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Point to Point Navigation
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.
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.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
27 people are currently reading
473 people want to read
About the author
Gore Vidal
418 books1,834 followersWorks of American writer Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, noted for his cynical humor and his numerous accounts of society in decline, include the play
The Best Man
(1960) and the novel
Myra Breckinridge
(1968) .
People know his essays, screenplays, and Broadway.
They also knew his patrician manner, transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, and he later became a relation (through marriage) to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Vidal, a longtime political critic, ran twice for political office. He was a lifelong isolationist Democrat. The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire published his essays.
Essays and media appearances long criticized foreign policy. In addition, he from the 1980s onwards characterized the United States as a decaying empire. Additionally, he was known for his well publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote.
They fell into distinct social and historical camps. Alongside his social, his best known historical include Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as the first major feature of unambiguous homosexuality.
At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde
Also used the pseudonym Edgar Box.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Gore Vidal é um dos nomes centrais na história da literatura americana pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Nascido em 1925, em Nova Iorque, estudou na Academia de Phillips Exeter (Estado de New Hampshire). O seu primeiro romance, Williwaw (1946), era uma história da guerra claramente influenciada pelo estilo de Hemingway. Embora grande parte da sua obra tenha a ver com o século XX americano, Vidal debruçou-se várias vezes sobre épocas recuadas, como, por exemplo, em A Search for the King (1950), Juliano (1964) e Creation (1981).
Entre os seus temas de eleição está o mundo do cinema e, mais concretamente, os bastidores de Hollywood, que ele desmonta de forma satírica e implacável em títulos como Myra Breckinridge (1968), Myron (1975) e Duluth (1983).
Senhor de um estilo exuberante, multifacetado e sempre surpreendente, publicou, em 1995, a autobiografia Palimpsest: A Memoir. As obras 'O Instituto Smithsonian' e 'A Idade do Ouro' encontram-se traduzidas em português.
Neto do senador Thomas Gore, enteado do padrasto de Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, primo distante de Al Gore, Gore Vidal sempre se revelou um espelho crítico das grandezas e misérias dos EUA.
Faleceu a 31 de julho de 2012, aos 86 anos, na sua casa em Hollywood, vítima de pneumonia.
People know his essays, screenplays, and Broadway.
They also knew his patrician manner, transatlantic accent, and witty aphorisms. Vidal came from a distinguished political lineage; his grandfather was the senator Thomas Gore, and he later became a relation (through marriage) to Jacqueline Kennedy.
Vidal, a longtime political critic, ran twice for political office. He was a lifelong isolationist Democrat. The Nation, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New York Review of Books, and Esquire published his essays.
Essays and media appearances long criticized foreign policy. In addition, he from the 1980s onwards characterized the United States as a decaying empire. Additionally, he was known for his well publicized spats with such figures as Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Truman Capote.
They fell into distinct social and historical camps. Alongside his social, his best known historical include Julian, Burr, and Lincoln. His third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), outraged conservative critics as the first major feature of unambiguous homosexuality.
At the time of his death he was the last of a generation of American writers who had served during World War II, including J.D. Salinger, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer and Joseph Heller. Perhaps best remembered for his caustic wit, he referred to himself as a "gentleman bitch" and has been described as the 20th century's answer to Oscar Wilde
Also used the pseudonym Edgar Box.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Gore Vidal é um dos nomes centrais na história da literatura americana pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial.
Nascido em 1925, em Nova Iorque, estudou na Academia de Phillips Exeter (Estado de New Hampshire). O seu primeiro romance, Williwaw (1946), era uma história da guerra claramente influenciada pelo estilo de Hemingway. Embora grande parte da sua obra tenha a ver com o século XX americano, Vidal debruçou-se várias vezes sobre épocas recuadas, como, por exemplo, em A Search for the King (1950), Juliano (1964) e Creation (1981).
Entre os seus temas de eleição está o mundo do cinema e, mais concretamente, os bastidores de Hollywood, que ele desmonta de forma satírica e implacável em títulos como Myra Breckinridge (1968), Myron (1975) e Duluth (1983).
Senhor de um estilo exuberante, multifacetado e sempre surpreendente, publicou, em 1995, a autobiografia Palimpsest: A Memoir. As obras 'O Instituto Smithsonian' e 'A Idade do Ouro' encontram-se traduzidas em português.
Neto do senador Thomas Gore, enteado do padrasto de Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, primo distante de Al Gore, Gore Vidal sempre se revelou um espelho crítico das grandezas e misérias dos EUA.
Faleceu a 31 de julho de 2012, aos 86 anos, na sua casa em Hollywood, vítima de pneumonia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
March 13, 2013
Disappointerissimo. This memoir is meant to cover Gore’s life from 1968-2006, but unlike its predecessor Palimpsest, fails to offer an entertaining and comprehensive account of the Great Wit’s activities during these four pregnant decades. First off, the chapters are unpardonably bitesize—lacking in detail and conversational digressionism familiar to Gorehounds—and second off, Gore discusses his childhood at length (heard it!) and, seemingly, whatever interests him at the moment of writing. The non-linear sprawl that worked so well in Palimpsest here is simply unfocused and far too casually anecdotal. The bitesize approach leaves many chapters feeling like responses to questions posed by interviewers, as Gore freestyles long or short answers depending on what pops up in the memory hole, and although we itch ourselves impatiently for facts-presented-chronologically, we lap it up like the snivelling Gorehounds we is. R.I.P.
December 3, 2012
Palimpsest, for all Vidal's narcissism, was an achievement in autobiography, a genre generally to be avoided. For a man I'm inclined to think of as exceptionally cold it was lyrical and warm, surprisingly frank on the heart, and well structured. He didn't feel compelled to tell us all - self aware enough to edit even life for the good bits.
But this. If you rate Vidal, best not read it.
The voice is still there, the wonderfully shaded irony, his acidic cutting through spin in commentary on events. But it's mostly the final telegrams of an old man missing his dead partner and lamenting the death and decline of his America, his friends, his glittering life. Even the chapter length tells of his waning powers - a page or two at most, before he must rest.
The queerest thing of all was the three or so chapters where he rated academic and biographical writings on his own life and significance. One chapter is a complete quote from the book of an academic - like he was reading you his book review over the breakfast table.
Or perhaps he was worried that his words, his important words, were impermanent after all. Not etched on tablets for eternal reference. I'll be reading his collected essays for the rest of my life, as he himself never put down his Montaigne.
I am hoping for some unreleased essays and his correspondence to be published. But this second autograph of his life made me feel like I was feeding on carrion.
But this. If you rate Vidal, best not read it.
The voice is still there, the wonderfully shaded irony, his acidic cutting through spin in commentary on events. But it's mostly the final telegrams of an old man missing his dead partner and lamenting the death and decline of his America, his friends, his glittering life. Even the chapter length tells of his waning powers - a page or two at most, before he must rest.
The queerest thing of all was the three or so chapters where he rated academic and biographical writings on his own life and significance. One chapter is a complete quote from the book of an academic - like he was reading you his book review over the breakfast table.
Or perhaps he was worried that his words, his important words, were impermanent after all. Not etched on tablets for eternal reference. I'll be reading his collected essays for the rest of my life, as he himself never put down his Montaigne.
I am hoping for some unreleased essays and his correspondence to be published. But this second autograph of his life made me feel like I was feeding on carrion.
January 4, 2009
Between Obituaries, 10 Dec 2006
"No other writer has peered so intently under the hood of American Society. None can match his uncanny gift for "telling us what we want to know' about public life, including politics, theatre and the movies. His new book is sad, spotty chronicle that would suggest Gore is stuck in a fog from a dwindling set of landmarks. Vidal's' imagination has always been able to get into the past" James
None of us know much about Vidal Gore, he likes it that way. His two memoirs have shed light on himself and the people he liked and loved. Gore's wit could cut someone, usually politicians, to the core with out them even realizing they had even a sliver. However, with his contemporaries, authors, he is even tempered and respectful. His stories about Tennessee Williams, whom he adored, but wrote about with sarcasm, are ones to savor. As are his stories about and with Johnny Carson. Carson and Gore liked each other and when Gore appeared on 'The Tonight' show, that was what television is all about. Marcus There are witty remembrances of Paul Bowles, Federico Fellini, Amelia Earhart, and Jackie Onassis. Gore Vidal's father had a 'fling' with Amelia Earhart and hits inside is a story in itself. Of course, the fact that Gore Vidal had entrance to the Camelot known as the Kennedy Administration was his forte. He and the Kennedy's had spats but one of the final chapters in this memoir is about Kennedy and his death and has credence.
