Gore Vidal: American Prophet

Towards the end of his long life, Gore Vidal would just fill up with fluid. The 86-year-old died painfully. The biographers do not record what liquid was drained from Vidal’s body as he rotted away in the ruins of his final home – a Spanish revival mansion on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills – only that he needed to be voided on a daily basis. What was in him? Chyme? Gastric acid? Black phlegm? I suspect it was bile.

By 2010, Vidal was waterlogged, a storied and slowly sinking destroyer. He could no longer control his bladder. He hallucinated. His brain, the doctors said, was “wet”. He had dementia and congestive heart failure and a tendency to excommunicate what few friends remained, or banish once-loved nephews he believed were spying on him for the Central Intelligence Agency. Old comrades turned away.

Christopher Hitchens accused him in Vanity Fair of hawking “crank-revisionist and denialist history”. At the time, Hitchens was the spokesperson for a large constituency that believed liberal democracy could be spread throughout the Middle East by the US Marine Corps and the Fifth Fleet. Vidal thought that elements within the Bush administration might have allowed 9/11 to happen. He also predicted that the US would be run out of Afghanistan, paving the way for China to resume its historic role as a world power.

Vidal seemed mad and sad and alone and drunk. His writing – his writing, Vidal’s, whose essays had been compared to his hero Montaigne’s – no longer seemed contemporary. It was the early Obama era. The cargo-cult optimism that accompanied the 44th president’s rise was not yet completely dispersed. And there was Vidal, who couldn’t read the room any more, gabbling from his wheelchair about the downfall of the United States, writing and saying everything was bad and would only get worse. Maybe he had nothing left to say, mistaking the decline of his own flesh and mind for the decline of the world itself. His watchful attendants – all of whom would be cut from Vidal’s legacy when he died in July 2012 – approached him wearing surgical gloves, as if to protect themselves from contagion. Vidal had always liked to quote Montaigne on death: “How did the living die and what did they say and how did they look at the end?” Those near Vidal as he lingered on and on noticed that however reduced he was, even when he was wracked and struggling to breathe, his eyes stayed wide open.

Gore Vidal was born 100 years ago. His family had roots in the Irish bog (maternal) and the Austrian Alps (paternal). While Vidal would eventually entertain on two coasts, and in London, Venice, Marrakesh, Bangkok, Rome, his antecedents were heartlanders; his grandfather was a US senator from Oklahoma, a populist – as Vidal later reflected without judgement 1985, “anti-banks, anti-railroad, anti-black and anti-Semitic” –  and an isolationist. His self-image was aristocratic: “I belong to the highest class there is: I’m a third-generation celebrity. My grandfather, father and I have all been on the cover of Time. That’s all there is. You can’t go any higher in America.” The Vidals were the ruling class. His father, an aviation pioneer, still has an award at West Point named after him; his mother is usually described as an “ambitious” (drunk) socialite. The United States was the family business. He felt that the state itself was his patrimony: “Whenever I want to know what the United States is up to, I look into the blackness of my own heart”. Vidal’s understanding of power’s true basis was elitist. Small groups and charisma counted for more than ideas. Individuals generated more real motion than systems. History was no more than a kind of “gossip”. 

The US in 1925 was largely dominated by a north-eastern Wasp establishment which took their manners, clothing, sporting habits, husbands and stylised anti-Semitism from the British aristocracy. The country was ambitious and industrious, driving hard and fast towards an imperial horizon. After the Second World War, Vidal would grow to become the chronicler of that transition from republic to empire. “We have embarked upon empire (Rome born again our heavy fate) without a Virgil in the crew, only tarnished silver writers in a bright uranium age,” he wrote in 1956: part lament, part audition for the role he was destined to play. An essayist, screenwriter, playwright, novelist and occasional ham actor, Vidal’s work adds up to a beguiling, barbed compound of Tacitus and Oscar Wilde.

He confused his contemporaries, the American alpha novelists like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. His art was not as pure or secluded as Roth’s or Bellow’s, less frenzied than Mailer’s. “Art is energy shaped by intelligence,” he wrote. His intelligence was lacerating. His energy was bullying and gratuitous; he liked to goad his targets, to kick and scratch at them when they were down. An irrepressible bitch, he impugned people by questioning their mental acuity. He liked to tell his readers who people really were. Edward VII: “The Duke’s stupidity was of a perfection seldom encountered outside institutions.” F Scott Fitzgerald: “barely literate”. The English: “eccentric Norwegians”. Ronald Reagan: “an indolent cue-card reader”. When he was an old man he said he regretted that he had never killed anybody. He had no need for regrets. His essays were already littered with bodies.

