One heck of a review …

… of what sounds like a first-rate biography: on Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini (Doubleday) | On the Seawall: A Literary Website by Ron Slate (GD). (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

His grandfather’s isolationist politics triggered Vidal’s anti-imperialist critiques. “The world, in his view, had fallen away from a beautiful moment at the inception of the American republic,” Parini writes, “when – briefly – the ideals of life and liberty seemed to prevail.” Short-lived idyllic beginnings yield to endless malaise. With shrewd timing, Vidal produced satirical novels, essays and plays that Americans wanted to read and see. At least one’s own celebrity and notoriety can flare up in opposition. His antagonistic but poised arguments could enrage his enemies – and so again, I revert to YouTube to watch him joust with William F. Buckley on the Vietnam War, an argument that leads to Buckley calling him a “queer” and losing his famous composure.

Buckley himself came to think he had lost it, but he had asked Vidal twice, quite politely, not to use  the term "crypto-Nazi." Had it been I, I would have simplyy got up and jacked Vidal's jaw. But I hail from the underclass.