If you know me you know I am Gore Vidal’s number one fan but for somebody who was known for being so coldly and precisely self-aware, he was often simultaneously totally lacking in self awareness. He created elaborate copium narratives about himself just as much as if not more than the people he accused of doing so and seemed to exist in a perpetual and unyielding state of self-deception and repression, with a very interesting definition of what it means to be truthful. That’s a major part of what makes him so fascinating to me.
I love his hateration towards Henry Miller because half of it is real and accurate and half of it reads like narcissistic projection—critiquing Miller for his arrogance and elaborate self-mythologizing when his own biography ended up being entitled Empire of the Self—and all of it is hilarious and cutting in his typical fashion.
“Yet Henry never seems to do anything for anyone, other than to provide moments of sexual glory which we must take on faith. He does, however, talk a lot and the people he knows are addicted to his conversation. ‘Don’t stop talking now…please,’ begs a woman whose life is being changed, as Henry in a manic mood tells her all sorts of liberating things like ‘Nothing would be bad or ugly or evil— if we really let ourselves go. But it’s hard to make people understand that.‘ To which the only answer is that of another straight man in the text who says, ‘You said it, Henry. Jesus, having you around is like getting a shot in the arm.‘ For a man who boasts of writing nothing but the truth, I find it more than odd that not once in the course of a long narrative does anyone say, ‘Henry, you’re full of shit.’ It is possible, of course, that no one ever did, but I doubt it.”
