Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir - Hardcover

Vidal, Gore

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385517211 ISBN 13: 9780385517218

Publisher: Doubleday, 2006

Synopsis

The brilliant sequel to Gore Vidal’s acclaimed, bestselling memoir, Palimpsest.

In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II. As he says, “As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.” It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds—far from linear but always on course.

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics and international society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman’s ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the “Glorious Bird”), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book’s most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, among other things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.

Elegiac yet vital and even ornery, Point to Point Navigation is a summing-up of Gore Vidal’s time on the planet that manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly provocative, and thoroughly moving.

About this title

About the Author

Gore Vidal is the author of twenty-two novels, five plays, many screenplays, more than two hundred essays, and the critically lauded memoir, Palimpsest. Vidal’s United States (Essays 1952–92) won the 1993 National Book Award. Vidal lives in Los Angeles, California.

Reviews

When I was growing up in Washington, WDCA-TV ran a weekly horror-flick showcase called "Creature Feature," hosted by Count Gore de Vol. The count was suave, fond of cheesy movies and inclined to plant his teeth in the nearest neck. In all these respects, he was the double of Gore Vidal, whose vampiric sang-froid has seen him through a long and bustling career of pamphleteerism and historical revisionism -- with plays, novels and screenplays thrown in for ballast. And if Vidal isn't technically speaking undead, there has always been something about his tireless stream of prose that seems unruffled by mortality.

The biggest surprise, then, of Vidal's latest memoir -- more surprising than Eleanor Roosevelt's (allegedly) sapphic passion for Amelia Earhart, more surprising than Jeanette MacDonald (allegedly) groping a strange man, more surprising even than the young Gore's hero-worship of Mickey Rooney -- is the sight of America's iciest provocateur thawing at the prospect of his own endgame. Bereaved, unmoored, hobbled by an artificial knee and ruptured spinal disks, the Vidal of Point to Point Navigation is reduced, like the hero of Samuel Beckett's play "Krapp's Last Tape," to a conversation with old selves.

And what glamorous selves they were. Vidal may be a populist on paper, but he has managed to spend a large part of his life standing on Aubusson rugs. (A typical sentence begins, "One evening as I was dressing to go out to dinner at Mimi Pecci-Blunt's palace outside the Campidoglio. . . .") If he has any veterinarians or accountants among his friends or enemies, they have yet to be revealed. His 50th-birthday party attracted the likes of Princess Margaret and Lady Diana Cooper; while in London for the event, he bumped into Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a relation-by-marriage whom Vidal, still seething over old slights, ignored. "Bye-bye," she murmured.

Vidal contains multitudes, yes, and at times the names pile up in associative train wrecks: Saul Bellow triggers Mary McCarthy, who sets off Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Lowell. The celebrity-juggling, time-skipping structure that proved so effective in Vidal's earlier memoir, Palimpsest, registers now as a helpless subservience to age. Old hates -- Truman Capote, Vidal's own mother -- are brought back for fresh savaging; old anecdotes about Jane Bowles and Tennessee Williams are recycled; and large chunks of the life go missing. To cite one gap, why is there no full account of Vidal's notorious 1968 televised run-in with William F. Buckley Jr.? (For those who think politics was a gentler business in those pre-Rove days, Buckley's ad homo-nem snarl is just the corrective: "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.")

By book's end, Vidal has dragged us perhaps to a few too many dinners, but he remains a peerlessly entertaining companion, especially when he's working in miniature. His snapshot of Orson Welles: "When he laughed, which was often, his face, starting at the lower lip, would turn scarlet while sweat formed on his brow like a sudden spring rain." Jacqueline Susann had "large dark eyes whose thick false lashes resembled a pair of tarantulas in a postcoital state." Compare them with Graham Greene's eyes, which were "curiously glazed, like mica," and Eleanor Roosevelt's "tombstone teeth." Here's Rudolf Nureyev, raging at the president of the United States for refusing to bring over Nureyev's mother: "I told this Carter he would be punished for not allowing an old woman to come visit her son, for his cruelty and his rudeness and then I said that because of this behavior he would lose the coming election, which he did and all thanks to my curse. Very powerful, these Russian curses."

Vidal himself is not above cursing, but readers of Palimpsest were startled to find him doing something quite opposite: holding a torch for a childhood sweetheart named Jimmie Trimble, "the unfinished business of my life," killed on Iwo Jima at the age of 18. (Don't get the author started on "good wars.") From the evidence, one could believe that Vidal's heart was killed off in the same instant -- were it not for this second volume's moving testament to the late Howard Auster, Vidal's companion for more than half a century. They met on Labor Day 1950. Years later, Auster told Vidal "that he thought he was just passing through my life and was surprised as the decades began to stack up and we were still together. But then it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does. Each had a sex life apart from the other: all else including our sovereign, Time, was shared."

Until lung and brain cancer began to do their work. Heading into surgery, Auster asked Vidal, out of the blue, to kiss him. "I did. On the lips, something we'd not done for fifty years." The end came not long after. "I passed a hand in front of his mouth and nose. Nothing stirred. . . . The eyes were open and very clear. I'd forgotten what a beautiful gray they were -- illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end."

