Book review: Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies, Jay Parini

Jay Parini. Photo / AP

By the age of 25, Gore Vidal had written five novels, bought a huge pile on the Hudson River and claimed to have had more than 1000 sexual partners. He had served on a transport ship in the Aleutian Islands off Alaska during World War II and then, in The City And The Pillar, written one of the most important gay novels of the 20th century while living in an old convent in Guatemala. He had been pursued by Anais Nin in New York, met Andre Gide in Paris and E.M. Forster in London, and chased streetboys with Tennessee Williams in Rome. He wasn't hanging around.

This impatience for achievement never left him. As Jay Parini's new biography details, Vidal dreaded losing momentum, fearing the obliterating strokes of what he called the Great Eraser. This entailed a kind of creative promiscuity: he never finished one book before he had started the next, twice ran for political office, had two Broadway hits and wrote scores of screenplays and essays while never missing the chance to appear on television.

It was the small screen that made him big. While many high-minded intellectuals disdained television, Vidal realised its power. On screen, he exuded patrician charm and weary disdain, nonchalantly saying the unsayable and getting under his rivals' skin.

In 1968 he was pitted against the conservative intellectual William F. Buckley in a series of debates as Republicans and Democrats selected their presidential candidates. At one point, Vidal goaded his opponent by calling him a "crypto-Nazi"; Buckley bared his fangs, called Vidal "a queer" and threatened to "sock" him.

Vidal's reputation as a scourge of the establishment was made. In his celebrated essays, many of the best published in the New York Review of Books, he attacked the corruption of politics by corporations, the Cold War excesses in national security spending, homophobia, racism, the war on drugs and almost every aspect of American foreign policy. He relished revisionary history, debunking the reputations of revered presidents. And, at his best, he was nastily funny. The thumping great United States: Essays 1952-92 is his enduring testament.

Even the most ambitious and sweeping of his essays was always personal. Vidal's was a life lived in the public eye and he mythologised it as he went along, drawing on a store of polished anecdotes to charm his many interviewers. He wrote two memoirs, Palimpsest (1995) and Point To Point Navigation (2006), and appointed Walter Clemons as his official biographer.

When Clemons failed to complete the work, Vidal asked Parini, whom he had befriended in the mid-1980s, to take over. Parini agreed, but would only publish the book after Vidal was dead, as he was sure it would cost them their friendship. In the meantime, Parini recommended Fred Kaplan, who in 1999 produced a thorough biography that the controlling Vidal hated. Vidal, apparently, was insistent that Parini write the book, and gave him access to his diaries, letters and friends. They also spent a good deal of time in each other's company, right up until his death in 2012.

All of which leaves Parini, as a biographer, in a difficult position. His closeness to Vidal leaves him open to accusations of being either a hagiographer or a back-stabber. He is respectful of Vidal's work while being honest, often ruthless, about his personal flaws. For the most part, Parini keeps his balance.

Vidal gauged his ultimate success by his stature as a novelist and felt slighted when he was praised for his essays instead. Parini tells one anecdote in which Vidal, over a boozy lunch with Leonard Bernstein, insisted he was one of the greatest two novelists alive (the other being Saul Bellow). This, needless to say, was misguided.

Parini is frank about Vidal's "exhausting and debilitating" narcissism. Like Narcissus, Vidal proclaimed to disdain love, despite living with his partner Howard Austen for half a century; again like Narcissus, he was captivated by his own reflection, decorating the study walls in his spectacular Ravello villa with framed magazine cover portraits of himself. In later years he also lost himself, this time in an ocean of single malt.

Alcohol was the lubricant for Vidal's decline. His mother had been an alcoholic and Vidal staggered down the same path, later polishing off a bottle of Scotch a day on his own. The booze and hangovers fed his paranoia, thinned his skin and dulled his judgment. "When he was drunk, he could seem terribly racist and anti-Semitic," Parini writes.

That he became something of a crank is only part of the story, however, and one that Parini puts in its booze-addled context. There is no doubting that Vidal could be contradictory. He championed social justice but relished his connection to Princess Margaret. He attacked those with power but craved it for himself. He pricked pomposity with his pen but was an inveterate name-dropper.

Vain? Yes. Flawed? Often. But one thing was consistent: whenever he sat down with a pen, he wrote with guts and style.

Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies
by Jay Parini
(Little, Brown $65)

- Canvas, Telegraph