Gore Vidal is a slick novelist, impressive essayist, and perfect bitch. All three of these skills come in handy in his memoir, Palimpsest. The gossip in it is rivetingly indiscreet; the nonfiction writing—as in descriptions of places and people he was indifferent to—evocative and entertaining; and the fiction—as in accounts of himself—smooth to the point of slipperiness. Palimpsest is, apparently, a collaboration. A picture at the beginning shows Vidal with a white cat crouching on his shoulder. The caption reads, “The memoirist in 1992. I am about to start writing this book in Ravello, aided by the white cat.” And indeed, reversing the formula, he got the cat’s tongue. A dubious proposition as a memoir, Palimpsest is awesome as a catty gossip column.

There are, to be sure, many ways to write a memoir—almost as many, I should think, as there are to skin, or collaborate with, a cat. But as there are also many ways to review a memoir, let me lay my cards on the table. I have had my innings with Gore Vidal, as who in this trade hasn’t? I will relate three incidents for the readers’ consideration.

David Susskind once decided that, in the wake of televised confrontations between Vidal and others, it was time for his going mano a mano with me on an entire “Open End”—the David Susskind show, which could go on for hours. Having had me on before, Susskind called me again to ask if I was willing. “Sure,” I said, “but Vidal will never agree.” “Why not?” “Because he is chicken.” David laughed this off. Soon, though, he called me back: “You were right; he won’t do it.” “And why not?” “Why should he make you famous, he says.” Not quite logical, this. Either I am a worthy opponent, then why not do it? Or I am an incompetent, in which case Vidal wipes the floor with me. The upstart sinks into instant oblivion, blood-starved TV audiences are gleeful, and Gore is in his glory.

Vidal had published an essay in Commentary titled “Literary Gangsters,” a clever synonym for his unfawning reviewers, myself among them. Reprinted in all his essay collections, it reads in part: “Other gangsters today? John Simon was lovingly noted. A Yugoslav with a proud if Serbian style (or is it Croatian?—in any case, English is his third language), Mr. Simon has for twenty years slashed his way through literature, theater, cinema.” There follows, in Vidal’s customary bravura polemical style, my bracketing with Gilles de Rais, Charlie Manson, and Lyndon Johnson. Although reading this has given me exquisite pleasure, I regret to say it hasn’t made me famous.

The third time this essay was gathered in a volume, Vidal affixed a footnote after “his third language”: “Mr. Simon has since instructed us that English is his fifth language.” In what may prove to be the final, ne varietur version of the piece, as reprinted in the 1,300-page modestly titled United States: Essays 1952–1992, Vidal has seen fit to omit the footnote. Fate chastised him with a typo: “English in [sic] his third language,” a matter of no great consequence, except as it proves that, at least as a proofreader, Vidal has not yet attained perfection.

Finally, some years ago, when I was language columnist for Esquire, I published something that offended Vidal. In “The Good and Bad of Gore Vidal,” I wrote, “Vidal is an essayist of talent. I am not sure that I would bestow on him the mantle of Matthew Arnold or Edmund Wilson, as Stephen Spender does … nor am I quite convinced that ‘Vidal’s paradoxes at their best rival Oscar Wilde’s best,’ as Edmund White asserts. … But the new collection contains some very good pieces, as weighty as anything in Oscar Wilde and easily as witty as the best of Matthew Arnold.” Vidal, ignoring for once the risk of contributing to my fame, dashed off a sharply critical reply. After expatiating at some length on my unworthiness, it ended in a palinode: for all my flagrant shortcomings, I was still one of the few civilized literary journalists in America. I took this to be less a compliment to me than a cautionary slap at all the rest.

Sorry about this lengthy exordium, but people should be alerted to the possibility that, in reviewing Palimpsest, I may be guilty, despite all my efforts to the contrary, of revanchisme, a quality readers of Vidal’s oeuvre should be well acquainted with. So, to be fair, I admit up front: I mistrust Gore Vidal as autobiographer, and rather than summarize the book in a conventional review (which you could easily get elsewhere), will raise the larger, and perhaps more relevant, issue of his modus operandi and ultimate credibility.

