Culture > Reviews

Gore Vidal — Palimpsest: A Memoir
A Lavender Salon book review
by John Olski
posted 11/25/03

Palimpsest (Random House: 1995) describes Gore Vidal's approach to memoir: a parchment erased and reused as needed.  Vidal was never a diarist, so Palimpsest is an accumulation of memories from the author's childhood through the Kennedy presidency.  Born into relative privilege as the grandson of U.S. Senator Thomas P. Gore, the author understandably does more writing than erasing.  Vidal was related to Jackie Kennedy by marriage and knew JFK personally.  His career took him into the power circles of Hollywood and a cultural set that included the likes of Tennessee Williams and Anais Nin.

Despite Vidal's proximity to power, he remained a rather solitary figure.  His mother and father divorced, providing the author with a family of half-siblings and a more stable home life with his maternal grandparents.  The young Vidal was sent to boarding school and served in the military during World War II.  A lover of men, he faced some critical ostracism for writing The City and the Pillar, an early novel with a homosexual theme.  Yet as the author came of age before the Stonewall riots, he never identified with a gay civil rights movement.  Vidal penned some popular novels under the pseudonym Edgar Box and worked as a screenwriter, notably receiving no credit for his work on Ben Hur.  The man ran for U.S. Congress in 1960 as a Democrat in a Republican New York district, losing the election but out-polling JFK in the district by some forty thousand votes.  Vidal spent much of his later life in a villa in Italy, living platonically with another man.

Vidal's one great love was Jimmie Trimble, a blond-haired youth he last saw at age 17 in 1942.  The boys met at St. Albans boarding school and had a sexual relationship involving bodily contact, though not mutual masturbation.  Vidal recounts his love in terms of Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes' story of three original sexes split apart and left to seek their other halves in life: male-male, male-female, female-female.  The author's other half entered the Army in 1943 and died on Iwo Jima in early 1945.  Jimmie Trimble had a girlfriend, but a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass he carried suggested to Vidal that Trimble had met a special man in the Army.  In search of details, Vidal met with Trimble's mother years later and surprisingly learned that Jimmie was sent to boarding school to get away from a step-father who liked the boy "altogether too much."

As one Lavender Salon member suggested, Palimpsest is "an interesting book, but not a great book."  Vidal is a man of ideas, and his memoir covers enough cultural ground to spark conversation for several Salon meetings.  But as with the author's historical novels, such as Lincoln and Burr, dramatic impetus is moderate at best.  One reads Vidal for information and viewpoint, not for page-turning excitement.  As the title Palimpsest suggests, the author takes a pencil stroll through memory, making connections but not attempting to define themes of his life or times.

 Palimpsest often seems like a vehicle for reckoning with historical figures, giving Vidal the last word on deceased acquaintances like Truman Capote or Robert Kennedy.  If that makes Vidal seem arrogant, one can ask "When was Vidal not arrogant?"  In the end, culture is a Palimpsest to which Gore Vidal confidently adds some scribbles of his own.