Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir by Gore Vidal

From Barnes & Noble

Gore Vidal's talents as a raconteur are in evidence throughout this captivating and insightful memoir. Point to Point Navigation picks up where his 1995 Palimpsest left off. Apparently, the pace of Vidal's life has not slackened since the mid-'60s, nor has he lost his sharp tongue and keen wit. His observations capture his famous associates at their best and their worst; the book's celebrity roster includes Tennessee Williams, the Kennedys, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Elia Kazan, and Rudolph Nureyev. Point by Point Navigation is a feast for gossips, but this memoir also embodies Vidal's heartfelt thoughts about his deepest convictions and loves. A major statement by a brilliant gadfly.

From the Publisher

The brilliant sequel to Gore Vidal’s acclaimed, bestselling memoir, Palimpsest.

In Point to Point Navigation, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal ranges freely over his remarkable life with the signature wit and literary elegance that is uniquely his. The title refers to a form of navigation he resorted to as a first mate in the Navy during World War II. As he says, “As I was writing this account of my life and times since Palimpsest, I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering Sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.” It is a beautifully apt analogy for the hazards (mostly) eluded during his eventful life and for the way this memoir proceeds—far from linear but always on course.

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theater, politics and international society where he has cut a broad swath, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made (and on a number of occasions lost). Among the gathering of notables to be found in these pages, sketched with a draftsman’s ease and evoked with the panache of one of our great raconteurs, are Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy, Tennessee Williams (the “Glorious Bird”), Eleanor Roosevelt, Orson Welles, Johnny Carson, Greta Garbo, Federico Fellini, Rudolph Nureyev, Elia Kazan, and Francis Ford Coppola. Some of the book’s most moving pages are devoted to the illness and death of his partner of five decades, Howard Austen, and indeed the book is, amongother things, a meditation on mortality written in the spirit of Montaigne.

Elegiac yet vital and even ornery, Point to Point Navigation is a summing-up of Gore Vidal’s time on the planet that manages to be at once supremely entertaining, endlessly provocative, and thoroughly moving.

The Washington Post - Louis Bayard

The biggest surprise…of Vidal's latest memoir—more surprising than Eleanor Roosevelt's (allegedly) sapphic passion for Amelia Earhart, more surprising than Jeanette MacDonald (allegedly) groping a strange man, more surprising even than the young Gore's hero-worship of Mickey Rooney—is the sight of America's iciest provocateur thawing at the prospect of his own endgame. Bereaved, unmoored, hobbled by an artificial knee and ruptured spinal disks, the Vidal of Point to Point Navigation is reduced, like the hero of Samuel Beckett's play "Krapp's Last Tape," to a conversation with old selves.

And what glamorous selves they were. Vidal may be a populist on paper, but he has managed to spend a large part of his life standing on Aubusson rugs.

Publishers Weekly

It would be too easy to say Vidal's second memoir picks up where Palimpsest left off; as in that earlier book, he essentially lets his memories flow at will, often revisiting yet again the stories of his Washington childhood. The general focus, however, is on the latter half of his life, particularly the deaths of those closest to him, including his longtime companion, Howard Auster. Yet Vidal changes subjects and tone so frequently and abruptly here tender, here combative that the family memories and celebrity anecdotes become scattershot, limping to a close with a bizarre summary of somebody else's theory about how organized crime bosses ordered the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Assured of his own genius ("I have never needed an editor"), he repeatedly slams biographer Fred Kaplan as "dull" and sex-obsessed, then jabs at a few other people who've written about him. He also makes frequent observations about the current events unfolding as he writes, and his criticisms of the New York Times and the Bush administration's "oil-and-gas junta" will come as no surprise. In short, the memoir is a perfect encapsulation of Vidal's outsized personality and readers' reactions will be determined by how they already feel about him. (Nov. 7) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The title of this sequel to prolific author Vidal's 1995 memoir, Palimpsest, refers to navigating not with a compass but by memory of landmarks. Here, the demise of those near and dear to him is often a topic of interest to octogenarian Vidal, and one he describes affectingly. His wit and sharp tongue are also much in evidence, particularly in the captions for his photos. Some of the material from Palimpsest is repeated, such as Vidal's runs for electoral office and his interactions with President John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt-but then where is true north anyway? Vidal feels an affinity for the great memoirist and essayist Michel de Montaigne, and in his free-flowing style one can see the similarity. But for an entire book, it grows tedious to keep losing the thread. Though Vidal's critiques of his own critics give this reviewer pause, one might do better simply to skip his memoirs and instead read his other literary genres as examples of his writing skills. For larger public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/06.]-Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences in Philadelphia Lib. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

