[Reader-list] Gore Vidal Interview

[S. Jabbar]

>From The Times
September 30, 2009
Gore Vidal: ŒWe¹ll have a dictatorship soon in the US¹
The grand old man of letters Gore Vidal claims America is Œrotting away¹ ‹
and don¹t expect Barack Obama to save it

Tim Teeman

A conversation with Gore Vidal unfolds at his pace. He answers questions
imperiously, occasionally playfully, with a piercing, lethal dryness. He is
83 and in a wheelchair (a result of hypothermia suffered in the war, his
left knee is made of titanium). But he can walk (³Of course I can²) and
after a recent performance of Mother Courage at London¹s National Theatre he
stood to deliver an anti-war speech to the audience.

How was his friend Fiona Shaw in the title role? ³Very good.² Where did they
meet? Silence. The US? ³Well, it wasn¹t Russia.² What¹s he writing at the
moment? ³It¹s a little boring to talk about. Most writers seem to do little
else but talk about themselves and their work, in majestic terms.² He means
self-glorifying? ³You¹ve stumbled on the phrase,² he says, regally enough.
³Continue to use it.²

Vidal is sitting in the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair, where he has been coming
to stay for 60 years. He is wearing a brown suit jacket, brown jumper,
tracksuit bottoms; his white hair twirled into a Tintin-esque quiff and with
his hooded eyes, delicate yet craggy features and arch expression, he looks
like Quentin Crisp, but accessorised with a low, lugubrious growl rather
than camp lisp.

He points to an apartment opposite the hotel where Churchill stayed during
the Second World War, as Downing Street was ³getting hammered by the Nazis.
The crowds would cheer him from the street, he knew great PR.²

In a flash, this memory reminds you of the swathe of history Vidal has
experienced with great intimacy: he was friends with JFK, fought in the war,
his father Gene, an Olympic decathlete and aeronautics teacher, founded TWA
among other airlines and had a relationship with Amelia Earhart. (Vidal
first flew and landed a plane when he was 10.) He was a screenwriter for MGM
in the dying days of the studio system, toyed with being a politician, he
has written 24 novels and is hailed as one of the world¹s greatest
essayists.

He has crossed every boundary, I say. ³Crashed many barriers,² he corrects
me.

Last year he famously switched allegiance from Hillary Clinton to Barack
Obama during the Democratic nomination process for president. Now, he
reveals, he regrets his change of heart. How¹s Obama doing? ³Dreadfully. I
was hopeful. He was the most intelligent person we¹ve had in that position
for a long time. But he¹s inexperienced. He has a total inability to
understand military matters. He¹s acting as if Afghanistan is the magic
talisman: solve that and you solve terrorism.²

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. ³We¹ve failed in every other
aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to
call it.² The ³War on Terror² was ³made up², Vidal says. ³The whole thing
was PR, just like Œweapons of mass destruction¹. It has wrecked the airline
business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He¹d be cutting his wrists.
Now when you fly you¹re both scared to death and bored to death, a most
disagreeable combination.²

His voice strengthens. ³One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he
says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not
always the case. I don¹t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don¹t say
there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had
a watchdog, the media.² The media is too supine? ³Would that it was. They¹re
busy preparing us for an Iranian war.² He retains some optimism about Obama
³because he doesn¹t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John
McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his
plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.²

Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in ³a black city²
(meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama¹s intelligence.
³But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was
to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party
when in fact it¹s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred ‹ religious
hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word Œconservative¹ you
think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They¹re not, they¹re fascists.²

Another notable Obama mis-step has been on healthcare reform. ³He f***ed it
up. I don¹t know how because the country wanted it. We¹ll never see it
happen.² As for his wider vision: ³Maybe he doesn¹t have one, not to imply
he is a fraud. He loves quoting Lincoln and there¹s a great Lincoln quote
from a letter he wrote to one of his generals in the South after the Civil
War. ŒI am President of the United States. I have full overall power and
never forget it, because I will exercise it¹. That¹s what Obama needs ‹ a
bit of Lincoln¹s chill.² Has he met Obama? ³No,² he says quietly, ³I¹ve had
my time with presidents.² Vidal raises his fingers to signify a gun and
mutters: ³Bang bang.² He is referring to the possibility of Obama being
assassinated. ³Just a mysterious lone gunman lurking in the shadows of the
capital,² he says in a wry, dreamy way.

