Although not the equal to his earlier autobiography/memoir "Palimpsest", it's still absorbing, entertaining and, while his steps sometimes falter, offers a poignant glimpse into the aged iconoclast's extremely private relationship with his partner, the late Howard Austen, and his attempts to come to terms with Austen's death and his own impending exit from the stage.

Maybe not quite as epic and deep (and much thinner) than his first memoir, Palimpsest, this still had me hooked from beginning to end. On top of the usual droll and witty rants, he offers us some wonderful anecdotes about, y'know, Grace Kelly, Huey Long, Princess Margaret (he calls her "PM", LOL), Tennessee Williams , Johnny Carson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rudolf Nureyev, etc... The reason some of these stories didn't appear in Palimpsest was very simple: the protagonists weren't dead yet.

Which leads me to the melancholy flipside of this "last memoir" (so Vidal calls it): not only does he describe what it's like for so many friends and enemies to be dying all around him, for the first time, he tells us what he felt when Howard Auster died. (The secret to their fifty-three year relationship? They never had sex.) The recollection is mostly dispassionate reportage: he never once tries to get inside Howard, nor does he allow us even a toehold inside himself during these bleak proceedings. And that's when you notice he's utterly bereft. Powerful stuff.

And to top it all off, he concludes with the real story behind the JFK assassination -- to his mind the most tragic ironic moment in recent history.

Yes, it is true that this book's a bit jumbled thematically and chronologically, but that just makes this a more vivid, decentered tale: you never know what's coming next when this acidic octogenarian gets going (well, probably some more Tennessee Williams gossip, but you don't know what's next after that) . Also, duh, the book's title.

One last note: I'm still not sure what's going on in chapter fifty-three, which seems to consist entirely of a tedious, unattributed quote from Marcie Frank (I'm guessing). Bad editing? Absentmindedness? Some odd Montaigne stylistic allusion I just don't get? Anyway: weird.

This one will really test my vocabulary - but still like listening to his voice. It was a good read - loved his narration. For some reason it reminded me of my Dad, not sure why because my Dad certainly didn't sound at all like Gore, but maybe he had similar politics. I think this was better as an audio book, his narration and imitations of the celebrities and authors he met during his life were spot on.

Urbane truth speaker of the American Empire

This book is liking sitting down for a long conversation with Vidal about his life. Simply amazing.

I wrote a full review, but when I tried to post it, it was somehow absorbed by the internet gremlins. Argh. So here is another try.

"Point to Point Navigation" was sent to me by a friend with whom I exchange books that we have read and feel the other might enjoy (or challenge the other to enjoy!). Before she sent me this book, I had no sense of Gore Vidal other than as a famous novelist, politician, and sometime actor whose literary work with whom I was not familiar. I do have a memory of seeing his appearances on the intellectual-minded, debating TV shows popular in the 1960s and into the early 1970s (and I SO miss that type of "reality TV" as opposed to, say, "Real Housewives" of ANY city).

I was hooked from the moment I began reading. I haven't read Vidal's autobiography "Palimpsest" - or any other work by him - but I take "Point to Point Navigation" to be all the yummy extra details that would have added too much distraction and bulk to "Palimpsest." There was no particular timeline and the memories seemed to be scattered. But that is fine with me. I enjoyed Vidal's jumping from memory to memory. And since this was written at the end of his writing career as well as the end of his life, I find myself eager for every memory he wants to share. This man has had such an extraordinary life - being the grandson of a politician, and thus being close friends with other politicians, as well as being a novelist and screenplay writer AND acting in movies. Hello? Who wouldn't hang on to every juicy detail he has to give?

I did find lacking the details about Howard - although I find it very telling that he's sarcastic about the PC (Politically Correct) world who refer to Howard as his "partner." He didn't say, though, how he would have preferred for his relationship to Howard to be declared to a homophobic world. I also wanted more details about his mother, Nina. Gore said that he was surprised at the number of people who could not understand why he completely cut her out from his life, especially in this age when mothers are put on a pedestal. I totally understand where he is coming from, but would have liked more detail into why he feels this way. Maybe that's an insight given in "Palimpsest"?!