In this successor to the first volume of his memoir, Palimpsest (1995), prolific novelist/essayist/gadfly Vidal mixes mournful minor keys among his usual trumpet blasts against what he regards as an American emporium run by oil men and religious fanatics. Vidal fans will recognize much material from Palimpsest and Screening History, which offered his meditations on the movies. But in contrast to earlier reminiscences, "melancholy baggage" weighs more heavily on him here-declining health and departed friends, notably longtime companion Howard Austen. (The account of the latter's final days is the most affecting part of this book.) Moving from his villa in Ravello, Italy, to the Hollywood Hills, Vidal starts this year-long chronicle on New Year's Eve 2004. Death-Iraq casualties, disaster victims in New Orleans, the exits of Saul Bellow, Johnny Carson and Pope John Paul II-provokes a flood of memories and political fulminations. Like a weary ancient Roman patrician, he awaits his turn to shuffle off this mortal coil, though not without cost. "These rehearsals for death take more and more out of one," he confesses. Sensing that time is no longer on his side, Vidal summons his energies to celebrate friends, flay enemies (the New York Times froze his first several novels out of its daily book reviews, largely, he says, because of his sexual orientation) and bemoan the end of "our old original Republic." When of a mind, Vidal can produce memorable portraits (e.g., on Orson Welles: "When he laughed, which was often, his face, starting at the lower lip, would turn scarlet while sweat formed on his brow like a sudden spring rain"). But while taking credit for urging JFK to create a Peace Corps, hefails to note it was proposed in Congress earlier. Moreover, he mentions nothing about imbroglios with William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, and is mostly silent on novels like Lincoln and Burr. Though Vidal's memories from encounters in DC, New York, Hollywood and elsewhere remain intact, the wit that animates the best of his oeuvre is largely absent, leaving a voice at best affecting and at worst hectoring.

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Point to Point Navigation

Doubleday

Chapter One

The Influence of the Movies on My Generation: The Backstory

As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies. Naturally, Sex and Art always took precedence over cinema but neither ever proved to be as dependable as the filtering of present light through that moving strip of celluloid which projects past images and voices onto a screen. Thus, in a seemingly simple process, screening history. (My book of that name has been allowed to go out of print and so I now reprise its principal argument.)

As writer and political activist, I have accumulated a number of cloudy trophies in my melancholy luggage. Some real, some imagined. Some acquired from life, such as it is; some from movies, such as they are. Sometimes, in time, where we are as well as were, it is not easy to tell the two apart. Do I wake or sleep?

I was born October 3, 1925, on the twenty-fifth birthday of Thomas Wolfe, the novelist not the journalist. I have lived through three-quarters of the twentieth century, and about one-third of the history of the United States of America. Briefly, what has been your impression thus far, Mr. Vidal? as eager interviewers are wont to ask. Well, it could have been worse, I begin with a calculated understatement. Then the Japanese recording machine goeson the blink and while the interviewer tries to fix it, he asks me to tell him, off the record, what was Marilyn Monroe really like? As I barely knew her, I tell him.

It is a universal phenomenon that whether one is at Harvard or at Oxford or at the University of Bologna, after the dutiful striking of attitudes on subjects of professional interest, like semiology, the ice does not break until someone mentions the movies. Suddenly, everyone is alert and adept. There is real passion as we speak of the falling-off of Fellini in recent years (of which more later) or of Madonna's curious contours and have they yet passed the once-disputed border of mere androgyny, arriving at some entirely new sexual continuum? Movies are the lingua franca of the twentieth century. The Tenth Muse, as they call the movies in Italy, has driven the other nine right off Parnassus-or off the peak, anyway.

Recently I observed to a passing tape recorder that I was once a famous novelist. When assured, politely, that I was still known and read, I explained myself. I was speaking, I said, not of me personally but of a category to which I once belonged that has now ceased to exist. I am still here but the category is not. To speak today of a famous novelist is like speaking of a famous cabinetmaker or speedboat designer. Adjective is inappropriate to noun. How can a novelist be famous-no matter how well known he may be personally to the press?-if the novel itself is of little consequence to the civilized, much less to the generality? The novel as teaching aid is something else, but hardly famous.

There is no such thing as a famous novelist now, any more than there is such a thing as a famous poet. I use the adjective in the strict sense. According to authority, to be famous is to be much talked about, usually in a favorable way. It is as bleak and inglorious as that. Yet thirty years ago, novels were actually read and discussed by those who did not write them or, indeed, even read them. A book could be famous then but today's public seldom mentions a book unless, like The Da Vinci Code, it is being metamorphosed into a faith-challenging film.

