Perfect or near-perfect matches between author and subject are rare, indeed, in the world of publishing. Jay Parini’s Empire of Self, a new biography of Gore Vidal, is one of them. A long-time biographer as well as a novelist who has written fictional accounts of the lives of Tolstoy, Herman Melville and the left-wing German critic, Walter Benjamin, Parini is perfectly suited to tell the story of the twentieth century’s foremost American historical novelist.
While Vidal began to publish groundbreaking fiction about homosexuality (The City and the Pillar) in the 1940s and achieved success in the 1960s with satirical works like Myra Breckinridge, he didn’t really find his métier until the 1970s when he began to churn out hefty novels about major American historical figures. Burr (1973) came first, followed by Lincoln (1984) and then Empire (1987) in which he concluded his epic account about the evolution of the United States from a republic to an imperial power, a process that fueled his ire.
A patrician in rebellion against his own social class, Vidal tangled with many of his literary contemporaries, including Norman Mailer and William Buckley, and published dozens of trenchant essays on matters both political and cultural that originally appeared in The New York Review of Books. Moreover, along with Alexander Cockburn, he also appeared in the pages of The Nation. Not surprisingly, he attracted the attention of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI; his files fattened even as the list of his published work grew longer year after year. Though he was a critic of empire, there was also something curiously imperial about Vidal’s persona. To observers, he seemed to be a kind of Roman senator without the toga. Hence Parini’s title, Empire of the Self, which captures the very essence of the man and his work in four words. No, he wasn’t a proletarian, and probably never did a day’s work with his hands, but he was beholden to no one and nobody owned him or gave him his marching orders.
This biography begins a bit stiffly and perhaps overly Freudian with brief mention of Vidal’s complex relationship to his mother, which he himself invited. But Empire of the Self soon warms to the subject, even as it maintains critical detachment that allows the author to view Vidal from a distance and at the same time with real intimacy.
Parini and Vidal were friends who spent time together in Italy where Vidal lived much of the time in self-imposed exile, though he insisted that he was never an expatriate. Indeed, his time outside the United States seemed to have provided him with a critical perspective on the nation, whether it was at war or at peace, in eruption or in a state of semi-somnolence. Empire of the Self offers a series of snap-shots of Vidal, Parini and their friends and associates, with ample quips from the imperial author himself.
“In my country, yes, the people can say anything they want, as long as nobody is listening,” Vidal told the famed Italian author Alberto Moravia. “They do as they are told. On the other hand, Hollywood makes them happy.” In imperial America, as in imperial Rome, he argued, the masses received their share of bread and circuses to keep them from open rebellion.
Vidal’s off-hand remarks, along with his sense of sarcasm, makes this biography sizzle, sing and sail briskly and Vidal becomes a likeable curmudgeon in spite of himself. Parini calls him “cantankerous, testy, ill-mannered, a terrible snob, a drunken bore.” That was surely true some, though not all of the time. To put it another way, he was a thorn in the side of the American Empire when it seemed to him to be in an irreversible downward spiral.
In the mid-1980s I interviewed Vidal for publication one afternoon at his mansion in the Hollywood Hills after he had put several thousand words down on paper earlier the same day. He was gracious, polite, candid and armed with barbs that he hurled into the air at invisible yet tangible enemies. Sitting in a large armchair and wearing a purple bathrobe and slippers, he moved effortlessly from one subject to another.
“Here we set ourselves up as a world empire and we don’t bother to train anyone to run it,” he told me. “We have presidents who don’t know where they are half of the time. Reagan doesn’t know the difference between the Medici and Gucci, except that his wife wears one and the other sounds vaguely familiar. The ignorance of the American ruling class is horrendous.” He was perfect for late night TV and appeared with Dick Cavett and Merv Griffin.
In 1983 I also reviewed Vidal’s Duluth and noted that the author moves “with ease from electric vibrators between satin sheets to racial vibrations in the streets.” Sex — hetero and homo — almost always rivals politics in Vidal’s fiction, and even in minor work such as Duluth he can be entertaining.
Empire of Self is a model biography. Perhaps more to the point it’s a fun read, albeit not for the whole family. Still, for anyone who likes to trace American literary history and who enjoys gossip about writers, celebrities, presidents and their wives, such as Jackie Kennedy, Parini’s book is a delightfully wicked page-turner.
In his conclusion, the author asks whether Vidal will be read and remembered years from now, and, while he doesn’t provide a simple yes or no answer, he says that “Gore will certainly be recalled by anyone who lived in his time as a meteor who streaked through the night skies, with a fantail of sparks.” Yes, Parini is a poet as well as a novelist and biographer. Empire of the Self is infused with bright images, prosaic facts and impassioned literary judgments. “He was by nature a provocateur,” Parini writes. “The American scene is poorer without him.”
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