The most painful to read portion of this book is the time and death of Vidal's companion Howard Austen. Vidal gives s a vivid portrayal of his life just before his death and the final moments of Howard's life. These are poignant and give us insight into this great man.
We learn about Vidal Gore's entry into politics and why it did not work out. The writing of his forty-sox books, his philosophy of life and the writers he revered. Montaigne is the author he reveres and reads time and again about memory and the lapses of memory.
"Gore Vidal has the looks of a prince, the connections of a prince, more wit than any prince, and a prose style that should be the envy of the dwindling few who realize that prose style matters." Larry Mc Murtry.
This is a book to be revered if you are a Gore Vidal fan, as I am. I did not want it to end. Gore Vidal is now eighty-one and his memoirs may end but a trilogy would be most welcome. Highly Recommended. prisrob 12/09/06
December 10, 2012
Crazy old Gore: as arch as two bastards and drier than a wooden god. He's a loss to us. He was right to call this a 'memoir', for in little way is it an autobiography, really, in the expected sense. Only the tiniest snippets of his life are (re)arranged for us here, in idiosyncratic order, while the rest remains firmly behind locked doors, you rather feel. Yet this is a witty read - most of the morsels are pretty delicious. The Barbara Cartland in Bangkok story has stuck in my memory, as has Jackie Kennedy in the lift, Garbo leaving the dunny seat up and Barbara Streisand's 500 eggs for breakfast. Gore isn't one to build carefully constructed anecdotes that end with a punchline. He delivers a 'story' and lets you find your own way through it as you will. If you spot the wry hilarity behind his selected observation, then you're doing well. If you miss it - as, frankly, I did with several of his chapterlets - then a moment's pondering upon one's own idiocy is due. I remain none the wiser about his falling out with Bobby Kennedy. Ditto his lousy relationship with his mother (whatever it was she said about Howard must have been ripe). Perhaps his earlier memoir casts a bit more light there? I'll have to make sure I read it. This book was a witty diversion that I quite enjoyed.
November 8, 2016
A tiresome, meandering autobiography that should only be read by those who already know everything about Vidal and just want to wade in it, as this does little to explore anything new or interesting to those coming from the outside.
Still, Vidal is always entertaining to read, no matter what the content.
Still, Vidal is always entertaining to read, no matter what the content.
July 16, 2014
Listening to this memoir by Gore Vidal, I had the feeling I was spending the afternoon with an elderly man listening to his stories. A few years ago I had read a biography of General Robert Olds who in 1942 married Nina Gore Auchincloss. Gore Vidal’s famous actress mother. I like it when information in one book I read shows up in another book I am reading. Vidal came from a famous family. His father was a military pilot who in civilian life started three airlines, TWA, Eastern and Northwestern. His mother was an actress whose father was a long time Senator from Oklahoma. Gore tells about reading to his grandfather who was blind and going into the U.S. Senate to read whatever was needed to him. The book is a bit rambling but just as it would be if you were sitting having a conversation with him. His life ranged from a playwright on Broadway to a Hollywood screen writer to essayist and novelist. In the book he discusses the various famous people he knew in all types of professions. From Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy (his step sister was Jackie Auchincloss Kennedy). He also discussed Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Saul Bellows, and Marlene Dietrich, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Two people he had nothing nice to say about were Truman Capote and Richard Nixon. A few of his witty aphorism were present also. He wrote this just after the death of Howard Austen his partner for 53 years. I noticed some of the reviews of this book were negative but I enjoyed listening to Gore Vidal. He gave me a glimpse into the life of a famous writer and intellectual from the 1930 through 2005. I remember reading some of his books such as Lincoln, Burr and the novel Myra Breckinridge. I read this as an audio book downloaded from Audible. Gore Vidal narrated the book himself.
December 3, 2007
Wow. I mean, wow. If I could be Gore Vidal for a day, I could die happy. I can't think of any other person who has been at the center of politics, academia, literature, hollywood and pop culture for the last five decades and certainly no one who can write as well as he. It was an enjoyable read because of the anecdotes, the digs about modern America, and the (lack of) organization -- it zig-zagged like a conversation, where one point or person makes him think of something else and suddenly you're off into another recollection and the reader doesn't see the connection until we skip to the next recollection.
I didn't really think all his counter-arguments to his critics were necessary -- mainly because I hadn't heard the critiques before, so I thought it just interrupted a good book when he would go on a rant about something that was published about him twenty years ago. It's also quite morose, since his life-long partner died, you get the sense he's just sitting around waiting to die and being disgusted with the world.
If you think Gore Vidal is an amazing author and necessary social critic, you'll love it. If you think he's an egotistical, elitist prick, this book won't change your mind. I loved it.
I didn't really think all his counter-arguments to his critics were necessary -- mainly because I hadn't heard the critiques before, so I thought it just interrupted a good book when he would go on a rant about something that was published about him twenty years ago. It's also quite morose, since his life-long partner died, you get the sense he's just sitting around waiting to die and being disgusted with the world.
If you think Gore Vidal is an amazing author and necessary social critic, you'll love it. If you think he's an egotistical, elitist prick, this book won't change your mind. I loved it.
December 20, 2008
Vidal continues, sort of, where he left off in Palimpsest. His writing is as always biting, occasionally cruel, and quite funny. It's always interesting to get an "inside" version of some of the movers and shakers of our recent past.
A previous reviewer mentioned that this book jumps around. Yes, it does. The title and the forward explain that Vidal uses one person, idea, or event to lead to another, gently wandering through the past.
This starts a bit slowly; I thought, "Oh no, Gore has finally succumbed to time and his writng has slipped in quality." I was wrong; as the book progresses his voice becomes stronger.
Vidal is an acquired taste. If you've enjoyed his previous work, you'll enjoy this. He's not for everyone.
A previous reviewer mentioned that this book jumps around. Yes, it does. The title and the forward explain that Vidal uses one person, idea, or event to lead to another, gently wandering through the past.
This starts a bit slowly; I thought, "Oh no, Gore has finally succumbed to time and his writng has slipped in quality." I was wrong; as the book progresses his voice becomes stronger.
Vidal is an acquired taste. If you've enjoyed his previous work, you'll enjoy this. He's not for everyone.
July 1, 2021
Who, finally, was Gore Vidal? He asked himself this question frequently, so I guess we can ask it here. A novelist? I hope not. He wrote some remarkable trash, like "Duluth" and "Myron." Then there's "Two Sisters." It isn't trash, it's just a hodgepodge that never figures out where it's going, yet somehow gets there anyway. A writer of historical fiction? "Lincoln" isn't trash, it's tedium, which might be worse. A memoirist? "Palimpsest" is okay, not great, but has a memorable line, to the effect, you can't fix someone else's life, or their story. Maybe you can't fix their story, Mr. Vidal, but you sure as heck should have let someone fix a really bad title. The subject of the biographer? I have read only one biography, Jay Parini's "Empire of Self," which is first-rate. Gore Vidal knew his way around Hollywood. He knew his way around Washington. He lobbed plenty of political grenades and was especially fond of blasting what he derisively termed the "American Empire." He ran unsuccessfully for office, perhaps motivated by his maternal grandfather, a senator from Oklahoma who influenced him, even profoundly. He knew his way around Italy, which he eventually called home. He was a gay man, and he sowed his wild oats, though how much of what he says is exaggerated went with him to the grave. Certainly his sexuality figures considerably in his writing. He lived with another man, Howard Austen, and they found true love in not making love. He called William F. Buckley, Jr., a Nazi on national television, before television ruined itself. He got punched by Norman Mailer. Last but not least, he was a sailor posted to the Aleutian Islands during World War II, where the weather made it necessary sometimes to rely on "point-to-point navigation." I think this book, also a memoir, is his best. Its title, this time a very good one, is our clue. What is the very last image that comes to mind, when one thinks of Gore Vidal? A sailor. But he was. He was a GI, like millions of others, answering the call to become part of something very much bigger than himself. He did this when he was 20, and it is perhaps his tragedy he couldn't again, until six decades later.
March 31, 2019
Many things can be said about Gore Vidal. He was a snob, but he was well connected (and he'll make sure you know that.) He wrote some good books, traveled the world and made a good talk show guest.