The main elements of Palimpsest can be labeled (a) family and school reminiscences (hates mother, likes father and grandparents, has little use for school); (b) recollections of wartime service (mostly easy cohabitations with fellow servicemen); (c) the love-hate relationship with the Kennedys (Jackie was a stepsister), with whom he appears to have been on good terms much of the time; (d) complex, idiosyncratic sexuality, and the way it has been, most of the time, satisfied; (e) aspirations to political office—even dreams of the presidency—without ever winning an election, and the resultant disenchantment with politics; (f) literary activities in the theater, television, cinema, and in the writing of fiction and nonfiction; (g) famous people known, and gossip about them; and (h) two special relationships—with Howard Austen and Jimmie Trimble.

To start with, two details where I have privileged information. We read that Rosalind, a girlfriend and potential wife, “vanished into marriage [with another] but I saw a good deal of her friend Cornelia Claiborne, a pretty girl with gray-blue hyperthyroid eyes and an interest in literature. She was helping to start a literary paper, The Hudson Review. I was roped into escorting her to a mass coming-out party at the Waldorf for those girls, deprived by war, of what used to be called debuts.” The rest of the paragraph is devoted to the first meeting with James Merrill, a subject of greater interest to Vidal; Cornelia is never mentioned again. Three years later, I escorted Corky, as she was known, to a party at the American Embassy in Paris, and she rather talked my block off about whether or not she should marry Gore Vidal. Since she was neither a liar nor a fool, she must have, dying young and unmarried, deserved more than half a paragraph in a memoir of well over four hundred pages that stops with Vidal anno aetatis suae thirty-nine.

Again, in a passage about Saul Bellow, and in particular Herzog, Vidal talks about Valentine, the villain of that novel. “The original of Valentine, the adulterer, was Saul’s most devoted admirer, Eckermann to Saul’s Goethe. He was some sort of writer-teacher, long since forgotten. I can still remember the afternoon when the president of Bard introduced him to me because, ‘you are both writers,’ and Valentine said, in his thick impenetrable English—he was German, I think—‘At least I write English.’ As it proved, he was optimistic.” Now, both Valentine and I were teaching in the same department at Bard at the time. His being pilloried in the novel for having bedded and wedded one of those wives Bellow kept shedding like so many snakeskins seemed a mite harsh—especially in view of the veneration in which the real-life Valentine continued to hold Bellow ever after. This man was Jack Ludwig, a Canadian, whose accent was every bit as good as Vidal’s, and rather less affected.

Teutonization and demonization of Ludwig, especially after his many visits to Vidal’s nearby home, Edgewater (on one of which I, too, was present), is not to be condoned in a memorialist. How concerned is Vidal with the truth? Early on in the book he writes, “I have pretty much kept to my system of recording only what a faulty memory recalls (and the written—equally faulty?—memories and biographies of others),” but adds that he has on one occasion requested help from a library. Is that enough? When he confides, “I am told that I have an eidetic imagination (I can summon up vivid scenes, recalled or invented, in my head),” one notices that memory and fantasy are given equal status. On meeting John Osborne, Vidal asks “about his two-volume memoir, ‘Did you take notes or keep a diary?’ ‘Good God, no! … Actually, I think I make it all up.’”

This is not comforting to the book’s readers, nor is Vidal’s statement, “My own tendency to lie is seldom indulged in except when picking up a stranger.” Anaïs Nin, one of the few women with whom Vidal seems to have had an extended sexual relationship, wanted him to write about her, “but although I can perjure myself in a short blurb for a book, I cannot sustain deceit over any great critical length.” How about autobiographical length? He wonders why he bothered keeping track of the lies of Truman Capote (hatred of whom, in these pages, runs second only to that of Vidal’s own mother), but explains it with “a constitutional dislike of liars, not to mention Truman himself.” This bolsters our confidence a bit, until we reach “lying is the worst of sins, but there are times when it forestalls what the Bird [Vidal’s nickname for his intimate, Tennessee Williams] regarded as the very worst of sins, gratuitous cruelty.” Since examples of the latter abound in Palimpsest, we might assume that the memorialist preferred unkindness to untruth, though we can’t dismiss the possibility of his having found a way of reconciling the two.

