The Essential Gore Vidal - Hardcover

Vidal, Gore; Kaplan, Fred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679457461 ISBN 13: 9780679457466

Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

A definitive anthology of the writings of Gore Vidal combines a selection of his most famous essays, previously unpublished letters, short stories, all of Myra Breckenridge, and excerpts from such novels as Julian, Burr, Lincoln, and others. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United States Military Academy at West Point. His first novel, Williwaw, appeared in the spring of 1946, when he was nineteen years old and just out of the Army. Since then he has written twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, short stories, well over two hundred essays, and a memoir.

Fred Kaplan is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His books include Thomas Carlyle: A Biography; Charles Dickens: A Biography; and Henry James: The Imagination of a Genius.

Aus dem Klappentext

d size of Gore Vidal's literary achievement is remarkable. He is a master of the historical novel, in which he has explored American history, ancient history, and the history of religion. He has developed his own style of science fiction combined with satire, and in the books he refers to as his "inventions" he writes cautionary tales about sex, politics, art, and philosophy. He is at once a contrarian, a wise man, and a romantic. He is also wickedly funny, and often outrageous. All of these qualities are evident in his essays, which deal with things about which he feels passionately.

He writes about other writers--Tennessee Williams, Henry James, Montaigne, Edmund Wilson--and about public life, and his own life, which has been complicated and rich. This collection (the only single volume that includes both Vidal's fiction and his essays) contains two complete long works--Myra Breckinridge, perhaps his most famous novel, and The Best Man, a play about the American presidency. Th

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THE CITY AND THE PILLAR

The City and the Pillar was one of the first novels about homosexual characters and experiences to be published by a mainstream New York press. After hesitantly accepting it in 1946, E. P. Dutton delayed publication for almost two years. The book appeared in January 1948, shortly before the publication of the Kinsey Report (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male), which presented the then startling statistic that 37 percent of American men had had at least one homosexual experience since adolescence. On one extreme, reviewers attacked the appropriateness of any novel at all on such a subject for the general reader. On the other, some welcomed it for its subject alone.

Some of the critical analysis of The City and the Pillar focused on its artistic awkwardness, and several otherwise sympathetic readers objected to its violent conclusion, which to them implied that homosexual relationships must always end unhappily. The two main characters, Jim Willard and Bob Ford, have an apparently mutually satisfactory late-adolescent sexual experience and then are separated by events. Willard retains an idealized remembrance of the affair, but when, much later, they meet in New York City and he attempts to renew their sexual relationship, Bob Ford finds his overtures repellent. Furious at the rejection, Willard attempts to subdue and rape Ford. In the 1948 version he kills him. In both of the revised versions (1965, 1995) Willard fights with but does not kill his former lover. In addition to the altered conclusion, the revised versions contain substantial stylistic revision.

Preface to The City and the Pillar and Seven Early Stories (1995)

Much has been made--not least by the Saint himself--of how Augustine stole and ate some pears from a Milanese orchard. Presumably, he never again trafficked in, much less ate, stolen goods, and once this youthful crime ("a rum business," snarled the unsympathetic American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.) was behind him, he was sainthood bound. The fact is that all of us have stolen pears; the mystery is why so few of us rate halos. I suspect that in certain notorious lives there is sometimes an abrupt moment of choice. Shall I marry or burn? Steal or give to others? Shut the door on a life longed for while opening another, deliberately, onto trouble and pain because . . . The "because" is the true story seldom told.

Currently, two biographers are at work on my sacred story, and the fact that they are trying to make sense of my life has made me curious about how and why I have done--and not done--so many things. As a result, I have begun writing what I have said that I'd never write, a memoir ("I am not my own subject," I used to say with icy superiority). Now I am reeling haphazardly through my own youth, which is when practically everything of interest happened to me, rather more soon than late, since I was force-fed, as it were, by military service in the Second World War.

