Palimpsest

American author and public intellectual Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest (1995), covers the first four decades of his life, from his birth in 1925 into the 1960s. The book is named for a technique Vidal defines as "erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text."

Born Eugene Lewis Vidal in 1925, Vidal was the only child of Eugene Luther Vidal, an aeronautics instructor at the West Point military academy, and Nina S. Gore, the daughter of U.S. Senator Thomas Gore. Vidal explains his name change: "My birth certificate says 'Eugene Louis Vidal': this was changed to Eugene Luther Vidal Jr.; then Gore was added at my christening [in 1939]; then, at fourteen, I got rid of the first two names." A socialite who appeared on Broadway in 1928, Nina divorced her husband when Vidal was ten years old. Vidal's relationship with Nina was fraught: "I am beginning to think she knew how to play on a sadistic streak with me." He goes on to wonder if her withholding of "motherly love" is what inspired him to become a writer, sparking a lifelong need to invent imaginary people and relationships.

As an adolescent, Vidal frequently read to his senator grandfather who was blind, later serving as his seeing-eye guide and senate page. In 1939, on the way back from a summer holiday cut short by the onset of World War II, Vidal met then-U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Joseph Kennedy—the first of many interactions with the family. Rather than attend an Ivy League university like his peers, or any college for that matter, Vidal enlisted in the U.S. Army upon graduation from high school. He served as a first mate of a supply ship stationed as part of the Alaskan Harbor Detachment during World War II. During this time, he wrote his first novel, Williwaw, which chronicled his experiences during the war.



In 1946, the year of Williwaw's publication, Vidal began work on his most controversial novel, the loosely autobiographical The City and the Pillar, which compassionately depicts a young man's discovery of his own homosexuality. The book was dedicated to "J.T.," the initials of James Trimble III, the only man Vidal claims he ever loved who died during the Battle of Iwo Jima.

After the publication of The City and the Pillar, the literary critic Orville Prescott of The New York Times refused to review it and sought to prohibit any other critics from doing so. E.P. Dutton, an editor at the publishing company told Vidal, "You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now, you will still be attacked for it." Blacklisted by the publishing industry, Vidal spent the next few years writing mystery novels under a pseudonym.

Meanwhile, Vidal obtained work in Hollywood, landing a job as a rewriter on the screenplay for the 1959 Charlton Heston biblical epic Ben-Hur. Vidal sought to clarify the enmity between Heston's character and his antagonist by inserting homosexual subtext into their interactions. While the filmmakers agreed that Vidal's contributions to the script enriched the characters significantly, the conservative Heston was livid when someone explained the subtext to him. In retribution, Heston lobbied to have Vidal's name removed from the movie. Vidal's opinion of Heston, meanwhile, is that he imagines being forced to direct him would be like trying "to animate an entire lumberyard."



In 1960, Vidal entered politics. He claims that his interest in the political left began when he realized the government collected so much in taxes from his paychecks. Rather than embrace the presumably low-tax policies of conservatism, however, Vidal reasoned that the government will collect taxes no matter what, and so those taxes should go toward providing adequate healthcare and education, rather than funding wars in far off places. That year, Vidal became the Democratic nominee for Congress in New York's 29th district, a heavily Republican area that any Democrat, no matter the candidate, was expected to lose. While Vidal did indeed lose the general election by a margin of 57 percent to 43 percent, he received more votes in that district than any Democrat had in fifty years. His candidacy also attracted the attention of high-profile Democrats like Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Newman.

Around this time, Vidal became closer with the Kennedys, in particular, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Vidal was distantly related to Jacqueline through marriage. Not knowing this, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy took offense to Vidal's apparent intimacy with Jacqueline, and Vidal left the White House in a huff. Vidal viewed Robert's behavior as a form of homophobic bullying belied by the Attorney General's own repressed sexuality. He writes, "Between Bobby's primitive religion and his family's ardent struggle ever upward from Irish bog, he was more than usually skewed, not least by his own homosexual impulses, which, Nureyev once told me, were very much in the air on at least one occasion when they were together."

Although Palimpsest's autobiographical history stops short in the 1960s—and is perhaps overly concerned with gossip and sniping—it is a valuable glimpse into the mind of one of the twentieth century's most prominent and controversial public intellectuals.