So farewell then, Gore Vidal - dull novelist and master of malign compassion

I can’t even imagine the hoo-hah that calling a homosexual "you queer" on television would cause today (unless it was by another homosexual, of course).

I enjoyed Gore Vidal’s essays and frequent TV appearances until my mid-twenties, when I realised that, while he might display good literary taste, he was invariably wrong about everything else. The penny finally dropped when, being interviewed by Michael Parkinson during the Thatcher era, he claimed the economy of Italy (where he lived) had outstripped Britain’s, and advocated that the UK should be turned into an American-owned historical theme park. The audience tittered nervously, when I would have preferred them to storm the stage and thrash the patronising ponce for his damned impertinence.

Like many people, I found Vidal’s novels unreadable. Whether dealing with great figures from American history or Roman Emperors, or being smutty about gender issues in modern life (I mean - who the hell cares?), I found him an unengaging writer. Even when I was interested in the subject – for instance Aaron Burr or the Emperor Julian – I could never get past chapter two (I don’t think I even made it that far on the several occasions I tried to read Myra Breckenridge).

The reason I attempted to read the novels was that Vidal was, for a while, a splendidly entertaining writer of essays and articles: the format allowed him to sweep one along on waves of patrician contempt for writers he considered less talented than himself (that would be every other living novelist), especially if they outsold him, and politicians, all of whom he evidently considered lower-class, philistine upstarts. Vidal ran for Congress in 1960 (supported by Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Newman, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about his political views) and lost. In 1982 he ran against Jerry Brown in California in a Democratic primary senate election, and lost. For a descendant of American political aristocrats, this must have been lowering: successful politicians such as Eisenhower (“the great golfer”), Reagan (“a triumph of the embalmer’s art”) and Dubya (“the stupidest man in America”) really got his goat.

As far as Vidal was concerned, every successful American politician was in the pay of the military-industrial complex. None of them had any interest whatsoever in the well-being of the common man: they were all in it for themselves. America was always in the economic doldrums. Every military intervention was imperialistic and expansionist in intention. Any foreign regime supported by the US was, by definition, evil and oppressive...

All straight out of the poisonous lefty “parallel universe” handbook.

What finally made one tire of the drawling doom-sayer’s schtick was his ardent proselytising for homosexuality (for Vidal, there was no meaningful difference between the procreative act and sticking your dick up some other chap’s backside); his loathing for Christianity (“the great unmentionable evil at the centre of our culture is monotheism” – which is no doubt why regimes which outlaw religion invariably produced such rich, enlightened, empowering cultures); his hatred of anyone in America who had made money by working hard at grubby, non-literary pursuits; and, despite his constant belly-aching about the “poor” and blacks and the Left’s other favourite victim groups, his withering contempt for the Great Unwashed (“At any given moment, public opinion is a chaos of superstition, misinformation, and prejudice” – yes, that’s right, Gore, we’re too stupid to form our own opinions based on facts, common-sense and basic human decency: why don’t you tell us what to think?).

On that last point, he once made the following interesting statement: “You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life, and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country.” In psychiatry, I believe this is characterised as denying one’s own faults by projecting them onto others.

Vidal also probably made more truly asinine statements than any other clever commentator in the 20th century:

We’re the most captive nation of slaves that ever came along. The moral timidity of the average American is quite noticeable. Everybody’s afraid to be thought in any way different from everyone else. 

[John] Lennon was somebody who was a born enemy of those who govern the United States. He was everything they hated. So I just say that he represented life, and is admirable; and Mr. Nixon and Mr. Bush represent death, and that is a bad thing.

I mean, that’s piss-poor undergraduate debating society tosh of the very lowest order.

There are three sorts of political views I despise: the sort that are adopted purely because they make the “thinker” feel good about themselves (i.e. most liberal opinions); the sort that arise purely from negative emotions such as fear, contempt, resentment and hatred (i.e. most totalitarian opinions); and those based on malign compassion – you support certain victim groups not because you actually feel sorry for their suffering, but purely in order to annoy people you don’t like. All of Gore Vidal’s opinions seemed to belong to one or both of the last two categories. His support of any cause appeared to be for purely for negative reasons - and that’s what eventually made his world-weary, Age of Enlightment aristocrat performance unbearable three and a half decades before his death this week.

When William F. Buckley died four years ago, Vidal displayed his humanity by hoping his great political arch-rival would wake up in hell. Because Gore Vidal’s essays stimulated me for years – and because I’m a follower of one of those monotheistic religions he despised -  I don’t wish him the same fate. But I’d love to have seen his face when he woke up to find himself face-to-face with the Supreme Being. Not so smug now, eh, Gore?