We come now to a crucial utterance: “Today an ambitious writer would be well advised to label any work of his imagination nonfiction, or, perhaps, a memoir.” (The context is a lament for the death of the novel, a leitmotif of the book, to which I’ll return.) And, of course, we must allow for a certain irony that runs through the writing—a kind of amused half-light in which the contours of narrative honesty and license to embellish are jokily blurred. Yet aren’t certain jokes confessions? Invitations to be caught out without being fully disprovable? The tone here is a neat balancing act between, “Don’t you recognize a joke when you hear one?” and “How many times must I underline a point for you to get it?” Near the end of the book, Vidal reiterates, “Again, I note that only the novel can ever be true.”

But even a novelist can surely have a little truth left over for his memoirs. Vidal’s ways of not telling it are as diverse as they are grandiose. There are times, for example, when we feel that the author knows too much to be trusted. Never mind, say, that we are told that, on a school trip to Europe, Gore and his chums were in Downing Street watching Neville Chamberlain head for Westminster “to say that war is now at hand.” Or that, returning to the States on the Antonia, the boys watched its sister ship, the Athenia, being torpedoed by a German sub. Unlikely, but possible. What about other cases, though, where Vidal’s omniscience is a bit too rampant? He says about Eleanor Roosevelt and FDR, “certainly he hurt her mortally in their private relationship.” Mrs. Roosevelt seems to have been friendly with him, but would she have let this out? And is that “mortally” consistent with her style?

Or take the following, about the Kennedys. “I think Jackie’s dislike of Grace began when she and Jack were looking at the press coverage of the wedding in Monaco. Jack studied the pictures intently; then frowned and said, ‘I could have married her!’ Jackie’s face was again tear-stained.” For anyone to write this, he must have been present, yet Vidal, so quick to boast, does not say he was there. And had he been, would JFK, who knew him well enough, have committed such a faux pas?

And what about the casually tossed-off, “had I known to what extent J. Edgar Hoover was blackmailing the Kennedy brothers,” with no further elaboration? Or take this passage, beginning with one of Vidal’s favorite refrains about JFK’s warmongering out of lust for glory, which “he was about to achieve anyway by falling victim to a gangland plot. The ultimate irony is that the elements that did him in—the Marcello mob in New Orleans and so on—were the kind of people that his father had comfortably done business with all his life.” Vidal wants us to believe he knows exactly who did in Kennedy, but can’t be bothered to go into all those tiresome details. And notice also the characteristic Samurai swordsmanship: with one swift swish of the blade, he gets both son and father. Again, about the Windsors: “Only Wallis knew how to control the Duke’s premature ejaculation.” Was Gore hiding under the bed? Yet, at other times, what fastidious shyness! His father, Gore is told by his mother, had three balls. But “I never dared look—you don’t look at parents.” Only at Windsors, in bed.

Closely related to inattention to truth is cavalier sloppiness about English and other tongues, particularly offensive from someone who, while pretending to superior culture, neglects his own writerly tool, language. To start with the poor English, which Vidal, the autodidact who skipped college, cannot even blame on academia. We get “intrigued” (for fascinated), “quo-pro-quid” (for quid pro quo), “equinoctal” (for equinoctial), “at Milton Klein’s, our dentist” (for dentist’s), “paraphrastic” (for periphrastic), “the people who comprised” (the whole comprises the parts, not the other way round), “echt-American writers as Hawthorne” (for like), “masterful gift” (for masterly), “center around” (for on), “except for Tennessee and Bowles and Louis Auchincloss, I never got to know many of my contemporaries” (for any), “a deep affinity … exacerbated by” (only bad things can be exacerbated), “unlike the Jimmie play, I don’t much care for this one” (a dangler), “Niggers” (for niggers—you can’t eat your P.C. and have it too), “of varying degrees” (for degree), “could not help but feel” (for could not help feeling), “Roger L. Stevens, tycoon and sometime producer” (for sometimes—he never gave it up), “Russell was meant to be him” (for he), “better to worship a false image … than that sky-god religion” (faulty parallelism—you can worship a sky-god, but not a religion), and so on.

He is equally poor at foreign languages he keeps throwing around: there is Gide saying, “Premier le Kinsey Report et après le Prix Nobel” (for d’abord); “de Montherlant” and “de Sade” (for Montherlant and Sade); “Ce n’est plus une ardeur dans mes veines cachées” (for cachée—the ardor, not the veins, is hidden); “malòcchio” (for malocchio—an absurdly misplaced accent from someone who’s been living in Italy for decades); “acte gratuite” (for gratuit); “Vidal is a common name in every Latin country, as it derives from vitalis, the genitive of the word for life”—which, of course, is vitae.

