Gore Vidal Leaves the Ring

By JOHN WILLIAMS

Gore Vidal, who died at the age of 86 on Tuesday, wore many hats: Novelist. Essayist. Screenwriter. Playwright. He was also a combatant, one of the last popular authors whose public persona was opinionated, political and aggressive.

In 1968, arguing with William F. Buckley while the Democratic convention was infamously raging in Chicago, Mr. Vidal called Mr. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Mr. Buckley responded with his own slur, and a threat to “sock” Mr. Vidal in the face. (Some of Mr. Buckley's language can't be printed here, but the video clip is available.) Even more redolent of its time was Mr. Vidal's run-in with Norman Mailer on Dick Cavett's show, which segued into a run-in between Mr. Mailer and Mr. Cavett. At one point, Mr. Vidal wondered if what he said had hurt Mr. Mailer's feelings, to which Mr. Mailer responded: “It hurts my sense of intellectual pollution.”

These were not isolated incidents. Later in life, Mr. Vidal was still lashing out at another legendary rival: “[Truman] Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”

Andrew Solomon visited Mr. Vidal for a 2004 profile in the New York Times Magazine: “For almost seven years, Gore Vidal has refused to talk to newspapers and magazines. (He told Hillary Clinton that he would never again do a print interview in English.) ‘This is the last time,' he announces with grim satisfaction. I shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Wilde.”

In 2010, Christopher Hitchens wrote that he believed the aftermath of 9/11 had “accentuated a crackpot strain” in Mr. Vidal “that gradually asserted itself as dominant.” But he also recalled the things Mr. Vidal wrote that “one wished one had said oneself. Of a certain mushy spiritual writer named Idries Shah: ‘These books are a great deal harder to read than they were to w rite.' Of a paragraph by Herman Wouk: ‘This is not at all bad, except as prose.' ”

The withering Mr. Hitchens admiring Mr. Vidal's vintage putdowns even in the midst of putting him down - an appropriate way to remember writers who lived for battle.