I was going into a polling-booth to vote on the Maastricht Treaty (Oh; against it, if you must know), when I noticed a young woman - perhaps too young to vote - sitting on a wall and reading a fat book. On the way out, I stopped and asked what the book was.
She showed me the cover - 1876, one of Gore Vidal's historical novels. Was she reading it on assignment? No; a friend had recommended it. Was she liking it? Oh, very much indeed. Had she read anything else by this author? No, but she was sure that she would, because she liked his style and his point of view. I told her that there was no more congenial or reliable way of reading American history than in Mr Vidal's "American Saga" novels. I recommended other books of his; told her about his essays; and almost made her swear that she would read them.
Readable commentator
I came away walking a foot above the ground, not only because I had found a young person with a book in her hand, but because she was reading the best and most readable commentator on the multitudinous affairs of that country which Vidal calls The United States of Amnesia.
Mr Vidal's Gore ancestors left Donegal in the 17th century and became patrician landowners in Maryland, where Washington City now stands in that 100-square-mile area called the District of Columbia. The family branch to which he belongs had moved to Mississippi, which sent his grandfather, T.P. Gore, back to Washington as a senator. Here, Gore Vidal grew up, was educated (very well, it turns out), and went off to the second World War as first mate of a supply ship at the age of 16.
His Vidal ancestors went to America from the Veneto, in the hinterland of Venice. Eugene Gore Vidal (the writer's full name) was born in 1925, at West Point, to Nina Gore, daughter of the senator from Mississippi. His father, Gene Vidal, was West Point's first instructor in aeronautics, and later Franklin Roosevelt's director of the Bureau of Air Commerce.
Gore Vidal published his first novel in 1946. He spent some time in Hollywood, where he wrote several film scripts. (He is very good on that gun-totin' wooden actor, Charlton Heston, and on "Chester Chatterbox" Ronnie Reagan, B-movie actor and cue-card-reading, somnolent tenant of the White House.) He has written Broadway plays and television dramas. He returned to writing novels in 1964, and to publishing essays in those journals unafraid of his political views - views, in fact, which are simply those of someone who is not a machine thinker, but a man who does his own analysis and shares it voluminously with persons willing and wise enough to listen. He is a committed democrat - the full Montesquieu.
He was, he says, "shaped by the second war and Dr Kinsey, `radicalised' by Korea and Joe McCarthy." There are so many sides to Vidal - fiction, political and social comment, literary criticism - and so much of him between so many covers, that I can only adapt the advice given me by a Glasgow woman reading a female author on a bench in St Stephen's Green. "Rrread Herrr. I urrrge you," she said. Read Vidal. Then, using his subversive political prism, look again at Charlie McCreevy.
Latest novel
Recently, Mr Vidal turned 75 and - a renowned master of all the communications media - he is touring the print and broadcasting outlets with his latest novel, The Golden Years, and, as always, having great fun. This novel is the seventh of his historical novels, and, I think, the 22nd novel he has written. He continues to collect his essays, which deal with a startling range of themes, and to publish them in volumes which - though the essay is no longer thought a "cool" product in these tabloid-publishing and Internet times - sell in great quantity.
Like all who read in bed, I find that books build into tower-blocks at my bedside. Every so often, I have to do a demolition job: to tear down built-up books, haul them off, and find space for them away from the bed. Before I remove them, I sort them: put into one pile those which must move out, and into a very small pile those which must stay. Later, when I am reading something that is greatly informative, worthy, but styleless and a little dull, I put it aside and pick up something from the small pile that never leaves, and re-read bits of it for the sheer flavour of it. The Great Gatsby is in that little pile. The collected Shakespeare is there. So is Dylan Thomas. Jane Eyre is there. (Others, too: the little pile is taller than I thought.) And Gore Vidal is always there.
Always subtle
Sometimes, Vidal is Rabelais; at other times, he is Swift. He is always the subtle writer who compliments his readers by assuming that they are as smart and as well informed as he is. In one of his essays, demolishing an author who seeks to instruct the world in the joys of sex, Vidal reflects upon times past, when, he says, the American girl, before the vibrator, always kept a Coca Cola bottle at hand.
And then he comes in with the killer question: "But will it not rot her teeth?" He makes no further comment. The reader, remembering his own misinformed youth, either gets the point or not. Great story-teller that he is, Vidal never explains his jokes.