Gore Vidal
Eugene Luther Gore Vidal was an American writer and public intellectual known for his cynical epigrammatic wit. His novels and essays criticized the social and sexual norms he perceived as driving American life. Vidal was heavily involved in politics, and unsuccessfully sought office twice as a Democratic Party candidate, first in 1960 to the United States House of Representatives, and later in 1982 to the United States Senate.
A grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore, Vidal was born into an upper-class political family. As a political commentator and essayist, Vidal's primary focus was the history and society of the United States, especially how a militaristic foreign policy reduced the country to a decadent empire. His political and cultural essays were published in The Nation, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, and Esquire magazines. As a public intellectual, Vidal's topical debates on sex, politics, and religion with other intellectuals and writers occasionally turned into quarrels with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. and Norman Mailer.
As a novelist, Vidal explored the nature of corruption in public and private life. His style of narration evoked the time and place of his stories and delineated his characters' psychology. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, about a dispassionately presented male homosexual relationship, offended conservative book reviewers' literary, political, and moral sensibilities.
In the historical novel genre, Vidal recreated the imperial world of Julian the Apostate in Julian. Julian was the Roman emperor who attempted to reestablish Roman polytheism to counter Christianity. In social satire, Myra Breckinridge explores the mutability of gender roles and sexual orientation as social constructs established by social mores. In Burr and Lincoln, both part of his Narratives of Empire series of novels, each protagonist is presented as "A Man of the People" and as "A Man" in a narrative exploration of how the public and private facets of personality affect national politics in the United States.
Early life
Vidal was born in the cadet hospital of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal and Nina S. Gore. Vidal was born there because his father, a U.S. Army officer, was then serving as the first aeronautics instructor at the military academy. The middle name, Louis, was a mistake on the part of his father, "who could not remember, for certain, whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther". In his memoir Palimpsest, Vidal wrote, "My birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening in 1939; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names."Vidal was baptized in January 1939, when he was 13 years old, by the headmaster of St. Albans School, where Vidal attended preparatory school. The baptismal ceremony was effected so he "could be confirmed " at the Washington Cathedral, in February 1939, as "Eugene Luther Gore Vidal". He later said that, although the surname "Gore" was added to his names at the time of the baptism, "I wasn't named for him , although he had a great influence on my life." In 1941, Vidal dropped his two first names, because he "wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author, or a national political leader... I wasn't going to write as 'Gene' since there was already one. I didn't want to use the 'Jr.
His father, Eugene Luther Vidal Sr., was director of the Commerce Department's Bureau of Air Commerce during the Roosevelt Administration and the great love of the aviator Amelia Earhart. At the U.S. Military Academy, Vidal Sr. had been a quarterback, coach, and captain of the football team and an all-American basketball player. He competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics and the 1924 Summer Olympics. In the 1920s and the 1930s, Vidal Sr. was a founder or executive of three airline companies: the Ludington Line, Transcontinental Air Transport, and Northeast Airlines.
Gore's great-grandfather Eugen Fidel Vidal was born in Feldkirch, Austria, of Romansh background, and came to the U.S. with Gore's Swiss great-grandmother, Emma Hartmann.
Vidal's mother, Nina Gore, was a socialite who made her Broadway theater debut as an extra actress in Sign of the Leopard, in 1928. In 1922, Nina married Eugene Luther Vidal Sr. They divorced in 1935. Nina Gore Vidal married two more times, to Hugh D. Auchincloss and to Robert Olds. She also had "a long off-and-on affair" with the actor Clark Gable. As Nina Gore Auchincloss, Vidal's mother was an alternate delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention.
The subsequent marriages of his mother and father yielded four half-siblings for Gore Vidal—Vance Vidal, Valerie Vidal, Thomas Gore Auchincloss, and Nina Gore Auchincloss—one stepbrother, Hugh D. "Yusha" Auchincloss III from his mother's marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss, and four stepbrothers, including Robin Olds, from her marriage to Robert Olds, a major general in the United States Army Air Forces, who died in 1943, 10 months after marrying Nina. Through Auchincloss, Vidal also was the stepbrother once removed of Jacqueline Kennedy. Vidal's nephews include Burr Steers, a writer and film director, and Hugh Auchincloss Steers, a figurative painter.