And what of the general misinformation Vidal tosses about with grand insouciance? Thus “Hieronymous” Bosch, Marlowe’s “Faust,” a ballet “adage” (for adagio), “Raimond” for Raimund von Hofmannsthal, the writer “Leslie Blanche” (for Lesley Blanch), and so on.

There is a basic disrespect here for the values Vidal purports to be upholding, as well as flagrant indifference to other people. Yet what bemoaning of the lack of culture, of the loss of literacy and the impending, or already incurred, death of the novel. “I am plainly at the end of the road. So, I suspect, is literature.” No one realized at “Vance Bourjaily’s gatherings, that we had arrived on the scene to witness the end of the novel.” Again, “now no one does much of any book reading.” And, “today’s publishers are reluctant to publish first novels by anyone who has not been, at the very least, a movie star or a serial killer.” Or: “In those days works of literature were often popular, something no longer possible.” Partly, Vidal seems to deplore his declining sales and insufficient fame; partly, he relishes the notion of having been the last important novelist. “I am American literature,” he tells Christopher Isherwood.

The self-idolizing and mythicizing begins with his physique. Palimpsest features in front (on the binding, under the translucent dust jacket) a full-page, or full-cover, head shot of the young memorialist, giving a lie to the adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover. “I am mesmerized by the tributes to my beauty that keep cropping up in the memoirs of that period,” writes Narcissus, affecting sweetly shy surprise. Though he assures us of his “lifelong reluctance to read anything about myself,” and affirms that “there does come a time when one stops reading about oneself,” he can make exceptions for, say, the memoirs of Cecilia Sternberg, in which she asks about Gore, “Is he by any chance the boy who looks like an archaic Apollo?” and her cousin, Count Eddie Bismarck (the chancelor’s grandson), replies, “Why, so he does, rather, though his wits are far from archaic.”

Now, you—or Gore—might claim that some of this is adduced in jest. But it is neither funny nor infrequent enough to be lightly dismissed. We read, for instance, that “Myron and Myra Breckinridge would explode on the world scene as not only saviors of MGM but of the human race as well.” Anaïs Nin and Gore together were like “a very mature Marie Corelli and a very young Jonathan Swift—well, Mencken…” At sixty-seven, Vidal proclaims himself “a movie star.” Furthermore, “I had been brought up with far more famous people than the old writers to whom I was … paying homage.” The king of Malaysia has (and is no doubt famous for) a “father who once gave me lunch in Johore, where he was sultan.”

At the Washington Rotunda, where he is being shot for a documentary, Vidal mingles with tourists “several [of whom] ask for my autograph.” Noam Chomsky likes his novel Creation; Jack Kerouac puts him in The Subterraneans as Arial Lavaline. When he and Kerouac check into the Chelsea Hotel for a night of sex, “I told the bemused clerk that this register would become famous … We [Vidal and Kerouac, not the clerk] owed it to literary history to couple.” Sir Frederick Ashton affects to be in love with Gore. While his ambitious literary contemporaries read “thin Hawthorne or wafer-thin Hemingway,” Gore, late at night, “read straight through Meredith and Peacock; and felt at home in their company.” I wonder how they would have felt in his. Republished by Victor Weybright, The City and the Pillar sells a million copies (hmm?), “a large number in those days.” He publishes an attack on Israel, and claims to have started “what was called Vidalgate,” which makes him the first man to have given himself the gate.

An elderly Hudson Valley neighbor, Alice Dows, writes, “he is handsome, yes, I had long ago conceded this point; there was no denying his crisp good looks and his dimpled smile.” Later, “she was buried with my letters.” Elaine Dundy, Kenneth Tynan’s first wife, confesses in her memoirs to having been in love with Gore. A party at the Tynans, attended by Vidal and Antonioni among others, inspires the movie Blow-Up. (From the way Vidal describes the party, this is hardly apparent.) At a literary conference in the Soviet Union, both Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow are awed by Vidal. “In the early primaries, most of the substance of Jerry Brown’s speeches was my work, and Clinton hated Brown, though not enough for him to refrain from taking over some of Jerry’s—my—best lines. Later, ecumenically, I sent Clinton material for his debates with Bush.”

