Burning in Hell

Once during a skit in which he portrayed a film director making a sympathetic biography of Genghis Khan, British comedian Benny Hill was asked how, for example, would he make Khan likeable after he massacred a village. Without missing a beat, Hill replied, “on the way out he pets a dog.”

For those who consider such hyperbole confined solely to comedic sketches, a recent biographical attempt at making Lillian Hellman, a subject as ugly in politics and personality as her physical appearance, more independent minded than her Stalinist image offered a less lethal, but equally ridicoulus example. To show she was not as slavish toward the Soviet Union as commonly thought, Alice Kessler Harris countered that on a trip to Russia Hellman disparaged their bathrooms.

If there is a figure who could provoke such an equally apparent strain in a sympathetic biographer it would have to be Gore Vidal. In him we have all the Hellman characteristics, and worse, or better, depending upon your point of view, a pride in them. He was the limousine lefty extradonaire, residing in an expensive villa in Italy, while espousing socialist views. In his never-changing view that the United States was a fascist security state, he became as reactionary as the anti-communists he hated, never allowing new events to alter his outlook of an America seeking war. He asserted that FDR knew ahead of time the Japanese were about to attack Pearl Harbor and allowed it to occur in order to nourish the military-industrial complex; six decades later, he insisted that 9–11 was carried out by the Bush administration to feed the same entity.

A professional hater, Vidal, once slighted, never got past it, and this often overlapped into his literary judgement, in many ways the ultimate sin of a writer. Hence, since William F. Buckley called him a “queer” on national television (in response to Vidal calling him a “crypto Nazi”), Buckley had to be a bad writer. Buckley, by contrast, the supposed reactionary, was much more generous, acknowledging that despite his personal and political differences with Vidal, he considered him a good writer.

While others sought to “make themselves look more human,” (a cottage industry of insincere self-deprecation among today’s celebrities), Vidal reveled in not doing so. He cheerfully reported that he was a selfish lover, uninterested in giving pleasure. As a badge of honor, he bragged that he never loved anyone. Months away from his own death, he greeted Buckley’s with the hope that he was “burning in hell.”

Such a figure, especially by one considered to be a friend, would seem to require the same kind of transperantly ridicolous attempts as the Hellman biography. Micheal Menshaw’s compulsive readable account of his 40 year friendship with Vidal does at times exhibit the same strain. He recounts Vidal’s courtesy toward a lost deliveryman in patiently giving directions as some kind of humane populism. Often his attempts to make Gore likeable doubles back and bites him. In an effort to show that Gore did not demand corrections to unsympathetic portraits, Menshawi inadvertently exhibits Vidal’s vanity. After reading a profile Menshaw did on Gore, the latter took umbrage at Menshaw noting his “receding hairline” (Vidal once burst into a bathroom while Menshaw was using it and brandished photographs of his youth to prove his hairline stayed the same).

Menshaw sets up the thesis that Vidal went from being a brilliant writer in his youth to a “transgressive performance artist” in his old age. There is certainly a kernel of truth in this. In his celebrated play, The Best Man (1960), Vidal was generous toward the otherwise repellent Nixon character, allowing a warm relationship with his wife. Decades later, there was no such attempt. He found nothing accessible in George W. Bush and fantasized about the Founding Fathers hanging him. Menshaw attributes this knee-jerk hatred to alcohol finally catching up to and ruining him.

But even within this rigged game, Menshaw dares to criticize his subject. Publicly drunk, Vidal once lunged...