Gore Redux

Gore Vidal sits on the terrace of La Rondinaia, his cliff-top villa overlooking the Gulf of Salerno, south of Naples. The red roofs of Amalfi lie hundreds of feet below. Beyond are rolling coastal hills that disappear into a sapphire sea.

Vidal has spent most of the last thirty years here in his beloved town of Ravello. He talks about the confusion he has felt since the death a year ago of his companion, Howard Austen. “For fifty-three years I had some idea who I was, in relationship with Howard. Now, I’m not so sure.” At one point in our conversation, Vidal leans over to make a phone call, then sinks back into his chair. “I was about to call Howard,” he sighs.

Vidal will soon part with the second love of his life, this Renaissance-style villa where he has been living the life of an expat and hosting people like Greta Garbo, Princess Margaret, Tennessee Williams, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I run into Howard’s ghost in every room. I talk to him, but he doesn’t answer.”

When I met Vidal for the first time in Los Angeles two months earlier, a scheduled twenty-minute meeting turned into a four-hour session, a downed bottle of scotch, and an invitation to meet again in Ravello. After a couple of days at the villa, he spoke as if we’d known each other for years. I hadn’t expected the raw and open way he expressed his emotions.

“I’m sufficiently Greek in attitude to be stoic, and to know that if you are too happy, you will be struck down. That’s what happened. I suppose I knew it was coming and was more or less prepared, but you never really are. It’s pretty grim living here alone, so it’s time to go.”

About to start his eightieth year and hobbling around with a bum knee, Vidal is giving up his “self-imposed exile” to live permanently in the United States. He plans to add his voice to those opposing George W. Bush, and be another wild card in an election campaign already full of surprises.

“I’m a battleship,” he says. “I’m a destroyer. I’m meant for war.” He trails off in a long pause. “But I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”

For most of his life, Vidal has waged a struggle against what he calls the “United States of Amnesia.” He’s had a prolific career as a writer of film scripts, plays, controversial essays, and celebrated novels (including Myra Brekenridge in 1968, Lincoln in 1984, and The Golden Age in 2000). He has explored America’s past, unravelled its national psyche, and railed against its misdeeds. Most of all, he’s fought against the hypocrisy of those who talk democracy, but are more interested in the defence of property.

Vidal comes from an aristocratic family. He shared a stepfather with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and his father, Eugene L. Vidal, was the first director of the Bureau of Air Commerce in the Roosevelt administration and appeared on the cover of Time in 1933. His grandfather was the first senator from Oklahoma. He’s known presidents and princesses, celebrated writers, and billionaires. Through his work he has accumulated significant wealth. Yet his criticism of American society is no less compromising than a Chomsky or a Zinn. He’s a genuine class traitor.

“The next national trauma will be a sharpening of class struggle,” says Vidal. “There are two Americas: those that have and those that have not.”