![\"Gore](\"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Gore-Vidal-during-a-Los-A-008.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI think that’s why he’s never been a favorite author of mine. Though I’ve read a handful of his novels over the years and his memoir Palimpsest<\/em>, none of his books made that great an impression on me. I do remember him wafting through Anais Nin’s Diaries<\/em> where he seemed fascinating and somewhat creepy, a young man on the make.\u00a0 Nin’s take on him was almost more interesting than Vidal himself.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery page I think, Jesus, what a fag. Jesus, what a faggot<\/em> this guy sounds.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Where do you start to unpack lines like that?\u00a0 Despite his attempts to blur the question, Vidal was gay, lived with a man and only had sex with men.\u00a0 And here he was, using “faggot” as invective.\u00a0 But putting that aside, what did he find in Lawrence’s work that evoked so much contempt?\u00a0 Vidal comes across in that bizarre outburst as an anti-intellectual boob, a yahoo–or a bigot.<\/p>\n Unless he was simply jealous.\u00a0 Because Lawrence reached artistic heights Vidal couldn’t even approach.\u00a0 Lawrence is one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.\u00a0 Can Vidal even compare?\u00a0 Has he written anything as profound or beautiful as Women in Love?<\/em><\/p>\n I’ve never revisited any book of Vidal’s and I’ve never wanted to. The New Yorker<\/em> piece quotes some of Vidal’s work but it left me as cold as the anecdotes of his studied hauteur. I’d happily read a new biography of Lawrence, though.\u00a0 And it’s probably time for me to go back to Women in Love, <\/em>which I’ve read a handful of times.\u00a0 O<\/em>r perhaps some of his wonderful short fiction.\u00a0 Or his pungent, quirky Studies in American Literature.<\/em>\u00a0 Or The Fox<\/em>.\u00a0 So many terrific choices…. Lev Raphael is the author of The Vampyre of Gotham<\/a> and 24 others books in many genres which you can find on Amazon<\/a>.\u00a0 You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com\/LevRaphael<\/b><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I grew up watching Gore Vidal on TV and enjoying his wit. He was a liberal version of William F. Buckley, Jr.: witty, insanely well-read, cosmopolitan, and delightfully snide. But like Buckley, he oozed privilege and contempt, and his act could wear thin. I think that’s why he’s never been a favorite author of mine. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[784],"tags":[625,629,628,619,701,633,634,624,630,627,626,631,621,623,622],"class_list":["post-1916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gore-vidal","tag-anais-nin","tag-biographers","tag-biographies","tag-gore-vidal","tag-homophobia","tag-internalized-homophobia","tag-jealous-writers","tag-jr","tag-literary-envy","tag-martin-amis","tag-novelists","tag-the-fox","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-william-f-buckley","tag-women-in-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1916"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2399,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions\/2399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>A writer friend recently recommended that I read Jay Parini’s new Vidal biography just as I’d finished reading a review essay about it in the New Yorker<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 That piece offered me an insight into Vidal I’d never expected.\u00a0 In the late 70s, Vidal told the novelist Martin Amis that he’d been reading D. H. Lawrence and this is what he thought about Lawrence:<\/p>\n<\/a>I’ve been reading and re-reading Lawrence for years.\u00a0 He can definitely be excessive and melodramatic, but his soaring prose always moves me, and so does his grasp of human psychology and his understanding of how passion can shipwreck us. Lawrence’s depth of feeling, his imagery, and his rhapsodic voice always blow me away when I return to his fiction.<\/p>\n
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