Titling this memoir ‘Palimpsest’ does imply an act of active structured creation rather than simply memory, and although it is quite scattergun and gossipy, the book does tell a clear story about Gore Vidal’s life up to the age of 39. Born into some notable privilege (his grandfather T.P. Gore was a senator) and the elite (although not supremely rich), Vidal seemed to have set his sights on becoming a novelist early on and was an insatiable reader - he mentions that his English teachers at school were notably less well read than he (and that he had read Pliny, ‘at age 7’).
The most formative event of the book comes early on (he himself calls this the ‘Rosebud’ moment), when he describes his love for Jimmie Trimble, a clean-cut athlete from high school – this love was returned, it seems, although we are not clear how far it went, but the other boy was then sent out to the horrors of the Pacific War and perished at Iwo Jima. This event seems to have had a profound effect on Gore, who thereafter pursued sex as a purely physical act and not as part of a relationship (and, he notes in passing, he had some 1,000 encounters by age of 25, at a rate of one a day) – his rule was never sleep with a friend or someone older than you. For the last 50 odd years of his life, he lived with Howard Austen, and maintained a purely platonic (love) relationship with him, while he pursued his desires elsewhere. Oddly, Howard appears only fleetingly in the memoir, though they met long before the end of the book – possibly, he did not want to be.
As a young novelist in the post-war era, Gore made his name with the The City and the Pillar [1948], which was essentially a re-telling of the story of his love story with Trimble and was a scandalous success, which Gore says forced him to give up literature a while and seek his fortune elsewhere (in the theatre and in the movies, most lucratively, though he also wrote pulp fiction under another name). The tone is generally ironic and arch, and he is seemingly amused by everyone he meets – famously, he was said to have met ‘everyone’. The book is bursting with waspish anecdotes of his meetings with famous authors, such as The Bird (Tennessee Williams], Truman Capote, Anais Nin, Harold Acton, Saul Bellow, Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer – he is sometimes hilarious about these fellow scribes (about The Bird and Capote, in particular - he claims that he once mislaid his glasses and mistook the latter for an ottoman and sat on him), although he claims no envy for any other writer, some of the sly putdowns would seem to indicate a competitive instinct at work.
As a screen writer, Vidal also had a great deal of success, and also managed to bring the homoerotic ‘Rosebud’ love story into his screenplay of Ben Hur, unbeknownst to the right-wing star, Chuck Heston (though with the full knowledge of the director). Throughout his time in the movies, he seemed to have resented the idea that the director was the auteur of the film – in his view, they were simply ‘technicians’. Much of his experience in the ephemeral world of Hollywood would go into his fine later historical novel of that name, but we learn very little about his actual processes in the memoir – other than that he wrote in long hand and had a strange ability to envision fully formed scenes from his novels some time in advance of writing them (his historical novels are quite film-like).
Later, in the early 1960s, he had a brief flirtation with politics – he was friends with the Kennedys and stood as a Democratic candidate for the House in 1960. This section gives him the opportunity to relate some stories about JFK (whom he seemed to like but not admire for his Cold Warrior tendencies), and Bobby (whom he did not like at all), and Jackie (whom he knew from family connections). This section seems slightly tacked on and is a little boring, compared with the deliciously irreverent literary gossip. It also gives him the opportunity to exercise his inner Chomsky and discourse on the American empire and the burgeoning National Security State – this is something that he has written about at length elsewhere and it sits uneasily in this work, I feel (also, I don’t read Gore Vidal for that).
This is, aside from the last caveat, a hugely entertaining and often hilarious book but the inner Gore Vidal often remained somewhat hidden under the carapace of his ironic brilliance – as he says himself, only novels tell the truth.

5*

Vidal's first forty years, as remembered. Unfortunately, he was one of the authors/essayists/playwrights that had too many powerful enemies in the country and respective industries to allow his artistic contributions to age well, if at all.
Rather than go on about his works, Vidal takes us through multiple decades of gossip that reveals one of the most interesting lives of all time. Here are some greatest hits:
-Attended Congress as his blind grandfather's aid as a child in the thirties.
-Wrote the first openly gay novel.
-Wrote the first draft of "Ben-Hur" that was actually filmed.
-Shared a step-father with Jackie Kennedy, which led to being part of the Kennedy inner circle in the late fifties and first couple years of the sixties (and then became a Kennedy family denouncer from the mid-sixties on).
-Became good friends with, and up-state neighbors of, Eleanor Roosevelt.
-Had almost daily anonymous sex with young men (his rules were never to fuck friends, while drunk, or those older than you; his other two general life rules were to never decline neither sex nor appearing on TV).
-He fucked Jack Kerouac in the ass, which was unusual for both of them (see above reason for Vidal; Kerouac because he usually wasn't the submissive catcher).
-And much much more...

