Gentleman Radical

For a long time I had a photo clipped from a magazine pinned to a bulletin board. It was probably taken somewhere around 1960. Three men smiled for the camera. On the left was Tennessee Williams, on the right Gore Vidal and in the center John Kennedy. At the time, Kennedy was either running for president or had just been elected. The grouping said much about 20th-century iconography. All three came from the World War II generation, the one now rapidly passing. Lately these parents and grandparents — the ones whose lives were disrupted by old-style dictatorship — have been celebrated and idealized, but, having been raised by that generation, my memories of it are not as fond. I recall small-minded conformists who became bent out of shape by everything from Little Richard to the length of my hair.

The men in the old photograph were, however, something else again, definitely deserving of idealization, and all products of what Vidal — the lone survivor of the three — called a golden age. “Nineteen-forty-five through 1950 was the only time we have not been at war in my lifetime,” Vidal tells me during a recent interview at his Hollywood Hills home. “Five years. That’s all we had. In ’50, we got the Korean War. After that, nothing but war. Between ’45 and ’50, we were ahead in music with the whole world. We were ahead in poetry. We were ahead in the ballet, something we’ve never been noted for before; ahead in the theater, with Tennessee and Arthur Miller. There was, in five years, this great burst of culture, because we had been repressed — first by the Depression for some 20 years, and then by World War II.”

Of the trio in the picture — and this is not in any way to denigrate him — Vidal is hardest to define. Kennedy was the consummate politician and, later, the assassinated boy king. Williams is counted among the greatest playwrights of the English language. But what exactly is Vidal? Excellent company, perhaps, but something of a cultural jack-of-all-trades. Now approaching his 81st birthday, he has spent a long and infinitely productive life shuttling among a variety of roles. He has written 25 novels under his own name, five more under pseudonyms, plus a collection of short stories. He has had seven plays produced, crafted movie and television scripts (including having a subversive hand in the screenplay for “Ben-Hur”), and his essays, articles, monographs, memoirs and other works of nonfiction and political commentary are too numerous to count. He has acted on the stage and in a number of movies, including “Bob Roberts,” “Gattaca,” “With Honors” and Fellini’s “Roma,” and he appeared in the film version of Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” in addition to adapting it for the screen.

Vidal was also an early TV personality, quick to recognize the power of television as a tool of self-promotion, and he became a regular on the early talk-show circuit, trading quips with the likes of Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas and Dick Cavett. His love affair with the small screen extended as far as “What’s My Line,” “Laugh-In” and “Playboy After Dark,” and, even today, he continues to bring his august presence to “Real Time With Bill Maher” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” He has even sat still for Sacha Baron Cohen’s wigger-moron shtick on “Da Ali G Show.”

Vidal’s heavyweight exposure to the mass TV audience came in 1968, when he and right-wing pundit William F. Buckley Jr. were hired by ABC News to provide point-counterpoint political commentary on the Republican and Democratic national conventions in that troubled year. As the Chicago police gassed and clubbed war protesters on the streets, Buckley and Vidal came close to blows in the studio, with Vidal calling Buckley a “crypto Nazi” and Buckley responding by calling Vidal a “queer” and threatening to “sock him in the goddamn face.” In a subsequent essay, published in Esquire in August 1969, Buckley attacked Vidal as an “apologist for homosexuality” and trashed Vidal’s novel “Myra Breckenridge” as “pornography.” A month later, Vidal countered with an essay of his own, in which he denounced Buckley as “anti-black,” “anti-Semitic” and a “warmonger.” A lawsuit ensued, which would be settled to neither’s satisfaction. Amazingly, the whole matter resurfaced just three years ago, in 2003, when Esquire published its “Big Book of Great Writing” that included Vidal’s original essay. Buckley launched another libel suit, which the magazine settled for a total of $65,000.

This furor and TV feud at the violent end of the 1960s set Vidal on the path to what he has become today: the gay, patrician, highly erudite preserver of all that is worthwhile in traditional American dissent. Although he would probably dislike the characterization, Vidal is an American institution whose voice is still crucial in these grim and oppressive times.

