Ah, yes: the man who would be president. Had Gore Vidal, America's number one prince-in-exile, ever fulfilled his youthful ambition, that of becoming the main tenant of the White House, how different his life would have been. (And how different recent US history might have proved). As president he would at least have left a collection of viciously witty speeches unique to the office and destined to remain unsurpassed for sheer speed of epigrammatic thought. Grandson of the famous blind Senator Thomas Pryor Gore and the only child of a famously unhappy glamorous couple, his father a star athlete, his mother a gorgeous alcoholic monster, Gore Vidal was shaped by a family legacy, an unsettled childhood, a desire to be a writer and a flair for impersonal personal relations. As the respected biographer of Dickens, Thomas Carlyle and Henry James, Kaplan would seem more cursed than blessed in a formidable subject renowned for his patrician wit and still very much alive. This is a huge, deferential book, 800 pages and groaning under a relentless mass of detail and the weight of Vidal's presence, if non-interference. Having allowed Kaplan access to all his papers, Vidal could also provide a large cast of living acquaintances all willing to speak about his life and times. The result is a gossipy and unscholarly volume offering endless references to Vidal's beauty and active pursuit of casual sex. Just as his essays remain far superior to his fiction, the best of which is contained in the historical tomes, Vidal the diverse writer remains more satirically aware than gifted. Far more impressive in person, or at least in voice, than on paper, he is - on the basis of this book - either a lot less interesting than expected, or too clever for even the most tenacious of biographers. I suspect the latter.
