Vital Vidal.

The Essential Gore Vidal * Edited by Fred Kaplan * Random House * $39.95

If the gay world handed out Nobel Prizes, Gore Vidal would have won one long ago, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Paige Reuse, and the guy who invented Rogaine. Vidal has always been here, and he has always been queer, yet, paradoxically, he has always been a crucial part of the straight intellectual world as well. But perhaps his greatest accomplishment can be stated even more simply--he's always been right.

A sample of his more important writings has just been collected by Fred Kaplan in a massive 1,000-page tome titled The Essential Gore Vidal. I've been keeping track of what the straight press has to say about it, and so far the reviews have been properly reverential. But they have been remarkably obtuse when it comes to one element gay readers will pick up on immediately--Vidal's magnificent obsession with the male butt. Gore, you naughty boy.

A prime example is Myra Breckenridge, included in its entirety in the book. People these days remember the dismal and confusing movie version; consequently, the book has fallen out of favor. In fact, Myra Breckenridge is way ahead of its time, very gay, and by far Vidal's most personal novel. The moment when Myra, after many hilarious machinations, manages to get his/her finger up Rusty's sphincter is one of the most profound and shocking in 20th-century literature. It is in that split second that Vidal's career comes together--part satire, part history, part show business, part philosophy, all captured in a brilliant and indelible metaphor. I hadn't read Myra Breckenridge since it was first published in 1968, and now I see it for what it is: As prurient entertainment mixed with intellectual concepts, it is in that holy triumvirate that includes Lolita and Portnoy's Complaint.

The other stuff is pretty good too. True, I found the selections from the historical novels--Burr, 1876, Lincoln, etc.--a trifle staid and conventional. And The City and The Pillar, Vidal's early homosexual novel (and one of the first published in this country by a mainstream press) does not excite contemporary tastes. But the 25 essays that round out the collection are heaven indeed. Vidal has known everybody, it seems, and his marvelously bitchy commentary makes for delicious company. As he dispenses scandal, insight, and punch lines, all that's missing is the pitcher of martinis. But amid all the dish are some touching nuggets: his encounter with Eleanor Roosevelt as she was arranging gladioli in her toilet bowl (now there's a metaphor) and his reminiscences of his friendship with Tennessee Williams, in which he gets as close to warming the reader's heart as he's ever going to.

Most of all, one comes away awed by Vidal's career--not just his writing but also the people he has known (he is related to the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), his politics (he has run for both the Senate and the House), and the fights he has gotten into (William F. Buckley Jr. once called him a queer on live TV). Kaplan is now preparing a biography of Vidal. Given Vidal's life and Kaplan's talent (his last book was a wonderful biography of Henry James), we may be in for a real treat--and a worthy companion to this, well, essential book.

Plunket is the author of My Search for Warren Harding and Love Junkie.