A Lifelong Pleasure

[EDITORIAL NOTE: This story was originally published in slightly different form at Blogher.]

Last December, after six months in my new home in Portland, Maine, shelves were installed in the library – a room I’ve dreamed of having all my life. I eagerly sorted through 50 cartons of books, reacquainting myself with old favorites and organizing them into useful categories.

I was surprised to find that my collection of Gore Vidal takes up three sections of shelving. In my New York home, his books were scattered among Essays, Politics and Fiction and I suppose that’s why I didn’t realize I own and have read (and re-read) most of everything he’s written over 50 or 60 years.

In addition, I have several binders where I have collected his periodical writing and the print interviews he has given over many years.

Mr. Vidal was much in the media late last year, promoting his newly published second memoir, Point to Point Navigation. I read it along with a collection of his eight short stories, Clouds and Eclipses, that had been reissued under this new title a few months earlier.

The short stories were written when Vidal was in his twenties; the new memoir finished in his 80th year. To read them side-by-side was a revelation. His youthful talent already showed the clarity of vision, the wit and biting satire that he developed to an nth degree of perfection in intervening years.

I began reading Vidal in my teens, in the 1950s. He doesn’t know it, but he was then, has been and continues to be the only mentor I ever had, leading me to ideas, history, politics and literature I would never have found without him while delighting me in every publication with his inimitable voice.

Interests in our lives come and go and we have no idea, when we take up one, if it will last or be fleeting. Some time ago, a reader here, whose name I don’t recall, left a comment saying one of the good things about getting old is that you know how your life turned out. In sorting through my books in December, after not having them available for six or seven months, I realized how important and enduring an influence Gore Vidal has been since high school - on my education, thought and intellectual development – a lifelong pleasure.

Now and again, people make lists of the four or five individuals – dead or alive – they would most like to have dinner with and in fact, some decades ago, Steve Allen produced a show on PBS doing just that with actors playing such historical figures as Benjamin Franklin, Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln. And I think there is a meme with this question that now and then pops up around the blogosphere.

When I ask it of myself, there is only one name that matters. I would like my dinner to be a private one with Gore Vidal. Actually, I’m greedier than that. I would wish it to be a weekly dinner going on indefinitely. And to many of my friends certain astonishment, I’d even let him do all the talking.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: At The Elder Storytelling Place today, there is an extraordinary story of strength in adversity from Holly Stevens titled Keep on Singing.]

Comments

[tamar]

A favorite thing to do is to go through my entire book collection! Poring over each tome, and title, the look, feel, and smell, and examining how the materials — paper, glue, binding, inks — have fared over the years. And when I bought the book, and why, or when I got it as a gift, and from whom. And who I thought I was then, and with whom I was friends and where I was living, and what I was studying or working on. And what I thought of the book, the author, the genre, and on and on.

Please share, if you will, Ronni, why Gore is/was/and might remain your guru? I never clicked with him, and maybe now is a chance to have another look, to make a fresh start today.

[Matty]

You've got me so curious..now I must go and check Amazon and see what's available by Gore Vidal. Over the years I've probably read some of his stuff. I would choose Anthony Hopkins for a dinner date...for more reasons than one. He could read the labels on soup cans and I would be mesmerized by his voice.
Cheers!

[Darlene]

i share your love of Gore Vidal. i was not as young as you were when I discovered him but once I did his name became a magnet and I read everything I could find that he wrote.

[Tom Shugart]

This is a meme item if I ever saw one. It will require some thought on my part, but you could do a lot worse that Vidal. He'd probably be on my short list. But you've already picked him, so I'll have to come up with someone else.