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 gay 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 coat-tails 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 tragically
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.