Here’s Gore Vidal from his memoir “Palimpsest” on running into Henry Kissinger at some kind of celebration for the American Academy at the Sistine Chapel hosted by the Angelli’s, the Fiat industrialists.
“The Agnellis had taken over the newly restored Sistine Chapel for an evening; then dinner for 150 in the Hall of the Statues, a brilliant long room with statues in niches like front-line troops poised to defend Olympus from the Titans.
“Among the crude Titans was Henry Kissinger. In the next few days he and I attended a half-dozen functions together. I have no idea what he was doing memorializing the American Academy; but the people who give money for such causes have made something of a pet of him, rather as they had made one of Truman Capote in an earlier time. I could hear the ceaseless rumbling voice in every corner of the chapel. The German accent is more pronounced in Europe than on television at home. He has a brother who came to America when he did. Recently, the brother was asked why he had no German accent but Henry did. “Because,” said the brother, “Henry never listens.” As I left him gazing thoughtfully at at the hell section of “The Last Judgement” (as pretty and bright now as Tiepolo), I said to the lady with me, “Look he’s apartment hunting.”
Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist 
Vidal was no leftist, but he abhorred hypocrisy and recognized the centrality of violence within American capitalism. His remark that Eisenhower killed more people than McVeigh brings to mind the controversy over the recent Idaho billboard to the effect that Obama has killed far more people than James Holmes. In this, he highlighted how the privileged use the state for their own perverse ends. His refusal to conform to the restrictions of monogamy also had a tremendous cultural impact.
Comment by Richard Estes — August 1, 2012 @ 5:46 pm
And he gets into some kind of hall of fame for the line “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer,” after Mailer knocked him down physically.
Comment by MB — August 1, 2012 @ 6:59 pm
Vidal on Buckley’s death: “I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.”
Comment by Richard Estes — August 1, 2012 @ 8:39 pm
I’d argue Vidal was indeed a leftist because, as Estes said: “he abhorred hypocrisy and recognized the centrality of violence within American capitalism.”
As such he shit chunks of reeling semi-tough cowards like Buckley out in his morning stool.
This proud gay man represents to LBGT/TG radicals what Joe Hill, Eugene V. Debs, Rosa Luxembourg, Howard Zinn plus Lenin & Trotsky due to us straight commies.
He was living proof that Trotskyist parties that embraced LBGT & Transgendered as historically oppressed (vs. the SWP which was reactionary in this regard) were the future of socialist politics whatever else their real & imagined sectarian faults.
He was anti-capitalist. He was Anti-War & raised a fuck you finger at racists & homophobes. His editorials in the Nation magazine were typically to the left of the Nation’s editors. If that doesn’t give you leftist credentials than what does?
If he wasn’t a leftist then sure as hell Proyect wouldn’t provide tribute to him on this unrepentant Marxist blog.
He’s given due respect here for a reason. Because he deserves it as much as Howard Zinn.
I say Gore Vidal presente! I will miss your Witt, witticism and ruthless criticism of everything existing.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — August 2, 2012 @ 3:25 am
Apart from his great one liners and scathing repartee, Vidal wrote history. We have to read that to decide where he stood on the left-right scale. Though he enjoyed, maybe excessively, playing the bright celebrity, he disliked not being considered, first of all, a serious writer of books.
Comment by Peter Byrne — August 2, 2012 @ 10:33 am
Karl: whether Vidal was a leftist is an interesting question because of his tendency to contrast the present with an idealized notion of pre-Civil War, states rights America, as he did in his book about McVeigh, if I remember correctly
but I’m willing to concede the point
your remarks about the significance of Vidal’s sexuality is important, especially because of the lack of engagement with it in the obituaries that I’ve seen
here’s what I wrote on my blog:
“Culturally, Vidal was a rebel in the right place at the right time. While refusing to characterize himself in terms of sexual orientation, he was, in the expanding horizons of the immediate post-war era, openly gay, without, oddly enough, drawing a great deal of attention to it. So much so that he polled more votes as a Democratic candidate in a conservative, upstate New York congressional district in 1960 than any other Democratic candidate had done in 50 years. He was matter of fact about his preference for men and his promiscuity, thus demonstrating that it was no longer possible to require people to conform to a public expectation of straight monogamy regardless of how they lived privately, personally foreshadowing the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the gay rights movement of the 1970s.
Of course, Vidal’s privileged background provided him with advantages in this regard, but he was still taking risks. He maintained that the New York Times nearly killed his literary career in the 1950s because of a novel that he wrote with an expressly gay protagonist, and Buckley no doubt thought that he was damaging Vidal greatly by calling him queer on national television in 1968. Buckley, perhaps confused by Vidal’s evasions about his sexuality, thereafter characterized him as an evangelist for bisexuality and an advocate for the acceptability of homosexuality. Vidal was much better in taking the true measure of Buckley, as he did when asked about how he felt about Buckley’s death: I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred. For people like Buckley, Vidal was a provocation in all aspects of his life, public and private.”
Could it be said in the case of Vidal that “the personal was the political”?
Comment by Richard Estes — August 2, 2012 @ 6:18 pm
Though Vidal’s sexual politics never varied, his civil politics made a long arc from the right. In 1945 he was “delighted” by FDR’s death.”He had got us into the war; he had established a dictatorship; he had defeated my grandfather in the election of 1936.” But in 1960 Vidal had Eleanor Roosevelt’s friendship and support in his run for congress. His views then were slightly to the left of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. That was a long way, at least in U.S politics, from his original Southern Democrat conservatism. Fifty years later his remarks were much more radical but pretty general. Maybe his real politics would have to be extracted from his novels, books like “Washington” or “Empire.” and from his literary essays. After all he was first of all a novelist, not a polemicist.
Comment by Peter Byrne — August 2, 2012 @ 9:18 pm