Vidal soon scurries back inside his "WASP glacier," but the spectacle of an intellectual carapace cracking under the weight of grief is as affecting here as it was in Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Nothing in the above should suggest that Gore Vidal has gone "soft." (Donald Rumsfeld would be well-advised not to turn his back on him.) But for a few pages, he hammers his stake into his own heart, and something discombobulatingly sweet comes pouring out. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

Reviewed by Louis Bayard
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

It would be too easy to say Vidal's second memoir picks up where Palimpsest left off; as in that earlier book, he essentially lets his memories flow at will, often revisiting yet again the stories of his Washington childhood. The general focus, however, is on the latter half of his life, particularly the deaths of those closest to him, including his longtime companion, Howard Auster. Yet Vidal changes subjects and tone so frequently and abruptly—here tender, here combative—that the family memories and celebrity anecdotes become scattershot, limping to a close with a bizarre summary of somebody else's theory about how organized crime bosses ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Assured of his own genius ("I have never needed an editor"), he repeatedly slams biographer Fred Kaplan as "dull" and sex-obsessed, then jabs at a few other people who've written about him. He also makes frequent observations about the current events unfolding as he writes, and his criticisms of the New York Times and the Bush administration's "oil-and-gas junta" will come as no surprise. In short, the memoir is a perfect encapsulation of Vidal's outsized personality—and readers' reactions will be determined by how they already feel about him. (Nov. 7)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

One of America's most distinguished writers recalls, once again, following his previous glance backward in Palimpsest (1995), even more events in his inarguably interesting life. Vidal's new volume of self-revelation free-ranges over his more than eight decades as he eschews a particularly strict time line. Chapters are short, like brief scenes in a movie; indeed, cinema is the book's recurring, binding metaphor. Movies he has seen are discussed, and movies he has written for are also part of his discussion; but also, as any reader knows who has read the latter volumes in his American Chronicles cycle of historical novels, he is ever conscious of the cinema as a significant cultural and political force. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are signs of his liberal politics (for instance, when he posits "the criminalizing of drugs and sex is very much a sign of that malign primitivism which has always reigned in Freedom's Land"). Certainly one of the best treats of the book is that Vidal has known many famous people, whom he mentions with a genuine interest in sharing what about them interested him. And Vidal always can be appreciated for his beautiful prose style alone. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

The Influence of the Movies on My Generation: The Backstory

As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art always took precedence over cinema but neither ever proved to be as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen. Thus, in a seemingly simple process, screening history. (My book of that name has been allowed to go out of print and so I now reprise its principal argument.)

As writer and political activist, I have accumulated a number of cloudy trophies in my melancholy luggage. Some real, some imagined. Some acquired from life, such as it is; some from movies, such as they are. Sometimes, in time, where we are as well as were, it is not easy to tell the two apart. Do I wake or sleep?

I was born October 3, 1925, on the twenty-fifth birthday of Thomas Wolfe, the novelist not the journalist. I have lived through three-quarters of the twentieth century, and about one-third of the history of the United States of America. Briefly, what has been your impression thus far, Mr. Vidal? as eager interviewers are wont to ask. Well, it could have been worse, I begin with a calculated understatement. Then the Japanese recording machine goes on the blink and while the interviewer tries to fix it, he asks me to tell him, off the record, what was Marilyn Monroe really like? As I barely knew her, I tell him.

It is a universal phenomenon that whether one is at Harvard or at Oxford or at the University of Bologna, after the dutiful striking of attitudes on subjects of professional interest, like semiology, the ice does not break until someone mentions the movies. Suddenly, everyone is alert and adept. There is real passion as we speak of the falling-off of Fellini in recent years (of which more later) or of Madonna's curious contours and have they yet passed the once-disputed border of mere androgyny, arriving at some entirely new sexual continuum? Movies are the lingua franca of the twentieth century. The Tenth Muse, as they call the movies in Italy, has driven the other nine right off Parnassus—or off the peak, anyway.

Recently I observed to a passing tape recorder that I was once a famous novelist. When assured, politely, that I was still known and read, I explained myself. I was speaking, I said, not of me personally but of a category to which I once belonged that has now ceased to exist. I am still here but the category is not. To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun. How can a novelist be famous—no matter how well known he may be personally to the press?—if the novel itself is of little consequence to the civilized, much less to the generality? The novel as teaching aid is something else, but hardly famous.

There is no such thing as a famous novelist now, any more than there is such a thing as a famous poet. I use the adjective in the strict sense. According to authority, to be famous is to be much talked about, usually in a favorable way. It is as bleak and inglorious as that. Yet thirty years ago, novels were actually read and discussed by those who did not write them or, indeed, even read them. A book could be famous then but today's public seldom mentions a book unless, like The Da Vinci Code, it is being metamorphosed into a faith–challenging film.