He produced trash from time to time in a way that even Mailer, author of an alimony-raising Marilyn Monroe biography, sidestepped. Caligula (1979) was “easily one of the worst films ever made”, Vidal said. He was its screenwriter. In Gore Vidal: A Biography (1999), Fred Kaplan reports how Bellow introduced his son to Vidal with the words, “I want him to meet someone really cynical!” They thought Vidal, when he turned to politics and power – the subject that is the true through-line of his work – was a paranoid bore. Roth, whose overblown late-historical novel sequence has rightly been compared to watching a man chewing, dismissed Vidal as “a society hairdresser who has written a book or two”. While Roth lived like a monk in his forested 150-acre Connecticut estate, Vidal palled around with Tim Robbins and Princess Margaret and Tennessee Williams. Following Goethe, Vidal did not believe talent could survive if it was solitary. Talent must enter the torrent of the world and fight. That was how real character formed. He laughed at the alphas for their “terrible garrulousness” and their lamely insular writing about writing. Men like Roth and Bellow were chestless talents, not mighty characters. Vidal noted that American authors were, “if not Waldenised solitaries, Darwinised predators constantly preying on one another”. He was a superb and steely predator.

Vidal predicted his own future and those of the other writers he came up with. Their lives – picked over by academics and journalists – would blot out their work. “Novels command neither interest nor affection but writers do, particularly colourful ones who have made powerful legends of themselves. I suspect that eventually novels will be read only to provide clues to the author’s personality…” In the obituaries, the awful prophetic power of Vidal’s novels and essays take a back seat to his mannerisms, sexual habits and friendships. There was naked envy at the way he was able to live. “I interviewed Vidal for the Sunday Times in 1984,” wrote one undoubtedly penurious British novelist in 2012 in a typical death notice. “We had lunch in his room at the Dorchester – A-list authors were well looked after then.” The obituarists were not remembering Gore Vidal. They were wondering why they weren’t as rich or as successful as he was. Otherwise they condemned him, as Gideon Rachman did in a short, curt piece in the Financial Times: “Vidal was an arrogant conspiracy theorist, trading off a reputation he made with novels written decades ago.”

Early on in his valedictory 1,200-page United States: Essays 1952-1992, Vidal tells his readers who he is. “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag,” he declared in 1956. Across reviews, reportage and memoir in that collection, Vidal prosecutes a set of unchanging arguments. America, once a republic, was now a decadent empire doomed to become a tyranny. Literature could not be taught by academics or studied in universities; it existed only to illuminate people and transform them into “archetypes – elemental figures like those wild gods our ancestors peopled heaven with”. Monotheism was “intrinsically funny”. The sexual attitudes of any given society were the result of political decisions. If an argument or personality inspired great hatred, that meant they were usually right about something. (This was convenient for Vidal, who attracted passionate hatred at all times.) History was a set of “crude fictions” agreed by contemporaries, then selected and presented as truth at a later date by unwitting historians and biographers. The world was governed by men’s deeds, not by buried Freudian motives. Events were the work of individuals who were “frivolous, even casual”. We are atoms. All the essential problems of life are the same, generation after generation. There is “no cosmic point to our lives”. Nothing follows us. “No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”

Like Montaigne or Suetonius, Vidal had the gift of telling us what we ache to know. His birth and breeding gave him access to rooms that careful observers are often barred from. (The powerful and celebrated do not, generally, want to be watched too closely by cruel eyes.) From Vidal we learn that Amelia Earhart had “mild-white eyelashes”; Tennessee Williams once “commented favourably” on John F Kennedy’s arse; Orson Welles patted his stomach “as if it were a dog”; Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt’s arguments usually ended with her fleeing from the dinner table “in tears”; Anaïs Nin referred to herself as a “legend” in later life; Edmund Wilson, well into his seventies, would begin an evening at the Princeton Club by lining up a sequence of six martinis at its bar, and after a few drinks Clark Gable would “loosen his false teeth, which were on some sort of peg and then shake his head until they rattled like dice”. Vidal relates a public dinner with Harry Truman, with the former president in the middle of “making a particularly solemn point”. Suddenly Truman’s face “jerked abruptly into a euphoric grin, all teeth showing”. Vidal thought Truman had finally lost it, when he saw “photographers had appeared in the middle distance”. The high and the mighty, the commanders of fleets and bombers, the playwrights and artists: to Vidal they were all so many whores.

He wanted and expected to be the president of the United States. From Vidal’s perspective nothing else made sense. He was reading Livy (in translation) by the age of seven, flew and landed a plane by the age of ten, attended his first presidential convention at fourteen. By the time he was 25, he claims in his memoir Palimpsest, he had had over a thousand sexual encounters. This was not gay, of course. (“There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person.”) He said if he had become president he would have married and had nine children. Vidal stood as a Democrat in Republican upstate New York in 1960 and narrowly lost the race. In 1982 he finished second in the Californian Democratic senatorial primary to Jerry Brown. In between he twice set out his vision for America in “state of the union” addresses, as if he were an unelected shadow president, written for Esquire magazine. 

“We hate this system that we are trapped in but we don’t know who has trapped us or how”, he wrote in May 1975. “We don’t know what our cage really looks like because we were born in it and have nothing to compare it to but if anyone has the key to the lock then where the hell is he?”

