Gore Vidal Interview (page: 4 / 9) National Book Award	Print Interview

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.

And why was that?

Gore Vidal: It was a book about the absolute normality of "same-sexuality," as it was sometimes called. Remember, I spent all my life not only in boys' schools, but here I am stuck in three years of the Army. I knew exactly what went on in the real world. It was Walt Whitman who said, "No one will ever know what goes on in armies." Everybody thought it was the bloodshed and so on. Whitman was after different game. I knew what went on in the real world, and I thought, well, nobody would write about it.
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Certainly not in America, up to that point.

Gore Vidal: No, certainly not in a favorable way, although I am pretty nonjudicial.

All the people who had praised my war novel were suddenly hysterical over this book, and I responded in kind, being brought up by the Gores, sharp-tongued and quite mean-minded as I get angry, and I am quite for fighting back. I have conducted an absolute feud with The New York Times for 50 years, because of what they did to that book and to me. They're not doing very well these days, I'm happy to report from the front.
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You must have known that you were inviting controversy if not worse.

Gore Vidal: Well no, I'm not exactly stupid, but at the same time, I didn't realize how stupid they were.

You were writing a serious literary work on a subject that hadn't been touched on before.

Gore Vidal: Well, it had been touched on before. After all, there was Proust. All sorts of great writers had dealt with it, but always in a peripheral way. All you have to do is spend three years in the Army. There is nothing you don't learn about that subject, among other things. It seemed to me something that needed doing.

I suspect at a very early age that one of the things I most disliked in the world was a dishonesty and hypocrisy. Since the United States is firmly based on both, I had a rich subject, my native land, and certain taboo subjects were obviously going to interest me. Why, of all the founding fathers, did I pick Aaron Burr to write a book about? Well, I thought it was time that his point of view was expressed, because he is very interesting about the founding of the country.
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How did that affect your career as a young novelist?

Gore Vidal: It was not a brilliant move, no, but I attracted a large audience in many countries aside from the U.S., and then I went to television to make a living. The New York Times didn't care what was on television. I finally came back to the novel with Julian, and I have been a novelist ever since.

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