Gore Vidal | Academy of Achievement (original) (raw)

You left out the mystery books.

Gore Vidal: No, you left them out.

You did not exactly have a conventional childhood. What would you call it?

Gore Vidal: Well, it was conventional in the sense that I was at the Republican Convention that nominated Wendell Wilkie in 1940. I was at two other conventions, Democratic, since my family was Democrat. It was very conventional in that sense. If you mean it was like the boy next door, no.

How would you describe your childhood? What was it like growing up in Washington?

Gore Vidal: It was wonderful. Family life was fraught. It’s never pleasant to have an alcoholic mother. I don’t think many children enjoy that, but you survive it somehow. I lived mostly with my grandparents, Senator and Mrs. Gore. He was blind from the age of ten, and I was precocious at reading, thanks to his brandishing his cane at me. So I would read to him. I was the only nine-year-old probably in the United States who understood bimetallism; he was on the Finance Committee of the Senate. I would often act as his page, take him onto the floor of the Senate, and they were giants in those days. Everybody thinks that about their childhood, but they really were. There was Huey Long, who was the funniest man that ever lived, and Borah of Idaho — “the Lion of Idaho” — they were all such performers! They were great actors. If you just studied them, it was like studying at the Old Vic or something. I really wanted to be a politician, but unfortunately, I was born a writer. When that happens, you have no choice in the matter.

That’s a rarefied atmosphere for a ten-year-old.

Gore Vidal: Yes, it was, but there was one ten-year-old who certainly appreciated it. I was fascinated by politics, and the Senate was the engine room of the country. Roosevelt was President during most of my childhood, still President when I went in the Army at 17, and he was the main political fact of the country, but the Senate, full of prima donnas, and each one saw himself as very much the equal of the President, if not his superior. So there was this tug of war going on between the executive and the legislative. We are getting a small, corrupt version of it (now), as everything we have today is small and corrupt, but we are seeing a bit of that, where the House of Representatives is telling the executive, “Go get lost. We are an equal power here, and you don’t just break into one of our offices.” Let’s say I never had to take a civics course.

What were you like as a kid?

Gore Vidal: Mean. I was brought up by Senator Gore. I was more of a Gore, which was my mother’s side, than a Vidal, who were rather pleasanter people from the Italian Alps. My father was a great athlete and a great designer of airlines. He started three airlines and Roosevelt made him Director of Air Commerce, and while he was Director of Air Commerce, he got me to fly when I was ten years old. You can get the Pathé newsreel footage to add to this portrait of me at ten, getting into a plane and taking off at Bolling Field in Washington in 1936.

The Gores were Anglo-Irish and there was one point, back in the early 1700s, when there was something like eight Gores sitting in the rump parliament in Dublin, all in the British interests, of course. They were Protestant. Then they immigrated here, and there was one point I remember — I was very young, but I remember it — it was a big story in the papers. The Gores were in charge of every legislature in the South. The Gores were running Alabama, they were running Georgia, they were running this, they were running that. If you look at the career of cousin Albert Gore, you can see how he got to be Vice President really rather quickly. He is related to everybody down there, as I am, although I don’t seem to be able to collect the votes that he does.

Were you a good student?

Gore Vidal: No. The schools hadn’t learned then, and they still haven’t learned. If I could have a second career, I would go into education. They teach nothing of interest to anybody. Talking of L.A., all these problems over in Van Nuys. That was Birmingham General Hospital where they have now got a high school, and the kids are not graduating, and they can’t pass algebra, they can’t do this, they can’t do that.

Well, it’s partly the teachers are not much good, but it’s partly there’s no tradition of reading, there’s no tradition of intelligence in the country. Everybody is pleased to be sort of dumb, and it is considered cheating if you learn anything. Well, this is a very bad atmosphere for the 21st Century. The United States is already on the ropes. We are behind in everything, including the skills of our schoolchildren. You have got to learn how to make it interesting.

I hated mathematics. My grandfather was a genius at math, even though he was a blind man. Every now and then he would think of my education, while I’m reading him The Congressional Record. “Trigonometry,” he said, “is the study of triangles.” And with that, my brain just turned off. I didn’t care what it was the study of, just keep it away from me. I must say, in the course of a long life, I have never had an occasion to do any trigonometry at all outside of the classroom. So it didn’t prove to be terribly useful. Why not go to useful subjects?