He lived an interesting life (and he'll make sure you know that.) He was a liberal, bisexual and had a mean streak that could be vastly entertaining when he spit out bon mots that were funny because they were true in their meanness. But I had forgotten how casually cruel he could be. He had a fight with Bobby Kennedy and this led to Jackie Kennedy dropping him from her circle. It must have hurt him terribly (although he should have known that blood is thicker than water) and in a classic example of showing one's true colors, crosses the line of human decency in Chapter 39 to nail her to the cross. Even if what he says is true and no matter how badly she hurt him by dropping him, she does not deserve to be drenched in the bile he spews her way. All in all, I would say Vidal is no where near as smart and clever as he thinks he is. His insecurity shines through in nearly every chapter.
He lived an interesting life (and he'll make sure you know that.) He was a liberal, bisexual and had a mean streak that could be vastly entertaining when he spit out bon mots that were funny because they were true in their meanness. But I had forgotten how casually cruel he could be. He had a fight with Bobby Kennedy and this led to Jackie Kennedy dropping him from her circle. It must have hurt him terribly (although he should have known that blood is thicker than water) and in a classic example of showing one's true colors, crosses the line of human decency in Chapter 39 to nail her to the cross. Even if what he says is true and no matter how badly she hurt him by dropping him, she does not deserve to be drenched in the bile he spews her way. All in all, I would say Vidal is no where near as smart and clever as he thinks he is. His insecurity shines through in nearly every chapter.
December 16, 2019
I find Gore Vidal to be a fascinating personality. He is intelligent and outspoken and has a biting ironic humor. He has written an amazing number of books. He has also been a movie maker. I listen to this book in the Audible format. It was read by the author himself. Audible book readers are very often very talented so a reading by the author may not necessarily be an asset. However Vidal does have a voice and presentations girl that is special. I was so intrigued listening to this that I added to my future listening library several additional books by Vidal. I am running about two years behind between purchase and listening these days with dozens and dozens of audible books awaiting me in the cloud.
The author is an inveterate name dropper. He has a lifetime of experiences with famous people and stories regarding most of them. His accuracy and validity is undoubtedly sometimes questionable but if you lean a little left politically, you Will find most of what he says fascinating and enjoyable. He is well known for his belief in the CIA/mafia conspiracy resulting in the assassination of JFK.
The author is an inveterate name dropper. He has a lifetime of experiences with famous people and stories regarding most of them. His accuracy and validity is undoubtedly sometimes questionable but if you lean a little left politically, you Will find most of what he says fascinating and enjoyable. He is well known for his belief in the CIA/mafia conspiracy resulting in the assassination of JFK.
January 16, 2024
Definitely an interesting man and a thought provoking well written memoir. He is more than a little annoying and I am sure his arrogance and need for attention would be tiresome in person. But well worth the time. It might have come across better to me if I hadn't read it immediately after the much better memoir West with the Night. But few memoirs could stand up well to that comparison.
April 30, 2021
So what do people talk about when they talk about Gore Vidal? This terrifying question (or any ambitious author or artist or human being) is the ghost hooting from the bottom of the well throughout this book. This question is never directly asked, of course - Vidal was far too shrewd for that. But, like so many giants of postwar American fiction, he had lived long enough to witness the vast cultural shift (or decline?) that was proving increasingly inhospitable to such giants.
Here is the opening paragraph to Vidal's Wikipedia page:
"Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (/vɪˈdɑːl/; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July
31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner,
epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing."
Here is the closing "Legacy" section of Vidal's Wikipedia page:
"The New York Times described him as "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile, or gotten more mileage from their talent". The Los Angeles Times said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language". The Washington Post described him as a "major writer of the modern era ... [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters".
The Guardian said that "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism, rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style". The Daily Telegraph described the writer as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him". The BBC News said that he was "one of the finest post-war American writers ... an indefatigable critic of the whole American system ... Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows; his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing."[130] In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal", the Spanish on-line magazine Ideal said that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States", and described him as a "great American novelist and essayist". In The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles, the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera described the novelist as "the enfant terrible of American culture" and that he was "one of the giants of American literature". In Gore Vidal: The Killjoy of America, the French newspaper Le Figaro said that the public intellectual Vidal was "the killjoy of America" but that he also was an "outstanding polemicist" who used words "like high-precision weapons"."
Vidal has not been dead long enough for a full appreciation or reevaluation of his work can be established (if such things are ever "established"), but there is definitely a kind of incoherence here, which I think is fair, given the lack of time and perspective. Oh but how he would smirk at "polished style of writing" and the boiler plate descriptions from the newspapers (words like "high-precision weapons").
And so, a legacy - that's it?
***
So what can a writer do about this situation. How do you secure a legacy? Is this even possible? Whose fault is this? Who let all the barbarians in the gates? Am I one of them (yeah, probably)?
The writer has to take some responsibility. Vidal reminds me of Christopher Hitchens in that they were both polemicists who loved a good debate. They were terrific writers. But debates tend to not age very well, or mutate when the characters and events go from current events into history.
***
Vidal is drawn to celebrity, his own most of all, but he is too self-aware to delude himself that an author, even a very successful one (with movies and plays to boot) will be anything but third class when it comes to American celebrity. And so we are deluged with Vidalian name-dropping throughout: Jackie O, Princess Margaret, The Bird (that's Tennessee Williams to you and me), Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, etc. Vidal is cool about this, as much as it is possible to be cool while name-dropping. And why should I complain? Vidal led an interesting, productive life, and he knew these people (although he doesn't mention it, Wikipedia claims Vidal was engaged to Joanne Woodward briefly!).
***
Vidal was uneasy - if not dismissive of - a potential legacy based on his groundbreaking exploration of sexuality and gender - Myra Breckinridge alone should put him on syllabi everywhere. But I am acquainted with a young person majoring in English at a prestigious private university and from what she tells me, pretty much anybody writing before c. 2005 is ignored in the "modern lit" classes. Maybe my sample is too narrow, but I've heard rumors from other sources that this is the case. The literary 20th century went extinct about ten years ago and Vidal with it.
In any case, Vidal doesn't want that kind of legacy, as a paragon of sexual/gender identity - he refused to be labeled as gay - stating that it is impossible to be identified by sexual preference, an attitude not popular nowadays: there are only homosexual acts, not homosexual people, he said, on several occasions. The word he uses is "homosexualist." Vidal wanted to be a man of letters in the old-fashioned sense, outside the university, free-wheeling, saying whatever he wants to a public that...that listens to old-fashioned men of letters. Think H. L. Mencken - mean and smart and on top of things. Oh my. This has been a disaster for the Big Names born around 1920 - they are old enough to remember the glory days - and Gore Vidal was glorious - but lived long enough to see it disintegrate. Always slow on the uptake, I remember my first real awakening came when I encountered Saul Bellow's last Playboy interview (May 1997) - his bitterness and dismay and despair were evident. The culture that had lionized him was now failing him. Vidal manages less bitterness than Bellow, which makes his situation more poignant. Throughout the book he touts his accomplishments, disguised as little asides - some times these are rather heartbreaking:
"In a fit of absentmindedness I said that I would serve as president of the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 1990. I usually avoid festivals, prize-givings and every sort of bureaucratic event involving the arts. I can't think why I said yes." (p. 234)
Uh huh. This book is filled with "events" of one sort or another - and this passage immediately follows a long quote from Montaigne about lying
Even sadder is Vidal's lingering yen for Camelot.
"Recently a new mystery was revealed. There is some TV footage of Jack, Jackie, and me making our entrance at a Washington horse shoe where I end up sitting to Jack's left; then there is Jackie to my left and an unknown lady behind us. Just visible, back of us, was the memorable hat of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who had been at diner in what had once been her bedroom..." (p. 206).
This opening is part of an entire chapter devoted to correcting "a lady" with proof that "Alice sat beside the president." This goes on for a couple of paragraphs, Vidal straightening out who sat next to who at the Kennedy horse show. Then a bit of ghoulish and hard to believe gossip: "She (Jackie) was also bemused by the piece of his (Jack's) skull which she wanted to put back in place." (p. 207). Bemused? Good God, they were all monsters then! Or this might be the wrong word. Who knows? Who, really, cares?
Gore Vidal first shocked me some 30 years ago with a similar bit - I forget where I read it, probably a magazine, where he said that Jackie marrying far beneath her station when she married Jack, a bootlegger's son. I thought all these people were all rich, but noble and civic-minded quasi-aristocrats who were all pretty much part of the same upper crust - an American upper crust. What a child I was! So Vidal was one of those writers who wised me up a bit, and I'll forever be grateful.
