FROM THE HALLS OF MONTEZUMA

AS A SOMETIME LECTURER OF GORE VIDAL’S WORKS, many of my former students and other people I do not know have written to me of late, somewhat concerned about how we should remember him now that he has finally succumbed to the death he had more or less been expecting since 2003. I wonder whether among these people are the girls in my class who, when I announced we would be studying “Duluth”, by Gore Vidal, confused him (as did Ali G) with Vidal Sassoon, or the boy who, for some obscure reason, thought I meant Roald Dahl.

MEDIA OUTLETS HAVE BEEN DEBATING what to print about the most successful and controversial American man of letters of all time, more or less choosing what to write according to whom they believe their readership/viewers might be and what they would like to read and hear.

WE THUS HAVE HEADLINES SUCH AS: “Former Senatorial candidate Gore Vidal”; “Eminent Historian Gore Vidal”; “Prolific Novelist…”; “Gay Activist…”, “President of the American Humanist Society…”; “Writer of Ben Hur…”; et caetera. My own “headlines”, as it were, would be slightly different.

GORE VIDAL MAY NOT HAVE BEEN A MARINE in the traditional sense of the term, but, if he is to be believed, he managed to have sex with several hundred of them when he was stationed in the South Pacific in the early years of World War II, “because we had nothing else to do on our aircraft carriers”, as he stated on the BBC’s Hardtalk. If we take into account that he claimed he was not a homosexual because (I am cleaning up his statement) he had never given oral or been buggered, then this means he shagged a good portion of the US Navy.

HOWEVER WHAT I REMEMBER most clearly are two statements: one he made at a conference I attended when some fool asked him his opinion of the hated lawyer and president Abraham Lincoln and one when he was asked about the threat from the Soviet Union on some occasion on TV back in the nineteen eighties.

OF LINCOLN HE SIMPLY SAID “worse than Stalin”. About the possible threat from the Soviets, he said that he had been to Moscow on many occasions and discovered that the Russians still hadn’t managed to make a bottle of Vodka on which one could put the screw-on top back successfully, and that none of the plugs fitted the holes in the washbasins in their best hotels. Thus, he deduced, he could not imagine they could have a successful nuclear programme.