An astute observer from the inside

Palimpsest: A Memoir
By Gore Vidal
Andre Deutsch: 435 pp.
Reviewed by Dave Riley On the final page of this book, Gore Vidal informs us that the actor Paul Newman has just rung and proposes dinner with the Clintons. Why not? "Since no one else is talking to them", he writes, "we will." This familiarity with notables is a Vidal standard. Related through his father's side of the family to the current vice-president of the United States, he shares a connection to Jacqueline Kennedy through one of his mother's later marriages. Vidal is anything but common. Indeed, the Gores and the Vidals are very much establishment families with a long term penchant for politics — an activity he refers to as "the family business". The young Vidal shared two competing passions: the machine populism of the US Democrats and writing. He followed the example of his blind grandfather, T.P. Gore, when he stood for the US Senate in 1960 and won the mantle of another bright lad running with the Kennedy camp. But mixing it with the presidency at close quarters proved too much for his liberal code. He drifted left and, along with fellow writers Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy, became an acerbic critic of successive US administrations during the Vietnam War. But any reader of, at least, his various anthologies of essays will tell you it is Gore Vidal the writer that excites us the most. More literary than his younger peers, he inhabits the twilight of the golden age of US fiction. While Vidal is the most modern of stylists his pragmatic philosophy locates him as a conscious throwback to the keener aspirations of 19th century bourgeois democracy. This doesn't make Gore Vidal an archaic read. Instead, it establishes him not only as a recognised man of letters — in the traditional sense — but also one with something interesting to say. Black-listed in the '50s for his employment of homosexuality as a theme in his early novels, he kept up his mortgage payments by switching to drama — initially writing for television and the stage and then later under contract as a script writer in Hollywood. When his comedy of sex change in a mythical Hollywood, Myra Breckinridge, was published in 1968, Vidal was notoriously famous worldwide. He is the US right's resident sodomite spectre: when the Republicans were swept back into Congress in 1994 it was proclaimed to be "the end of the age of Lenin and Gore Vidal". Looking back from his villa in Italy, Palimpsest recalls it. And it's all juicy gossip. No stranger to the TV talk show, Vidal knows that readers like their anecdotes packed with calumny and detraction. To hear it as he tells it is to get the insider's story on Hollywood, the White House and the literary pack he ran with. You don't mind the regular name dropping because there's always a nice bit to go with it — Beat hero Jack Kerouac's sex life, playwright Tennessee Williams' cruising the president, Charlton Heston's absurd naivete, keep us voyeurs interested. Palimpsest's sometimes wry humour shares a wisdom that describes — quite consciously — a particular epoch of US imperialism as it was refracted in the nation's culture and political system as monitored by an astute observer. Despite his enriched WASP roots, Vidal can distance himself from the milieu that nurtured him and, while he is incapable of breaking with it, attack it for its failure to care for a population of socially distant fellow citizens duped by it. Vidal, despite his ambivalent loyalties, is nothing if not rational about the age he lives in.