Gore the Bore

Yes, that’s harsh, but this is the blogosphere, after all—snark city, the town without pity. In fact, I felt a lot of pity for Gore Vidal. He hit it big while quite young, publishing the 1948 gay shocker The City and the Pillar at age 23. For the next twenty years Vidal had a lot of fun, a Manhattan bad boy with the golden touch, knocking out essays, novels, plays, and movie scripts with equal aplomb. When JFK was elected, Vidal had a special entry ticket to Camelot via a slender but glamorous family connection—his mother, after divorcing his father, married Hugh D. Auchincloss, bearing one of the most aristocratic names in the Social Register and who, several marriages down the road, became Jackie Kennedy’s stepfather, making Gore and Jackie non-related semi-step-siblings. If ever a man was born to exploit a relationship like that, well, it was Gore Vidal.

Vidal’s undoing was the massive success of his 1968 super-shocker Myra Breckinridge, which made him enormously wealthy at age 43 and, apparently, absolutely shattered by the fact that it hadn’t happened to him when he was 23. He spent the next 44 years stumbling down hill, growing ever more tedious and obnoxious, a old drunk ever searching for new ways to irritate and disappoint his friends.

Despite his still massive reputation, Vidal never struck me as anything more than a poseur. He had no novelistic imagination and always wrote in his own voice. He could be entertaining in his early essays—a naughty man about town who’s having too much fun to draw blood—but old age ruined him. He hated being old, and it showed. He hated everything, because he hated being old. And he was old for a very long time.

Afterwords
Is this a minority opinion? Definitely. Well, read him and tell me I’m wrong.