Even when Peter Cook was alive, Gore Vidal was the person I most enjoyed seeing interviewed on television. Not since Evelyn Waugh’s Face to Face with John Freeman has anybody swatted interrogators or hostile panellists more effortlessly, more lethally. Alan Bennett gives a classic example in Writing Home, describing a radio programme of 1984:

Gore Vidal is being interviewed on Start the Week along with Richard [Watership Down] Adams. Adams is asked what he thought of Vidal’s new novel about Lincoln. ‘I thought it was meretricious.’ ‘Really?’ says Gore. ‘Well, meretricious and a happy new year.’ That’s the way to do it.

It sure is. Vidal, who has shaken hands with Gide, who shook hands with Wilde, is one of the few people alive who can deploy a Wildean wit.

One of the best phrases he ever minted was ‘the objective narcissist’, meaning, someone who enjoys looking at himself but is as interested in the flaws as in the beauties. The big question was, would his vanity allow him to achieve that in his autobiography—or memoir, as he prefers to call it? We had seen that vanity grotesquely on parade in his introduction to a reissue of his 1983 novel Duluth, whose heroine, Darlene Ecks, is a woman cop addicted to strip-searching male Mexican wetbacks (‘Gimme a piece of okra and a pair of prunes!’). Recording the remark of a British journalist that ‘the Spanish translation of Duluth is the most popular book in the women’s penitentiary of Lima, Peru’, Vidal adds:

That is truly significant. For those who prefer to go upmarket, let us cut now to the Royal Lodge at Windsor late one night. The Sister of the Sovereign reads Duluth aloud to a small group. Then, laughter at last under control, she turns to the author and says, ‘What is there in me so base that loves this book?’

Those ironic capital letters don’t distract us from noticing that Vidal is delivering a double whammy, a big name-drop and a mighty pat on the back for clever old Gore. Magnificent Mr Toad!

There’s plenty more about HRH in the memoir, most of it entertaining (Gore is rarely a bore), and the expatriate author feels we will want to know that ‘the British Embassy in Rome has just rung. Will I come to dinner for Princess Margaret in September, two months away? I say no.’ But in general he does manage to keep his vanity from becoming, say, Rowsian. He really is an objective narcissist, often denying himself the benefit of the doubt—though he doesn’t go so far in self-revilement as that other prince of camp, Kenneth Williams, did in his 1985 autobiography, Just Williams, of which George Melly wrote: ‘Someone who disliked him intensely couldn’t have done a better hatchet job.’

Winston Churchill said Clement Attlee was a modest man—with much to be modest about. In fairness to Vidal, he is a vain man with a lot to be vain about, starting with his classic looks in youth which occupy the whole of the front cover. (The title is on a see-through dust-jacket, so that this Praxitelean image shall not be sullied by lettering.)

As an autobiographer, Gore Vidal has many assets, besides a literary style as classic as his youthful countenance: an unhappy childhood, with a fiend of a mother, if you believe (as I do) his portrait of her; early acquaintance with the great, such as John F. Kennedy and Jackie, with whom Vidal shared a stepfather; an ‘in’ to politics (Grandpa Gore was a senator; we don’t hear so much of the Vidals); a variegated sex-life; early literary fame; a determined and successful chase after the famous, ended only by a disgruntling visit to E.M. Forster; friendship with Tennessee Williams and Christopher Isherwood, both good copy; and fulfilment of his promise in a series of political novels, the 20th century’s answer to Trollope.

The more outrageous novels, including Myra Breckenridge and Duluth, require a grope back to the 18th century for a parallel, in Smollett’s The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, (a very Vidalesque name), of which Hazlitt thought, ‘The subject and characters … are, in general, exceedingly disgusting…’ while Walter Scott rejected the Count’s character as a ‘disgusting pollution of the imagination’. By coincidence, Palimpsest finds Vidal writing about Hazlitt in his, Vidal’s, Italian exile, and finding him tedious. I enjoy the way Vidal makes us free of the Ravello setting where he is writing the memoir. ‘I have always been curious to know where writers are physically situated when they write their memoirs,’ he explains, not forgetting to tell us that on one side of the fireplace is ‘a photograph of me with the president who did us most harm, Harry S. Truman’, and that another photograph is ‘of me, welcoming Jack Kennedy to Dutchess County. He has just been nominated for president. We are both very young, to state the obvious.’

Gore Vidal became notorious overnight in 1948, with the publication of his novel The City and the Pillar. A courageous account of the love of one boy for another, it got him blacklisted for years by the books pages of the New York Times. Tennessee Williams described it as ‘one of the first homosexual novels of consequence’. That qualifying ‘one of’ is well advised: I think that Evelyn Waugh has never been given full credit for his candour about homosexual love in Brideshead Revisited, published three years before Vidal’s shocker. Waugh’s revelations must have raised eyebrows behind the round-framed spectacles of pipe-smoking civil servants and bank managers of the post-war years. But, unlike Vidal, Waugh gave himself an escape clause in the wry, so-understanding words of Lord Marchmain’s mistress, Cara, to the young Charles Ryder:

I know of these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans. They are not Latin. I think they are very good if they do not go on too long.

That was the ‘just a phase’ notion of homosexuality; but Vidal knew his was for keeps.

