Gore Vidal
Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 7:39PM Navigating the Troubled Waters with Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is dying.
He’s not gravely ill or circling the drain.
He’s dying like all of us are dying. He’s just a bit closer to it.
I just finished his final (he grimly reminds us) memoir Point to Point Navigation and the old man seemed a bit preoccupied by his approaching mortality. At 83 years old, notes for posterity become quite significant. Best that the living tell their tale instead of dubiously motivated biographers.
Much of the book is dedicated to the memory of his life partner, Howard Austen, who passed away five years ago from cancer. The rest is a fond and not-so-fond reflection on people, events, places, politics and art with an ever present sense of moribundity about it.
Vidal seems quite at peace with it all.
And well he should be. He is one of the great thinkers and Man of Letters of the last half of the 20th Century to the present, telling Americans the ugly truths they simply did not and do not care to hear. Which is why he has spent much of that time living in Europe. Who wants to hang around a bunch of uncultured ingrates?
He is a philosopher, historian, wit, writer, provocateur, critic and bon vivant and my life is much richer because of him.
But these small words of mine cannot encapsulate the very large life of this noble creature so I will, as always, defer to his eloquence:
From Point to Point Navigation, Gore Vidal…
On literary theory:
“… a glass-bead game whose reward for the ludic player is the knowledge that once he masters it, he will be thought by his peers to be ludicrous.”
On his Mother:
“She never baked a pie, but she did manage to drink, in the course of a lifetime, the equivalent of the Chesapeake Bay in vodka.”
On the loss of movie “magic” (reflecting on the cinema of the ‘20s and ‘30s):
“… it must be recalled that in those days if you saw a movie once, that was that. The odds were slim that you would ever see it again. There were no Museums of Modern Art or film retrospectives. Today, thanks to videocassettes and DVDs, one can see a film as often as one likes. But since we knew back then that we would have only the one encounter, we learned how to concentrate totally.”
On labeling liberals:
“A current pejorative is narcissistic. Generally, a narcissist is anyone better looking than you are, but lately the adjective is often applied to those “liberals” who prefer to improve the lives of others rather than exploit them. Apparently, a concern for others is self-love at its least attractive, while greed is now a sign of the highest altruism.”
On commercialism:
“… it is the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all.”
On the falsity of time being the great healer:
“Time is the great constant reminder of things lost and gone for good.”
On military service:
“During the three years I spent in the army (WWII) I never heard a single patriotic remark from a fellow soldier, only grief for friends lost and, almost as often, a fierce grievance felt for those back home who were decimating our adolescent generation.”
On creative vision at CBS:
“… for a time they did abandon producing slices of movie filler to separate the commercials from each other, the only object of their peculiar enterprise.”
On coping with death of Howard Austen:
“… Leto wept. I envied him- the WASP glacier had closed over my head."
On the work of Tennessee Williams:
“… it was a tone of voice the like of which had not been heard since Mark Twain. Each was a comic genius within a dark universe that the innocent persist in calling ‘home sweet home‘.”
On Paul Bowles death:
“He died November 18, 1999, missing the first years of the twenty-first century and the last years of the American Republic.”
On the U.S. Congress:
“I can also attest that our own congressional voices fifty years ago were light-years superior to those today or to the halting subliterate style of our governing junta.”
On the strained relationship with his Mother:
“Obviously, a new epoch of mother worship had been ushered in by… Freud? Fannie Farmer? I’ve yet to read any criticism of George Washington for his bad relations with his mother or even Ernest Hemingway. But a sea change occurred in the twentieth century and mothers are automatically exempted from all blame if my lady friends are to be believed.”
On birthdays:
“I cannot imagine anyone willingly celebrating time’s ruthless one-way passage.”
On Princess Margaret:
“… she was far too intelligent for her station in life. She often had bad press, the usual fate of wits in a literal society.”
On his famous remark- “Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.”:
“Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent FOX News.”
A few Gore Vidal fun facts:
He ran for the Congress and Governorship of California.
Introduced Francis Ford Coppola to wine appreciation.
Was close friends with Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams.
Introduced Barbra Streisand to caviar.
Essentially invented the “book plug” for authors doing television appearances.
Was the last contracted writer for MGM Studios.
His brother, in his youth, urinated on Clark Gable’s back during a swimming lesson.
His father helped found two airlines that later became TWA and Eastern.
His father was also put in charge of the search for Amelia Earhart, a family friend.
He is the grandson of Thomas P. Gore, Senator from Oklahoma (1907-1921, 1931-1937).
He is a distant cousin of Al Gore, Jr., Vice President of the U.S. (1992-2000)
Reader Comments (5)
Beautiful. The Clark Gable thing and commercialism. Natasha retrospective? maybe? please?
I once read a book review of Vidal's "Palimpsest" that began like this:
"Gore Vidal is a slick novelist, an impressive essayist, and a perfect bitch."
All too true!
Shall we presume his critique of commercialism exempted his own self-promotion?
Yes, we shall.
Here's a new concept for "Fitzy the free marketer/libertarian/capitalistic wonder boy".
Some artists promote, through their work, the furtherance of ideas, concepts, art, politics, social critiques, what have you- simply to put them out there. To get them recognized. The financial success of these ideas is quite secondary. They create them because of a need to express an innate desire to inform, entertain, anger, elate, provoke, or yes, feed ego (in Vidal's case), etc.
Here's where you get lost Fitzy, so pay attention.
Some people do things regardless of monetary gain.
Commercialism stands as anathema to that.
Sort of like the band "Wings".
That is what Vidal was getting at.
Lesson endeth.
C.
;)