Cold-hearted man, but what a superlative writer, storyteller, and gossip.

Intriguing, brilliant, and frustrating at times.

Delicious.

Such a good writer. Very layered book.

Very good. The amazing life of a great writer and intellectual. I recommend this book to everyone.

Only Vidal could make smugness palatable and occasionally even sexy.

Fun, if not necessarily truthful, read. The problem is that he makes these lordly statements about virtually everyone who was anyone in the last seven decades of the 20th century, and the net result makes it pretty plain that he can only see other people as extensions of himself. Jackie (truly improbable as he presents her) is Gore Vidal; Bill Walton is Gore Vidal; Bobby exists for Gore to hate, Schlesinger to patronize, etc. His voice is funny, but he only has one. I have the same issue with his novels, nearly all of which I have read. They're entertaining as hell, but more listening to a gossipy friend talking than, say, actual history (think Nancy Mitford's "biographies", but with more spite). Still, you go in knowing what you are getting, and the writing is sharp.

This was a very good memoir and I fully enjoy the genre. The teenager in me who was obsessed with Beats loved all the gossip and I somehow managed to be shocked by how messed up and terrible the Kennedys were. This memoir does feel fully from a different time and I do have some moral qualms about just how easy and pleasurable I find reading about the white ruling class of mid century America.

I read, or rather raced through almost in one sitting, Palimpsest when it first came out, with unalloyed if sometimes rather startled attention. Ten years later, savoured like a splendid dinner, it was even better. Of course one would need the same easy talent with words as its author to say anything that would do it justice. Yet what exactly is it: not a biography because it hops around seemingly free-associating randomly between just about any subject over time and place; far too un-dusty to fit into the category of ‘Memoirs’; certainly not a ‘confession’ because it’s completely shameless without a trace of an explanatory apology; a lot more than a collection of gossipy anecdotes though there’s plenty of those too; patrician conversational reminiscences only if anyone dared answer back; and least of all a fiction although it sometimes might almost read as one. Unique Vidal I suppose –if he had few equals in his own time, it’s safe to bet that that there’s none now - turned by Time’s remorseless march from statuesque gilded youth into rather portly idol or devil according to taste with whole encyclopaedia of experience to reflect on and now departed, no doubt a relief to as many as it’s a loss to others.

