Michael Mewshaw's Sympathy for the Devil, his reminiscence of Gore Vidal, proves easy to praise—swift, canny, sensitive, and unafraid.” —John Domini, Bookforum
“[Mewshaw's] Vidal is brilliantly alive, raunchy, as easily offended as he is quick to give offense—and then, finally, desperately self-hating, vituperative, and alone.” —Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe
“Michael Mewshaw knew Vidal as a friend for nearly forty years, and he pays his respects to him in this affectionate, sympathetic biography. [Sympathy for the Devil is] a thoroughly entertaining, breezy and up-close memoir about a public man of 'wealth and taste' who prided himself on his pride.” —Tom Lavoie, Shelf Awareness
“Fascinating . . . Sympathy for the Devil might be the perfect Vidal biography because it reveals a figure that is more human - more flawed, more interesting, more real - than the caricature that the public came to accept as the bona fide Gore.” —Doug Childers, Richmond Times
“Exceptionally entertaining.” —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
“Mewshaw develops a picture of his friend as quixotic, a devoted life-mate to his companion Howard Austin, an avuncular if not fatherly figure and often a raging provocateur at dinner parties, banquets and conferences-except when he's not. Mewshaw records a lot of sharp, witty one-liners which, as he reveals, Vidal practiced and polished before he delivered them. And the vast amounts of alcohol the writer imbibed on a daily basis reveal him to be a contradictory character . . . A study of friendship with a famous man, easy to admire and difficult to love.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR, All Things Considered
“In Sympathy for the Devil, Michael Mewshaw removes the mask to reveal a man much more complexand tortured than most fans of Vidal's writings might ever have dared imagine . . . The decline andfall of Gore Vidal is a painful but perversely exciting read. Behind the patrician veneer was clearly a troubled man.” —Robert Collison, The Toronto Star
“A companionable account that finally succeeds in living up to its title. The reader, too, will feel sympathy for the old devil . . . there is little doubt that Mewshaw's affection for Vidal is genuine.” —James Campbell, The Times Literary Supplement
2014-10-01
Vidal unvarnished: the private life of an aging provocateur.Near the end of this memoir of life with Gore Vidal (1925-2012), novelist and journalist Mewshaw (If You Could See Me Now, 2011, etc.) writes that he prefers to remember how "generous and hospitable" Vidal was. "Not at all the bitchy, mean-spirited man his critics imagined." It's an odd conclusion to a book that, if anything, makes the opposite case. Mewshaw knew Vidal well, as a friend, interview subject, dinner companion and part-time expat neighbor in Italy, but the relationship clearly tested his patience. As he writes, "[Vidal] embodied Goethe's dictum that ‘the world only goes forward because of those who oppose it.' And those who oppose it have to expect to take their lumps." Although he never denies Vidal his assets—literary brilliance, productivity, loyalty, professional and financial help to others—Mewshaw was also clearly worn out by the older writer's boorishness, self-absorption, and apparent decadeslong ambition to eat and drink himself to death. As the author sees it, Vidal's lordly, self-satisfied demeanor was something of a ruse; he was also beset by demons—old resentments, vindictiveness, oversensitivity to slights—which he battled with alcohol and pills. Luckily, he also had a hardy constitution; Mewshaw recalls one evening after the next seeing Vidal drinking enough wine or whiskey to slay an ox, only to get up the next morning and write. Consequently, the book counterbalances Vidal's airbrushed self-portrait in Palimpsest (1995), which Mewshaw writes "wasn't so much a memoir as a novel with a thoroughly unreliable narrator." Mewshaw gives a good inside picture of Vidal's domestic life, as well as showing his fears, vulnerabilities and full-time dependence on his 50-plus-year partner, Howard Austen, whose death in 2003 left Vidal with little more than alcohol for consolation. Mewshaw's account is more devilish (and sometimes downright cruel) than sympathetic, but it's also well-written, funny and never boring. Literary lives don't get dishier.
