GLR May June

man book: with alcoholism and decline. “I have no intention,” Mewshaw writes in his preface, “of producing what Joyce Carol Oates [the three saddest words in the Eng- lish language, according to Vidal] has de- scribed as a ‘pathography’—the kind of lurid postmortem that dwells on an author’s deterioration.” The fear that he is producing a pathography, however, seems to haunt him: “Perhaps Gore Vidal should be permit- ted to rest in his grave, confident that neither I nor anyone else will reveal what he was ac- tually like. But in the case of a writer whose work and character have so often been mis- represented, I’m convinced that there needs to be a corrective portrait.” And that would have to deal with the fact that “alcohol, mas- sive amounts of it consumed over decades, did him incalculable damage, ravaging his physical and psychological equilibrium. This, it might be argued, was his private

in case chlorine is not enough to kill the virus. And Vidal and Austen remain healthy and Rome golden. Soon the Mewshaws are going to parties at Vidal’s place filled with actors, priests, film directors, writers, and male models—the sort of party we all wish we’d gone to, in a city we wished we’d live in, particularly at that time. And then, as time passes, things begin to change—for reasons that are never quite explained. All Mewshaw writes is: “As the rest of us enjoyed the sweet life, Gore in- creasingly seemed glum and off-kilter. … Death was more and more on his mind as he approached sixty, and a parallax yawned between his handsome, haughty persona and the paunchy, disconsolate man he was turning into.” For one thing, it was the booze. “In addition to great quantities of wine, he consumed Rabelaisian amounts of Scotch and vodka. The old cautionary tales

business. But because drinking undermined his work and his public persona, I believe that this topic and his long-standing depression deserve discussion.” Okay. But dandruff? Vidal’s dandruff first appears in a description of the great man in a bookstore in London as Mewshaw waits in line to have a book signed. Howard Austen, he writes, looks “drawn and pale. ... Gore, who had turned seventy in October, didn’t look much better. His shirt buttons were stretched to the popping point, and

about hard liquor, and his disdain for contemporaries whose careers had been wrecked by alcohol, no longer played any part in his repertoire. When warned that with his high blood pressure he had better cut back on drinking, he said that he would rather die.” But what caused this? Simply the loss of youth, the specter of old age, the failure of his own success to match what he had hoped for? (Vidal had serious political ambitions.) Mew- shaw thinks Vidal suffered for years from unacknowledged depression. At a certain point we learn that even the hustlers no longer helped. “Don’t tell me you can still get it up,” Vidal accuses a friend. “I need real technicians now, not street trade.” At the same time he started blabbing about sex at ele- gant dinner parties—talking about his ancestors’ genitalia, asking the women at a dinner party what they think of anal sex. The irony, Mewshaw writes, is that “for all his coruscat- ing chatter about sex, Gore struck me as one of the least sen- suous, least tactile men I ever met. Despite a drawling, relaxed voice, he was physically rigid, coiled. ... In his essay ‘Pornog- raphy’ he wrote that ‘an effort must be made to bring what we think about sex and what we say about sex and what we do about sex into some kind of realistic relationship.’ In his own life, however, he never appeared to come close to achieving that harmony.” Tim Teeman’s In Bed with Gore Vidal is about contradic- tions as well, though it purports to be a study of Vidal’s take on sex. Mewshaw’s memoir is simply richer and more rounded; he knew Vidal for decades. In Sympathy for the Devil we see Vidal in Rome, in the villa in Ravello to which he moved after Rome became too expensive and polluted, on a book tour in London, at a literary seminar in Key West, and home in Los Angeles; and we see him over time. We watch the man who, when Vidal and Mewshaw got to Rome, didn’t drink hard liquor. By the time the book is over, Vidal is downing Scotch and vodka throughout the day, but to Mewshaw’s amazement he seems never to have a hangover, and he always gets up the next day to deliver the article or interview as promised. So, inevitably we end up in the same place we do in the Tee- May–June 2015

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