Gore vidal a biography of shakespeare

Gore Vidal

GOREDOM

Gore Vidal looks up, yawns, tells me to strip, and I do.

I arrived at Ravello on the Naples night-train, wrapped up in couchette-gauze like a thin corpse, fazed by speed-dreams of the Kingdom of Gore, not certain if I had slept or if I was still dreaming.

Goredom lies behind a solid iron gate, down a long dirt footpath – a nine-acre slice of Paradise chipped into a ring of mountains which shimmer all around you like blue shadows against a Klein-blue sky which drips into a Klein-blue sea. Past his vine terraces, olive orchards and lemon trees and the neighbours’ crumbling Kane-like mansion, his white villa clings to the cliff looking down a sheer 200 foot drop, looking out over Salerno and Amalfi, a suffocating haze of blue bay, where the yachts sunbathe in the hounding 40 degree heat and the specks of speedboats appear to crawl across the vast view. Lizards flit between my toes, thumb-sized locusts menace my phobia. The horizon has gone, sucked into the blue.

Late and lost, I find Gore Vidal by a purple swimming pool – a fat cat on a sun-lounger, white towel wrapped around a white-haired ball of belly. He looks up, yawns, tells me to strip and I do. Wearing an old man’s pair of Yves Saint Laurent shorts, I slip into the purple pool and slip away into Goredom, where the only conflict is the force of boredom against the lap of luxury, it hasn’t rained for two months and every form of pain has been removed.

“Do you ever get tired of this ?” I ask him – the stupidest question of my, and Gore Vidal’s, life. No reply. No need. We’ve all done it. When he heard that his good friend Paul Newman was doing a coffee commercial in Japan for two and a half million dollars, Gore Vidal asked him why. Newman replied, succinctly: “I’d have to think up a damned good reason not to.”

Vidal is gracious enough to let me lie on his lounger, soak up his sun, but on this sleepy Sunday he greets my first question with sighs of supreme weariness and utter indif

ONE MORE TIME I WAS to be observer, participant, and witness. In February 1999, my telephone rang. "I understand the book's finished. When do I see it?" Gore Vidal said to me.

"When it's published," I said. "When the rest of the world gets to see it, as it states in our agreement."

Long pause. "What agreement?"

My hand was already moving across my desk. In preparation for this day, I kept one of the many copies of the document in easy reach. "The agreement you signed on March 15, 1994, in which you stated that I would have complete access to and use of your unpublished letters and that you would not interfere in any way with publication of the book."

Another long pause. "What about the quotes from my letters?"

"What about them?"

"Well, they are my words. I should have some control over them. I should have at least the opportunity to correct them for misquotation."

"How can you check them for misquotation," I asked, "when you don't have the originals or copies of the originals to check them against?"

It seemed to me that Vidal's interest in checking the letters was a substitute for what he really desired�to read my manuscript before it was too late to influence what it said and how it said it. If a lengthy first-ever biography of me were about to be published, I'd be nervous, too. What inaccuracies, slanders, and misrepresentations might the book not broadcast? And I had previous experience with Gore that led me to believe that he felt about his unpublished letters much as he felt about his fiction in progress�they were drafts subject to revision, at least to the extent of eliminating stylistic infelicities. He did not think of letters written fifty years ago as historical documents.

"Don't you have your copy

(1925-2012)

Who Was Gore Vidal?

American writer Gore Vidal is known for many popular screenplays, plays and novels, as well as other literary works. He wrote and published more than 200 essays and 24 novels throughout his career, which included a venture into politics, a stint as a popular talk-show guest and even running for political office. Among Vidal's most famous works are the 1960s books Julian and Myra Breckinridge; the 1984 novel Lincoln; his 1993 political work United States: Essays 1952-1992, for which he won the National Book Award; and his 1995 memoir, Palimpsest.

Early Life and Education

Vidal was born as Eugene Luther Vidal Jr. on October 3, 1925, at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. Vidal became very close to his grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore, at a young age. He often read to his grandfather as a boy, and soon developed a fondness for both literature and politics. Vidal's father, Eugene Vidal, a former All-American football player and track star, worked under U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, heading the Bureau of Air Commerce. His mother, Nina, the daughter of Oklahoma Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, worked as an actress. According to Vidal, his mother drank often and had frequent outbursts, which caused disruption at home.

Vidal's parents divorced in 1935, and when his mother remarried Hugh D. Auchincloss (Jacqueline Kennedy's stepfather), he went to stay with his mother in Virginia.

Vidal attended the St. Albans School in Washington, where he experienced his first of several homosexual relationships, with his athletic friend Jimmie Trimble. Trimble died soon after enlisting in World War II, at Iwo Jima, and Vidal was deeply saddened by the loss; he later described feeling as though he'd lost his "other half."

U.S. Army Service

Following his graduation from the Phillips Exeter Academy, at age 17, Vidal enlisted in the U.S. Army. Two years later, he earned the title of warrant

Gore Vidal was born Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. on October 3, 1925 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. He did not go to college but attended St. Albans School in Washington and graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1943. He enlisted in the Army, where he became first mate on a freight supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. His first novel, Williwaw, was published in 1946 when he was twenty-one years old and working as an associate editor at the publishing company E. P. Dutton. The City and the Pillar was about a handsome, athletic young Virginia man who gradually discovers that he is homosexual, which caused controversy in the publishing world. The New York Times refused to advertise the novel and gave a negative review of it and future novels. He had such trouble getting subsequent novels reviewed that he turned to writing mysteries under the pseudonym Edgar Box and then gave up novel-writing altogether for a time. Once he moved to Hollywood, he wrote television dramas, screenplays, and plays. His films included I Accuse, Suddenly Last Summer with Tennessee Williams, Is Paris Burning? with Francis Ford Coppola, and Ben-Hur. His most successful play was The Best Man, which he also adapted into a film. He started writing novels again in the 1960's including Julian, Washington, D.C., Myra Breckenridge, Burr, Myron, 1876, Lincoln, Hollywood, Live From Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal, and The Golden Age. He also published two collections of essays entitled The Second American Revolution, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1982 and United States: Essays 1952-1992. In 2009, he received the National Book Awards lifetime achievement award. He died from complications of pneumonia on July 31, 2012 at the age of 86.