No one seems to have relished his own, well-crafted personal persona to Vidal's extent, nor been so brutally honest about his foibles ("Why do we always have to go get an English asshole for this sort of part when we have one of our own?" p. 145). I found particularly interesting his discussion of convergent vs. divergent minds. While it's true (p. 239) that many convergent minds are drawn to fields as teleological as Engineering, the great attraction of Engineering (rapid convergence on something that will be agreed upon as a potential solution) it also gives the mind more time to explore those ideas where divergent thinking can be more fruitfully applied. I was struck, in reading Vidal's memoir, that convergent minds are more drawn to ideology. It seems only in the divergent, speculative phase that ideology is productive, becoming ossified as spiritual inquiry is reduced to mindless ritual. Vidal's great strength was his intellectual fluidity.

There is so much to this book that it is difficult to organize my reactions. They go in two directions: the book is too long and dragged in places, but also was generally engaging and I liked it and Vidal more than I expect to.

If there is a theme to Vidal's memoirs, it might be summarized in a quote late in the book which he attributes to John Kennedy: "You get to know all the big movers and shakers and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are." While Vidal disparages Truman Capote (accurately) as a nasty gossip, Vidal's book does pretty much the same thing, recoding insider stories which are heavily over balanced to the negative. If my memory serves, only Eleanor Roosevelt and perhaps Alice Longworth come out well, and the Kennedys (especially Bobby) by far the worst. I did actually meet Bobby Kennedy when I was in college, and must admit I was as put off by the encounter as Vidal is by the man in general.

Good grief, he sure knew everybody. I counted more than a hundred "characters" in the book who were familiar to me, including everyone from Queen Elizabeth to Greta Garbo and Ralph Ellison. While Vidal never attended college, he worked in fiction, film, TV and politics, and moved with agility among all four professional communities. He was, I think, around 70 when he wrote "Palimpsest."

The political stories are interesting reading for today. I had not realized how corrupt the US was back in the 1950-s and 60's, and while today seems tangibly worse, the margin of difference is a lot less than I would have thought. I was surprised how little attention Sen. Joe McCarthy receives, though he is mentioned in passing a couple of times, and also surprised that the evil spirt of Roy Cohn never arises anywhere in these recollections.

Late in the book, Vidal asks his published to include an interview he experienced within a planned book of essays, but is told "Address the subjects, leave your self out." He seems to have followed that guideline in this book. It left me want to know more, but I also realize the book would have been unreadably long had it also included this.

So what does the reader learn about the author? His politics are sincerely and conventionally liberal. He had, in Nina, the mother from hell. Raised in WASP privilege, he lacked the anti-Semitism endemic to that group. And he has a clear sexual protocol: never sleep with anyone you actually know, especially a friend, and always have partners younger than you are. He describes himself as "homoerotic" rather than "homosexual," the distinction being it was only about sex and not about feeling or relationship creation. He sure seems to have been active, though not much detail is provided (probably just as well, I guess).

The great love story of Vidal's life occurs in HS, with a boy named Jimmie Trimball, who dies on Iwo Jima at age 20. I kept wondering, though about his relationship with Howard Austen with whom he seems to have lived platonically for more than forty years. I kept thinking there must be a touching story there and some vulnerability, which is otherwise invisible in this volume.

I am not sure how to summarize my reactions. I did find the book useful and stimulating as a historical record of a time that I experienced at least some of, so older readers might find this engaging. Younger ones interested in American history might, as well. I'm surprisingly glad I read it.

This has a surface of glitter and wit, written by a man who is as acerbic, clever and a great hater. I can't stay in his literary company for too long at a time and I'm glad I was never really in his company. I would never have survived. So I took my time with these memoirs and enjoyed myself. Gore Vidal can be laugh out loud funny. He is a great name dropper but it is done in a way that makes you feel that the big names are impressing other people by dropping his name into conversations. His gossip is wonderful and woe to those who fell out with him. He is a master manipulator of words and stories and Bobby Kennedy and Truman Capote especially find themselves targets. And he was certainly on the fringes of great events and famous people and mixed in societies that he could and did describe with sharply honed wit. I like him and admire his skill and intelligence. And that he can entertain so well. I am going to reread 'Julian' because I remember how much I enjoyed it once and I am about to start 'Point to Point Navigation' which is the second volume of the memoirs. So I am not ready to leave him yet.