“Had it not been for me, Ronald Reagan would never have been president.” When Vidal’s movie The Best Man was being cast, Gore didn’t think Reagan right for an Adlai Stevensonish character. Melvyn Douglas got the part, and “his career was hugely revived, while the rejected Reagan, at a loose end, became governor of California.” When Vidal is told that, for services rendered, JFK would give him “something,” the proud response is, “I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted other than Jack’s job, plainly not destined for me.” Whose was the greater loss: Vidal’s or the country’s?

At last, though, Vidal is rewarded for choosing to be a novelist first and foremost. In Rome, with his companion Howard Austen, he is at the heart of literature. Two blocks to the north, Thomas Mann wrote Buddenbrooks. Nearby, too, had lived and worked George Eliot, Ariosto, Stendhal. “I myself wrote at least part of several books in this flat, as well as all of Myra Breckinridge. … Italo Calvino lived at the north end of the street, and we used to cher confrère each other when we met.” The way Vidal describes it, it is rather like those Hollywood maps showing tourists how to find the homes of the stars.

But self-aggrandizement is not enough; one must also minimize the competition. There is “our young cousin [Albert Gore] who currently lives in vice-presidential obscurity, a sort of family ghost flickering dimly on prime-time television.” “As Joe [Alsop] was an expert on everything, he was generally wrong on almost everything.” Could this be true of other universal experts as well? Or take the description of John Lehmann, a friend and publisher of Gore’s: “Sexually, it was his pleasure to beat working-class boys; otherwise, he lived a life of perfect domestic virtue with a ballet dancer called Alexis Racine, an uncommonly plain, uncommonly effeminate man.” Evelyn Waugh was “a drunken social climber who wrote small funny novels of no great appeal.” This screed goes on, and then makes fun of Waugh’s post-Brideshead-on-TV popularity, which made him “to English literature what Winston Churchill is to politics, and written about at endless length, as if here were a great writer, like James Joyce or Rupert Everett.” Note how envy reeks from every Vidal pore, so that in a jab at Waugh even Joyce ends up belittled by being bracketed with the effete movie actor Rupert Everett.

Allen Ginsberg tells Vidal that Kerouac “was rather proud … that he blew you,” and, indeed, a description of Vidal’s brutal buggering of Kerouac is the most distasteful episode of this tasteless memoir. Lionel Trilling? “Anyone who could write a book about E.M. Forster and not be aware of his intense, almost religious, faggotry, is not much in the way of a critic.” It all depends, I suppose, on whether you practice literary or bedroom criticism. Greta Garbo, a good friend, does not escape Vidal’s malice, perhaps motivated by vagina envy. Garbo is described admiring the breasts of Irwin Shaw’s girlfriend, whom she gets to bare them for her. “Garbo’s own,” we read, “hung very low.” Ken Tynan, a rival in outrageous wit, must be humbled: “Ken was tall and languid, very much an Oxonian queen who preferred women to men; hence Ken was fondly regarded by us all as one of nature’s innate and unalterable lesbians.” How fond can regard get?

Of JFK: “Jack seemed—and indeed was—mildly decrepit. He moved stiffly when he did not limp painfully from a bad back: war wound was the official line; touch football, the reality. … Jack’s skin was a curious bronze color that at first looked to be the result of a suntan, but then, when we caught the odd yellow glint, it looked like makeup. Actually, the color was a manifestation of Addison’s disease.”

Bobby Kennedy, who disliked Vidal, comes off worse: “Between Bobby’s primitive religion and his family’s ardent struggle ever upward from Irish bog, he was more than usually skewed, not least by his own homosexual impulses, which, Nureyev once told me, were very much in the air on at least one occasion when they were together. ‘Nothing happen,’ said Rudi. ‘But we did share young soldier once. American soldier. Boy not lie … maybe.’” Well, both Bobby and Rudi are dead, and cannot contest allegations; even so, it all hangs on a maybe. And how does Vidal bolster up a case more sagging than Garbo’s breasts? “Yet anyone who has eleven children must be trying to prove—disprove?—something other than the ability to surpass his father as incontinent breeder.” After which, to hedge his bets, Vidal makes a joky reference to Catholicism. But the doubt has been cast.

