Palimpsest
A memoir organises a life as social evidence, placing wit, rank and sexual candour under the pressure of what the argument cannot contain: the grief that outlasts every performance of detachment.
406 pages · Paperback · Abacus · August 1996
Permission without belonging
Gore Vidal's Palimpsest organises a life as social evidence: who performed, who lied, who held rank, and what proximity to power actually cost. For a young gay reader in the late 1990s, at an age when style could feel like rescue, it arrived as a revelation: a who's who written by a man standing close enough to see the powder on the faces, with the sentence already prepared. Often a funny one.
The book still dazzles for that reason. Its gossip has architecture. Vidal does not scatter names for glitter. He arranges them as evidence. Kennedy, Jackie, Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood: the post-war theatre of literary and political life appears under social examination — who performs, who lies, who has merely inherited a place near power. The memoir's title supplies the method. A palimpsest is a surface written over, with older marks still showing beneath. Vidal writes his life in that form. A room at Merrywood carries childhood, Kennedy mythology, family failure, sexual memory and the dead boy who never leaves the book.
Vidal begins with suspicion. Memoir, for him, is already a "tissue of lies," though the phrase carries pleasure as much as warning. He knows memory edits, that people revise themselves, that he is doing the same. The pleasure of Palimpsest lies in watching a writer make performance part of the record. His bitchiness is not decorative. It is judgement in social form. He classifies people by letting their own conduct expose them.
He did not plead. Vidal treats same-sex desire with cold intelligence, historical confidence and comic nerve, not as a wounded petitioner seeking tolerance but as a fact of appetite: sexual flexibility, he argues, is common among young men, and guilt is a middle-class disorder from which people with sufficient power are simply exempt. It belonged to the long traffic of vanity, need and memory. For that young gay reader, the force was specific. It made shame look provincial.
The permission was also instruction in a particular kind of damage. Vidal's position — that there are no homosexual people, only homosexual acts — can free a reader from the pressure of category. It can also be adopted as justification: a ready-made intellectual argument that lets a young gay man avoid the harder work of self-identification. Gay politics could seem too earnest beside his patrician contempt. Vulnerability could seem like bad style. A reader could take from him poise, wit and sexual defiance, then use his argument to keep community at arm's length without recognising what that distance was costing.
The memoir is less controlled than Vidal's theories. Jimmie Trimble is the place where the argument fails. Vidal may avoid the word love, saying he does not know what other people mean by it, but Palimpsest keeps returning to Jimmie with a force the prose cannot discipline. He is the "unfinished business" around which Vidal's memory turns. The account is restrained, but restraint does not reduce the feeling. It intensifies it. What Vidal argues about sex and what the memoir does with grief are different books sharing the same pages.
Childhood trained the method. The family material is not background but a first education in power: mothers, stepfathers, senators, money, marriages and schools as the original political order. The private house is already public theatre. Vidal does not criticise American power from outside. He writes from inside its manners, and his system of social classification, the portraits, the cruelty, the wit arranged as judgement, is what that education produced.
That closeness gives the memoir its authority and its danger. He saw the rooms. He knew the people. He also uses access as possession. His portraits can be thrillingly cruel, sometimes too complete in their contempt. He reduces others with such skill that the reader must ask what the skill protects. The answer sits beneath the performance: grief, sexual secrecy, family damage. The older mark beneath the finished line.
Reread now, across decades, Palimpsest is a different book from the one it first seemed. The social portraits still carry the excitement of proximity. But its deepest argument, that desire can be disaggregated from identity, was not available to every reader equally.
Vidal wrote from a position of rank, wealth and social insulation that let the argument function as intellectual freedom. For a young gay man without that privilege, the same position produced something else: compartmentalisation dressed as philosophy. The tissue of lies was not only his. It was the bargain his argument made possible, and it took decades to name what it had cost.
Editorial