, he picked up young men in the street though his Italian was lamentable. According to another of his then circle, sex was not “hugely important” to Gore though it was sufficiently important it to be “an addiction”. “It was something he did, and then moved on.”

The portrait that emerges is of a discontented, difficult, vain man forever raging against enemies real and imagined. Those of us who were acquainted with him, however slightly, must feel ambivalent. “Will anyone remember Gore Vidal in years to come?” asks Parini, who prefaces each chapter of his biography with a personal vignette. Of course, no one knows what will survive of a writer’s work. But if the best of Gore’s doesn’t – the essays, a few of the historical novels, notably Lincoln and Burr, and his majestic memoir, Palimpsest – then we all may as well pack away our pens and take up tap dancing.