Parody
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 16, 1997 LETTERS JUST BETWEEN COUSINS, PART II In last week's issue of The New Yorker, readers will recall, we published some of the correspondence between Gore Vidal and...
...Fortunately, Brooke Astor continues to feed me, though Mailer is ever there, haunting me...
...War is afoot in the Middle East...
...The time is out of joint...
...Mailer, always Mailer...
...Who would have written Myron...
...She married my mother's step-brother-in-law, as I am sure you recall...
...The editor of the book review then was named Shapiro...
...Mine and Bob Guc-cione's...
...Gore March 1982 Dear Gore, How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable was last night's dinner at Brooke Astor's...
...He bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus...
...They know not whom they suppress when they suppress me...
...Louis...
...My sister's condition only gets worse...
...Louis January 1991 Mon cher Lou, The Israelites have had their way...
...Why whine...
...Too good to be true, of course, that a man such as you could actually serve in the Senate...
...Gore March 1997 Dear Gore, My wife has taken ill, as has my dog...
...There was I, the Saint-Simon of my time, and who was playing the role of the Sun King...
...or Kalki...
...I fear for my sanity...
...THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 16, 1997 LETTERS JUST BETWEEN COUSINS, PART II In last week's issue of The New Yorker, readers will recall, we published some of the correspondence between Gore Vidal and Louis Auchincloss, novelists and distant cousins whose vital role in the world of post-war American literature is extraordinarily clear to both of them...
...There hasn't been a writer like you since Henry James, save, perhaps, Barbara Cartland...
...by gorE vidal and louis auchmcLoss April 1975 Cher Cousin Louis, The long-nosed eminences of what passes for Amerikan High Kultur having taken their Sabbath off to bow the head toward Tel Aviv, we can safely open Caligula—my screenplay, you know—at porn theaters nationwide before the sulzberger stormtroopers come marching in to break the crystal beauty that is my work...
...As the author of Voyage to a Small Planet, universally acknowledged as the finest television playlet ever written about a space alien, I will outlast them...
...Exeunt hurriedly, followed by bear...
...It was not well-reviewed in the Times on Sunday...
...Tant mieux than last month's...
...They like each other, admire each other, respect each other, but they do seem to have some difficulties playing with other children...
...That is exactly what I asked Johnny Carson last night during an appearance to promote the rere-lease of Myra Breckenridge, indubitably the greatest novel ever written about a transsexual played on the screen by both Rex Reed and Raquel Welch...
...I rented Bob Roberts, the movie in which you play a liberal Senator...
...But what a loss for letters it would be...
...Just read the novel you wrote this month...
...What would Henry Adams say...
...This has made progress on this month's four novels exceedingly arduous...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 39