Vidal now believes, as he did originally, Clinton would be the better
president. ³Hillary knows more about the world and what to do with the
generals. History has proven when the girls get involved, they¹re good at
it. Elizabeth I knew Raleigh would be a good man to give a ship to.²The
Republicans will win the next election, Vidal believes; though for him there
is little difference between the parties. ³Remember the coup d¹etat of 2000
when the Supreme Court fixed the selection, not election, of the stupidest
man in the country, Mr Bush.²

Vidal says forcefully that he wished he¹d never moved back to the US to live
in Hollywood, from his clifftop home in Ravello, Italy, in 2000. His partner
of 53 years, Howard Austen, who died in 2003, collated a lifetime¹s-span of
pictures of Vidal, for a new book out this autumn, Gore Vidal: Snapshots in
History¹s Glare (an oddly clunky title). The cover shows what a beautiful
young man Vidal was, although his stare is as hawkish as it is today.

He observes presidential office-holders balefully. ³The only one I knew well
was Kennedy, but he didn¹t impress me as a good president. It¹s like asking,
ŒWhat do I think of my brother?¹ It¹s complicated. I¹d known him all my life
and I liked him to the end, but he wrecked his chances with the Bay of Pigs
and Suez crises, and because everyone was so keen to elect Bobby once Jack
had gone, lies started to be told about him ‹ that he was the greatest and
the King of Camelot.²

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has
become corrosively isolationist, he says. ³Ask an American what they know
about Sweden and they¹d say ŒThey live well but they¹re all alcoholics¹. In
fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over.²
Instead, America has ³no intellectual class² and is ³rotting away at a
funereal pace. We¹ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis
that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better
off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being
over-educated. He doesn¹t realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience
is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the
corruption of the people and that happened under Bush.²

Vidal adds menacingly: ³Don¹t ever make the mistake with people like me
thinking we are looking for heroes. There aren¹t any and if there were, they
would be killed immediately. I¹m never surprised by bad behaviour. I expect
it.²

While materially comfortable, Vidal¹s was not a happy childhood. Of his
actress and socialite mother Nina, he says: ³Give her a glass of vodka and
she was as tame as could be. Growing up is going to be difficult if the one
person you hate is your mother. I felt trapped. I was close to my
grandparents and my father was a saint.² His parents¹ many remarriages means
that even today he hasn¹t met all his step-siblings.

He wrote his first novel, Williwaw, at 19. In 1948, he was blacklisted by
the media after writing The City and the Pillar, one of the earliest novels
to deal graphically with homosexual desire. ³You¹ll be amazed to know it is
still going strong,² he says. The ³JT² it is dedicated to is James ³Jimmy²
Trimble, Vidal¹s first love and, he once said, the love of his life. ³That
was a slight exaggeration. I said it because there wasn¹t any other. In the
new book there are wonderful pictures of him from our schooldays. He was a
great athlete.² Here his voice softens, and he looks emotional, briefly. ³We
were both abandoned in our dormitory at St Alban¹s [boarding school]. He was
killed at the Battle of Iwo Jima [in 1945] because of bad G2
[intelligence].²

Vidal says Trimble¹s death didn¹t affect him. ³No, I was in danger of dying
too. A dead man can¹t grieve a dead man.² Has love been important to him?
³Don¹t make the error that schoolteacher idiots make by thinking that gay
men¹s relationships are like heterosexual ones. They¹re not.² He ³wouldn¹t
begin to comment² on how they are different.

In 1956 he was hired by MGM, collaborated on the screenplay for Ben Hur and
continued to write novels, most notoriously Myra Breckenridge about a
transsexual. It is his satires, essays and memoirs ‹ Live From Golgotha,
Palimpsest and most recently, Point to Point Navigation ‹ which have fully
rounded our vision of this thorny contrarian, whose originality springs
simply, and naturally, from having deliberately unfixed allegiances and an
enduring belief in an American republic and railing sadness at how that
ideal has been corrupted.

Vidal became a supportive correspondent of Timothy McVeigh, who blew up the
Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 killing 168 people. The
huge loss of life, indeed McVeigh¹s act of mass murder, goes unmentioned by
Vidal. ³He was a true patriot, a Constitution man,² Vidal claims. ³And I was
torn, my grandfather [the Democrat Senator Thomas Gore] had bought Oklahoma
into the Union.² McVeigh claimed he had done it as a protest against
tyrannical government. The writer Edmund White took the correspondence as
the basis for a play, Terre Haute (the jail McVeigh was incarcerated in
before he was executed in 2001), imagining an encounter between the bomber
and Vidal charged with desire.

