Never famous enough
September 2012
Gore Vidal first visited Australia in 1974, and lunched with Prime Minister Whitlam at the Lodge, where they sparred jocularly over the historical accuracy of Vidal’s novel about the Roman Emperor, Julian. Vidal was much taken with Gough, though he remarked that it was difficult to preserve the line between vanity and overweening vanity. The same could be said of Vidal himself.
Whitlam seemed the sort of politician Vidal imagined himself to potentially be: educated, patrician and a convinced social democrat. Thirty years later Vidal was back in Australia, dining with Bob Carr, whom the ABC subsequently persuaded to be filmed driving through Los Angeles with Vidal, as he held forth on the evils of the American Empire. One suspects that particular piece of footage is not held in high regard by Carr’s current department.
My connection with Vidal dates from the seizure in 1971 by a zealous Sydney Airport customs official of his novel Myra Breckinridge, which became the basis for a Council of Civil Liberties trial aimed at our then draconian censorship laws. Customs won the case – Judge Levine concluded that there were passages in the book “introduced for the sake of dirtiness, and from the sure knowledge that notoriety earned by dirtiness will command for the book a ready sale” – but the laws were soon abolished.
Defending Vidal in court proved the basis for a long acquaintanceship, although one limited by my position in the literary pantheon. After all, as Vidal once observed, “in the world of stars no-one is a stranger”. I was invited to stay at the villa at Ravello, but not, sadly, at the same time as either Princess Margaret or Mick Jagger.
Vidal was always a generous host, as long as he remained the centre of attention. During a 50-year partnership with Howard Austen he maintained a strict routine: writing in the morning, hunting for sex in the afternoon, dinner with friends in the evening. The routine was interrupted only by travel or by his two attempts to enter politics: his race for a Congressional seat in 1960 and the more quixotic campaign for the Democratic Senatorial nomination in 1982.
Vidal insisted that he was bisexual, and often spoke disparagingly of those he referred to as “homosexualists”. Only they and Catholic priests, he said once, were interested in marriage: “But since those who believe in romantic love suffer so much anyway, I would not dream of adding to their sufferings.”
Vidal was never able to recognise, as Christopher Isherwood said, that you know you are homosexual when you fall in love with another man. His public persona, with its mixture of charm and aggression, was in part a product of an inability to fully accept his own sexuality, and he fluctuated between denying he was part of the gay movement and occasionally speaking for it.
Vidal was a remarkably disciplined and hard-working writer. Conventional wisdom claims that he was best as an essayist, though I suspect some of his critics are too lazy to have read most of his novels. Not only was he a master of the historical genre, he also created some of the blackest satires of contemporary America. Myra Breckinridge, which subsequently became one of the all-time bad films, should be read as the founding text of queer theory.
When I was approached some years ago by a publisher to write a book about “a celebrity”, I chose Vidal, a recognisable icon of American intellectual life for half a century. We agreed that I would only show Vidal the manuscript once it was ready for copy editing, and he could only correct factual mistakes.
He must have read the manuscript four or five times, and clearly brooded on what he saw as insufficient recognition, but he did agree to appear at two events for the book at bookstores in southern California. By then he was eighty, walked with difficulty, drank too much and was still mourning the loss of Howard, who had died two years earlier. But the presence of an audience – and Vidal was still able to draw hundreds to bookstores – rekindled the old hunger for adulation.
I learnt much from Gore Vidal, not least that if one craves fame one can never be certain one is famous enough. When Gore Vidal’s America was published in November 2005, there was something very sad about his constant need to reassure himself of his importance, and the sudden bursts of anger about hurts and rivalries going back over a long career. On stage Vidal was witty, imperious, and absolutely unwilling to share the limelight.
As he aged Vidal grew increasingly bitter with what he saw as the failures of the United States, which he proclaimed a corrupt empire, but after Harold’s death he sold the villa in Ravello and moved back to the Hollywood Hills. His were not a happy last few years, but he would have delight in the attention his death occasioned. Indeed if he and I believed in the afterlife I could imagine his stentorian voice correcting my grammar as I write this.
Dennis Altman is Professor of Politics and Director, Institute for Human Security at LaTrobe University.
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