This review by Florence King appeared in the March 2007
issue of The American Spectator. To subscribe to the
monthly print edition, click here.
Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir
By Gore Vidal
(Doubleday, 277 pages, $26)
SHOOT IF YOU MUST this old gray head, but spare your country’s
enfant terrible. Gore Vidal — expat liberal elitist,
name-dropper extraordinaire, snidest of the snide, unabashed
advocate of male love decades before America even knew what “gay”
meant, has written his final memoir, and I loved it.
His first memoir, which took him from his birth in 1925 to age
70, was called Palimpsest, and I panned it, saying among
other things that the title “sounds like an arcane sexual practice
involving an inflated condom that explodes like the
Hindenburg in the tradesman’s entrance of some hired
Apollo, sending ecstasy and other things washing over Maitre
Vidal.”
Actually “palimpsest” refers to a papyrus that has been written
on before and scraped clean, leaving traces of the earlier writing
showing through. Vidal intended it as an allusion to the tricks
that memory plays on autobiographers, but the title he has given
this, his second memoir, is a more down-to-earth description of the
82-year-old memory he must now depend upon. In World War II he
served as first mate of an Army freight-supply ship based in the
Aleutian Islands, where the weather was so cold that the compasses
often froze, making it necessary to rely on memorized landmarks, a
process known as “point to point navigation” in which the navigator
proceeds without radar and hopes for the best.
He repeats previously published accounts of his birth and
childhood in Washington, D.C., but interestingly, his portrait of
his blind grandfather, Sen. Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, is sharper now
that he himself has reached the age of the old man for whom he
acted as guide and reader. Instead of the eccentric character he
seemed in Vidal’s earlier writings, the stoic Gore, who served 30
years in the Senate, abstained on the Social Security vote, lived
on his $15,000 salary, and was the first and probably the last
senator from an oil state to die without a fortune, emerges here
almost as a ghost from the Early Roman Republic when virtue in its
original sense of male honor reigned supreme. If Vidal has seemed
to harbor a patrician contempt for just about every “popular”
leader and flavor-of-the-month pol, it is because he had the good
fortune, during his formative years, to know and to serve a giant
among men.
Today he has moved back to the United States from his self-exile
in Italy and spends much of his time reading Montaigne and
meditating on mortality. Were it anyone else but Gore Vidal one
could say that he has “mellowed,” but he is still the master of the
withering retort. What makes this memoir different from anything he
has ever written is his unsentimental yet heartrending account of
the horrendous final illness of his companion of 53 years, Howard
Auster, and his unexpected revelation about the nature of their
relationship.
Howard was a lounge singer. The two met soon after the war —
Vidal doesn’t say how but other accounts claim the friendship began
at the Everard bath house in New York — and became housemates. “He
confessed 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.” Howard did not pursue a musical career but he sang at
their parties, which he also planned. A born host, he was able to
compile a guest list containing the likes of Greta Garbo at a
moment’s notice. Altogether, just the kind of person a writer
needs.
Although he was a heavy smoker, he remained remarkably fit until
the age of 70 when he suddenly started getting sick. His first
illness looked like appendicitis to Vidal, who had had it himself,
but the doctors patiently explained that nobody can get
appendicitis at 70, whereupon Howard’s appendix burst and he had to
be rushed to the hospital and operated on for peritonitis. Next, he
developed a malignant tumor on one lung. The doctors operated and
claimed they got it all, but found that the other lung was weakened
by emphysema. Then the cancer spread to the section of the brain
that controls locomotion. The brain operation left him unable to
control his movements or his bodily functions, and he had to wear
diapers.
He had several falls. Vidal ruptured a disk lifting him up, and
also developed an ulcer from worrying about him and dealing with
“the ongoing bureaucracy of American medicine, never again to be
avoided this side of Rock Creek Cemetery.” And as if all this were
not enough, he was rewriting his movie, The Catered
Affair, for television, complete with 44 breaks all in the
right places; “slices of movie filler to separate the commercials
from each other.”
