Palimpsest: A Memoir

by Gore Vidal

Overview

Vidal on Vidal—a great and supremely entertaining writer on a great and endlessly fascinating subject.

A New York Times best American memoir

“In the hands of Gore Vidal, a pen is a sword. And he points it at the high and mighty who have crossed his path.” —Los Angeles Times

Palimpsest is Gore Vidal's account of the first thirty-nine years of his life as a novelist, dramatist, critic, political activist and candidate, screenwriter, television commentator, controversialist, and a man who knew pretty much everybody worth knowing (from Amelia Earhart to Eleanor Roosevelt, the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor, Jack Kennedy, Jaqueline Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Andre Gide, and Tennessee Williams, and on and on).

Here, recalled with the charm and razor wit of one of the great raconteurs of our time, are his birth into a DC political clan; his school days; his service in World War II; his emergence as a literary wunderkind in New York; his time in Hollywood, London, Paris and Rome; his campaign for Congress (outpolling JFK in his district); and his legendary feuds with, among many others, Truman Capote and William F. Buckley.

At the emotional heart of this book is his evocation of his first and greatest love, boyhood friend Jimmy Trimble, killed in battle on Iwo Jima.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593314395
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/16/2021
Series:	Vintage International
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	395,023
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 7.98(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) was born at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. His first novel, Williwaw, appeared in the spring of 1946. He wrote more than twenty-four novels, five plays, many screenplays, and more than two hundred essays. Vidal’s United States: Essays 1952–1992 won the 1993 National Book Award. He died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of eighty-six.

Hometown:

La Rondinaia, a villa in Ravello, Italy; and Los Angeles, California

Date of Birth:

October 3, 1925

Place of Birth:

West Point, New York

Education:

Attended St. Albans. Graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, 1943. No college.

Table of Contents

Palimpsest 3

The Small Bedroom at Merrywood 7

The Desire and the Successful Pursuit of the Whole 21

Dah 41

Dot 67

Briefly, Schools, War 79

"Today My Nerves Are Shattered. But I Am Indomitable!" 99

Guatemala 117

Dancers: An Interval 127

"Gene Collins" 133

Rome and the Glorious Bird 141

The Guest of the Blue Nuns 157

Paris, Proust's Whorehouse, Gide, Bowles, and Isherwood 167

London, E. M. Forster, as well as Friends-to-Be 189

"I Was the Last King-Emperor, You Know" 203

"Now You Owe Me a Dollar" 211

At Home on the Hudson in the Cold War 235

To Do Well What Should Not Be Done at All 271

London, Nina 313

The Twenty-ninth New York Congressional District 333

Thirteen Green Pages with Hindsight Added 353

Getting Out 383

Getting Back 405

Section: E Lot 293½, Subdivisions 2 and 4 417

Index 421

Editorial Reviews

As host of the crowded cocktail party that is his memoir, Gore Vidal is mostly on his best behavior. He seldom scandalizes his guests and rarely flings a martini into anyone’s face. Courtly but gossipy, chummy but not overfamiliar, he proudly points out all the notables he has managed to attract to his soirée. . . . Vidal is a first-rate essayist, one of America’s finest.”
—Time

“This is Vidal at his most devastating, connoisseurs of which will find enough in Palimpsest to satisfy if not fully slake their thirst.”
—The Washington Post

“The book is the product of a mind fully immersed in both the frivolities and sinister undercurrents of its era. Best of all, it keeps readers conscious of how much the past is an ever-evolving, often illusory product of the present. . . . Vidal’s portraits of fellow writers find him at his wittiest.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Among the writers of his midcentury vintage, Gore Vidal stands apart. . . . [An] entertaining, gossipy memoir.”
—The Boston Globe

“As absolutely everyone with a taste for literary candy has no doubt already discovered . . . Palimpsest is a trick-or-treater’s El Dorado. . . . While his own life may not fascinate him . . . treating it as history certainly does. Nothing engages his imagination like telling the truth.”
—The Village Voice

“Invigoratingly high-plumed cynicism . . . I knew Vidal would have me frowning and nodding and smiling and smirking—with admiration, with exasperation, with scandalized dissent. I never dreamed Vidal would have me wiping my eyes, and staring wanly out the window, and emitting strange sighs (many of them frail and elderly in timbre).”
—Martin Amis, The Sunday Times (London)

“Provocative . . . it is autobiography at its best. . . . Loaded with vintage Gore . . . here he lays himself bare, tells us as much about himself as he does about those friends and enemies who have populated his early work. Vidal’s take on twentieth-century history is remarkable—and right up close.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Witty, literate, perceptive, didactic; in short, vintage Vidal. . . . Always entertaining, in so erudite a way.”
—The Detroit News

“Reveals the intellectual pugilist in a different light. . . . Here is a man who has known much of the literary and political history of the twentieth century through personal experience, who has strong opinions about politics and the arts and who can articulate his ideas without falling into the traps of ideology and party lines.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“In this memoir, Vidal takes a great risk. He sets aside his public persona and opens his heart, allowing us to see a rare vulnerability. . . . While Vidal’s writing is consistently entertaining, it is the meeting of brittle, worldly humor with a tender teenage love story that lifts Palimpsest above the level of gossip to an emotionally fulfilling experience.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“True to the rhythms of real life. . . . Palimpsest is the story of a rich life, and an ode to loss. . . . A bittersweet backward glance.”
—The Virginian-Pilot

“The first chapters here are recalled with a rapture which matches some of the great literary memoirs of childhood, such as Nabokov’s Speak, Memory.”
—Financial Times

From the Publisher

Prolific essayist, novelist (Burr et al.), screenwriter (Suddenly, Last Summer), playwright (The Best Man), and sometime political candidate Vidal quotes the definition of palimpsest as " `a parchment which has been written upon twice; the original having been rubbed out.' " This particular memoir of his first 39 years (1926-65), says Vidal, has "many rubbings-out and puttings-in," which may explain its many-layered nature and the bare nod to chronology, with flashbacks and flashforwards and curious juxtapositions of friend and foe. In it he blithely skewers both family and friends (or ex-friends)-particularly his alcoholic mother, the Auchinclosses, John and Jackie Kennedy, Anas Nin and other literati, and too many more to recount-with nasty revelations. But Vidal is still a stylish writer, and those not put off by the mean-spiritedness of these self-serving memoirs and fascinated by the literary, political, and entertainment worlds of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s may want to read this. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/95; BOMC and Quality Paperback selections; New Yorker serial, Oct. 2.]-Francine Fialkoff, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Vidal employs his characteristic wit and the gift for turning an elegant story in a candid memoir of the first 40 years of his life. His story comes complete with a difficult family, talented friends, and interesting enemies. The cast includes Tennessee Williams, the Kennedys, Eleanor Roosevelt, Truman Capote, Joanne Woodward, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Anais Nin, among others. B&w photos. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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