[In the following review of The Essential Gore Vidal, Brownrigg praises Vidal's diverse and provocative oeuvre, though finds shortcomings with the volume's critical introductions and selections by editor Fred Kaplan.]

Repackaging is one of the finer arts of publishing. How to recast a familiar author in such a way as to tempt old admirers and new readers both, without seeming too mercenary about it? It is not as though we haven’t had much of Gore Vidal in print recently: the past six years have seen publication of his award-winning volume of essays United States: Essays 1952–92; of his acerbic and entertaining memoir Palimpsest; of his latest novel, The Smithsonian Institution, and a reissue of his controversial 1948 novel, The City and the Pillar, along with some early stories. In Britain last year, it was hard to avoid Vidal’s cool, patrician sarcasm on the Monica Lewinsky affair. As one who has spent a lifetime chronicling the theatre of money, sex and deal-making that is the American presidency, Vidal was perhaps that farcical episode’s ideal commentator. “Though Americans dislike history, they do like soap operas about the sexual misbehavior … of real people in high places”, Vidal wrote—in 1971, in a piece on Eleanor Roosevelt, included in The Essential Gore Vidal. What will prove “essential” about a figure whose vibrant verbal presence has itself been an essential of American cultural life for the past fifty-odd years? Fred Kaplan, one of Vidal’s official biographers, answers with a mixture of fiction and non-fiction that provides an adventurous tour around the busy mind and improbable imagination of this gifted, incisive autodidact. Along with twenty-five of Vidal’s most acute essays, the volume includes the script for his sharp political play The Best Man (to which, Vidal has said, Primary Colors owes its plot—“I am often ripped off and I suppose it is a compliment”), and his unique gender-bent comedy of 1960s manners, Myra Breckinridge, as well as selections from his religious and American historical novels.

It is an admirable project. Unfortunately, Kaplan is not the keenest reader of Vidal’s work. Though he is alert to the great scope of Vidal’s interests, and is capable of some neat summaries—a description of Vidal as “an angry and disappointed utopian” is a helpfully succinct characterization of Vidal’s often paradoxical political positions—Kaplan’s critical commentary is fairly pedestrian. On the hysterically funny Myra Breckinridge, he notes soberly that it is “very much about sexual politics”, while on Vidal’s historical fictions he offers, “As an historical novelist, he takes no liberties with fact. But … he is free to create suppositions about fact and sometimes to give these the claim of narrative truth. That is what historical novelists usually do.” Kaplan’s flat tone is in such contrast with Vidal’s distinctive archness that one almost suspects Kaplan of playing literary straight man to Vidal’s stylish comedian, the better to set the reader up for the provocative pleasures of the Essential.

Vidal’s writing, whether fiction or essay, divides into the didactic and the intuitive. It is almost all the former. Vidal develops an analytical line—that Lincoln was the president who truly federalized America, for instance—and will stick with it, in book after book. He is a writer who likes to be in control, and the material over which he exerts control is vast: he wilfully commands entire legions of biblical and Roman and American historical figures; he can analyse the machinations of Washington as easily as breathing; and he knows the lines of American self-deception and self-mythologizing like the back of his hand. He is at his happiest debunking these myths, and certainly a nation in love with its dream of itself needs a debunker. Vidal’s political writings are invariably entertaining, astute, witty, gripping. They are also essentially bloodless.

But every now and then, Vidal lets his polemical mind take a nap, and some wild and authentic anarchy takes over. Myra Breckinridge is the most complete expression of this, though equally strange and vital moments animate the early story “The Ladies in the Library” and selections included from Duluth and The City and the Pillar. Of the latter, Kaplan makes the interesting decision to give us Vidal’s redrafting of the story’s original melodramatic ending, though it is frustrating that he hasn’t deemed “essential” the whole of that stark and daring novel about homosexual love—on the altar of which the young Vidal sacrificed the possibility of a political career, and for which the literary elite blacklisted him for years. (The book initiated a great friendship, though, between Vidal and Christopher Isherwood, and later drew praise from Thomas Mann.) Here the rules of repackaging clearly come into play: don’t include the whole of a book if you have just reissued it.

What a treat, though, to discover or rediscover the bitter hilarities of Myra Breckinridge, a raucous tour de force about the transsexual Myra who cuts a clean (if filthy) swath through her Uncle Buck Loner’s acting academy outside Hollywood. Vidal has said that when he began the novel—“I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess”, its uncompromising first line—he didn’t know that Myra had once been Myron. That bold spontaneity ignites the novel. Myra, unlike many of Vidal’s other fictions, is neither an idea nor an argument (though it provoked both); it is a genuine “invention”, as Vidal calls it. Myra may be unreal, but she has a surreal presence and life force unmatched by Vidal’s more plausible characters. And that she is a mouthpiece for Vidal’s own views is part of her appeal; we recognize her passionate championing of American movies of the 1930s and 40s; her outlandish, and selective, truth-telling (“if one is right, the unsayable must be said”); and, of course, her cruelty: “I can think of no greater pleasure than to approach an open face and swiftly say whatever needs to be said to shut it.”

