Approached from the side, the villa seems impossibly narrow, wedged into the Mediterranean cliff-face. But once we were within, the white passages spanned out impressively in unexpected directions. A courteous if uneffusive host, Vidal parked me in his wood-and-leather library, seated himself opposite and began to talk, dividing his lustrous gaze between me and our photographer (who cavorted acrobatically round him throughout the afternoon, to Vidal’s occasional unease). ‘That’s my bad side,’ Vidal would say. ‘My left side is my good side.’
Vidal’s looks, in common with everything else about Vidal, are dear to Vidal’s heart. He minds about them: they are a source of both exhilaration and anxiety. The same applies to his varied talents and the extent to which society honours them with gratitude and rewards. This is not a love affair built on complacence: it is one grounded in ceaseless reassessment (‘Am I really that great? … Yes’ is how the soliloquy probably goes). Vidal is perhaps one of the best-selling serious writers in the world, and certainly one of the most prolific; in addition, he has shone brightly in several careers (politics, television, theatre, cinema), any of which might have satisfied a less restively arrogant man. And yet success has not brought serenity: although he has little of the paranoia worryingly frequent among well-known writers, he is someone who delightedly cultivates the envies and rivalries of his peers; although he is assured of his eminence, he has no desire whatever to be above it all. Why?
A recent much-publicised punch-up with his rival Norman Mailer is illuminating in this respect — and highly entertaining, let me say. Vidal’s eyes flood with dissimulated pleasure as he prepares to tell the oft-told story; he is looking forward to coming well out of it.
The scene was a New York party, thrown by Lally Weymouth for publisher Lord Weidenfeld (freshly arrived Ambassador Peter Jay was among the startled guests). Vidal was talking to a group of people, when he felt an agitated hand on his shoulder. It belonged to Mailer. The two men had been wary friends for years; but their polarities grew intolerable after Mailer’s The Prisoner of Sex, and they nearly came to blows on a Dick Cavett television show in 1971.
‘It was Norman, looking small, fat and out of shape. “Gore,” he said, “you look like an old Jew.”
‘”Well, Norman,” I said in my witty way, “you look like an old Jew, too.”‘ (Mailer, by the way, is Jewish. Gore is, if anything, oppressively Aryan in appearance and ancestry.)
‘Then he threw the contents of his glass in my face, and punched me gently on the side of the mouth. It didn’t hurt. Then I pushed him. Norman has always hated die fact that, apart from everything else, I’m much taller and stronger than he is. He went flying backward six or seven feet, landing — to our alarm — on top of the man who invented Xerox.’
Order then laboriously re-established itself. But Mailer is said to have gone round the room attempting to enlist an anti-Gore faction and demanding that the hostess eject him. She refused. Dourly, Mailer reapproached his foe. It is at this point that the tale turns brutal.
“‘Come outside,” he said to me. His mouth was working and you could smell the fear. “Norman,” I said, “you can’t go on this way. You’re too old for all this.” At that point, my friend Howard [Howard Austen, Vidal’s aide/secretary/companion for the past twenty-eight years] turned on Norman. Howard is Jewish; he grew up on the same streets as Norman; he knew what Norman was doing. Howard advanced on him steadily, saying, “You flea! Get out, you fucking asshole loser, you fucking asshole loser.” That was it. No more Norman. The next day he was on the phone to the gossip columnists, convincing them that there had been a fight, that he was some sort of — what’s his word? — “existential hero”.’
According to the press reports, Vidal had the last word: ‘Once again, words failed him.’ All Mailer could manage was: ‘Vidal? He’s just a mouth.’
Mailer had had an early word, though, which goes a bit nearer home. It’s the sort of he-man dismissal one would expect from an existential hero; but there may be something to it. ‘Vidal’, said Mailer once, ‘lacks the wound.’