Gore Vidal, 1925-2012
I read Julian first. I was an undergraduate and it helped me think critically about my Christian faith, triggering a thirty-year-plus process of reflection and analysis. Ultimately, it enabled me to have a more profound faith, which I am certain would have horrified Vidal. There always are unintended consequences.
The second novel was Washington, D.C. Although it was far from the best of his "American history" novels, it set me on the path of reading each and every one of them. Lincoln was and remains my favorite; Burr, a close second. As with Julian, they assisted my critical thinking about our country's history. In a way few Americans would understand or acknowledge, Vidal was a great patriot. He also possessed a rare ability to make his readers, hate him or love him, think.
I did not share some of his conspiracy theories. I don't believe Dubyah had foreknowledge of the attacks on New York or Washington in 2001 (other than that he ignored because he was too stupid to understand what his intelligence briefer was telling him or too lazy to care). But he put his finger squarely and accurately on the fact that most of our major wars have made us worse as a nation and that our fling into empire-building has been our undoing as a nation.
I wasn't particularly enamored of Myra Breckenridge or of Live from Golgotha. Possibly because I didn't read it until sometime in the late 1970s, I never found The City and the Pillar as earth-shaking as some do. Some of his essays were as good as the form got in the Twentieth Century. His stage and screen scripts were brilliant. He rescued Ben-Hur from being just another overblown toga-and-sandals epic that, but for his uncredited contribution, might have been compared with The Ten Commandments and found wanting. I thought Dress Gray was one of the sharpest t.v. scripts of its day and wonder why it has never been released on DVD. I am equally puzzled as to why he never wrote a screenplay based on Julian. I thought it the most "filmable" of his novels. But in general, regardless of the medium - novel, essay, letter, script, screenplay - I can think of only a handful of writers in the English language who were his superiors.
Though he took a rather dim view of Thomas Jefferson in Burr (one which he wrote that he did not personally hold, not entirely) I believe it would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall if the two of them were dining together. He was arrogant, abrasive, and perhaps too well aware of the fact that he was the brightest bulb on any and every porch. He was thoroughly un-American in that and that is why I enjoyed him so much during his lifetime and believe that our culture will be further dumbed-down without him.
He will rest beside his lifetime companion in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington and, although he did not believe in an afterlife, I do. I won't predict where his soul will end up, but if it is not in the happy place, it will confirm Shaw's observation, "Heaven for climate; Hell for company."