[In the following review, Brogan offers a positive assessment of Palimpsest.]

Autobiography is a form which invites experiment, and Gore Vidal has been bold enough to accept the invitation. In his introductory chapter to Palimpsest he confesses that, until recently, he misused and mispronounced the word. The OED definition is “a parchment, which has been written upon twice, the original having been rubbed out.” Skillful palaeographers can read what lies obliterated underneath.

To call a book of memoirs a palimpsest is therefore to invite readers to undertake detective work; it implies that there is a subtext for discovery. The title is also a warning that the author is not trying to make things easy. Another definition of palimpsest is, “… a parchment, prepared for writing on and wiping out again, like a slate”. Vidal has flagrantly done a great deal of wiping out and writing in. He boasts of it. In short, he has set up the sort of game in which Nabokov used to delight. It is very enjoyable.

Admittedly, the book could be read at a rush by someone ready to skip and intent only on finding the anecdotes. Of these there are a great many, from set-pieces—such as the night with Jack Kerouac and the weekend with the Kennedys on Cape Cod—to the detail that, at West Point, Dwight D Eisenhower was known to his fellow cadets as “Ike the Swedish Jew”.

Together they add up to a narrative of unflagging brilliance, and a pageant of American top people (bluebloods, writers, politicians, film stars) in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s that couldn’t be better choreographed. There is a story of Claire Bloom rehearsing the role of Blanche Dubois with Tennessee Williams that ought to be read by every actress or director undertaking A Streetcar Named Desire. But my favourite scene shows Leonard Bernstein being importuned on the telephone for a campaign contribution by a senator from California, who has views on war and peace. Bernstein: “Well, all that sounds fine, but I really don’t know you or where you stand on—well, on a really important issue like…” Senator Cranston: “Like what?” Bernstein: “Like what would your position be on doubling the strings in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth?” Cranston: “I’ll get back to you.” And he does, saying, “Before I give you my position, how big is the auditorium?”

There are plenty more stories, and numberless aphorisms (“Celebrities are invariably celebrity-mad, just as liars always believe liars”) and superb put-downs (“Malcolm Muggeridge, a bright fool”). Those who enjoy wit will find abundance here. But to read Palimpsest in this way would be to slight Vidal’s design, and to miss the subtext entirely.

The book has a sort of double structure. It is both a journal kept while writing a chronicle of the author’s life from infancy to middle age, and the chronicle itself. The two elements are folded into each other (my metaphor is drawn from cooking). The effect is a better mimicry of the way memory works, as today reflects on yesterday and is tossed about by free association, than anything in Proust (though it slightly resembles The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon). It does not pretend to be entirely trustworthy. Readers are compelled to be palaeographers.

Gore Vidal, in boyhood, met and fell in love with another boy, Jimmie Trimble, in whom he found his other half, the soul he needed to complete himself. Jimmie seems to have returned his love, but the second world war broke out, he joined the marines and was killed on Iwo Jima. In some sense Vidal never got over this loss.

He has never loved since, he says, and cannot link—let alone fuse—sex and affection. But he does not put all his cards on the table. He has lived for more than 40 years with his friend Howard Austen. Though he explicitly says they have not coupled sexually in that time, a couple they most definitely are. Who can believe it is not love? Vidal’s almost complete reticence about this relationship seems a confirmation.

Yet nostalgia for Jimmy remains. The curious point is that Vidal’s second novel, The City and the Pillar, in which he fictionalised the affair, is a powerful and persuasive warning against that crippling emotion. Plainly, the physician could not heal himself; the past enthrals him. It is a thraldom characteristic of many other Southern writers.

Vidal was born at West Point but brought up in Washington DC, where his grandfather, T P Gore, born in Mississippi, served three terms as a senator from Oklahoma. The Senator was a decisive influence on his grandson. Vidal’s mother (cruelly and comically delineated) divorced two husbands and did all she could to separate her son from his father. The grandparents provided the only real home the boy knew, and got his entire devotion in return. This too was an early love, which cast a long, cold shadow.

Vidal quotes Senator Gore reverently, and he was plainly a remarkable man who was entirely blind from the age of ten, yet made a successful career as a lawyer and politician. But his views on history, economics and politics, as reported, were provincial and archaic when not simply erroneous.

Even Gore Vidal sees that the Senator’s opposition to the New Deal won’t do. For the rest, he calls him a Populist and professes to share his beliefs, particularly his isolationism. It is no wonder that Vidal himself never got far in politics. It is no wonder that he never got far in love. Loyalty to Jimmie and the Senator maimed his heart and his intelligence. That seems to be the message of the palimpsest, the writing under the chronicle.

This would be a sad story, but for two things. First, it is not, perhaps, quite credible: the memoirist loves truth but is playing games. Second, his talent for writing is so huge and compelling that it is hard to believe that he would have neglected it in favour of politics even if his grandfather had been Franklin Roosevelt. Vidal’s political opinions, however jejune, have made lively talking points on many a TV show; and we have his formidable body of writing: novels, plays, essays, screen-plays—a most honourable catalogue. Enough, surely?