Gore Vidal

I was sad to hear that Gore Vidal had died.  Although his declining years were marred by increasingly crackpot pronouncements on 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and the rest, I always retained an affection for the Great American Iconoclast.

It must have been the late lamented South Bank Show that brought him to my attention, sometime in the early 80s, and I was enthralled by this elegantly waspish, seemingly effortlessly learned man who had known everybody.  A friend and I once joked that Vidal was actually the Comte de St Germain. 

 

While bracketing him with that post-war literary flowering of Mailer et al, most of the obits I’ve read seem to conclude that his legacy lies in his essays.  It’s difficult to argue with this, as my much thumbed copy of United States testifies.  His memoir Palimpsest will endure too, I think, as an artefact of the American Century but there are at least three novels that I have paid the compliment of repeated re-reading.

 Julian is probably his best.  Quite apart from the intriguing what-if scenario of a Roman emperor endeavouring to turn back the clock and rescue the classical world from the self-righteous death-cult of Christianity, the first-person narrative approach of letters and extracts from Julian’s memoirs obscures the second-rate characterisation and prose that are all too evident in other novels. 

Burr is often unjustly overlooked, I think, if only for its jaundiced view of the American Revolution and the curiosity of the early years of the unsteady Republic under the Virginian Junta.  I had the novel very much in mind this spring, as I paused en-route to the Staten Island Ferry and took a moment to find Hamilton’s memorial in Trinity Churchyard.

Lincoln succeeds after a fashion, in as far as it humanises, and humourises, the great man but there is a good deal of deadly-dull padding on the home life of the Chase family and the secessionist intriguers fail to be much more than puppets. That said, anyone trying to get a sense of the Civil War could do a lot worse than to read this alongside Doris Kearns’ Team of Rivals and Shelby Foote’s epic trilogy, which I have only recently (finally) got around to.

As for the rest, I never felt tempted by any of his more whimsical entertainments, I put Creation down half-finished and the other one or two Narratives of Empire novels that I picked up left so little impression that I never stirred myself to complete the series.  But he will be missed and Presidential elections will never be quite the same again.