Even for anyone who had never heard of him (if such an individual exists), it’s pretty clear from the first couple of pages that an awful lot of people are going to loathe Gore Vidal; I think he had the reputation at a stage of being the most hated man in America, a remarkable accomplishment in itself, though one now probably superseded by a few other real villains. Why? Apart from so deliberately and unpatriotically upsetting a good many ‘Amerikan’ apple-carts by a cold-bloodedly and unrelentingly accurate exposé of the mechanisms of Empire (“we have made so many enemies all around the world that, in the name of terrorism, a quite effective police state has ever so gradually replaced the old republic”), mostly sheer envy I’d think, and not for just getting away with that. Who if he was honest wouldn’t wish to be not just dashingly handsome but positively beautiful, brought up in exciting and ‘high-society’ surroundings, precociously self-assured, flying a plane at the age of ten, being able to evade the tiresome exigencies of schools and universities because he had a twenty thousand-volume library at his disposal in boyhood, fiendishly clever not only in a very intelligent but satirically witty way, producing a whole string of best-sellers starting from before he was twenty, hobnobbing effortlessly with the bad and the beautiful in Hollywood and Washington and sought after by the international rich and famous – and infamous - everywhere. A high-regarding – ‘imperial’ as some have said, or others ‘arrogant and boastful’ - idea of himself didn’t of course help his popularity, though it could also be said, with so many favours of fortune heaped on his head, that it would have been rank hypocrisy to see himself as otherwise; he wasn’t the type to creep around wrapped in any cloak of false modesty. Vidal states his preferences, or prejudices as you wish, straightforwardly, usually with good reasons for them, and you can like it or lump it. I think I can sincerely say that of at least one of the seven deadly sins I’m customarily guiltless, yet immersed in this volume the green-eyed monster couldn’t always be suppressed: I admit, I’d love to be like Gore Vidal, fluidly at home in a world where far greater sins were passed over unless they were ‘bad form’, where the duelling tools of young men were quotations from Cicero, where learning and erudition was admired and imitated as much as frivolous and urbane repartee and when none of it was hindered by the sour disapproval of preachers and scientists. There’s a delicious episode when the cocky twenty-two year old was permitted to pay his respects to the eighty-five year old George Santayana. “I shall talk and you shall listen”, pronounced the philosopher; “You can ask questions of course. But remember that I am very deaf”. The unruly lad was enchanted, he’d met his match: “I felt like Phaedo with Socrates”. This was at the same period as the budding and enduring friendship between Vidal and Tennessee Williams, unlikely companions one might have thought though perhaps another quotation explains it. “Invariably, at the end of A Streetcar named Desire, when the audience was barking like seals as the broken Blanche Dubois is led with away with the poignant cry, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers, the Bird’s (Williams’) hoot of laughter would echo in the snuffling theatre and he would say, loudly, ‘Now she’s off to the bughouse’ ”; only Vidal saw that the playwright envisaged for his ‘pathetic’ heroine an enjoyable stay in the ‘bughouse’, seducing a few of the more comely doctors before opening up a successful boutique. (I have to admit I didn’t quite see that myself but it fits perfectly!) The quality in common was a very finely-tuned ear, as acutely sensitive to the just-audible poetry of mundane words as it was in picking up the false notes of maudlin sentimentality and insincerity. And on and on for four hundred pages, where just about everybody who was anybody makes an appearance, including in one of the best chapters with unexpected sympathy the disgraced Princess Margaret with her “Hanoverian” tones and by way of complete contrast and rather more warily Denham Fouts from Alabama. The Princess had a certain claim to grandeur, the male poule de luxe par excellence of his brief time had to make his own: “I haven’t seen so much of Paul since he became king and had to marry Fredericka”, he remarked from a feathery cloud of opium fumes. Still-living literary legends, such as André Gide and E. M. Forster on the other hand, tend to get the cold shoulder for their frousty snobbishness. Post-War Paris, where the author’s adventures included a visit to The Master’s favourite brothel “still full of Mother Proust’s lugubrious furniture”, assumes the proportions of a bohemian urban Garden of Eden….Vidal’s Golden Age, as he was wont to call it in later years, whether tongue-in-cheek or not and anyway it was very short-lived, the Age of Incoherence had already set in by the next decade, though not without a few lingering relics. Edith Sitwell is especially choice: when she was resident in a London club for gentlewomen “I would arrive to find Edith already enthroned in the lounge as the military ladies, one by one, marched up to pay her tribute. To each she gave a winning girlish smile while whispering to me, ‘this one we call the field-marshal’. A bob-haired figure, in sensible shoes, with swagger stick – if there was not a swagger stick there should have been - bowed low over Edith’s hand. ‘Dame Edith’, a gruff voice saluted her. Edith responded with gay girlish giggles. Then the field-marshal went off to war, and Edith said ‘Now I know that you Americans always want a drink of something before lunch - something light for me of course. Now what was that lovely drink that Osbert and I became so fond of in New York? Something amusing and – I think – Italian….’ A waitress appeared with a small gold-fish bowl. ‘Here’s your martini Dame Edith’ “. (The lunch, as ordained by the hostess, was a ‘red’ one – lobster and strawberries accompanied by a bottle of burgundy apiece, after the gold-fish bowl martinis. It’s a wonder they could stand up, let alone after that to scribble away into the night. It comes as a bit of a shock to realise that this was going on when I was approaching adolescence; a reminder also, a theme often harped on by Vidal, of how dull the world has become so quickly). After that we descend into American politics of the 1960’s, in which unwholesome world Vidal for a while had ambitions though, with hindsight, no hope of success. To some extent in the court of Kennedy what he did finally come to see – though it would have seemed then like the craziest of what’s now naively labelled as ‘conspiracy theories’ – that even the leading participants were not only motivated by little more then private vendettas against each other, but failed to realise that they themselves were only puppets in a master plan being engineered elsewhere: the whipping-up of a ‘communist threat’ as a justification for preparing the dogs of war for the benefit of certain industrialists, or genuine madmen. In the quoted words of J.F. Kennedy himself: “In this …uh … job you get to meet just about everybody. 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”. Kennedy, neither particularly innocent any more than idealistic, was innocent enough not to see that the Security State was already burgeoning behind his back; he was soon to find out. Thirty years later, Vidal’s still-dim prescience had become all too plainly visible as modern America went on record as the most war-mongering empire in the whole of history – something he, prodigiously well-read not only in almost everything written in his own time but reaching back to the annals of Ancient Rome, was almost uniquely qualified to state. None of that is funny at all and the best that Vidal, escaping to the libraries of Europe, could muster was a sort of wry cynicism where the pen, if not mightier than the sword, was at least the more honourable alternative. So naturally he was also hated because he was feared, all to little avail of course. If ‘politics’ was bad in the 1960’s that’s nothing to what it’s become.

