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Overview
The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini’s Empire of Self digs behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal’s colorful career to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truths underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well—a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Johnny Carson, Leonard Bernstein, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood. Also a generous helping of feuds with the likes of William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and The New York Times, among other adversaries.
The life of Gore Vidal teemed with notable incidents, famous people, and lasting achievements that call out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal’s life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal’s life and his papers, Parini excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal—novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, historian, wit, provocateur, and pioneer of gay rights—has long needed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345805836 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/20/2016 |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.18(w) x 7.99(h) x 1.04(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
My friendship with Gore Vidal began in the mid-eighties, when I lived with my wife and young children in Atrani, a fishing village on the coast of southern Italy. We had a small villa on a cliff overlooking the sea, with a view to Salerno to the south, and Capri just out of sight to the north. The bay below us glistened, the sunlight like diamonds scatted on the water, almost too bright to bear, with fishing vessels departing each morning in search of mullet, mussels, mackerel, tuna, and squid that they would unload in the afternoon and sell in wooden barrels by the dock. I was writing a novel in the mornings at a café in Amalfi itself, walking into town along a stony footpath where a thousand cats seemed to prowl, where sturdy women carried groceries slowly up hundreds of steps, and children kicked footballs in back alleys. The smell of laundry soap, cat piss, and wild flowers were ubiquitous.
We had a lovely rooftop terrace, above which rose a lemon grove and high limestone cliffs. A massive villa – alabaster white, clinging to the rocks like a swallow’s nest – shimmered above us, and we wondered who lived there in such opulence. Some Italian nobleman? A local mafia don? A film star? When I asked the tobacconist in town about its resident, he said, “Ah, lo scrittore! Gore Vidal. Americano.” He explained that the writer stopped by his shop almost every afternoon for a newspaper. He retired to the bar next door for a drink, where he would sit and read for an hour or so before taking the bus up the hill to Ravello.
Already I knew the work of Gore Vidal quite well. Having been an anti-war activist during the Vietnam era, I admired his fierce political commentaries in Esquire and The New York Review of Books. I never forgot his fiery debates with William F. Buckley during the presidential conventions of 1968, especially during the siege of Chicago. He had held his ground, driving Buckley mad with his relentless logic and unflappable manner. I had read half a dozen of his novels, including Myra Breckinridge, Burr, and Lincoln. Needless to say, I wanted to meet him.
I sent a brief note, telling Gore I was an American writer living at 23 via Torricelli in Atrani, and would like to meet him. That evening he pounded on my door, inviting us (my wife and I) to dinner. I was terrified, as his reputation preceded him, and thought he might be tricky. But a friendship blossomed. I would often meet him for a drink or dinner, and a series of conversations began that lasted until his death in 2012. It would be fair to say, in a crude way, that I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son. We had a good deal in common, including a passion for liberal politics, American history, and books. We both loved Henry James, Twain, Trollope and Henry Adams – just to name a few of the more obvious names – and we invariably found we had more to talk about than time allowed. We also shared a love of both Italy and Britain. By that time I had spent seven years in the British Isles, and it turned out we knew many of the same people. The literary world is, in fact, quite small – especially in Britain and Italy, where writers and editors often converge at parties and literary events.
In the decades that followed, we spoke on the phone every week – for periods on a daily basis. And I would stay with him often in Ravello or, later, Los Angeles, meeting him often when he traveled. I have strong memories of times together in such places as Rome, Naples, Edinburgh, Oxford, London, New York, Boston, even Salzburg and Key West. He proved more than helpful to me as a younger writer, reading drafts of my books, offering frank critiques and encouragement. We discussed his work at length, too – he would frequently send a typescript or galley for me to read.
His phone calls, in later years, often began: “What are they saying about me?” To a somewhat frightening degree, he depended on the world’s opinion. Once, in one of those memories that stands in for many others, my wife and I were sitting in his study in Ravello when he came in with drinks. On the wall behind his desk were twenty or so framed magazine covers, with Gore’s face on each cover. I asked: “What’s that all about, those covers?” He said, “When I come into this room in the morning to work, I like to be reminded who I am.”