Jackie, who was mostly nice to Gore, fares worst. After a long discussion of her craving for publicity (look who’s talking!), there comes this demure two-way blow of the Samurai sword: “Actually, to be fair, she loved money even more than publicity and her life was dedicated to acquiring it through marriage.” Note, please, that Judas-kissy “to be fair.” There follows an account of how she “lost her virginity to a friend of mine in a lift that he had stalled in a pension on Paris’s Left Bank,” a chap she couldn’t marry although “he came from a better family than hers,” because “he had no money.” Elsewhere, however, in the spirit of Christian forgiveness, Vidal writes, “Once, after I was blown by an old man of, perhaps, thirty—my absolute cut-off age—he offered me ten dollars, which I took. As a result I, alone in the family, did not condemn Jackie’s marriage to Onassis.” A quo-pro-quid? And even such a very close friend as Tennessee Williams doesn’t escape Vidal’s (or the white cat’s) tongue when our author, after mentioning Tenn’s grief for a dead ex-lover, adds, “The Bird would mourn Frank ever after, quite forgetting that he had thrown him out several years earlier.”

Which brings us to the slipperiest aspect of these memoirs: Vidal and sex. On the one hand, like so many homosexuals, he wants us to believe that the whole world is actually or covertly or potentially homosexual. On the other, he and his likes are not really homosexual at all. We read: “Like most men, I am attracted to adolescent males.” In the armed services during the war, “most of the boys knew that they would soon be home for good, and married, and that this was the last chance to do what they were designed to do with each other. … It was my experience, in the war, that just about everyone, either actively or passively, was available under the right circumstances.” And, of course, there is “a beauty and fulfillment in sex with strangers that one seldom enjoys with people one knows.” “Most young men, particularly attractive ones, have sexual relations with their own kind.” Already at school, “What we were all up to was a perfectly natural homoeroticism, which some continued for the rest of their lives without lapsing into the physically more complex homosexuality or, for whatever reason, into serious heterosexuality.” Note that “for whatever reason”—presumably not a very good one.

Now for the distaff side. “Alla Nazimova [was] a somber actress of almost unendurable power who reigned over Hollywood’s lesbian world, which included, I have been assured, just about every woman star or star’s wife.” So, too, Jackie Kennedy was fascinated by a lesbian bar in Provincetown, “but dared not look in.” But women, straight or not, are of lesser interest to the casuist from Ravello, even though he has consistently refused to call himself homosexual. Instead, he has opted variously for bisexual, same-sexual (probably unaware that homo is the Greek for same), and homosexualist, as well as homoerotic, as here. All of these, it seems, mean something other than homosexual. At nineteen, Vidal picked up a merchant mariner for sex, but when the fellow tried to bugger him, Gore violently fought him off. “That,” he tells us, “was my first and last experience of being nearly fucked.”

So you wonder just what Vidal does (did?) in the bedroom? Alfred Kinsey congratulates him on having no sexual guilt feelings, to which the grandson of Senator T.P. Gore of Oklahoma and stepson of Hugh D. Auchincloss haughtily replies that none of his family suffer from that “middle-class disorder from which power people are exempt.” Dr. Kinsey then “told me that I was not ‘homosexual’—doubtless because I never sucked cock or got fucked.” We are to infer that he only buggers and lets himself be sucked. And indeed, that, along with rubbing together (frottage) is mostly what happens in the session with Jack Kerouac he describes in some detail. Nonetheless, Kinsey, on the basis of Vidal’s sexual history, rates our homoeroticist “as a lower-middle-class Jew, with more heterosexual than homosexual interests,” which Gore finds more applicable to Howard Austen. But whatever he is, he is “setting world records for encounters with anonymous youths, nicely matching busy Jack Kennedy’s girl-a-day routine.” Except that, as Vidal tells us elsewhere, JFK usually bedded two girls simultaneously.