I was especially fascinated by Vidal's various conspiracy theories. I came away from this book believing most of them. Is he that convincing a writer, or are his theories compelling because they are true? I don't know. But I do know that his Mafia-related theory behind JFK's death leaves me shaken.

The book is rambling at times, and the last couple of chapters are scattershot. But altogether, it's a collection of memories of a man who has led a fascinating life, and I was spellbound!

I have spent the last few months reading and listening to Gore Vidal and I have loved every minute. He is an intellectual force to be reckoned with, clever, sometimes bitter often wicked and hugely entertaining. This last volume of his memoirs is sadder and less vibrant. He is surrounded by friends who are dying among them his long time partner Howard Auster. He describes Howard's death in his usual exact and almost clinical way but the emotion is just under the surface and there is clearly a big hole in his life. So this book is not typical of Vidal. He flits from subject to subject without bothering to make any logical connections. There is a story from Greta Garbo about Jeanette McDonald that is unworthy of either Garbo or Vidal but there is also a poignant last encounter with Jackie Kennedy, an odd insider's explanation of the Kennedy assassination that I would love to know more about and a cruel setting up of Barbara Cartland that is pure Vidal. I was a bit uncomfortable with it. But this is for Vidal enthusiasts. It is a sadder Vidal with only occasional sparks. But I still love him for it.

This is a a good follow up to "Palimpsest," but I wouldn't call it anything exciting or beyond exceptional for Gore Vidal. It's mostly 2-5 pages per chapter of genuine memoirs related to his childhood, his father, his life in Italy with Howard, his reflections on leaving Italy, and of course some of that good old name dropping gossip that Gore Vidal is well known for.

The last decade of Vidal's life was very sad, and quite tragic. Gore's partner of 50 years fought a harrowing battle with cancer and then died, suddenly, in the home in which they hoped to live out their last days, having abandoned their Italian villa when Gore's lack of mobility made it an impossibility. According to a gossipy (almost criminally irresponsible) story in the NYT, Gore responded by getting drunker, meaner, and more paranoid (in addition to being diagnosed, eventually, with a form of dementia). Of course, as Hitchens also detailed around this time--and as many observers could see--Gore's politics became increasingly conspiratorial as the madness of Bush-era politics finally pushed him over the edge and turned him into less of a devil's advocate and more of a ranter and a raver about Bush's alleged complicity in 9/11 and Oswald's innocence. Gore, according to Burr Steers, ceased to be Gore and, in fact, aside from this memoir, the last dozen years of his life were minimally productive ones, which is unusual for such an indefatigably prolific writer.

This book, published in the wake of his partner, Howard Austen's, death, came after his break with Hitchens and followed several vaguely trutherist tracts about 9/11 and the sins of our empire. I was reluctant to read it for obvious reasons as it received mixed reviews and I wanted to avoid seeing the beginning of the end of one of our greatest public intellectuals.

Fortunately, my concerns were (mostly) overblown. True, this memoir is not a flawless work of craft like its predecessor, Palimpsest. Instead, we get a much more digressive, sometimes rambling, collection of stories, anecdotes and the occasional rant. Even so, we are still talking about the life of Gore Vidal, one of the most relentlessly interesting figures of the 20th century. As one other reviewer noted, the effect is similar to a series of reminiscences in front of a fire, as Gore's idiosyncratic memoir traces random neural connections in his fading memory banks. The title is quite fitting, as we see Vidal feel his way forward, guiding his reader through his recollections of the last 40 years or so.

There are many great anecdotes herein, even if it never congeals to anything like a properly chronological memoir. Unlike other works, there are also vast sections where the mask falls away, and we see a more vulnerable side of Gore, as when he details the sickness and death of his partner. or when he reflects on the wasted potential of his friend, Princess Margaret. There's a lot of good stories about Capote, and Fellini, Paul Newman and some others. Also a lot of musing about death and the author's legacy.

Of course, there are also some bizarre detours--gratuitous attacks against his biographer, random score-settling with this or that literary critic, and, in the final section, long excerpts (peppered with critical asides) from works about Vidal. Puzzlingly, the book then concludes with Gore's emphatic insistence that Oswald was innocent.

