As Vidal jump-cuts back and forth over the first 39 of his 70 years, the result on one level is a highbrow “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” That’s fine–so are Byron’s journals and letters. Vidal is a kind of contemporary Byron: patrician, major writer, glamourboy, flouter of norms (an open “same-sexual,” as he prefers to call it), role-player in public events.
What he’s really wanted, as this memoir reiterates, is to be president. JFK is a key figure in Vidal’s consciousness, a kind of alter ego and competitor, especially in sexual matters. “Neither [of us] was much interested in giving pleasure to his partner.
Each wanted nothing more than orgasm with as many attractive partners as possible . . . Unlike Jack, I had once been in love . . . Jack Kennedy, by his own admission, never came close.” Describing his World War II service on a supply ship, Vidal says, “At least, unlike Jack Kennedy, I didn’t get run over by a Japanese destroyer.” He tells with relish about his own surprisingly strong 1960 campaign for Congress, quoting JFK as saying, “The most humiliating experience of the election was Gore running 20,000 ahead of me in upstate New York.”
The implication of this self-invoked competition is that Vidal could have made the real Camelot, linking the worlds of art and politics. “Palimpsest” oscillates between those worlds. On the political side, there are the Kennedys, including Bobby, whose hatred of Vidal (who had ignored JFK during that 1960 congressional campaign) is matched only by his hatred of Jimmy Hoffa. One of Vidal’s pet aversions is Henry Kissinger, who is described looking at the Hell section of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in Rome. “Look, he’s apartment hunting,” says Vidal. On the art side there are the usual suspects: Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Paul Bowles, all neatly evoked, some stroked, others choked by Vidal.
The keys to Vidal’s story are his family and that one love he had that JFK didn’t. His father, Gene, was a pioneer air corpspilot who became FDR’s director of air commerce. His mother, Nina, was a beauty who became alcoholic, attempted suicide and was envious of Gore, to whom she was “a resourceful enemy.” The most compelling family figure is Vidal’s maternal grandfather, T P. Gore, blinded in youth, who became the first senator from the new state of Oklahoma. But the key emotional event in his life was his affair with a classmate at St. Albans school for boys in Washington, D.C., Jimmie Trimble. In Jimmie, Vidal found, for the first and only time, his “other half.” The sexual details (“His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great”) become a spiritual epiphany. “There was no guilt, no sense of taboo . . . I not only never again encountered the other half, but by the time I was 25, I had given up all pursuit, settling for a thousand brief anonymous adhesions.” After each adhesion, Vidal came home to Howard Austen, his companion now for 44 years. How have they lasted so long? “No sex.”
Trimble joined the Marines and died at 19 on Iwo Jima. Vidal fietionalized the relationship in his 1948 novel, “The City and the Pillar,” a soberly written book that nonetheless was shocking in its time (The New York Times refused to accept ads for it). Vidal started to write for movies, television and the stage. He became a master (the master) of the essay, developed two kinds of novel, the historical (“Burr”), and the satirical (“Myra Breckin-ridge”). But if there has always seemed to be a missing dimension in the novels, the answer may be in “Palimpsest.” The artist was never able to complete himself with his political side. The man was never able to complete himself with his emotional side. Behind its vivacity, “Palimpsest” is a stoic confession of a brilliant but unfulfilled spirit.
