In 1960, he submitted to the old tug of politics and ran for Congress: he stood as a Democratic-Liberal candidate for a safe Republican seat in upstate New York. He lost, of course, 78,789 to 103,325, but he trebled the Democratic showing and won 20,000 more votes than John Kennedy — ‘as I never ceased to remind him’. Two years later, he was asked to stand for the US Senate. Vidal pondered the offer carefully — then fled the country.
‘Why did you give up politics?’
‘I would never have gone far enough to be of any use. But I could have made it. I am just perfect for television, and that’s all a President has to be these days. No — I would have become a drunken Senator who said something interesting once a year.’
‘Why did you want to be President?’
‘Why not? Admittedly I lack the character and wisdom of Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter. But the office itself ennobles. Anyway, I left the country. I wanted to be a writer again.’
‘Why couldn’t you be that in America?’
‘Because I didn’t want to become an alcoholic, basically. They all are there, for some reason. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner are the classic examples, but it didn’t stop with them. Apart from the Jews, all American writers do seem to booze a great deal. After all, there’s something to be said for being an alcoholic in America.
‘Either that or they barricade themselves away, like Salinger. But I wonder how he passes the time. It is very cold where he lives…’
Besides, Vidal had a specific novel to research and compose, and it was this that brought him to Italy. The book was called Julian: it turned out to be the start of a fresh track in Vidal’s career as a writer. A study of the fourth-century apostate Roman Emperor, the new novel combined imaginative passion (Vidal’s suspended nostalgia for pre-Christian grandeur and chaos) with intellectual distance (a chance to be rigorous and erudite). Julian was his first fiction for ten years: it was a huge success, critically and commercially, and prepared the way for his equally redoubtable trilogy about the American political past, Washington, DC, Burr and (well-timed for the bicentennial year) 1876. These novels, together with the problematical Myra Breckinridge, have made him world famous — and a millionaire at least a couple of times over.
Although there is almost total unanimity about Vidal’s quality as an essayist, assessments of his fiction vary to an unusual degree. To some, Vidal’s gifts are primarily analytical and expository. So long as his fiction is tied to argument — as in the historical novels — it has all the wit and conviction of his essays, with an added spaciousness and poise, a sense of intimacy with the way the world works. Once freed from this reality, though – as in the satirical fantasies Myra Breckinridge and Myron — his imagination founders in a kind of puerile vivacity, mere low-campery. Auberon Waugh remarked of Myron that only humourless people seemed to find it funny. And such people would, on Vidal’s admission, include a great many Americans.
While he forged ahead with his fiction during the Sixties, Vidal became, if anything, even more trenchant and ubiquitous as a commentator on the American scene. ‘Living outside America helps: you see things more sharply and can say what you want.’ Undiminished controversy shadowed his exile, In 1961 he launched his famous feud with Bobby Kennedy. ‘Jack was tremendous company — really droll. But with Bobby… it was chemical. Put us in the same room and I’d want to kick him. He was a McCarthyite tough.’
In 1967, he wrote two remarkably clear-headed attacks on the Kennedy political machine, The Holy Family and The Manchester Book; he was later to say of Teddy’s presidential aspirations, ‘Well, he would have made a very good bartender.’
During elections he returned to gallivant round the US television circuit, eliciting on one occasion this lucid retort from William Buckley Junior: ‘Listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face.’ During the 1970 election Vidal became co-chairman of Dr Spock’s New Party, a wet-lib fringe group running on a collection of fashionable issues (a protest-vote, surely?). Two years later his play An Evening with Richard Nixon earned him an impressive bundle of death threats. (‘Well-written death threats, too. They weren’t just lunatics.’) Vidal is, and will remain, an energetic, increasingly Parnassian monitor of his homeland — ‘a national treasure,’ as one critic put it, ‘one of the very few sane voices amidst the babble’.