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'The Essential Gore Vidal' Edited by Fred Kaplan

Anthology presents Vidal’s vitality and versatility

Sunday, January 31, 1999

By Harry Kloman

	The Essential Gore Vidal By Edited by Fred Kaplan Random House $39.95

How do you digest 23 novels, half a dozen plays, hundreds of essays and a few dozen other screenplays, teleplays, and short stories into less than 1,000 pages that convey the “essence” of a political, literary and personal life that has spanned half a century?

The answer to that modest literary conundrum is “The Essential Gore Vidal,” an anthology of writing by an author who has spent almost 40 years chronicling America’s decline from democratic Republic to war-driven empire — and even longer trying to get America to cast off its old tired ethics about human sexuality and nonsensical “Sky-God” religion.

That, in essence, is the portrait of the artist that emerges from the anthology, which will certainly please the casual reader, but which may leave the well-schooled Vidalian feeling some regret at the omissions.

Read this hefty tome, and you’ll get a rollicking good sense of Vidal’s beautiful prose and of how relentlessly he believes in the themes that have marked his career as a successful writer and failed politician. That should be enough from an author who’s chosen to write from an intellectual rather than introspective point of view.

But the 73-year-old Vidal possesses more than his intellect, and he has written novels that reverberate with echoes of his guarded inner life. Including these works would have better traced the anthology’s pivotal theme: The dissolution of the passionate, conflicted young romantic and his phoenix-like re-emergence as the passionate, intractable social reformer.

Thus we get no samples of Vidal’s early autobiographical novels, “In a Yellow Wood” and “The Season of Comfort,” both written in the 1940s, and both long out of print in the United States. Nor do we taste any of his wonderful 1954 novel, “Messiah,” which concerns the marketing of a mellifluous, unwitting Angel of Death through TV advertising techniques, a theme rather ahead of its time in the late 1940s, when he began to write the novel.

Most startling of all, this collect contains more than 300 pages of essays that make up nearly one-third of the book. Of course, it would be foolhardy to present Vidal without a few of his trenchant, witty, provocative essays. But he published “United States,” a 1,300-page anthology of his essays and a National Book Award winner, in 1993, and it seems rather unnecessary to reprint so many of them here yet again.

These choices make “The Essential Gore Vidal” a volume that reaffirms the perception of the author as a socio-political novelist, a splendid essayist and a longtime crusader for acceptance of human sexuality in all of its permutations.

From the early Vidal, we begin with passages from “The City and the Pillar,” his novel of same-sex love that altered the course of his career when he published it in 1948. Next comes a short story with homoerotic undercurrents, and then two engaging passages from “The Judgment of Paris,” his subtly erotic 1952 novel that demonstrates the first full blush of the more mature, arch tone that would become Vidal’s most recognizable voice.

The anthology’s largest fiction section weaves together passages from Vidal’s six novels of American history, most generously from “Burr” and “Lincoln.”

Together, these excerpts reveal the scope of Vidal’s historical project and unite the narrative threads of his blood relations in the six books — a sort of genealogical blending of fact and fiction. The passage from “Washington, D.C” is one of the most poignant in that novel — and perhaps even in all of Vidal’s fiction.

Two longer works appear in their entirety: “The Best Man,” his 1960 political drama; and “Myra Breckinridge” (1968), his ribald and hilarious post-modern novel, or “metafiction,” as some now call it. Two other comic metafictions, “Duluth” and “Live from Golgotha,” appear briefly, which is more than enough.

Vidal’s novels on religion round out the fiction: “Julian” takes place in the third century of the Christian era, and “Creation” journeys through the pre-Christian lands of Persia, Cathay and India. These novels vivify the treachery and complexity of their worlds, and they’re filled with Vidal’s lifetime of reading about antiquity, which began in his grandfather’s library when he was a boy of 10.

Vidal himself has nothing to say about all of this. Instead, the distinguished English professor Fred Kaplan of Queens College has penned a lucid 20-page introduction, as well as a rather detailed chronology of Vidal’s professional life and brief comments throughout the text before each thematically organized section.

Kaplan, who is writing a biography of Vidal, provides a most illuminating springboard into the writing, contributing sound scholarship, sturdy accolades and deft context.

He calls the mature Vidal “an angry and disappointed utopian with a strong practical sense,” which is perhaps the most concise explication of the author’s heart and mind that you’re likely to find. Citing the myriad classical writers who launched Vidal’s education in childhood, Kaplan submits: “Vidal is probably the most engaged universal reader of any American writer of the twentieth century.”

In the late 1940s, Vidal embarked on an audacious path as a young writer. Ever since, he’s relentlessly tried to convince us that a cadre of wealthy, capitalistic, imperialistic, moralistic, white heterosexual corporate oligarchs control our society with no regard for the people.

“The Essential Gore Vidal” is the weightiest salvo yet in the author’s ongoing war to save what he has come to view as his dying, ungrateful nation.

Harry Kloman is a longtime student of Gore Vidal’s work as well as a film critic. He is based in Pittsburgh.