Two great subjects that are never taught, one is your body, general health. There are many old gentlemen who go to their grave not knowing where the liver is. They just don’t know. They don’t know what the heart really does, they can’t figure it, it’s all too complicated. Nobody will tell them. The other thing is money. They never tell you how to get a mortgage. At 12, I was perfectly willing to move out, several times — from my mother’s house, not my grandfather’s. I would have moved out if I could have got a second mortgage or even a first mortgage, but I was not allowed that luxury, because I didn’t know how to do it.

Start with things people are going to need, and then remember that the only thing interesting about the United States is our history, and start right off from the Revolution on, or even the Indian Wars. Do all that. It is wildly interesting, and it’s the most unpopular subject among children. I think it’s Purdue, once a year asks the graduating seniors all over the country in high schools, “Which subjects do you like the most?” And it is always packing or lunch. “And which do you most hate?” And it’s always American history. Now you have to be a genius to make that uninteresting. You have to really have great gifts of boredom, beyond the norm available to most people. I have spent my life writing American history, feeling a bit guilty, because I often think, “It’s hard work. Why am I doing this? The schools should have done it.” Why am I telling the country about Lincoln and Aaron Burr? It’s sad, because if ever a country was off on two or three wrong courses, it’s this one.

What motivated you when you were growing up?

Gore Vidal: Well, I wanted to go to the Senate like my grandfather. He was the major figure in my childhood. So politics. I might have gone by way of the law. The law fascinates me, and I have written quite a bit about the Constitution and constitutional law. It is endlessly interesting, particularly as it is being carefully screwed up now by “interested corporate parties.” Try to get every syllable out clearly. That was my major motivation.

Besides Senator Gore, were there other people or events that influenced you growing up?

Gore Vidal: My father was a great influence. He was a real jock. He was an all-American football player, a quarterback at West Point, part of the great winning team of 1917. He was captain of the team. I was the mascot. They lost the game to Navy. Nobody’s perfect. But his character was a great stimulus to me. Athletes who do everything easily — and he got a silver medal for the decathlon at the Olympic games in Antwerp in 1924 — great athletes are very serene. They have to be. I remember he said — he wasn’t talking to me because I was not interested in athletics — but he was talking to somebody, and he said, “Well, never look back.” In other words, if you’ve missed a shot at tennis, never think about it again, go right on to the next one. And this was terribly good advice about life’s hazardous ways, so I took that seriously.

What about books and films? What books or films influenced you, growing up?

Gore Vidal: I wrote a little book called Screening History, in which I go in great detail into the movies that affected me growing up. This was in the years of puberty, and so on. The Prince and the Pauper, based on Mark Twain’s novel with the Mauch twins in it. All of the propaganda films I loved, because they were political. There were something like 8,000 British secret agents in Washington, all trying to get to know my grandfather; the Speaker of the House, Sam Rayburn; even my mother, who had a great sort of salon in Washington. So all of these rather brilliant Brits were there to try to get us into the war on their side, because the Luftwaffe was bombing them to pieces, and France had surrendered.

I was living in the middle of history. The summer of ’39, obviously before 1940, with a group of boys from St. Alban’s, where I was in school — one of them being the son of Hamilton Fish, who was the great leading isolationist in the country — and we were first in France, and then we were in Mussolini’s Rome, and then we were up in Chamberlain’s England. I remember standing outside No. 10 Downing Street on the day that Chamberlain went to tell the House, “We shall be at war with Hitler.” If you are in the middle of history — and then we were on the last ship, the Athenia out of Liverpool — there was a 50-50 chance that we would not make it safely to the other shore. So all of that wakes you up to the real world.

It seems rather precocious that you were so involved politically at that young an age.

Gore Vidal: Well, I was what? Fourteen? Fifteen? The Gore family were the founders of the Party of the People, which was first organized up in Northern Mississippi, but it leaked over into Georgia, Alabama. The Party of the People — that’s where the word “populist” comes from, we are the original populists — we represented the farmers who had been destroyed by the Civil War, other people who were not doing terribly well in our society, particularly what we called Indians, but now are called Native Americans. It was a party for the turbulent poor who didn’t like their situation, and we promised, with great sincerity. It was an interesting party, it was also quite racist, but then the whole South was racist. My grandfather was not racist, and he lost his first race in Mississippi for Congress, because he was thought to be in too close with African Americans who lived in the southern part of the state, which was governed by the Bourbons, as we called the rich white people. We hated them just as much as the black folk did. So the Gores and the African Americans were always allies. So… comes also isolationists. We believed what George Washington said. When he left office, he addressed the nation, and he advised us to mind our own business. He said, “Nations, like individuals, ought not to have enemies, and they ought not to have special friends. Nations only have interests.” Very good advice, which I always took seriously, and still do.

The question that could arise in the minds of some aspiring writers is, “How do you get started? How do you go about writing?”

Gore Vidal: I remember being present when a Jesuit priest in Rome asked Tennessee Williams, “How do you write a play?” and Tennessee said, “Well, I start with a sentence.” Well, I start with a sentence, and that’s how you write a book.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Gore Vidal: No. I always tell people who say they are suffering from it, “Be grateful. You are lucky. You don’t have to do it, because you’re not a writer.” Writers don’t get this unless their brains go or they’re very ill or something. I think circumstances can drive them to being dried up, but no real writer ever gets that way. There are just some of them that have been kind enough not to go on writing all the time. Those, I honor beyond belief!

No self-doubt, no fear of failure?

Gore Vidal: All life is a failure since you are going to die. Why be afraid of it? That’s part of the contract.

Writers, among others, are subject to criticism. How do you handle that criticism?

Gore Vidal: I became a critic. Attack me and I will have your head. You must defend yourself. By and large, it isn’t worth it most of the time, when you think about who the critic is. If somebody I respected were to attack me, yes, I would be upset, somebody whose opinion I valued. But if you don’t value the opinion of some unknown journalist, why should it bother you? It’s like being bothered by the daily astrological signs.

You have never been shy about offering your own opinions and your own points of view, and often that leads to controversy. How do you handle controversy in your life and career?

Gore Vidal: Obviously I love it. I would not evoke it if I didn’t. The unexamined life is not worth living said Socrates, allegedly. One’s job as a writer is to examine the world around him. If that causes distress, so much the worse for those distressed.

Does a day go by when you are not writing? Is it something you have to do every day?

Gore Vidal: No, I don’t have to do it. I have slowed down with age, and I don’t think I can ever go back to those long novels that I wrote, all that history.

When you were writing those novels, or working in television or when you’re writing essays or commentaries, when all of this stuff is coming out of you, did you have a routine? Is it important to stick to one?

Gore Vidal: It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.

How would you describe the writer’s life?

Gore Vidal: Mine has been very interesting. I have lived in the world and taken part in many things outside myself. The problem with most American writers is they only write about themselves, and they’re not very interesting. I don’t care about why the marriage went wrong and why the author left his wife for the au pair girl when he did not get tenure at Ann Arbor, which really broke his heart. I mean these books should be written on Kleenex and disposed of. But everybody’s been told in the United States that he is interesting. “You are a very interesting person. I can just tell!” or “My feelings are just as good as your feelings.” Well, that is a fairly true statement, but what’s a feeling? We all have feelings and most of them are not worth dealing with. It’s what you know, it’s what you think, and if you have the gift of invention, very rare may I say, it’s what you make up.

What is a novelist’s role in society, relationship to society?

Gore Vidal: It changes. I would say it’s almost nonexistent now. People have stopped reading novels. TV and video games have taken the place where novels were once. When I was young, everybody read them. Now it seems hardly anybody does. Publishers are screaming, but they’ve contributed a great deal to the collapse of the novel as a popular art form. They publish too many bad books. They’ve overpublished all sorts of things, and then they’re surprised when nobody wants their wares, but that’s a business decision, which has nothing to do with a creative one.

What was your purpose in writing?

