Florence King Reviews Gore Vidal's "Palimpsest: A Memoir"
Crashing Gore
Editor’s Note: The following essay by Florence King is reprinted from the December 31, 1995, issue of National Review. King reviews Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest: A Memoir. It is reprinted now to mark her recent passing.
Giving one’s memoirs a title that has to be explained must be a status symbol among the leftist literati. First there was Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento; now comes Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest. Miss Hellman’s title at least sounded pretty, but Maître Vidal’s sounds like an arcane sexual practice involving an inflated condom that explodes like the Hindenburg in the tradesmen’s entrance of some hired Apollo, sending ecstasy and other things washing over Maître Vidal.
But no. A palimpsest is a special kind of paper that can be written on and wiped clean again, like a slate; or paper that has been written on twice, the original writing having been rubbed out. Maître Vidal adapts the word to the task of remembering and recording one’s life in the face of memory’s familiar tricks.
He likens the process to the writer’s task of revision in which one deletes something here, adds something there, or scratches out and starts all over again. But revision also includes pulling discrete
material together into a logically ordered narrative, and this he doesn’t always do.
A case in point is his account of Hillary Clinton’s visit to his Italian villa last year. The local papers treated it as a pilgrimage (“Lady Clinton nel paradiso di Vidal“), so he takes pains to resurrect the moment with all due pomp. After describing himself waiting seigneurially at the gates, he fashions a solemn interior monologue suitable for the occasion.
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