Spats with Truman Capote, punch-ups with Norman Mailer, a TV showdown that electrified the US and has now been made into a feature-length documentary … Jay Parini on the bravery and bite of Gore Vidal

I came to know Gore Vidal in the mid 1980s, when I was living in southern Italy, virtually a neighbour, and our friendship lasted until his death in 2012. Needless to say he was a complicated and often combative man. It took an effort, strenuous at times, to remain a close friend; but it seemed to me worth putting in the time, allowing him to relax into his deeper self, which was actually quite shy, even solitary. The public mask didn’t fit the private man very well, and I was always much relieved when he took it off.

Vidal would dwell at length on his feuds and fixed on the idea, which he took from Goethe, that talent is formed in stillness but character “in the stream of the world”. He entered that stream and swam vigorously, often against the current. And his wide knowledge of the world informed his work – the brilliant historical novels, especially Burr (about Aaron Burr, a founding father) and Julian, about the fourth-century Roman emperor. His seven novels about American history form an elegant and entertaining interlocking series that runs from the Jeffersonian years through the mid-20th century, and which puts his vast erudition on display in palatable ways. His essays, as gathered in United States: Essays 1952-1992, make up more than 1,000 pages of vivid writing about books and ideas – perhaps his main contribution to the republic of letters. His perspective is always that of the lofty intellectual. As John Lahr once said, Vidal “pisses from an enormous height”.

A brilliant writer and public intellectual who could take on the world when he felt it necessary, Vidal was a brave figure on the political scene who would stand up for things that meant a lot to him, and he made his case eloquently before a wide audience. He was that nearly extinct variety of human being: a famous writer whose fame extended far beyond the realms of literature: a wit, a political pundit, a sought-after TV guest, a scold and much more. As he put it himself: “I am at heart a propagandist, a tremendous hater, a tiresome nag, complacently positive that there is no human problem that could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.” That he was also a brilliant novelist and essayist was often beside the point.

From the start of his career in the late 1940s, he looked around to see who else was getting attention, and it irked him when others seemed to outflank him. Truman Capote certainly annoyed him, and he honed his talent for feuding with this feline young novelist from the American south whose first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, swept the bestseller lists in 1948. That same year, Vidal’s first major novel, The City and the Pillar, arrived noisily on the scene; one of the first American novels with an explicitly gay theme, it turned Vidal into something of a pariah in the literary establishment.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gore Vidal aged 21. Photograph: Jerry Cooke/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Vidal lived in New York after the war, as did Capote, and they moved in the same social circle, over which Tennessee Williams presided. “I first met Truman at Anaïs Nin’s apartment,” Vidal recalled. “My first impression – as I wasn’t wearing my glasses – was that it was a colourful ottoman. When I sat down on it, it squealed. It was Truman.”

It annoyed Vidal horribly that when Life magazine ran an article on the new generation of writers it featured a large picture of Capote and a small one of Vidal. The two men quarrelled endlessly in those days, exchanging punches in the press over each other’s styles. Vidal accused Capote of imitating the prose of Carson McCullers with “a bit of Eudora Welty” thrown in for good measure. Capote suggested that Vidal’s main literary influence was the New York Daily News. Overhearing this particular exchange, Williams rolled his eyes in mock horror: “Please! You are making your mother ill.”

‘Don’t call me a crypto-Nazi!’ The lost heart of political debate Read more

In 1948, Vidal travelled to Paris, where he met up with Williams and Christopher Isherwood, and, the purpose of his visit, saw the elder statesman of world literature, André Gide, who had won the Nobel prize in literature the year before. Gide was at the peak of his fame, a public intellectual who represented, for Vidal, an ideal of sorts. Like Vidal, he considered homosexuality utterly natural, noting that it could be found in most of the advanced cultural moments in history. That Gide was also gay intrigued Vidal, and he gratefully accepted from the 79-year-old writer an inscribed copy of Corydon, a volume of four dialogues on homosexuality.

