Pocket Book Review # 9

Palimpsest, by Gore Vidal



I have to begin this post by confessing my inability to remember much of what I read. What I retain, instead, are imagined thoughts about a book. This makes my recollections profoundly unreliable, and it means that when I compare a book to another I read a while ago I'm stepping onto thin ice.

I would feel worse about this if Nick Hornby hadn't confessed to the same thing in one of his "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns for the Believer. Don't ask me which one. I only remember him confronting his inability to remember what he'd read and asking, "If I'm not going to remember any of what I'm reading, what's the point?" I sort of feel that way.

All of which is a long way of introducing Gore Vidal's memoir "Palimpsest" by saying it reminded me of "The Education of Henry Adams," which I read a few years back. "The Education" is a classic, the delightful autobiography of the comically detached Henry Adams, who keeps himself at arms' length throughout his narrative by writing about himself in the third person. Adams was born into wealth and privilege (he was the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great grandson of founding father John Adams). Yet he seems not to have had much of a knack for wealth and privilege. He bounced around Harvard, Europe, and Washington, never knowing what to do with himself, even as every opportunity lay open to him, all the while seeking education in all its forms, until, as I remember it, he suddenly realizes that he's always been a writer.

You might think of Gore Vidal as a writer who writes about himself in the third person without formally employing that point of view. The comic detachment that Adams had to achieve with the third person is there in Vidal's memoir, even when Vidal writes in first person about himself. It's one of Vidal's great talents.

"The Education" doubles as a history of 19th Century America, but "Palimpsest" takes place in the milieu of 20th Century American writers and actors, and the Kennedy-Gore clan. Which, to Vidal, amount to the same thing. History itself is barely present.

So it gets a bit gossipy, but Gore Vidal is nothing if not entertaining. Anais Nin, Truman Capote, and the Beats all come in for various degrees of Vidal's patented comic disdain.

Vidal seems to understand that "Julian" was his greatest book, and it easily could be. I haven't read a smarter or more entertaining fictional treatment of the Roman Empire, and "Julian" will always be one of my favorites. "Creation" -- a kind of sequel -- is also well worth the time.