Gore Vidal, 82, is in the UK on a mini-tour. last night he was interviewed on “The South Bank Show” by Melvyn Bragg. Tomorrow, again with Bragg, he’s in conversation on stage in London. At he weekend he’s in Hay-on-Wye. I have tickets for Saturday. Here’s hoping he makes it alive, he’s not in the beast of health and the journey to Hay can take it out of anyone. Melvyn Bragg, incidentally, is the first person on record ever to use the word “prat” to mean “fool” in his 1969 novel “Without a city wall.”
I just watched the TV show and, as you’d expect, Gpre was good value. he talked about christianity in robust terms enticing Bragg to defend it’s (or its adherents’) good works. Gore replied that he’d not seen any and asked if Bragg remembered the “Gibbon line”. a shake of the head. well, at the time of the Sparticus rebellion, whomever was controlling the empire of the time rounded up a bunch of christians and strung them up on the Apian way and set light to them . . . and Gibbon says “it was the only illumination they ever gave”.
Gore goes on to berate america for its political and cultural stupidity, and the show ends with him reading somberly from “The Golden Age”:
As for the human case, generations of man come and go and, in eternity, are no more than bacteria upon a lumious slide; and the fall of the republic, or the rise of an empire, so significant to those involved, is not detectable upon the slide, even were there an interested eye to behold that steadily proliferating species, which would either end in time or, with luck, become something else. Since change is the nature of life, [pause] and its hope.
Vidal nods to camera and the picture freezes. The credits rise. Count one, two, three. A northern voice sparks up over the face of the great man:
Sarah Ferguson is on a mission to help a family of overweight smokers in a two-part documentary, later. Next up - Hitler in Colour!
Well, it made me laugh.
