Iconoclast Gore Vidal (1925-2012)

Gore Vidal was incapable of writing a dull sentence, hence his preeminence as an essayist. Whether or not you agreed with his views, and they were often radical, no one equaled him when it came to puncturing the pomposities of leaders, celebrities and mediocrities. He was a self-taught polymath who used his devastating wit to provoke, entertain and educate. In his books and essays, Vidal took on his country – the United States of America – with unrelenting attacks on its leaders for undermining the constitution and waging wars around the world. “I am so alarmed by what is happening with our global empire, and our wars against the rest of the world,” he said in an interview during George Bush’s regime, “it is to time to take political action.”

Although Vidal failed in his attempts at public offices in the two times that he ran - first in 1960, when he was the Democratic Congressional candidate for the 29th District in upstate New York, and again in 1982, when he campaigned in California for a seat in the Senate - his powerful pen skewered the shakers and makers of American foreign policy for decades. With his passing, Henry Kissinger is undoubtedly feeling relieved.

But Vidal did not spare the mainstream literary heavyweights either. He was the quintessential intellectual gadfly. Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Truman Capote, William F. Buckley, to name only a few, felt the sharp sting of his criticism. He considered their work pretentious and sophomoric. His fiery rejection of what he considered trite and transient was something he shared with Vladimir Nabokov.

Vidal was too negative and extreme for most peoples’ taste. Comedian Bob Hope used to make fun of his cotrariness in his skits. But Vidal’s pungent wit and biting one-liners made him a sought-after guest on TV and campuses around the country. No shades of gray for him; he knew exactly what he thought and felt and expressed himself memorably and forthrightly. “Style is knowing who you are,” he explained, “what you want to say, and not giving a damn.” He had a matching ego to go with his talent. “There is not one human problem that could not be solved,” he once said, “if people would simply do as I advise.”

When asked during an interview where the young Vidals, the young Mailers, the young Millers were in contemporary America, Vidal alluded to Eisenhower. “Eisenhower, in a rather great speech when he left office – he warned against the military-industrial complex which he said was taking over too much of this nation’s money and life. A part of it is that is never quoted – he said, in effect, that the universities and learning will be hurt the most because when place of learning and knowledge are dependent upon government bounty and subsidies for their very lives … we have a whole generation of teachers and they are not very good teachers. Some of them are very talented writers, but they’re quiet. They don’t want to rock the boat. They want to keep their jobs … They saw what happened if you got associated with radical movements … Now, they’re quiet as could be.”

Vidal was being unfair to many talented writers and teachers who took on (and continue to take on) the establishment (the late David Foster Wallace, to name only one) without fear but his larger point that we have become a politically partisan nation, indifferent to the essence of our constitution, is on the mark.

I did not read Vidal’s novels – somehow, I could not find them compelling reads - but his essays were something else. “Brilliant” is too small a word to describe them. Incisive, witty, universal, fresh, all delivered with incomparable verve, imagination and style. Just two of the thousands of quotable snippets that I recall off the top of my head now are “drones in their unchanging hives” and “presidents and paint manufacturers.”

Gore Vidal is gone but surely his essays will live on.

The Last Book of Christopher Hitchens

The last published book of Christopher Hitchens, who died on 15 December, 2011 at age 62, is titled "Arguably." It is a collection of his previously-published essays, a fitting coda to a polemicist and a literary polymath. You don't have to agree with Hitchens, and there was much to disagree about - his support of the Iraq War, for instance - to recognize that his opinions were provocative, well-argued and always a great read. "Boring" is a word you will never associate with anything Hitchens wrote.

I read some of the essays in "Arguably" when they were first published in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate. But what I found remarkable in the book is the content of the dedication page: "To the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamadeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu."

Unless you were living in the woods as a hermit for the past two years, at least the first name - Mohamed Bouazizi - should ring a bell. He was the Tunisian vendor who set himself afire and launched the Arab Spring last year. But the others?

Well, here is Hitchens: "The three names on the dedication page belonged to a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur, and a Libyan husband and father. In the Spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt. The third, it might be said, gave his life as well as took it: loading up his modest car with petrol and homemade explosives and blasting open the gate of the Katiba barracks in Benghazi - symbolic Bastille of the detested and demented Qadafi regime in Libya."

Why did Hitchens dedicate his last book to three Muslims who became known only after their death? Because, "in preferring a life-affirming death to a living death-in-life, the harbinger of the Arab Spring hoped to galvanize their fellow subjects and make them aspire to be citizens. Tides will ebb, waves will recede, the landscape will turn brown and dusty again, but nothing can expel from the Arab mind the example and esprit of Tahrir. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers ..."

The faith of the three, Islam, was, of course, of no significance to Hitchens whatsoever. He railed against religion all his life and even wrote a best-seller reveling in his unfaith. What moved Hitchens was obviously the extraordinary courage of three nameless and faceless citizens who answered the calls of their conscience, a rarity at any time and in any age. For Hitchens, if anything could move mountains, this was it.

I always read Hitchens expecting to be provoked and entertained by his though as well as by his use of the language, and I was never disappointed. In fact, his polemical writings against religion, and, in particular, against Islam, only strengthened my faith because he forced me to dig deep and find answers to his charges and attacks with reason, study and yes, belief in the Unseen.

There is a silly tendency to anoint people with this or that title after they pass away. "He was the best essayist of his generation," was a refrain we heard after Hitchens' death. It really doesn't matter whether or not he was the best essayist, or whether that title belongs to Gore Vidal or to someone else. The point is that Hitchens brought a fresh point of view to everything he wrote, even when he was wrong, and in doing so, he always strove to fulfil the primary responsibility of a writer: provoke, excite, entertain, and expand the scope of readers while skewering the tyrants, the corrupt and the powerful, without pandering to anyone or to any ideology.