Peter Crockett
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal’s recent death might invite some comparison with Australia’s Patrick White, in spite of their many differences.
Each were national and international public figures whose marked political and social concerns were voiced through their plays and, prolifically, novels.
Their implacability, at times expressed as an argumentative self-importance that reflected heightened sensibility, sharpened the establishment’s condemnation of these self-appointed cultural cynosures, not least for pronouncing mordantly against their nation’s massed citizenry for its defiant, almost studied, shallowness.
Dull reverential adherence to materialism was in their view allied to the people’s virtual contempt for life’s higher human and spiritual purposes. For Vidal and White delighted in detailing yet were offended by the soulless unintegrated immaturity of their lately begun yet precociously decaying white European societies.
Each were gay with very long term partners. Near contemporaries, they were WW2 servicemen.
Vidal was more politicised than White, with a sharper more wilfully provocative wit. And as an historian Vidal brought a more involved (and evolved) long-view understanding of notably American society.
White was more earnest. His surer immersion in universal themes illuminated life’s essences perhaps to reveal him as the greater writer.
