Approaching Gore Vidal is no easy task, as David Dimbleby recently discovered. He's the last man standing from the era of the mega-celebrity author, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote having died. He's also older than most American houses, if not the Sun. Reading his autobiography, 'Palimpsest', you would not be surprised to read a withering put-down of Jesus, or an anecdote about Julius Caesar cruising for rough trade.
Given Vidal's absurdly interesting life story, 'Palimpsest' is a pallid, sporadically interesting work. In large part this is due to Vidal's aristocratic background, and the tiresome focus on family (or family tree) that follows. One of the best anecdotes in the book is of Princess Margaret watching a film about the fall of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, and exclaiming "They're so ordinary. They're just like us!". When Vidal is in aristocratic mode, the book becomes tiresome - clearly, nobody ever told him that an Upper Class name dropper is not a thing to be. This mindset also leads him to effectively end the book with the assisination of JFK, in 1963. The book was written in 1994, and Vidal, seeing himself as the sum total of the company he keeps, considers very little of the 30 intervening years to be worth recording.
More's the pity, as the first half of the book, dealing with his adolescent love affair with a boy named Jimmie Trimble, his ongoing homosexuality and World War II, is riveting. Vidal's style, alternately acid and profound, suits the subject matter perfectly. Jimmie dies in WWII, and Gore undertakes a pre-AIDS marathon of loveless casual sex, etching over a thousand notches into his proverbial bedpost. Despite the evidence to the contrary, Vidal is reticent to consider himself homosexual - one of his most famous aphorisms being "there are no homosexual or heterosexual people, there are homosexual and heterosexual acts". In Gore Vidal's case, there are an epic amount of homosexual acts, and next to no heterosexual acts.
Animating the section is Vidal's dedication to creating an historical record of an existing homosexuality (or homosexual acts) in the mythic past beloved of American conservatives. In Vidal's alternative history, WWII becomes a festival of enforced homosexuality, which demobbed soldiers re-enact with glee. The emergence of the USA as the world's hyperpower provides Gore and his contemporaries with more places to cruise. Allusions are made to the homosexual leanings of both JFK and RFK.
The aspect of the autobiography that is most striking is the distance with which he views his friendships. He draws a scathing comic sketch of the author Anais Nin, drawing on his dislike for her prose, her rampant lying and narcissism. All very amusing, but obviously posing the question of why he was a very close associate of hers for several years. Tennessee Williams has a slightly less sharp assessment, but then they were friends for decades, and the portrait is still cutting. The last years of his life story as he tells it, spent as a courtier in the JFK White House, follow a similar pattern - Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Onassis bearing the brunt of his spite. Ultimately, the impression that Vidal creates is of the consumate observer-writer - dispassionate, non-interventionist and not averse to shaping a narrative to his greater glory.
A more enjoyable read than most of vidal's prose.
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