Howard began to hallucinate and had to have radiation for the
brain tumor, his head bolted in place while gamma rays were zapped
into his skull. Then came pneumonia, followed by heart spasms. The
descriptions are almost unbearable to read, but it is as he is
lying quietly in the hospital that a perfect brushstroke of a
sentence clinches the whole experience in a single touching detail:
“The hospital bed had a railing around it and one could barely poke
a hand through in order to hold his hand.” No one who has ever been
a patient or a visitor in a hospital could read that with a dry
eye.
Howard died at 74 in 2005. Reflecting on their long successful
life together, Vidal says without fanfare: “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.”
POINT TO POINT NAVIGATION ZIGZAGS a lot and frequently
doubles back, but it makes port without foundering. It carries a
classic Vidal cargo with a generous store of name-dropping (“Howard
and I sailed the Aegean in a caique with Paul Newman and Joanne
Woodward”); Zelig moments (how he invented the Peace Corps and
“passed the proposition along to Jack”); devastating descriptions
(Jacqueline Susann’s thick false eyelashes “resembled a pair of
tarantulas in a postcoital state”), (Tony Blair’s “tic-like smile
and bright vulpine stare”); Garbo in an androgynous mood, making a
point of leaving the toilet seat up after using the bathroom at a
party; catty digs at Truman Capote (who plagiarized Eudora Welty
because “he wanted to be a great Southern lady writer too”); and
spot-on one-liners (“Commercialism is the ability to do well what
ought not to be done at all”).
There is plenty of dish, such as Eleanor Roosevelt’s resentment
of his aviation-pioneer father’s affair with Amelia Earhart, “for
whom she had a Sapphic passion that Amelia found disconcerting.
Amelia said that Eleanor was always suggesting they make flights
together all around the country, just the two of them, communing
with the wind and the stars.” The aviatrix supposedly wanted to
marry the elder Vidal, but he declined, saying he thought of her
only as a friend and flying companion. Shortly before her last
mysterious flight from which she never returned, she wrote him a
long emotional letter which his wife found and destroyed, never
telling her stepson Gore what was in it, but his father speculated
that Earhart had deliberately crashed her plane to escape her
miserable marriage to the publisher G.P. Putnam, and because “she
was having some sort of premature menopause.”
He also passes along a story that touches obliquely on one of
the personages in our 2004 election. At a dinner party given by the
late Princess Margaret Rose sometime around 1990, the guests
included Vidal, Jack Nicholson, Tony Richardson, and, seated across
from Princess Margaret, “Senator John Heinz… soon to be killed in
a plane crash.” Princess Margaret whispered to Vidal, “Isn’t he
beautiful?” and Vidal says: “I complimented her on her taste.”
Senator Heinz was Teresa Heinz Kerry’s first husband. Does this
mean that he and Princess Margaret were lovers?
These are one type of Vidal story, not proven but well within
the realm of possibility all the same. Another type of Vidal story
is the jaw-dropper. The one included here claims that when Pope
Pius XII died in 1958, he was embalmed by an amateur
taxidermist:
…while he lay in state in the basilica, he turned,
according to one viewer, “emerald green.” Then, in response to the
summer heat, he suddenly exploded. This was kept from the world for
a long time until someone (a Jesuit?) passed on the information. It
is also reported that many sturdy Swiss guardsmen fainted during
this holy combustion.
For conservatives for whom the name Gore Vidal is anathema, there
is hope: He loathes the
New York Times. His war with the
gray eminence began in 1948 when he published his second novel,
The City and the Pillar, an openly gay work, and the
paper’s most powerful book critic was so shocked that he swore he
would never review the author again.
Newsweek followed his
lead, and Vidal’s next seven books went unreviewed by publishing’s
most important venue. “A professor who lectures on my work tells me
that academics to this day refuse to believe that the
Times could ever have done such a thing. Such is simple
faith.”
Worse than the blackout was the paper’s hypocrisy and outright
stupidity: It raved the three mysteries he wrote under a pen name,
but a decade later when he published them in a single volume under
his real name, it reviewed them again — and panned them.
