Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24)
"I used to be the handsomest man in Rome. Now I'm just another ruin," quipped writer Gore Vidal when he was 50. Or characterizing himself, he once said, "I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water." Complex, chilly, confrontational, and abrasive are the words one associates with Vidal, yet freelance journalist Michael Mewshaw, in his new memoir detailing his nearly 40-year friendship with him, attempts to give a corrective, more nuanced, nonreverential portrait. He only partially succeeds.
Receiving a fellowship in Rome in 1975, Mewshaw and his wife Linda are introduced to Vidal by a mutual friend. Thus begins an amusing but also sad exposition on Italian expatriate life nestled in the context of gossipy lunches and entertaining dinner parties with famous guests, stretching into late-night confessions fueled by alcohol, set in Vidal's Rome apartment and his villa, La Rondinaia, on the Italian coast. Mewshaw is intent on debunking popular conceptions of Vidal as arrogant, American-hating, vicious, and sexually deviant by showing he could be discreetly generous, a loyal friend, and a hardworking, disciplined writer.
The book is by no means a biography of Vidal. It provides a brief background chapter on Vidal's life to provide context for their initial meeting, zeroing in on Vidal's privileged but dysfunctional childhood, characterized by cruelty, parental promiscuity, and alcoholic fury. His father Eugene, whom Gore loved, was a football player at West Point, competed in the 1920 Olympics as a pentathlon, and helped build the American airline industry after WWII. After her divorce from Eugene, Vidal's mother Nina, whom Gore basically hated, moved into her father's (Sen. Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, which began Vidal's lifelong fascination with politics) home. Later, a perennial gold-digger, she wed the rich Hugh Auchincloss, which also netted Jacqueline Bouvier (later Kennedy) as Gore's stepsister once removed. Vidal served in the Army in the Aleutian Islands during WWII.
There is hardly any literary analysis of Vidal's work here, although Mewshaw's description of Vidal's sentences as possessing "the snap of a dominatrix's whip" hits the bull's-eye concerning his power as a writer. It might be added that Mewshaw has repeatedly used his relationship with Gore for monetary gain, not only with this book, but for numerous in-depth articles and interviews written before Vidal's death in 2012, at 86.
Vidal's nearly 50-year relationship with Howard Austen figures prominently in this memoir. Austen was James Boswell to Vidal's Dr. Samuel Johnson, a round-the-clock nanny who did everything for Vidal so that he could attend mostly to his writing. Austen tried to moderate Vidal's drinking, admonished him as well as made amends if he obliterated a friend with a cutting remark, and kept him from falling off the deep end. Mewshaw believes it was largely a platonic relationship; however, they both paid for rent boys, whom they traded back and forth. (Vidal's favorite sex was belly-rubbing frottage, and was proud of the fact he never pleasured any man in return.) Sometimes they had sex with the same partner at the same time. Despite sleeping with hundreds of men, Gore still identified himself as bisexual, though asked when he had last slept with a woman, he could only recall an orgy "when I plugged into the wrong socket."
Real raconteur
Vidal emerges as a charismatic storyteller and performer, cultural gadfly, and fearless social critic, always the talk-show guest raconteur with an outrageous, witty remark (Mewshaw observes that Vidal's one-liners were well-rehearsed and repeated ad nauseam), the closest the U.S. has come to producing an Oscar Wilde. But as the years pass, Vidal's alcoholism, depression (which at times could slide dangerously close to suicide ideation) and disillusionment escalate. In one horrifying incident, Vidal, unable to open an expensive bottle of scotch, bashed the bottle against his fireplace and drank straight from the jagged edge. After Howard died in 2003, Vidal slid into early dementia, and his writing, mostly political essays excoriating Bush foreign policy, bordered on paranoia. Vidal's final public appearance in a wheelchair at a Key West literary weekend is described by Mewshaw as a colossal wreck where he embarrassed himself and insulted everyone. "Once he had been a witheringly funny iconoclast. He now seemed a kind of transgressive performance artist determined to give offense."
In 1995, Vidal wrote his memoir Palimpsest, which Mewshaw calls his best book in decades, seeing it more as a "novel with a thoroughly unreliable narrator, its greatest flaw being Gore's refusal to come to grips with his inner life, with the painful traumas he suffered in private while he sustained the impression in public of perfect equanimity." Mewshaw also critiques Fred Kaplan's authorized biography of Vidal in 1999 as failing to crack Vidal's icy veneer. But the same criticism could be applied to Sympathy for the Devil. The problem is that the popular conceptions of Vidal as nasty and venomous are largely true, so the brilliant, provocative Vidal emerges in Mewshaw's analysis as a caustic Sphinx with rare fits of charm. If he didn't know himself, he wasn't about to let himself be known by others.
Like many famous authors, the real Gore Vidal is found in his writings. Vidal produced no masterpiece. Mewshaw correctly evaluates him as being overly didactic, especially in his historical fiction. He forecasts that ultimately Gore's essays, where he is amusing and perceptive, will be his chief literary legacy. Vidal paid a heavy personal and professional price for being an LGBT pioneer (his novel The City and the Pillar was revolutionary in its time), so perhaps only a gay critic can compose an authentic biography with insight, someone who will understand the role homophobia played in molding and ultimately destroying his personality and his career.