Comments | marlowe1: Gore Vidal is Dead

marlowe1

Gore Vidal is Dead

Aug 01, 2012 12:48

When I read Anais Nin's diary from 1944-1947, I was rather surprised to discover that the main narrative concerned her friendship with Gore Vidal (who would later mock the shit out of her in Myra Breckenridge) and how she saw him as a sensitive young artist who was eager to escape his rather sinister family. Immediately, I thought that either Anais ( Read more... )

Comments 5

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marlowe1 August 2 2012, 01:14:02 UTC

Oh shit. Totally forgot about his "she was a hooker" defense of Roman Polanski - even as I was mentioning the creep.

uvula_fr_b4 August 2 2012, 04:23:25 UTC

Well, if you read his literary essays as opposed to his political ones, you'll discover that there were quite a few writers that he admired. Off the top of my head: Italo Calvino; Dawn Powell; Anthony Burgess; Michel de Montaigne; Mark Twain. He also appreciated Sinclair Lewis rather more than Lewis's biographer, Mark Schorer, did, even if he didn't think Lewis was a great stylist or a consistent writer.

He also had affection for Edgar Rice Burroughs, allowing that ERB, when he was on his game, could write extremely effective, engrossing and entertaining action scenes (something that Vidal freely admitted that he could not do).

If Vidal mercilessly mocked the likes of Hemingway, Updike, Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, Henry Miller, Doris Lessing, and, yes, Anaïs Nin -- well, I have no real problem with that, as my encounters with their work (saving only Lessing, whom I've not read yet) tend to give credence to his ill opinion of it.

I also love that he called Dumas père "dull"; after slogging through the Oxford World's Classics ( ... )

marlowe1 August 2 2012, 04:49:57 UTC

Edgar Rice Burroughs is a terrible writer even if you hold your nose and overlook the cultural imperialism. His hatred of Nin, Miller and Capote was purely personal. And as Hitchens pointed out, his opinion about fellow writers became increasingly "They aren't me so they suck".

I will read Burr, but I think I already read Empire - not sure, is that the one where he blamed FDR for Pearl Harbor as if it was a massive conspiracy?

uvula_fr_b4 August 2 2012, 13:51:04 UTC

Ah, no; you're thinking of The Golden Age, wherein he also dramatized the fact that the Brits put on a full court press to get the U.S. into the European Theatre before the Pacific Theatre (not that the U.S. had any ships to go after the Japanese immediately after Pearl Harbor, IIRC). Given how many far right factions in the U.S. favored Hitler's Germany (ideological forbears to many of today's right wingers, I'd say), it was by no means certain that the U.S. would help the UK and the "Free French," et al, in 1939-40.

Empire deals with McKinley deciding to take up the "white man's burden" by reneging on promises to Filipino insurgents and ganking the Philippines for the U.S.'s sake after chasing the Spanish out (and also grabbing Hawai'i, incidentally, at the urgings of the Dole family). In the background are the counterpoints of Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst (the book concludes with a verbal duel between the two; Vidal admitted that this scene was fictionalized, as they apparently never met more than in passing ( ... )

marlowe1 August 2 2012, 14:08:49 UTC

Interesting. Thanks.