In 1984 the crusty Australian novelist and Nobel laureate Patrick White received a letter from one Jim Jenkins, asking for a letter of support for the 1985 Gay Mardi Gras. He replied:

As a homosexual I have always detested the Gay Mardi Gras nonsense … The homosexual issue is an increasingly serious one. We shall be persecuted more and more since AIDS came to stay. A lot of screaming queens in Oxford Street will not help the cause for which we shall have to fight.

White was asserting his inalienable right not to stand on a float wearing fancy dress and blowing a whistle. Being invited to join the ‘gay’ circus is not the worst thing that befalls the homosexual writer who comes out. He is suspected of disliking women (a charge from which Vidal has defended Tennessee Williams) or of ogling the flies of every man he meets, however repulsive the fellow. He is expected to relish an unrelieved diet of camp badinage and catty gossip. Worst of all, he will never again be regarded as a writer, or a good writer; from now on he is a gay writer—almost a gaywriter like the amalgam ‘Williamandmary’ in 1066 and All That, or, in Vidal’s own narrative, Evelyn Waugh’s wife ‘poor Laura’. (‘Poor Laura was always pronounced as one word.’)

Into this elephant trap Gore Vidal fell headlong in 1948 and he has never quite managed to climb out. Instead of taking his rightful place in the pantheon of novelists, he is demeaned as an also-ran in a list of ‘dandy wits’ in Mark Booth’s 1983 book Camp:

The Dandy Wit is a dilettante, a gifted amateur. One aspect of his seeming knowingness is his conviction that, although in fable the tortoise may beat the hare, in life the hare may stop to take a nap, flip idly through a fashion magazine, pare his nails and still put on a spurt to win.

Models in life and literature include Brummell, Pelham [a Bulwer-Lytton hero], Trebeck [Thomas Lister’s fictionalised portrait of Brummell], Disraeli, Wilde, Lord Wotton, the Duke of Dorset, [Saki’s] Bassington, Addison de Witt in the film All About Eve and Gore Vidal.

Though Vidal is oddly muted on the subject of Howard Austen, with whom he has lived for 44 years (recipe for happiness, ‘No sex’), he is admirably candid about his sex-life, and has written the sort of book that, for example, John Pope-Hennessy ought to have written. His great love was for Jimmie Trimble, a handsome fellow student and athlete. Vidal was left wondering what their relationship might have developed into, for Trimble was killed in the second world war. Though Vidal’s relationship with Trimble was, as it were, consummated (‘… there we were, belly to belly, in the act of becoming one’) his account of him carries something of the bleak, ‘Land of Lost Content’ frustration that A.E. Housman felt and expressed over Moses Jackson, the athlete who rebuffed the pass Housman made at him. Love suspended, love unrequited: these loves never suffer from metal fatigue, remain forever ideal.

Vidal’s other love-making is unidealised: one-night stands with the minimum of sentiment. ‘I never go to bed with friends, much less with anyone older than I,’ he writes. He is scathing about Harold Acton’s view that Tennessee Williams had a ‘casual yet condescending attitude’ to the young Italians he picked up ‘without any interest in their character, aspirations or desires’. Vidal’s scornful comment:

This sentiment or sentimentality could be put just as well the other way round—and with far more accuracy. Italian ‘trade’ has never had much interest in the character, aspirations or desires of those to whom they rent their ass.

Those whose tastes swing the other way may find it hard to enter into the spirit of Vidal’s sex-life; but at least they ought to concede that he renders it in memorable language, which stirs comparisons with the celebrations of male beauty in Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’, the Venice letters of Baron Corvo and the Journals of Denton Welch. Vidal’s lack of sentimentality, almost an affectation at times, gives force to his description of wartime soldiers in the Snakepit Bar of the Olympia Hotel in Seattle.

We were a lean, sinewy, sweaty race, energised by sex and fear of death, the ultimate aphrodisiac. Bodies were different then. No one was fat, unlike most Americans today. These were Depression boys. I recently watched some old ‘pornographic’ films of the period. I had forgotten what the so-called workingman’s body was like—thick-thighed, flat-chested, with muscular arms, not as comely as an aerobics-styled body of today, but solider, uncalculated, earthlike.

The juxtaposition of those last three adjectives is as perfect as Macaulay’s, ‘The Lord Chief Justice was rich, quiet and infamous.’

With all his assets as a self-portraitist, Vidal has some disadvantages too. First, in his determination to be ‘experimental’, he constantly treats us to flashbacks and flashes forward, whirling us all over the shop. Reviewing a crime novel for The Spectator recently in which the detective and his side-kick despised each other, Harriet Waugh wrote, ‘I sigh for the convention’—of some kind of camaraderie between the two. In Vidal’s book, I sigh for the convention by which childhood is followed seamlessly by school, university and so on.

Vidal’s other main drawback is that, as one of nature’s autobiographers, he has already blabbed about some of the book’s cast, in earlier essays. I wondered how he was going to avoid duplicating what he had already written about Tennessee Williams, so finely, in an essay of 1985 published in the collection Armageddon (1987). He solves the problem by a barefaced, enjoyably disingenuous stratagem. First he quotes a passage from the essay, as a quotation, in italics (‘In 1985 … I wrote…’) Then, without drawing breath and with only minimal modifications, he just goes on quoting from the 1985 essay in Roman type as though telling the whole story afresh. This part of the book is yesterday’s dinner reheated. But I can’t blame him: I don’t think the food could be bettered.