Eccentric Cool
Hitchens on Gore Vidal:

More than a decade ago, I sat on a panel in New York to review the life and work of Oscar Wilde. My fellow panelist was that heroic old queen Quentin Crisp, perhaps the only man ever to have made a success of the part of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. Inevitably there arose the question: Is there an Oscar Wilde for our own day? The moderator proposed Gore Vidal, and, really, once that name had been mentioned, there didn’t seem to be any obvious rival.

Like Wilde, Gore Vidal combined tough-mindedness with subversive wit (The Importance of Being Earnest is actually a very mordant satire on Victorian England) and had the rare gift of being amusing about serious things as well as serious about amusing ones. Like Wilde, he was able to combine radical political opinions with a lifestyle that was anything but solemn. And also like Wilde, he was almost never "off": his private talk was as entertaining and shocking as his more prepared public appearances. Admirers of both men, and of their polymorphous perversity, could happily debate whether either of them was better at fiction or in the essay form.

I recently read a description of actor Johnny Depp which called his style an eccentric cool. Like Vidal and Wilde, there's a confident independence. Even though Vidal is in Italy and Depp is in France, they are still "involved" and not hermits. Not too long ago I saw Vidal on Henry Rollins's show, which was funny. And Depp has a new Disney blockbuster Alice in Wonderland movie coming out.*

Louis Auchincloss just passed away and I remember Vidal always spoke highly of him. From the Times obituary:

Admirers compared him to other novelists of society and manners like William Dean Howells, but Mr. Auchincloss’s greatest influence was probably Edith Wharton, whose biography he wrote and with whom he felt a direct connection. His grandmother had summered with Wharton in Newport, R.I.; his parents were friends of Wharton’s lawyers. He almost felt he knew Wharton personally, Mr. Auchincloss once said.

Like Wharton, Mr. Auchincloss was interested in class and morality and in the corrosive effects of money on both. "Of all our novelists, Auchincloss is the only one who tells us how our rulers behave in their banks and their boardrooms, their law offices and their clubs," Gore Vidal once wrote. "Not since Dreiser has an American writer had so much to tell us about the role of money in our lives."

And yet five judges of the United States Supreme Court remain oblivious.  Obama's pointed disrespect ("With all due respect to the separation of powers...") last night was amazing. The Times obit also describes the class traitor Auchincloss's partrician/cultural elite personal style (which also could be said of Vidal.):

Mr. Auchincloss had a beaky, patrician nose and spoke with a high-pitched Brahmin accent. He had elegant manners and suits to match, and he wrote in longhand in the living room of an antiques-filled apartment on Park Avenue.

What was most memorable about Vidal's memoirs, to me at least, was the anecdotes about his mother. They are unbelievably funny and she comes off as highly intelligent and unsentimental (i.e. a major bitch) with no trace of self-doubt (like the mother/matriarch on the hilarious sitcom Arrested Development**). For all I know she was a nice, if distant, woman, but Vidal's portrait is unforgettable.
 -----------------------------
* It's good to see Depp working again with friends Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter. It's also exciting to see they invited Anne Hathaway down the rabbit hole to play the White Queen. Hathaway was unbearably heartbreaking in Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married, a film that struck too close to home for me.
**That show is incredibly funny and absurd. I just started watching it.