Richard Burton: The Subject was Sex

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor

Richard Burton had no particular complaints about literary pornography or sex, and was suspicious of those who did.

“The unctuous rubbishy shit written about pornography is nonsense,” wrote the Welshman in his journal for Nov. 17, 1966. “Practically all good pornography is best-selling, so I understand, and yet I have never found anyone who when asked if they enjoyed it will ever admit it.”

“(Author Malcolm) Muggeridge quotes Hugh Kingsmill as saying that the act of love is ludicrous and disgusting. Speak for yourself, Kingsmill. I love its disgustingness and comicality. Put some jaundice in your eyes and the act of walking is ludicrous and obscene, and swimming and, above all, eating. All those muscles, in most people, 50 percent atrophied, sluggishly propelling people over land or through water or gulping oysters. Come off it.

“It is an important thing to kill cant and humbug even if one is a humbug oneself."

With his fine voice, the well-read actor could hold forth on many topics. And one of them, apparently, was homosexuality.

That nettled Gore Vidal, who recalled that whenever he met Burton, Burton would launch into “…an extravagant aria about why he was not homosexual. I’d listen as long as I could and then say, ‘Who cares, Richard? Let’s talk about dermatology. Now there’s a subject!’”

Burton was always touchy about his bad skin, so touché.

Gore Vidal Sees Music

Vidal with his Olympian view

Leonard Bernstein

Gore Vidal permitted few visitors the use of the study in his Olympian-situated home at Ravello, on the Amalfi coast of Italy. But one of them was the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.

“I watched him working on two scores that he was going to conduct in Amsterdam,” Vidal recalled. “They‘re like atlases, and he had a red pencil and a blue pencil. Why? ‘I’m doing Mahler and I’m doing Schumann,’ he said. … ‘With the red one I make a track for myself through the score. With the blue one I change the instrumentation.’

“It was fascinating to watch the way he worked. I said, ‘Do you hear it as you see it?’ He said, “No, I see it.’ I said, ‘How does that correlate with hearing?’ ‘What do you mean hearing? I’ll hear when the instruments play it.’ ‘Do you know what it’s going to sound like?’ ‘Well, of course I do. I see it.’ ‘But do you hear it?’ ‘Of course I don’t hear it!’

“I began to understand the mystique of what music is about. Closer to mathematics than language.

“I thought the overture was like Ives. ‘God, you’re stupid musically,’ he said. ‘It’s not Ives. It’s Aaron (Copland) I’m ripping off. Can’t you tell?’”

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Vidal's home in Italy, La Rondinaia

The World According to Gore

Gore Vidal counted the American republic lost a long time ago.

“In Vidal’s story the Founding Fathers were a brilliant but mixed lot (George Washington the dullest of them all), who created a balance between the big-money interests of the Federalists and the small-farm, small-money, small-government civil-libertarian views of the Jeffersonians,” wrote Fred Kaplan. “But Jacksonian America broke the precarious balance.

“Land and power became the predominant concerns: the Indians east of the Mississippi were pushed westward or destroyed; slavery could not be contained, let alone abolished.

“Lincoln, as much villain as hero, established a nationalistic, monolithic Union, a huge, industrialized anti-Jeffersonian monster.

“In the next 50 years, his successors, led by McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, transformed the United States from a republic into an aggressive empire. The Monroe Doctrine had established the Caribbean and South America as n American sphere of influence. Now the Pacific was going to be an American lake.

“World War I, into which Woodrow Wilson elected to insert America, made the United States the dominant economic power of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal retooled American government and slightly redistributed national wealth in order to make America safe for capitalism.

Author Gore Vidal

“Immediately after World War II, Harry Truman celebrated the absolute international dominance of the United States by creating for the first time a national-security state whose underlying premise was that the Soviet Union was so great a menace that Americans must give up some of their freedoms to guard themselves permanently against the enemy.

“The temporary wartime OSS was converted into the permanent peacetime CIA. Its ongoing task was to balk the Soviet Union, whose strength was exaggerated by those for whom the Cold War was an economic and ideological boon.

“For the first time, a huge peacetime Army was put in place. The defense budget became sacred. The garrison state became permanent. Those who controlled and had always controlled wealth and political power in America kept themselves rich and powerful. Inevitably, the Korean and Vietnam wars followed. As with ancient Rome, America had moved from republic to empire.”

“No one knew the American history better than Gore Vidal. It was in his blood,” wrote Bob Carr. “He learnt it from a grandfather who served in the Senate, and from his personal association with the great American political families of his time.

