Palimpsest (4*)

Imagine the feeling of having been so central to your time that you can use your memoir to critique how others, including Anaïs Nin and Tennessee Williams, portrayed you in theirs. Or, to put it another way: was any 20th-century American as well-connected as Gore Vidal in literature, show business and politics?  And unapologetically homosexual to boot?

A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts, double checked. I’ve taken the memoir route on the ground that even an idling memory is apt to get right what matters most. I used to say, proudly, that I would never write a memoir, since “I am not my own subject.“ Now I’m not so sure. After all, one’s recollected life is just about all that’s left at the end of the day when the work is done and gone, property now of others.

Vidal published Palimpsest in 1995, when he was 70, a year after the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, "whose boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice were a great joy to me." I checked the timing because his Jackie dish is more than a little damning, at least for someone who has had her demure First Lady picture (autographed) hanging in my bathroom for nearly half a century.  The two shared a stepfather and while that relationship doesn't sound particularly significant, it gave him early admission to Camelot not long after he had lost a Congressional election in New York State, despite the endorsement of Eleanor Roosevelt, a less attractive but far more accomplished First Lady.

Did Jackie really become sexually intimate with RFK sometime after JFK bedded Lee Radziwill, her sister, while she slept in the next room?  Was RFK really the love of her life (she didn't marry Aristotle Onassis until after her brother-in-law was assassinated, too)?  Did Jackie really fuck William Holden?  Did the European jet set really find Ari more charming than she? You know how the gays love to gossip!

Much less shocking is Vidal's speculation that Jackie's mother was Jewish, and that the former newspaper photographer disliked Princess Grace (a year younger) because of her conservatism and JFK's reaction when the senator from Massachusetts--with his eye already on the presidency--saw her front-page nuptials in 1956: "I could have married her!"

With a life like Vidal's, he can't help dropping names but what makes Palimpsest particularly fascinating is his candor about his sexual orientation.  In today's hook-up parlance, he would be known as a "total top," who doesn't reciprocate with his partners, a type I alway have avoided.  

In those days, I liked to give the impression that I was a professional tennis player turned hustler.

Looks-wise, Vidal likens himself, without too much conceit, to a Greek god--Apollo--which helps explain how he managed to notch more than a thousand sexual encounters at a fairly young age, a benchmark he claims puts him in range of  JFK and Marlon Brando. Much to my surprise, it seems that gay men could get laid as easily in post-World-War-II New York City as they could in the 70s before AIDS, sometimes even in the same establishment before it burned down in 1977 (my fear of the place may have been a life saver and not just because of the fire that killed seven people).

I also discovered, that magical winter, the Everard baths, where military men often spent the night, unable to find any other cheap place to stay. This was sex at its rawest and most exciting, and a revelation to me. Newly invented penicillin had removed fears of venereal disease, and we were enjoying perhaps the freest sexuality that Americans would ever know. Most of the boys knew that they would soon be home for good, and married, and that this was a last chance to do what they were designed to do with each other.

Vidal clearly enjoys bragging about an especially noteworthy conquest whom he meets not at another venue quite popular among gay men of his generation, although not one I would have expected the author of On The Road to frequent.

I still see Jack vividly. We are standing at the back of the opera box, which is so crowded that our faces are only a few inches apart. I feel the heat from his body. The eyes are bright and clear and blue; the body muscular, not yet bloated; a drop of water slides alongside his left ear and down his pale cheek, not sweat, but water that he must’ve just used to comb his thick black Indian-like hair. We were also coming on to each other like two pieces of trade – yes, I was attracted.

Afterward, the "two pieces of trade" check into the Chelsea Hotel, under their own names where Vidal tells the bemused clerk that their night together will make literary history.  But when Vidal reminisces about what went down--a drunken Kerouac, to be specific--it seems more sad than anything else.  

As does his reconstructed ode to Jimmie Trimble, a consummated crush a year ahead of him at St. Albans, who found a girl he wanted to marry before taking a bullet at Iwo Jima.  He amusingly (and accurately) describes their encounter as kid stuff before inflating it to something else entirely.

If not seated together in class, Jimmie and I would signal each other when a hard-on had arrived unbidden. When the other boys figured out what we were doing, they began signaling, too.  At twelve, erections come and go, like T. S. Eliot’s ladies, talking, most appropriately, of Michelangelo.

Jimmie Trimble, 17 (1942)

His love for Trimble haunts the memoir and almost certainly served as the basis for The City and the Pillar, his third novel, published when the wunderkind was just 22. Trimble's memory was relatively fresh then and yet to be colored by decades of projection and nostalgia.  The novel originally ended with the gay protagonist, clearly modeled on Vidal, murdering his now married crush years later, after he tries to renew their relationship and is rejected. In the revised edition, one I read shortly after graduating from college, the gay protagonist doesn't kill his crush but rapes him instead.  Though the novel may have been groundbreaking in its depiction of a shameless homosexual, it certainly doesn't model behavior worth emulating.

Tellingly, Vidal mentions Howard Austen, whom he "met" at the Everard, only in passing even though he lived with the man platonically for more than 50 years, including a summer when they happily shared a Malibu beach house with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, their long-time friends. Vidal concludes the book with the news that reveals he and Austen will be buried together in Rock Creek Cemetery, "midway between Jimmie Trimble and Henry Adams--midway between heart and mind to put it grandly."  If there's a gay afterlife, Austen, né Auster (he made the change at Vidal's suggestion to sound less Jewish, thereby reducing workplace discrimination in the advertising world) has every right to ask "What was I, Gore, chopped liver?" 

This begs for some amateur psychoanalyzing.  Here goes:  the only person besides Trimble who arouses feelings of similar passion for Vidal is his mother, whom he despises with good reason if his characterization of her as a narcissistic alcoholic is accurate.  Having never been loved by the woman the majority of people would say loved and nurtured them the most in life would stunt a person emotionally, to say very the least.

Still Vidal's lack of maternal affection likely enhanced his determination to succeed professionally and dominate sexually. Palimpsest is a glorious subconscious testament to that, and Vidal's incisive analyses of politics in The Best Man and his acclaimed historical novels including 1876, my favorite, will secure his place in American literary history.

On a more personal note, it's heartening to know that Vidal, like me at a similar age, had begun developing a "never again" list.  

. . . I am not social; I also like giving up things, letting go. The British Embassy in Rome has just rung. Will I come to dinner for Princess Margaret in September, two months away? I say no. I don’t want, ever again, to sit at a formal table with a strange lady on either side of me and make conversation.

My own list is a little more prosaic.  It includes the Pines, colonoscopies and house painting,