Gore Vidal

News of Gore Vidal's death came this afternoon.

Around ten years ago, I went through a big Vidal phase.  The novels serious that stick with me are Messiah, Live from Golgotha, Julian, and Creation.  The latter is one I've read several times, although Live has been a Holy Week standby for a very long time -- just the right level of depravity to keep one sane in the midst of a lot of intense singing!

I read The City and the Pillar about the same time as the Palimpsest volume of Vidal's memoirs came out.  This was followed by Myra Breckinridge & Myron.  I was exploring Felice Picano, Edmund White, and Lawrence Kramer around the same time -- all very lengthy, rich, and rambling in their story-telling, to which Vidal made a happily acerbic and to-the-point foil.

While not wanting to deprecate Vidal, I think Armistead Maupin explored a more appealing style of epic story-telling through the six volumes of Tales of the City, where he developed a more life-affirming narrative.  By contrast, City and the Pillar belongs to the same kind of claustrophobic world as E.M. Forster's Maurice, where affirmation of the main character is very contingent and uncertain.  That said, without Vidal, there couldn't have been Maupin.