One of the semester’s chief joys, whenever I teach journalism, is the first of eight classes on “political commentary”—the day when I introduce unsuspecting youngsters to the K-hole known as “YouTubing Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley.” We watch selections from the 1968 debates in Chicago and Miami, and undergraduate jaws tend to dislocate within the first three minutes. The classroom’s stated task is to compare 1960s and ’70s notions of public intellectualism and political gamesmanship with our own age’s debased versions of these things, and to have a gut-bustingly good time doing so.
Once in a while a student will take a shine to Buckley (“debonair” and “like James Bond”), but if we let the tape roll long enough, Vidal’s deeper composure and keener knowledge of history will often seduce even the most conservative students. Whereas Buckley produces one of Evelyn Waugh’s anti-socialist epigrams idly, like removing a kerchief from the pocket of his blazer, Vidal’s points of reference in these televised sparring matches are precise, sedulously selected from his self-compiled encyclopedia of a brain. His glibness is not, as with Buckley, the premise of argument, his wit less a tool of deflection than a source of argumentative propulsion. Few pieces of 20th-century political theater can match the intellectual bloodsport of these tapes.
The value of the public intellectual is somewhat inflated by sentiment in this age where few applicants qualify; nostalgia for the allusive pronouncements of over-educated white men is both lingering and probably irrelevant. Vidal, though, is something of a special case.
Director Nicholas Wrathall’s new documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia offers an entertaining, almost entirely votive biography of the man, generously peppered with five decades of him being fabulous on television. Viewers unfamiliar with Vidal’s seductive intellect will likely be taken in—his half-performed egotism was rarely less than winsome, if you lived anywhere near his political camp—and those who have already plundered YouTube’s Vidalian offerings will find here plenty of new (or forgotten) footage of the man in his element. Critics will keep arguing whether his principal achievements were the novels or the essays, but Vidal’s greatest stock-in-trade was being Gore Vidal. The film would likely tickle his ego, but as a critic and enemy of cant, Vidal might well despise the dewy lens through which the audience is invited to view his life.
In Wrathall’s account, Vidal’s life is something charmed and airborne; an early and surreal moment has Gore at 10 years old, piloting a prototype airplane designed and built by his father Eugene, the aeronautics inventor and magnate who ran the Bureau of Air Commerce under FDR. In his teenage precocity, Vidal spent afternoons in the office of his grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore, reading aloud to the blind elder statesman who shared, or indeed helped form, his grandson’s pacifist and non-interventionist dogmas.
By 15, Vidal was trying novels as a means of forgetting the ugliness of his relationship with his mother; within a few years, he would “defect,” as he said, from his inherited perch in the American aristocracy. “The whole point to a ruling class,” Vidal has said (on several occasions), “is they don’t conspire, the ruling; they all think alike. Unless you get out of it, as I did.” At 19, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, while convalescing in the North Pacific, where he served for three years during World War II. Writing in the Times in 1946, Orville Prescott gave a triumphalist review, and Vidal had arrived, terribly young, in the world of letters.
The glittering accomplishments of Vidal’s youth are more impressive, even moving, when we consider that Vidal published The City and the Pillar just two years later, in 1948—an explicitly gay novel that the Times refused to review, just as they did not review Myra Breckinridge. In his earliest television appearances, culled here with sensitivity by Wrathall, the young Vidal is remarkably composed and confident as he declares the difference between gay and straight to be “about the difference between somebody who has brown eyes and somebody who has blue eyes.” He was an outspoken pioneer on dangerous territory despite being—to believe Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor and the documentary’s M.C.—“really quite shy” at the time.
Similarly, Vidal’s boosterism of the women’s liberation movement, he claims, was the final wedge between him and Norman Mailer. In wildly divergent ways, both men were canny traffickers in literary celebrity, and Vidal comes close to admitting as much midway through the film: “He wasn’t crazy. He was a persona.”. . .
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