The history man

History for Gore Vidal was a vehicle to be ridden in triumph, perhaps as in an out-take from Ben-Hur, which he worked on during one of his stints as a Hollywood hack, camping up the script to annoy Charlton Heston. Not only did he ride the Vehicle of History, but as its amanuensis and avatar, born and raised to the purple, in his mind he somehow was History, and of his many achievements the greatest was to persuade others to share that belief. His career presents the realised fantasy of the charismatic narcissist, which is to be taken at one’s own estimation. The American writer and academic Jay Parini, who was a friend of his from the 1980s, remembers him saying, ‘I might have been president’, but the presidency would not have been enough. Much in demand as a godfather, he once lamented, ‘Always a godfather, never a god.’

Parini calls his biography ‘a frank yet fond look at a man I admired, even loved’. Though broken up by embarrassing ‘vignettes’ of their times together (‘ “Maestro,” I say, kissing Gore on each cheek…’), his narrative is otherwise conventionally chronological.

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal ‘had a profound sense of his aristocratic lineage’, but as his first biographer, Fred Kaplan, pointed out to his fury, his lineage was not remotely aristocratic. His father, Eugene L. Vidal (‘Big Gene’ to our hero’s ‘Little Gene’ — how he must have hated that!), was ‘a farm boy’ who attended West Point, became a professional footballer and went into aviation, helping to found the Ludington Line (eventually absorbed into TWA), where he hired and bedded Amelia Earhart, of whom, as of so many historical figures, Vidal had anecdotal memories.