Contrary to what many believe, literary fame has nothing to do with excellence or true glory or even with a writer's position in the syllabus of a university's English Department, itself as remote to the Agora as Academe's shadowy walk. For any artist, fame is the extent to which the Agora finds interesting his latest work. If what he has written is known only to a few other practitioners, or to enthusiasts (Faulkner compared lovers of literature to dog breeders, few in number but passionate to the point of madness on the subject of bloodlines), then the artist is not only not famous, he is irrelevant to his time, the only time that he has; nor can he dream of eager readers in a later century as did Stendhal. If novels and poems fail to interest the Agora today, by the year 3091 such artifacts will not exist at all except as objects of monkish interest. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. It is simply not a famous thing.

Optimists, like the late John Gardner, regarded the university as a great good place where literature would continue to be not only worshipped but created. Perhaps he was right, though I do not like the look of those fierce theoreticians currently hacking away at the olive trees of Academe while seeding the Cephisus River with significant algae, their effect on the sacred waters rather like that of an oil spill off the coast of Alaska. Can there be a famous literary theoretician? Alas, no. The Agora has no interest in parlor games, other than contract bridge when one of the players is Omar Sharif. Literary theory is a glass-bead game whose reward for the ludic player is the knowledge that once he masters it, he will be thought by his peers to be ludicrous.

But I have lately been taken to task by an English teacher for my “intemperate” attacks on English Departments, which have, she noted ominously, cost me my place in the syllabus. So I shall now desist and, like Jonah, wait for that greatest of fishes to open wide his jaws and take me in. After all, if you miss one syllabus, there'll always be another in the next decade.

The best of our literary critics was V. S. Pritchett. I find fascinating his descriptions of what the world was like in his proletarian youth. Books were central to the Agora of 1914. Ordinary Londoners were steeped in literature, particularly Dickens. People saw themselves in literary terms, saw themselves as Dickensian types while Dickens himself, earlier, had mirrored the people in such a way that writer and Agora were, famously, joined; and each defined the other.

In London, Pritchett and I belonged to the same club. One afternoon we were sitting in the bar when a green-faced bishop stretched out his gaitered leg and tripped up a rosy-faced mandarin from Whitehall. As the knight fell against the wall, the bishop roared, “Pelagian heretic!”I stared with wonder. Pritchett looked very pleased. “Never forget,” he said, “Dickens was a highly realistic novelist.”

Today, where literature was movies are. Whether or not the Tenth Muse does her act on a theater screen or within the cathode tube, there can be no other reality for us since reality does not begin to mean until it has been made art of. For the Agora, Art is now sight and sound; and the books are shut. In fact, reading of any kind is on the decline. Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president—the same half?

TWO

In 1925, the year that I was born, An American Tragedy, Arrowsmith, Manhattan Transfer, and The Great Gatsby were published. A nice welcoming gift, I observed to the Three Wise Men from PEN who attended me in my cradle, a bureau drawer in Washington, D.C.'s, Rock Creek Park. I shall be worthy! I proclaimed; shepherds quaked.

For a moment, back then, it did look as if Whitman’s dream of that great audience which would in turn create great writers had come true. Today, of course, when it comes to literacy, the United States ranks number twenty–three in the world. I have no idea what our ranking was then, but though the popular culture was a predictable mix of jazz and the Charleston and Billy Sunday, we must have had, proportionately, more and better readers then than now; literature was a part of life, and characters from contemporary fiction, like Babbitt, entered the language, as they had done in Pritchett's youth and before. Our public educational system was also a good one. Certainly the McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers of my grandfather's day would now be considered intolerably highbrow.

True, the Tenth Muse was already installed atop Parnassus, but she was mute. Actually, the movies were not as popular in the twenties as they had been before the First World War. Even so, in the year of my birth, Chaplin’s The Gold Rush was released, while in my second year there appeared not only DeMille’s The Ten Commandments as well as, no doubt in the interest of symmetry, Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo; it was also in my second year that the Tenth Muse suddenly spoke those minatory words “You ain't heard nothin’ yet.” Thus, the moving and talking picture began.

I saw and heard my first movie in 1929. My father and mother were still unhappily married and so we went, a nuclear family melting down, to the movies in St. Louis, where my father was general manager of TAT, the first transcontinental airline, later to merge with what became TWA.

I am told that as I marched down the aisle, an actress on the screen asked another character a question, and I answered her, in a very loud voice. So, as the movies began to talk, I began to answer questions posed by two-dimensional fictional characters thirty times my size.

My life has paralleled, when not intersected, the entire history of the talking picture. Although I was a compulsive reader from the age of six, I was so besotted by movies that one Saturday in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, I saw five movies in a day. It took time and effort and money to see five movies in a day; now, with television and videocassettes and DVDs, the screen has come to the viewer and we are all home communicants.

I don’t think anyone has ever found startling the notion that it is not what things are that matters so much as how they are perceived. We perceive sex, say, not as it demonstrably is but as we think it ought to be as carefully distorted for us by the churches and the schools, and ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385517211
• ISBN 13: 9780385517218
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 278