***
Reviewers, both professional and amateur have already pretty much covered all this book's blatant defects: how it rambles on, its disjunct chapters that go nowhere, the pitiful gouts of showing off. Perhaps worst of all - as already touched upon with the horse show photo, was how enthralled Vidal was by celebrity. To the point where everybody gets about fifty bonus points for just being famous. Which left me often feeling confused. Princess Margaret comes off heroic - so what Edward St. Aubyn's version of her wrong? My suspicion is that Vidal was as dazzled by Royals as he was the Kennedy's - a fulsome description of a Princess of Siam complete with one of her royal subjects salaaming comes early on in the book. I get the feeling Vidal wouldn't object to somebody salaaming at his feet. Which is part of his charm, I suppose, since his arch self-regard is tempered by what appears to me as being self-loathing.
***
Vidal starts this memoir out with his love of movies. This love is presented without a look back - they way love should be. But the seeds of his own (partial) irrelevancies are being sown. What happens if you are a novelists who actually prefers movies to reading books? In Vidal's case, you start writing for Hollywood, which is not, I think, an act of selling out, or prostitution or whatever. But it is, for the novelist, apparently disappointing - Fitzgerald comes to mind. Yeah, for once your talent will be tied to a steady paycheck, but the amount of dibbling and dabbling that goes into a script pretty much makes it a collaborative effort until that moment when the actor botches things (or if you are lucky, transforms your hybrid, stitched-together words into something somehow sublime).
***
About a year ago, I'd abandoned this review out of sloth and sadness. Vidal's my better and the only thing I got going for me is that I am still alive and he's dead. A weevil beating a dead war horse.
But I was inspired to come back to this in November 2020 because I found a copy of Vidal's book At Home, Essays 1982-1988 and it is simply masterful. The writing, the wit, the intelligence, the finely-tuned bullshit detector. This is a fine mind at the top of his game.
Some of his rather futile preoccupations are here - politics, I mean. Which he gets wrong sometimes - no, Japan did not buy up the USA and turn us into a farm. No, the USSR didn't get provoked into Armageddon by Ronald Reagan. Both were very much possibilities in 1982, according to many (I graduated high school in '82, so I recall). But Vidal's preoccupations with Hollywood and celebrity was much more in check back in the '80s. But it is all worth reading, even when his prognostications are wrong. He is exhilarating, not from time to time, but pretty much all the time.
In the 1980s, Vidal also saw the end of American literary culture. He calls out the academic creative writing industry for being the fraud that it is, a kind of Ponzi Scheme bureaucracy. The extinction of the serious reader is also noted, a real problem for such a serious writer. In 1982, alas.
So go straight to the At Home essays and save this late book for later.
Here is the opening paragraph to Vidal's Wikipedia page:
"Eugene Luther Gore Vidal (/vɪˈdɑːl/; born Eugene Louis Vidal, October 3, 1925 – July
31, 2012) was an American writer and public intellectual known for his patrician manner,
epigrammatic wit, and polished style of writing."
Here is the closing "Legacy" section of Vidal's Wikipedia page:
"The New York Times described him as "an Augustan figure who believed himself to be the last of a breed, and he was probably right. Few American writers have been more versatile, or gotten more mileage from their talent". The Los Angeles Times said that he was a literary juggernaut whose novels and essays were considered "among the most elegant in the English language". The Washington Post described him as a "major writer of the modern era ... [an] astonishingly versatile man of letters".
The Guardian said that "Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism, rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him. His fans, on the other hand, delighted in his unflagging wit and elegant style". The Daily Telegraph described the writer as "an icy iconoclast" who "delighted in chronicling what he perceived as the disintegration of civilisation around him". The BBC News said that he was "one of the finest post-war American writers ... an indefatigable critic of the whole American system ... Gore Vidal saw himself as the last of the breed of literary figures who became celebrities in their own right. Never a stranger to chat shows; his wry and witty opinions were sought after as much as his writing."[130] In "The Culture of the United States Laments the Death of Gore Vidal", the Spanish on-line magazine Ideal said that Vidal's death was a loss to the "culture of the United States", and described him as a "great American novelist and essayist". In The Writer Gore Vidal is Dead in Los Angeles, the online edition of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera described the novelist as "the enfant terrible of American culture" and that he was "one of the giants of American literature". In Gore Vidal: The Killjoy of America, the French newspaper Le Figaro said that the public intellectual Vidal was "the killjoy of America" but that he also was an "outstanding polemicist" who used words "like high-precision weapons"."
Vidal has not been dead long enough for a full appreciation or reevaluation of his work can be established (if such things are ever "established"), but there is definitely a kind of incoherence here, which I think is fair, given the lack of time and perspective. Oh but how he would smirk at "polished style of writing" and the boiler plate descriptions from the newspapers (words like "high-precision weapons").
And so, a legacy - that's it?
***
So what can a writer do about this situation. How do you secure a legacy? Is this even possible? Whose fault is this? Who let all the barbarians in the gates? Am I one of them (yeah, probably)?
The writer has to take some responsibility. Vidal reminds me of Christopher Hitchens in that they were both polemicists who loved a good debate. They were terrific writers. But debates tend to not age very well, or mutate when the characters and events go from current events into history.
***
Vidal is drawn to celebrity, his own most of all, but he is too self-aware to delude himself that an author, even a very successful one (with movies and plays to boot) will be anything but third class when it comes to American celebrity. And so we are deluged with Vidalian name-dropping throughout: Jackie O, Princess Margaret, The Bird (that's Tennessee Williams to you and me), Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, etc. Vidal is cool about this, as much as it is possible to be cool while name-dropping. And why should I complain? Vidal led an interesting, productive life, and he knew these people (although he doesn't mention it, Wikipedia claims Vidal was engaged to Joanne Woodward briefly!).
***
Vidal was uneasy - if not dismissive of - a potential legacy based on his groundbreaking exploration of sexuality and gender - Myra Breckinridge alone should put him on syllabi everywhere. But I am acquainted with a young person majoring in English at a prestigious private university and from what she tells me, pretty much anybody writing before c. 2005 is ignored in the "modern lit" classes. Maybe my sample is too narrow, but I've heard rumors from other sources that this is the case. The literary 20th century went extinct about ten years ago and Vidal with it.
In any case, Vidal doesn't want that kind of legacy, as a paragon of sexual/gender identity - he refused to be labeled as gay - stating that it is impossible to be identified by sexual preference, an attitude not popular nowadays: there are only homosexual acts, not homosexual people, he said, on several occasions. The word he uses is "homosexualist." Vidal wanted to be a man of letters in the old-fashioned sense, outside the university, free-wheeling, saying whatever he wants to a public that...that listens to old-fashioned men of letters. Think H. L. Mencken - mean and smart and on top of things. Oh my. This has been a disaster for the Big Names born around 1920 - they are old enough to remember the glory days - and Gore Vidal was glorious - but lived long enough to see it disintegrate. Always slow on the uptake, I remember my first real awakening came when I encountered Saul Bellow's last Playboy interview (May 1997) - his bitterness and dismay and despair were evident. The culture that had lionized him was now failing him. Vidal manages less bitterness than Bellow, which makes his situation more poignant. Throughout the book he touts his accomplishments, disguised as little asides - some times these are rather heartbreaking:
"In a fit of absentmindedness I said that I would serve as president of the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 1990. I usually avoid festivals, prize-givings and every sort of bureaucratic event involving the arts. I can't think why I said yes." (p. 234)
Uh huh. This book is filled with "events" of one sort or another - and this passage immediately follows a long quote from Montaigne about lying
Even sadder is Vidal's lingering yen for Camelot.
"Recently a new mystery was revealed. There is some TV footage of Jack, Jackie, and me making our entrance at a Washington horse shoe where I end up sitting to Jack's left; then there is Jackie to my left and an unknown lady behind us. Just visible, back of us, was the memorable hat of Alice Roosevelt Longworth who had been at diner in what had once been her bedroom..." (p. 206).
This opening is part of an entire chapter devoted to correcting "a lady" with proof that "Alice sat beside the president." This goes on for a couple of paragraphs, Vidal straightening out who sat next to who at the Kennedy horse show. Then a bit of ghoulish and hard to believe gossip: "She (Jackie) was also bemused by the piece of his (Jack's) skull which she wanted to put back in place." (p. 207). Bemused? Good God, they were all monsters then! Or this might be the wrong word. Who knows? Who, really, cares?
