Welcome to the United States of Amnesia

Spectator, The, May 24, 2008 by Wakefield, Mary

To kill time, as I wait for Gore Vidal by the reception desk in Claridge's, I leaf through the pages of his memoirs, looking at the photographs. One in particular takes my fancy: Gore aged three, in the garden of his grandfather's house in Washington DC -- a dapper little chap in shorts and a smart round-collared shirt, tending what seem to be cabbages. He's glancing up at the camera half-amused, entirely self-possessed. He's so unusually composed for a toddler, that I squint at the pic up close, peering at his eyes.

'Are you waiting for me?' There on my right, at wheelchair height, are the same eyes, 80 years on. Shaken, I nod. 'Well then, ' says Gore Vidal, 'let's get a drink, ' and wheels off in the direction of the bar, trailing a wake of handsome Italian helpers.

Since that snap in the cabbage patch, Gene Luther Gore Vidal (he dropped the first two names 'for political and aesthetic reasons') has lived through (as he puts it) three quarters of the 20th century and about one third of the history of the United States of America. But he hasn't let the drama just drift by: he's starred in American history, written the script.

He's partied with JFK, slept with Jack Kerouac, had tea with André Gide; he's skied with Garbo, swum with Nureyev, travelled with Tennessee Williams and whenever the opportunity has arisen put his nemesis, Truman Capote, in his place.

Gore Vidal's name crops up everywhere throughout the last half-century; he's like the subject of 'Sympathy for the Devil': 'Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste, I've been around for a long, long time. . . ' Sympathy for the Vidal, maybe -- respect, certainly: as well as all the hob-nobbing with superstars, he's stood for Congress, written 22 novels, five plays, over 200 essays and has become the most outspoken critic of America's foreign policy, railing against the ongoing corruption of the oncegreat republic.

And now here he is, sipping whisky and soda: grey-haired but still kempt and handsome, looking at me with pale, candid eyes.

It makes me nervous. I'm a Vidal fan. I think Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace should be a set text; his memoir, Palimpsest, is brilliant, but he's not fond of hacks. 'I'll never give another interview to a print journalist, ' he wrote in 1994. Though of course he has (lots), the sentiment behind the vow remains.

I begin with his beginning. Nina Vidal wasn't an ideal mother was she? 'No. She was a drunk and a monster, ' Vidal shrugs. 'But I didn't take her seriously, I just ignored her.

It was the only thing you could do with her unless you wanted to kill her. But -- let's be equitable -- I don't think many women are good mothers, or men good fathers.' He lifts his glass and toasts Nina's ghost.

It's true -- Nina does sound a fright: a rager and a boozer who resented her son's success. But thankfully little Gore spent most of his childhood at Rock Creek Park with T.P.

Gore, the blind but brilliant (and first ever) Senator of Oklahoma. 'My memories of him? Oh, they're joyous really.' Vidal's voice softens. 'My grandfather loved books, and so did I. I was the only one of his descendents who had any brain, so I read to him endlessly: Voltaire, Gibbon, Shakespeare.' Did you inherit his political views? 'No, I didn't inherit his views. I ground out my own political ideas.' The bite's suddenly back in his bark.

Did you ever make up stories for him? 'I did write him a poem once, when I was very young. I was an extremely bad poet, but at least I knew I was bad, which is more than some of the poets today do. It was about a rose; about death and mortality and so on, the sort of things the Victorian guys liked. It went like this, ' Vidal adopts a theatrical voice and declaims: 'That rose is dead. That rose is no longer red.' Pause. 'There. My grandfather burst into tears every time I read it to him. Very Victorian. Of course in my family, the Gores of Mississippi, something like 18 were dead in one generation of diabetes.' The Senator cared a lot for young Gore and not much for his daughter, but all three generations shared a tendency to speak their minds. T.P. put his career on the line in 1917 to protest against sending American soldiers to a foreign war ('I agree with him about that, ' says Vidal). Nina's version of integrity was an absolute candour about her sex life (too frightening to go into here). Both forms of honesty -- principled and personal -- were passed on to Vidal, who at 24 published a novel based on a love affair with a schoolfriend, Jimmy, killed at Iwo Jima.

The City and the Pillar caused a nationwide scandal. It was, as Bernard Levin put it, 'The first serious American homosexual novel', and it rode high on a bestseller list, just behind Orwell's Nineteen EightyFour. But Vidal didn't write it to cause a fuss, he wrote it to tell the truth. 'Jimmy was my other half, ' he says. 'I think boys often feel like that. I think boys fall more madly in love with each other than they ever do with girls.' Really? 'Yes, but then they have to mate and so on and conform to the pressures of society. Sometimes they are very happy and sometimes they are not.' Do you still think of Jimmy as the great love of your life, even more than 60 years after you last saw him? 'Of course, why shouldn't I?' Vidal is surprised. 'Love is a constant, if it's there at all. In my life it was not there very much, so where it is I give it the honourable place.'