Vidal is a natural skeptic, and one of the pleasures of his criticism is the extent to which he refuses to be had by certain writers, try as they might. Only later does one attempt to answer the question: to what extent has the maker of the world accomplished what he set out to do?” Mark that try. “I try to inhabit his work, to enjoy it, to be-very simply-had by the artist. “I start from the premise that the creator is ‘right,’” he notes, in the introduction to his second collection of essays, Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship. Though he often writes of politics, he is a critic and a satirist rather than a pundit, and much of even this work comes by way of book reviewing. Though he reads with a sympathetic eye, his judgments are sonorous with authority. Note the absence of their immediate predecessors: Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson. For models, he looks to the worldly, progressive belletrists of the late 19th and early 20th century: Henry James, William Dean Howells, Henry Adams. When the air is clear, you can see across borders when it’s cloudy, chats by the fireside agitate and charm.Ītypically for a critic of the 20th century, Gore Vidal does not subordinate his perceptions to any school or ideology. But the essays of Gore Vidal are a break from all that, a weather station in the Alps. In literature as in life, there is something to be said for indeterminacy, ambiguity, and the aching, open synapses of incomplete ideas.
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