‘Palimpsest’: Memoirs of an Intellectual Gadfly

A review of ‘Palimpsest’, by Gore Vidal; Random House, 1995.

In the trailer for the Gore Vidal biopic United States of Amnesia, a string of one-word descriptions of the man— ‘socialist’, ‘bisexual’, etc.— flash upon the screen. Whether or not all of these adjectives were accurate, we can be fairly sure Vidal would not have approved of being reduced to a sequence of them. He was, after all, the man who said that ‘to be categorised is, simply, to be enslaved.’

But he did, like Whitman, ‘contain multitudes’, or perhaps binaries. He was deeply interested in duality, as against multiplicity, and in Palimpsest, his memoir, he describes his relationship with Jimmy Trimble (the J.T. at the start of The City and the Pillar) as one between two likenesses. This youthful romance, cut short by Jimmy’s death at Iwo Jima, shaped Gore’s life to a great degree. If you wondered why he chose to be buried at Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, along with Supreme Court Justices and other politicians, you can find an answer not far from his grave, where a headstone reads: ‘James Trimble III. 1925–1945.’

This youthful romance, cut short by Jimmy’s death at Iwo Jima, shaped Gore’s life.

A palimpsest (Gore tell us) is like an Etch-a-Sketch: a piece of material on which writing may be superimposed and rubbed out. This is his framing metaphor. He admits he misunderstood and mispronounced the word for years before sitting down to write his book, which he reminds us from the start is a remembered account, not a history. Amusingly, however, much of it deals with the inaccurate recollections of others, rather than Gore, who nevertheless and predictably gets his excuses in early.

Palimpsest is ‘set’ at Gore’s house in Ravello in Italy; the narrative returns here from time to time. Gore likes to look around the room, let his eye fall on a photo or a knick-knack, and then explore the circumstances which led to its taking or acquisition. Palimpsest is bitchy and fun, as you might expect from the author, but reads like a wandering mind which gets quite far before it is snapped back to the present and Ravello. Ravello, by the way, was where Gore spent three months of the year. It is south of Naples, on the Amalfi coast, far south of Rome, where Gore and Howard Austen, his partner, would pick up ‘trade’. For Vidal, the coalescence of love and sex ended with Jimmy’s death, freeing him to satisfy his lust without risking an violent raid of emotion on his life. The secret to the longevity of his bond with Howard, Gore says, is that they never had sex.

There is a loose chronology to Palimpsest. The narrative circles, chapter by chapter, around a place or person or time in his life. He seems to have known or met (and in some cases, upset) almost everyone of note from his time. He is an awful name-dropper. He was kicked out of Camelot, the J.F.K. White House, for feuding with Bobby. He rowed with William F. Buckley at the Democratic Convention in ’68. He had a spat with his on-again, off-again friend Norman Mailer, who nutted him backstage at the The Dick Cavett Show. (‘Once again,’ said Gore of the incident, ‘words fail Norman Mailer.’) Jack Kerouac blew him in a hotel room. He doesn’t have a spat or tryst with everyone he meets (though his conquests, to use a vulgar term, are in the thousands). Though in some ways it was this combination of aggression and subversion, firmed up by his patrician manner and elegant prose, that made and makes him an engaging subject.

Jack Kerouac blew him in a hotel room.

You have probably guessed already that what the book lacks is almost any insight into Gore’s inner life. He is more keen on sharing his various and invariably funny experiences with royalty, politicians, actors, writers, musicians and common-and-garden-variety narcissists like his once-wife Anaïs Nin, who kept a ‘Lie Box’ to keep track of her many untruths. Gore did not think highly of Freud; but the likeness between Nin and Gore’s alcoholic, self-involved mother, Nina — the closest thing the book has to a villain — is difficult not to note. And it is in Gore’s remarks about Nina, which the passage of time has not stripped of bitterness, that we get the deepest insight into his psychology.

Gore promised throughout his career never to write a memoir. But it is a good thing he did. Palimpsest is fun, and that is hardly surprising because Gore, at least from a distance, was fun. Naturally there will be some who say that Palimpsest is not a true memoir; but memoirs are, almost by definition, imperfect and semi-fictional. They are not histories, as Gore himself notes, and nor are they autobiographies. You are encouraged to take the book with a pinch, or perhaps a big dollop, of salt. At any rate, call it what you like. It is an entertaining book.