Making It

Did you know that Gore Vidal was responsible for the moon landing? Neither did I, until I read in "Point to Point Navigation" (Doubleday, 277 pages, $26) — Mr. Vidal's haughty, shoddy new memoir — how he watched Neil Armstrong's descent "in a mood for boasting." After the election of 1960, he explains, John F. Kennedy "asked a number of us to write him what should be the principal goals of his administration: the exploration of space, I declared." Thus, he delicately implies, the idea traveled from his pen, via the Oval Office, to the brains of 10,000 NASA engineers and behold — a giant leap for mankind. Since he published his first novel, "Williwaw," at the age of 20 in 1946, Americans have gotten to know Mr. Vidal as a novelist, screenwriter, essayist, political gadfly, television personality, and society figure. Now we must add a new honorific — Moon-Conqueror.

A reader unfamiliar with Mr. Vidal's self-created mythos, as advanced in six decades' worth of books, articles, and interviews, might wonder whether that note to the president-elect did more to hasten the American space program than, say, the launch of Sputnik. But "Point to Point Navigation" is not the work of a man used to being asked such questions. Mr. Vidal has reached the age (he just celebrated his 81st birthday) where he is always the most eminent figure in the room. His elevation, after September 11, 2001, to the august company of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, as one of the European left's favorite anti-American Americans, can only have reinforced his tendency to pontificate. Indeed, on the few occasions when the new memoir ventures political pronouncements, they have the closed-off, formulaic quality of a speech delivered too many times: "the Cheney-Bush junta," "two countries that we were obliged to smash to bits so that they might one day enjoy true freedom," and so on.

Yet even when it comes to Mr. Vidal's private life, "Point to Point Navigation" is a weary book, fragmentary and repetitive, stuffed with twice-told tales. It is billed as a sequel to Mr. Vidal's 1995 memoir, "Palimpsest," which covered his life up to the early 1960s. But while the 20 years after the Kennedy assassination were the most productive in his literary career — all the books for which he is best known, including his series of American-history novels, were written during that period — "Point to Point Navigation" has almost nothing to say about his writing life. Nor does his private life over the last 40 years get much of a look-in.

Instead, Mr. Vidal largely rehashes the celebrity anecdotes he told, more interestingly, in "Palimpsest." The few new stories tend to feel like barrelscrapings — a clever put-down of Barbara Cartland, a fond memory of Johnny Carson. There is nothing in the new book to compare with the merciless sketches of Tennessee Williams and the Kennedys in "Palimpsest." Indeed, much of the time, Mr. Vidal seems reluctant to be writing at all, spurred into print only by some book or newspaper clipping that happens to cross his desk. (One whole chapter consists of a long quotation from a study of Mr. Vidal's own work, presented without comment, only a tacit nod of approval.)

This is a shame, since it is increasingly clear, as Mr. Vidal's novelistic reputation fades, that his greatest work is not "Burr" or "Lincoln" but his own life. Over years of retellings, he has fashioned his biography into some hybrid of picaresque, tall tale, and secret history. Like Zelig's, Mr. Vidal's sly, handsome face can be spied wherever the good and great assembled in the second half of the 20th century. There he is in the much-reproduced photograph of poets and writers at the Gotham Book Mart, wedged between Edith Sitwell and W.H. Auden. There he is in a Pathe newsreel from the 1930s, a boy of 10 flying a plane that his father, a pioneering pilot, designed as an aeronautical equivalent to the Model T. There he is in the Kennedy White House, trading gossip with Jackie and threats with Bobby. There he is in Rome after the war, talking literature with Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles; at the Chelsea Hotel, having sex with Jack Kerouac; on the MGM lot, writing scripts for Bette Davis and Charlton Heston; at a party in London, getting drunk with Princess Margaret.

Fate gave Mr. Vidal a head-start in this game of collecting celebrities. He is the grandson of an American Senator, T.P. Gore of Oklahoma; his mother was a celebrated Washington beauty (and a terrible alcoholic), his father a dashing Air Force officer and an FDR appointee. Boldface names gathered around his cradle. His precocious success as a novelist, his work in Hollywood and Broadway, and his lifelong part-time residence in Rome gave him entrée to ever-widening social circles. The high point of his life, however, was Camelot, when his distant relationship to Jacqueline Kennedy — Mr. Vidal's mother preceded Jackie's as the wife of Hugh Auchincloss, a Standard Oil heir — allowed him a close-up view of the political world that was his birthright. Mr. Vidal's decision to give up that birthright by writing "The City and the Pillar," a pioneeringly frank novel about homosexuality, still stands out as the noblest, most admirable act of his career.

Finally, however, the sheer number of Mr. Vidal's famous acquaintances comes to seem less remarkable than the fact that he has never known anyone who is not famous. "It seems that practically everyone that I have ever met is now the subject of at least one biography," he wrote in "Palimpsest," leaving the reader to wonder what sort of person would contrive such a glamorously restricted life. The one great exception to the rule was Mr. Vidal's lifelong companion, Howard Auster, whose death from lung cancer evokes the only moving passages in "Point to Point Navigation."

Yet here, as in "Palimpsest," Mr. Vidal tells us next to nothing about Auster's personality or their relationship, except to repeat, airily and rather brutally, that it was entirely asexual. Only his allusions to Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," a far better book about mourning a spouse, suggest that he understands how much more deeply this subject could, and should, have been treated. Mr. Vidal has always revelled in the aristocrat's pose of cool detachment; by allowing that pose to freeze into indifference, "Point to Point Navigation" reminds us why almost all great writers have come from the middle class.

akirsch@nysun.com