Gore Vidal on TRP gay?

[Rodney Welch]

Rodney Welch wrote:
> 
> John Boylan notes that Gore Vidal has "a mix of reservation and
> admiration for TRP," and that Vidal hoped GR would not fall into the
> clutches of the academy."
> 
>         Actually, if I recall correctly, Vidal believed that Pynchon and
> Barth were made for the academy; I think Vidal pegged GR as a fairly
> representative example of the "U Novel" -- the "University Novel,"
> written to be taught rather than to be read. Vidal is incapable of
> writing about literature without bemoaning its decline -- the art of
> Howells, James and Faulkner proving utterly defenseless in the face of
> television and rock and roll, which have lowered the national threshold
> for the literary attention span.
> 
>         I think Vidal, something of a Luddite himself, found Barth and
> Pynchon fairly indicative of a anti-literary age; "anti" not so much in
> the sense that their books were dumb as that they were specialized and
> academic. Vidal once said that American writers don't want to write good
> books, they want to write great books, and as a result they usually write
> neither. I'm sure GR was, is, his worst nightmare.
> RW