Gore's rosebud

[John Boylan]

Paul Mackin:

>I don't have Charles S's Vidal essays (see below) to compare MY cryptic
>rosebud quote to, but here's mine from V's "Plastic Fiction" in the July 15,
> 1976 issue of the The New York Review. It's at the end of a paragraph
>characterizing and quoting widely from GR. (suppose to represent outlandish
>stuff I guess)
>"'Submit Gottfried. Give it all up. See where she takes you. Think of the
>first time I fucked you . . . Your little rosebud bloomed.'" Hard to
>believe that it is close to a decade since that pretty moss tea-rose was
>first forced, as it were, in my greenhouse.

>Wonderfully poetic final sentence, but what can we make of it?
>What is Vidal saying to us?

And I reply :

Vidal is alluding to scene in 'Myra Breckinridge' in which dildoed Myra
(formerly Myron) is enjoying the anal favors of a hetero stuntman. The
stuntman's anus is referred to as a rosebud.

Vidal, I guess, is saying that he is the first to make novelistic use
of 'rosebud' in this anal context.