Gore Vidal has died

[PennLady]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local...riter-was-86/2012/08/01/gJQAFF7FOX_story.html

 

[estragon]

A very complex character. His play "The Best Man" was wonderful. "Myra Breckenridge" was years ahead of its time, a succes de scandale. But I felt I could never find the person under the persona.

And even though he never believed in any life after death, may he rest in the light.

 

[PennLady]

I have to add to my list of authors I haven't read but probably should.

 

[LaRascasse]

Myra and Myron were his seminal works.

 

[trysail]

The Impossible H.L. Mencken
by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
New York, New York 1991.



from the Foreward by Gore Vidal:
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mencken.htm

... A babble of words that no one understands now fills the airwaves, and language loses all meaning as we sink slowly, mindlessly, into herstory rather than history because most rapists are men, aren't they?

Mencken is a nice antidote. Politically, he is often right but seldom correct by today's stern standards. In a cheery way, he dislikes most minorities and if he ever had a good word to say about the majority of his countrymen, I have yet to come across it. Recently, when his letters were published, it was discovered that He Did Not Like the Jews, and that he had said unpleasant things about them not only as individuals but In General, plainly the sign of a Hitler-Holocaust enthusiast. So shocked was everyone that even the New York Review of Books' unofficial de-anti-Semitiser, Garry Wills (he salvaged Dickens, barely), has yet to come to his aid with An Explanation. But in Mencken's private correspondence, he also snarls at black Americans, Orientals, Britons, women, and WASPs, particularly the clay-eating Appalachians, whom he regarded as subhuman. But private irritability is of no consequence when compared to what really matters, public action...

***​

... Matthew Arnold wrote that a "style is the saying in the best way what you have to say. The what you have to say depends on your age." Mencken certainly said what he had to say about the age that he had been assigned to. When asked why, if he could find nothing to "revere" in the United States, he lived there, he replied, "Why do men go to zoos?"

Religion as generally practiced by the Americans of his day, he saw as a Great Wall of China designed to keep civilization out while barbarism might flourish within the gates. He himself was a resolute breacher of the Great Wall, and to the extent that some civilization has got through, he is one of the few Americans that we can thank. Plainly, so clear and hard a writer would not be allowed in the mainstream press of today, and those who think that they would like him back would be the first to censor and censure him.

As for Mencken himself, he wrote his own epitaph in 1921 for The Smart Set: "If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl." I realize that he has, viciously, used the G-word and, even worse, the long-since-banned H-word. But there he is. And there we are, lucky we.



http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/mencken.htm

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Apparently a talented writer but one with an extraordinarily high opinion of himself. Gadfly? More like PITA.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

You have to admire quick-witted, sharp-tongued and literate people such as Vidal. At least I do. Was he opinionated? Perhaps, although I found I could overlook that and just watch the sharpness with a touch of awe.

Why do I get the nagging feeling that the greatest proof of a conscious and meaningful afterlife is the sheer potential of the joke it would be that god finds Gore Vidal sufficiently intelligent, arrogant, and egotistic that he/she/it is compelled to 'stick it to him' in a personal interview right about... ...now.

In the nicest Vanity Fair way, of course.

Another great writer was Capote - god could he spin a yarn; although I never thought he could finish his stories properly. The first halves, though, were sensationally seductive.

 

[Athalia]

Gadfly? More like PITA.

Was there ever a true gadfly who was not a PITA?

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

Was there ever a true gadfly who was not a PITA?

Guarantee you that Socrates was a royal pain. Why do you think that they had him killed?

Gore Vidal had flaws, sure. That's part of being human. He also had integrity, something lacking in the pop culture of today. He was a man who made his own moral code, which is something to admire indeed. After all, if Jesus and Moses can do it, why not Gore Vidal?