Over many decades he had built a huge empire of self, sending out colonies in various languages. “They love me in Brazil,” he would say. Or Bulgaria, or Turkey, or Hong Kong. I took his rampant egotism with a grain of salt. It was part of him, but only part. The narcissism was, at times, an exhausting and debilitating thing for him, as it proved impossible to get enough satisfying responses. He required a hall of mirrors for adequate reflection, and there was never enough. The narcissistic hole can’t be filled. At times, I wondered about how much money and time I spent in winging off to various far-flung cities to spend a few days with him, and my transatlantic phone bills reflected my own mania. But his flame was very bright and warm, and I was drawn to it.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Rock Creek Ramble 6
Chapter 1
I A Silver-Plated Mug 9
II Capitol Steps 14
III A Wider World 27
Truman and Gore at the Plaza 38
Chapter 2
I Not a Lovely War 40
II Two Roads Diverging 50
III Storm at Sea 56
IV Hearts of Darkness 58
Edgewater Recalled 67
Chapter 3
I Portrait of the Artist as Balletomane 69
II Pillars of Salt 72
III Stateside 83
IV More Dolce Vita 87
V Finding Dutchess County 90
VI Loving Howard 95
Beverly Hills Blues 101
Chapter 4
I Detecting Life 103
II The Spanish Main 111
III Media as Messages 114
IV Silvery Screens 117
V More Visits to Small Planets 121
VI Outlaws 124
VII Ben-Hur 128
VIII A Place at the Round Table 132
At the Witter's Edge-Hyannis 134
Chapter 5
I "You'll Get More with Gore" 136
II Slouching Towards Camelot 145
III Essaying the World 148
IV Roman Spring 153
V Julian Rising 158
Moravia and Gore on the Isola Tiberna 164
Chapter 6
I Romanitas 166
II Capitol Steps Revisited 173
III The Holy Family 175
IV Myra 177
V Busy Weekends 182
VI The Vidal-Buckley Debates 185
VII Furious Visions 191
Miss Sontag Writes a Novel 198
Chapter 7
I A Bad Year 200
II Writing Richard Nixon 205
III Italian Hours 207
IV Patriotic Gore 213
V The Swirl 219
VI Myron Unmanned 222
The Man Who Wouldn't Fall to Earth 228
Chapter 8
I Half a Century 230
II 1876 and All That 236
III Memories, Dreams, Self-Reflections 239
IV Apocalypse Not Quite Yet 243
V Hollywood Redux 250
VI Grace and Hope 253
Gore and Isaiah Berlin in Oxford 259
Chapter 9
I Acting President 261
II Running in Place 267
III Duluth: Love It or Loathe It 272
IV Honorary Citizen 274
V Land of Lincoln 278
VI Ah, Venice! 284
The Lesson of the Master 287
Chapter 10
I "It's a Trade" 288
II "One Disaster After Another" 293
III Fear of Flying 294
IV Imperium 297
V Sailing the Coast 302
VI Adding Wings to the Mansion 306
Lenny and Gore 314
Chapter 11
I "Our Country's Biographer" 316
II "The Other Side of the Camera" 319
III Attacking the Sky-God 323
IV Thinking About Sex 328
V Retreats, Advances 330
VI In the Widening Gyre 332
At the Harvard Faculty Club 343
Chapter 12
I Rethinking Washington 345
II Dreams of Wholeness 348
III Elder Statesman 351
IV Reviewing the Life 352
V The Golden Age 355
VI Still the Best Man 358
Songs in the Hollywood Hills 366
Chapter 13
I The Pamphleteer 368
II Finding Founding Fathers 372
III A Death Before Bedtime 375
IV Marching to the Sea 380
V The Last Memoir 385
VI Mopping-Up Operations 388
VII Snapshots of the End 393
Conclusion 401
Postscript 407
Acknowledgments 411
Notes 413
Photo Credits 437
Index 439