Gore Vidal first shocked me some 30 years ago with a similar bit - I forget where I read it, probably a magazine, where he said that Jackie marrying far beneath her station when she married Jack, a bootlegger's son. I thought all these people were all rich, but noble and civic-minded quasi-aristocrats who were all pretty much part of the same upper crust - an American upper crust. What a child I was! So Vidal was one of those writers who wised me up a bit, and I'll forever be grateful.
***
Reviewers, both professional and amateur have already pretty much covered all this book's blatant defects: how it rambles on, its disjunct chapters that go nowhere, the pitiful gouts of showing off. Perhaps worst of all - as already touched upon with the horse show photo, was how enthralled Vidal was by celebrity. To the point where everybody gets about fifty bonus points for just being famous. Which left me often feeling confused. Princess Margaret comes off heroic - so what Edward St. Aubyn's version of her wrong? My suspicion is that Vidal was as dazzled by Royals as he was the Kennedy's - a fulsome description of a Princess of Siam complete with one of her royal subjects salaaming comes early on in the book. I get the feeling Vidal wouldn't object to somebody salaaming at his feet. Which is part of his charm, I suppose, since his arch self-regard is tempered by what appears to me as being self-loathing.
***
Vidal starts this memoir out with his love of movies. This love is presented without a look back - they way love should be. But the seeds of his own (partial) irrelevancies are being sown. What happens if you are a novelists who actually prefers movies to reading books? In Vidal's case, you start writing for Hollywood, which is not, I think, an act of selling out, or prostitution or whatever. But it is, for the novelist, apparently disappointing - Fitzgerald comes to mind. Yeah, for once your talent will be tied to a steady paycheck, but the amount of dibbling and dabbling that goes into a script pretty much makes it a collaborative effort until that moment when the actor botches things (or if you are lucky, transforms your hybrid, stitched-together words into something somehow sublime).
***
About a year ago, I'd abandoned this review out of sloth and sadness. Vidal's my better and the only thing I got going for me is that I am still alive and he's dead. A weevil beating a dead war horse.
But I was inspired to come back to this in November 2020 because I found a copy of Vidal's book At Home, Essays 1982-1988 and it is simply masterful. The writing, the wit, the intelligence, the finely-tuned bullshit detector. This is a fine mind at the top of his game.
Some of his rather futile preoccupations are here - politics, I mean. Which he gets wrong sometimes - no, Japan did not buy up the USA and turn us into a farm. No, the USSR didn't get provoked into Armageddon by Ronald Reagan. Both were very much possibilities in 1982, according to many (I graduated high school in '82, so I recall). But Vidal's preoccupations with Hollywood and celebrity was much more in check back in the '80s. But it is all worth reading, even when his prognostications are wrong. He is exhilarating, not from time to time, but pretty much all the time.
In the 1980s, Vidal also saw the end of American literary culture. He calls out the academic creative writing industry for being the fraud that it is, a kind of Ponzi Scheme bureaucracy. The extinction of the serious reader is also noted, a real problem for such a serious writer. In 1982, alas.
So go straight to the At Home essays and save this late book for later.
August 17, 2012
I wrote a full review, but when I tried to post it, it was somehow absorbed by the internet gremlins. Argh. So here is another try.
"Point to Point Navigation" was sent to me by a friend with whom I exchange books that we have read and feel the other might enjoy (or challenge the other to enjoy!). Before she sent me this book, I had no sense of Gore Vidal other than as a famous novelist, politician, and sometime actor whose literary work with whom I was not familiar. I do have a memory of seeing his appearances on the intellectual-minded, debating TV shows popular in the 1960s and into the early 1970s (and I SO miss that type of "reality TV" as opposed to, say, "Real Housewives" of ANY city).
I was hooked from the moment I began reading. I haven't read Vidal's autobiography "Palimpsest" - or any other work by him - but I take "Point to Point Navigation" to be all the yummy extra details that would have added too much distraction and bulk to "Palimpsest." There was no particular timeline and the memories seemed to be scattered. But that is fine with me. I enjoyed Vidal's jumping from memory to memory. And since this was written at the end of his writing career as well as the end of his life, I find myself eager for every memory he wants to share. This man has had such an extraordinary life - being the grandson of a politician, and thus being close friends with other politicians, as well as being a novelist and screenplay writer AND acting in movies. Hello? Who wouldn't hang on to every juicy detail he has to give?
I did find lacking the details about Howard - although I find it very telling that he's sarcastic about the PC (Politically Correct) world who refer to Howard as his "partner." He didn't say, though, how he would have preferred for his relationship to Howard to be declared to a homophobic world. I also wanted more details about his mother, Nina. Gore said that he was surprised at the number of people who could not understand why he completely cut her out from his life, especially in this age when mothers are put on a pedestal. I totally understand where he is coming from, but would have liked more detail into why he feels this way. Maybe that's an insight given in "Palimpsest"?!
I was especially fascinated by Vidal's various conspiracy theories. I came away from this book believing most of them. Is he that convincing a writer, or are his theories compelling because they are true? I don't know. But I do know that his Mafia-related theory behind JFK's death leaves me shaken.
The book is rambling at times, and the last couple of chapters are scattershot. But altogether, it's a collection of memories of a man who has led a fascinating life, and I was spellbound!
"Point to Point Navigation" was sent to me by a friend with whom I exchange books that we have read and feel the other might enjoy (or challenge the other to enjoy!). Before she sent me this book, I had no sense of Gore Vidal other than as a famous novelist, politician, and sometime actor whose literary work with whom I was not familiar. I do have a memory of seeing his appearances on the intellectual-minded, debating TV shows popular in the 1960s and into the early 1970s (and I SO miss that type of "reality TV" as opposed to, say, "Real Housewives" of ANY city).
I was hooked from the moment I began reading. I haven't read Vidal's autobiography "Palimpsest" - or any other work by him - but I take "Point to Point Navigation" to be all the yummy extra details that would have added too much distraction and bulk to "Palimpsest." There was no particular timeline and the memories seemed to be scattered. But that is fine with me. I enjoyed Vidal's jumping from memory to memory. And since this was written at the end of his writing career as well as the end of his life, I find myself eager for every memory he wants to share. This man has had such an extraordinary life - being the grandson of a politician, and thus being close friends with other politicians, as well as being a novelist and screenplay writer AND acting in movies. Hello? Who wouldn't hang on to every juicy detail he has to give?
I did find lacking the details about Howard - although I find it very telling that he's sarcastic about the PC (Politically Correct) world who refer to Howard as his "partner." He didn't say, though, how he would have preferred for his relationship to Howard to be declared to a homophobic world. I also wanted more details about his mother, Nina. Gore said that he was surprised at the number of people who could not understand why he completely cut her out from his life, especially in this age when mothers are put on a pedestal. I totally understand where he is coming from, but would have liked more detail into why he feels this way. Maybe that's an insight given in "Palimpsest"?!
I was especially fascinated by Vidal's various conspiracy theories. I came away from this book believing most of them. Is he that convincing a writer, or are his theories compelling because they are true? I don't know. But I do know that his Mafia-related theory behind JFK's death leaves me shaken.
The book is rambling at times, and the last couple of chapters are scattershot. But altogether, it's a collection of memories of a man who has led a fascinating life, and I was spellbound!
December 25, 2014
This isn't a chronological biography or memoir but really just a collection of mostly short chapters with Vidal telling various and often funny anecdotes about writers such as Truman Capote and Tennessee (The Bird) Williams and other famous people such as Rudolph Nureyev and Princess Margaret. I listened to the audiobook version which has the added benefit of Vidal doing his Capote and Williams imitation voices and that of others such as Jack Kennedy.
It seemed to jump the shark when the climax is built around Vidal advocating for the mob-hit / CIA cover-up version of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy and using as his source Lamar Waldron's Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK. That seemed to be the totally wrong note to go out on.
His earlier thoughts on mortality and the passing of his companion Howard Austen were more moving.
It seemed to jump the shark when the climax is built around Vidal advocating for the mob-hit / CIA cover-up version of the Kennedy assassination conspiracy and using as his source Lamar Waldron's Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, the Plan for a Coup in Cuba, and the Murder of JFK. That seemed to be the totally wrong note to go out on.
His earlier thoughts on mortality and the passing of his companion Howard Austen were more moving.
March 1, 2009
I became interested in Gore Vidal when Barry and I stayed at Hotel Palumbo in Ravello and I saw Vidal's villa perched on a cliff overlooking the gulf of Amalfi.