My own first brush with Vidal came during my early teens. A sleazy store at the bad end of my English hometown specialized in books and magazines remaindered in bulk from the United States, and, if you looked hard enough among the pulp fiction, the go-go girlie mags and the Archie comics, you might come up with a Beat Generation gem, like a Digit paperback of Burroughs’ “Junkie,” or an Olympia Press edition of de Sade’s “Justine.” I discovered Vidal’s novel “The City and the Pillar” racked with a mess of print-porn paperbacks with titles like “Party Girl,” “Pagan Urge” and “Caged Lust.” I had no idea, as I walked away from the store with a Blackhawk comic, Famous Monsters of Filmland, a copy of Swank and “The City and the Pillar” in a plain brown bag, that this was a notorious gay novel. Indeed, I had no real idea there were such things as notorious gay novels — and no clue that the book’s publication had caused such fury in American literary circles that The New York Times refused to review Vidal’s next five novels. The book, however, did much to offset the institutionalized homophobia that was standard issue to the British schoolboy of the time. I also found myself totally convinced by what seemed to be Vidal’s underlying theme: that one should not dwell upon the past, because the future was what counted.

From then on I consumed Vidal wherever I found him, from the inevitable “Myra Breckenridge” and the allegorical “Two Sisters” through the heavyweight historical novels like “Burr” and “Lincoln” to the satirical science fiction of “Duluth” and, of course, the constant and invaluable political commentary. No part of this, though, has prepared me for the eventuality that I would find myself, in the summer heat of 2006, driving up to his house in the Hollywood Hills — his permanent home since he gave up his cliffside villa in Ravello, Italy — and ringing the doorbell of the faux-Spanish house that might have been that of a well-heeled client in a Raymond Chandler novel. The English schoolboy is completing one unexpected circle.

This afternoon meeting with Vidal is on the second or third day after the outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah. The news has just broken that the US government is expecting its citizens to pay for their evacuation from Lebanon, and Vidal, despite seeming tired and frail, and walking with difficulty (“I have a titanium hip”), is furious. He makes no attempt to contain his towering contempt for George W. Bush, his principles and his henchmen.

“We need a real American president, not this bad joke,” Vidal says. “I think he did himself in with the 25,000 Americans trying to get out of Lebanon. The Norwegians got their people out. The Swedes got their people. The French got [their citizens] out. Everybody, every other nationality is out, with [fewer] logistical problems than ours, and it’s Katrina No. 2. Not only does he pay no attention to anything; he doesn’t give a damn. It is clear to me by his activities, first in the Katrina affair and now in his total indifference to 25,000 Americans marooned in Lebanon, he does not like the American people. He really dislikes them. You can just see him when he gets out there. He is so uncomfortable. He will not go to a funeral of any of the soldiers that he’s sent off to be killed. He has no response other than loathing. They’re in his way. Things he wants to do, he can’t do. Like cut brush, or whatever it is he does in that little place of his.”

Regrettably, current events and anger at Bush overshadow our entire encounter. In theory, sitting with Vidal should offer the possibility of 100 stories and anecdotes of the famous and notorious with whom he’s rubbed shoulders, but to depart from the crisis of world politics is wholly impossible. That’s the way of things in this wretched summer.

“Little Bush says we are at war, but we are not at war, because to be at war, Congress has to vote for it,” he fumes. “He says we are at war on terror, but that is a metaphor, though I doubt if he knows what that means. It’s like having a war on dandruff — it’s endless and pointless.”

Vidal pulls no punches. “We are in a dictatorship that has been totally militarized. Everyone is spied on by the government itself. All three arms of government are in the hands of this junta. Plus we have a media more vicious, stupid and corrupt than at any previous time.” He lapses into a parody of Bush’s phony Texas drawl: “‘I’m a wartime president, wartime president, wartime president.’ Why doesn’t somebody say, ‘There is no war’?”

But, in fact, someone has just said there is no war — no less than Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s own attorney general. While the media were focused on the explosions in Haifa and Beirut, Gonzales faced the Senate Judiciary Committee over the legality of the National Security Agency wiretaps and, under pressure from California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, haltingly admitted that the country was not, in legal terms, at war. Most of the world had not been watching, but Vidal had missed nothing.

