In 1977, after visiting Vidal at his cliff-perched villa on the Amalfi Coast, Martin Amis observed that “he has little of the paranoia worryingly frequent among well-known writers.” Norman Mailer had been onto something, Amis concluded, when he said that “Vidal lacks the wound.” It was an act, a put-on-perhaps the most effective double bluff in the history of literary P.R. In the course of more than half a century, his quips, aphorisms, insults, and punch lines amounted to a self-portrait, airbrushed so as to highlight his favorite warts: Olympian detachment, patrician hauteur. In October of 1975, dining in Rome, Gore Vidal told his new friend the novelist Michael Mewshaw that Françoise Sagan was “a magnum of pure ether.” He didn’t stop to clarify, but rigor was beside the point the Vidalian bon mot was about the speaker, not about the subject.
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