Gore Vidal has just became the latest, and certainly one of the greatest, People Whom I Desperately Want To Write To, To Tell Them How Much They Mean To Me, But Never Quite Find The Occasion, And Then They Die.
The main reason I wanted to write was to wax on about how great his cycle of American political history novels was. (I’ve been thinking about them again lately, reading another historical novel, Wolf Hall, which I can’t help but compare unfavourably to Vidal’s books, owing to the gaping absence of the actual workings of politics within Mantel’s novel.)
I used to save Gore Vidal’s novels for my holidays, so they have especially happy memories for me; memories of the book, and the place, and a happy interval from work.
If I remember right… (I read them in a screwy order, starting halfway through, then going back to the beginning):
Empire was Edinburgh,
Hollywood was Vienna,
Washington, D.C. was Rennes and Paris,
Burr was Amsterdam,
Lincoln was Dubrovnik,
1876 was the Black Forest, and
The Golden Age was New York.
I should have just told him this. I think he’d have liked it.
We are all Wotan 