Envy is permissible when it’s admiring – unless, as more often happens, vicarious delight at such tales and truth-telling is tainted by the realization that one could never rise to that level and is translated into spiteful and resentful malice. Because, as he grew older, one thing was certain: not too many would venture into close proximity to the sharp-tongued Mr Vidal other than on tip-toe. Another thing was equally certain, that as soon as he was safely dead a whole flock of carrion crows and a swarm of biliously-disposed serpents would have a field day. They did and have, as represented in a recent publication enticingly entitled “In Bed with Gore Vidal”. I haven’t read this, and don’t wish to, having seen enough reviews of it; my impression is that it could be described as a truly dirty book, though not in the way its manufacturer intended. The main target, naturally, is Vidal’s private life, for which it must be said he himself provided more than ample material. Supposing perhaps that candour was enough while overlooking that sympathetic readers didn’t need to be told while the others don’t want to be told and stick their heels in if they are, he doesn’t always present his most attractive side - proclaiming for example that he’d never sought to give anyone else any pleasure or “the potency of other males is a turn-off”; after all, such glittering metal surely is enhanced rather than tarnished by - what shall we say, a ‘friendlier’ approach - to the business of lust. Nor is it entirely convincing, for once: only the most crudely self-centred philanderer would take that tone un-ironically, and Vidal, however impatient with vulgar sentimentality, was far too intelligent to be that. Here one has to read very carefully between the lines, because the more crudely psychologically-inclined observer might be all too eager to smell a rat, and conceivably it was Vidal’s aversion to ‘psychoanalysis’ that egged him on, actually, to provoke it. Amateur analysis of the popular variety, inevitably, has been dragged by those who don’t like him by way of providing a cover of intellectual respectability for their own aversions: he hated his mother and was therefore not only ‘misogynistic’ but ‘a closet gay’ and ‘incapable of real love’. Bunkum, or accurately enough in his own words, “how a drop of Freud can poison so many wells”. Glamorous in palmier days, Mrs Eugene Vidal, as she briefly was, was not an ideal figure of a woman or a mother . Her own parents, to whom the young Gore was devoted and says from whom he derived his education, are reported to have burst into song, ‘Lulu’s Back in Town’, and dissolved into resigned giggles when they heard of her infrequent appearances. She was a ruthless gold-digger, vituperative and selfish even when she was sober; only a real artist could have made her into the reluctantly comic figure she is here. On the other hand, Vidal Senior and the Gore grandparents are portrayed with genuine affection and gratitude; as indeed are various other people in spite of the tone of worldly sang-froid (in itself simply an expression of a distaste for emotional excess, rather understandable after the mother). But it’s over Vidal’s ‘partner’ of half a century that the knives really come out, sharpened by the now-notorious statement that except initially there was no sexual contact between them, as indeed according to his idea of things there should never be between friends. Allowing for over-statement in the interests of making a point, this in fact is a very sensible solution to ‘marriage’, especially in a milieu where “divorce is an institution” – it avoids the jealousies, tantrums and vengeful recriminations that destroy most conventional arrangements so that mutual understanding and sympathy can flourish, and we don’t need cheap journalistic probes into any of that. It might have been too tactlessly honest of Vidal unabashedly to state that he had thousands of other encounters, most of them rapidly efficient and in more foolish modern language, “predatory” or even “exploitive”; though none of his ‘victims’ was ever heard to complain – indeed, one apparently still living, formerly a teenage street ‘hustler’, defended him warmly. Nor is there the slightest reason to suppose, as some have, that he was exaggerating in order to show off; J. F. Kennedy, he admits, beat him on that score, and I’ve known myself more than one other who could have too. If Vidal was ‘monstrous’, it was only because he was unfortunate enough to survive into the age of the new Puritanism and its treacherously-forked tongues. As he said, “we did what we felt like and made no fuss about it”. That was the prevailing ethos of the time, he raised no eyebrows amongst his chosen contemporaries who were perfectly used to amiably insulting each other and tolerating each other’s foibles no matter how bizarre, something a later generation befuddled with some sort of existential angst which obliges them to both auto-flagellation and censoriousness, fails to understand. There is an additional source of latter-day resentment. ‘Homo-erotic’ (his expression) by inclination, Vidal wouldn’t use the word ‘gay’ except in inverted commas – “the weirdly inappropriate word used to describe a non-existent category” – and had no truck with its exponents, preferring words which were then in common usage but are now ‘forbidden’, because he believed strongly in individual human variations and insisted that these were matters not of artificial classification but of many universal continua all intertwined in un-analyzable ways, and that “there is no such thing as homosexual, only homosexual experiences” – in which, and he was one to know, a considerably higher proportion of the adult American male population than even Dr Kinsey calculated willingly participated “under the right circumstances”. Just as in the Ancient World, as Vidal sees ‘love’ as the Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, where sex is really rather irrelevant and incidental, until Christianity and Islam put a stop to that sort of playfully serious high-spiritedness by making it sinful and thereby raising it to the level of scurrilous excitation. This is rank heresy to the gay brotherhood, crypto-fascists all, because it denies them the pleasurably-martyred opportunity of feeling special because uniquely persecuted on account of their tragic destinies, rather as Jewish critics of Israeli policies are more savagely denounced as traitors to the cause than non-Jews. The conventional idea of marriage, in which otherwise healthy males are supposed all of a sudden to devote themselves with undying love and fidelity to someone they often hardly know and so spend a miserable existence – unless they manage to extricate themselves – of furtive ‘cheating’ and expensive atonement is, by Vidal’s assessment one of the most absurdly unrealistic ever invented; and, paradoxically, now emulated by ‘gays’ who at the same time lay all their troubles at the feet of ‘straight’ oppression. The subtleties of the male world, inaccessible to women because they have their own equally inaccessible to us, is also for most men too strange or even alarming to venture into, which I think is what is being indicated here. Delving further into the wave of antagonism one learns that, in addition to all that and as usual, avarice was rearing its ugly head. Vidal, through his own hard work, had a considerable fortune to dispose of, and none of it went to any of those so eagerly waiting to see themselves in the list of fortunate beneficiaries. Contesting law suits flourished, bringing up an accumulation of rumour, gossip, innuendo and downright falsehoods: Vidal was a secret ‘pederast’, a maid had witnessed he and his friend in the same bed so he was being ‘untruthful’, he suffered from dementia brought on by excessive drinking (hardly visible in final television interviews!), and so on and so forth. He must have been chuckling sardonically from the other side of the grave.

