The Eternal Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal, who would have turned one hundred today, is not always a man easily remembered. There is no simple canon to jam him inside, no well-meaning scholarly societies to huddle around and insist on holding extravaganzas in his memory or at least petitioning the local schoolboards to slip Myra Breckinridge or The City and the Pillar or Burr into the high school curriculums next fall. Politicos in both parties cannot find any comfortable ways to weaponize his memory. If they know anything about Vidal, they would come to understand he probably disdained them and what they were trying to do—unless, somehow, they possessed his withering, Augustan sensibilities.