Gore Vidal was far from the cold, unlovable man he liked to claim
Jason Epstein, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, was for 40 years editorial director of Random House, which published Gore Vidal's works.
Gore Vidal and I were friends long before I became his editor, a delicate situation in which the editor may be tactful but must be honest and so our long, delightful friendship, which I cherish, ended quietly with neither bang nor whimper. By the mid-90s Gore's career as a highly successful historical novelist, mostly on American subjects – Aaron Burr, Lincoln and so on – was fading, partly because of his failed attempts to repeat the success of Myra Breckinridge, his great comic celebration of polymorphous sexuality. Interspersed between his bestselling, much praised historical fictions were his weak efforts to extend the Myra formula to religion and similar topics, which confused and alienated readers of his historical titles and were not funny. Still worse, the Myra theme – in which a character traverses the sexual continuum from male to female as he/ she travels from coast to coast – was beginning to invade the histories themselves. The end came when he submitted a manuscript in which Saints Paul and Timothy are lovers, and so our friendship slept but did not die. I wanted to preserve it as it had been. His career as a writer of fiction then subsided, replaced by the polemical essays that were his real strength and for which his historical fiction had provided the context.
Gore famously wrote that he was "exactly as I appear. There is no lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water. Love is not my thing." With respect to sexuality this may have been true. He once claimed to have slept with a thousand people. On one such occasion I was present. I had walked over to his apartment in Rome near the Pantheon. We were going to a party later and were to have dinner first at a restaurant. He told me that he was expecting somebody from the embassy, handed me the New Statesman and said he'd be just a minute. I opened to a longish review by WH Auden, heard someone at the door, assumed that this was the man from the embassy and continued reading. When I looked up from the review Gore was ready to leave. "What happened," I asked, "to the young man from the embassy?" "He's gone," Gore said and we stepped into the elevator.
There is another side. On a summer evening at La Rondinaia, his glorious, messy house at Ravello above Amalfi on the Gulf of Salerno, we were having drinks before dinner – Gore, his companion, Howard Austen, and I. Their little dog, a miniature dachshund named Rat, a gift from Paul and Joanne Newman, was on the tiled floor dying of cancer, a red mass on his jaw. The day had been warm. The evening was cool. The night sky soft. We had stopped talking and then Gore said: "First Rat will die, then Howard, and I shall have no one."
In springtime we would hire a car and driver in Lyon and visit the great provincial restaurants. Père Bise on Lake Annecy, Chez Point at Vienne, Bocuse in Collonges, the magical Relais de la Poste at Magescq. Gore's formal education ended at prep school, from which he had joined the army. But he had read everything and when we had talked enough in the back of our car we could watch the poplars swivel as we passed. These were the best times with Gore, when we had nothing to think about but the last meal or the next one. I can see Gore now after dinner at Roanne mounting the stairs to his room clutching a bottle of Krug by the neck and turning to wave good night.
He thought he should be president and would have been better than most.
Read the Guardian obituary here