Chris Jones wrote:
>
> On my recent trip to the Blue Mountains I found in a second hand bookshop in
> Katomba someone's collection of Gore Vidal which I happily emptied my wallet
> to purchase.
>
> I did do a little bit of a lit-search for critical writings on Vidal and
> perhaps happily found little but I was wondering if anyone has any interest
> in Vidal? I am just curious to hear what others may have to say (and not
> knowing why I would ask this in taking Gore Vidal for my own private
> pleasure. Maybe I have a thing for writers that were once banned in the days
> of my youth in Australia and now wish to live what my childhood life through
> censorship lacked?)
>
> best wishes, Chris Jones.
>
> But now, as my private day begins to fade, as the wind in the desert gathers
> in intensity, smoothing out the patterns in the sand, I shall attempt to
> evoke the true image of one who assumed with plausibility in an age of
> science the long-discarded robes of prophecy, prevailing at last through
> ritual death and becoming, to those who see the universe in man, that solemn
> idea which is yet called by its resonant and antique name, god.
> (From Messiah, Gore Vidal, 1955.)
Have to admit I'm not familiar w/ his first books - Williwaw, The City
and the Pillar. But of what I've read, I think Messiah was his best,
followed by some of the historical recreations - Julian first, then
Lincoln, Burr, and Creation.
I've often thought that the only really effective social/political
satire written in America in the 1950s took the form of science
fiction. Sometimes written by masters of the genre (about as marginal
then as now), sometimes by basically mainstream novelists who found they
had to resort to sci-fi to get sufficient imaginative distance.
Masterpieces in first group: Gladiator-at-Law by Frederik Pohl and Cyril
Kornbluth, and Vonnegut's Player Piano. In second, Vidal's Messiah;
also Mailer's Barbary Shore. If I were a critic it would make for an
interesting monograph: The Fate of Satire in an Age of Conformity. But
I'm not a critic.
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