Raised in Washington, D.C., Vidal attended the Sidwell Friends School and St. Albans School. His maternal grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, was blind, and Vidal read aloud to him and was his Senate page and seeing-eye guide. In 1939, during his summer holiday, Vidal went with some colleagues and a professor from St. Albans School on his first European trip, to Italy and France. He visited Rome, the city that came to be "at the center of Gore's literary imagination", and Paris. When the Second World War began in early September, the group was forced to return home early. On his way back, he and his colleagues stopped in Great Britain, where they met the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, Joe Kennedy. In 1940, Vidal attended the Los Alamos Ranch School. He later transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy, where he contributed to the Exonian, the school newspaper.
Rather than attend university, Vidal enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 17 and was assigned to work as an office clerk in the USAAF. Later, Vidal passed the examinations necessary to become a maritime warrant officer in the Transportation Corps and served as first mate of the F.S. 35th, a US Army Freight and Supply ship berthed at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutian Islands. After three years' service, Vidal suffered hypothermia, developed rheumatoid arthritis, and was reassigned to duty as a mess officer.
Literary career
The cultural critic Harold Bloom wrote that Vidal believed his sexuality had denied him full recognition from the U.S. literary community. Bloom contended that Vidal's limited recognition was more because his "best fictions" were historical novels, a subgenre "no longer available for canonization".Fiction
Vidal's literary career began with the success of the military novel Williwaw, a men-at-war story derived from his Alaskan Harbor Detachment duty during World War II. His third novel, The City and the Pillar, caused a moralistic furor over his dispassionate presentation of a young protagonist coming to terms with his homosexuality. The novel was dedicated to "J. T."; decades later, Vidal confirmed that the initials were those of his boyhood friend and St. Albans classmate James Trimble III, who was killed in the Battle of Iwo Jima on March 1, 1945, and was the only person Vidal ever loved. Critics railed against Vidal's presentation of homosexuality in the novel, as it was viewed generally at the time as unnatural and immoral. Vidal said that New York Times critic Orville Prescott was so offended by the book that he refused to review or to permit other critics to review any book by Vidal. Vidal said that, upon the book's publication, an editor at E. P. Dutton told him, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it." Today, Vidal is often seen as an early champion of sexual liberation.Under the pseudonym "Edgar Box", Vidal wrote the mystery novels Death in the Fifth Position, Death before Bedtime, and Death Likes it Hot, featuring Peter Cutler Sargeant II, a publicist turned private eye. His satirical novel Messiah, detailing the rise of a new nontheistic religion that comes to largely replace the Abrahamic faiths, was also published in 1954. The Edgar Box genre novels sold well and earned the blacklisted Vidal a secret living. That success led Vidal to write in other genres, including the stage play The Best Man: A Play about Politics and the television play Visit to a Small Planet. Two early teleplays were A Sense of Justice and Honor. He also wrote the pulp novel Thieves Fall Out under the pseudonym Cameron Kay but refused to have it reprinted under his real name.
In the 1960s, Vidal published Julian, about the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who sought to reinstate polytheistic paganism when he saw Christianity as a threat to the cultural integrity of the Roman Empire; Washington, D.C., about political life during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency ; and Myra Breckinridge, a satire of the American movie business by way of a school of dramatic arts owned by a transsexual woman, the eponymous anti-heroine.
After publishing the plays Weekend and An Evening With Richard Nixon and the novel Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, Vidal concentrated on essays and developed two types of fiction. The first is about American history, novels specifically about the nature of national politics. The New York Times, quoting critic Harold Bloom about those historical novels, said that "Vidal's imagination of American politics is so powerful as to compel awe." The historical novels formed the seven-book series Narratives of Empire: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and The Golden Age. Besides U.S. history, Vidal also explored and analyzed the history of the ancient world, specifically the Axial Age, in the novel Creation. It was published without four chapters that were part of the manuscript he submitted to the publisher; Vidal restored the chapters and republished Creation in 2002.
The second type of fiction is the topical satire, such as Myron, the sequel to Myra Breckinridge; Kalki, about the end of the world and the consequent ennui; Duluth, an alternate universe story; Live from Golgotha, about the adventures of Timothy, Bishop of Macedonia, in the early days of Christianity; and The Smithsonian Institution, a time-travel story.