My father once told me, after reviewing his unpleasant period in public office, that whenever it came time for him to make a crucial decision, he invariably made the wrong one. I told him that he must turn Churchill and write his own life, demonstrating what famous victories he had set in motion at Gallipoli or in the "dragon's underbelly" of the Third Reich. But my father was neither a writer nor a politician; he was also brought up to tell the truth. I, on the other hand, was brought up by a politician grandfather in Washington, D.C., and I wanted very much to be a politician, too. Unfortunately, nature had designed me to be a writer. I had no choice in the matter. Pears were to be my diet, stolen or homegrown. There was never a time when I did not make sentences in order to make those things that I had experienced cohere and become "real."

Finally, the novelist must always tell the truth as he understands it while the politician must never give the game away. Those who have done both comprise a very short list indeed. The fact that I was never even a candidate for the list had to do with a choice made at twenty that entirely changed my life.

At nineteen, just out of the army, I wrote a novel, Williwaw (1946): it was admired as, chronologically, at least, the first of the war novels. The next year I wrote the less admired In a Yellow Wood (1947). Simultaneously, my grandfather was arranging a political career for me in New Mexico (the governor was a protégé of the old man). Yes, believe it or not, in the greatest democracy the world has ever known--freedom's as well as bravery's home--elections can be quietly arranged, as Joe Kennedy liked to explain to you.

For someone twenty years old I was well situated in the world, thanks to two published novels and my grandfather's political skills. I was also situated dead center at a crossroads rather like the one Oedipus found himself at. I was at work on The City and the Pillar. If I published it, I'd take a right turn and end up accursed in Thebes. Abandon it and I'd turn left and end up in holy Delphi. Honor required that I take the road to Thebes. I have read that I was too stupid at the time to know what I was doing, but in such matters I have always had a certain alertness. I knew that my description of the love affair between two "normal" all-American boys of the sort that I had spent three years with in the wartime army would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land--which has always been more Boeotia, I fear, than Athens or haunted Thebes. Until then, American novels of "inversion" dealt with transvestites or with lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for Marines. I broke that mold. My two lovers were athletes and so drawn to the entirely masculine that, in the case of one, Jim Willard, the feminine was simply irrelevant to his passion to unite with his other half, Bob Ford: unfortunately for Jim, Bob had other sexual plans, involving women and marriage.

I gave the manuscript to my New York publishers, E. P. Dutton. They hated it. One ancient editor said, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now you will still be attacked for it." I responded with an uneasy whistle in the dark: "If any book of mine is remembered in the year 1968, that's real fame, isn't it?"

To my grandfather's sorrow, on January 10, 1948, The City and the Pillar was published. Shock was the most pleasant emotion aroused in the press. How could our young war novelist . . . ? In a week or two, the book was a best-seller in the United States and wherever else it could be published--not exactly a full atlas in those days. The English publisher, John Lehmann, was very nervous. In his memoirs, The Whispering Gallery, he writes, "There were several passages in The City and the Pillar, a sad, almost tragic book and a remarkable achievement in a difficult territory for so young a man, that seemed to my travellers and the printers to go too far in frankness. I had a friendly battle with Gore to tone down and cut these passages. Irony of the time and taste: they wouldn't cause an eyebrow to be lifted in the climate of the early sixties." But only twenty years ago the book was taken from Dennis Altman as he arrived at the airport in Sydney, Australia. Altman challenged the obscenity law under which the book had been seized. The judge in the case acknowledged that under the law that he must administer the book was obscene, but then, in a famous obiter dicta, he wrote that he thought the law absurd: in due course, it was changed. Meanwhile, even today, copies of the book still fitfully blaze on the pampas and playas of Argentina and other godly countries. As I write these lines, I have just learned that the book will at last appear in Russia, where a Moscow theater group is...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House USA Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0679457461
• ISBN 13: 9780679457466
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 988
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Harder; https://www.edel.com; ; Neum�hlen 17; Hamburg; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland