Master Of Insolent Intimacy

The Age

Saturday January 6, 2007

PETER CRAVEN

BOOK REVIEW: Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir 1964-2006 By Gore Vidal Little, Brown, $49.95

Gore Vidal's second volume reveals a big life lived, and recounted, with panache, writes Peter Craven.

GORE VIDAL MUST BE one of the most enchanting writers ever to unfold an anecdote or an idea in non-fiction form since World War II.

I can remember what I was doing in the early '70s - travelling to Sydney - when I first read an essay by him: it was about Eleanor Roosevelt and the stories she told him about Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the clan, and how he had advised FDR to sell Britain out to Hitler.

Before that I would have read that fine taut novel The City and the Pillar, even nosed my way through some of Myra Breckinridge, but it was the spell of that voice telling tales tall but true that established itself then as one of the world's higher and mightier pleasures.

Many of the stories and all the iridescence of the style come together in Palimpsest, simply one of the better memoirs in the English language: Gore's conquests - Kerouac and Brando? - the fine steel of Princess Margaret, Tennessee Williams outclassing JFK at shooting practice and remarking that the President had a wonderful arse, Vidal's enduring passion and enduring grief for a boy who died at Iwo Jima. It's a wonderful book and Point to Point Navigation is its glowing coda.

Vidal succeeds as a memoirist in making even what is terribly sad truly enthralling. The great set piece is the account of the last illness and death of Howard, his lifelong partner in a relationship based on love and companionship rather than sex. It is almost unbearably poignant when Vidal kisses him on the lips for the first time in decades.

This is an old man's book, the book of an octogenarian who has moved from his beloved Ravello back to California. He is already meditating on the Washington grave where he will lie next to the man he loves.

Point to Point Navigation is an elegy for a life and it has a marvellous sense of the sweetness of what passes but, although there are recurrent snatches of melancholy, this autumnal book will at the same time cheer the spirit with its sense of the glory of a thousand moments caught in sunlight.

He says that he liked the Bird, old Tennessee, because they laughed at the same things and people, and there is a sheer hell-raking brilliance in the humour that runs through this book - whether it's Princess Margaret sagely declaring that the Queen is a very talented woman because she can walk down a staircase with a tiara on straight or Paul Newman fleeing some German princess who proceeds to throw up all over the pleasure cruise.

Vidal has as a writer, as well as a talker, the all-but-supreme - Wildean - gift of anecdote. Graham Greene never quite made it to stay with Vidal and Howard on the Amalfi coast, but Vidal found himself with the novelist at some glasnost affair organised by Gorbachev.

Greene complained that Anthony Burgess had been causing trouble by running around talking, on television no less, about the most vulgar and unspeakable matters. What does he talk about, Vidal asks. "He talks," Greene replied, underlining the outrage, "about his books."

Part of the glory of Gore Vidal is the way he captures the telltale detail about a situation or a person in it. He says that Jackie Kennedy, if she had thought quickly enough, need only to have thrown Kennedy down onto the floor of the car at the moment of the shooting because he wore a corset that would have protected him. Somehow that little remark is less deadly than when he refers to her little-girl Marilyn Monroe voice.

People in future ages will understand an extra something about the 20th century and its immediate aftermath because of the insolent intimacy that Vidal establishes with some of the most glittering souls around.

It's partly that he's a kind of Suetonius figure, lowering the tone by giving the lowdown, and partly that he is at least as fascinating as the presidents and film stars he captures the glow and the growl of.

He is an extraordinarily magnetic performer. He makes fun of some cultural-studies woman of some fatuity who barely deserves such detailed correction but who emphasised - and then beat to a pulp - the insight that Vidal's presence on television was the popular flame that illuminated his public intellectual status.

It's a banal remark and it hardly merits the attention Vidal gives it. Some will wonder too at the amount of space he gives to first correcting, later endorsing, various points in Dennis Altman's recent discussion of him.

What's not in doubt is a fabulous performer who has the capacity to embody in person the quality that sparkles through the panache of his storytelling.

He talks about the brief period when he performed the one-man show about the great blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, reading his letters, and the trick he used to stop himself from weeping.

I saw the show in New York in late 2003 and it exhibited with a consummate artistry and in concentrated form what this book demonstrates - that Gore Vidal is a wizard of comic timing and that he has made his finest work by acting out dramatically his intimacy with a world that captivated him.