American writer Gore Vidal was an intimate of political power. His grandfather was a US senator; his father served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Director of Air Commerce. When his mother remarried, to Hugh Auchincloss, Vidal obtained a descendant of Vice President Aaron Burr as a stepfather. Later, Hugh remarried Janet Bouvier, and her daughter – the future Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – became Vidal’s stepsister. Jackie took over Vidal’s childhood bedroom at the Auchincloss estate and wore his old shirts riding. They shared three nephews between them. Gore and Jacqueline’s husband, John F. Kennedy, were close.

Vidal grew up, as he said in Screening History, ‘backstage’ to the ‘real world of real politics, in a very real Washington’. As a child, he read to his blind senator grandfather and received a lesson in power. He was able, when reviewers challenged the historical veracity of his novel Lincoln (1984) to cite his grandfather’s conversations with President Lincoln’s son Robert. While Vidal’s literary career began early (his début novel, Williwaw [1946], was published when he was twenty), a career in politics beckoned. In 1960, Vidal ran as a Democrat for a New York Congressional seat, endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt and JFK. He lost but put in a good performance in a traditionally Republican district. In 1962 he turned down the nomination for a New York Senate seat that he might well have won. He later ran, unsuccessfully, for the Senate in California. Vidal decided against a political career and in doing so ‘fail[ed] to complete the “unfinished business” of his grandfather’s life by becoming president of the United States’. But as a writer he retained a fascination with power. ‘I had the sort of background,’ he said, ‘that made it possible – inevitable – for me to write about men of power from first-hand knowledge.’

Power is the subject of Heather Neilson’s excellent Political Animal, an erudite but accessible study of Vidal’s writing that ranges across his non-fiction and drama but centres on the historical fiction. Beginning with the ‘Ancient Worlds’ novels, Messiah (1954), Julian (1964), and Creation (1981) – which chart Vidal’s distrust of, but fascination with, powerful religions – Neilson moves into the Narratives of Empire series: ‘the seven novels [which] collectively comprise a thesis about the ways in which American political mythology has been formulated since the War of Independence.’

Vidal believed in the power of literature to shape politics and history. In a 1969 interview, he said that ‘to be practical, if one wishes to influence events, the Congress is hardly the place to do it. A writer with an audience has more power than most Congressmen.’ Vidal distrusted historians, believing they ‘write fictionalized versions of the facts, imbued with vested interest’. Fiction, he thought, ‘can somehow more truthfully and insightfully represent the past’. Indeed, Vidal considered his historical fiction to be not merely literature but ‘a historical force’.

In Narratives of Empire, Vidal seeks to ‘demythologize’ the gilded portrait of America’s political founding, to ‘recover and to communicate the realities which the accretion of legend has obscured’. This is achieved, in large part, by his fictional studies of presidents, often narrated by ‘someone with proximity to power but not in a position directly to exercise it’. ‘One of his signature devices’ for achieving this ‘was the unflattering close-up, premised on the idea that veneration is dependent upon mystique’. In Burr (1973), George Washington is presented with ‘abscesses on his buttocks’: ‘He spoke the way one imagined a statute would speak. But then he sat too far back in his chair. Gasping with pain, he swore mightily, aware that he was no longer royal in my eyes but simply a Virginia planter whose bottom hurt.’ Andrew Jackson is ‘a pale old man … in physical pain … his false teeth do not fit; one can see them shifting about in his mouth as he purses his thin lips trying to make himself comfortable’. This demythologising is not so much insolence as an attempt to ‘rehumanise … the sanctified Fathers’, and to emphasise the fact that ‘however vainglorious the political animal may be, he is always inescapably that – an animal. Sooner or later the body will render all mortals either absurd or pitiable.’

Narratives of Empire variously rehabilitates and censures the political reputations of America’s great leaders. Vice President Aaron Burr, who famously shot Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel, ‘has been rewritten in history as a “traitor”, a dangerous ghost’. But Vidal’s fictional portrait challenges that received historical wisdom, contextualising Burr’s destroyed reputation within Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson’s ‘implacable hostility’. Abraham Lincoln gets short shrift from Vidal, a self-defining Southern writer. Vidal portrays him as a ‘benign and complex tyrant’ who ‘chose to fight the [Civil] war not on the issue of slavery but on the holiness and indivisibility of a union that he alone had any understanding of’.