The young writer admired Gide’s severe manner, recalling his large bald head with a dent above the brow, skin like rice paper and eyes that glistened with a combination of “lust and intelligence”. Gide smoked, talking in mandarin French about Oscar Wilde and Henry James as if he were giving a lecture. When Vidal heard that Capote had been there only a couple of days previously, he nervously asked the old master how he found him. “Who?” asked Gide. Then he remembered that there was a young American author by that name and found on his desk the article from Life that featured Capote. Unsurprisingly, the young Vidal winced.

The novelist and composer Paul Bowles was a friend of both Capote and Vidal, who decided to join him in Morocco in the summer of 1949. When Bowles explained that Capote planned to come as well, Vidal cooked up a practical joke. He thought it would be amusing for Capote to step off the boat and see Bowles with Vidal at his side. And the scenario played out nicely. When Bowles met Capote at the dock, Capote looked behind him to see Vidal with his hands in his jacket pockets, as if in permanent residence. Capote’s face fell “like a souffle that had been stuck into a freezer”, a French diplomat who happened to be there at the time recalled.

Theirs was a minor squabble, with neither side missing a chance to make a joke about the other. But the feud expanded in the 60s, after Vidal had been – according to Capote, in an interview with Playgirl – tossed out of the White House by Bobby Kennedy because he was “drunk and obnoxious”. In fact Kennedy had taken offence at Vidal’s apparent intimacy with Jacqueline Kennedy – the first lady was distantly related to Vidal by marriage – and the writer had left in a huff. Vidal sued Capote over the remark, and Capote countersued. The legal case dragged on with Vidal winning in the end, though Capote had no money by then, so it was a Pyrrhic victory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Best of Enemies official trailer

Their wrangling continued until Capote, ill from his abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs, died in the late summer of 1984. When Vidal’s editor called from New York with news of his rival’s death, Vidal remarked after the briefest pause: “A wise career move.”

Vidal and Norman Mailer first met at a mutual friend’s Manhattan apartment in 1952. Mailer had made a huge splash with The Naked and the Dead, his bestselling novel of the Pacific war, frustrating Vidal, whose own war novel, Williwaw, had barely registered. The two young writers circled each other warily, and a complicated friendship began that would play out over the next five decades. The two had little in common. “Norman imagined himself by nature a kind of boxer – though he wasn’t, not really,” says Gay Talese, a friend to both men. “In reality, Norman was soft. But he put on this aggressive mask. Vidal had another kind of mask: cool, suave, worldly-wise. It was a good contrast with Norman. They played well together, but it was always a kind of act. They both understood the publicity value of this contest, and they let it play out in different ways.”

The real trouble started in 1971, when Vidal chose to review Mailer’s incendiary book about the feminist movement, The Prisoner of Sex. He dismissed Mailer, combining him with two other macho men, Henry Miller and the murderer Charles Manson, to create a single male aggressor and sexist pig he called “M3”. Vidal wrote: “Women are not going to make it until M3 is reformed, and that is going to take a long time.”

Needless to say, Mailer didn’t enjoy being compared to the likes of Manson. Never, by his own admission, one to pass up the opportunity to be on television, Vidal accepted an offer from Dick Cavett to appear on his talk show with Mailer. In the green room, according to Mailer, Vidal put a warm hand on the back of his neck, a gesture that he interpreted as veiled aggression. Mailer answered with a not-so playful swipe on the cheek. Much to Mailer’s surprise, Vidal slapped him back. Then Mailer leaned forward like a boxer and, in a move that suggested to Vidal he had been drinking, winked before headbutting his cheek.