I am amazed at how much I have in common with an 83 year old gay man from a prominent southern political family. I obviously don't agree with everything Gore believes but I love the way he has lived his life.
His writing is full of references to great writers and philosophers from history, many of who he has known.
His vocabulary is extensive and I appreciate learning new words. He shares how Faulkner went to his grave believing that coeval meant evil(!).
He shares so candidly about his life yet sets boundaries around things that are sacred to him, like his 50 year partner relationship with a Jewish writer, Howard Austen.
Great book for those interested in popular culture from the 40's to today.
I am amazed at how much I have in common with an 83 year old gay man from a prominent southern political family. I obviously don't agree with everything Gore believes but I love the way he has lived his life.
His writing is full of references to great writers and philosophers from history, many of who he has known.
His vocabulary is extensive and I appreciate learning new words. He shares how Faulkner went to his grave believing that coeval meant evil(!).
He shares so candidly about his life yet sets boundaries around things that are sacred to him, like his 50 year partner relationship with a Jewish writer, Howard Austen.
Great book for those interested in popular culture from the 40's to today.
May 31, 2014
This is the 2nd time I’ve listened and read him. His voice and words captivate me. His wit and observations command my attention. I feel what I call his pedigree…for lack of better word is amazing too…His grandfather was a senator, his father the founder of two airlines…his family and their friends were all the major players of his time….Amelia Earhart, the Roosevelts, politicians, show biz …a cousin to Jackie Kennedy. He also ran for office and even beat Jack K…in a race somewhere…. I’m compelled to read more of his books and view his movies. A world traveler, actor….I wish I found his work sooner….!
4/9/2009
4th time audio 5/15/14
4/9/2009
4th time audio 5/15/14
October 11, 2010
I found this to be a fascinating book. I listened to the audio version read by the author which made it even better because of the accents and because there was no doubt when he was being ironic. He has been everywhere and done everything and is related to all kinds of people. He also has a very amusing, and unfortunately true, outlook on American politics.
Definitely worth listening to. It is semi-episodic and jumps around in time so it lends itself to listening in short snatches like a commute without losing context.
Definitely worth listening to. It is semi-episodic and jumps around in time so it lends itself to listening in short snatches like a commute without losing context.
July 29, 2011
Only for the hardcore Gore Vidal fan. (me) Half of the book is his trying to get even with his critics - and that part gets old fast. If you're reading the book, your already on his side. The other half is the story of the death of his life partner which I thought was beautifully written.
June 23, 2012
The most touching thing about this book is his description of the loss of his partner of 50 years. He handles the loss in the simplest and most heart-renchingly exposed way - it's a short scene worth reading the entire book just to encounter.
August 10, 2015
I listened to the author read this memoir. Very narcissistic man. I have never read his books but have heard of him so was interested to find out a little about him. I don't think I will bother with any of his books.
March 19, 2019
Great writer. Great memoir.Great read.
" When my mother was asked why,after three famous marriages,she did not try for a fourth she observed."My first husband had three balls.My second two.My third,one. Even i know enough not to press my luck."
" When my mother was asked why,after three famous marriages,she did not try for a fourth she observed."My first husband had three balls.My second two.My third,one. Even i know enough not to press my luck."
December 18, 2016
Urbane truth speaker of the American Empire
February 4, 2018
Gore Vidal laments the death of literature, the novel in particular. He used to be a famous novelist, but movies have taken over and writers are overlooked. Our yuuuuuge president claims to have never read a book. Four hours of TV a day make him happy. Vidal wrote this in 2006 and died before the 2016 election. He must be spinning in his grave. Vidal began reading vociferously at the age of six. It was 1931, and he also loved movies. West Point was his birthplace and his father, a military man and his mom a hard drinking woman who married two more times. Her second husband was wealthy and Gore had white servants, a sign of real money. A third generation atheist, Vidal believed that films gave us a false sense of immortality. I share in both his lack of faith and love of movies. His family knew Huey Long, the populist governor of Louisiana who built schools and hospitals with tax dollars from Standard Oil. Long was killed as he prepared to run against FDR in 1936. Vidal reminisces about his many appearances on the Tonight Show with Johnny Caron. He was impressed by the comedian’s political savvy. The name dropping continues; JFK and Jackie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart were all friends of the family. His biting sense of humor is evident. A brief story involving Pope Pius XII is my favorite. Vidal writes that after his death, the Pontiff’s embalming seemed to have been done by an amateur taxidermist. First, Pius turned emerald green, and then, in the summer heat, he exploded a holy combustion. Tears of laughter are rolling down my face. Catholic readers will truly understand the irony. How about an immaculate implosion? Tennessee Williams was a life long friend, especially as a letter writer who encouraged Vidal to find his inner voice. Williams’s comic genius was on par with Mark Twain, Vidal writes. Hollywood called in 1956, and he wrote his first screenplay, “A Catered Affair,” starring Bette Davis. He met Francis Ford Coppola on a movie set and introduced him to French wine and Francis later bought a vineyard in California. They co-wrote the script for “Is Paris Burning.” He appeared as himself, using improvised dialogue in Fellini’s “Roma.” The director despised scripts. After graduating from Exeter, Vidal joined the army instead of attending Harvard like many of his classmates. He remembers WBAI radio here in New York where I was fortunate enough to hear him broadcast his wit and wisdom on numerous occasions. Another funny anecdote, as his friend Tennessee Williams visited Vidal’s adopted city of Rome for an audience with the Pope. The Vicar of Christ was unavailable and Williams instead met the “black pope,” a nickname for the head of the Jesuit order. To Vidal’s astonishment, William’s had converted to Catholicism. T.P. Gore was a blind senator from Oklahoma and the young Gore Vidal would read to his grandfather every day including the complete works of Mark Twain, a personal hero and fellow skeptic. The family tree on the Vidal side was Swiss, German, and Catholic, until a land dispute and loss of property to the Church resulted in a long time disdain for organized religion. The British Gore ancestors were split as mostly Methodists and Baptists. T.P. Gore was a complete non-believer. Vidal maintained a good relationship with his father but had no contact with his mother for the last 20 years of her life. An unexplained rift with Bobby Kennedy caused Jackie O to ignore him after JFK’s death. Vidal lived with his partner, Harold, from 1950 until his death in 2003. They had a platonic relationship with each having intimate encounters with others. The book ends with a plausible theory regarding the JFK assassination. The former bootlegger, Joseph Kennedy had made a deal with mobsters which was broken by his son Bobby working as Attorney General. RFK’s relentless pursuit of crime bosses led to JFK’s death. In the age of President Tweet, I miss Vidal more than ever. Point to Point is never boring and I highly recommend it.
February 8, 2025
Looking for some lighter reading I was rewarded by the wit and elegance of Gore Vidal’s prose which here adds to his previous memoir to cover the years 1964 to 2006. It is like a wine-assisted, long series of conversations with a close friend over several weeks and nights. Of course there’s some delicious gossip and scandal as well as some serious criticism of various governments of the USA including Nixon, who, unknown to me featured in one of Vidal’s six plays, An Evening with Richard Nixon.
I was almost completely ignorant of his 24 novels, previously brought to my attention only when they became screenplays, for example, Myra Breckinridge. Of his many screenplays such as Ben Hur, I didn’t know abut his involvement with Fellini and Vidal’s mostly ignored script for Casanova (the fate of many film-script writers). Other screen writers mentioned included Dalton Trumbo, ‘who fell afoul of congressional Red hunters with his sharp responses to their deeply un-American catechisms’. Vidal’s support for him after Hollywood blacklisted him, included Vidal’s only stage experience in the play Trumbo and his pleasure when Trumbo in old age was finally given the Academy Award for one of his many pseudonyms used by the few brave Americans who employed his work secretly.
Vidal and Howard, his partner lived many years in Rome as did Trumbo whose European films were accredited to him. Pope John Paul II came in for some deserved scorn and a marvellous joke attributed to the Jesuits on his reactionary policies along with a scandalous secret about the lying in state of Pope Pius XII whose corpse at least, seems to have got poetic justice.
Vidal’s language, reminiscent of Alexandre Pope takes down cant and pretension, for example, on the marriage of Grace Kelly to become Princess Grace of Monaco, replacing a dying screen career with a new fame. Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t escape when, she heard that Vidal was staying at Windsor Lodge at the invitation of Princess Margaret (PM), ‘the Queen’s girlish voice was replaced by the voice of Lady Bracknell: “My room!” She boomed, Then she fled across the lawn.’
