Memoir:American writer Gore Vidal looks back at the second part of his life
The problem for the memoirist is what to do with, or about, the past. For of course a memoir is not really concerned with the past, but the present. The past, though it shine in the mind far more vividly than the humdrum here and now, is only the route by which the writer came to be who and where he is, whether he be Chateaubriand or Philip Larkin's "shit in the shuttered chateau", a youthful prodigy or oldster hunched infirm at his desk, attempting, for the first or last time, to solve the enormous mystery of being here, of having been here.
This is Gore Vidal's second crack at the conundrum. His first, Palimpsest, was an altogether more substantial volume, yet although Point to Point Navigation shows the effects of the wear and tear of the years - Vidal is now 81 - it is in its way a subtler and deeper work than its predecessor. The title is derived from the author's time on an American army freight-supply ship based in the Aleutian Islands during the second World War. The weather up there was often so bad, he says in an author's note, that the compass could not be used in charting a course, and so the sailors had to rely, hazardously, on map and memory. As he was writing this memoir of the years 1964 to 2006, since Palimpsest, he tells us, "I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather".
Yet the weather in Point to Point has many sunny intervals, as we would expect from this most polished and waspishly witty observer, who has been at his station now for eight decades on the poop deck of the Ship of Fools. Gore Vidal has had a good life. He was born into the American aristocracy and grew up handsome, independent-minded and lavishly gifted. He is a writer with a political brain, and a would-be politician steeped in the bitter lessons of history. In his own lifetime he saw much history in the making. Born at the US Military Academy at West Point in 1925 - "contrary to legend, I was born of mortal woman" - he grew up in Washington, within a beltway within the Beltway, for his mother's people, the Gores - Al of that ilk is a cousin - had been for generations at the heart of American political life.
Perhaps the strongest influence on him was that of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Gore, who had been blind from the age of 10 and had put himself through law school by memorising texts that were read to him by a cousin, and who, as his grandson puts it, "having helped invent the state of Oklahoma . . . became their famous senator". The old man was a wit and a scholar, and those genes ran straight through to the writer who was named after him.
VIDAL'S FAMILY TREE is florid even by the standards of Wasp America, with many a plumed and polished bird perched among its boughs. Parting the leaves we glimpse a complex tracery. Musing on the reasons for his impressive but failed bid for public office in 1960 - he ran for Congress, encouraged by his friend Eleanor Roosevelt among others - Vidal informs us that
part of the why of 1960 was Jack Kennedy who had married Jackie whose mother had taken the place of my mother as Mrs Hugh Dudley Auchincloss. After my mother and I had moved out of Auchincloss's Virginia house Jackie's mother and sister moved in while my half brother and half sister became Jackie's stepbrother and stepsisters . . . Oh, what a tangled web is woven when divorcées conceive.
Vidal is ambiguous in his attitude to JFK, whom he considered both a shallow opportunist and a great and wily politician; he was also, as Vidal has assured us, wonderfully funny, and the author of Myra Breckinridge will forgive a lot for a good joke. Robert Kennedy, on the other hand, he found humourless, bigoted and dangerous, and the two men thoroughly loathed each other. His fight with RFK led to a break with Jackie, and Vidal limns a sad little vignette of a chance encounter in the lift of the London Ritz when he deliberately turned his back on her: "the lift door opened and she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, 'Bye-bye' and vanished into Piccadilly". Yet he is kind to her memory, and quotes with approval her stoical answer to a friend who asked her what she considered her greatest achievement: "That after all I had gone through I did not go mad".
Vidal admires the stoics, and from the start he modelled himself, consciously or otherwise, on great figures of the classical world such as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius and, of course, the Emperor Julian "the Apostate", who tried to turn back the tide of Christianity, and on whose life and noble failures Vidal based a novel which some critics consider his first truly substantial work.
His first novel, Williwaw, which he published when he was 19, used as material his wartime experiences, and brought him a measure of fame. His second, In a Yellow Wood, was slated, and his third, The City and the Pillar, dealing with a young man's coming to terms with his homosexuality, became a cause célèbre, shocking postwar middle America and incurring the displeasure of the New York Times, the perennial maiden aunt of American journalism, which blacklisted him and silently refused to review his next half dozen novels. Discouraged, and in need of the wherewithal to maintain himself in the style which his birth and upbringing had if not accustomed him to then at least led him to expect - showing an interviewer once over the grand garden of his house at Ravello on the Amalfi coast he remarked with a straight face, "As you see, my needs are modest" - he became a playwright and a writer for the movies and television. His best-known script was for Ben Hur, a thing perhaps not to be boasted of, though he does.
The points by which he navigates his book are mainly tombstones. It may certainly be said of him that he had such friends, including among many others Federico Fellini, Johnny Carson, Rudolf Nureyev, Greta Garbo, Amelia Earhart - who at one time wanted to marry Vidal's father, Gene, the founder of, along with other things, TWA - Paul Bowles, Princess Margaret, Tennessee Williams, known as the Glorious Bird, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and the Crown Princess Chumbhot of Thailand. Only two out of this list are still living.
Dead too is Vidal's greatest friend, Howard Auster, his "partner" - the quotation marks are Vidal's - of 53 years, whose subtle memorial the book is. Vidal once expressed fond amazement at the fact that he had lived for the larger part of his life with a man who looked like Golda Meir. Their partnership, he assures us, was a white one. Vidal is firmly of the opinion that one should never mix love and sex, or even friendship and sex: he tells of Tennessee Williams and himself prowling the streets of New York one summer night in a vain search for trade, at the end of which Tennessee suggested that the two of them might . . . to which, according to Williams's account, Vidal witheringly replied, "Don't be macabre".
VIDAL'S FIRST LOVE, Jimmy Trimble, was killed at the age of 18 in the battle of Iwo Jima - see Palimpsest for a measured yet heartfelt celebration of this lost idyll - and after that something seems to have hardened to permafrost in Vidal's heart. Yet it is obvious that his attachment to Howard Auster was deeply felt and, yes, loving. The description Vidal gives in Point to Point of Auster's death is the pivot of the book, and raises what might have been a mere memoir into the realm of the tragic. Not that there is anything Wagnerian in this particular Liebestod. Here as elsewhere Vidal is ever the writer, detached, beady-eyed, coolly passionate, determinedly accurate. His description of the moment of his beloved's death is a marvel of judgment and control.
He had been sitting straight up when I came in the room but now, very slightly he slumped to the left in his chair . . . "Can you hear me?" I asked him. "I know you can see me." Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, "So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about." In my general state of confusion I was oddly comforted that in death he was in perfect easy character . . .
Montaigne himself could not have been more economical, more restrained or more affecting.
Christine Falls, by Benjamin Black, the first in a series of crime novels by John Banville under a pen name, was published last year by Picador
Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir By Gore Vidal Little, Brown, 277pp. £17.99