Easily the best, most entertaining book about Gore Vidal is his 1995 memoir “Palimpsest.” But with the possible exception of “In Bed With Gore Vidal,” Tim Teeman’s 2013 tell-all, “Palimpsest” is also the least reliable of the Vidal books. Vidal was a tireless self-mythologizer, and as his title suggests, that book is a layering of rememberings, re-rememberings and mis-rememberings. In his new, much sounder biography, “Empire of Self,” Jay Parini suggests that even the account of Vidal’s idyllic romance with his high school friend Jimmie Trimble, one of the touchstones of “Palimpsest” — the story of a love so perfect and unearthly that it could never be duplicated — was most likely a fabrication.
Parini was close enough to Vidal to know when not to take him at his word. An English professor at Middlebury College, he met Vidal while on sabbatical in Italy in the mid-80s, and somewhat improbably — Parini is modest, earnest, scholarly and straight, none of which could be said about Vidal — the two became friends. “It would be fair to say, in a crude way, that I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son,” Parini writes, not adding that, as so often happens, the son wound up taking care of the father to a certain extent and putting up with more than he had bargained for.
Vidal couldn’t wait to read a biography of himself, and in the early ’90s, he proposed that Parini write one. Parini wisely declined, realizing that he couldn’t be friend and biographer both while Vidal was alive, and, not so wisely, arranged for Fred Kaplan to take over the job. Kaplan’s file cabinet of a book, which came out in 1999, pleased nobody, least of all its subject, who pretended that it had all been a mistake and that the biographer he really meant to authorize was Justin Kaplan.
Parini readily admits that for his own book he has leaned a little on Kaplan’s research, particularly for the years before he met Vidal, and factually his account differs very little. We get once again Vidal’s lonely childhood with a monstrous, alcoholic mother (he once said he had grown up in the House of Atreus); his formative friendship with his beloved maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, the blind senator from Oklahoma; his indifferent education and service on an Army transport ship during the war; his return to the United States and then, when he’s still just in his 20s, that sudden flowering in which his talents seem so abundant that they shoot off in every direction: novels, plays, movie and television scripts. There is also, of course, his love-hate relationship with the Kennedys; the two runs for office; the feuds with Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and William F. Buckley; the grand self-exile to Italy; the nutty embrace of Timothy McVeigh; the increasing crankiness with America and American foreign policy. If at times “Empire of Self” feels as if it’s checking off a list, it’s because Vidal’s life was so large and various.
What distinguishes Parini’s account is its readability — though it’s not without a certain amount of professorial throat-clearing and too many clichés Vidal would have winced at — and its sympathy. His Vidal is less a monster of egotism than a damaged, needy figure who can measure his self-worth only in terms of how others see him, and who at the same time holds others off by demanding not just love and admiration but something like obeisance. Even Vidal’s boastful embrace of pansexuality was something of a pose, Parini says: He was gay, though he hated the word, and wished he were otherwise.
Parini doesn’t flinch at the sad spectacle of Vidal’s last years, a long, slow self-*ruination in which, after the death of his companion, Howard Austen, in 2003, he more or less drank himself into dementia, but “Empire of Self” doesn’t linger on it, either. Readers hoping for more lurid details — Vidal, unable to open a bottle of Scotch, smashing it against a fireplace and guzzling from the broken neck, or lunging so abruptly for a bottle that his suspenders snap and his pants fall down — will have to turn to Michael Mewshaw’s “Sympathy for the Devil: Four Decades of Friendship With Gore Vidal,” which came out earlier this year. Mewshaw’s résumé curiously parallels Parini’s (he is also straight and a family man; also a literary journeyman), but he is a more vivid, more gossipy writer, and if his book dwells on Vidal at his worst, it also conveys more of his voice and his charm, his hugeness of personality, his gift for one-liners — why, in short, Vidal’s company was something to be valued.
“Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies,” Vidal famously said, and the phrase has been pressed into service as the title for the British edition of Parini’s book. But on the evidence of both Parini and Mewshaw, Vidal could be a generous, thoughtful and attentive friend to those who passed his muster, and the list of those who did was considerable, somehow including even Princess Margaret. His closest relationship was with Austen, who in Parini’s book emerges as a thoroughly winning character. Vidal met him, a redheaded would-be pop singer who suffered from stage fright, at the old Everard Baths in New York on Labor Day in 1950, and though they soon stopped sleeping together, they were afterward seldom apart. Austen became to Vidal what Chester Kallman was to W.H. Auden, and David Jackson was to James Merrill: factotum, major-domo, helpmate. Part of his job, especially toward the end, was saving Vidal from himself. He watered his drinks, hauled him off to bed and called him down from his perch when he got too pompous.
Both Mewshaw and Parini can’t get over how productive Vidal was, considering how many mornings he woke up with a mind-numbing hangover. He wrote more than 50 books, many of them very good, a few pretty bad, but — though he would hate to think this — none of them truly great or major. Parini devotes perhaps too much space to discussing Vidal’s individual works and trying to assess his literary legacy. (Note to Middlebury students: Professor Parini is a very fair grader but not always an easy one, and cuts his friends no slack. He also nods off sometimes, as when he tries to compare “Myra Breckinridge” to Updike’s “Couples” and Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint.”)
Parini’s guess is that it’s the historical novels — especially “Julian,” “Burr” and “Lincoln” — that will last, if any do, but he also suggests that it was both Vidal’s gift and his limitation that no single literary form could contain him. The essay came closest, and it’s there that Vidal most gets to show off his wit, stylishness and erudition — to be Vidal. But as Vidal was painfully aware, unless you’re Montaigne, essays won’t make your reputation. It’s possible, in fact, that Vidal will live on most vividly not on the page but on YouTube. No other American writer has been so at home on television, a medium to which he was ideally suited and where, funny, urbane, glamorous and magisterial, he could capture the attention of *millions and become the imperial self he imagined.
