Gore Vidal

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Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (born October 3, 1925), known simply as Gore Vidal, is a well-known American writer of novels, plays and essays, and has been a public figure for over fifty years.

1 Biography
2 Writing career
3 Political Views
- 3.1 Views on September 11, 2001
4 Essays and Non-Fiction
5 External links

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Biography

He was born Eugene Luther Vidal in West Point, New York, the son of Eugene Vidal and Nina Gore. His birth took place at the United States Military Academy where his father was an aeronautics instructor. Vidal later adopted as his first name the surname of his maternal grandfather, Thomas P. Gore, Democratic Senator from Oklahoma.

Gore Vidal's father, Eugene Luther Vidal was born April 1895 in Madison, Lake County, South Dakota to Felix Luther Vidal (born Sept. 1871 in Bangor, La Crosse, Wisconsin to Eugen Fidel Vidal, an Austrian chemist from Feldkirch and a Swiss mother, Emma Hartmann) and Margaret Ann Rewalt (born August 1870 in Wrightsville, York, Pennsylvania to a prominent physician, Luther L. Rewalt, who was of German and Scotch-Irish descent, and a mother, Mary Jane Magee). Eugene Luther Vidal worked as an engineer for A.A. Humphrey's Military Camp in Fairfax, Virginia in 1920.

Gore Vidal's mother, Nina S. Gore, was born in Lawton, Comanche County, Oklahoma in 1904. Nina's parents were Thomas P. Gore who was born as "Governor Thomas Pryor Gore" on December 10, 1870 in Walthall, Sumner County, Mississippi and Nina Belle Kay who was born in March 1877 in Palo Pinto, Texas. Thomas' father, Thomas M. Gore, was born in Alabama and his mother, Carrie E. W., was born in South Carolina. They chose titled names for their sons. Thomas Pryor Gore also had a brother whose first name was Colonel. Nina Belle Kay's father was J. Thomas Kay and was born in South Carolina, her mother's name was Macilla and was born in Mississippi.

In 1930, young Eugene was living with his parents and his maternal grand uncle, Howard M. Kay at 5 Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. His maternal grandparents lived next door.

Vidal was brought up in the Washington, D.C., area. It was there that he attended St. Albans School. His grandfather Gore was blind, and the young Vidal both read aloud to him and frequently acted as his guide, thereby gaining unusual access for a child to the corridors of power. Senator Gore's isolationism has been one of the guiding beliefs of Vidal's political philosophy, which has always been unwaveringly critical of what he perceives to be American imperialism.

After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy, Vidal joined the US Army Reserve in 1943.

For much of the late 20th century, Vidal divided his time between Ravello, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast, and Los Angeles, California. He sold his home in Ravello in 2003 and spends most of his time living in Los Angeles. In November, 2003, Howard Austen, Vidal's life partner, died. In February, 2005, Vidal buried Austen's remains in a tomb maintained for the two of them at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC.

Vidal is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society.

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Writing career

At 21 he published his first novel, Williwaw, based upon his military experiences in the Alaskan Harbor Detachment. The book was well received. A few years later, his novel The City and the Pillar, which dealt candidly with gay themes, caused a furor, to the extent that the daily New York Times refused to review a number of his later books. The book was dedicated to "J.T." After rumors were published in a magazine, Vidal eventually confirmed that this was his St. Albans love, Jimmie Trimble, whom the book clearly involved. Trimble died in the Battle of Iwo Jima June 1, 1945, and Vidal would later claim that he was the only person he ever loved. Subsequently, as sales of his novels slipped, Vidal worked on plays, films, and television series as a scriptwriter. Two of his plays, The Best Man and Visit to a Small Planet, were Broadway hits and later, were adapted successfully as movies.

In the early 1950s, using the pseudonym Edgar Box, he wrote three mystery novels about a fictional detective named Peter Sergeant.

Vidal was hired as a contract writer for MGM in 1956. In 1959, Director William Wyler needed work done on the script of Ben-Hur, written by Karl Tunberg. Vidal agreed to collaborate with Christopher Fry to rework the screenplay on the condition that MGM let him out of the last two years of his contract. The death of the producer, Sam Zimbalist, however, led to complications in allotting credit. The Screenwriters Guild resolved the issue by listing Tunberg as the sole screenwriter, denying credit to both Vidal and Fry. Charlton Heston was less than pleased with the carefully veiled homosexuality of a scene which Vidal claims to have written and has denied that Vidal had significant involvement in the script.[1]

In the 1960s, Vidal wrote three highly successful novels. The meticulously researched Julian (1964) dealt with the apostate Roman emperor, while Washington, D.C. (1967) focused on a political family during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. The third novel was unexpected–the satirical transsexual comedy Myra Breckinridge (1968).