Gore Vidal believed – he sincerely assumed as his birthright – that Gore Vidal had that key. Jason Epstein was the co-founder of the New York Review of Books as well as the editorial director of Penguin Random House, and Vidal’s editor at both, recalled that, “He thought he should be president and would have been better than most.” Vidal, like Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde, was a visionary politician who had somehow been waylaid by literature. He was trapped in his historical novel sequence and his essays. It was as if after Disraeli wrote Vivian Grey he never became an MP or Prime Minister. 

What kind of president would Vidal have made, nine children aside? “Mr. Vidal sometimes claimed to be a populist — in theory, anyway — but he was not convincing as one”, wrote the New York Times in its obituary. “Both by temperament and by birth he was an aristocrat.” We have discovered in our own time that a billionaire (Trump) or a private school boy (Farage, Johnson) can renege on the values, ideals and expectations of their class. An “aristocratic” upbringing is not a barrier to harrying a distant, uncaring oligarchy nor promising a rabid electorate retribution for the failures of their leaders. This did not mean Vidal loved the people. That wasn’t what was at stake. “The oligarchs think that the people are both dangerous and stupid”, he wrote. “Their point is moot. But we do know that the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.”

There was a fearsome autocratic populist inside Vidal. He was fascinated enough by Abraham Lincoln, whom he knew had similar tendencies, to summon him to the pages of a best-selling novel. He likened Lincoln to Otto Von Bismark, admiring him not for “freeing the slaves” but for his Caesarian certainty and ruthlessness. His presidency was not far removed from tyranny. He liked to quote Lincoln’s speech before the Springfield lyceum in 1838. “Here he speaks of the nature of ambition and how, in a republic that was already founded, a tyrant might be tempted to reorder the state in his own image. At the end Lincoln himself did just that. There is a kind of terrible Miltonian majesty in his address to the doubtless puzzled young men of the Springfield lyceum. In effect, their twenty nine year old contemporary was saying that, for the ambitious man, it is better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven.” 

Lincoln, “this essential American writer”, was simultaneously the same as Vidal and his opposite “A literary genius who was called upon to live, rather than merely to write, a high tragedy.” Lincoln’s bloody re-ordering of the United States through warfare, his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863, all his terrible fateful grandeur, amounted to something like the first and (so far) only tyranny experienced by the United States – that was the life Vidal wanted for himself. Instead, novels and essays. Nervous interviewers, winding their way towards Vidal’s palace overlooking the Gulf of Salerno, the same sea that Tiberius gazed upon from Capri, were unsettled by Vidal once they met him. They compared him to Xerxes and Adolf Hitler. “The trouble with Gore,” Princess Margaret once observed, “is that he wants my sister’s job.” She wasn’t joking. 

In late January this year I was in Washington for the second inauguration of Donald Trump. The Golden Horde was moving into the frozen city. There was flu in the air, and the bars began to fill with bearded young men in red hats with running nostrils who told me about the anonymous racist X accounts they ran from their phones. They were about to start working for the Pentagon or the State Department.

At a cocktail party I stood next to a famous Maga essayist dressed in white tie who had been pulled back into working for Trump on national security, while he went through the pros and cons of bombing Iran. On balance he thought it would happen soon. A gala reception was held for one of the released Israeli hostages. I couldn’t hear what she was saying because I was being harangued by somebody who believed 9/11 was an inside job. Trump was spoken of flatly, with no irony, as an emperor. The Golden Horde was not sure it wanted to go through the rigmarole of another election. The hottest party in town was called the “Coronation Ball”. We watched the ceremony in the Capitol rotunda on 20 January in a bar filled with boys hollering at the sight of the oligarchs who owned most of the American economy, men who once turned their newspapers and social platforms against Trump, kneeling and broken before his power. At night the white marble monuments in the centre of the city yellowed under artificial light until their colour was indistinguishable from old skull and bone.

Vidal did not live to see this moment but he would have recognised it. America was “rotting away at a funeral pace” he told the Times in 2009. “We’ll have a military dictatorship pretty soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together.” He believed Obama would be broken by the “madhouse” that the US had become. The Americans were chased out of Kabul in 2021, years after it had become obvious that China had resumed its historic role as a major world power and a peer of the US, something Vidal had anticipated in 1988. The cost of empire that pushed America down with “nukes, bases, debts” had eventually inspired a populist revolt from its immiserated citizenry, opening the gates of the capital to a figure Vidal knew well from history: Caesar. America First would return, Vidal said in early 1995. “It’s no bad rallying cry.”

Extreme sickness had made an extreme remedy inevitable. The conspiracy theories Vidal obsessed over were now truths widely held and cherished throughout America. The madhouse rattled and jabbered to music that he heard first, many years before. When I returned from Washington, I found my old copy of United States. The author portrait showed him in black and white, turning shyly half away, his mouth turning towards a smile, eyes wide open. The years of bile lay far in the future.  

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[Further reading: Kamala Harris cares too much about being nice]

This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate