It’s interesting to speculate what its subject would have thought about Michael Mewshaw’s “Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal.”
Vidal, that cynic of cynics who died in 2012, had a sour view of friendship, borne out by his famous saying, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” He had equally caustic things to say about competition and success, borne out by his other famous saying: “It’s not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Of course it follows that failure is more satisfying to witness if those others are also friends.
Mewshaw has supplemented the usually modest sales of his books with teaching, Fulbrights and Guggenheims and magazine profiles of more celebrated writers than him, writers like Gore Vidal. Vidal was, of course, Gore Vidal; famous from the age of 20, famous for being famous from middle age onward, a TV gadfly and prosperous bestseller who lived in a palazzo maintained by a retinue of servants and counted Bruce Springsteen, Paul Newman and Hillary Clinton as friends.
At one point in “Sympathy for the Devil,” Mewshaw acidly anatomizes Vidal’s reviewing of the memoirs of Tennessee Williams, whom Vidal had known since he was a young man:
“That he should have recused himself because of his friendship with Williams never crossed his mind. This, I inferred, was the way the game was played at the top level. Punctiliousness about such matters applied only to midlisters like me who were instructed to step aside as reviewers if we had so much as a passing acquaintance with an author, his agent, or his publisher.”
Mewshaw first meets the expatriate Vidal in the seedy, dangerous Rome of the 1970s, an era marked by the slayings of the radical filmmaker Pasolini and Prime Minister Aldo Moro. For Vidal, Pasolini’s death at the hands of a young hustler hides a conspiracy that might implicate both the Mafia and the Catholic Church. His own “confidence is his talent for sniffing out plots” elicits this bon mot from Vidal: “Anybody who’s not paranoid is not in full possession of the facts.”
Spending time in Vidal’s company over the years, Mewshaw notices that, like Wilde, Vidal is continuously polishing and recycling his crisp epigrams.
“A narcissist is anyone better-looking than you are,” he tells an interviewer, and we suspect he has trotted out the quip a few times before. Mewshaw comes to find a repetitive and fixated quality to Vidal, that “for all his pretense of detachment, Gore seethed just beneath the surface with infantile rage.”
This will not be surprising to anyone who has read more than a few of Vidal’s essays. Vidal’s remembrance of his colleague and friend, Italo Calvino, for example, is fatally marred by a long and inappropriate rant on the state of American literary culture.
Vidal’s underlying rage is magnified as alcohol, always a presence, comes to dominate his life. He becomes bloated, more prone to falls and blackouts, and his conversation degenerates into cabal-mongering and embarrassing sexual gossip. In his 70s, as his body begins to fail him, the incontinence is physical as well as verbal.
Yet through it all, Vidal continues to produce a steady stream of work, capped by an impressive pair of memoirs, which, if they are not quite literature, manage to be elegant collections of first-rate gossip organized by an uncharacteristic knack for the perfect organizing metaphor. In “Palimpsest”(1995) and “Point to Point Navigation”(2006), Vidal gives us a privileged view of the innermost circles of political, dynastic and artistic power, a view that he believed gave him greater clarity about the way things really work.
Yet even here, Mewshaw finds much to quibble about. He questions Vidal’s veracity and discovers a lack of real self-examination. “Palimpsest” is “a bravura performance” rather than a masterpiece and rather than taking its place among the classics of introspective writing, it “shunted the stock footage of his life from one medium to another” and “wasn’t so much a memoir as a novel with a thoroughly unreliable narrator.”
Intermittently respectful of its subject’s achievement, courage, work ethic, iconoclasm and furtive acts of generosity, Mewshaw nonetheless manages to diminish Vidal not just as a man but also as a writer. So perhaps “Sympathy for the Devil” brings to mind not the words of Gore Vidal but of his friend Joan Didion, who drily remarked that “writers are always selling somebody out.”
BIOGRAPHY: LITERARY ICON
Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal
by Michael Mewshaw (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