Mailer leaned forward like a boxer and winked before butting his head into Vidal’s cheek

On the show, Mailer expressed his disapproval of Vidal, saying he was intellectually shameless. Somewhat clumsily, he described Vidal’s writing as “no more interesting than the stomach of an intellectual cow”. Vidal ignored him, offering an innocent smile. But Mailer attacked again, asking him why he didn’t, for once, speak to him directly instead of talking to the audience. Then he attacked Vidal for alluding to the fact that Mailer had stabbed his wife in 1960, calling him “a liar and a hypocrite”. Vidal didn’t flinch. Instead, he remained eerily calm when Mailer asked him to apologise for comparing him to Manson. “I would apologise if – if it hurts your feelings, of course I would,” said Vidal. Mailer replied: “No, it hurts my sense of intellectual pollution.” Vidal smiled serenely. “Well,” he said, “I must say that as an expert, you should know about such things.” The conversation grew ever more hostile, but – as anyone who watches a clip of this broadcast will notice – Vidal never lost control of himself. On the other hand, Mailer came off as a bully.

The two avoided each other for some years, but their rivalry came to a head in 1977, when Vidal and his partner, Howard Austen, were passing through New York. “Howard adored New York,” said Vidal. “I never did. It has all of the filth and confusion of Calcutta without the cultural amenities.”

One night they attended a party for Princess Margaret, before going on to an expansive apartment owned by Lally Weymouth, a journalist and daughter of Katherine Graham, publisher of the Washington Post. More than 100 guests crammed together. “You could hardly breathe,” Austen recalled, “everyone standing shoulder to shoulder.” It was a glittering affair, with Mailer, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, JK Galbraith, Gay Talese, William Styron and Jerry Brown – Vidal’s future rival for a senate seat in California – among the guests.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer on the Dick Cavett Show

What happened next varies according to the teller, but Austen’s version accords with that of others:

[Mailer] saw Gore surrounded by friends, everyone talking and laughing. Gore was in a good mood as Mailer moved right up to him, got in his face, and everybody around them fell pretty silent. It looked like trouble. Norman told Gore that he looked like an old Jew, and Gore shook his head. He didn’t want to get into anything with Norman. Then Mailer threw his drink in Gore’s face, right in his eyes, then hit him in the mouth with a punch, a kind of glancing uppercut. Gore was stunned, and he stepped back. He wiped a dribble of blood from his mouth with a handkerchief. Then Gore said, ‘Norman, once again words have failed you.’

This confrontation at Weymouth’s apartment became emblematic of an age when literary lions roared at each other. “It was all very tedious,” said Vidal, referring to the encounter as “the night of the small fists”. For his part, Mailer had another version, as he wrote to a friend: “I butted him, threw the gin and tonic in his face, and bounced the glass off his head. It was just enough to prime you or me for a half-hour war, but Vidal must have thought it was the second battle of Stalingrad for he never made a move when I invited him downstairs. Twenty-four hours later he was telling everybody he had pushed me across the room.”

In 1984, Mailer decided to call a truce, inviting Vidal to participate with him in a fundraising event in New York. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us,” he wrote to Vidal, “has become a luxury. It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time. Apart from that, I’d still like to make up. An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.”

Vidal said, “I never actually disliked Norman, not really. So now the feud – for what it was worth – was officially over. This was fine with me, as long as I didn’t have to read another of his books.” The pair would do several fundraising events in their last decade, and the truce held.

This was never the case with William F Buckley, who was Satan as far as Vidal was concerned: a vicious rightwing polemicist who represented everything that was wrong with American society. Buckley was the quintessential US conservative of a certain stripe: Roman Catholic, Ivy League-educated, wealthy, with a mid-Atlantic accent that seemed to parody itself at times. He founded the National Review, a conservative magazine, in 1955 and used it as a platform to make himself the spokesman for laissez-faire, pro-business economics and a hard-nosed, anti-communist foreign policy. With his first book, a feisty memoir called God and Man at Yale (1951), he had laid down the gauntlet, helping to set in motion the movement that eventually led to Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

To his credit, Buckley and his circle did a good job in the 50s and early 60s of distancing themselves from segregationist and antisemitic voices in the American conservative movement. Buckley disliked the libertarian novelist Ayn Rand (an atheist) as well as Governor George Wallace (an obvious racist, in his view). Much like Vidal, he had denounced the John Birch Society, an extremist rightwing organisation, as representing a dangerous turn in American political thinking.

