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With Friends Like These

Review: Michael Mewshaw's 'Sympathy for the Devil, Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal'

Gore Vidal / AP
January 30, 2015

Michael Mewshaw, a magazine writer and mid-list novelist whose books you probably haven’t read, once knew Gore Vidal. Reasonably well, as it happens. They met through a mutual friend in the ’70s, when Vidal had just turned fifty and Mewshaw was getting his start as a writer. For a time, both lived in Rome, and Vidal often entertained Mewshaw and his wife there.

Vidal is of course dead now, having suffered a long and very public decline, and Mewshaw has written a memoir detailing their relationship. To get some of the flavor of the book, consider the following passage. The scene is a party in Rome thrown during the filming of Godfather III:

Gore and I were sitting together on a couch…when a handsome young man in blue jeans sauntered over. His face looked familiar, but I didn’t catch his name and only afterward learned that he was Andy Garcia.

"Sorry to interrupt," he said. "But before I leave, I wanted to say hello to my favorite author."

Gore extended his hand with the practiced solemnity of a cardinal presenting his ring to be kissed.

"I don’t mean you," Garcia said. "I mean Mr. Mewshaw."

This had all the earmarks of one of Mickey Knox’s elephantine jokes—a doubled-edged gag to tweak Gore’s nose and at the same time embarrass me. Guardedly, I asked, "What have you read of mine?"

"I don’t read much," Garcia conceded. "I have an awful lot of scripts to get through, and I’m sort of dyslexic. But I saw a funny article you wrote about eating with your kids at the first McDonald’s in Rome, and I think that’s the best thing I’ve ever read."

Andy Garcia shook my hand and exited stage left. It was a moment to treasure. Even though he hadn’t read my books, in this company it was heartening to hear that I was his favorite author.

Gore promptly put an end to my preening. "You can have all the dyslexic ones."

Though the genre of literary and celebrity gossip does not suffer for lack of contributions, this stands out as a remarkable, even a unique book. Mewshaw claims that he wanted to write a sympathetic and "corrective" portrait of Vidal, one that tells both the good (his hospitality) and the bad (his alcoholism) that other accounts have allegedly missed.

Mewshaw succeeds in evoking sympathy for his subject, or at least pity, but mostly for the fact that Gore Vidal had to have this book written about him by Michael Mewshaw, who mingles his genuinely cruel account of private moments with a deteriorating human being with scenes documenting said human’s consistently generous treatment of him as a young writer. The effect is dizzying, and confusing. Mewshaw claims that the last thing he wants to do is write a "pathography" of Vidal's decline, and seems to write with a serene assurance in his own good and honest intentions. Meanwhile, the much more gifted man whom Mewshaw repeatedly documents as being nothing but decent to him gets the knife jammed in again and again. Such that there is a moral to this story, it is to never do Michael Mewshaw a favor.

Vidal, who once feuded with his own mother in the pages of Time, was no stranger to mean-spirited literary attacks. But, in his prime, Vidal’s offensives tended to be directed laterally or up (Bill Buckley or the Kennedy’s were perfectly capable of giving as good as they got). When they were not laden with anti-Semitism and hatred toward his native country they could even be funny, and he owned them. He came, he saw, he caused offense—it was a living.

Mewshaw is not a terrible writer, really, and as a volume of bitchy-table-talk-cum-mid-quality-travel-writing, the book is quite readable. But for someone whose manner is so knowing, Mewshaw is remarkably lacking in self-awareness. For a man who can write, apparently without irony, a passage like this—

In 2003, when Louisiana State University Press published my memoir Do I Owe You Something?, the cover was a composite portrait of me, a mosaic made up of shards from different authors I had known. James Dickey’s ear, one eye from William Styron, and another eye from Robert Penn Warren formed a jigsaw puzzle face that was capped by Gore Vidal’s hair.

—to then go on to describe the U.S. ambassador to Rome and his wife as "starf—kers" is a pretty neat trick. Mewshaw seems completely untroubled by the fact that he repeatedly used his access to Vidal to try to make money, writing up profiles and interviews with the man for the New York Times Magazine (which never ran the profile) for House and Garden (a piece about Vidal’s Italian villa) for Architectural Digest (the villa again) and for Notorious, a magazine project sponsored by Sean Combs (which folded before it could run the piece). The well has apparently yet to run dry.

Mewshaw—on the evidence, unwittingly—also paints a picture of his own journalistic career that is nothing short of hilarious, in a laugh-at sort of way. In Rome during the peak of the Red Brigade terrorist campaign, he gets a commission from Harper’s to write about the violence. Afraid of getting hurt, he refuses to actually do any real reporting, and submits a piece researched by "roving the streets of Rome, letting it all wash over me—scenes of boys playing soccer under the portico of the Pantheon, enterprising old men painting grids on the cobblestones and pretending to be parking lot attendants, young lovers kissing…" You know—the vibe.

Lewis Lapham, understandably angry, demands the piece be cut in length and offers to pay only a third of the originally promised amount. Mewshaw goes to Vidal for help, and Vidal (perhaps surprisingly, considering his reputation) advises that he do as he is told, admitting that much of his best work had come after abiding by the demands of editors. And Mewshaw takes his advice, but the article still doesn’t run, because of the kidnapping of the former prime minister by the Red Brigade. Months later, when the body of the prime minister is found, Harper’s asks Mewshaw to update the article with the latest developments so that it can finally be run. Mewshaw asks for more money, which is the final straw. (If all of this seems a little bit familiar, it's because Mewshaw's subsequent novel about the affair was made into 1991's Year of the Gun, starring Sharon Stone. You saw that, right?)

A book that makes one not only pity Gore Vidal but also see things from Lewis Lapham’s point of view does constitute an accomplishment of sorts. Mewshaw’s attitude towards all this seems to be that, his reputation having preceded him, these sorts of anecdotes must come off as charming. But it doesn’t, and they don’t.

Mewshaw is also so singularly ungracious throughout the book that one starts to suspect the memoir is a strange piece of performance art, that—when Vidal literally hands him the keys to his lavish villa so that he and Mrs. Mewshaw can have a vacation there, and he spends the next several hundred words of the chapter complaining about how uncomfortable and cold it was—he is having us on.

Yet Mewshaw seems to genuinely mean what he writes. At the end of the book, when Vidal is, like not a few old men, lonely, sick, bitter, and beyond caring what anyone thinks of him, Mewshaw badgers him into attending a literary conference he helps organize in Key West. Vidal shows up in his wheelchair and is totally miserable, and works pretty hard at making everyone around him miserable, too. At one point, not obviously joking, he asks for a gun so that he can shoot himself. He is also easily confused. Apparently bewildered at some turn in events, Vidal touches Mewshaw’s hand, and says, "Help me, Mike, I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel."

Mewshaw writes: "There was so much I might have said. I might have told him that he had left it too late to learn." It takes a great deal of pomposity to write something like that. Just as it took a great deal of ill will, bottled up during three decades of abject sycophancy, to write this book.

Published under: Book reviews