When I was a kid, Gore Vidal seemed a kind of mythical figure. I'd always known his name - ever since Lily Tomlin's Ernestine called him "Gory Veedal" - and I even read 'Myra Breckinridge' when I was a teen, but that only served to reinforce my image of him as... not quite real.

Maybe that's why it was appropriate that one of his earliest works ('Visit to a Small Planet') seems, in a way, to present Vidal himself as an extraterrestrial; an alien intelligence that came here from another world in order to observe America, its people and its politics.

Vidal's terrific memoir backs up that intelligent-yet-alien image.

I know that Vidal was polarizing. There seemed to be no middle of the road for most people; they either loved him or hated him. But, from what he writes here, you get the sense that - in keeping them at a distance - Vidal was actually doing people a favor. He admits his faults and confesses to being more than an acquired taste; you probably wouldn't want to get used to him or make a habit of him.

Such an attitude could - no doubt often did - translate as 'snob'. But the memoir doesn't read that way... well, except for one chapter - 'At Home on the Hudson in the Cold War', which could easily have been titled 'Snobs I Have Known' and details a number of those in Vidal's inner circle who were less-than-pleasant. (It's the only chapter in the book that bored me - because the people did.)

Instead, this account quite often reads like an attempt at setting the record straight. Being somewhat enigmatic by nature (or design) - and, on top of that, rather successful in his career, Vidal (as he sees it) was, by turns, lied about, intentionally misunderstood and envied. It's not that he's getting his revenge in print. In fact, Vidal reads kind of like a diary of Addison DeWitt (of 'All About Eve') but without the smoldering bitchiness. ~well, for the most part; even the occasional bitchiness reads as benign.

Vidal states early on that he's not all that interested in writing something linear with these memories. As a result, he sort of flies around somewhat - though he'll land and stay on-topic for reasonable periods of time. And his writing is often charged with brilliance: n  

The squalor never ends once one gets involved with people for whom truth is no criterion.

n ~as well as poignancy, as when Vidal writes about Jimmie Trimble (the love of his life - who died at 19 in Iwo Jima and to whom Vidal dedicated the novel 'The City and the Pillar'): n  

Jimmie was both homoerotic and heteroerotic. I suppose I am curious about the balance between the two in his nature. But then when one lover goes into shock at the news of his death and another [Vidal] mourns him to the end of his life, we have moved far beyond sex or eroticism and on to the wilder shores of love, and shipwreck.

n

A great view of an "insider-outsider" in the world of politics and intellectual life which sometines extends to more than his inicial purpose of taking a glimpse in his first 39 years. The portraits are vivid, so even if one doesn't agreee with Vidal's views on some subjects, it's still a great reading. Sometimes the flooding of names makes the narration a little cumbersome, what can be easily solved by some consults with wikipedia.

Simply a delight, as only he can deliver.

I have always enjoyed reading Gore Vidal. This book is about his early life and the amazing people that he knew and met.

It begins with a retelling of the sexual perversions of John F Kennedy and Gore Vidal's memoir just keeps giving the juicy details. Unfortunately most of that juice is squeezed out of socialites and intellectuals of the 1950s, most of whom are long forgotten (except, obviously, by Vidal). Nonetheless Vidal is a born novelist who could point a reader to the fun stuff in any life, even someone far more boring than him (like Jesus Christ). And he comes up with fun devices, like excerpting passages from others' writings that involve him, and then contradicting those other writers. A particularly fun example is the night he and Jack Keruac shared that was later fictionalized by Keruac. This book will be enjoyed by everyone, especially those who enjoy Paul Newman's salad dressing.

