|
It's a most enjoyable read. I heartily recommend
it to all my descendants. What am I talking
about? What spoon has stirred the thick porridge
of my phlegmatic northern dejeuner? I pick
it up in a Charity Shop in Ormskirk, on a
Wednesday, in the dying year of the millennium.
'I'll take this book if I may?' I say to the old dear behind the counter.
She slides her head forward and down, adjusts
her pink spectacles on a Roman snozzle that
allows no purchase on the sweaty slope of
its Mons Capitolinus. Her empurpled fingernails
claw open the cover page and she checks the
price.
'That'll be eighty-five pee luvvie.' She fuddles it into a paper bag without
looking up, and as she hands it to me, she's
already in eye contact with the next customer.
Outside the shop, in the busy street, I remove
the book from its covering and examine it
under the protective chapeau of my umbrella.
A handsome man's face adorns the front and
rear cover of the volume. Just a face - no
words. I think of the discussion that must
have taken place in the 'Design and Marketing Department' of Abacus the publishers, before the order
was given to adopt this strange marketing
gimmick. After all, although I recognise
the author, (and the photograph must be at
least forty years old,) not everyone would
know the celebrated American writer Gore
Vidal. I twist the book sideways and read
the words on the spine - 'Gore Vidal - Palimpsest - A Memoir.
Palimpsest, Yes, I know the meaning of this word, for
it was the word that Nicky used in his presentation
volume of his poems to me. He wrote it on
the inside page: 'To my best friend Jud - Corporal Evans of
the Gloucestershire Regiment, 28th Foot -
A Palimpsest of Past Conceits.' I turn the book over in my hands and examine
it closely. It's in mint condition. I grin
to myself and a warm bubble of self-congratulation
wells up inside me and pops to the surface
of the limpid pond of my English reserve.
Only a fellow bibliophile or perhaps a self-abuser
would understand the feeling of gratification.
I place the book in the string-net pocket
in the back of Connor's pushchair and weave
my youngest son through the crowds of afternoon
shoppers towards the supermarket and a rendezvous
with Clare and Cameron.
This urbane patrician American has always
impressed me. He's often on British TV. Always
immaculately curried, cropped and attired.
A consummate TV performer and interviewee,
he lolls in his chair one leg thrown aimlessly
over the arm, seemingly oblivious of the
blistering studio lights and the out-of sight
technicians and cameramen. His voice is mellow,
with rounded effortless vowels that slalom
down the idiomatic slopes of his New England
drawl. He's an amusing urbane ecdysiast,
who teasingly strips away the covering layers
of his sophisticated fairing and gradually
reveals himself as a full blooded rampant
homosexual. After a while it becomes apparent
that the upright poles that mark the downward
slalom of this sapient sybarite, are the
upright members of myriad male voluptuaries.
Many are the males that he has sedulously
seduced in the salons and conveniences of
the American capital, and most other places
that appear in the gazetteer of the Times Atlas of the World, (including Kathmandu.) The man is delightfully
irascible and very percipient. His louche
good manners and wit are reminiscent of Oscar
Wilde, or the British Member of Parliament,
homophile profligate and bon vivant, Lord
Boothby. This is no thin-lipped stressed-out
gay, rived with dissonant psychoses - this
is no eremitic Proustian recluse, coughing
his lonely lungs up in some odoriferous draped
cupboard - this is an adorable, cuddlesome,
alfresco queer in his most diverting epiphany
- an entertaining faggot in his most amaranthine,
brilliant incarnation. He has all our flaws
and more - and jubilates in them. He is a
firecracker of a human being.
Few gays endear themselves to the heterosexual
public - Vidal is one of them. However, this
is not all, for the gentleman takes us on
a coruscating cruise through the corridors
of US power. As we clench onto his skirts
and swirl behind him (the safest position
to be,) we bump into all kinds of interesting
wraiths. The sapphic Eleanor Roosevelt, Anaïs
Nin, the ever rampant, woman-a-day, John.
F. Kennedy, and of course the lost Annabelle
Lee of Vidal's life, his loveable, doomed,
US Marine lover, Jimmie Trimble, who died
on the battlefield of Iwo Jima in 1945.
My dead wife and I once strolled past
his
villa tucked into the greisen cheeks
high
above the Amalfi coast at Ravello in
Italy.
We spotted Vidal and his thurifers
on a patio,
drinks in hands. The flitterbugs swirled
around in the lamplight. How I would
have
loved to have scraped back a chair
and joined
in the evening colloquy. Alas, whilst
the
great American frolicked, we continued
along
the strada and disappeared into the
anonymous
semidarkness where all tourists dwell
after
the clubs close. I did not mind - one
glimpse
was enough.
Gore Vidal*
Gore Vidal was born in 1925 at the United
States Military Academy at West Point.
He
was brought up in Washington, D.C.,
and attended
St. Albans School and the Phillips
Exeter
Academy. He enlisted in the army at
the age
of seventeen and served as first mate
on
an army ship in the Bering Sea, where
he
wrote his first book, Williwaw. In
the sixties,
three widely praised novels established
Vidal's
reputation as a best-selling author:
Julian
(1964); Washington, D.C. (1967); and
Myra
Breckinridge (1968). His collected
essays,
United States, won the National Book
Award
in 1993. In 1995 he published a memoir,
Palimpsest,
which the London Sunday Times called
"one
of the best first-person accounts of
this
century we are likely to get."
The Essential
Gore Vidal was published by Random
House
in 1999.
|
