“I have no wish to do more than describe a man I admired and valued as a friend,” writes Parini, and for much of the book we simply follow Vidal’s pivoting from project to project, place to place. “Empire of self” plainly indicates Parini’s focus on Vidal’s blob-like expansion of himself into the culture, from the graphomania of novel writing to his many appearances on talk shows, and from his nose-tweaking of America’s sexual and moral codes to his failed campaigns for political office. His third, The City and the Pillar (1948), implied his coming out as gay – though as Parini says, “He certainly liked the idea of being bisexual, as the notion of being exclusively gay had very little appeal, pushing him too far into the margins of society.” By age 25, he had already published four novels. What drives a writer to keep answering, and to what? Is it a promise, a compulsion, or both? Parini’s spry biography compels the reader to ask these questions about the writer described by the BBC as “America’s greatest living man of letters.” His output over a lifetime included 25 novels, two plays, 200 essays, a memoir, teleplays and screenplays.

One reason to read a literary biography is to sense the source of the promise and the shape of the response. “An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond,” writes Robert Pinsky in an essay. She asked the boy, “Would you like it if I went back to your father?” He learned early about the impermanence and unreliability of affections. In one scene, he sits down heavily at the top of the stairway where he, as a ten-year old kid, had discovered his distraught, alcoholic mother lying in her dressing gown on the morning after her wedding night to Hugh. You couldn’t breathe in his presence.” But for the film, Vidal projects an authentic weariness, fundamental to the man.

James Merrill once remarked, “Gore sucked all the air out of any room he entered. The camera follows as he narrates his life, including a return to Merrywood, the mansion on the Potomac that had belonged to Hugh Auchincloss, the affluent stockbroker his mother Nina married immediately after divorcing Gene Vidal. I watched the 1995 BBC documentary on Vidal, largely the product of its then seventy-year old subject. He made himself so visible that one can’t help but indulge. Jay Parini’s biography of Gore Vidal, Empire of Self, is an entertaining narrative, but midway through the book I shifted over to YouTube to watch Vidal in action.

Empire by Gore Vidal