(2 of 4)
Vidal has lived most of his adult life in the public eye. Even for people who have only heard of his mischievous best seller Myra Breckinridge, his image from countless TV talk shows is indelible -- by turns suave, perverse, a man smarter than anyone else on the set. His waspish ripostes can be frightening to confront but endlessly quotable later -- like his line about Ronald Reagan: "A triumph of the embalmer's art." Handsome, saturnine, Vidal projects the threat that he is capable of derailing anything.
Christianity, for one thing. LIVE from Golgotha takes a shocking look at Jesus' claim as the Messiah and at those who, like St. Paul and St. Timothy, spread the word. Though the author has personally never progressed beyond a manual Smith Corona ("I have spent my life changing ribbons"), he has a sophisticated knowledge of computer gadgetry and a puddle jumper's expertise at time tripping.
Golgotha and Myra have several things in common: fantastic sexual gambits and a kind of Lewis Carroll flouting of the laws of time. Plotted like a mystery for late-page plot twists, it casts Paul as a tap-dancing gay, Jesus as a brilliant businessman. Drawing on the work of historian Joel Carmichael, Vidal argues that when Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple, he was destroying a sophisticated Roman financial structure that controlled banking in the Middle East -- and thereby sealing his own fate.
The narrator is Timothy, who is caught on a time trip not of his choosing. All he wants to do is set down his own account of the glory days, but he is thwarted by sci-fi circuitry that allows other people to penetrate his narrative. In particular, two chaps named Cutler intrude ruthlessly. Gradually it becomes clear that Cutler One wants to discard Jesus and await a Messiah who does not end up on a cross. Cutler Two opts for Jesus as the focus of a new religion. In this muddle, centuries turn inside out and the cast at Golgotha can be changed and added to; there is even room for Mary Baker Eddy and Dr. Helen Schucman. It is also possible for Jesus to command a good table at Spago. Or, given Vidal's insatiable need to shock, to find himself pinioned by user-friendly nails at the Crucifixion.
Already, an Irish bishop, a Conservative British M.P. and the Vatican press have denounced Vidal for blasphemy, though none of them had access to the book when they went public. But LIVE from Golgotha will nettle many more. The author shrugs it all off: "Christianity is such a silly religion." As for the book's teasingly naughty humor, he washes his hands of other people's want of wit: "Sometimes the wrong word makes exactly the right joke."
Vidal has always been impossible to pigeonhole. He is ever the restless bull in the china shop of conventional wisdom. He is also a serious student of history. Jason Epstein, his old friend and longtime publisher, correctly calls Vidal "the last in a line of men of letters -- among whom Edmund Wilson is a classic example. Scholars like him are rare in any age, polymaths with a huge range of interests." Vidal can lampoon the New Testament because he knows the Bible and Roman history.