Remembering Gore Vidal

About himself, Gore Vidal once said: “I’m exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water.”

My earliest memory of Gore Vidal isn't of him as a writer (I came to that later and have read most of his essays and novels), but as an aspiring political figure. He ran for Congress in 1960 in the district adjoining ours; my family lived in Albany, New York at the time, but even as a child I could see that Mr. Vidal was in a losing battle. It wasn't just that his district, unlike Albany's, was heavily Republican; no one as iconoclastic and as relentlessly frank as Gore Vidal was ever going to win any important political office in the U.S.

That he didn't win his political races may have been literature's gain, but it was also America's loss. We could have used that often cranky gadfly in the House or the Senate. The New York Times obituary is here.

UPDATE: A fascinating look at Vidal's teleplays and screenplays by F.X. Feeney at the Los Angeles Review of Books.