The Kennedy’s and their involvement with mobsters from Cuba and elsewhere are revealed, including the plot to assassinate Castro and a plan to mount another attack on the island after the failure of the Bay Of Pigs folly. Vidal dismisses Earl Warren’s report into the assassination and remains convinced that Oswald was the patsy and Jack Ruby was CIA; as usual, he was never afraid take up unpopular opinions. In 1978, he famously spoke at the Arlington St church in Boston before 1,500 in the audience to defend the 24 men who had been arrested at Revere Beach during a campaign by police ‘cracking down on same-sexualists’ (the police wording). The chief justice of Massachusetts was in the audience and forced to resign. In answer to Vidal’s letter of support, the judge quoted Solzhenitsyn ‘…hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else is this disease rejected in the press.’ We share those times again.
In his concluding chapter, he writes: ‘Irony has never had an easy time in our American version of English.’ Much of his time in public life was spent as an ironist so it is fitting that his last reference was to Alexander Pope and a quotation of the last Ines of The Dunciad.
‘Lo thy dead empire, CHAOS is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness buries all.’
I was almost completely ignorant of his 24 novels, previously brought to my attention only when they became screenplays, for example, Myra Breckinridge. Of his many screenplays such as Ben Hur, I didn’t know abut his involvement with Fellini and Vidal’s mostly ignored script for Casanova (the fate of many film-script writers). Other screen writers mentioned included Dalton Trumbo, ‘who fell afoul of congressional Red hunters with his sharp responses to their deeply un-American catechisms’. Vidal’s support for him after Hollywood blacklisted him, included Vidal’s only stage experience in the play Trumbo and his pleasure when Trumbo in old age was finally given the Academy Award for one of his many pseudonyms used by the few brave Americans who employed his work secretly.
Vidal and Howard, his partner lived many years in Rome as did Trumbo whose European films were accredited to him. Pope John Paul II came in for some deserved scorn and a marvellous joke attributed to the Jesuits on his reactionary policies along with a scandalous secret about the lying in state of Pope Pius XII whose corpse at least, seems to have got poetic justice.
Vidal’s language, reminiscent of Alexandre Pope takes down cant and pretension, for example, on the marriage of Grace Kelly to become Princess Grace of Monaco, replacing a dying screen career with a new fame. Queen Elizabeth II doesn’t escape when, she heard that Vidal was staying at Windsor Lodge at the invitation of Princess Margaret (PM), ‘the Queen’s girlish voice was replaced by the voice of Lady Bracknell: “My room!” She boomed, Then she fled across the lawn.’
The Kennedy’s and their involvement with mobsters from Cuba and elsewhere are revealed, including the plot to assassinate Castro and a plan to mount another attack on the island after the failure of the Bay Of Pigs folly. Vidal dismisses Earl Warren’s report into the assassination and remains convinced that Oswald was the patsy and Jack Ruby was CIA; as usual, he was never afraid take up unpopular opinions. In 1978, he famously spoke at the Arlington St church in Boston before 1,500 in the audience to defend the 24 men who had been arrested at Revere Beach during a campaign by police ‘cracking down on same-sexualists’ (the police wording). The chief justice of Massachusetts was in the audience and forced to resign. In answer to Vidal’s letter of support, the judge quoted Solzhenitsyn ‘…hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else is this disease rejected in the press.’ We share those times again.
In his concluding chapter, he writes: ‘Irony has never had an easy time in our American version of English.’ Much of his time in public life was spent as an ironist so it is fitting that his last reference was to Alexander Pope and a quotation of the last Ines of The Dunciad.
‘Lo thy dead empire, CHAOS is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness buries all.’
February 13, 2022
The last decade of Vidal's life was very sad, and quite tragic. Gore's partner of 50 years fought a harrowing battle with cancer and then died, suddenly, in the home in which they hoped to live out their last days, having abandoned their Italian villa when Gore's lack of mobility made it an impossibility. According to a gossipy (almost criminally irresponsible) story in the NYT, Gore responded by getting drunker, meaner, and more paranoid (in addition to being diagnosed, eventually, with a form of dementia). Of course, as Hitchens also detailed around this time--and as many observers could see--Gore's politics became increasingly conspiratorial as the madness of Bush-era politics finally pushed him over the edge and turned him into less of a devil's advocate and more of a ranter and a raver about Bush's alleged complicity in 9/11 and Oswald's innocence. Gore, according to Burr Steers, ceased to be Gore and, in fact, aside from this memoir, the last dozen years of his life were minimally productive ones, which is unusual for such an indefatigably prolific writer.
This book, published in the wake of his partner, Howard Austen's, death, came after his break with Hitchens and followed several vaguely trutherist tracts about 9/11 and the sins of our empire. I was reluctant to read it for obvious reasons as it received mixed reviews and I wanted to avoid seeing the beginning of the end of one of our greatest public intellectuals.
Fortunately, my concerns were (mostly) overblown. True, this memoir is not a flawless work of craft like its predecessor, Palimpsest. Instead, we get a much more digressive, sometimes rambling, collection of stories, anecdotes and the occasional rant. Even so, we are still talking about the life of Gore Vidal, one of the most relentlessly interesting figures of the 20th century. As one other reviewer noted, the effect is similar to a series of reminiscences in front of a fire, as Gore's idiosyncratic memoir traces random neural connections in his fading memory banks. The title is quite fitting, as we see Vidal feel his way forward, guiding his reader through his recollections of the last 40 years or so.
There are many great anecdotes herein, even if it never congeals to anything like a properly chronological memoir. Unlike other works, there are also vast sections where the mask falls away, and we see a more vulnerable side of Gore, as when he details the sickness and death of his partner. or when he reflects on the wasted potential of his friend, Princess Margaret. There's a lot of good stories about Capote, and Fellini, Paul Newman and some others. Also a lot of musing about death and the author's legacy.
Of course, there are also some bizarre detours--gratuitous attacks against his biographer, random score-settling with this or that literary critic, and, in the final section, long excerpts (peppered with critical asides) from works about Vidal. Puzzlingly, the book then concludes with Gore's emphatic insistence that Oswald was innocent.
So, all in all, yes it is not a perfect work and, in some ways, it is a sad one because it foreshadows the decline and death that was to come only a few years later. But Vidal is still Vidal, and when he's on--and he is for much of this book--there is no better storyteller and essayist. Probably only recommended for Vidal completists, but I enjoyed this one in spite of (or perhaps because of) the flaws.
This book, published in the wake of his partner, Howard Austen's, death, came after his break with Hitchens and followed several vaguely trutherist tracts about 9/11 and the sins of our empire. I was reluctant to read it for obvious reasons as it received mixed reviews and I wanted to avoid seeing the beginning of the end of one of our greatest public intellectuals.
Fortunately, my concerns were (mostly) overblown. True, this memoir is not a flawless work of craft like its predecessor, Palimpsest. Instead, we get a much more digressive, sometimes rambling, collection of stories, anecdotes and the occasional rant. Even so, we are still talking about the life of Gore Vidal, one of the most relentlessly interesting figures of the 20th century. As one other reviewer noted, the effect is similar to a series of reminiscences in front of a fire, as Gore's idiosyncratic memoir traces random neural connections in his fading memory banks. The title is quite fitting, as we see Vidal feel his way forward, guiding his reader through his recollections of the last 40 years or so.
There are many great anecdotes herein, even if it never congeals to anything like a properly chronological memoir. Unlike other works, there are also vast sections where the mask falls away, and we see a more vulnerable side of Gore, as when he details the sickness and death of his partner. or when he reflects on the wasted potential of his friend, Princess Margaret. There's a lot of good stories about Capote, and Fellini, Paul Newman and some others. Also a lot of musing about death and the author's legacy.
Of course, there are also some bizarre detours--gratuitous attacks against his biographer, random score-settling with this or that literary critic, and, in the final section, long excerpts (peppered with critical asides) from works about Vidal. Puzzlingly, the book then concludes with Gore's emphatic insistence that Oswald was innocent.
So, all in all, yes it is not a perfect work and, in some ways, it is a sad one because it foreshadows the decline and death that was to come only a few years later. But Vidal is still Vidal, and when he's on--and he is for much of this book--there is no better storyteller and essayist. Probably only recommended for Vidal completists, but I enjoyed this one in spite of (or perhaps because of) the flaws.
January 1, 2020
The title of this second volume of GV's memoirs refers to the practice of navigating a ship without a compass, which could refer to many things. Over the course of this late-life memoir, which was written just 12 years or so after the first one, he says it was originally to have been called 'Between the obituaries', which gives a clue as to the core themes.