“From his home atop a Ravello cliff face he spun wonderful stories out of American history, buttressed by a flawless memory and a talent for mimicry.

“His historical novels chart the emergence of America as a continental power with centralized government, and what he saw as a descent into imperialism.

“He embodied an anti-imperial tradition that goes back to Mark Twain – representing an isolationist viewpoint that once ran deep in America. Gore Vidal believed no foreign war justified a single American life and this view was his fundamental political commitment.”

By the way, Vidal’s solution to America’s Mideast migraines was to end all U.S. military aid to Middle Eastern countries. “The Middle Easterners would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever,” Vidal said. “In any case, we would be well out of it.”

Sources: Thoughtlines with Bob Carr; “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Yellow Star and Pink Triangle

Fighting homophobia in the 1980s, Gore Vidal cited author Christopher Isherwood’s encounter with a young Jewish Hollywood producer. “After all, Hitler killed 600,000 homosexuals,” Isherwood argued. Unimpressed, the producer snapped, “But Hitler killed six million Jews.”

“What are you?” replied Isherwood. “In real estate?”

Vidal’s editor Barbara Epstein told him, “The Jewish situation is in no way analogous to that of homosexuals.” Vidal replied, “Well, Hitler felt otherwise.”

Vidal’s point was that gays, Jews and blacks all suffered precisely the same kind of unprovoked persecution. “I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed,” Vidal said.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Sex and the Single Author

Author Gore Vidal

“In Rome, as in Bangkok, sexual opportunism was simply an ordinary way of life for innumerable people, as Gore (Vidal) constantly observed in regard to himself and others. On occasion it ran parallel with interests of the heart. More often it expressed physical desire and turns of individual personality. For Vidal the subject was interesting, the practice ordinary and hardly worth, on the personal level, describing or commenting on.”

Commenting on the “homoerotic” in Shakespeare’s sonnets, Vidal wrote, “Who thought up that word has saved the pride of thousands of hetero school teachers who cannot imagine a great writer not liking Miriam, the two children and a split-level ranch house.”

Whatever the merit of his views, Vidal lived at the crossroads of sex and literature. After all, he wrote “The City and the Pillar” and “Myra Breckenridge” and slept with both Anaïs Nin and Jack Kerouac.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

And Nothing Has Changed

“Gore was himself angry, and very disappointed in what human beings had done and were doing to our planet. His country was among the most powerfully predatory destroyers. Its puritan tradition devoured people’s natural instincts and chances for happiness by rigid, self-serving moralism. Its expansive and self-deluding greed was making dollar materialism more triumphant than ever. In Vietnam we were destroying a semi-helpless people, wasting our own substance, coarsening our national life, dividing America with an intensity that threatened national chaos. And literature seemed to be fading away into either an artifact from the past or the preserve of an elite few.”

Those were Gore Vidal’s reflections in 1965, and none of that has changed, except that we’ve added a couple of more Vietnams and moved closer to national chaos. The people on the tracks who can see the approaching lights of a train are called "pessimists" by those facing in the wrong direction.

—   Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Vidal and Capote: Those Catty Literary Lions

They were both famous authors and professional celebrities, vain and gay, catty literary lions who concealed a claw behind every purr and competed for attention on several levels at once. Having so much in common wasn’t entirely a good thing for Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.

In the late 1940s, Vidal was visiting composer/author Paul Bowles in Morocco, and his frenemy Capote was coming but didn't know Vidal was already there. Vidal, delighted at the idea, insisted on going to the ship with Bowles to surprise Capote. There was Capote on deck, waving in his Dr. Who scarf, right up to the moment when he saw Vidal. Then his face fell like Daffy Duck's and he literally sank beneath the railing.

“When he assumed a standing position again, he was no longer grinning and waving,” Bowles recalled.
They crossed paths at a party in New York, where Vidal recounted that, not wearing his glasses, he sat down "on what I thought was a stool and it was Capote."
"Of course, I'm always sad about Gore," Capote told David Susskind. "Very sad that he has to breathe every day." Vidal later called Capote's death a "good career move."
Vidal dryly observed that Capote had "raised lying into an art — a minor art" and that he "belongs less to the history of literature than the history of public relations."
"I find on TV I am often supposed to talk about fashions and famous society ladies," Vidal said. "I then remind the host that I am the one who talks about politics and Capote is the one who tells naughty stories about the rich and Mailer is the messiah."
As for Norman Mailer, he famously threw the contents of a drink and an ineffectual punch into Vidal's face at a glitterati gala thrown in honor of Princess Margaret (who had sent her regrets, perhaps wisely). The incident prompted Russell Baker to write a column about the beatings that the "bloodthirsty" Henry James had delivered to his literary rivals. "James finally retired from pugilism after Edith Wharton knocked him out for 35 minutes with her famous powder-puff uppercut during a chance meeting at Alice Roosevelt's coming-out party," Baker wrote.

