Gore Vidal Interview (page: 3 / 8) National Book Award	Print Interview

We've read that when you were at Phillips Exeter, you joined America First.

Gore Vidal: I was the head of it.

It seems rather precocious that you were so involved politically at that young an age.

Gore Vidal: Well, I was what? Fourteen? Fifteen?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The Gore family were the founders of the Party of the People, which was first organized up in Northern Mississippi, but it leaked over into Georgia, Alabama. The Party of the People -- that's where the word "populist" comes from, we are the original populists -- we represented the farmers who had been destroyed by the Civil War, other people who were not doing terribly well in our society, particularly what we called Indians, but now are called Native Americans. It was a party for the turbulent poor who didn't like their situation, and we promised, with great sincerity. It was an interesting party, it was also quite racist, but then the whole South was racist. My grandfather was not racist, and he lost his first race in Mississippi for Congress, because he was thought to be in too close with African Americans who lived in the southern part of the state, which was governed by the Bourbons, as we called the rich white people. We hated them just as much as the black folk did. So the Gores and the African Americans were always allies. So... comes also isolationists. We believed what George Washington said. When he left office, he addressed the nation, and he advised us to mind our own business. He said, "Nations, like individuals, ought not to have enemies, and they ought not to have special friends. Nations only have interests." Very good advice, which I always took seriously, and still do.

When did you start writing? When did you discover you had an aptitude or a desire to write?

Gore Vidal: The first time I read my first book all by myself without my grandmother helping me. She was my reader for a while. As soon as I started to read and understand it easily, I started to write a book. I thought, "This is not only easy to do, but I think I could probably do it better than they're doing it." At least I would write something more to my own interests.

How old were you?

Gore Vidal: Nine.

What is the first thing you wrote about?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Gore Vidal: I had seen a movie called The Mystery of the Blue Room, I think it was called. I can't find it in any of the encyclopedias, but I remember liking it very much, and so I wrote "The Mystery of the Blue Room." Yes, I was a plagiarist very early, just borrowed it from the movie. Nobody noticed. Nobody had seen it in my family. There I was, retelling the story, but I was using family characters, my grandmother, who was a wonderful woman, very, very intelligent, but she never listened to anybody. She wasn't deaf, she just didn't like listening to people. She didn't like talking that much either. She would occasionally say something intelligent, but she would miss an entire conversation because she'd be thinking about other things. And then she would ask the subject of what we were talking about. We said, "But we told you a few minutes ago." "Oh, is that what it's about?" And she would just drift off. So I was already using other people's characteristics to decorate my tales.

Isolationist that you were, you went off and enlisted in the United States Army.

Gore Vidal: That's what we did in those days.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. At 17, I enlisted in the Army, and I served three years in the Pacific. I was the First Mate of an Army ship in the Aleutians, which is why I am in a wheelchair. Due to hypothermia, I had a frozen knee, which developed rheumatoid arthritis. Misdiagnosis naturally, by the Army. It turned out to be osteoarthrosis, and I now have an artificial knee. But the knees are the only part of the anatomy I have never had to use in life.

So you were still in the Army when you wrote your first novel?

Gore Vidal: I wrote my first novel while in the Army Hospital at Anchorage, Alaska, and then over here in Van Nuys at Birmingham General Hospital.

What inspired that?

Gore Vidal: Well, it was about a first mate on an Army ship in the Aleutian Islands. I think I was already working pretty close to home. I didn't have anything else to write about.

Had you already decided that this was your life's calling?

Gore Vidal: I think pretty much, although I decided I wanted to go into politics, but I didn't know to what extent I would be able to get around physically, and you sit still when you write a novel, so I wrote my first novel there, sent it to a publisher. I wrote it at 19; it was published when I was 20.

It got good reviews, didn't it?

Gore Vidal: Yes indeed, followed by very bad reviews for The City and the Pillar, my third book.

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