So, all in all, yes it is not a perfect work and, in some ways, it is a sad one because it foreshadows the decline and death that was to come only a few years later. But Vidal is still Vidal, and when he's on--and he is for much of this book--there is no better storyteller and essayist. Probably only recommended for Vidal completists, but I enjoyed this one in spite of (or perhaps because of) the flaws.

Only my stubbornness forced me to finish the book. Allowances should always be given for old-age crankiness, but 3/4 of the way through I decided my tolerance had reached its top level. But then if I had stopped reading earlier I would not have learned about Greta Garbo's toilet habits.

So what do people talk about when they talk about Gore Vidal? This terrifying question (or any ambitious author or artist or human being) is the ghost hooting from the bottom of the well throughout this book. This question is never directly asked, of course - Vidal was far too shrewd for that. But, like so many giants of postwar American fiction, he had lived long enough to witness the vast cultural shift (or decline?) that was proving increasingly inhospitable to such giants.

Here is the opening paragraph to Vidal's Wikipedia page:

"Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (/vɪˈdɑːl/; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July
31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner,
epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing."

Here is the closing "Legacy" section of Vidal's Wikipedia page:

"The New York Times described him as "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile, or gotten more mileage from their talent". The Los Angeles Times said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language". The Washington Post described him as a "major writer of the modern era ... [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters".

The Guardian said that "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism, rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style". The Daily Telegraph described the writer as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him". The BBC News said that he was "one of the finest post-war American writers ... an indefatigable critic of the whole American system ... Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows; his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing."[130] In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal", the Spanish on-line magazine Ideal said that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States", and described him as a "great American novelist and essayist". In The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles, the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera described the novelist as "the enfant terrible of American culture" and that he was "one of the giants of American literature". In Gore Vidal: The Killjoy of America, the French newspaper Le Figaro said that the public intellectual Vidal was "the killjoy of America" but that he also was an "outstanding polemicist" who used words "like high-precision weapons"."

Vidal has not been dead long enough for a full appreciation or reevaluation of his work can be established (if such things are ever "established"), but there is definitely a kind of incoherence here, which I think is fair, given the lack of time and perspective. Oh but how he would smirk at "polished style of writing" and the boiler plate descriptions from the newspapers (words like "high-precision weapons").

And so, a legacy - that's it?

***

So what can a writer do about this situation. How do you secure a legacy? Is this even possible? Whose fault is this? Who let all the barbarians in the gates? Am I one of them (yeah, probably)?

The writer has to take some responsibility. Vidal reminds me of Christopher Hitchens in that they were both polemicists who loved a good debate. They were terrific writers. But debates tend to not age very well, or mutate when the characters and events go from current events into history.


***

Vidal is drawn to celebrity, his own most of all, but he is too self-aware to delude himself that an author, even a very successful one (with movies and plays to boot) will be anything but third class when it comes to American celebrity. And so we are deluged with Vidalian name-dropping throughout: Jackie O, Princess Margaret, The Bird (that's Tennessee Williams to you and me), Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, etc. Vidal is cool about this, as much as it is possible to be cool while name-dropping. And why should I complain? Vidal led an interesting, productive life, and he knew these people (although he doesn't mention it, Wikipedia claims Vidal was engaged to Joanne Woodward briefly!).

***

Vidal was uneasy - if not dismissive of - a potential legacy based on his groundbreaking exploration of sexuality and gender - Myra Breckinridge alone should put him on syllabi everywhere. But I am acquainted with a young person majoring in English at a prestigious private university and from what she tells me, pretty much anybody writing before c. 2005 is ignored in the "modern lit" classes. Maybe my sample is too narrow, but I've heard rumors from other sources that this is the case. The literary 20th century went extinct about ten years ago and Vidal with it.

