Gore Vidal: American Prophet

Summary

Photo by Joseph Leombruno/Condé Nast Via Getty Images Towards the end of his long life, Gore Vidal would just fill up with fluid. The 86-year-old died painfully. The biographers do not record what liquid was drained from Vidal’s body as he rotted away in the ruins of his final home – a Spanish revival mansion on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills – only that he needed to be voided on a daily basis. What was in him? Chyme? Gastric acid? Black phlegm? I suspect it was bile. By 2010, Vidal was waterlogged, a storied and slowly sinking destroyer. He could no longer control his bladder. He hallucinated. His brain, the doctors said, was “wet”. He had dementia and congestive heart failure and a tendency to excommunicate what few friends remained, or banish once-loved nephews he believed were spying on him for the Central Intelligence Agency. Old comrades turned away. Christopher Hitchens accused him in Vanity Fair of hawking “crank-revisionist and denialist history”. At the time, Hitchens was the spokesperson for a large constituency that believed liberal democracy could be spread throughout the Middle East by the US Marine Corps and the Fifth Fleet. Vidal thought that elements within the Bush administration might have allowed 9/11 to happen. He also predicted that the US would be run out of Afghanistan, paving the way for China to resume its historic role as a world power. Vidal seemed mad and sad and alone and drunk. His writing – his writing, Vidal’s, whose essays had been compared to his hero Montaigne’s – no longer seemed contemporary. It was the early Obama era. The cargo-cult optimism that accompanied the 44th president’s rise was not yet completely dispersed. And there was Vidal, who couldn’t read the room any more, gabbling from his wheelchair about the downfall of the United States, writing and saying everything was bad and would only get worse. Maybe he had nothing left to say, mistaking the decline of his own flesh and mind for the decline of the world itself...