For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - iSites - Harvard University

11/13/13 For Gore Vidal, a Final Plot Twist - NYTimes.com
Mr. Vidal had dementia and “wet brain,” said Mr. Steers: its proper name is Wernicke-
Korsakoff, a syndrome characterized by a number of symptoms, including confusion and
hallucination.
“Gore was on a planet all his own,” Mr. Parini said. “In the last five years he was not at his full
hilt, full strength. He had been in a state of decline, highly diminished, sad and depressed. I feel
very sad about the case. He felt very close to Burr, loved him and liked Nina very much.”
It is his sharply declined physical and mental state — Ms. Straight wrote in a piece in Vanity
Fair after Mr. Vidal’s death that his appearance “bordered on that of a street person in the last
few years of his life” — that have led some friends and family members to claim that the
Harvard bequest was one of a man not fully in control of his faculties.
“Gore didn’t care about Harvard,” said Boaty Boatwright, a talent agent and a longtime friend,
though the author used a somewhat earthier expression to make his point. “Why not fund a
Gore Vidal School for Young Writers or a Foundation for Women? He was always championing
feminism.”
Mr. Steers said his uncle despised Harvard’s “neocon” academics. “His last will makes no
sense,” he said.
Mr. Tyrnauer, who edited Mr. Vidal’s writing at Vanity Fair, said he saw the bequest as an
expression of the author’s split identity.
“He was the liberal iconoclast, railing against the Establishment, and he was the man boasting
about spending time at the Royal Lodge, Windsor, with Princess Margaret,” he said.
Mr. Vidal “clung to those upper-class tropes, so Harvard, being the most prestigious of
universities, was the place to put his legacy,” Mr. Tyrnauer said. “But why give it to an
institution rolling in money, when Gore was not only passionately anti-academics but also so
committed to the good fight? Why didn’t he leave a sum to the A.C.L.U., or any number of
liberal causes or something subversive?”
But Mr. Vidal’s bequest could be the culmination of a late-in-life relationship with Harvard. He
believed his papers had not been treated with the respect they demanded at the University of
Wisconsin, where they were previously held, Mr. Parini said.
“During the 1990s he did a lecture series at Harvard, which brought him into close contact with
faculty members,” Mr. Parini said. “He spoke about ‘the wonders of Harvard.’ To him, who
hadn’t had a university education, Harvard represented the Platonic ideal of a university.”
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