I realize he's falling fast in the estimation of the Establishment

File: G.K.-Chesterton.jpg (73KB, 570x321px) Image search: [Google]

73KB, 570x321px

The whole thing about Gore Vidal is that he's horribly, overwhelmingly middlebrow. Or at least all his WORKS are, all his historical fiction, all his essays, his entire body of actual literary output. The most interesting thing about him was his persona, and, in fact, it's the persona that's survived in the minds of most people. He's a bit like Chesterton, really, except that it feels like Chesterton's stuck around a bit more than Vidal has, and Chesterton wound up influencing people who have stuck around a lot more than the people Vidal influenced.

>>9850452

You spend entirely too much time shut in and on this site, you goofy drone.

>>9850465
I get out into the world a fair amount and I know for a fact I'm right. Both Vidal and Chesterton were massive personalities in their day, and both, to a certain degree, have been passed by. However, Chesterton endures among a remnant in a way Vidal does not. There is an American Chesterton Society. Is there an American Vidal Society? A quick Google search tells me there is not.

File: bestofenemies-buckley-vidal-debate-sig-1920x830.gif (909KB, 1920x830px) Image search: [Google]

909KB, 1920x830px

So who was in the wrong here?

>>9850452
>middlebrow

He's the closest thing the US has had to a patrician. Given his background, his transatlantic accent, his diction, and erudition, there's virtually nothing middlebrow about him.

>>9850482
redpill

>>9850441
Read some of his essays, crackpot, before you start throwing around your knee-jerk Redpill buzzword .

>>9850452
By "middlebrow" you mean accessible?

>>9850482
Buckley lost his cool 1st.

Sugarpill swallowers who think they've been redpilled might be intrigued to read how rabidly Vidal is denounced by Salon slimes as a Racist and anti-egalitarian. He's the poster boy for White Privilege. Moreover, he never identified as a homosexual. Till he keeled over, Randy Shilts harrangued Vidal for not accepting some Gay Lit little pope hat. Vidal did not define himself by his sexuality, as professional gays do.

>>9850452
I don't believe that's correct; if you read essays like 'American Plastic' and 'The New York Times Top Ten', he excoriates middle-brow literature, and always aims for the higher plane. He analyses works that are not commonly known, and in a complex manner- his two essays on "The New Novel" from the early seventies are brilliant analyses of Gass, Pynchon etc. And he's also very interesting on sexuality; giving a complex analyses of the peccadilloes of people, and concluding that there are not nearly as many homosexuals and heterosexuals as previously thought: rather, there are homosexual and heterosexual acts. You should pick up his 'United States' essay collection. It's almost 1300 pages of complex, witty discussion of an almost endless amount of topics. It also stops before 1992, when he got a bit loopy. In his literary criticism, as well as his analyses of personages, political groups etc, he tends to attack and burrow into them, while someone like Christopher Hitchens tended to sort of circle the exterior of a subject with a spray can. His discussions on power are also good.

Regarding his historical novels, they do tend to vary drastically in quality, but I reckon Julian, Burr, and Lincoln are fairly unique works. People like Bloom have heaped praise on them as well. Regarding whether he'll last, only time will tell. Though I would remind you that there are many, many brilliant writers who have been forgotten, if only because they talked about unfashionable topics.

Fucking link one dude.

>>9850538
Spot on.

>>9850534
He's against God's will through degeneracy

>>9850482
Buckley. The guy thought it appropriate to compare a bunch of harmless hippies burning a flag or something to America white supremacists during WWII- a fairly fascistic argumentative device.

>>9850550
Please castrate yourself NOW before you propagate.

Yah, he has two streams as a novelist. Burr and Julian are gold. His Absurdist stuff not so much.

>>9850534
He did, however, write one of the first openly and unapologetically gay novels, 'The City and the Pillar'. And he also worked with friends like Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood against what the latter described "the heterosexual dictatorship." He has always spoken up for homosexuals. It's just the modern type of people who seem to, in his eyes, make it there whole identity, which he considered to be "a vulgar american habit". He would have thought the modern gay rights movement to be fairly perplexing: all this self-titling. In his words:

“Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. The sexual acts are entirely normal; if they were not, no one would perform them.”

>>9850498
it's a bot.

>>9850614
I've been borged?

>>9850612
Yes. But he consistently avoided the gay stamp, as you've youself observed. I think this was not any evasiveness, but a wise concern not to ghettoize himself. He was an American author, never a "gay author. '

>>9850434
Why compare him to King, who isn't a political essayist, just another celebrity who comments on public matters? Anyway, don't most American public intellectuals eventually fade away once the winds change?

>>9850634
My specific point is that there are no more Vidals. King is the devolution, he's a handy example of a nonreflective chump commentator but with millions of acolytes.

>>9850631
Nah I agree. I meant that he would have been perturbed by these writers who do an article for the guardian and say "and this is what my book means for Te lbgtqiA community."

One could point out that Vidal incarnated the popular idea of What a Writer Should Be in the mid century mold, with his longtime exile clifftop address up from Amalfi, his chatty appearances on television, his well-placed seating for collecting dish on other notables. Vidal was ultra style conscious. They really do not make them like this anymore.

>>9850538
>his two essays on "The New Novel" from the early seventies are brilliant analyses of Gass, Pynchon etc
I cannot find what you're referring to here. Could you elaborate on what exactly you were talking about or provide a link.? Thanks.

>>9851642
"French Letters: Theories of the New Novel", and "American Plastic"- both huge essays. I can't find my old collection for some reason; I would have typed up an excerpt otherwise. Basically, it's a very long and complex discussion of the writing of Sarruatte, Robbe-Grillet, Roland Barthes, Pynchon etc.

One of his points is that a lot of these post-modern pieces are not written for the general public, but the university; that they are lessons in theory unto itself, bereft of passion or intelligence or relevance to anybody but a professor and a suffering student. I'm probably not doing it justice, but he's one of the few writers who had the patience to read as much the writer's oeuvre as was necessary, and he does in these and other essays. He analyses and gives his opinions on the writers, he's fair, and even if you disagree with him, you come away having learned something new.

“In general, Professor Halperin's novel‐theorists have nothing very urgent or interesting to say about literature. Why then do they write when they have nothing to say? Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about . . . The half millennium of academic tenure... I would prefer for these works decently to die rather than to become teaching‐tools, artifacts stinking of formaldehyde in a classroom (original annotated text with six essays by the author and eight critical articles examinine the parameters of the author's vision). But the academic bureaucracy, unlike the novel, will not wither away, and the future is dark for literature.”

>>9852375
> French Letters: Theories of the New Novel", and "American Plastic"

Thanks for the response. I still wasn't seeing either of these on his Wikipedia bibliography page but it looks like they are from a book of essays titled "Matters of Fact and Fiction" from 1977.

>>9854033
Well, these essays are impossible to find online. Libgen or anywhere else, no trace. I'd like to hear Vidal's take on those other writers and his opinion of the novel but not sure it's worth buying, especially without a preview. Oh well.

>>9854963
I'm going to speak slowly and tell you a great secret.
Public.
Library.

>>9850492
Those are all pretentious, middlebrow things.
>erudition
He really had no new ideas or anything original

>>9855077
Rather like yourself?

>>9855129
>no u xD

>>9850550
Don't you get tired of copy pasting these posts instead of thinking by yourself?