After two unsuccessful plays, Weekend (1968) and An Evening With Richard Nixon (1972), and the strange semi-autobiographical novel Two Sisters, Vidal would focus mainly on his essays and two distinct strains of his novels: historical novels dealing with American history such as Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln, (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989), The Golden Age (2000) and another excursion into the ancient world Creation (1981, published in expanded form 2002); and the funny and often merciless "satirical inventions": Myron (1975, a sequel to Myra Breckinridge), Kalki (1978), Duluth (1983), Live From Golgotha (1992) and The Smithsonian Institution (1998).

Vidal also occasionally returned to write for cinema and television, including a TV movie of Billy the Kid with Val Kilmer and a mini-series of Lincoln. He also wrote the original script for the controversial film Caligula but later had his name removed because the director and the lead actor re-wrote the script, changing the overall tone and theme. Ironically, in a failed attempt to restore Vidal's vision during the post-production, the producers of the film ended up turning it into something neither Vidal, Brass nor McDowell had in mind.

Perhaps contrary to his own wishes, Vidal is more respected as an essayist than novelist. He writes chiefly on political, historical, and literary themes. He won the National Book Award in 1993 for United States (1952-1992). A subsequent collection to 2000 is The Last Empire. Since then he has published "pamphlets" highly critical of the present Bush-Cheney administration as well as a text on America's founding fathers, Inventing A Nation. He published a well-received memoir, Palimpsest in 1995, and according to recent reports is working on the follow-up.

In the 1960s, Vidal moved to Italy and was cast as himself in Federico Fellini's film Roma. His liberal politics are well-documented. In 1987 he wrote a series of essays entitled Armageddon, exploring the intricacies of power in contemporary America and ruthlessly pillorying the presidential incumbent Ronald Reagan, whom he once famously described as a "triumph of the embalmer's art." Besides his politician grandfather, Vidal has other connections to the Democratic Party: his mother, Nina, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr., who later became the stepfather of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Vidal is a 5th cousin of Jimmy Carter. He was also an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress in 1960, losing a very close election in a traditionally Republican district on the Hudson River. In 1982, he lost to Jerry Brown in the Democratic Party senatorial primary despite the backing of such liberal celebrities as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Vidal has said that he and Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, are distant cousins, but genealogical research has uncovered no such family link.

He co-starred in the 1992 film, Bob Roberts, with Tim Robbins as well as other films, notably Gattaca, With Honors and Igby Goes Down.

Vidal is noted as a self-publicist. If a more accurate definition of his view on things were required, it is neatly summed up in his tongue-in-cheek assertion from a magazine interview: "There is not one human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise."

In August 2004, The New York Times reported that Vidal, then 79, was selling his 5,000 square foot (460 m²) Italian cliffside villa, which had been his principal residence for 30 years, for health reasons and was moving permanently to his other home in Los Angeles.

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Political Views

Vidal considers himself a "radical reformer" who has been described as wanting to return to the "pure republicanism" of early America. As a prep school student, he was a supporter of the America First Committee. Unlike other supporters of the movement, he continues to hold that the United States should not have become involved in World War II (although he now appears to believe that material assistance to the Allies was a good idea). He has also suggested that President Roosevelt "incited" the Japanese to attack the United States to allow American entry into the war, and believes that FDR had advance knowledge of the attack.

As a political activist, he became a 1960 Democratic candidate for Congress from upstate New York ("You'll get more with Gore"), receiving the most votes of any Democrat in 50 years. From 1970 to 1972 he was one of the chairmen of the People's Party, and in California's 1982 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, he finished second in a field of nine (polling a half-million votes).

