5/29/2023 0 Comments Empire of Self by Jay PariniNot long into their friendship Vidal asked him to take on his biography, which he wanted to appear in his lifetime. He quickly became a confidant and over the following years saw the older man often and at length in Italy, America and Britain, witnessing moments of bad behaviour and kindness alike, along with his subject’s ever-growing infirmity before his death in 2012 at the age of eighty-six. Parini first met Vidal in the mid-1980s when, as a young writer on sabbatical, he found himself in an Italian village just below La Rondinaia, Vidal’s massive cliff-top villa on the Amalfi coast. And the books, though it’s too early to tell if they will earn time’s pardon. What can be said about Gore Vidal, for or against him, that he hasn’t already said himself, and better than any of us can hope to? How should we see this thin-skinned litigious charmer, this predatory and all too talented monstre of ego, who neither forgot nor forgave anything? The indictment is long against it lie some enduring friendships and a talent to amuse. ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ So Jay Parini quotes from TS Eliot’s ‘Gerontion’ at the end of this clear-eyed book, and while he suggests that the question ‘haunts every biographer’, it seems especially apposite here.
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