Lachlan Mackinnon
Observer - Sunday November 7, 1999

Gore Vidal once began an article about President Kennedy by saying: 'Until last month [March, 1961], I had not been at the White House since 1957, when I was asked to compose a speech for President Eisenhower.' The insouciant ease with which he moves among the mighty here runs in tandem with the shameless assumption that he is himself at least as interesting as any possible subject. 

He is probably right, for Vidal has lived an extraordinary life. An interest in politics came naturally. From long hours of reading to his maternal grandfather, the blind Senator T.P. Gore, Vidal acquired a substantial education as well as a strongly conservative view of American history. His father, Gene, was a national sporting hero before becoming an aviation pioneer and ultimately Franklin Roosevelt's Director of Aeronautics. The 10-year-old Vidal was filmed flying one of his father's prototypes for a newsreel. He was already used to ushering Senator Gore onto the floor of the Senate.

With such a background, it is not surprising that Vidal ran for Congress in 1960. He lost, but in his district he outpolled his party's presidential candidate, John Kennedy. Vidal was initially close to the Kennedy administration. Jacqueline Kennedy and he had a stepfather in common, and she was warm towards him until he published an attack on Robert Kennedy, after which they never spoke again. Vidal remained an influential commentator, and in 1982 he campaigned unsuccessfully for the Democratic Senate nomination in California. 

In friendships as well as politics Vidal has followed a remarkable trajectory. Anaïs Nin, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Truman Capote and Norman Mailer have all left their own records of Vidal: Professor Kaplan lets us watch them coming and going as we have so often before, for their relationships have featured in gossip-columns as much as in books.

The closeness between Vidal and the actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who shared a house with Vidal in the late Fifties, is the one Kaplan brings out most clearly, though, but even in this case he fails, as all too often, to analyse. Vidal's mother was an alcoholic monster. One need not be a Freudian to sense that this might have mattered, but Kaplan offers only a few tentative suggestions. 

The main relationship of Vidal's life has been with Howard Austen: they have lived together in a non-sexual relationship, effectively since 1950. Kaplan only informs us that they play chess daily and that Vidal is better at staying up late. Austen's replies to Kaplan's enquiries are hilarious, professing blank ignorance about Vidal's motives at crucial moments in their lives together.

Although he rejects the label 'homosexual', most of Vidal's sex-life has been with men. Women close to him have felt that this was much more from choice than from destiny. Repudiating romantic love and the ideology of marriage, Vidal has been an outspoken advocate of sexual libertarianism, but one must wonder how far his parents' marital failure contributed to this. Kaplan also wonders. 

In The City and the Pillar (1948), the 22-year-old Vidal wrote sympathetically about homosexuality. A glittering literary career, begun with Williwaw (1946), written at 19 about his wartime experiences, seemed to self-destruct. Until Julian (1964), Vidal made his living by writing for television, Broadway and Hollywood - all successfully.

Since then he has written two sorts of fiction. One is what he calls 'inventions' such as Myra Breckinridge (1968) and Duluth (1983), which won Italo Calvino's admiration. He also writes historical novels, mostly in the sequence Narratives of a Golden Age. Among these is the astonishing Lincoln (1984), a convincing, sceptical yet admiring portrait. Vidal has published more than 40 volumes of fiction, plays and essays, including the memoir Palimpsest (1995). Most are obsessed with an America that might have been, conservatism and liberalism battling for his heart. Kaplan offers some lame plot summaries. 

Palimpsest was shaped round Vidal's boyhood love Jimmie Trimble, killed at Iwo Jima. It at least told us how Vidal wanted us to think he thought of himself. Kaplan is so mired in detail, grammatical solecism and sheer error ('Prime Minister Bevan') that he ends up telling us nothing. This is not a 'life' but a data-bank, devoid of its subject's humour, intelligence and stylishness. One day, someone will quarry a briefer, better-shaped, more interpretative story from it, but until then, the fact that the witty, vain, self-protective Vidal authorised this book will seem like a brilliant practical joke.