ABC News hired Vidal and William F. Buckley as analysts for the 1968 Republican and Democratic presidential coventions, predicting that viewers would enjoy seeing two men famous for their acerbic wit and sarcasm engage in verbal combat on-air. Verbal combat was definitely joined, and very nearly physical combat as well. After days of bickering that often devolved into childish ad hominem attacks on both sides, Vidal referred to Buckley as a "pro-crypto Nazi," to which Buckley, visibly livid, riposted thusly: "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a pro-crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." Buckley apologized to Vidal in a lengthy essay published in Esquire magazine in August 1969, entitled "On Experiencing Gore Vidal" (anthologized in The Governor Listeth, a collection of Buckley's writings from the period). The September 1969 edition of Esquire included a response by Vidal, in which Vidal heavily implied that Buckley and/or unnamed members of his family had vandalized a church in their hometown of Sharon, CT, in 1944 after the wife of the pastor sold a home to a Jewish family. Buckley sued Vidal and Esquire magazine for libel, and Vidal counterclaimed for libel against Buckley, citing Buckley's characterization of Vidal's novel "Myra Breckenridge" as "pornography." Vidal's claim was dismissed by the court, and Buckley eventually settled for $115,000 in attorney's fees and a statement from Esquire magazine that they were "utterly convinced" of the untruthfulness of Vidal's assertion. Vidal bore his own attorney's fees, estimated at $75,000.

The entire affair surfaced again in 2003 when Esquire imprudently published "Esquire's Big Book of Great Writing," an anthology that included Vidal's libelous essay. Buckley again sued for libel, and Esquire again settled for $55,000 in attorney's fees and $10,000 in damages to Buckley personally.

Vidal has stirred up controversy regarding his relations with Timothy McVeigh. The two began a correspondence while McVeigh was in prison, and Vidal believes that McVeigh either had accomplices or was framed for the Oklahoma City terrorist attack. Vidal also has suggested that the attack may have been carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in order to pass stronger anti-terrorist laws. In another interview he said that Timothy McVeigh did this as a retribution to the United States for what the FBI did, alleging that the FBI spies on and murders Americans.

In 1994, Vidal contributed a preface to Israel Shahak's highly controversial book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, which has been criticised by Talmudic scholars.

In his preface, Vidal states that: "(s)ometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. 'That's why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.' As neither Jack nor I was an antisemite (unlike his father and my grandfather) we took this to be just another funny story about Truman and the serene corruption of American politics."

Vidal is a member of the advisory board of the World Can't Wait organization, which is part of the movement to impeach George W. Bush. [2]

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Views on September 11, 2001

Vidal is strongly critical of the Bush administration, as he has been of previous U.S. administrations that he considers to have either an explicit or implicit expansionist agenda. He has frequently made the point in interviews, essays, and in a recent book that Americans "are now governed by a junta of oil-Pentagon men ... both Bushes, Cheney, Rumsfeld and so on". He claims that for several years this group and their associates have aimed to control the oil of central Asia (after, in his view, gaining effective control of the oil of the Persian Gulf in 1991). Specifically regarding the September 11, 2001 attacks, Vidal writes how such an attack, which he claims American intelligence warned was coming, politically justified the plans the administration already had in August 2001 for invading Afghanistan the following October.

He discusses the lack of defense, including the delay in getting fighter planes into the air to intercept the hijacked airliners, compared with the time one might expect after a hijacking report. If, he says, these huge failures were incompetence, they would deserve "a number of courts martial with an impeachment or two thrown in". Instead there is to be only a limited inquiry into how the "potential breakdowns among federal agencies ... could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur." This, concludes Vidal, opens the possibility that the administration in fact let the attack happen, in order to capitalize on a catalyzing event that would enable it to achieve controversial policy goals under the rubric of a War on Terror.

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Essays and Non-Fiction

Rocking the Boat (1963)
Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship (1969)
Sex, Death and Money (1969) (paperback compilation)
Homage to Daniel Shays (1973)
Matters of Fact and of Fiction (1977)
The Second American Revolution (1982)
Armageddon? (1987) (UK only)
At Home (1988)
A View From The Diner's Club (1991) (UK only)
Screening History (1992) ISBN 0233988033
Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992) ISBN 1878825003
United States: essays 1952–1992 (1993) ISBN 0767908066
Palimpsest: a memoir (1995) ISBN 0679440380
Virgin Islands (1997) (UK only)
The American Presidency (1998) ISBN 1878825151
Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings (1999)
The Last Empire: essays 1992–2000 (2001) ISBN 037572639X (there is also a much shorter UK edition)
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace or How We Came To Be So Hated, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002, (2002) ISBN 156025405X
Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta, Thunder's Mouth Press, (2002) ISBN 1560255021
Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson (2003) ISBN 0300101716
Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia (2004)