Feuds: Wasted Talent

From their polar positions, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. see themselves as witty, wily intellectuals magnificently equipped to interpret (respectively) the left and right of U.S. life. Except when they confront each other directly, the notion is not entirely absurd. But when they fence on television or in type, bitchiness erodes their polish and learned discourse dissolves into tantrums.

Millions saw this happen when ABC-TV engaged the two to comment daily on the national political conventions in 1968. A heated argument over the clash of cops and demonstrators in Chicago inspired Vidal to call Buckley a “pro-crypto Nazi” and Buckley to reply: “Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddam face.” The blowup led Buckley to sue Vidal for $500,000 in libel damages and Vidal to countersue for $4,500,000. Esquire, entirely aware of the entertainment value of the squabble, then allowed the contestants to fight on in its pages. Buckley opened fire in the August issue; Vidal replied in the September issue, out last week. Not since George Sanders divorced Zsa Zsa Gabor has so much talent been wasted on such a nasty spat.

Money’s Worth. Vidal claimed that he had deliberately enticed Buckley into the TV eruption as a public service. “Looking and sounding not unlike Hitler, but without the charm,” Vidal wrote, “he began to shriek insults in order to head me off, and succeeded, for by then my mission was accomplished: Buckley had revealed himself. I had enticed the cuckoo to sing its song, and the melody lingers on.”

Buckley concedes that he was agitated —but properly so. “My pulse was racing and my ringers trembled as wave after wave of indignation swept over me. And then suddenly Vidal was whispering to me. ‘Well,’ he said, smiling. ‘I guess we gave them their money’s worth tonight!’ ” As for calling Vidal “queer,” Buckley apologizes for doing so “in anger,” but he still considers Vidal an “evangelist for bisexuality” whose “essays proclaim the normalcy of his affliction and his art the desirability of it.” He is “not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher.”

Buckley quotes an excerpt from Vidal’s novel, Myra Breckinridge, describing in detail the “splendor” of the male buttocks, claims that Myra “sees all life as a naming of parts, an equating of groins, a pleasing and/or painful forcing of orifices—the essence of pornography.” He also charges that the book “attempts heuristic allegory but fails, giving gratification only to sadist-homosexuals and challenge only to taxonomists of perversion.”

Low Blows. Nothing of the sort, says Vidal. “I do not prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality,” he writes, “or, for that matter, heterosexuality to homosexuality . . . But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime.” Vidal insists that “I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom.” He calls Buckley one of those “morbid, twisted men” who are always “sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others.”

Vidal says he did not mean to link Buckley to “Hitler’s foreign and domestic ventures.” But he insists that Buckley’s views “are very much those of the founders of the Third Reich who regarded blacks as inferiors, undeclared war as legitimate foreign policy and the Jews as sympathetic to international Communism.”

For low blows, distortion and invective, Vidal is the clear-cut winner in the Esquire phase of the Buckley-Vidal vendetta. In fact, Buckley last week widened his sights and filed a new $1,000,000 libel suit, this one against Esquire.