“There’s no war. Gonzales — who proved to be even dumber than one suspected — said that to Feinstein … did you see that? It was on C-SPAN,” he says. “Gonzales was before the Judiciary Committee and she said something about FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], that court which Bush refuses to use to get permission for warrants on everybody, and Gonzales really — usually he’s very good at being slithery — put his foot right in his mouth when he said, ‘Well, of course, that was designed for wartime, and this is not wartime.’ No, there is no war. There are no wartime powers. Bush pretends that he has certain inherent powers as commander in chief which allow him to do anything he wants to do: torture, wiretap, imprison without trial.”

Vidal becomes passionately emphatic. “There are no inherent powers. There are enumerated powers in the Constitution and each one is written out very clearly. A child of 5 could explain to Bush about his enumerated powers. But I don’t think they can find a child of 5 who wants to expose himself to the tedium of explaining the Constitution to the president.”

The degree to which Vidal detests Bush might seem obsessive in someone less sophisticated, but he uses the weapons of wit, charm and intelligence to remain and sound entirely rational. A part of his contempt may also be rooted in his own experience. He served in a war, freezing in the Aleutians during World War II, and he has lost someone close to him in war. The dedication in “The City and the Pillar” is to “J.T.”; Vidal has revealed that those are the initials of Jimmie Trimble, his lover at St. Albans prep school, who died in the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. In his memoir “Palimpsest,” Vidal wrote of Trimble’s death: “Forever after, I was to be the surviving half of what had once been a whole.” He knows the truth about war and has no tolerance for those who don’t, yet are prepared to use it as a tool of power.

“[Bush and his cronies] are all sissies. Remember that,” he says. “These are people who’ve never been in an army. The men behind the war in Iraq are cowards who did not fight in Vietnam. They’ve run away like the president, who I refer to as the Yellow Rose of Texas. They’re weak little people with an agenda — which is: ‘We’ve gotta show our muscle around the world. Running out of oil? We’ll take it. Show how tough we are. We’re macho.’ And we’re also dumbo, and that is the problem.”

The rarest pleasure of talking to Vidal is to witness his acute sense of history. While most historians slice the past into bite-sized decades or easy political eras — the Clinton period, the Reagan era, the Nixon years — he sees the past as a continuous process that leads inexorably to the present, and on to the future. It is no surprise to him that American service people should be killing and dying for Big Oil in Iraq. It’s merely one more inevitable incident in the long thread of US corporate imperialism.

“We behaved badly always — [in] Central America in particular, but Latin America too,” he says. “We’d taken them for granted. United Fruit was ripping them off, paying no tax, and they couldn’t run their governments because Chase Manhattan was collecting all the money to service old debts. The great Smedley Butler, commanding general of the Marine Corps in the early 20th century, always said, ‘I was an enforcer. As head of the Marines, I was an enforcer for Chase Manhattan. I was an enforcer for Standard Oil.’ He said, ‘Al Capone had only five city districts in Chicago; I had five continents.’”

Vidal fluidly cites historical examples, from the Founding Fathers to the Civil War to the New Deal and FDR (a man he seems to simultaneously revere and dislike), as they relate to the modern world. When I suggest that Bush — or, more likely, Rumsfeld — might actually use a nuclear weapon just to prove that he could, Vidal has an appropriate historic reference at his fingertips. “Harry Truman did. Truman received a unanimous ‘no’ from all the commanding officers of World War II — from Eisenhower in Europe to Nimitz in the Pacific. Every one of them, including the mad Curtis Le May, said, ‘Don’t do it. Japan is already asking for a peace treaty. They surrender.’ But Truman wanted to scare Stalin, so he dropped not one but two bombs. And really let the world in for hell. And we’re objecting to Iran getting a little nuclear bomb? It would be nice if they didn’t have it, yes. It would be nice if we didn’t have it, too.”

He makes it clear that his innate respect for history has been the driving force behind some of his best-known fiction. “In fact, it is to correct bad history that I have spent 30 years writing ‘Burr’ and ‘Lincoln,’ ‘1876,’ and all those books. You can be more truthful in fiction. Professional historians, by and large, have their prejudices, which condition everything they write because they must always be looking for tenure. Once they have tenure, they must maintain it. They must not rock the boat. They must not take political stands. That’s why we have no intellectual class.”

