Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal

by Jay Parini Narrated by John Lescault

Overview

An intimate, authorized, yet frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925-2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century.

The product of thirty years of friendship and conversation, Jay Parini's Empire of Self probes behind the glittering surface of Gore Vidal's colorful life to reveal the complex emotional and sexual truth underlying his celebrity-strewn life. But there is plenty of glittering surface as well-a virtual who's who of the American Century, from Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart through the Kennedys, Princess Margaret, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood.

The life of Gore Vidal was an amazingly full one-full of colorful incident, famous people, and lasting achievements-that calls out for careful evocation and examination. Jay Parini crafts Vidal's life into an accessible, entertaining story that puts the experience of one of the great American figures of the postwar era into context, introduces the author and his works to a generation who may not know him, and looks behind the scenes at the man and his work in ways never possible before his death. Provided with unique access to Vidal's life and his papers, he excavates many buried skeletons yet never loses sight of his deep respect for Vidal and his astounding gifts. This is the biography Gore Vidal has long needed.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Charles McGrath

What distinguishes Parini's account is its readability…and its sympathy. His Vidal is less a monster of egotism than a damaged, needy figure who can measure his self-worth only in terms of how others see him, and who at the same time holds others off by demanding not just love and admiration but something like obeisance.

Publishers Weekly

08/10/2015
Acclaimed biographer Parini (Robert Frost: A Life) draws on his 30 years of friendship and conversation with Gore Vidal (1925–2012), as well as on deep archival research, to offer a simultaneously admiring and candid portrait. With an elegance worthy of Vidal himself, Parini gracefully chronicles Vidal’s life from his childhood (he lived in a world of fantasies shaped by the movies he saw to escape his parents’ constant fighting and eventual divorce) and teenage years (he was a poor student, but always felt the siren song of writing) to the publication of his first novel, Williwaw, in 1946, and his struggles with and eventual acceptance of his homosexuality. As famous for his friends as for his writing, Vidal rubbed shoulders with Eleanor Roosevelt and John and Jacqueline Kennedy, and feuded with William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Parini nimbly explores Vidal’s fiction—from the controversial Myra Breckinridge to the historical novels Lincoln, Burr, and Julian—and nonfiction, such as Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. Vidal emerges as a brave and provocative political observer, yet a shy man, who, as Parini observes, wore the “elaborately contrived mask of Gore Vidal.” Parini’s access to Vidal and his thoughtful reflections on him establish this as the definitive biography of a major writer. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

Praise for Jay Parini’s Empire of Self

“A lucid, bracing, and candid book that is likely to become the definitive Vidal biography.” —Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs

“A fine biography.” —Wall Street Journal

“Wholly readable.  Parini is a veteran biographer, and it shows in the seemingly effortless way he unfolds Vidal’s life.” —The Boston Globe

“Marvelous. . . . Affectionate and balanced.” —The Economist

“A loving portrait of a very difficult man. Jay Parini, himself a gifted novelist, poet and biographer, has gone very deep into the ‘black energy’ of Gore Vidal’s relentless narcissism and megalomania.” —Washington Post

“[A] constantly memorable biography that will no doubt be the best Vidal will ever get.” —The Buffalo News

“Vidal is the perfect subject for a biography, as Parini proves in this highly readable and informative book. And Parini, who has also written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost and William Faulkner as well as essays and poetry, is the perfect person to write it.” —Dallas Morning News

“A wonderful, moving biography of Gore Vidal.” —Christian Science Monitor

“Parini nicely describes the 'lofty intimacy' of Vidal’s style, and makes a strong case for Vidal as one of the critics who helped to 'enlarge and redefine' the book-review essay.” —The New Yorker

“Parini takes a long view of Vidal’s eccentricities, shedding new light on the legacy-building efforts of one of the twentieth century’s great public intellectuals.” —Boston Review

 “More than anything, Parini reveals, Vidal feared ‘becoming a rumor in his own time’—and forgotten when he was dead. ‘One feels the Great Eraser always at work,’ he said again and again in conversations and letters. Empire of Self may stay the hand of the Great Eraser.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“An admiring but unblinkingly honest portrait of the self-mythologizing, self-aggrandizing literary titan and TV celebrity.” —The Daily Beast