Contrary to what many believe, literary fame has nothing to do with excellence or true glory or even with a writer's position in the syllabus of a university's English Department, itself as remote to the Agora as Academe's shadowy walk. For any artist, fame is the extent to which the Agora finds interesting his latest work. If what he has written is known only to a few other practitioners, or to enthusiasts (Faulkner compared lovers of literature to dog breeders, few in number but passionate to the point of madness on the subject of bloodlines), then the artist is not only not famous, he is irrelevant to his time, the only time that he has; nor can he dream of eager readers in a later century as did Stendhal. If novels and poems fail to interest the Agora today, by the year 3091 such artifacts will not exist at all except as objects of monkish interest. This is neither a good nor a bad thing. It is simply not a famous thing.

Optimists, like the late John Gardner, regarded the university as a great good place where literature would continue to be not only worshipped but created. Perhaps he was right, though I do not like the look of those fierce theoreticians currently hacking away at the olive trees of Academe while seeding the Cephisus River with significant algae, their effect on the sacred waters rather like that of an oil spill off the coast of Alaska. Can there be a famous literary theoretician? Alas, no. The Agora has no interest in parlor games, other than contract bridge when one of the players is Omar Sharif. Literary theory is a glass-bead game whose reward for the ludic player is the knowledge that once he masters it, he will be thought by his peers to be ludicrous.

But I have lately been taken to task by an English teacher for my "intemperate" attacks on English Departments, which have, she noted ominously, cost me my place in the syllabus. So I shall now desist and, like Jonah, wait for that greatest of fishes to open wide his jaws and take me in. After all, if you miss one syllabus, there'll always be another in the next decade.

The best of our literary critics was V. S. Pritchett. I find fascinating his descriptions of what the world was like in his proletarian youth. Books were central to the Agora of 1914. Ordinary Londoners were steeped in literature, particularly Dickens. People saw themselves in literary terms, saw themselves as Dickensian types while Dickens himself, earlier, had mirrored the people in such a way that writer and Agora were, famously, joined; and each defined the other.

In London, Pritchett and I belonged to the same club. One afternoon we were sitting in the bar when a green-faced bishop stretched out his gaitered leg and tripped up a rosy-faced mandarin from Whitehall. As the knight fell against the wall, the bishop roared, "Pelagian heretic!" I stared with wonder. Pritchett looked very pleased. "Never forget," he said, "Dickens was a highly realistic novelist."

Today, where literature was movies are. Whether or not the Tenth Muse does her act on a theater screen or within the cathode tube, there can be no other reality for us since reality does not begin to mean until it has been made art of. For the Agora, Art is now sight and sound; and the books are shut. In fact, reading of any kind is on the decline. Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for president-the same half?

TWO

In 1925, the year that I was born, An American Tragedy, Arrowsmith, Manhattan Transfer, and The Great Gatsby were published. A nice welcoming gift, I observed to the Three Wise Men from PEN who attended me in my cradle, a bureau drawer in Washington, D.C.'s, Rock Creek Park. I shall be worthy! I proclaimed; shepherds quaked.

For a moment, back then, it did look as if Whitman's dream of that great audience which would in turn create great writers had come true. Today, of course, when it comes to literacy, the United States ranks number twenty-three in the world. I have no idea what our ranking was then, but though the popular culture was a predictable mix of jazz and the Charleston and Billy Sunday, we must have had, proportionately, more and better readers then than now; literature was a part of life, and characters from contemporary fiction, like Babbitt, entered the language, as they had done in Pritchett's youth and before. Our public educational system was also a good one. Certainly the McGuffey's Eclectic Readers of my grandfather's day would now be considered intolerably highbrow.

True, the Tenth Muse was already installed atop Parnassus, but she was mute. Actually, the movies were not as popular in the twenties as they had been before the First World War. Even so, in the year of my birth, Chaplin's The Gold Rush was released, while in my second year there appeared not only DeMille's The Ten Commandments as well as, no doubt in the interest of symmetry, Flesh and the Devil with Greta Garbo; it was also in my second year that the Tenth Muse suddenly spoke those minatory words "You ain't heard nothin' yet." Thus, the moving and talking picture began.

I saw and heard my first movie in 1929. My father and mother were still unhappily married and so we went, a nuclear family melting down, to the movies in St. Louis, where my father was general manager of TAT, the first transcontinental airline, later to merge with what became TWA.

I am told that as I marched down the aisle, an actress on the screen asked another character a question, and I answered her, in a very loud voice. So, as the movies began to talk, I began to answer questions posed by two-dimensional fictional characters thirty times my size.

