Palimpsest: A Memoir

A thoroughly nasty, but very enjoyable, memoir, in which Gore Vidal shamelessly and wittily takes the opportunity to settle scores with numerous well-known people who aren't around any more to answer back, whilst at the same time doing his best to impress us with how many of the great and famous he has rubbed shoulders with at one time or another. I frequently felt uncomfortable about laughing out loud at this book, but it was hard not to.

Lots of vitriol is directed at his mother; at the Kennedys (he shared a stepfather with Jackie); at the US literary establishment, which he accuses of blacklisting him after the publication of The city and the pillar with its explicit same-sex love story; at Truman Capote (accused of being short); at show more President Truman's "national security state" (fair enough); at European cinema for its deluded notion that directors are more important than writers; at Charlton Heston; at Hillary Clinton (insufficiently impressed at meeting him); at the English royal family (dim); and at just about everyone else who appears in the book, with the minor exceptions of Tennessee Williams, who is only mildly teased, and Vidal's grandfather Senator T P Gore, who can do no wrong. show less

Let’s talk about name-dropping. It’s often the mark of the social climber, those who seek to inflate their importance by appearing on the margins of the lives of people more interesting than they. It’s never in good taste, is it? Then there is the closely related phenomenon, gossip. Tacky, right?
Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest, abounds in both, yet this reader never felt that Vidal ever lacked a sense of his right to be exactly where he was, even the White House. While his own life didn’t lack achievement—and he makes sure to include mention of his best-selling books and theater and film triumphs—these things seem to interest him less than the people he’s been able to observe at close range, beginning with his senator show more grandfather and his step-sister Jackie (“whose boyish beauty and life-enhancing malice were a great joy to me”), but including Eleanor Roosevelt, Marlon Brando, the Kennedys, the Windsors, Princess Margaret (“far too bright for her station in life”), Tennessee Williams, good friends Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and rivals like Norman Mailer. Of course, Vidal might question the term rivals. He would concede that Mailer and others saw him as a rival but denies being envious of anyone else’s success. Well, that may be so; nonetheless, Vidal does use the book to settle some scores, particularly with Truman Capote, whom he pays the left-handed compliment of possessing an inventive imagination, only to lament that he never used it in his attempts to write fiction.
Readers of Vidal’s essays (he was one of the best twentieth-century practitioners of that form) will also recognize some of his recurrent themes, such as his rejection of the auteur school of film criticism. Great films from the Hollywood studios, with few exceptions, owed more to producer and screenwriter than to the director, he asserts. Not that the creation of great movies was the goal. One of Vidal’s bon mots characterized film-making as doing well what shouldn’t be done at all.
Another of Vidal’s recurrent themes is his depiction of the U. S. as the National Security State. He recounts how slowly he came to this realization, despite living in Guatemala when the CIA engineered a coup at the behest of the United Fruit Company.
Despite the name-dropping and the gossip, this book lacks a third feature of many memoirs: there is little kiss and tell. Instead, Vidal is more at pains to set the record straight on those he didn’t sleep with, despite reports to the contrary, beginning with Anaïs Nin. And even if he wanted to name those he slept with, he wouldn’t be able to in most cases: his preferred form of sexual activity was the anonymous one-night stand. The exception haunts the entire story, the schoolmate who died on Iwo Jima and remained the love of Vidal’s life.
To the Elizabethans, it was the play. In the enlightenment, the essay. In the nineteenth century, it was the novel. Vidal was a master of all of these archaic forms. In our day, it is the memoir. With Palimpsest, Vidal produced a masterpiece of this genre as well. Perhaps its quality is due in part to paradox abounding. Vidal avers, “I am not social,” yet his company seems to have been sought out by people who had many others to choose from. He protests the past doesn’t interest him yet writes of it in a way that interests us. One more thing that sets this apart from many other memoirs and is one of the many ways the title, Palimpsest, is well-chosen: Vida repeatedly lets the present intrude. He records where he is as he writes, with details of the weather, his blood pressure, and the research process of finding people he last saw fifty years previously. All of this is told with the elegance and wit one expects from Gore Vidal. An excellent read. show less

I thought I had read Vidal's memoir some years ago but was not sure; as I began reading, I knew I had not read it. Vidal is witty, and often thought-provoking; his gossip is both vicious and delicious, but the real reason to read this memoir is not what he has to say about literary figures or politicians he as known but instead his reflections on a host of subjects: anonymity and fame, love and sex, literature versus popular culture, and more. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this first volume of memoirs.

Vidal has often been a bit too theatrical in his self-presentation--he can't help it seems than to push things a little too far (I'm thinking his later political writings, but you might also think of his tiff with Bill Buckley), and this makes many people take him less seriously than he really deserves to be treated.

This is the first part of his memoirs and it is really good (far better than the second half). Good writing on being "gay" (Vidal thinks everyone's on a sliding scale sexually, so he doesn't appreciate absolutist sexual identities) and being privileged (but not rich) in the WWII and postwar era.

Lots of interesting people pass through, but Vidal's not just namedropping.

And of course lots of interesting (and disputable) show more observations about Washington and American politics.

One of the best books of its kind that I've ever read. show less

I did not want to like this book. It holds all the worst of a memoir – in particular that name-dropping approach that can get so tedious and the desire to go into occasionally excruciating detail over little things. But it is impossible to not like this book. In spite of sometimes lapsing into the errors that can befall any memoir, it has one redeeming quality – it is written about Gore Vidal.

Vidal brings his skills to bear telling the almost true story of his life. Up front he admits that any story based on memory will not be the absolute truth. Hence the name of the book (Palimpsest – meaning parchment prepared for writing on and wiping off again.) This affectation gets overused and does not frame the book as well as the author show more may have liked. In particular, his use of the word to indicate where he may have rewritten passages (to either get them right or to ignore them). And the author constantly derides others for not being accurate in their memories while he openly (again, the name of the book) admits his memory cannot always be correct.

But the book rises above these minor issues. Actually, the author rises above these issues. Because Vidal keeps us reading, even as we feel it may be a guilty pleasure. And just about the time I would start to think things were slowing down, he would shamelessly throw out another name (Kennedy, anyone? Anais Nin? Eleanor Roosevelt? Capote?) and drag me back in. At the end of it all – an engrossing telling of Vidal’s life the way Vidal remembers it. show less

In his memoir, Vidal treats the reader as an intelligent confidant and writes in an arrogant, affectionate, and abrasive manner. From his early years to his time in Hollywood, Vidal's life is covered in the memoir. It includes his interactions with the Kennedys, his friendships with artists, and his involvement in American film.

His voice can be heard so clearly in his writing. I know I have read this book at least once before but I am surprised by how familiar his life's details are to me. I think I would say that this is one of the, now dead, people of history that I would have liked to meet. As a reader of Bloomsbury and the intersecting English circles of writers, painters, bright young things and aristocrats, it is exciting to read this book as Gore name drops his way through all of these people whose writings I have read, whose biographies I have read. As a result of reading this book again, I bought two new biographies of people he mentions that had connection to people I have already read about. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and, despite it being a show more hardcover, found myself underlining passages. show less