Buy it here:

Amazon, Bookshop

Synopsis:

The outrageous and immortal, gender-bending and polymorphously perverse, over-the-top, and utterly on-target comic masterpiece from the bestselling author of Burr , Lincoln , and the National Book Award-winning United States .

With a new introduction by Camille Paglia

“I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.”

So begins the irresistible testimony of the luscious instructor of Empathy and Posture at Buck Loner’s Academy of Drama and Modeling. Myra has a secret that only her surgeon shares; a passion for classic Hollywood films, which she regards as the supreme achievements of Western culture; and a sacred mission to bring heteronormative civilization to its knees.

Fifty years after its first publication unleashed gales of laughter, delight, and ferocious dissent (“Has literary decency fallen so low?” asked Time), Myra Breckinridge‘s moment to instruct and delight has once again arrived.

Review:

This is the first book I have read by Gore Vidal, but I have known who he is for a long time. I know that he was a book reviewer, essayist, novelist, and social commentator who came across as very opinionated, arrogant, prickly, and someone who did not suffer fools. He is part of the group of white American male writers who reviewed one another’s books and were hypercritical of one another. Between John Updike, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and John Irving, there is a steady stream of barbs and banter going back and forth through published essays, reviews, interviews, and straight to the other author’s face. I knew that Gore Vidal is in this group of cranky writers slinging insults at one another, but I did not know how involved until I was doing research about these literary feuds for a story I was writing. I wanted a character in my story to have a feud with Norman Mailer. I was well aware that Mailer had some big fights with Tom Wolfe, calling him a silly for wearing a white suit all of the time in New York and saying in his review of Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full that reading it was like having sex with a 300 pound woman: “Once she gets on top, it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” This is not a nice thing to say about someone else’s work (or women for that matter), but this was the type of stuff from Norman Mailer that I was looking into when I learned that Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal backstage at the Dick Cavett show in 1971, leading to a lifelong feud. I also started looking more into Vidal again when I read his praise of the work of Carson McCullers. Considering all I knew up until this point was his political stuff and his feuds with Mailer, I decided to pick up one of his early novels Myra Breckinridge, out of print for decades but finally reissued in 2019. After reading a few more biographical things about Vidal, a few essays about Myra Breckinridge, and from all of his very public feuds and fights with other people, it is not a stretch for anyone to feel like the character Myra is very close to the personality of Gore Vidal himself.

This is not a very high compliment. Myra Breckinridge goes to Hollywood to fleece the uncle of her dead husband, Myron, out of some inheritance. Myron’s uncle is the retired western movie star, Buck Loner, who has a empathy and posture school where many big screen hopefuls are working on their skills. When Myra comes into town, she demands her inheritance and half of the school as well, and she will teach there until she gets it. Buck instantly does not like her, knows that she is a fraud, and he has every right to be skeptical. Not only is Myra trying to get money, and is rude to the students who she is trying to teach, making them upset and quit, she is also a predator. She is looking for a person, particularly a young male, to sexually abuse. She sets her sights on Rusty, a young and naive man who is dating another student, Mary-Anne, who is even younger and even more naive. Myra wants to destroy them both, and her schemes work in ways that are equally effective and disgusting. Her acts only done to make Myra feel like she is more powerful than anyone else in the novel. 

Myra Breckinridge was initially published in 1968, and there are some of the themes, some of the language, and some of the plot that would be edited out if this novel were written by today’s standards. There are some homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semetic, and misogynistic scenes and feelings by the characters. Even the language around Myra herself is a little off-putting, but this is nothing compared to the climax of the novel, where Myra finally gets her way with Rusty, showing her power in a 24 page, highly detailed assault, ruing him the exact way that she wants. The sad thing is that Vidal’s portrayal of Myra and predators in general is too accurate to dismiss, that there are threads that connect the artists with the art. The only person Myra really befriends is Letita Van Allen, a Hollywood agent who is looking for a new stud to abuse. Predators generally recognize each other and compare notes, and this is what these two women do, which even involves Myra and Letita working together in a plot to break up the relationship between Rusty and Mary-Anne for good. At the end of the day, both women are on the same team. 

Through its problematic characters, it also illuminates a very problematic author. Gore Vidal was a notable sex addict, who was said to have had over a thousand sexual encounters by the time he was twenty-five. He spent his whole life having quick encounters with anonymous men, some of them paid, throughout his whole life, and he saw sex as something that you did outside of a relationship because it was more about power than pleasure. With the anonymous nature of most of his encounters, it shows that he had no interest in any sort of emotional attachment to his sex partners. This really is the same attitude as Myra Breckinridge, and she shares many of his other traits. She is sneaky, spiteful, and an ugly person, and I feel like Vidal was not a fun person to be around. Even still there is something compelling about him and about his writing. He is a masterful writer, sometimes incredibly funny, but always incredibly smart. He seems to be someone who can reference almost anything at any time. His distaste for hippies, drugs, and television are obvious, but so is his love for film, politics, and literature. Having read Myra Breckinridge, I should be put off by Gore Vidal, but there is something more intriguing about him, like his naked opinions about his sexual behaviors and feelings about relationships are enough to want to know more about him. However, it also feels like Norman Mailer might have been right to punch him in the face. He was most likely insufferable to be around for too long of a period of time.