Most of Vidal’s pickups are “poor youths my own age, and often capable of an odd lovingness, odd considering that I did so little to give any of them physical pleasure. But then, even at twenty, I often paid for sex on the ground that it was only fair.” He actually agrees with the despised Truman Capote when told by him, “I hear you’re just the lay lousé.” And he tells Anaïs Nin, apropos her efforts to arouse it in him, “Sexual jealousy is an emotion denied to me.” Cold-fishiness is next to saintliness.

Forthwith, though, we are shocked to learn that Gore was, after all, not setting world records with his more than a thousand (mille e tre?) encounters by age twenty-five—“my near contemporaries Jack Kennedy, Marlon Brando, and Tennessee Williams were all keeping up.” While telling about his episode with the dancer Harold Lang, who appeared with John Kriza and Jerome Robbins in Fancy Free (to Leonard Bernstein’s music), Vidal reports Bernstein as saying, “Practically everyone I know—or used to know—liked to tell me how one thing we have in common is the cast of Fancy Free.” To which Vidal, “Well, I did go to bed with two thirds of your cast.” (As if there hadn’t been women in that ballet, who, however, don’t enter into the reckoning.) “‘And I,’ said Lenny, competitive to the bitter end, ‘went to bed with all three. But I will say Harold’s ass was one of the seven—or whatever number it is—wonders of our time.’” Somehow or other, a conversation like this never appears in heterosexual memoirs.

Once again Vidal tells us that he has been as free from sexual jealousy as from envy of another writer. But then, he has “never had an affair with anyone. Sex, yes. Friendships, yes. The two combined, no.” So, it seems, his emotional repertoire is as limited as his sexual one. Indeed, “the potency of other males is, for me, a turnoff.” Amid all this comes an important announcement: “In those days, girls one’s own age meant marriage. This made any sort of friendship with them uneasy if not impossible. Later, when I turned dramatist, I got to know actresses, and as we were all in the same business, relations entirely changed. Most of them didn’t want marriage, either. I relaxed, for the first time, and enjoyed myself.” From this it is impossible to tell whether what he had with actresses was friendship or sex. The wicked tease keeps us guessing.

On the evidence of this memoir—but only from the captions—we gather that he had an “amorous friendship” with Diana Lynn, a charming actress, although by all accounts I am aware of a confirmed lesbian. At a later date, he lives in Los Angeles with Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who are lovers. “Joanne Woodward and I were nearly married, but that was at her insistence and based entirely on her passion not for me but for Paul Newman. Paul was taking his time about divorcing his first wife, and Joanne calculated, shrewdly as it proved, that the possibility of our marriage would give him the needed push. It did.” And off the happy pair go to London on their honeymoon, accompanied by, you guessed it, Vidal and his friend Howard Austen. The four of them kept her miscarriage on the honeymoon strictly secret, lest it hurt her career.

Things finally come to order. Marlon Brando fades out of the picture as sexual competition. JFK is “rather sad these days,” Gore is told by an insider. “Nothing happening except Jackie, maybe twice a week.” Whereupon “I pointed out that their marriage had revived—or perhaps really begun—when he started to see her face in every newspaper; he’s now taken to calling her ‘the sex symbol.’ Not till he saw the world’s response to her did he find her interesting.” From whom do you suppose Gore gleaned this information? Jack? Jackie? God?

And what about Vidal’s own happy sex life? The last glimpse we are afforded—although it does go back to Rome 1948, the book having little care for chronology—reads in part: “Every evening hundreds of boys converged on the Pincio in order to make arrangements with interested parties,” etc., etc. Then the paragraph makes a 180-degree turn: “If one knew two or three girls who enjoyed sex for its own sake, splendid orgies were possible … with no drinking permitted, or desired, as every fantasy was acted out in flesh,” etc., etc. One such sex-enjoying girl testifies “that she had never before been entirely satisfied.” And this joyous account stems from someone who keeps assuring us “I have never liked parties of any kind.”

So much for Vidal the sensualist. What about Vidal the true lover? Two men figure importantly in Palimpsest. One is Howard Austen. His real name was Auster—Jewish, and consequently unpropitious for employment in advertising, his field in those days of anti-Semitism in the agencies. Vidal—another bit of information found only in the captions—told him to change just one letter, Auster to Austen, and his career took off. Austen appears early in the book, rather cryptically: “I have now lived a half century with a man, but sex has played no part in the relationship and so where there is no desire or pursuit, there is no wholeness.” Later: “I was able, at twenty-five, to settle down with Howard Austen, age twenty-one. We had met anonymously at the Everard Baths. ‘How,’ we are often asked, ‘have you stayed together for forty-four years?’ The answer is, ‘No sex.’ This satisfies no one, of course, but there, as Henry James would say, it is.”

