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'Gore Vidal: A Biography' by Fred Kaplan

Biographer grasps where Gore Vidal belongs in history, if not the inner man

Sunday, November 14, 1999

By Harry Kloman

	Gore Vidal: A Biography By Fred Kaplan Doubleday $35.00

Fred Kaplan begins his mammoth biography of Gore Vidal -- the novelist, essayist, playwright, politician, historian, actor and conscience of America -- with the one subject his protagonist fears and in the one place he never wants to be.

The subject is death, the scene Rock Creek Park Cemetery, Washington, D.C., where Vidal and Howard Austen, his companion since the early 1950s, have come to inspect the burial plots that Vidal selected as their side-by-side final resting place.

The choice is not arbitrary: This site is equidistant from the graves of Henry Adams, whom Vidal admired, and Jimmie Trimble, the grade-school boy whom Vidal loved when they were 14.

With this engagingly melancholy prelude, Kaplan -- who has written biographies of Henry James, Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle -- introduces the subject of his bountifully detailed biography about a man who, either directly or through small degrees of separation, has intersected the lives of most major literary, political and cultural figures since his birth in 1925.

As a young writer after World War II, Vidal joined a salon of literati and aristocrats hosted in New York by Peggy Guggenheim. He smelled Mussolini’s acrid cologne on the eve of war, met Andre Gide and George Santayana in their twilight, conducted a lifelong friendship with Paul Newman, got Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt to campaign for him when he ran for the U.S. House and gave John F. Kennedy the idea for the Peace Corps.

The list of contacts goes on, from the literary luminaries Vidal engaged in Europe and America, to the Washington, Hollywood and New York political and social circles in which he swirled most of his life, until the 1980s, when -- tired of all the American scenes and of his globe-trotting peregrinations -- he and Austen settled in their Italian villa overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea.

It’s an extraordinary life, perhaps the last great literary life of the 20th century, for one can hardly imagine who else’s story approaches Vidal’s in its breadth of contact. It’s also a life whose protagonist seems to earn the patrician sense of himself that he so famously sustains.

Of course, to enjoy it, you have to care about the elements that formed the foundation of Vidal’s experience: His homosexuality, which he more or less did not hide during a time when such things were quite unacceptable; his international life among writers and publishers, including glimpses of how the book world works; and his passion for politics, a seed planted by his family’s political ties and made world-famous by his historical novels and trenchant essays.

In high school, Kaplan writes, Vidal displayed a mix of “compulsive overstatement and unembarrassed self-projection.” That’s one of Kaplan’s many concise evaluations of Vidal, a knack that frees him of the need to interpret his subject’s every move.

Certainly, the narrative climax of the book comes during the restless 1960s when, with meticulous research and analysis, Kaplan chronicles Vidal’s most infamous public feuds with: William F. Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Jewish right-wing intellectuals and the Kennedys, especially Bobby.

Kaplan’s accumulation of detail awards victories to Vidal in most of these disputes. And while his book is certainly not hagiography, it sometimes casts the pleasant redolence of beatification, at least in terms of how Vidal has lived up to his own standards.

Two characteristic themes emerge: Vidal’s rabid fear of death, and his hatred of lying and liars, a trait that arose from his complex relationship with his alcoholic, unstable, highly critical mother.

And so Vidal resolved early in life always to tell the truth: He became, says Kaplan, “a dedicated non-liar,” making a take-no-prisoners pledge that would occasionally cause him as much grief as satisfaction.

Vidal’s emotional life, drawn from half a century of letters and diaries, winnows through Kaplan’s narrative, presenting the biographer with his most daunting task. For Vidal truly is a man who guards his feelings, and Kaplan doesn’t feel compelled to drag anything out of him.

Kaplan writes elegantly, presenting his metaphors with precision and his characters with shrewd analyses. For the most part, he treats Vidal’s writings as incidents in a life, not pausing at any length to parse the work, which is the realm of other projects.

In all, his subject emerges as a successful, fortunate and maybe even rather ordinary man of letters. He wanted to be a writer, and so he worked diligently at it, winning recognition in every medium he tried.

Vidal engaged life but always somehow as an outsider, which allowed him clearer eyes to write about what he saw. He has, in short, lived a vividly public life of the mind, expressed in a voluminous body of work.

And as for the inner life? Well, it’s certainly in there somewhere, but it remains somewhat of a mystery. We may just have to settle for that.

Harry Kloman is a free-lance writer who lives in Pittsburgh.