My life has paralleled, when not intersected, the entire history of the talking picture. Although I was a compulsive reader from the age of six, I was so besotted by movies that one Saturday in Washington, D.C., where I grew up, I saw five movies in a day. It took time and effort and money to see five movies in a day; now, with television and videocassettes and DVDs, the screen has come to the viewer and we are all home communicants.

I don't think anyone has ever found startling the notion that it is not what things are that matters so much as how they are perceived. We perceive sex, say, not as it demonstrably is but as we think it ought to be as carefully distorted for us by the churches and the schools, and by-triumphantly-the movies, which are, finally, the only validation to which that dull anterior world, reality, must submit.

THREE

The screening by CNN of our latest wars is carefully directed by those who are producing the wars. What these serial wars are all about is still not clear to us, nor are we ever apt to know what really happened until someone makes a backstage movie like The Bad and the Beautiful or, perhaps, Platoon in the Desert, a bitter, powerful film, quite as unrealistic, in its way, as the CNN-Pentagon releases.

In February 1991 history was being invented before our eyes. From day to day we saw the editing and dubbing process at work. But we were merely viewers, while the actors on-screen were also, in an eerie way, passive: part of a process no one seemed to be in control of. Rumsfeld who now seeks to produce the sequels is, despite his elfin charms, no more than a thousand points of pulsing light in a cathode ray tube.

A few years ago while giving the Massey Lectures at Harvard the mood of prophecy was upon me! "We shall yet be invited," I said, "by the sponsors of USA, Inc., to bear witness to a presidential election in which one of the heroes of the Gulf will confront the politically ambitious Terminator." Yes, it will be someone like Rumsfeld versus Schwarzenegger, the ultimate screen version of my own old movie The Best Man, whose title was, of course, ironic.

FOUR

I was struck by Eudora Welty's contribution to Harvard's Massey Lectures, published as One Writer's Beginnings. I have not her courage when it comes to speaking of my own life. I have also never been my own subject. But I do like the way that she set her scene, in Jackson, Mississippi, where her life and her life as a writer began. She starts, as everyone must, with a family. I could do the same, but do I dare? Contrary to legend, I was born of mortal woman, and if Zeus sired me, there is no record on file in the Cadet Hospital at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. But if I was usually born, there my resemblance to other writers ends. My mother did not shop; and my father was not cold and aloof, nor was he addicted to the sports page of the newspapers. Unlike most American fathers-sons, too-he did not live vicariously. He was his own hero, and the Agora had loved him for a time. He had been an all-American football player at West Point, and he had represented the United States in the pentathlon at the Olympic Games. Later, he started three airlines. He was, I like to believe, the first person to realize that there was absolutely no point to cellophane as opposed to blessed celluloid.

"DuPont just invented this," he said, presenting me with a glassy cylinder. We unrolled the cellophane. "What's it for?" I asked. "Nothing!" He spoke with a true inventor's delight. For a season, in the thirties, one could see in the movie musicals cellophane used as curtains, tablecloths, showgirl dresses. Finally, cellophane, unlike celluloid, ended up as irrelevant wrapping. Yet it was nice in itself, like today's novel, say, or, as Cole Porter apostrophized in "You're the Top," "You're cellophane!"

Did my kindly maternal grandfather-from Mississippi, just like Eudora's-preside over a hardware business in Oklahoma City? No. From two unrelated accidents, he was blind at the age of ten. He put himself through law school, memorizing texts that were read to him by a cousin. At thirty-seven, having helped invent the state of Oklahoma-wit of this sort runs in our family-he became their famous senator.

Did my mother play bridge, bake pies in the kitchen, and perhaps drink too much of the cooking sherry? On the contrary, she was a flapper very like her coeval, Tallulah Bankhead. (Faulkner went to his grave believing that coeval meant evil at the same time as.) In appearance she was a composite of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. She never baked a pie, but she did manage to drink, in the course of a lifetime, the equivalent of the Chesapeake Bay in vodka. Eudora's people, just south of where the Gores lived, thought my mother fast. They were right. She married and divorced not only my famous father but a rich stockbroker; then she married a famous air force general, who promptly died. Meanwhile, the stockbroker married a woman whose daughter married a man who was elected president only to have his head shot in as the two of them were driving through Dallas on a hot November day. What is one to do, fictionally, with a family that has itself become a pervasive fiction that continues to divert the Agora? Later, I will try to reveal what actually happened that terrible day in Dallas.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Point to Point Navigation by Gore Vidal Copyright © 2006 by Gore Vidal. Excerpted by permission.
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