In any case, Vidal doesn't want that kind of legacy, as a paragon of sexual/gender identity - he refused to be labeled as gay - stating that it is impossible to be identified by sexual preference, an attitude not popular nowadays: there are only homosexual acts, not homosexual people, he said, on several occasions. The word he uses is "homosexualist." Vidal wanted to be a man of letters in the old-fashioned sense, outside the university, free-wheeling, saying whatever he wants to a public that...that listens to old-fashioned men of letters. Think H. L. Mencken - mean and smart and on top of things. Oh my. This has been a disaster for the Big Names born around 1920 - they are old enough to remember the glory days - and Gore Vidal was glorious - but lived long enough to see it disintegrate. Always slow on the uptake, I remember my first real awakening came when I encountered Saul Bellow's last Playboy interview (May 1997) - his bitterness and dismay and despair were evident. The culture that had lionized him was now failing him. Vidal manages less bitterness than Bellow, which makes his situation more poignant. Throughout the book he touts his accomplishments, disguised as little asides - some times these are rather heartbreaking:

"In a fit of absentmindedness I said that I would serve as president of the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 1990. I usually avoid festivals, prize-givings and every sort of bureaucratic event involving the arts. I can't think why I said yes." (p. 234)

Uh huh. This book is filled with "events" of one sort or another - and this passage immediately follows a long quote from Montaigne about lying

Even sadder is Vidal's lingering yen for Camelot.

"Recently a new mystery was revealed. There is some TV footage of Jack, Jackie, and me making our entrance at a Washington horse shoe where I end up sitting to Jack's left; then there is Jackie to my left and an unknown lady behind us. Just visible, back of us, was the memorable hat of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who had been at diner in what had once been her bedroom..." (p. 206).

This opening is part of an entire chapter devoted to correcting "a lady" with proof that "Alice sat beside the president." This goes on for a couple of paragraphs, Vidal straightening out who sat next to who at the Kennedy horse show. Then a bit of ghoulish and hard to believe gossip: "She (Jackie) was also bemused by the piece of his (Jack's) skull which she wanted to put back in place." (p. 207). Bemused? Good God, they were all monsters then! Or this might be the wrong word. Who knows? Who, really, cares?

Gore Vidal first shocked me some 30 years ago with a similar bit - I forget where I read it, probably a magazine, where he said that Jackie marrying far beneath her station when she married Jack, a bootlegger's son. I thought all these people were all rich, but noble and civic-minded quasi-aristocrats who were all pretty much part of the same upper crust - an American upper crust. What a child I was! So Vidal was one of those writers who wised me up a bit, and I'll forever be grateful.

***

Reviewers, both professional and amateur have already pretty much covered all this book's blatant defects: how it rambles on, its disjunct chapters that go nowhere, the pitiful gouts of showing off. Perhaps worst of all - as already touched upon with the horse show photo, was how enthralled Vidal was by celebrity. To the point where everybody gets about fifty bonus points for just being famous. Which left me often feeling confused. Princess Margaret comes off heroic - so what Edward St. Aubyn's version of her wrong? My suspicion is that Vidal was as dazzled by Royals as he was the Kennedy's - a fulsome description of a Princess of Siam complete with one of her royal subjects salaaming comes early on in the book. I get the feeling Vidal wouldn't object to somebody salaaming at his feet. Which is part of his charm, I suppose, since his arch self-regard is tempered by what appears to me as being self-loathing.

***

Vidal starts this memoir out with his love of movies. This love is presented without a look back - they way love should be. But the seeds of his own (partial) irrelevancies are being sown. What happens if you are a novelists who actually prefers movies to reading books? In Vidal's case, you start writing for Hollywood, which is not, I think, an act of selling out, or prostitution or whatever. But it is, for the novelist, apparently disappointing - Fitzgerald comes to mind. Yeah, for once your talent will be tied to a steady paycheck, but the amount of dibbling and dabbling that goes into a script pretty much makes it a collaborative effort until that moment when the actor botches things (or if you are lucky, transforms your hybrid, stitched-together words into something somehow sublime).

***

About a year ago, I'd abandoned this review out of sloth and sadness. Vidal's my better and the only thing I got going for me is that I am still alive and he's dead. A weevil beating a dead war horse.

But I was inspired to come back to this in November 2020 because I found a copy of Vidal's book At Home, Essays 1982-1988 and it is simply masterful. The writing, the wit, the intelligence, the finely-tuned bullshit detector. This is a fine mind at the top of his game.