Gore Vidal: You try to get it down, what it is you see, what it is you think. When I was writing my first play, my producer was a very popular playwright called George Axelrod, a very bright guy. I was changing a TV play into a Broadway play, Visit to a Small Planet, and I would just knock out a couple of scenes in 20, 30 minutes. He said, “Think. Don’t write.” I said, “George, I only think when I write. I have no idea what I think about anything until I have written it,” and then sometimes I am quite surprised and sometimes I am quite appalled, but anyway, this is how you get it done.

As a writer, you have also been an advocate. Is a novelist, per force, a political player, a provocateur?

Gore Vidal: Some are, some are not, it depends on the novelist. I am pretty much engaged, as they say, in politics, a view of the world, which I like to express. That’s all temperament. I would have been that if I had been a baker.

If you hadn’t been a writer, what would you have become? Where would you be?

Gore Vidal: Pennsylvania Avenue probably.

You did try politics. You ran for Congress in 1960, and you ran for the Senate in 1982. So you never really abandoned that idea.

Gore Vidal: Well, it depends on how seriously you run.

Why did you run for Congress in 1960, and in Upstate New York at that?

Gore Vidal: I wanted to be elected, and a friend of mine, Jack Kennedy, was running for President. It seemed like the thing to do that year, and I had a play on Broadway. It was a political play called The Best Man. Where it’s fascinating for a political activist, like myself — forget a novelist, I don’t think in terms of people’s occupations — I wanted to see how much strength my ideas had out there. You can only do that if you run. You can’t do it by reading newspapers and listening to journalists. So I introduced all sorts of things in 1960 that shocked even my friend Eleanor Roosevelt, who was very much behind my race, and I came out openly, in Dutchess County of all places, which is very right wing, for the recognition of Red China at the United Nations. “Oh. Well, they must first agree.” Even she was getting nervous at what I was doing. I said, “Look, I have been talking to these people for nearly two years.” It was five counties. It’s the biggest district in New York. I said, “I have been talking for years with all sorts of different people. None of them can understand why Red China has been excluded from the United Nations since they have got a billion people,” or whatever it was then. It did me no harm, and of course, you learned a lot from them, because they do know their own interests.

I remember in the ’70s, the first oil crisis, we were just talking to businessmen up in San José, up in the northern part of the state, explaining to me how oil worked. I even got some early word, I think, on Enron. You learn a lot.

Did you expect to win that election?

Gore Vidal: In ’82, no. In ’60, yes, I was winning as of August according to the polls.

Were you surprised at how well you did in a Republican area? You got more votes that JFK did, and you got more votes than any Democrat had gotten there in 50 years.

Gore Vidal: Since 1910, yeah. Well, I wasn’t surprised, because of television. Everybody knew me. I probably was the guest most seen on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show. All of that can add up, you know, building an audience for yourself. I think that played a part in it, but also, I found that if you speak in a candid way to people, they quite like it. Most politicians are dreadfully boring because they don’t dare tell the truth. Telling lies, which is my little sermon this morning, is not good for character, and in the end, they catch you.

What would have become of you if you had won that election?

Gore Vidal: Oh, another old boring drunk senator from New York State, like Pat Moynihan. Plenty more where that one came from.

Why did you run in California against Jerry Brown? Why did you want to be a senator?

Gore Vidal: Well, he could be beat. He was easy to beat as it proved in the general election, and it was a good year in theory, at least when I started into it.

But this was not a lark. You were a serious candidate.

Gore Vidal: I don’t go in for larks. It is too much work. No, I was quite serious about it. The press is only interested in how much money you have raised. I would say, “Practically nothing,” which was true. I couldn’t tell them I had quite enough to pay for the election myself. For a Party of the People man, this didn’t sound quite right, so I could never say that.

Jerry was very weak, as he proved to be in the general, which he lost. He beat me in the primary. There were nine candidates. I came in number two with half a million votes. The understanding at that time was that Barry Goldwater, Jr. would be the Republican candidate for the Senate. Well, he would be easily taken care of. So I said, “Oh well, Jerry is weak, Barry Goldwater Jr. isn’t ever going to get elected. Then Barry dropped out! Meanwhile…

I was told the facts of life by Senator Cranston, a very nice guy. He said, “Do you know what you are getting in for?” I said, “Of course I do. ” He said, “Okay. Say by some miracle you get elected to a first term in the Senate and you want a second term. Most of us do.” He said, “You have to raise $10,000 a week for your entire first term of six years.” You can do the math, six times 52 is a lot of money. It means you are on the phone every day begging people for money, and I have never asked anybody for any money that I can think of in my life. I have never had a bank loan or a mortgage. Well, I did have one mortgage, which I paid off as quickly as I could.