Because, really, all this sordid titillation is by-the-bye. Vidal, obviously, was a complicated, subtle and deeply thoughtful man, and one with the extraordinary courage not to conform to anyone else’s expectations. If the tone is one of blasé worldly-wisdom, well, he was very worldly-wise, exceptionally knowledgeable as well as perceptive without claims to being learned and impatient with those who were not. What else is there to do but to mock? And what if he didn’t always stick exactly to the truth (though I think he does more than most of us) when the purpose, as far as his writing went, was to entertain or even in an ironic way to enlighten his readers as well, one hopes, as himself. He didn’t believe it was possible to be objective about anything and that biography is nothing more than a pack of lies, the biggest lie of all being one’s creation of oneself; still, there are ways and ways of going about it. Nor, even without a high regard for humanity in general, is there any evidence either of real malice or cringing self-justification, which is more than can be said for most of us too. “How would you like to be remembered Mr Vidal?”, enquired another asinine interviewer. “Despite provocation I’ve never killed anyone”. Who can say if he was or wasn’t in the first rank of writers, whatever that means – the most read, the most ‘enduring’, ultimately just the most popular and reassuring to average readers? ‘Great writing’ is supposed to be immensely difficult and involve great suffering; it seems it wasn’t and didn’t in this case, another academically-puritanical point in his disfavour as it was for Anthony Burgess, almost as prolific under very different circumstances but for much the same reason, to make a livelihood as an outsider. Never mind about any of that, certainly he (Burgess too, sometimes) was amongst the funniest I for one have ever read, and laughter as distinguished from drunken mirth is the great restorer and humanizer. It’s the quality that puritans and dogmatists and the self-consciously righteous so notably lack.