=Book Recently Read: Palimpsest by Gore Vidal=

Gore Vidal: I am relieved not to see most people, even those I like—or once liked. I understand now why the old enjoy the obituaries of contemporaries. I used to put this down to play-acting in the face of memento mori; now I think it is a sense of relief in letting go for good of people whose presence one no longer needs.

Gore Vidal was a big admirer of George Santayana.

At fourteen, Gore Vidal experienced his first, last, and therefore only great love; it was with a school chum, also fourteen, who was later killed while a Marine at Iwo Jima.

Vidal remained obsessed with this boy for the rest of his life.

He was unapologetically indifferent about pleasing his sexual partners and, as he grew older and less physically attractive, paid for sex without guilt or regret.

If given the choice, Vidal preferred his lovers impotent.

He disliked Truman Capote who, he claimed, was a pathological liar. He found him physically repulsive, as well.

Between the years 1976 and 1981, Gore Vidal was the Antichrist.

After the crash of 1929, our ruling class vanished from the public scene—no more tiaras at the opening of the opera. Celebrities now fill in for them, and the shadowy Mellons will be chuckling softly as Capote’s jet-setters, filling in for the last time, are driven off in tumbrils, especially constructed for the revolution by the Ford Foundation, wrote Gore Vidal.

Vidal attended The Los Alamos Ranch School which William S. Burroughs also attended, a decade earlier.

His grandfather Thomas Pryor Gore was the first senator from Oklahoma. He was blind. As a child, Gore often read to him.

Al Gore is Gore Vidal’s cousin. Vidal called him “the Cromwell of Washington’s Fairfax Hotel.”

Despite persistent rumors and allegations, yet in absence of any hardcore evidence, Gore Vidal was never a pederast—according to Gore Vidal.

His father was on friendly terms with both Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh. He served in Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration as the first director of Air Commerce. He appeared on a Time magazine cover

Gore Vidal was born October 3, 1925, at “about noon.”

He made it a rule never to sleep with anyone older than thirty. After thirty, he considered another person, as far as sexual purposes were concerned, a corpse.

He once fucked Jack Kerouac up the ass.

Gore Vidal wrote “Visit to a Small Planet” a play whose general outline can be seen repeated in many later popular works of entertainment, such as “My Favorite Martian,” “Mork & Mindy,” and the ending of the Superman movie.

At twenty-two, he considered Anais Nin, then forty-three, an old lady and would never have considered proposing marriage to her, as she has written in her diaries.

Gore Vidal disliked his mother—intensely. The feeling, according to Vidal, was mutual.

He predicted that Bill Clinton wouldn’t survive his first term. “He will experience the bullet or a sudden resignation.”

Again on Nin: her sweat did, in fact, smell, despite her own olfactory assessment to the contrary.

He  refused to have anything to do with his mom for the last twenty years of her life.

Vidal found William S. Burroughs creepy and unattractive. He didn’t think much of Burroughs’s writing either.

In 1993 Vidal writes that he is “Well and truly traumatized by the fragility of our social arrangements, today more fragile than ever as the poor grow desperate, the rich arrogant, while the ubiquitous television set keeps showing consumers without cash how well the few live, not a wise thing to do.”

Vidal enjoyed the novels of Evelyn Waugh but found the man himself “singularly detestable.” He consequently advised never seeking out the company of a great writer.

Greta Garbo liked wearing his clothes.

He shared three nephews with Jackie Kennedy. They also shared a stepfather and a childhood bedroom, but not at the same time.

He rewrote a key scene of the movie Ben-Hur as high-camp gay erotica—without Charlton Heston (according to Gore, not merely the acting equivalent of a wooden Indian, but an entire “lumberyard”) or straight America ever suspecting a thing.

Once, Gore Vidal’s leg hairs tickled Jackie’s bare leg and Gore got, well, sort of turned on.

President John F. Kennedy according to Gore Vidal: “In this…uh…job you get to know all the big movers and shakers and the thing that most strikes me about them is how second-rate they really are.” Jack said this with some wonder, even wistfulness—as if he had really wanted to be impressed and wasn’t.

Gore Vidal didn’t like parties—and the grander the party the less he liked it.

Gore Vidal went to a lot of parties.

Vidal, at a party in the Sistine Chapel, observing Henry Kissinger gazing thoughtfully at the hell section of The Last Judgment. “Look, he’s apartment hunting.”

The squalor, Vidal said, never ends once one gets involved with people for whom truth is no criterion.

Amen, I say.