Speaking of the incomparable Gore Vidal, his newest book Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History’s Glare (Abrams Books) is, if you treasure this sort of thing (which I do), an amazing memoir (more than 500 images) rendered with a variety of artifacts—photographs, letters, manuscripts—from his archives and a great complement to Vidal’s published memoirs, Palimpsest and Point to Point Navigation.

It bears repeating that there is no one like Vidal both in his grasp of American history and the array of mid-century American events with which he was connected: the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hollywood, and his well-publicized feuds with William Buckley and Norman Mailer. Seeing the past 50 years or so through Vidal’s tchotkes is a nonpareil delight. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2009

Now that I am more kindly disposed toward The Paris Review—the literary institution founded by George Plimpton and a cohort of his pals back in the wild and crazy 1950s—since they have dropped the hyperbolic “DNA of literature” slogan, I am pleased to pass on the news of the newest volume of The Paris Review Interviews (Picador) and in fact, the offering of a slip-covered set of all the extant volumes.

Some of the interviewees in this volume include Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Price, Joan Didion, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Stephen King, Robert Lowell, Ralph Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, Raymond Carver, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Maya Angelou, Haruki Murakami, Paul Auster, Marilynne Robinson, and, of course many more.

Old pal Colum McCann, an excitable boy, enthuses:

The Paris Review books should be given out at dinner parties, readings, riots, weddings, galas—shindigs of every shape. And they’re perfect for the classroom too, from high schools all the way to MFA programs. In fact, I run a whole semester-long creative writing class based on the interviews. How else would I get the world’s greatest living writers, living and dead, to come into the classroom with their words of wisdom, folly and fury? These books are wonderful, provocative, indispensable.

While I am at it I feel compelled to make mention of a number of recent interviews that, if not indispensable, are significant by virtue of their subjects. There is no one like Gore Vidal for both his grasp of American history and clear-eyed, unsentimental analysis. His chat in London with Johann Hari features such gems as:

I was like everyone else when Obama was elected—optimistic. Everything we had been saying about racial integration was vindicated,” he says, “but he’s incompetent. He will be defeated for re-election. It’s a pity because he’s the first intellectual president we’ve had in many years, but he can’t hack it. He’s not up to it. He’s overwhelmed. And who wouldn’t be? The United States is a madhouse. The country should be put away—and we’re being told to go away. Nothing makes any sense.” The President “wants to be liked by everybody, and he thought all he had to do was talk reason. But remember—the Republican Party is not a political party. It’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth. It’s full of hatred. You’re not going to get them aboard. Don’t even try. The only way to handle them is to terrify them. He’s too delicate for that.

And for good measure the Atlantic offers up a snappy Q&A notable for:

In one recent interview, you referred to FDR as a great man.

He was a very great man.

But you opposed his foreign policy.

Well, of course. FDR was damaging the Republic by his imperial ways.

How do you reconcile that with your affection for him?

It’s like saying, “I like you and your wife, but I’m not coming to your house for supper because she’s the worst cook whom I’ve ever submitted to.” Would that be considered misogyny or venom and viciousness? I’m supposedly very vicious, trying to destroy people all the time. I’m simply saying that she may be a wonderful wife, and I adore being with her—but I won’t eat a meal at her house. I have this same problem with Jack Kennedy. He was a good friend—witty, sharp, and very smart. I would rather be with him than practically anybody now alive. But what did he do for us in a thousand days? He invades Cuba, fucks up, and brings the world close to a nuclear collision over the so-called missiles down there in Cuba. Deplorable.

And for good measure:

Who is the best leader in the Democratic Party right now?

Do you mean, Who can give the best speech? Who can raise the most money? Look, I’m not a sentimentalist. Nor am I a romantic. I don’t believe in the Great Man theory of history. Great men come along very seldom—and when they do, it’s pretty bloody. But, as once observed, God looks after alcoholics, little children, and the United States of America.

Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridien) reportedly finds interviews anathema (which explains their dearth), but he recently sat down with John Jurgensen and director John Hillcoat (The Road) in San Antonio and chatted about this and that including the forthcoming theatrical release of the film based on The Road. My favorite quote:

WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Recently I mentioned Umberto Eco’s latest project and book and coincidentally Der Spiegel published a detailed conversation with Don Umberto that is most illuminating indeed. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 20, 2009

Though well represented in print, most recently with Jay Parini’s edit of The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, the oracular Vidal seems glaringly overlooked by the buzzing, blooming noise/newsmakers bleating for our attention. Which makes his 2009 conversation with Parini (Vidal’s designated literary executor) all the more valuable—especially as it was produced by the inestimable Key West Literary Seminars. Gore Vidal, you should know, has written seven plays, countless essays, and more than 25 novels, of which the Empire series (Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and The Golden Age) lucidly parallel America’s history. To note, his 1993 collection United States: Essays 1952-1992 won that year’s National Book Award. —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 12, 2009

Even before the grand finale of the 2008 election campaign, new books on the only other president elected from the great state of Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, were much in evidence in reviews and bookstores. No surprise there, as somewhere in his forthcoming tome, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, Adam Gopnik mentions that Lincoln is the second most popular biographer’s subject after Jesus Christ. In the past few months we have seen (the titles are effectively descriptive): Abraham Lincoln: Great American Historians on Our Sixteenth President edited by Brian Lamb (Public Affairs); Lincoln’s Darkest Year: The War in 1862 by William Marvel (Houghton Mifflin); Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig L. Symonds (Oxford University Press); The Great Comeback: How Abraham Lincoln Beat the Odds to Win the 1860 Republican Nomination by Gary Ecelbarger (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press); Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 by Harold Holzer (Simon & Schuster); Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief by James M. McPherson (Penguin Press); Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan (HarperCollins); and Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon by Philip B. Kunhardt and Peter W. Kunhardt (Knopf).

As the process of knitting a cabinet and administration has unfolded, rehabilitated plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln has been frequently cited, not the least of the reasons being the president-elect’s gestures and consideration of past and future rivals. (Mrs. Clinton being the chief example—in the same vein as Lincoln appointed Edward Seward as secretary of state.) I have no doubt that the Lincoln bibliography listed above represents fine scholarship for students and history buffs. On the other hand, though it falls under the rubric of historical novel, Gore Vidal’s Lincoln (Random House), part of his Narratives of Empire series, offers a narrative true to the known facts and insights and coloration that are informative beyond a collection of factoids, dates, and such. Vidal is gifted with making the story a vivid, unfolding drama and presenting the dramatis personae from Lincoln and his coterie to the various eastern political establishment bigwigs as real and lively. Of course, Vidal was criticized (read: attacked) for his portrayal of Lincoln, and per usual, he gives better than he gets:

Although I do my own research, unlike so many professors whose hagiographies are usually the work of those indentured servants, the graduate students, when it comes to checking a finished manuscript, I turn to Academia…

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures… I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require…

 —Robert Birnbaum, Dec. 1, 2008

I was searching for video of one of my last visits to Chicago’s Grant Park; that trip took place in August 1968, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy walked across the street from the Conrad Hilton Hotel and addressed the gathered crowd as “the United States government-in-exile.” Though I couldn’t find any footage, but I did come across this fine moment, when Gore Vidal calls William F. Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley threatens to punch him in the face. But I digress.

I was struck, as I watched President-elect Obama declaim in Grant Park last week, not only by his eloquence…

It’s the answer that led those who have been told for so long by so many to be cynical, and fearful, and doubtful of what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.

…but also by the idea that there are so few great public orators and memorable speeches—and that, arguably, Obama has already made a handful of such speeches, from his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to, more recently, speeches in Berlin and in Philadelphia.

The New Yorker’s James Wood has already provided an astute commentary on the election campaign speechifying, and now he has published a clear-eyed and succinct exegesis of Obama’s Nov. 4 oration, which, by the way, prompts me to offer that that speech is also impressive on the page, as an inspiring read.

Should you choose to pursue this notion, here are a few worthy compendia of speeches: former presidential speechwriter William Safire’s Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History, which collects over 200 speeches from Ancient Greece to the present (you will, as I was, be surprised to see George W. Bush amongst these worthies) and the Library of America’s American Speeches: Political Oratory From the Revolution to the Civil War and American Speeches: Political Oratory From Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton. —Robert Birnbaum, Nov. 17, 2008

If you don’t own Vidal’s National Book Award-winning United States: Essays, 1952 – 1992, a compendium of his admirably provocative polemical prose exhibiting his vast erudition, you can dip into his amusing and well-honed unorthodoxy with this more-focused anthology. Jay Parini, Vidal’s literary executor, has selected 24 of the more than 200 essays Vidal has written, including well-known favorites “The Top Ten Best-Sellers,” “Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy,” and “The Second American Revolution.” —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 7, 2008