Vidal would never accept that he and Buckley had anything in common. But they shared a similar background, with roots in the south – Vidal’s grandfather, a powerful US senator, came from Mississippi, and Buckley’s father had struck it rich as an oil man in Texas. While they took opposing stances on many aspects of foreign and domestic policy, they shared more than either would admit.

Their most infamous confrontation came in 1968, events now captured in the feature-length documentary film Best of Enemies. A few months prior to the presidential nominating conventions that year, Vidal was asked to appear in a series of 10 prime-time television debates with Buckley, moderated by Howard K Smith, one of the most respected journalists in the country. This promised to be the intellectual and political fight of the decade, and Vidal took it very seriously. “He was like a prize fighter getting ready for the big fight,” recalled Austen. In his hotel suite, Vidal made elaborate notes on hot topics such as the Vietnam war, housing for the poor and the constitutional rights of assembly for protest. He knew Buckley would come well-armed with statistics and Jesuitical arguments, and planned to fire back with everything he could muster.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gore Vidal with Bianca Jagger in 1979. Photograph: Fotos International/Getty Images

It’s important to recall the historical context. The Vietnam war had taken a turn for the worse and President Johnson had stepped up the draft, calling for 48,000 new soldiers, a move that inflamed the college-age generation in the US, creating resistance on a scale that nobody in Washington could have foreseen. Martin Luther King, Jr had been assassinated in Memphis in April, Bobby Kennedy in Los Angeles in June. “We had always been a violent country,” Vidal said, “these deaths confirmed what we knew already.”

The Buckley-Vidal debates attracted 10 million viewers for each session and the saturation coverage turned both men into celebrities. From the outset, the tension between the opponents was clear. Buckley’s manner was pompous, with his tongue flicking, his eyes leering. Vidal was only slightly less pompous, with affectations and mannerisms that seemed, even to his friends, over the top and perhaps out of character.

Buckley attacked Vidal for spending much of the year in Europe, implying that he was a traitor because he lived in Rome. By the third debate, Buckley had begun to mock Vidal’s popular if scandalous sex-change novel Myra Breckinridge, which he described as pornography. Vidal hit back hard: “If there were a contest for Mr Breckinridge, you would unquestionably win it. I based her style polemically on you – passionate but irrelevant.” He referred to Buckley as “the Marie Antoinette of the right wing”, someone who wished to impose his own “bloodthirsty neurosis” on American politics. Allusions to homosexuality were abundant, with Buckley implying that Vidal was distinctly “other”; Vidal insinuated that Buckley was a closet queen.

The real fight began in Chicago, where the last debates took place. More than 10,000 demonstrators belonging to various student movements converged, despite the refusal of the mayor, Richard Daley, to allow permits. As Vidal saw it, this abrogated the “right to assembly” as put forward in the constitution. On 28 August, the day of the seventh debate, there had been a “police riot”, as it was described in the subsequent Walker Report. A young protester had lowered the American flag in Grant Park, and the police swarmed. Tear gas filled the air, and clubs swung. The nation watched in horror, as the United States appeared to slip into anarchy.

