I’m always asking why Gore Vidal hasn’t gotten his due, and why it doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. I’ve cracked the case wide open and it’s devastating.
Everyone knows that after a celebrity dies, there is a window of time where the culture reflects on their life and decides how they will be remembered, there’s eulogizing, young people learn about people they might of only had a vague name sense of before, there is the potential for someone to be noticed at the time of their death, as actually very cool and ahead of their time all along. How did this not happen to Gore Vidal when he died in 2012? He published an explicitly gay novel in 1948! He was anti-war his entire life! He was a class traitor! He was a man of letters! He was so hot! Myra fucking Breckenridge!
Well I blame Jay Parini. Jay Parini published the only posthumous biography of Gore Vidal in 2015 and Knopf publishers calls it “authorized” even though Jay Parini says in his own introduction that he intentionally deceived Vidal for decades about his plans to publish after his death, he knows GV would consider Empire of Self a betrayal, and that he’s “not looking forward to our meeting on the other side.” Gore Vidal’s estate was litigated after his death and it all belongs to Harvard, perhaps they’re allowed to call it authourized because Harvard authorized it, but thats not what they’re trying to imply, obviously.
In the early 1990s Vidal asked Jay Parini to take over writing his biography but he didnt take the job. “My wife, perceptively, insisted that I decline, saying that I would have to choose between the biography and my freindship. I couldn't have both. She understood that he would try to control what I wrote at every turn, driving us both insane. So I decided then to write a book that could only be published after his death.” He says he kind of fake wrote a book for years? And then on one of their last visits together GV wondered if he would ever follow through and finish and makes it clear he would still want him too. The quote really doesnt sell it to me that Gore authorized a posthumous biography. Parini says himself that he knows what he did end up publishing is explicitly against Gore’s wishes. Parini strung him along for 30 years knowing he would write a self serving salacious mean-spirited tear down after his "friend" died. He compliments himself for having the "patience" to "stick it out," with his plan because Gore is such a difficult person and it was expensive to travel to see his "friend" over the years. It's so mean. Right from the very first pages it's so mean.
One of the ways Jay Parini tries to make his splash is by casting a lot of doubt everywhere, on core narrative elements from Gore’s life he didnt waver about in 60 years. we will get into the examples of this as i develop this, but let me open up with casting a little doubt of my own.
I’m sorry to make you do this, but please read these abridged opening paragraphs of the intro to Empire of Self:
My freindship with Gore Vidal began in the mid-eighties when i lived for a period on a sabbatical with my wife and young children in Atrani, a village on the coast of southern Italy. We rented a small stone villa on a cliff overlooking the sea, …….We had a rooftop terrace, above which rose a lemon grove and limestone cliffs. A massive villa - alabaster white....loomed above us, and we wondered who lived there in such opulence. Some Italian nobleman? A local mafia don? A film star?.........I admired his commentaries in Esquire and The New York Review of Books. I never forgot his fiery debates with William F Buckley…..I’d read half a dozen of his novels,.......responding to a note I'd sent gore pounded on my door one afternoon not long after our arrival, inviting my wife and me to dinner. I was terrified, as his reputation preceded him, and thought he might be tricky
Ooooh, Big Jay, I think you’re lyin’. I dont think there is one fucking chance in the entire universe you accidentally, unknowingly, rented a villa as close as you could possibly afford to Gore’s house in Italy when you were “on sabbatical” only a couple of years after you finished your PhD anyway. I think you targeted him. You have made your career riding coattails, your only recognized work is writer bios and your special spin on well trodden ground is revealing more than ever of their messy difficult private stuff and adding your little Freudian take on their personality.
Jay Parini is a lot of things: an unreliable narrator, a clout chaser, unethical, a climber/poser, extremely privileged, a professor emeritus at middlebury college…..but he is not, and never was, a friend of Gore Vidal.
The whole fucking thing was based on a lie from the very begining. But im sure Gore knew this. I dont think he would be confused or taken by such a lie. He probably at best thought it was cute and flattering and enjoyed this middle aged man moving his whole family to his front yard in Italy, immediately attaching himself to Gore, and pretending all the while it was happenstance. Unlike Parini himself, and unlike the epitaph hes tried to carve for GV, we know the truth, Gore was kind and classy.
Welcome to this many part series, where I go off on the vulgar homophobic pile of shit “Empire of Self” by Jay Parini.
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