“Parini precedes each chapter with a vignette, a focused memory from his own experiences with Vidal. They range from amusing to deeply moving. . . . A superbly personal biography that pulsates with intelligence, scholarship, and heart.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“The outstanding quality—no, just one of the outstanding qualities—of this tour de force of effective biography is the dexterity, the balance with which Parini handles the two acute sides of his subject, Vidal the 'angel' and Vidal the 'monster.'” —Booklist, starred review

“The incomparable wit, the literary genius, the dazzling friends, the staggering output, the politics, the sex, the drink, the dreadful mother and the awful last days—it’s all here. This is as good as biography gets.” —Dick Cavett

Library Journal

09/01/2015
Gore Vidal (1925–2012) burst onto the literary scene with his controversial novel about homosexuality, The City and the Pillar (1948). Parini (D.E. Axinn Professor of English & Creative Writing, Middlebury Coll.; Jesus; The Last Station) draws on 30 years of friendship with Vidal to address both his attractions and failings. Over six decades, Vidal produced some 80 books, including 30 novels, 25 books of essays (in Parini's judgment, his finest work), and 22 plays and film scripts. He was a fixture on television, acted in movies, ran for public office (twice), and engaged in nasty public feuds with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and William Buckley. Vidal was a man of contradictions: a good friend but vicious in attacking those he deemed enemies (some of them friends until shortly before); a conscientious writer who weakened what he wrote by slapdash methods; a libertine who only cruised in the afternoon so his evenings were free for conversation. Vidal lived as though in front of a looking glass, never satisfied with what he saw there. VERDICT It's difficult to paint an appealing picture of a narcissist, but Parini has produced a balanced account of a man of immense talent who sometimes used it wisely and other times didn't. Lively and insightful, this book should find favor among lovers of literature and biography. It's got heart. [See Prepub Alert, 5/4/15.]—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2015-07-07
An intimate but unblinking look at Gore Vidal (1925-2012), the gifted essayist, playwright, novelist, and public personality, who, for a time, seemed ubiquitous in the popular culture. Poet, novelist, and biographer Parini (English/Middlebury Coll.; Jesus: The Human Face of God, 2013, etc.) met his subject in the mid-1980s, and he begins his chronicle with that encounter. They became fast friends as well as professional colleagues, though Parini continually reminds readers of Vidal's often difficult personality. Petty, jealous, judgmental, and imperious—all applied to him. But so do others, as the author ably shows: Vidal was generous, brilliant, assiduous, and innovative. Like many other fine artists, Vidal worked until he could no longer do so. Parini precedes each chapter with a vignette, a focused memory from his own experiences with Vidal. They range from amusing to deeply moving. Parini is a wise general biographer of a literary figure. He tells us about each of Vidal's major works (and the major reviews thereof) but never in prose choked with jargon or self-importance. The goals are exposition and elucidation, and he achieves them gracefully. Like other critics, Parini believes Vidal's essays surpassed his other work. We learn some quirky details about the writer, as well—his fascination with Billy the Kid (and, later, with Timothy McVeigh), his fondness for celebrities of all sorts, his discomfort with academics, and his rivalries with Norman Mailer (with whom he reconciled) and William F. Buckley Jr. (with whom he didn't). There is also a lot about Vidal's sexuality (he preferred anonymous sex with male partners) and his drinking problems. Finally, the author examines Vidal's sad decline and death. Parini uses detail in agile, unobtrusive fashion—though he erroneously reports that John Brown was killed at Harpers Ferry (he was hanged later in Charles Town). A superbly personal biography that pulsates with intelligence, scholarship, and heart.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169865394
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	10/13/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

My friendship with Gore Vidal began in the mid-eighties, when I lived with my wife and young children in Atrani, a fishing village on the coast of southern Italy.  We had a small villa on a cliff overlooking the sea, with a view to Salerno to the south, and Capri just out of sight to the north.  The bay below us glistened, the sunlight like diamonds scatted on the water, almost too bright to bear, with fishing vessels departing each morning in search of mullet, mussels, mackerel, tuna, and squid that they would unload in the afternoon and sell in wooden barrels by the dock.  I was writing a novel in the mornings at a café in Amalfi itself, walking into town along a stony footpath where a thousand cats seemed to prowl, where sturdy women carried groceries slowly up hundreds of steps, and children kicked footballs in back alleys.  The smell of laundry soap, cat piss, and wild flowers were ubiquitous. 