That the British publisher demanded changes to the novel to avoid obscenity charges is a reminder that Vidal has repeatedly taken pragmatic, if not necessarily aesthetic, risks in his work. He may not be a sensuous writer—“legs moving like pistons” is a Vidalian description of a woman dancing—but he can write a transsexual rape-of-young-man-with-dildo scene better than almost anybody. Or, as Harold Bloom put it (the novel has been a trove for theorists, an ironic fate to befall a practised academic-baiter such as Vidal), Myra Breckinridge “fixed the limit beyond which the most advanced aesthetic neo-pornography ever can go”.

The historical fictions do not share Myra’s imaginative and verbal liveliness; but they remain popular, both among lay readers and the professionals; presidential candidates, according to Vidal, all read Lincoln—even Reagan. “He probably colored it. We had a version for them to color.” In a gift to his abandoned republic, Vidal created, with these six volumes that stretch from the Revolution to the Second World War, a grand, compelling narrative whose project, as in his brilliant essays, is corrective and deflationary. He sets out to show how simplistic Americans have been in choosing their heroes and demons (Vidal’s fictions reclaim Aaron Burr, and reimagine Lincoln as a man rather than an icon); how at the beginning of this century America created an empire, though we don’t like to admit it; and how American society is and always has been an oligarchy.

It is unclear what Kaplan intends readers to make of the chapters included here. In awkwardly linked selections, he presents a disjointed “greatest hits” that includes Washington’s defeat at Brooklyn from Burr, the Gettysburg address (an oddly unaffecting scene) from Lincoln, and Henry James dining with Teddy Roosevelt at the White House in Empire. What is the point of such abridgements, given that these novels have never been championed for their prose? In Empire, Henry Adams, who is the most Vidal-like of his characters, is said to write like a Roman, “with an urgent war to report”; in a later review, we learn what Vidal considers Roman prose to be—“lean, rather flat, and, cumulatively, impressive”. It’s an apt description of his style in these books. Furthermore, though one expects and enjoys Vidal’s name-dropping in his essays, it is wearing to track the enormous number of famous faces parading across these 200 pages. Excerpts are also included, with mixed success, from three of Vidal’s religious fictions, the colourful Roman Julian, Creation, and the recent, extravagant Live from Golgotha; each, in its way, representing Vidal’s argument against monotheism, and his sympathy for paganism.

The essays are uniformly a delight, whether they catch Vidal in a near-wistful mood, as in a lovely piece about his aviator father and the history of the airline industry, “On Flying”, or in the surprisingly radical feminism of a 1971 essay on “Women’s Liberation”. As part of his life’s work analysing “that peculiarly American religion, President-worship”, Vidal makes his way through each of the presidents he has known, including, most famously, JFK. A charged and comic piece on “Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures” brings to mind a complementary essay, “In the Realm of the Fisher King”, by a fellow New York Review of Books contributor, Joan Didion. Didion and Vidal, two of America’s great iconoclastic political essayists, would make an interesting comparative study, each alert to American peculiarities, of the West and East coasts respectively.

For all that Vidal, for decades, has lived, for much of each year, as an expatriate in Italy, and clearly finds cultural solace in Europe, his drives and obsessions remain American. An apocalyptic vision is for some reason ingrained in the American sensibility, and Vidal has always written (not only as he has grown older) with a sense of the many imminent endings that face us. Politically, these include the end of the American Empire or our “imperial republic” as he variously figures it, of the “thorny Puritan American conscience” (its last flower, Eleanor Roosevelt) and even, in an unusual reliance on cliché, of American innocence, which Vidal thinks we lost post-war, in 1950. Literarily, he mourns the loss of decent biography, of politicians who can write, and, as early as 1967, of the novel itself.

Globally, too, Vidal is not optimistic. “I would not bet the farm on our species continuing in rude health too far into the next century”, he wrote several years ago in an essay reprinted here on “The Birds and the Bees”. Myra’s expression of this pessimism about humanity is, inevitably, more colourful: “we are the constant and compulsive killers of life, the mad dogs of creation, and our triumphant viral progress can only end in a burst of cleansing solar fire”. Until that apocalypse, however, and for as long as he gives us his edgy visions, we have the essential Gore Vidal, who may share something of Myra’s stern conviction: “A new world is being born without a single reliable witness except me.”