GLR May June

been given the assignment of attracting Vidal, there’s more when his old friend arrives: “A sad, shrunken doll in a rumpled blue blazer with an antimacassar of dandruff around his shoul- ders, he wore stained sweatpants and bright white tennis sneak- ers and sat slumped to one side in his wheelchair, as if the bones had been siphoned out of his body.” Vidal’s behavior at the Key West Literary Seminar is so bad, it’s hilarious—he’s the nightmare guest whose presence induces chiefly dread in his hosts: Can he get through it? At an inaugu- ral party at an art gallery, when the owner says, “Here’s some- one I’m sure you’d like to meet, Mr. Vidal. Joy Williams,” Vidal replies, “Why would I want to meet Joy Williams?” When one of the town’s leading lights, a man who has told Mewshaw he’s looking forward to meeting the writer Tennessee Williams in- troduced him to years ago, says to Vidal: “Gore, what a pleas- ure to see you after all these years,” Vidal replies, “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” And when a generous donor to the Seminar comes over to talk to him, Vidal barks “for somebody to ‘get this drunken cross-eyed cunt out of my face.’” Not your dream panelist, though Vidal went on to be filmed by C-SPAN in conversation with his literary executor Jay Parini and later in the year addressed the British Parliament and the legislature in Turkey, and conferred on a revival of his play The Best Man be- fore dying of pneumonia in Los Angeles not long after that. In other words, though much better written, more interest- ing, and more readable, Mewshaw does not come out in a place very far from Teeman’s gothic amalgam of interviews with Vidal’s caretakers conducted not long after his demise. So how does Mewshaw end up with something very close to a pathog- raphy after all? Is it just Vidal himself that makes it inevitable? Or is it the strange tax we levy on people who achieve great things? Or the difference between being straight and gay? In the end, the Mewshaws still seem like the young couple in The Rocky Horror Picture Show , or for that matter Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They, and many of Vidal’s friends, have had to put up with an awful lot. But when it’s over, the Mewshaws di- vide their time among London, Rome, and Key West, the par- ents of two grown sons and a grandchild, while Vidal has died a crazy drunk in a wheelchair. So he drank himself to death; so what? (Or rather, would it not be interesting to wonder why at sixty he began wishing to die?) Is there an explanation for it? Does it have anything to do with his genius, or was it just alcoholism? In this case, it’s nei- ther irrelevant nor explained. But surely we don’t read about Vidal because he died with wet brain. As with John Lahr’s re- cent biography of Tennessee Williams, Sympathy for the Devil portrays the tortured personality, the conflicts, the turmoil be- hind the public mask; but we never get what made both of these men the writers they were. Like Williams, Vidal was so witty, so quick, so sharp, he deserved a Boswell; instead we get these secondary figures who intersected with them as interviewers and survived to chart their terrible decline. Mewshaw’s memoir succeeds in its goal of showing us the variegated moods and as- pects of Vidal’s character; but what do he and Lahr want of their subjects, perfect mental health? It’s a bit like Orson Welles’ speech in the movie The Third Man (to condense): Renaissance Italy produced murder, the Borgias, Michelangelo, and Leonardo. Switzerland had five hundred years of democracy and peace and produced the cuckoo clock.

his blazer hung open, exposing a swagged belly. His shoulders were dotted with dandruff, and his parchment-dry skin had a per- manent crease on the right cheek.” Later, when Mewshaw and his wife had been invited for dinner: “Howard and Gore were drunk when Linda and I joined them in their suite at the Con- naught. Room service had sent up a magnum of Veuve Clicquot and a pot of caviar, much of which dribbled down Gore’s shirt- front, along with hard-boiled egg yolk and toast crumbs.” “Whom the gods would destroy, they first put hair on their backs,” Vidal once joked when speaking of Israelis, but dan- druff seems below the belt. I suppose one could say that it’s a measure of Mewshaw’s love for Vidal, his reverence for Vidal’s accomplishment and brilliance, that makes the details of his physical decline all the more horrific to him. Or it’s just a good writer’s eye for physical detail. Or the fact that decline is more dramatic than success. There is something Lear-like in Vidal’s long suicide by alcohol, his wish to die, his turning to senti- mental reveries about the prep school student Jimmy Trimble, who he claimed was the love of his life (a myth, both Teeman and Mewshaw conclude), his increasingly tacky behavior and offensive remarks. But that dandruff makes one wonder whether Mewshaw’s stated goal of showing the kind, conflicted, vul- nerable man behind the mask Vidal presented to the world has not been overtaken by the same inevitable Grand Guignol in which Teeman’s book is steeped, though Mewshaw’s is much better written, with a skilled writer’s eye for anecdote, punch line, and description of scene. At the Key West Literary Seminar, to which Mewshaw had

A CALOOSA CLUB MYSTERY

When drowned men’s bodies begin turning up in Lee County, Florida, Detective Bud Wright and sidekick Dan Ewing must set to work solving a series of brutal murders.

“Elliott Mackle is a gay Pat Conroy.”

—Dudley Clendinen, co-author, Out for Good

Purchase your copy at www.Elliottmacklebooks.com www.Amazon.com or www.BarnesandNoble.com

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