Is it true that you never went to college?

Gore Vidal: No, I didn’t. When I graduated from Exeter, I went straight into the Army. That was 1943, but I had already passed the college board to go to Harvard. So I had a choice when my first book was coming out. I was getting out of the Army in ’46. Would I go to Harvard, where most of my classmates who had survived the war were going? And I said, “No. I have been in institutions all my life. Why go to another one, having just got rid of the Army?” I’ve always had nice relations with Harvard, and all of my archives are there, manuscripts, and so forth. So as I always say, “I myself did not go to Harvard, but I sent my work there,” where they have been very good about cataloguing.

You have a long list of published works in many genres. Of your own work, what do you value most?

Gore Vidal: I like the inventions, as I call them, like Myra Breckinridge, Duluth. These are totally invented universes. Anybody can describe Abraham Lincoln’s life, but not many people can invent my Duluth, which I had to move, you know, from the northern part of the country. I put it a little too close to New Orleans. I don’t know what shape my Duluth is in now. It may be a bit wet, but I moved it down there. I have a group of enraged Hispanics, called the Aztec Terrorists, that were trying to take over the town, and I have got two lady writers. One of them cannot spell, and reads with great difficulty, but she is very, very famous. She has won the Wurlitzer prize. There was a rather good young novelist, or he used to be young, when I knew of him, Wurlitzer. She keeps repeating it, because it sounds like Pulitzer, which didn’t come her way. It’s about irreality. Everything changes. Once you think you understand what a situation is, it proves not to be the case, it’s something else. There is a spaceship in it, filled with giant cockroaches, and everybody is bored by it. Nobody wants to even open the thing. They just say it is going to be boring, so the spaceship sits there through most of the book, and it plays a part at the end. Not living up to expectations is a nice thing to do in prose.

How do you measure achievement?

Gore Vidal: Never bother.

Let me put it another way. What gives you your greatest sense of satisfaction?

Gore Vidal: I think live audiences. I might have been an actor at one point, except I couldn’t learn lines. I did a play on Broadway, Trumbo, which was reading letters basically. It’s a two character piece. It’s live audiences that turn me on. I was discussing it with Senator Wheeldon. He was an Australian politician who’s just died. He was a leading labor politician in Australia, he was in Whitlam’s cabinet, and he had been a great criminal lawyer. We were talking about the greatest moments in our lives. They did not include romance, sex, beauty, art, truth or wisdom. It was interacting with an audience. He said he had a definite murderer that he got off. An entire jury voted the way he wanted them to, and this terrible villain was freed. I said, “You mustn’t be too proud of that.” He said, “It’s art. It was the art of defense. I am a criminal lawyer.” He asked me what was my greatest moment. I said…

It was ’72, and Nixon had just beaten McGovern, and I was lecturing at this big, old 19th century building in Boston. Something Hall, not Faneuil. It’s a big red brick 19th century building. Jordan Hall! I was opening a season. There were about four galleries, it was packed. I had a new speech, which is always awful to give and I ended up having to read it, which is even worse. So it was getting pretty depressing, but when I came to questions and answers, it got very lively. Elaine Nobel, who later became the first lesbian assembly woman in Massachusetts, she was in the gallery. I didn’t know who she was. She was just in the gallery, we met later. She asked me, “How do you explain that Massachusetts is the only state that voted against Nixon in the last election?” I said, “Well, I can flatter you by saying this is the Athens of America.” Dutiful applause. I said, “I am not going to do that. I think I should remind you that since the beginning of the Republic, Massachusetts has been the most corrupt state in the Union, and you know a crook when you see one.” Well, the eruption of applause, it was like a tsunami hitting you. It pushed me about two feet back of the lectern. I have never felt anything quite like that. Anyway, that’s how I one-upped Senator Wheeldon, savior of murderers.