In 1965, Capote showed up in Rome, where Vidal was living. “We had a pleasant drunken evening recalling who said what about whom, and I must say my blood pressure began to rise, but then all ended well,” Vidal recalled. “He has apparently finished that book (‘In Cold Blood’), though the last two times I saw him he had just finished the book on each of those occasions.”

“I can’t get over how his appearance has changed (I can hear him on the subject of me), but he is an interesting brackish color now, rather lined, with a jaw worthy of Somerset Maugham. For the first time in 20 years I suspect that he is intelligent.”

“I found him positively affectionate, which is sinister,” Vidal said. “What can he be up to?”

Vidal found he became even more popular once he acquired that apartment in Rome with Howard Austen. "Dear Maureen O'Hara," he once wrote. "Yes, you .... will be welcome (to come stay) ... You had better have a lot of gossip and better than your meagre letter suggests. Meanwhile I remain, as always, a Great American." 
Vidal was a godfather to the children of Joanne Woodward, Kathleen Tynan, Claire Bloom and Susan Sarandon. "Always a godfather, never a god," he said.

— Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Goodbye to a Lady

In the gray rain at Hyde Park on Nov. 10, 1962, Gore Vidal attended the funeral of Eleanor Roosevelt. “This was one of the rare occasions on which he wanted to pay his last respects in the traditional way…”

“As he drove through the heavy traffic, the crowds were almost impenetrable. The rain kept falling. For him it was a dismal, funereal day filled with thoughts about the death of a great American who had been a friend to both his father and to him. He ‘stood alongside the thirty-third, the thirty-fourth, the thirty-fifth and the thirty-sixth presidents of the United States, not to mention all the remaining figures of the Roosevelt era who had assembled for the funeral… She was like no one else in her usefulness. As the box containing her went by me, I thought, well, that’s it. We’re really on our own now.’”

— “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

The Irrepressible Ethel

Merman by Al Hirschfeld

“Each day at the beach, Harold mostly absent, Gore diverted himself with Ethel Merman, the Broadway star with the stentorian singing voice ‘who was quite intrigued with the idea of her voice resounding in a monastery. She has,' he wrote to Pat Crocker, ‘very likely the worst figure of any woman in the world but she is amusing and loves to discuss things in terms of male genitalia. We got on quite well and she can’t wait to read (his forthcoming novel ‘The City and the Pillar’). ‘Don’t read much but love books about homos,’ she said.”

— “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

The Incorruptible Mr. Gore

Thomas Pryor Gore in 1929

The blind senator from Oklahoma, Thomas Pryor Gore, opposed America’s entry into World War I. He wasn’t blind to what the war would cost, finding no reason why young American blood should fertilize the soil of undemocratic, corrupt European states.

An Oklahoma Chamber of Commerce sent him a telegram threatening to defeat him in the next election if he didn’t support a declaration of war.

The senator wired back a question: “How many members of the Chamber of Commerce are of draft age?”

His principles cost him reelection, but inspired his grandson, Gore Vidal.

— source: “Gore Vidal” by Fred Kaplan

The Pity and the Pillar

By Dan Hagen

Just finished Gore Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar,” a novel to which I should have treated myself years ago. But I probably wasn’t ready to read it then.

Gore Vidal

The book is beautiful, bleak and honest in its closely observed, flatly written descriptions of oddly familiar types in an unfamiliar era, the 1930s and 1940s.

Vidal suffered a lot of slings and arrows just for writing it, and shrugged them off pretty bravely even at a young age. He lost all chance at the political future he’d wanted, and saw his books banned from being reviewed in the New York Times, simply because his dim but decently direct protagonist was gay. Watching all this receding in the rear-view mirror of the 21^st century, the cowardly, brute injustice of it all couldn’t be clearer.

Vidal is a writer with whom I have had an ambivalent reader relationship over the decades, but I find myself finally and completely on his side. Deeply cynical, he can nevertheless be as cleanly honest as a steaming hot shower.
"He's a man who looks constantly at the truth with such cold eyes that every often he gets at the truth and then he's not afraid of writing about it or being written," said his friend Judith Calvino. "He's courageous. He was always like that. A man of dangerous attraction."