Media Platforms Design Team
I read him when I was 22 years old and a salesman. I had a subscription to the New York Review of Books, and I would read his essays in steakhouses along the highways in my territory — in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana. I wanted to be a writer then, but I had no idea that I could be one, and indeed it seemed that I already failed in my ambition — I was a traveling salesman, and my ambition to be a writer already felt like a memory. But reading Gore Vidal was something new. He was cold, angry, contemptuous, dismissive, and he said things about America that I had never heard said, that I never imagined could be said. The great fear, then as now, was that we were in decline, but this was a man celebratory of American decline, and certain that decline would bring about a second Constitutional Convention that would rearrange the social pact between us. "Certain" isn't even the right word for what he was; he wrote with the cold patience of someone who knew that time was on his side, and that the worst he could say about a person or a country would eventually be borne out. He wrote out of entitlement, and he wrote for advantage, and he wrote with a sense of inevitability, and I never read him again, once my subscription ran out, and I finally started trying to write on my own. I would see him on TV, in his later years, as he went from celebrating the possibilities of American decline to gloating over it, and I believed he had become one of the American grotesques he despised, a man who might have been asked to play a corrupt Roman Senator in a sand-and-sandals epic from the Fifties and who might have been pleased by the invitation. But what kind of American wants to be a Roman? What kind of American goes through life as if he were to the toga born, and his life's greatest tragedy is that he has to endure it wearing slacks?
--
REMEMBRANCES:
• What I've Learned: Gore Vidal
• The Living Embodiment of a Century, by Mike Sager
THE GORE VIDAL ESQUIRE ARCHIVE:
• A Manifesto for Saving the Human Race
• On the Wrath of the Radical Right
• On a Fist-Fight by the White House
• On RFK
• ...and the Legacy of the Old Frontier
PLUS: Read Gore Vidal's Best Essays from the Esquire Archive
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xKernqqklravucSnq2iZYWp%2BdH%2BOoKarnV2rtqWty2aYpp2inrCieZBqaW1wY2qAcA%3D%3D