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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
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
11
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
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