Gore Vidal—An Interview

Our Rome correspondent Gaither Stewart has filed this little gem of an interview with the controversial author. We trust it will be of interest to many of our readers.—Ed

DATELINE (Gaither Stewart in Rome) When I interviewed Gore Vidal in October, 1983, in his penthouse apartment on Largo (Piazza) Argentina in the very center of Rome, he related the time a lady from the New York Times asked as her first question: “Mr. Vidal, you really hate the United States, don’t you.” He answered: “No, I hate the New York Times.”

Like the time, he recalled, he was introduced on an NBC television show as “the outrageous Gore Vidal”, he stopped the show when he asked why outrageous. “Ronald Reagan is outrageous,” he replied.

During the over two hours we spoke about politics and literature which I recorded on tape, Vidal never once minced his words or resorted to niceties toward anyone or anything. Forever irreverent as was his nature.

From the huge transcript, I fashioned articles subsequently published in various European leftwing newspapers and magazines, including L’Unità, the official daily newspaper of the Italian Communist Party, De Morgen, the major Belgian Socialist daily in Gent, The Haagse Post, an Amsterdam leftwing weekly, and others I no longer recall.

We tried sitting on his terrace overlooking Piazza Argentina and the ruins of four Roman temples but the noise from the late Sunday afternoon traffic was so deafening we soon retired to the huge salon. Yet this apartment that he had owned for 20 years, he called his retreat, reserved for work—reading and writing and thinking. The only reason he agreed to the interview here was because I lived in Rome.

American artists were all over a cheap Europe in the early post-war period. And they all passed through Rome: that catastrophic driver Tennessee Williams, writer and composer Paul Bowles, William Styron, Normal Mailer and Saul Bellow. Here on the loud Rome piazza he wrote his famous Myra Breckenbridge. Though the figure of Gore Vidal that Sunday loomed larger than expected against the reflections of the flashing lights from the heart of Rome below us, I had the thought that we could just as well have been in New York or his beloved California.

Rather than try to reconstruct the interview, I have recalled here some of his chief political points, familiar to older readers, but most likely new to the younger generation, which Vidal describes as a ‘non-reading generation.’ Surprisingly, most of his words of nearly 30 years ago ring quite contemporary today.

“American leaders never deal with real political and social problems. The Founding Fathers feared most of all democracy and monarchy and saw to it that we could never have either. We should scrap the Constitution and start over. It is only a document to protect property owners while America has the weakest union movement in the Western world, with only 20% of workers organized. I attack the system that has done this to the American people. Meanwhile we should get rid of both the New York Times and the Constitution.

“On the other hand the people are not concerned about real problems either. Americans don’t vote, while corporations select and pay for the politicians and get the Senators and Presidents they pay for. They function like Italy’s mafia that buys its votes.

“The Left-Right classifications are complex. I have said I am a man of the Left. But I think we need a new definition of the Left and its goals and how they can be achieved. It’s a good thing for people to govern themselves but it must be explained how it can be done. We need a new document, a new analysis, a new synthesis of those goals.”

Gore Vidal, 30 years ago, saw literature in a grim situation. “In my visits to some 125 university campuses I have seen that literature has become something that is taught, not actually read. Literature is chiefly a subject of university study. Even that wouldn’t be so bad if the universities preserved the best of our literary past, Instead, it is often a case of Professor x writing a book and Professor y teaching it in his classes. The university campus is not real life, but 90% of our writers are connected with universities.”

Punto Press Publishing.

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