While 'Palimpsest' was quite well structured, as well as vibrant, gossipy and often very funny, this volume is quite downbeat and flits around in time randomly, moving back and forth to the pre-1964 era (that of his 10-year literary ‘blackout’ after his first big success) and the post-1964 era, which is the one this book was due to cover in principle (being the era of his novel-writing renaissance, after a period of writing for films). The book also repeats some of the key stories about his childhood and some of the best anecdotes from the first volume, e.g. the one about Grace Kelly’s retirement at her peak from Hollywood and his landing a plane designed by his father at aged 10. This seems to indicate a lack of editing - and he does say that in the book that he does not like much intervention from publishers - and/or a failing memory on his part.
Generally, it is all a little listless and meandering - possibly due to his grieving for his long-term partner Howard, whose death is discussed quite early on in the book (and who was buried in the same cemetery as his first-love Jimmie Trimble, whose presence dominated the first volume); he himself is also getting old and ailing slightly and would die within 7 years of the book's appearance.
He is clearly struggling with the grief but still finds the energy to aim some darts at his biographer Fred Kaplan, and some others (Capote still comes out badly). He also continues to critique the American empire, and makes some prescient remarks about how the 2000 election farrago and Iraq war had softened up the people's resistance to lying by politicians (‘more than ever, the great whopping lie is seriously in vogue’). More presciently still, he notes near the end of the book, when storms put out his electricity in Italy, that climate change is the ‘principal fact of our lives’ (this in 2005, before Donald Trump had even thought about denying climate change perhaps).
Just before the end of the book, there is a strange chapter about irony and the JFK assassination, wherein he claims, with little evidence (other than another book), that the Kennedys had planned to use the mafia to assassinate Castro (whom they hated), but they then used the secrecy of this plan to take out the president himself. Not sure why this is relevant to his memoir, but it does in a way symbolise the random and dream-like quality of this second volume of freely-associated memoirs, which shows a writer at the end of his life, struggling with grief and mortality.
While 'Palimpsest' was quite well structured, as well as vibrant, gossipy and often very funny, this volume is quite downbeat and flits around in time randomly, moving back and forth to the pre-1964 era (that of his 10-year literary ‘blackout’ after his first big success) and the post-1964 era, which is the one this book was due to cover in principle (being the era of his novel-writing renaissance, after a period of writing for films). The book also repeats some of the key stories about his childhood and some of the best anecdotes from the first volume, e.g. the one about Grace Kelly’s retirement at her peak from Hollywood and his landing a plane designed by his father at aged 10. This seems to indicate a lack of editing - and he does say that in the book that he does not like much intervention from publishers - and/or a failing memory on his part.
Generally, it is all a little listless and meandering - possibly due to his grieving for his long-term partner Howard, whose death is discussed quite early on in the book (and who was buried in the same cemetery as his first-love Jimmie Trimble, whose presence dominated the first volume); he himself is also getting old and ailing slightly and would die within 7 years of the book's appearance.
He is clearly struggling with the grief but still finds the energy to aim some darts at his biographer Fred Kaplan, and some others (Capote still comes out badly). He also continues to critique the American empire, and makes some prescient remarks about how the 2000 election farrago and Iraq war had softened up the people's resistance to lying by politicians (‘more than ever, the great whopping lie is seriously in vogue’). More presciently still, he notes near the end of the book, when storms put out his electricity in Italy, that climate change is the ‘principal fact of our lives’ (this in 2005, before Donald Trump had even thought about denying climate change perhaps).
Just before the end of the book, there is a strange chapter about irony and the JFK assassination, wherein he claims, with little evidence (other than another book), that the Kennedys had planned to use the mafia to assassinate Castro (whom they hated), but they then used the secrecy of this plan to take out the president himself. Not sure why this is relevant to his memoir, but it does in a way symbolise the random and dream-like quality of this second volume of freely-associated memoirs, which shows a writer at the end of his life, struggling with grief and mortality.
January 2, 2023
"Point To Point Navigation" is Gore Vidal's second memoir; his first being "Palimpsest," which I have not read but is widely critically acclaimed. He was a renowned and controversial public intellectual, author across multiple genres, failed political candidate, actor, world traveler, expat and friend or acquaintance to many of the world's best known, most heralded celebrities in entertainment, politics, literature and high society; including for starters, Greta Garbo, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie & Jack Kennedy, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Tennessee Williams, Princess Margaret, Rudolph Nureyev, Amelia Earhart, to name just a few. The list seems endless. Equally glamorous are the many global locales where he resided with his partner, Howard, of 51 years - with much of that time spent in Italy.
Of course Vidal's personal life began quite extraordinarily. He was the grandson of a US Senator, raised in Washington, DC, with much of his youth spent within the Senate chambers alongside his grandfather. His renowned airplane pilot and aeronautics pioneer father created two major airlines and was extremely close with Ms. Earhart, among other aeronautical glitterati of the time.
I found much of the book disjointed, lacking a clear order, and at times a bit droll but it's well worth the read to understand the breadth of this exceptional life. Vidal's little tidbits on family members and the extraordinary people he met, along with his expat tales, are well worth the read. His commentary on society, sexuality, politics, art, media, classism, education, literature, climate change, war, etc, are at times revelatory and examples of just how current he was at every stage of his life. He personalizes historical references and makes them interesting and relatable. I highly recommend this book to lovers of history, individuality and the courage to live life loudly with vigor and valor every step of the way.
Of course Vidal's personal life began quite extraordinarily. He was the grandson of a US Senator, raised in Washington, DC, with much of his youth spent within the Senate chambers alongside his grandfather. His renowned airplane pilot and aeronautics pioneer father created two major airlines and was extremely close with Ms. Earhart, among other aeronautical glitterati of the time.
I found much of the book disjointed, lacking a clear order, and at times a bit droll but it's well worth the read to understand the breadth of this exceptional life. Vidal's little tidbits on family members and the extraordinary people he met, along with his expat tales, are well worth the read. His commentary on society, sexuality, politics, art, media, classism, education, literature, climate change, war, etc, are at times revelatory and examples of just how current he was at every stage of his life. He personalizes historical references and makes them interesting and relatable. I highly recommend this book to lovers of history, individuality and the courage to live life loudly with vigor and valor every step of the way.
November 4, 2023
Gore Vidal fue un intelectual, escritor, ensayista, guionista y periodista estadounidense. "Navegación a la vista" es la segunda parte de su autobiografía, escrita ya siendo un octogenario y tras la muerte de su pareja durante los últimos cincuenta años, el escritor Howard Auster.
Ya de vuelta de todo, relata recuerdos y anécdotas en forma de pequeños ensayos, como si estuviésemos conversando con él, por lo que cae en algunas repeticiones. Hay mucho de su conocido egocentrismo pero también muestras de su aguda ironía, conocimiento y elegancia. Tuvo una vida intensa y se codeó con lo más granado del panorama social internacional, tanto del mundo de la política, como de la literatura, el cine o la televisión. Críticas feroces a Truman Capote, las políticas norteamericanas (siempre próximo a los demócratas) y anécdotas con los Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Greta Garbo, Fellini y un largo etcétera. Una lectura muy disfrutona.
Ya de vuelta de todo, relata recuerdos y anécdotas en forma de pequeños ensayos, como si estuviésemos conversando con él, por lo que cae en algunas repeticiones. Hay mucho de su conocido egocentrismo pero también muestras de su aguda ironía, conocimiento y elegancia. Tuvo una vida intensa y se codeó con lo más granado del panorama social internacional, tanto del mundo de la política, como de la literatura, el cine o la televisión. Críticas feroces a Truman Capote, las políticas norteamericanas (siempre próximo a los demócratas) y anécdotas con los Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Greta Garbo, Fellini y un largo etcétera. Una lectura muy disfrutona.
May 18, 2017
"Money is now a Great Wall of China separating American rich from poor, a division that is beginning to seem as eternal as the Great Wall itself." Deze opmerking, te samen met veel andere scherpe observaties en 'bon mots' over politiek, schrijverij, kunst, vrienden, vijanden, randfiguren, maken deze memoires van Gore Vidal bijzonder interessant. Vidal is geboren uit en leefde te midden van een heel gezelschap dat er toe deed in het naoorlogse Amerika tot zijn dood in 2006. Zijn ironie en eruditie maken het bovendien erg prettig om te lezen.
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