Do you have an audience in mind when you are writing?

Gore Vidal: No. How could you if you don’t know who anybody is or where they are?

What prepares someone to be a novelist, if that is the life they are interested in?

Gore Vidal: Reflectiveness about the world they are living in, trying to make sense of it. A lot of novels, I suspect, come out of people who have been severely shocked at some point in their lives, and never quite knew how to live with the shock, so they want to reconstruct it by writing about it. It’s just kind of obvious therapy. The art novel is something more special, and that comes out of a deep knowledge of the art, such as you get in Henry James, who really was our greatest novelist. He never thought of anything else but fiction itself, the perfect phrase, the perfect encounter, the perfect clash. The Golden Bowl is full of the most astonishing scenes. His imagination just was so driven in that book that it is like nothing else.

If an aspiring writer came to you for advice, what would you say to them?

Gore Vidal: If you need my advice, don’t do it. You won’t be happy doing it. It’s not easy, but if you are a natural at it — as you are bound to be if you keep at it — then it’s certainly not onerous, and it has all sorts of satisfactions along the way.

Looking back, do you have any regrets, things you wish you could do over again or would do differently?

Gore Vidal: I don’t think so, no. Whatever I did was obviously what I should have done at the time, or so I thought.

As we head into the 21st century, what do you see as the biggest challenges that we have in America? What concerns you most?

Gore Vidal: Survival. I think there is a very good chance that we won’t get through the 21st century due to all the usual reasons, you know, environment gone wrong, the end of fossil fuels, inability to replace them with ethanol or whatever. I think going broke. We have already lost the Constitution of the United States. That is gone, and that is not going to return ever. Maybe in the lifetime of somebody one year old, it might come back, but I will never see it. You will never see it. The young people watching this might never see it either.

Everything is smashed. We had a wrecker’s crew got in office, and they set out to do everything that you ought not to do: first, to the economy; second, waging preemptive wars against non-enemies, people in no position to do us any harm even though they wanted to. At the time of the attack on Iraq, I said, “Why don’t you hit Denmark? It makes much better ruins and it would be more satisfactory, because it’s a beautiful place. Iraq is kind of a mess.” Every move that you make that could be wrong has been made, but terminally made. You don’t get Constitutions back all that easily. You don’t get the Fourth Amendment back once you have people taking off their shoes at the airport and you go through all the luggage, and you listen to their conversations. And there’s no objection to it. It’s as if Americans had never experienced freedom of any kind. It’s is if we were living in Paraguay all these years.

In one way, I think we have it coming to us. I am not in a kindly mood about my countrymen. On the other hand, I am in a kindly mood in the sense that they never voted for these people. They had no idea what they were voting for. Even 2004, when it was quite apparent about the war, and so on, they could have voted against that anyway, but we will never know because the voting machinery, Diebold, Triad, ESS, these all have been corrupted. We don’t even know what the votes were in Ohio in 2004, and Florida in 2000. We will never know. Once a so-called democracy gives up its elections for the leader of the country, it is not a democracy. It isn’t anything. It is a sort of Romanesque hull, full of corrupt people who tell lies. This is not good.

Why do you think this has happened in America? How do you think we have come to this?

Gore Vidal: Vanity! It’s the only explanation I could ever come up with about Vietnam. “How dare this inferior little people…” we thought, although basically their civilization is much older than ours. “How dare they defy us?” “How dare Panama? We are going to go down there and seize their leader and throw him into prison.” Even though we have no legal rights over him at all. That was Noriega. Then we get a narrative together. “Oh, he is in charge of all the drugs on earth and he is a great admirer of Adolf Hitler, did you know that? He has got a copy of Mein Kampf!” “Oh no!” “Yes!” “God, he must be evil.” “Yes, he is.” All these evil people they find everywhere on earth. They could look in the mirror occasionally, if they wanted to see something really evil.

How would you like to be remembered? What do you want your legacy to be?

Gore Vidal: I don’t know. Anyone who worries about being remembered ought not to be born.

Is there anything you have not had a chance to say that you would like to say?

Gore Vidal: If you have another two or three hours, I will start in at the basement, and we will work our way to the roof.

Thank you. That was fascinating.