The common mistake is to assume that Vidal is a true-blue Democrat. But, at best, his affiliations with the party are by default. He has run twice for office on a Democratic ticket. The first time was in 1960, when he ran for a congressional seat in upstate New York. The second was when he entered California’s 1982 Democratic primary for the Senate and finished second in a field of nine, polling a half-million votes but losing to former California Gov. Jerry Brown. When I ask him why he never attempted such a thing again, Vidal wryly shakes his head. “The moment of truth for me came from Alan Cranston — quite a good senator. And he said, ‘You realize what you’re doing if you get elected? Let me tell you. If you get elected for a first term — six years — every week you have to raise $10,000 if you want to run again.’ That’s six years, every week — 52 weeks a year, six times 52 — you do the math. And this was in ’82. Ten thousand dollars a week for six years. I said, ‘How do you get time to do anything?’ Cranston replied, ‘Oh, you don’t. You call people for money.’ This didn’t sound healthy to me, so I never even thought about it again.”

Vidal did, however, campaign earlier this year on behalf of anti-war candidate Marcy Winograd when she ran against incumbent US Rep. Jane Harman in the primary for the 36th US Congressional District. Many saw the race as a referendum on the war in Iraq, particularly Vidal, who denounced Harman as “pretending to be a Democrat” and “Bush-ized, totally gung-ho for the war.” He notes to me that “an awful lot of people came out for Marcy. I was there to help draw a crowd, and there were a lot of people waking up, the nucleus of a powerful anti-war movement in the country.”

But when Harman crushed Winograd — 62.5 to 37.5 percent — Vidal reverted to his oft-stated distrust of the two-party system. “There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings, Republican and Democrat,” he says. “Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently — and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists got out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.”

On the other hand, Vidal believes that party politics have little or no significance in elections that he is convinced are now on the way to being wholly rigged. “These elections are not going to be decided by who votes for or against,” he says. “They’re going to be decided by Diebold, by Sequoia and by Election System & Software [ES&S], electronic machinery which, each time, is going to be fiddled with. And no one is doing anything about it because the incumbents, who are our masters, and their masters — who are corporate America — like things the way they are, and want the wars to go on and on, to be extended into Iran and even further. It’s a horror story. But if you have a press which is not going to cover anything that is critical of a regime, you don’t have a republic. And you particularly don’t have a republic if the votes for president — two presidential elections back to back — are stolen. I think they’re so thrilled at the White House to see the end of the American Republic.”

With democracy vanishing into the computer, Vidal sees Bush and his neocons only being halted in their tracks when the nation runs out of money. “We’ll just default,” he says. “There’s really no way out. I think the financial collapse — which seems to me to be on its way — will at least stop the wars. We cannot go into the military adventures. “[They] cost too much. We haven’t got the men to fight the wars. Don’t think we’ll find them. I don’t think we can hire that many Albanians, you know, to pretend they’re American soldiers, but it will get to something like that.”

As I review all that’s been said, and all that I’ve read, I start to believe that maybe the only word to define Vidal is “radical.” With his charm, his elegance, his wit and his art collection, he hardly conforms to the popular image of the radical. He’s no wild-haired Abbie Hoffman or rumpled and academic Howard Zinn. Vidal is something currently unique, a gentleman radical. As someone in Vidal’s entry on Wikipedia puts it, he “is a radical reformer” with “a disdain for privilege and power” who wants to return to the “pure republicanism of early America”: a secular, egalitarian democracy with an elegant and comprehensively crafted Constitution and leaders honestly elected by, for and of the people. He is a radical striving for the revolutionary concept of a civilized America and who, incidentally, once wrote, “In a civilized society, law should not function at all in the area of sex, except to protect people from being interfered with against their will.” He also once remarked in an online interview, “As you may by now suspect, I don’t think we [the United States of America] are civilized.”

Vidal’s new book, “Point to Point Navigation,” will be published in November. It is, essentially, a companion volume to 1995’s “Palimpsest.” When I carelessly refer to “Navigation” as an autobiography, Vidal sternly corrects me: “A memoir.”

Gore Vidal is always precise. And goddamn it, we have serious need of his precision in this slovenly era of trash and duplicity.