THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511210490
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
PALIMPSEST
A Memoir
GORE VIDAL
Random House. 435 pp. $27.50.
According to Webster's Ninth, a palimpsest is ``a writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased.''
As title for Gore Vidal's new book, it supplants the one he suggests in the first line as most apt for any memoir: ``A Tissue of Lies.'' In a memoir - it being only the remembered script of one's own life, unlike an autobiography - the writer can do away with tedious checking of facts and dates. And the author of Duluth, Myra Breckinridge and Kalki, to name only a few, duly treats us to some vivid, inventive scenes.
Despite the personal revelations, there is a curiously distant quality to this memoir, which spans 1929 to 1964. Vidal narrates from the present, writing from his villa in Italy, wondering between sections if he's gone astray from the topic, or if the weather and his mood will improve. It's this nonlinear, hop-scotching about, which should perhaps be annoying, that makes the book so true to the rhythms of real life.
Vidal admires himself - surely a necessity for those driven to unleash their nonfiction selves upon the reading world. Yet unlike many writers-turned-celebrities (and vice versa) who undress for our entertainment, his recounting lacks self-absorption or self-pity. Gore Vidal finds most other people more interesting, he says, than his own ``youthful self.''
The reader may disagree. The young man who inhabited the political and literary scene of these decades moved in a fascinating cavalcade: Anais Nin, Christopher Isherwood, Tennessee Williams, Andre Gide, Jack Kerouac - even a condensed list would overflow this review's alloted space. He'd already grown up amid a crowd of lofty though often dysfunctional Gores and Kennedys and Auchinclosses, which must partly account for his natural indifference to hero-worship.
He refuses to be touched or scarred by the excesses, greed and cruelty going on around him; rejects self-pity or sympathy for his own psychological ``needs.'' Sometimes we feel this cool self-sufficiency as heroic, sometimes as sad. But it also distances, and many will read these pages with interest and amusement, then walk away just as untouched.
Perhaps that is as Vidal had planned. More than once he admits ``. . . in my youthful ignorance, I wanted to meet every writer that I admired. I met several; as a result, I never again wanted to meet, much less know, a writer whose work I admired.'' He recounts with mild irony disastrous (or merely boring) encounters between himself and hoary icons such as E.M. Forster, whom he calls ``the Madame Defarge'' of the unpleasantly judgmental post-Bloomsbury set.
But soon enough we understand there is in fact an emotional focus in this life that Vidal declares to be free of envy and jealousy, love and intimacy. It's the recurring image of a schoolmate named Jimmy, killed in World War II. His relationship with the young man still possesses Vidal, for Jimmy was the apparent ``other half,'' the completion universally longed for but rarely found. Jimmy's recurrence turns Palimpsest into not a ghost story, as Vidal fears, but rather an old-fashioned tale of a perfect love lost. Perhaps Jimmy's death was the clear sealer on the Vidal-the-Observer's polished shell.
Finally, Palimpsest is the story of a rich life, and an ode to loss. Of youth, of love, of people and chances long gone, and not enough time left to mourn, or even recall them. Still, it's far from the ``downer'' so anxiously dreaded in the shallow waters of modern publishing. Rather, it casts a bittersweet backward glance at times. I suspect even Mr. Vidal would scarcely wish to change. MEMO: Lenore Hart, the author of ``Black River,'' lives on the Eastern
Shore. Her second novel is due out next year. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
In Palimpsest, Gore Vidal dwells on present concerns in his villa in
Italy as he looks back...
...at his own ``youthful self'' and its growth from 1929 to 1964.
by CNB