Hitchens on Vidal

January 12, 2010

While Christopher Hitchens has engineered the decline of his own reputation among the best and brightest minds, at least he hasn’t completely lost his own mind quite like Gore Vidal has. And since he was one Vidal’s annointed heir, or something similarly silly and pompous, he’s probably best qualified to write about Vidal’s extra-chunky nuttiness in this entertaining and bitchy little piece in Vanity Fair.

(Also, does anyone remember this story in The Onion? It’s been almost seven years and I still haven’t laughed harder at maybe anything in The Onion since. Damn.)

It is really too bad about Vidal. Because before he went nuts, he wrote some very good books and said some zesty things–including remarking once that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates,” which I’d never heard before I read the Hitchens’ piece. Delicious.

But now Vidal seems bitter and hateful, a parody of his former self and without much cause or context. Here’s what he said recently about the 13-years-old-at-the-time rape victim of Roman Polanksi:

Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

Not charming. Not witty. Just weird and icky and nasty and sad. Poor Gore.