Gore Vidal: The Difference Between Genius & Talent

 

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal didn’t like many people, an attitude which rarely included himself. He wrote essays, books, plays and screenplays, though few are read or seen anymore. He said provocative things like "I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television,” and "There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices." Things like that.

He revered the American constitution but was sickened by the country, politicians and people. He lived in Italy for over thirty years.

He called William F. Buckley “a crypto-Nazi”, and Buckley called Vidal “a queer".

Despite his rejection of the gay label, Vidal lived with his male partner, Howard Austen, for 53 years. Gay rights activists said he could have done more to further their cause.

Vidal sued Truman Capote for slander over the accusation that he had once been thrown out of the White House for being drunk, putting his arm around First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and insulting her mother. Capote said of Vidal at the time: "I'm always sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day."

He wrote that Jacqueline Kennedy was "selfish and self-aggrandizing beyond the usual." Of Bobby Kennedy, he wrote, "Between Bobby's primitive religion and his family's ardent struggle ever upward from Irish bog, he was more than usually skewed, not least by his own homosexual impulses, which, Nureyev once told me, were very much in the air on at least one occasion when they were together."

Reflecting on a long life of letters, controversy, friends and enemies, he confessed, “The only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.”

Oscar Wilde said, "I have put my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Sensing familiarity, Gore may have been somewhat uncomfortable with this sentiment.

Unlike Wilde, his life and works cannot be separated. The point of Vidal is his personality—the patrician hauteur, witty and detached, a dandy in aspic, suspended forever between thought and action.

 

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