Fairly interesting, I enjoyed the gossip.

Possibly the best memoir ever written.

Vidal is selfish and self-obsessed. He writes as if he holds court to the glittering socialites and society-types who swarm around him as he delicately wafts them away, and yet he is the one playing courtier - not a single name goes unchecked, not a single encounter escapes being diligently written down to reflect the style in which he operated within it. Vidal is clearly entranced by celebrity: and as a celebrity who has to work for a living, he's especially bitter about those who do not.

Ever nasty, ever self-obsessed, ever the worst qualities of all those he loathes, Gore Vidal was made to write a memoir.

His ideas about himself and others are sometimes farcical. He loses a congressional Democrat seat in NY, but it's only due to Jack Kennedy's lack of popularity. Vidal's following commercial success at the top of the NYT bestseller list eventually leads powerbrokers to beg him to stand once again. He chooses to "let the cup pass unto" another candidate, who promptly wins it by a landslide - thanks to Vidal, of course. He maintains that he could have brought down perhaps his biggest foe in the administration, Robert Kennedy, if it wasn't for the fact that the evidence he wished to use was brought to him by the mob.

People, places, and vocations change and flicker constantly. Even the most famous A-listers (Garbo, the Kennedys, Tennessee Williams) are used as props for Vidal's wit, their worst traits and moments dissected for Vidal's pleasure. Their good qualities? Rarely, if ever, mentioned. Jackie Kennedy has "boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice [that] were a great joy to me". Grace Kelly at the time of her marriage is fat and rapidly ageing, willing to play princess on a rock above a casino to escape the fate of Loretta Young and Joan Crawford - that of an (gasp) old actress in the makeup chair before everyone else. Lee Radziwill (whose secret service codename was supposedly 'rancidass') is so loathed that her presence dominates the Kennedy Administration for him (and therefore us). Vidal would be misogynistic if he didn't view men with equal contempt. Even his partner of 53 years, Howard, gets nary a mention.

In this hurricane of casual sex and casual friendships, the one constant is grief, which is slowly revealed to dominate the book. Vidal's first love (and best friend) Jimmie Trimble is killed during the war. At the start of our story (in the present, as an old man) he meets with Jimmie's mother. In the middle he once again takes a break from dizzying past memories of glamorous NY socialites and NYC beatniks in order to document present-day meetings with Jimmie's friends. By the time we reach the final act of the book, he meets with the woman Jimmie was engaged to at the time of his death. Vidal is seemingly winded by grief when she shows him a picture Jimmie kept of her in his pocket - not because of what the photo represents, but because it is curved to the shape of his body.

The finest segments of this book are the earliest. Vidal has ways of describing the people and places around him in the heady days of his youth in a way that are reminiscent of an ancient Greek orgy. When discussing his bisexuality and homoeroticism in youth he writes that "we were true pagans who knew nothing about categories." When describing Trimble, he writes that "his sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great". He has a one night stand with the 'irresistible' Kerouac at the height of his 'animal charm' before the latter descends to rampant alcoholism, antisemitism, and an early death. When, decades later, he sees a youth wearing a t-shirt with Kerouac's face on it, he strikes up a conversation with the boy. Did he really look like that? asks the child? Yes says Vidal, he did for a time, and that's all that's necessary, to look like that - to be like that - for a time.

The book ends with - what else? - a recollection of society types flattering Vidal. The story he intends to convey means nothing, but a throwaway line that is mentioned almost innocuously is of interest. Vidal offhandedly writes that he has purchased a cemetery plot for himself in the same cemetery in which Jimmie Trimble was buried all those decades ago.

I expected the society gossip. Perhaps foolishly, I didn't expect the quality of the book.

Ugh. His political essays are so much better. This is one long bitchy rant. He just thinks his shit doesn't stink and says the nastiest things about everybody, so peevish and petty. Pass.

Dazzling, elegant, could such a life really have occured? Gloriusly illuminates several decades of US cultural and political history.