Vidal in cancer valley

Gore Vidal
POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION:
A memoir
288pp. Little Brown. £17.99.
0 316 02727 8

 
In the first volume of his memoirs, Palimpsest (reviewed in the TLS, October 20, 1995), Gore Vidal set about revising his memories up to his move to Italy in 1964. They filled a hefty volume crammed with an army of friends, enemies and acquaintances; it was a book by a mature writer, successful as a novelist, provoking as a critic, and in demand for film and television scripts. He had known the louche glamour of literary New York, and also the hard graft Hollywood showbusiness required, and tasted the mixture of both qualities that was national politics. Point to Point Navigation, by contrast, is much shorter, thinner in incident, more casual in tone, often discursive to the point of rambling. Vidal was eighty when he finished it, and one has the feeling that its writing required effort, perhaps at times more effort than he felt like making.

“Point to point” is navigation at sea from one plotted location to another, something which, as a freezing teenager aboard a United States Army supply ship in the Bering Sea, Vidal thought he had had enough of to last a lifetime. Yet here he is drifting this way and that with the currents of memories from the past forty years. The names continue to drop at a rate unknown outside the pages of Hello! magazine, and the end paper collage pictures the author’s apotheosis, surrounded by crowding celebrities, as it might have been attempted by Tiepolo. Some we have met before, some not. We get to know more of Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, and friends from the hotter media like Paul Newman and the chat show host Johnny Carson, but acting here as his own Boswell, Vidal offers much less anecdotal detail than he gave us before. Still, many of his stories are diverting and some are even memorable, such as the demand which the actor-director José Ferrer received from Hollywood studio executives to exclude all reference to Jews from a film he was making about the Dreyfus Affair. Some others, he might have better kept to himself, notably the childishly malign attempt to humiliate Barbara Cartland over her exclusion from Charles and Diana’s wedding. Vidal’s much-married, alcoholic mother returns for more of her son’s unforgiving contempt; an admired father and grandfather again reassert their claim on his memory. The New York Times is reminded of its shameful boycott of his early works; a hapless biographer is summarily disowned.

Whether it is Gore Vidal’s stature as a novelist that established him as a political pundit, or his panache as partisan scourge that won him the following he has as a writer, is something on which both admirers and critics are unlikely ever to agree. Whatever the case, it seems that his widespread fame (or infamy) today rests more on his career as controversialist than as man of letters, however much he might argue that they amount to the same thing. As with many contrarians, much of what people think of Vidal depends on how they feel towards the person he happens to be duffing up at the moment. What may sound to some like lurid accusations, leaden sarcasm and a tendency to weave insinuations into the appearance of an argument will pass for wit to others, not all of them the people who live in Woody Allen’s New York or attend David Hare’s plays. On several occasions the BBC has sought his analysis of the American scene – something comparable to CNN asking for a rundown of British politics from George Galloway, another public intellectual credited in some quarters with a ready wit and newsworthy insouciance. But Vidal’s credentials as an observer of American life are in appropriately apple-pie order, even if he carries on his inspection from the distant fringes of opinion. He is the son of a pioneer of American aviation and the grandson of the venerable Thomas P. Gore who helped organize the Oklahoma Territory and later, although blind, represented that state in the US Senate, with young Gore acting as his page and guide. Vidal was raised with reservations about FDR ringing in his ears, and exposed to the doctrines of homegrown isolationism – a world-view that is more complex than it has sometimes been painted, and is still potent political medicine in what are now called the “flyover states”. It is an attitude marked by fear of central government and loathing for the elites which control it; suspicion, warring with indifference, about all things foreign and a tendency to believe that the devil walks abroad and belongs to the opposition.

Irretrievably gone, after the war, was that country of Vidal’s youth in which this worldview flourished without apology, a place where almost all politics really were local politics; where the media were to be found down the street in the town’s newspaper office and the country’s standing army was smaller than that of Greece. Much like Edmund Wilson, Vidal came to the conclusion that the federal government, bloated and empowered through a war which Roosevelt helped provoke, had transformed itself into what he calls the Security State. This monstrous changeling then sought an expansion of power, both at home and throughout the world – a rayonnement which Vidal, and others, would persistently characterize by the word “empire”, without acknowledging its use as analogy. Such disaffection is hardly a novelty in American political culture; William Jennings Bryan, whose candidacy for the presidency was organized by old Senator Gore, famously rallied the country to the image of mankind crucified on a cross of gold. The senator’s grandson has gone one better, for Vidal does not shrink from claiming that this unAmerican imperium was achieved and sustained through conspiracy and deceit. No doubt novelists and conspiracists think along similar lines: plots, after all, are a part of their profession. Thus, Vidal sees conspiracy where the rest of us just see the news: witness his rhetorical questions elsewhere suggesting that the attack of 9/11 was an inside job. In Point to Point Navigation, he even argues that we have wrongly tended to dismiss the conspiracist’s approach to interpreting events: “it was about then [the time of Huey Long’s assassination in which old Senator Gore thought that FDR had a hand] that the conspiracy theorist doctrine was promulgated to make it impossible for anyone to investigate much of anything and so it was that we, a naturally suspicious and garrulous people, were officially silenced through our institutions”.

This seems to run counter to common experience, namely that the conspiracist is not the one who mounts an investigation, but the person who does not accept its results. The same naturally suspicious people Vidal speaks of, moreover, seem to have treated themselves to non-stop investigations of one thing or another over the past fifty years as records at all levels of secrecy were trawled and trawled again by senators, congressmen, presidents, special commissions, district attorneys, policemen and just about everybody who possessed press credentials and a phone. Stuff does not just happen in Vidal’s world: with the focus and perseverance of the autodidact, he will show us how it all fits together, and get in a few swipes at opponents while trying. The Cold War was thus a scam by Washington elites to keep the American war machine going – a charge which will puzzle the tens of thousands of bureaucrats who unwittingly took part in it. Rebutting innuendo, however, is a black hole of discourse: if you ask a rhetorical question, you’ll probably get a rhetorical answer. And conspiracy historiography will always have a part to play in populist democratic culture for, without it, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Eventually those searching intelligent design in human affairs tend to nudge each other farther out on a limb, and wind up rubbing shoulders with Rosicrucians, racists, and Da Vinci Code cryptographers. Meanwhile, as Harold Macmillan famously pointed out, the rest of us are left to deal with events.

And it is events of the most everyday tragic kind that cast their shadow over this book. Throughout, one has sensed a kind of désinvolture that makes it something of a ship’s log for the author’s point to point navigation. This suggests that Vidal’s mind is elsewhere as, in his words, the “we” of his life becomes “I”. As the new millennium opens, Howard Auster, Vidal’s companion for half a century, begins a long descent into terminal illness. A cancer defeated some years before reasserts itself. He must say farewell to his beloved La Rondinaia and the beauty of the Amalfi Coast; a new home is made in California, “cancer valley” Vidal calls it, where both men become votaries in the glass-walled temples of medicine, followers of the dread and doleful rites of oncology. Auster’s dignity and courage in the last days, and his friend’s heartbreak in witnessing them, turn these pages of the memoir into literature, reminding us of the respect we all owe to grief and those who endure it. Whatever the book as a whole may lack in purpose or direction, it finds in these pages a voice that speaks to the heart.

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James M. Murphy is a retired intelligence officer and a freelance writer on international affairs.