(4 of 4)
But J.F.K. was fun. Vidal, who had grown up among Washington elders, found an ebullient President, who was only seven years older than he, very refreshing. Kennedy relished the kind of slanging session at which Vidal is a master. He remembers Kennedy "as one of the greatest gossips I've ever known. He knew everything, and still he questioned you constantly. He was wildly interested in all the movie stars I knew. 'Tell me about Hope Lange,' he'd say."
Those freewheeling good times are distant now. His health is good, his career robust, but Vidal seems like a lion in winter. He feels that the populist causes he fought for all his life died with Lyndon Johnson. He is confident that Bush will lose the election, largely because of his stand on abortion, but he despairs of Bill Clinton's shaking up the economy sufficiently or reversing the incursions on civil liberties and women's rights made in the name of family sanctity by what he calls the Party of God, consisting mostly of Republicans, but Democrats as well.
"Bush is a perfectly rational man on abortion," he notes, "but he thinks he can't afford to be. His only hope is for a very small turnout and enough godly folk to push him over. But the Democrats have two conservative Southern boys running, and they'll take back the South." Vidal is depressed, but his irrepressible humor -- never dormant long -- bubbles to the surface. "Ultimately it's a matter of style. What it comes down to is this: Do you spell Jennifer with a J or a G? That's a class division. As a populist, I'm all for G."
Vidal is also confronting the fact that old friends are dying of AIDS. He does not advertise his homosexuality, but a reader of his fiction, notably Myra, Kalki, Duluth and of course Golgotha, knows that he hates the chains of sexual identity. Throughout his literary career he has played endlessly with the notions of bisexuality or transsexuality. If readers find the new novel repellent, it may be that it is no longer easy to laugh at scenes in which Nero rapes Timothy ("Tighten those beautiful little buns") or to laugh off lewd goings-on along the missionary trail.
Vidal will not give ground, as always determined to follow his instincts. There is a scene in Golgotha in which Timothy and Mark, walking in Rome, hear a noisome humming that they cannot place. "I hear it too," says the author. "It's not supernatural or anything silly like that. It's just a sense that things are going on around you." Armed with TV, the fax and endless phone calls from an international army of well-placed pals, this remorseless observer is picking up every buzz.