Parini suggests that the writer’s voice, ‘irreverent … knowing, urbane, and wryly bemused … was a gift to the late twentieth century and beyond’. Vidal’s second achievement lies in his essays. Of those last two, the latter is better history and the former a better novel still, Burr lacks the formal interest of E L Doctorow, news of whose death has arrived as I write. Yet Vidal did it consistently well and for a great many years, evoking late antiquity in Julian (1964) and America’s greatest political actors in Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984). Walter Scott may have kept the actual personages of the past off to one side, but, as Parini notes, there was, at the very least, the precedent of Robert Graves and I, Claudius. He was hardly unique in putting world historical figures at the centre of his fiction. The first is his ‘contribution to the biographical novel’. Vidal defined his more outré work as ‘inventions’, but though Parini admits to admiring Myra Breckinridgehe shares the common wisdom that Vidal’s legacy takes two principal forms. Gore Vidal pictured around 1945 by Carl Van Vechten.
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