They bordered a precinct “once sacred” to Isis, to whose ancient cult he attributed a nearby street-side relic: a colossal marble sandaled foot on a pedestal (the Piè di Marmo). His apartment on the Largo Argentina, not far from the Pantheon, overlooked the ruins of four Roman temples. Myra cohered in his mind, Vidal suggested, because of the residual presence of the Egyptian goddess Isis and her heraldic cats still populating modern Rome. The impetus for the novel was an invitation (which he declined) from British theater critic and producer Kenneth Tynan to contribute a sketch to Oh! Calcutta!, a picaresque sex farce that would become a smash hit in New York and London. Vidal finished it in a month, “from new moon to new moon.” But he claimed that two weeks of work had passed before he realized Myra was transsexual. I felt like a medium.” Although he normally worked slowly, Myra Breckinridge “poured out” in a rush. It was a unique episode in his more than two decades as an author: “I never quite had that experience, an otherworldly voice, one that took me over. Myra’s voice suddenly intruded into Vidal’s consciousness at his penthouse terrace apartment in a shabby 17th-century building in Rome’s historic district. “I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.” With that imperious opening sentence, Gore Vidal introduced his flamboyant transsexual heroine, one of the most willful and amusingly self-aware characters in modern literature.
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