This allows them to be clever and entertaining at their best but it also makes them, by and large, not very good novels. Unfortunately, Vidal is wiser than his books. In his new book, the author uses the crabby, gloomy Henry Adams.Īll three of these alter egos were much wiser than their times. In “Lincoln,” Vidal’s voice is the angled sophistication of Seward, who considered his President a bumpkin until he came to revere him as a great man. The voice of the failed adventurer, debunking the vain and pompous Washington, the piously devious Jefferson, the self-protective John Marshall and the whole uplift of our constitutional tradition-the Founding Fathers come out as so many progeny-gobbling Saturns-is the writer’s. Aaron Burr in the second novel, and one of the best, is thoroughly evoked in the historical detail of his scattered life. Using, appropriating, and sometimes even impersonating. He was dramatizing-even more than fictionalizing-his acid notions about the meaning of our history and national character, and using real personages to do it. It was about 10 years before Vidal returned to an American political novel and this time, he was doing something different and more interesting.

Perhaps writing a truly awful book can be useful in clearing the mind.

They are made up, and making up characters is not Vidal’s strength. Even naming them this way is a camp cliche, like Roy Lichtenstein painting comics. Its major characters include an old senator who is both corrupt and idealistic, a cynical newspaper publisher and an ambitious young politician. “Washington D.C.”-the first to be written, though the most recent in its setting-is sprawling and slack it makes Alan Drury look elegant. Vidal’s Washington novels began as scribbling. Alexandria as the infinitely disenchanted capital of Old Egypt, that is not Washington’s bedroom suburb. Now we are treated to the table talk and table manners of Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley, William Randolph Hearst and the two Henrys: Adams and James along with Vidal’s Alexandrian notions of what they all represented.

Blennerhasset-footnotes as well as Big Feet-Lincoln, Seward, Stanton, John Hay, William Cullen Bryant in their historical pajamas.

We had met Washington, Jefferson, Benedict Arnold, Col. In “Empire,” just published, he goes back for a missing chunk: the expansionist years of the Spanish American War and Manifest Destiny. In his fictional re-creations of our nation’s political life-”Burr,” “Lincoln,” “1876,” “Washington D.C.”-Vidal first-named his way from the Revolution and the Jackson era, to the Civil War, to the robber-baron Gilded Age, to a stretch running from the later New Deal into the McCarthy days. As mentor, Vidal has reservations about his protege. Gore Vidal and History are on breezy first-name terms, but there is a trickle of irritation underneath.

Empire of self a life of gore vidal