The evening debate contained fireworks of a kind never before seen on prime-time American television. Buckley spoke for the older generation when he decried the lawlessness in the streets. He exuded patriotism. When asked by Smith if raising a Viet Cong flag in the midst of the Vietnam war was unduly provocative, Buckley nodded, saying it was like raising a Nazi flag in the US during the second world war. Vidal shook his head, referring again and again to the “right to assembly”. “What are we doing in Vietnam if you can’t freely express yourself in the streets of Chicago?” he wondered.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest President John F Kennedy with Gore Vidal

He talked about the repressive treatment of protesters, alluding to the riots on the streets outside the convention centre. Buckley interrupted him, recalling the time George Lincoln Rockwell, a leader of the American Nazi Party, had marched with his followers into a small town in Illinois. They had been turned away, and Buckley thought this had been justified by the unusual circumstances. Taking the cue, Vidal jabbed at Buckley: “As far as I’m concerned, the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself.” It was a deadly assertion, and Buckley curled his lip and sneered: “Now listen, you queer! Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”

Responding to an interviewer the next day, Vidal said: “I’ve always tried to treat Buckley like the great lady that he is.” Not surprisingly, three years of law suits and countersuits followed, with no clear victory for either man. After Buckley’s death, Vidal wrote a caustic obituary of his old enemy which ended: “RIP – WFB – in hell.”

A later feud involved Christopher Hitchens, the English journalist and flamethrower who, in his early days as a leftwing polemicist, modelled himself partly on Vidal. “He wants to be me,” Vidal would often say, once designating Hitchens, whom he affectionately called Hitchy-Poo or, more often, The Poo, as his successor. In a witty counter-move, Hitchens printed some words by Vidal on the cover of his memoir, Hitch-22: “I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an inheritor, a dauphin or delfino. I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.” The quotation is crossed out, with a handwritten note beside it: “No. CH.”

As a young man, Hitchens seemed to relish the role of Vidal-come-lately, wasting no opportunity to appear on TV or comment on any political development. He drank booze in quantities even Vidal found excessive. From the outset, he had been suitably anti-establishment and anti-religious in ways that pleased Vidal, who spoke of him with admiration. When Hitchens attacked Henry Kissinger or Mother Teresa, Vidal applauded, although he told me “He will always be Vidal-minor”.

That Christopher Hitchens supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, for Vidal, beyond the pale

Then Hitchens moved to Washington, DC, and – according to Vidal – he “fell among thieves”. That Hitchens supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was, for Vidal, beyond the pale. Vidal had written several bestselling pamphlets against George W Bush and his gang in the years after 9/11, and had made himself vividly relevant in old age as a defiant critic of the White House and its brutal warmongering. Quite rightly, he predicted that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to chaos in the Middle East.

“He’s gone mad, our Poo,” he said to me one evening in the winter of 2010, after Hitchens published a nasty piece about him in Vanity Fair called “Vidal Loco”. Hichens criticised Vidal’s three post-9/11 pamphlets, calling them “half-argued and half-written shock pieces”. He also attacked him for giving an interview in which he railed against George Bush and Dick Cheney, saying “the whole American experiment can now be regarded as a failure”. Hitchens seemed especially irritated when Vidal said of Britain: “This isn’t a country, it’s an American aircraft carrier.”

On 2 October, 2010, not long after Hitchens was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, I spoke to him at a book festival in Pennsylvania. He was already fragile. We sat together in his hotel room and talked, and he asked me as I left if Vidal had spoken about him recently. I could not tell him the truth. “He wasn’t happy with your piece about him in Vanity Fair,” I said, “but he still thinks of you fondly.” Hitchens smiled, saying: “I looked to him as a model. We all did.”

Sex, looks and lawsuits - Gore Vidal in quotes

Class is the most difficult subject for American writers to deal with and the most difficult for the English to avoid.”

A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.”

Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for president. One hopes it is the same half.”

Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing acts, not people.”

Happily for the busy lunatics who rule over us, we are permanently the United States of Amnesia.”

American writers want not to be good but to be great, and so we are neither.”

After a certain age, lawsuits take the place of sex.”

I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.”

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country –and we haven’t seen them since.”

Never lose an opportunity to have sex or be on television.”

We should stop going around babbling we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We’re a sort of militarised republic.”

The four most beautiful words in our common language: I TOLD YOU SO.”

• Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies: The Life of Gore Vidal by Jay Parini is published by Little, Brown this month. Best of Enemies is on general release.