Conversations with Gore Vidal

Edited by Richard Peabody and Lucinda Ebersole

University Press of Mississippi

196 pages, $20.

LOVABLE, unlovable, wicked, vain, altruistic, egomaniacal, funny--all of these describe Vidal in the interviews he's given over the years. The years go from 1960 to 2003, the final being Amy Goodman's politically astute interview about post-9/11 America, originally published in Democracy Now. Most of the interviews include prologues that describe where and how Vidal was living at the time. In 1974, for instance, Gerald Clark (in The Paris Review) describes Vidal as living "in a run-down penthouse with plants that need watering." Clark reports that at the relatively young age of fifty Vidal is already hanging it up: he writes that he's deteriorating physically and watches that fact "with fascination." In a 1984 interview, Charles Ruas (in Conversations with American Writers) describes Vidal as "slightly heavier than he appears in person" but goes on to praise his "straight thin nose and firm jaw line." By 1988, all references to his physical appearance have ceased.

Along with the missing references to physical appearance, the later interviews do not recount the story of The City and the Pillar, Vidal's upbringing in Washington, or his friendship with Anais Nin, facts that have been cemented so deeply into the Vidal canon that even "illiterates" can tell you a thing or two about them. The interviews in The Transatlantic Review (1960) and The Paris Review (1974) concentrate on Vidal's first works and his treatment by The New York Times after the publication of The City and the Pillar. Twenty years after Times reviewer Orwell Prescott says he'll never review another book by Vidal, Vidal is still talking about the incident even though the passage of time has withered his...