Too much Gore

Vidal's second memoir merely retells the stories we already know from his enormous -- and potentially irrelevant -- body of work.

By Allen Barra

Read more: Books, Gore Vidal, Memoirs, Norman Mailer, Allen Barra, John F. Kennedy, Reviews, Book reviews

Jan. 3, 2007 | In the preface to his 1988 essay collection, "At Home," Gore Vidal wrote: "I shall never write formal memoir (I have never been my own subject, a sign of truly sickening narcissism). In any case, as I write of politics, literature, aviation and my father, I do, occasionally, strike a personal note, in order to give some of the geography, if nothing else, of my own life."

Since he was the one who brought up "sickening narcissism," let's go ahead and say it: The personal note in Vidal's work, whether he was ostensibly writing about politics, literature, aviation or anything else, was never "occasional." The "geography" of his own life has been virtually his only subject, which means that his new memoir, "Point to Point Navigation," a follow-up to "Palimpsest" (1996), the first memoir he promised not to write, is, by definition, unnecessary.

For decades now, in print interviews, essays and TV guest appearances, Vidal has gone on and on about -- take a deep breath -- his father, Eugene, one of the country's great aviation pioneers; his apathetic relationship with his mother; his friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt; his intimacy with Jacqueline Kennedy (some kind of connection through marriage that I never could get straight) and his subsequent falling out with Bobby Kennedy; his friendships with Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Newman; his on-again, off-again relationships with Norman Mailer and Truman Capote; his dogged insistence that there is no such thing as a homosexual or heterosexual person, but merely "heterosexualists" and "homosexualists" (I still don't understand the difference between a heterosexual and a heterosexualist, but let that pass); the death of the novel; the collapse of the American empire ... and always, always in relation to himself. A self-created mythos bordering on kitschy myth-mongering has always been the real subject of anything Vidal has written or talked about.

So many conversations with famous friends over the years that no one else was there to witness, so many witty remarks by Vidal recalled only by him, so many famous names dropped. Dipping into the essay collections at random we find: "The last time I saw W.H. Auden ..." and "I once asked Andre Gide several searching questions ..." and "The last time I saw Dorothy Parker ..." and "Carlos Fuentes told me ..." If you groove on this kind of highfalutin gossip, "Point to Point Navigation" is your kind of book. To wit: "In London, [V.S.] Pritchett and I belonged to the same club ..." and "I suspect that Paul [Bowles] found unfathomable my interest in how the American experiment was turning out ..." and "Federico -- pardon me, Fred to those few of us who knew him well -- Fellini," calling him to say "We must meet immediately." He wants the advice of Gore -- damn, how could I have forgotten, I meant Gorino -- on how to deal with Paramount Studios. "You know all this?" he asks Gorino rhetorically, "Ah, of course, they tell you, don't they?" Of course, they do. Everybody tells Vidal everything; like Nick Carraway in "Gatsby," he is privy to the secrets of wild, unknown men all over the world. You may not have known that he knew Auden or have cared what club Vidal or Pritchett belonged to, but legends aren't built by sitting around and waiting for other people to tell these kind of stories about you, especially when none of them ever has.

"There's no such thing," he tells us for the umpteenth time, "as a famous novelist now ... I use the adjective in the strict sense." By "strict sense," he must mean novelists who were famous for just writing novels, like in the old days when William Faulkner was so famous that all his books were out of print in the U.S. when he won the Nobel Prize. There are, after all, still novelists who pursue fame and achieve best-dom as talk show guests while pretending to loathe star-making machinery. From his many appearances on the Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett shows to his guest shots on "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," and even his legendary live blowout with William F. Buckley during the 1968 Democratic Convention, no writer has made more astute use of television. By the 1980s, Vidal's name had become so associated with TV that in Martin Scorsese's "The King of Comedy," he was the featured guest on "The Jerry Langford Show" the night Robert De Niro's Rupert Pupkin takes it over.

Or at least, no "serious" writer has made such astute use of television, which made Vidal famous (if not a famous novelist). It's doubtful that Vidal will remain so; a TV star's name, like an actor's before the age of film, is writ on water. The more interesting question is whether Vidal will continue to be regarded as a serious writer as his image fades. As the appearance of memoirs always calls a writer's career into perspective, let's look at the only part of Vidal's career that will continue to matter.

Vidal's reputation as a novelist has already begun to fade; indeed, regarding some of his notorious early works, such as "Williwaw" (1946) and "The City and the Pillar" (1948), it has already all but disappeared. Would anyone even remember his early works if Vidal hadn't kept telling us, again and again, in essays, on talk shows and now again in his memoirs, that the New York Times blackballed reviews of his books for daring to use a homosexual theme in "The City and the Pillar"? Vidal seems to believe he can argue them into the critical acceptance he feels they should have received more than half a century ago. But the Times, like most of Vidal's critics, was long ago whipped into submission -- note the recent gushing reviews of "Point to Point Navigation" by both Christopher Hitchens and Janet Maslin -- and still no one is rushing to read them. Isn't it time to get over it and let his early books disappear into deserved obscurity?

Most of Vidal's later fiction can be roughly divided into two categories. The fantasy-satires are best represented by "Myra Breckinridge" (1968), whose transsexual-in-Hollywood theme had jaws dropping in the late 1960s, but which is little read today. The second is his historical novels, the best of which are "Julian" (1964), about the last pagan emperor of Rome; "Creation" (1980), about a Persian ambassador who travels the ancient world from Greece to China; and "Lincoln" (1984). James Wolcott wrote off the lot of them as "club-footed," but at least they have a sense of scope and narrative, and don't have the irritating presence, as many of his other novels do, of Vidal whispering in our ear telling us which characters and ideas he wants us to embrace or reject. Even at their best, though, Vidal's historical novels seem populated by signifiers, not living, breathing people as in the fiction of E.L. Doctorow or Kevin Baker.

What of Vidal the playwright and screenwriter? Again, one wonders if he would have any reputation at all in theater and film if he hadn't so relentlessly promoted it over the years. "Palimpsest" spent a great deal of space telling us how Jerry Lewis ruined the film version of "Visit to a Small Planet," a play that would surely have been forgotten if not for the Lewis fiasco. He tells us in "Palimpsest" that the film adaptation of his political drama, "The Best Man," went "from commercial failure to 'classic' without intervening success." Exactly when and where, outside of Gore Vidal's memoirs, one wants to ask, did "The Best Man," either as play or film, metamorphose into "classic"? And where is the evidence for the inside knowledge of the film industry that Vidal has made so much of over the years? What is there in his uncredited work on "Ben-Hur" or "Suddenly Last Summer," the pumped-up feature film of Tennessee Williams' short play, that reflects an intimacy with the craft of film writing?

Next page: Vidal -- a fine critic and a crackpot pundit