Thursday, September 25, 2008

Gore Vidal: He Was Sad, Not Just With Age .. But The Indelible Melancholy Of The Court Jester



A writer whom The Corsair deeply respects once said over lunch that they noticed that in his old age Taki Theodoracopulos, in a previous incarnation a Old Right-leaning playboy, had become, in the Winter of his life, a fierce critic of the status quo because he saw what his country was becoming. Similarly, Gore Vidal, who is about as far to the left as Taki is to the right, has arrived, ironically, at the same point on the political spectrum. The Far Left and the Far Right are one on their scorn at the financial management of the country. And that scorn is as haunting and perhaps as impotent as Elgar's cellos. From The Telegraph:

"(Gore) Vidal, 83, was introduced by Naughtie as 'passionate, mercurial, even irresistible.' He showed himself as patrician ('We did run the country and we're running the empire as of this moment. Not very successfully'). He was also prophetic (the novel will die before the essay) and vehement (on having a fight with Bobby Kennedy, 'whom I loathed, with good reason').

"This being a Book Club, not a Today show, Naughtie did not dwell on this fascinating declaration but gently moved Vidal on to more audience questions about his own abortive political career. The questions, however, were answered by flights of fancy, darts of scorn, shafts of insight, unexpected displays of mimicry (Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Greta Garbo). He couldn't bear to be earnest, so he pretended not to be serious. But serious he was and sad, not just with age and infirmity but the indelible melancholy of the court jester."


Will the next generations remember Gore Vidal's syntactically perfect sentences? Does anyone outside of academia still read W. Somerset Maughman for fun?

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