³He¹s a filthy, low writer,² Vidal says of White. ³He likes to attack his
betters, which means he has a big field to go after.² Had he wanted to meet
McVeigh? ³I am not in the business of meeting people,² Vidal says. ³That
play implies I am madly in love with McVeigh. I looked at his [White¹s]
writing and all he writes about is being a fag and how it¹s the greatest
thing on Earth. He thinks I¹m another queen and I¹m not. I¹m more interested
in the Constitution and McVeigh than the loving tryst he saw. It was vulgar
fag-ism.²

Vidal says that he hates labels and has said he believes in homosexual acts
rather than homosexual people. He claims his relationship with Austen was
platonic (though they reputedly met at a legendary New York bath-house). He
was once quoted as saying that he¹d had sex with a 1,000 men by the time he
was 25. It must have been a little strange for Austen, Vidal¹s life
companion, to source those pictures of Trimble, his first, perhaps only,
love.

Vidal puts on a scornful, campy voice. ³People ask [of he and Austen], ŒHow
did you live together so long?¹ The only rule was no sex. They can¹t believe
that. That was when I realised I was dealing with a public too stupid by
half. They can¹t tell the difference between ŒThe Sun rose in the East¹ and
ŒThe Sun is made of yeast¹.² Was sex important to Vidal? ³It must have been
yes.²

He is single now. ³I¹m not into partnerships,² he says dismissively. I don¹t
even know what it means.² He ³couldn¹t care less² about gay marriage. ³Does
anyone care what Americans think? They¹re the worst-educated people in the
First World. They don¹t have any thoughts, they have emotional responses,
which good advertisers know how to provoke.² You could have been the first
gay president, I say. ³No, I would have married and had nine children,² he
replies quickly and seriously. ³I don¹t believe in these exclusive terms.²

Impaired mobility doesn¹t bother him ‹ he ³rose like a miracle² on stage at
the National ‹ and he doesn¹t dwell on mortality either. ³Either you accept
there is such a thing or you¹re so dumb that you can¹t grasp it.² Is he in
good health? ³No, of course not. I¹m diabetic. It¹s odd, I¹ve never been fat
and I don¹t like candy, which most Americans are hooked on.²

There is a trace of thwarted ambition about him. ³I would have liked to have
been president, but I never had the money. I was a friend of the throne. The
only time I envied Jack was when Joe [Kennedy, JFK¹s father] was buying him
his Senate seat, then the presidency. He didn¹t know how lucky he was.
Here¹s a story I¹ve never told. In 1960, after he had spent so much on the
presidential campaign, Joe took all nine children to Palm Beach to lecture
them. He was really angry. He said, ŒAll you read about the Kennedy fortune
is untrue. It¹s non-existent. We¹ve spent so much getting Jack elected and
not one of you is living within your income¹. They all sat there,
shame-faced. Jack was whistling. He used to tap his teeth: they were big
teeth, like a xylophone. Joe turned to Jack and he says, ŒMr President,
what¹s the solution?¹ Jack said, ŒThe solution is simple. You all gotta work
harder¹.² Vidal guffaws heartily.

Hollywood living proved less fun. ³If there was a social whirl, you can be
sure I would not be part of it.² He does a fabulous impression of Katharine
Hepburn complaining about playing the matriarch in Suddenly Last Summer,
which he wrote. ³I hate this script,² he recalls Hepburn saying . ³I¹m far
too healthy a person to know people like this.² Vidal snorts. ³She had
Parkinson¹s. She shook like a leper in the wind.²

I ask what he wants to do next. ³My usual answer to ŒWhat am I proudest of?¹
is my novels, but really I am most proud that, despite enormous temptation,
I have never killed anybody and you don¹t know how tempted I have been.²

That wasn¹t my question, I say. ³Well, given that I¹m proudest that I
haven¹t killed anybody, I might be saving something up for someone.² A
perfect line: we both laugh.

Is he happy? ³What a question,² he sighs and then smiles mischievously.
³I¹ll respond with a quote from Aeschylus: ŒCall no man happy till he is
dead¹.²