We had a lovely rooftop terrace, above which rose a lemon grove and high limestone cliffs.  A massive villa – alabaster white, clinging to the rocks like a swallow’s nest – shimmered above us, and we wondered who lived there in such opulence.  Some Italian nobleman?  A local mafia don?  A film star?  When I asked the tobacconist in town about its resident, he said, “Ah, lo scrittore!  Gore Vidal.  Americano.”  He explained that the writer stopped by his shop almost every afternoon for a newspaper.  He retired to the bar next door for a drink, where he would sit and read for an hour or so before taking the bus up the hill to Ravello.

Already I knew the work of Gore Vidal quite well.  Having been an anti-war activist during the Vietnam era, I admired his fierce political commentaries in Esquire and The New York Review of Books.  I never forgot his fiery debates with William F. Buckley during the presidential conventions of 1968, especially during the siege of Chicago.  He had held his ground, driving Buckley mad with his relentless logic and unflappable manner.  I had read half a dozen of his novels, including Myra Breckinridge, Burr, and Lincoln. Needless to say, I wanted to meet him.
I sent a brief note, telling Gore I was an American writer living at 23 via Torricelli in Atrani, and would like to meet him.  That evening he pounded on my door, inviting us (my wife and I) to dinner.  I was terrified, as his reputation preceded him, and thought he might be tricky. But a friendship blossomed. I would often meet him for a drink or dinner, and a series of conversations began that lasted until his death in 2012.  It would be fair to say, in a crude way, that I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son.  We had a good deal  in common, including a passion for liberal politics, American history, and books.  We both loved Henry James, Twain, Trollope and Henry Adams – just to name a few of the more obvious names – and we invariably found we had more to talk about than time allowed.  We also shared a love of both Italy and Britain.  By that time I had spent seven years in the British Isles, and it turned out we knew many of the same people.  The literary world is, in fact, quite small – especially in Britain and Italy, where writers and editors often converge at parties and literary events.   

In the decades that followed, we spoke on the phone every week – for periods on a daily basis.  And I would stay with him often in Ravello or, later, Los Angeles, meeting him often when he traveled.  I have strong memories of times together in such places as Rome, Naples, Edinburgh, Oxford, London, New York, Boston, even Salzburg and Key West. He proved more than helpful to me as a younger writer, reading drafts of my books, offering frank critiques and encouragement.  We discussed his work at length, too – he would frequently send a typescript or galley for me to read. 

His phone calls, in later years, often began:  “What are they saying about me?”  To a somewhat frightening degree, he depended on the world’s opinion.  Once, in one of those memories that stands in for many others, my wife and I were sitting in his study in Ravello when he came in with drinks.  On the wall behind his desk were twenty or so framed magazine covers, with Gore’s face on each cover.  I asked:  “What’s that all about, those covers?”  He said, “When I come into this room in the morning to work, I like to be reminded who I am.” 

Over many decades he had built a huge empire of self, sending out colonies in various languages. “They love me in Brazil,” he would say.  Or Bulgaria, or Turkey, or Hong Kong.  I took his rampant egotism with a grain of salt.  It was part of him, but only part.  The narcissism was, at times, an exhausting and debilitating thing for him, as it proved impossible to get enough satisfying responses.  He required a hall of mirrors for adequate reflection, and there was never enough. The narcissistic hole can’t be filled.  At times, I wondered about how much money and time I spent in winging off to various far-flung cities to spend a few days with him, and my transatlantic phone bills reflected my own mania.  But his flame was very bright and warm, and I was drawn to it.

Videos