Sympathy for the Devil
Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A generous, entertaining, intimate look at Gore Vidal, a man who prided himself on being difficult to know
Detached and ironic; a master of the pointed put-down, of the cutting quip; enigmatic, impossible to truly know: This is the calcified, public image of Gore Vidal—one the man himself was fond of reinforcing. "I'm exactly as I appear," he once said of himself. "There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water."
Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, a memoir of his friendship with the stubbornly iconoclastic public intellectual, is a welcome corrective to this tired received wisdom. A complex, nuanced portrait emerges in these pages—and while "Gore" can indeed be brusque, standoffish, even cruel, Mewshaw also catches him in more vulnerable moments. The Gore Vidal the reader comes to know here is generous and supportive to younger, less successful writers; he is also, especially toward the end of his life, disappointed, even lonely.
Sparkling, often hilarious, and filled with spicy anecdotes about expat life in Italy, Sympathy for the Devil is an irresistible inside account of a man who was himself—faults and all—impossible to resist. As enlightening as it is entertaining, it offers a unique look at a figure many only think they know.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this memoir about his friendship with Gore Vidal, Mewshaw (Lying with the Dead) proposes to offer a "corrective portrait" that will reveal the vulnerability beneath the legendary writer's legendary hauteur. To be sure, Vidal was known for his scathing wit, several examples of which are amusingly recounted. When actor Andy Garcia, for instance, indicates that Mewshaw, not Vidal, is his favorite author, the catty Vidal tells his friend, "You can have all the dyslexics." Elsewhere, we read of Vidal's penchant for discussing "celebrity equipment" with guests, his long-standing vendetta against the New York Times, and his "rich history of hypochondria." But as amusing as these anecdotes are, Mewshaw's book is best when probing its subject's true character. Vidal is revealed to have been an avid protector of his own public persona, at one point making Mewshaw tell the London Review of Books that Vidal planned to sue the magazine for libel. Vidal's real self is more elusive: in one episode, he claims to have fathered a daughter so he won't be tied down to one sexual identity, and in another he tells a story about an adolescent affair with the "love of his life," which Mewshaw later learns might not be true. To Mewshaw's credit, readers will share his sadness as he watches his dear friend, the oft-irascible, even unlikable Vidal, decline. 8 pages of b&w illus.
