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An exquisite interview with Gore Vidal.

When Christopher Hitchens visited my alma mater, Kenyon College, he was nice enough to have drinks with student organizers and interested party crashers after his talk. I asked him to pencil down a few good books I should read along with his autograph. One of the books he recommended was Gore Vidal's historical fiction novel Lincoln. Hitchens was very enthusiastic about the significance Vidal had on mid-century literature and criticism, and I came to agree, after reading Lincoln, that Vidal was extremely talented.

But Vidal, like many of his beat counterparts, was irresponsible in how he deployed his intellectual gifts. Indeed, most of the literary pop idols of mid-century--Norman Mailer in particular--deserved a sock in the goddman face (as Buckley put it) for their churlish anti-Americanism. And their work was lazy. As Mailer finally admitted near the end of his life, his generation never lived up to the modernist masters whom he and his contemporaries idolized.

Nevertheless, Vidal is, above all, an entertaining figure. This latest interview with him throws into relief the scant, cowardly personalities we encounter among the Paris Review youngsters and literary darlings of 2008.