In the summer of 1968, two men sat across from each other on live television during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and conducted one of the most famous exchanges in the history of American broadcasting. Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. had been hired by ABC News to provide commentary, and what they provided instead was a glimpse into the fault lines running through American intellectual and political life with an intensity that the network had not anticipated and could not control. When Buckley called Vidal a "queer" on air and threatened to punch him in the face, and Vidal responded with the composure of a man who had been waiting for precisely this moment, the exchange crystallized something essential about both men and about the era they inhabited. Vidal was delighted. He had spent his entire career engineering exactly this kind of confrontation, using his wit, his aristocratic bearing, and his complete indifference to being liked as instruments of a decades-long assault on American complacency, hypocrisy, and the mythology of its own innocence. He was at his most himself when someone powerful was trying to silence him, and the attempt never worked.
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was a figure of such deliberate and sustained self-construction that it can be genuinely difficult to separate the man from the performance, which was, of course, precisely the point. Born into a family with deep connections to American political life, the grandson of a senator, the stepson of Hugh Auchincloss, who would later become Jacqueline Kennedy's stepfather, Vidal inherited access to power and spent his entire career using that access to anatomize power's pretensions with a cold and gleeful precision. His historical novels, Burr, Lincoln, 1876, and the others that make up his "Narratives of Empire," subjected the founding mythology of the American republic to a revisionist scrutiny that was neither cynical nor disillusioned but deeply, seriously engaged with the gap between what the republic claimed to be and what the documentary record showed it actually was. His essays did the same work in shorter form, with more acid and less mercy.
What made Vidal irreducible, and what continues to make him so difficult to place in any comfortable critical category, was the coexistence in a single sensibility of qualities that do not usually travel together: the patrician and the subversive, the classicist and the provocateur, the political moralist and the author of Myra Breckinridge, one of the most deliberately transgressive novels of the 20th century. He was openly bisexual at a time when that required genuine courage, a critic of American imperialism from a platform that gave his criticisms unusual force, and a defender of literary seriousness in an age increasingly indifferent to it. He was also vain, vindictive, capable of spectacular personal cruelty, and possessed of feuds so elaborately maintained that they became a kind of art form in themselves. The contradictions were not incidental to the achievement but constitutive of it, which is what makes his life so rewarding and so demanding as a subject.
To navigate those contradictions with the empathy and the critical intelligence they require, we turn to Jay Parini, professor at Middlebury College, acclaimed biographer and novelist, and the author of Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal, a portrait that is neither hagiography nor takedown but something considerably more valuable: a sustained, honest reckoning with a man whose brilliance and whose flaws were expressions of the same fundamental character. Parini knew Vidal personally over many years, which gives his biography an intimacy that purely archival work cannot provide, and he brings to the subject both a scholar's command of the literary and historical record and a novelist's instinct for the revealing detail and the moment that unlocks a life. In this interview, he reflects on the wit and the wounds, the novels and the provocations, and why Gore Vidal, for all his aristocratic disdain for the age he lived in, was one of the most fully, combatively American writers it produced.
Charles Carlini: Vidal famously said, "Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little." How much of his literary persona was performative—a calculated act of self-mythology—and how much was genuine disdain for rivals?
Jay Parini: When Gore said that, he was sincerely acknowledging a feeling of rivalry with his peers and competitors. And he was trying to be funny, and succeeding too!
CC: Vidal’s feud with Norman Mailer was legendary, full of public vitriol and even physical altercations. Beyond personal animosity, what did their clashes reveal about competing visions of American literature?
JP: Gore and Norman ended as good friends, but there was a lot of jealousy from both sides, and I think they have such different worldviews. Norman was “masculinist” to a fault. Gore was gay, of course, and came from a different universe. And both were massive egotists.
CC: Vidal wrote that "the United States was founded by the brightest people in the country—and we haven’t seen them since." Do you think he ever truly believed in democracy, or was his elitism fundamental to his worldview?
JP: Gore had a complicated view of democracy. He certainly read the words of the Founding Fathers, mostly with admiration. I suspect that he harbored an elitist view that came into conflict with his democratic impulses, which were very real. So I’d say he was full of mixed emotions about democracy. He did have a sense of being from the ruling class, but he also felt rejected by that class.
CC: In The City and the Pillar, Vidal broke ground with one of the first mainstream American novels to depict homosexuality frankly—yet he rejected the label "gay writer." Was this a principled stand against categorization, or a strategic evasion of marginalization?
JP: Gore almost couldn’t face his homosexuality. He thought he’d have been a successful politician, maybe even a president, if it were not for that. But he understood that he was indeed gay, and in The City and the Pillar decided to come out in a public fashion. The result was a hugely important novel in the annals of gay literature.
CC: Vidal’s historical novels, like Burr and Lincoln, play fast and loose with facts. Did he see history as a tool for truth-telling or as raw material to be weaponized?
JP: I really don’t think he understood that he was weaponizing history for his own purposes. He had views of American history that were personal, not necessarily accurate— though he’d never acknowledge that. I think he thought of himself as a truth-teller. And these novels are impressive representations of American history, even with their evasions and rewriting of the facts at times.
CC: He once quipped, "Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." But how much did Vidal actually not give a damn? His lifelong obsession with fame suggests otherwise.
JP: I don’t actually believe Gore said that, although it’s often attributed to him. In any case, he often said things like that. He was obsessed with fame. He was narcissistic, so he looked to the world for visions of himself. It was all mirrors.
CC: Vidal’s political critiques—from the Kennedys to Bush—were often scathing. Yet he moved in elite circles himself. Was he a genuine outsider, or just a particularly clever insider?
JP: I think he felt like a rejected former insider, or someone who, by virtue of his class associations, should have been taken seriously as a member of the ruling class. All very complicated, and he had no consistent view of this matter.
CC: You’ve written about Vidal’s complicated relationship with his own celebrity. Did his hunger for attention ultimately undermine his intellectual legacy?
JP: Yes, totally. He should have been content to say what he thought, and with his usual elegance, and let others digest and respond. But he wanted to control all attitudes about him and the responses that necessarily came his way. He became his own worst enemy.
CC: Vidal claimed that sex was "the only thing left that isn’t taxed." But in his writing, sex is often detached, even clinical. Was he truly liberated, or was he trapped in an old-world stoicism?
JP: He was kind of an old-world guy, almost an ancient Roman in his attitudes to sex. But also defensive. His liberation was, I fear, a kind of pose. But he did have a measure of bravery, and this was shocking and exhilarating and good.
CC: If Vidal were alive today, how do you think he’d navigate our current cultural wars? Would he be a Twitter provocateur, a podcast sage, or would he dismiss the whole spectacle as beneath him?
JP: He would avoid Twitter but adore the world of podcasts. He liked to talk aloud, and the interview was his medium. His best work came in the form of interview responses. He would have adored the Trump craziness, which he would have delighted in making fun of every day of the week.
Recommended Reading
0 comments