Touch than if I lived, let us say, in Anahaim, Orange County. Our corporate owners lie to us about everything except money, which they have to deal honestly with, in reporting, that is. I watch CNN, read the Herald Tribune, plus two Italian newspapers, the Guardian weekly roundup of Washington Post stories, Le Monde and the Brit Guardian.
How is your perception of American culture and politics influenced by your perspective as a resident of Italy? It was Vidal's commentary on American empire and the Internet that inspired the following interview, conducted via fax, with Vidal at his villa in Italy. Perhaps it's his extended exposure to the famous that allows Vidal not only to point out that the emperor's new clothes are not there, but that the emperor is actually an emperor and not just the prez (as he recently argued in Vanity Fair). But Americans have never cared much for irony. He is, at heart, a brilliant pragmatist, with a great sense of humor and irony. Reading through the dozens of reviews, stories and editorials that compose "United States" (accounting for approximately two-thirds of his published articles), it becomes clear that Vidal's reputation as a polemicist is something of a bum rap. Jack and Jackie, Tennessee and Anaïs all wander across the playing field, without their political or literary raiments - drunk, fragile, mendacious - as if caught in the harsh, incontestable light of a Polaroid snapshot taken by a sober nephew or cousin.Įven better are the essays. In his aptly titled autobiography, "Palimpsest," the personal and the historical rub shoulders again. Compare, for instance, "Visit to a Small Planet" or "The Best Man" to "Suddenly, Last Summer" or "Myra Breckinridge." His forthcoming novel, "The Smithsonian Institution," returns to his favorite political and sexual themes. Vidal's contributions to popular culture - both as an early writer for television and as a Hollywood screenwriter - expose human folly and frailty, in a more contemporary and occasionally picaresque mode. Thomas Gore and kin to Jimmy Carter, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and the current vice president, Vidal has woven his sitting room perspective of American politics into novels like "Burr," "Lincoln," "1876" and "Empire." It is his familial view of great people and events that makes them feel real.
Born at West Point and raised in Washington, D.C., the grandson of the legendary blind Sen. Gore Vidal puts us at ease with history, probably because he has spent so much time at its elbow.
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