Gore Vidal -- Bitter to the End

Gore Vidal died yesterday at the age of 86, bitter to the end. By his own account, the key event in his life was the death of the only man he ever loved: Jimmie Trimble, his high school sweetheart. Trimble, who could easily have avoided the war but instead volunteered for the Marines, was killed in combat on Iwo Jima. Gore insisted that he never felt passion again, and that although he enjoyed occasional sexual encounters (mainly with anonymous strangers) he "never gave pleasure except inadvertently." He had a lifelong male companion, but he insisted that the only reason they stayed together was "no sex."

Instead Vidal poured his passion into writing, and into a skeptical if not hostile attitude toward everything around him. His hatred of Roosevelt, and his lifelong advocacy of the idea that Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was coming, flowed in an obvious way (even to him) from his grief over the death of Jimmie Trimble. He regularly avowed that he hated America and he reveled in what he said was America's decline. His attitude toward America was not helped by the critical silence that greeted his first openly gay novels, which in the 1950s were considered too shocking to even mention in a major publication. His later historical novels, especially Burr and Lincoln, got better receptions, but to Vidal that was never enough, and he insisted that America would not recognize his genius because of his homosexuality.

I have read Lincoln, and I liked it. It does a good job of portraying Lincoln as a politician who, like most politicians, was very much focused on getting and using power. The setting is perfect, and when I imagine Civil War Washington I am probably seeing more what Vidal portrayed than anything else. But I did not love it. I thought that Vidal was just too cynical to understand Lincoln, a man who really believed in democracy and in the idea of America even when he was suspending habeas corpus and sending Sherman across Georgia to the sea. To Vidal, anyone who says he believes in America is, if powerful, just pursuing his own personal aggrandizement and, if humble, only trying to puff himself up by identifying himself with American might. This is certainly part of the truth, but it is not the whole truth.

When a man works hard through a career spanning 60 years, even though he has long been wealthy enough to retire, you have to wonder what drives him. With Gore Vidal, the answer seems obvious: he was motivated primarily by spite. Nothing he achieved -- not his literary awards or his money or his friendships with so many stars of literature, movies, and politics -- ever contented him. He was driven to fame and a sort of greatness by a black hole inside him that was never filled.