Some of his rather futile preoccupations are here - politics, I mean. Which he gets wrong sometimes - no, Japan did not buy up the USA and turn us into a farm. No, the USSR didn't get provoked into Armageddon by Ronald Reagan. Both were very much possibilities in 1982, according to many (I graduated high school in '82, so I recall). But Vidal's preoccupations with Hollywood and celebrity was much more in check back in the '80s. But it is all worth reading, even when his prognostications are wrong. He is exhilarating, not from time to time, but pretty much all the time.

In the 1980s, Vidal also saw the end of American literary culture. He calls out the academic creative writing industry for being the fraud that it is, a kind of Ponzi Scheme bureaucracy. The extinction of the serious reader is also noted, a real problem for such a serious writer. In 1982, alas.

So go straight to the At Home essays and save this late book for later.

Gore Vidal laments the death of literature, the novel in particular. He used to be a famous novelist, but movies have taken over and writers are overlooked. Our yuuuuuge president claims to have never read a book. Four hours of TV a day make him happy. Vidal wrote this in 2006 and died before the 2016 election. He must be spinning in his grave. Vidal began reading vociferously at the age of six. It was 1931, and he also loved movies. West Point was his birthplace and his father, a military man and his mom a hard drinking woman who married two more times. Her second husband was wealthy and Gore had white servants, a sign of real money. A third generation atheist, Vidal believed that films gave us a false sense of immortality. I share in both his lack of faith and love of movies. His family knew Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana who built schools and hospitals with tax dollars from Standard Oil. Long was killed as he prepared to run against FDR in 1936. Vidal reminisces about his many appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Caron. He was impressed by the comedian’s political savvy. The name dropping continues; JFK and Jackie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart were all friends of the family. His biting sense of humor is evident. A brief story involving Pope Pius XII is my favorite. Vidal writes that after his death, the Pontiff’s embalming seemed to have been done by an amateur taxidermist. First, Pius turned emerald green, and then, in the summer heat, he exploded a holy combustion. Tears of laughter are rolling down my face. Catholic readers will truly understand the irony. How about an immaculate implosion? Tennessee Williams was a life long friend, especially as a letter writer who encouraged Vidal to find his inner voice. Williams’s comic genius was on par with Mark Twain, Vidal writes. Hollywood called in 1956, and he wrote his first screenplay, “A Catered Affair,” starring Bette Davis. He met Francis Ford Coppola on a movie set and introduced him to French wine and Francis later bought a vineyard in California. They co-wrote the script for “Is Paris Burning.” He appeared as himself, using improvised dialogue in Fellini’s “Roma.” The director despised scripts. After graduating from Exeter, Vidal joined the army instead of attending Harvard like many of his classmates. He remembers WBAI radio here in New York where I was fortunate enough to hear him broadcast his wit and wisdom on numerous occasions. Another funny anecdote, as his friend Tennessee Williams visited Vidal’s adopted city of Rome for an audience with the Pope. The Vicar of Christ was unavailable and Williams instead met the “black pope,” a nickname for the head of the Jesuit order. To Vidal’s astonishment, William’s had converted to Catholicism. T.P. Gore was a blind senator from Oklahoma and the young Gore Vidal would read to his grandfather every day including the complete works of Mark Twain, a personal hero and fellow skeptic. The family tree on the Vidal side was Swiss, German, and Catholic, until a land dispute and loss of property to the Church resulted in a long time disdain for organized religion. The British Gore ancestors were split as mostly Methodists and Baptists. T.P. Gore was a complete non-believer. Vidal maintained a good relationship with his father but had no contact with his mother for the last 20 years of her life. An unexplained rift with Bobby Kennedy caused Jackie O to ignore him after JFK’s death. Vidal lived with his partner, Harold, from 1950 until his death in 2003. They had a platonic relationship with each having intimate encounters with others. The book ends with a plausible theory regarding the JFK assassination. The former bootlegger, Joseph Kennedy had made a deal with mobsters which was broken by his son Bobby working as Attorney General. RFK’s relentless pursuit of crime bosses led to JFK’s death. In the age of President Tweet, I miss Vidal more than ever. Point to Point is never boring and I highly recommend it.