Remembering Gore Vidal, American Essayist

Gore Vidal, who died on Tuesday, will be remembered as one of the first American writers to deal openly with homosexuality in his fiction. He'll also be remembered for his failed efforts to follow his grandfather into politics and for his feuds with William Buckley and Norman Mailer.

But above all, perhaps, Vidal should be remembered as one of the finest American essayists of the past century. "His essays celebrate the triumph of private values over the public ones of power," said poet Stephen Spender. "They represent the drama of the private face perpetually laughing at, and through, the public one."

In 1993, Vidal received the National Book Award for his collection United States: Essays, 1952-1992. Professor Samuel Pickering commented at the time on Vidal's distinctive persona and penetrating prose style:

In his essays he is a man of little doubt and much certainty. The labor of 40 years of good writing has tightened Vidal's prose beyond doubt. Instead of the fashionable and critically alluring spectacle of a man struggling with himself, Vidal presents the hammered results of laborious thought. Instead of "process," readers get conclusion. . . . To put it simply Vidal is very much an 18th-century writer. His sentences snap like couplets. His wit sparkles then explodes.
(Samuel F. Pickering, "Living Appropriately: Vidal and the Essay." In Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain, ed. by Jay Parini. Columbia Univ. Press, 1992)

With the highest regard for the man who said "Write something, even if it's just a suicide note," we pass along some of Gore Vidal's observations on writing and rewriting.

• What a Writer Needs to Succeed
  A writer needs energy most of all. Physical energy and imaginative energy.
  (Interviewed by Jay Parini in Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. Columbia Univ. Press, 1992)


• Style
  Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.
  (Quoted in The Daily Express, 1973)


• Work Habits
  I often read for an hour or two. Clearing the mind. I'm always reluctant to start work, and reluctant to stop. The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes. Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That's why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.
  (Interviewed by Gerald Clarke in "The Art of Fiction No. 50." The Paris Review, Fall 1974)


• Essays
  Money . . . gave me the leisure to become an essayist. I spend more time on a piece for The New York Review of Books than I ever did on, let us say, a television play. If my essays are good it is because they are entirely voluntary. I write only what I want to.
  (Interviewed by Gerald Clarke in "The Art of Fiction No. 50." The Paris Review, Fall 1974)


• Revising
  I write first drafts with great speed but the older I get (a familiar observation, I know) I rewrite more and more. When I first started, it was like egg-tempera--flat, quick-drying, on a wall, one got it right or one didn't. . . . I'm more an oil-painter now. More deliberate. A good deal less certain.
  (Interviewed by Eugene Walter in "Conversations With Gore Vidal." Transatlantic Review, Summer 1960)


• Comment Upon Comment
  My line to Dwight McDonald, "You have nothing to say, only to add," really referred to me. Not until somebody did a parody of me did I realize how dependent I am on the parenthetic aside--the comment upon the comment, the ironic gloss upon the straight line, or the straight rendering of a comedic point. It is a style which must seem rather pointless to my contemporaries because they see no need for this kind of elaborateness. But, again, it's the only thing I find interesting to do.
  (Interviewed by Gerald Clarke in "The Art of Fiction No. 50." The Paris Review, Fall 1974)


• Where Are the Readers?
  You hear all this whining going on, "Where are our great writers?" The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?
  (Interviewed by Mike Sager in "What I've Learned: Gore Vidal." Esquire, June 2008)
  
  There will always be a certain amount of good writing, but what I have to wonder is who will read it? . . . On the other hand, I keep writing--novels, essays, screenplays. Again, it's simply what I do. I'm a writer.
  (Interviewed by Jay Parini in Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain. Columbia Univ. Press, 1992)

More Writers on Writing:

• Norman Mailer on Writers and Writing
• William F. Buckley on Words
• Natalia Ginzburg: On Being a Great Small Writer

Image: Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, by Gore Vidal (Little, Brown and Company, 2008)