I am sorry to have to join the ranks of the unbelievers. Clearly, Austen became a kind of amanuensis to Vidal. But what sort of companions does one pick up at the Everard Baths, a homosexual meeting and mating place? And why does one go on living with such a person for the rest of one’s life? Vidal quotes Elaine Dundy referring to Howard as his “companion,” which—in homosexual and perhaps even homoerotic parlance—means spouse. And whom but a spouse would one take along on a sort of double-dating honeymoon with Newman and Woodward? After this, Austen makes no further appearance in the book till the very end, where Vidal tells us, “I have just bought two small plots for Howard and me in Rock Creek Cemetery; we will be midway between Jimmie Trimble and Henry Adams—midway between heart and mind, to put it grandly.” Now, it may just be possible to remain side by side platonically in life; but in eternity, surely not.

The great, the only, love of Vidal’s life—if we are to believe it—was Jimmie Trimble (1925–1945). He was a boy Gore met at Exeter, had an affair with then, and, later, a one-night stand. Then Jimmie went off to the wars and died, a heroic Marine, on Iwo Jima. Gore considered him more than a lover—a twin, with whom he completed himself. And even more than that: “me,” as he says in one place. A fictionalized Jimmie is the autobiographical hero’s lover in The City and the Pillar, and he weaves his way as a sort of princesse lointaine through Palimpsest: a refrain, a leitmotif, the great love story that might have been. Yet even here, in a rare access of credibility, Vidal allows that “my ‘unfinished business’ with him would have been long since finished had he lived.” And this even though “the small room where Jimmie and I had made love” is “a now-legendary room,” presumably even more so than the one at the Chelsea, where Vidal and Kerouac, by coupling, paid their debt to literary history. In fact, Vidal is even posthumously jealous of Jimmie, trying to figure out who it was that, out there in the Pacific, turned him on to Walt Whitman.

We learn quite a bit about Jimmie. Some of it directly from his twin, Gore, e.g., that “his sweat smelled honey-sweet, like that of Alexander the Great.” Some of it from the fallen hero’s fiancée, whom Vidal spares no effort to track down. Jimmie will be reposing not far from Vidal and Austen, so that our memorialist can perhaps, like Jack Kennedy, have an “alternate” lover during that exceptionally long night. We are shown a picture of Jimmie’s final resting place, which he shares with one P. Sherwood Alverson (1896–1972), about whom the book—and even the captions—stays mum. Very touchingly, however, Palimpsest ends by noting that “the half of me that never grew up” will be “only a few yards away.” And then the work’s noble penultimate sentence: “Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared but a love story … ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.”

You may have noticed that I have skimped on some aspects of this memoir: Vidal the fictionist, essayist, playwright, TV dramatist, screenwriter, movie actor, politician, and TV talk-show personality. It’s really Gore’s fault for being so much more interesting as a social butterfly, sexual athlete, and self-publicist. But I cannot refrain from adducing a sample of his literary criticism (yet another of his far-flung activities): “Although, as writers, Kerouac and Burroughs were not much different from such conventional writers as Philip Roth and John Updike, I feared that their imitators would, like the executors of some inexorable Gresham’s law, drive literature itself out the window. All this proved a false alarm. Their imitators are few, while the originals either died or did not continue, and literature went out the window anyway.” This should prove how interchangeable Vidal’s activities are: only a talk-show pundit would manage, as it were, to lump Kerouac and Burroughs with Roth and Updike; and only a self-publicist who wants literature to end with himself would so roundly proclaim its defenestration.

But perhaps I’ll get another chance to make up for my omissions. The conclusion of Palimpsest—a paragraph in itself—is the one word and three dots, “Meanwhile…” That, clearly, is the answer to the question why the memoir ends, notwithstanding countless flash-forwards, with its subject aged only thirty-nine. Doubtless a second volume will in due time enrich our shelves and vicarious lives. After all, John Osborne, whose sojourn on earth was shorter, got two volumes out of it.