John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 31 July this year, Gore Vidal died aged 86. In tonight's and tomorrow's adjournment debates I want to speak about this extraordinary man. Gore Vidal was provocative, sometimes spiteful, but never boring. Through his novels, essays and plays he maintained a ferocious independence of thought fuelled by an unwavering belief in his intellect. He once argued that 'there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise'. He was, perhaps, the last of a generation of American writers, along with the likes of Mailer, Capote and Thompson, whose personalities and politics were as entertaining as their prose and whose magnetism and wit demanded public attention. The world of those who value the written word, who yearn for intelligent debate, is a less exciting place for his passing.

Eugene Louis Vidal was born on 2 October 1925 at West Point Military Academy, where his father was an aviation instructor. Much of his youth was spent at the side of his grandfather Thomas Gore, a Democratic senator from the state of Oklahoma. Senator Gore had been blind since childhood, so young Vidal often acted as his guide on the Senate floor. Vidal inherited his grandfather's oratorical artistry, his reverence for words and much of his politics. After graduating from the prestigious Philips Exeter Academy in 1943, Vidal shunned the well-worn paths leading to Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Instead, he enlisted in the US Navy, serving aboard a supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. At just 19 years of age he wrote Williwaw, which was based on his experience. It was a bestseller and established Vidal's reputation as one of the most promising writers of his generation.

His next novel, The City and the Pillar, earned him notoriety and enmity in equal measure. Tame by our standards, its frank portrayal of homosexuality was considered corrupting and pornographic by some. Vidal was convinced its publication had been blacklisted from the day's major newspapers. Australian academic and activist Dennis Altman had a copy of the book seized at Sydney Airport. The judge declared the work obscene while voicing some concerns about its confiscation. In response to being blacklisted, Vidal wrote three popular novels under the pseudonym Edgar Box and then turned to the screen and stage to keep himself in the manner to which he was accustomed. His political melodrama The Best Man,written in this period, was nominated for six Tony awards. Notably, Ronald Reagan auditioned for the lead role without success—Vidal thought him an unconvincing presidential candidate. Later, when Reagan got the chance to play the President for real, Vidal heralded it as 'a triumph of the embalmer's art'. As well as writing extensively for television Vidal, along with Christopher Fry, redrafted the screenplay of Ben-Hur, but neither was credited for their contribution.

Vidal's work on Broadway, in Hollywood and with television, brought financial security and allowed him to focus again on writing for his own purpose. In the early 1960s, he published a number of works dedicated to historical fiction. The first and arguably the greatest of these, Julian, was published in 1964. Similar in style to Robert Graves's I, Claudius, it paints a vivid picture of life in the Roman Empire in the time of the fourth century emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus. Vidal uses the work to explore the notion of the social construction of religious belief and its relationship with politics.

Politics would serve again as a central theme for a series of novels dedicated to the development of what he saw as a once great American republic. The first and arguably the greatest of these, Washington D.C., was published shortly after Julian and the last, The Golden Age, was published in 2000. Together they traced the arc of American history from its idealistic beginnings to what Vidal considered the decadent imperial now. His purpose was to remind his audience of the founding principles of the United States and to remedy what he saw as its collective amnesia. His critique of contemporary American politics was unrelenting but, as the literary critic Peter Craven wrote:

He may have hated his native America as only a lover can hate it … everything he wrote was a passionate dramatisation of the power of the American dream.

Along with these historical works, Vidal published a series of searing satires such as Myra Breckinridge, Duluth and Live from Golgotha. These really did display Vidal's irreverence. Nothing was sacred—in fact the more sacred it was the more likely it was to be lampooned. Later, he published two critically acclaimed memoirs, Palimpsest in 1995 and Point to Point Navigation in 2006.

Because of the time this evening, I do plan tomorrow evening in the Senate to speak further about the late Gore Vidal, writer, wit, commentator and activist.

Senate adjourned at 23:00