Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship with Gore Vidal by Michael Mewshaw

 Answering the telephone was the least of what Howard did for Vidal.  In addition to handling hundreds of mundane chores, he had monitored Gore's drinking, curbed his excesses, scolded him when he crossed the line, and generally prevented him from going over the edge.  He hadn't just enabled Gore to create; he had enabled him to continue living when he declared that he wanted to die. 

--Michael Mewshaw, Sympathy for the Devil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015)

I have come across Gore Vidal several times in my life:  he ran for Congress from my district in upstate New York in 1960 (he lost but received more votes than any other Democrat who had previously run in the district); he gave a speech at Exeter when I was a student there in the sixties (he was a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy); he was a frequent writer for The Nation when I worked there in the eighties.  I watched Vidal with fascination when he sparred with William F. Buckley, Jr. during the 1968 presidential conventions and I was quite impressed with his political insights, just as I have always found his essays more interesting than his didactic novels.  

Mewshaw knew Vidal during the last half of his life as Vidal gradually became a falling-down drunk, especially after the death of Howard Austen, who had been Vidal's companion for many years.  Vidal, who died at 86 in 2012, was probably the last public intellectual in this country and I miss his acerbic wit and his intelligent analyses of (mostly) what's wrong with our nation and what we can do about it.