GORE VIDAL:GORE VIDAL, the American writer, controversialist and politician manqué, who has died aged 86, was celebrated for his caustic wit and mandarin's poise.
His public career spanned seven decades and included 25 novels, numerous collections of essays, a volume of short stories, five Broadway plays, dozens of television plays and film scripts, and even three mystery novels written under the pseudonym Edgar Box.
After the September 11th attacks on New York and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, he returned to centre stage with a series of blistering pamphlets and public pronouncements that led many, including his former friend Christopher Hitchens, to disagree with him. But Vidal never looked back.
Despite his output as a novelist and playwright, many considered Vidal's witty and acerbic essays his best work. He liked to present himself as an insider - a man who understood the world and how it worked. This knowing quality, registered in the tone of his prose, permeates the essays. Their edge and vitality derive from his complete mastery of the scene he described, whether ridiculing Ronald Reagan as "a triumph of the embalmer's art", reassessing the presidency of John F Kennedy or outlining the theory of the French "new novel".
Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style.
Probably no other US writer since Ernest Hemingway lived his life so much in the public eye. His father was Eugene Vidal, Franklin Roosevelt's director of air commerce from 1933 to 1937. His maternal grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, a commanding figure in Washington politics for many decades.
His mother, Nina Gore Vidal, divorced his father in 1935, then married the financier Hugh D Auchincloss, who in turn divorced her and married Jacqueline Kennedy's mother, thus establishing a connection between Vidal and the Kennedy clan. Vidal's unflattering view of the Bouvier sisters was registered in Two Sisters (1970).
In 1940 he entered the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was an indifferent student. After leaving in 1943, he joined the Army Transportation Corps as an officer.
In 1944 he began his first novel, Williwaw. Suffering a bad case of frostbite, Vidal was invalided back to the US.
Williwaw focused on a rivalry between two maritime officers. In style it owed something to Hemingway and Stephen Crane. For a writer barely out of his teens when it was published, in 1946, the book was an unusual achievement. He was compared favourably to Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and Saul Bellow.
Vidal worked briefly in publishing in New York, but the critical success of Williwaw emboldened him, and he decided to live by his pen. Having little money, he moved to Guatemala.
By any standard, the postwar years were amazingly productive for Vidal, who published eight novels between 1946 and 1954, including The City and the Pillar (1948), an explicitly gay novel that challenged the homophobia he believed was ingrained in American culture. It was a bestseller, but the consequences were severe, and Vidal's literary career nearly ground to a halt. His next five novels were largely dismissed by the mainstream press and one can feel the hostility in the reviews.
After a period of wandering through Europe with Tennessee Williams (in Paris he was greeted by André Gide as a prophet of the sexual revolution), Vidal settled along the Hudson River Valley. Around 1950 he met his lifelong companion, Howard Austen. They lived together for 53 years, until Austen died in 2003.
Always intent on living well, Vidal needed more money than his fiction attracted, and turned to television, Hollywood and Broadway. "I am not at heart a playwright," he explained at the time, with typical candour. "I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer; and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations."
His finest moment in theatre was Visit to a Small Planet (1957), a play that ran for more than 300 performances on Broadway.
Vidal's screenwriting assignments included a vivid adaptation of Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer, in 1959. To the end, he kept a hand in screenwriting.
Having harboured political ambitions since adolescence, in 1960 Vidal ran for Congress as a Democrat in New York's traditionally Republican 29th District. He spoke out for the recognition of communist China, limiting the Pentagon's budget and increasing federal aid to education. Not surprisingly, he lost the election. In 1982 he ran in the Democratic primary for the US Senate in California, and was beaten.
Vidal's politics were always on the left side of the spectrum, and he derided the two-party system in his native land, arguing in the 1970s: "There is only one party in the United States, the Property party . . . and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat."
Soon after losing his first election, Vidal moved to Italy, where he would spend the bulk of each year until 2003, when he moved to a large home in the Hollywood Hills after Austen's death. In Rome, he wrote Julian (1964), a bestselling novel about the enigmatic Roman emperor who rejected Christianity and embraced paganism.
The late 1960s were a heady time for Vidal, who feuded with William F Buckley on TV during the Chicago presidential convention of 1968. That year, he lifted his satire to a new level of outrageousness with Myra Breckinridge. His narrator, Myra, was formerly (before a sex change) Myron, nephew of Buck Loner, a retired horse-opera star.
Of all his works, it is his sequence of novels on American history that may be his most lasting achievement. Vidal had nothing like a sequence in mind when he published Washington, DC (1967), a fairly conventional novel about politics during the era of FDR. Burr, the next to appear (in 1973), brings into play virtually all the author's various talents. Next came 1876 (published in 1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1990) and The Golden Age (2000).
Vidal continued to write satires, alternating them with American historical novels. These included Myron (1974), a sequel to Myra Breckinridge; Duluth (1983); and Live from Golgotha (1992).
He published a gossipy but moving memoir, Palimpsest (1995). Portraits of his friends and enemies were sharply drawn, including the Kennedys, Mailer, Capote, Jack Kerouac, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He followed this memoir with two sequels.
Vidal seemed to have known everyone and been everywhere, slipping easily from the political corridors and back rooms of Washington to the poolside patios of Hollywood and the salons of European writers and intellectuals.
When his editor in New York phoned with the news that Capote had died, he responded: "A wise career move." Although one can easily find connections between Vidal and previous US writers, from Mark Twain and Henry James to HL Mencken and Edmund Wilson, he remained an American original.
Vidal is survived by his half-sister, Nina, and half-brother, Tommy. - (Guardian service)
Gore Vidal, born October 3rd 1925; died July 31st, 2012