Gore Vidal – Point to Point Navigation – Review

It has been many years since reading volume one of Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest. In part two, Vidal writes of his past as recalling events taken from photographs lying sprawled across his writing desk. Memory is recalled in fragments of a full life once lived, a word or phrase that prompts a single frame of a film reel or an ancient conversation in passing, spoken amongst the chaos of an individual's personal history. Vidal best describes this process when choosing the memoir's title:

“In World War Two, I served as the first mate of an army freight supply ship based in the Aleutian Islands, where the weather was so bad that we seldom saw the sun, much less the moon and stars; this made it nearly impossible to use the compass to chart a course. Instead, we relied upon maps where we had memorized various points or landmarks as guides, a process is known a “point to point navigation,” a process with obvious dangers (we had no radar). As I was writing Palimpsest... I felt as if I were again dealing with those capes and rocks in the Bering A sea that we had to navigate so often with a compass made inoperable by weather.”(Author's Note)

The memoir does not proceed linearly, though much similar to memory jumps forward and backward on the timeline, sprinkled with entertaining anecdotes about famous people, historical events, and the author's relationships.

I distinctly remember staying up late with my father watching black and white television. On one evening, during the democratic convention in Chicago, seeing William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal doing the commentary, when at one point both men became hostile: Buckley calling Vidal a “queer” and Vidal calling Buckley a “Nazi.” I recall my father laughing and asking him the meaning of the word “queer.” As a child, seeing Vidal on television was a common event.

Gore Vidal seemed to know anyone of any consequence in the 20^th century. For example, Orson Welles, JFK, Francis Ford Coppola, Tennessee Williams, Eleanor Roosevelt including royalty in foreign lands. Out of all these friends and acquaintances, his life-long partner, Howard Auster, was the closest human being to Vidal. When he writes about Howard and his eventual passing away, it is done with a pure heart without a hint of sentimentality. I found these passages about Howard very moving.

Personally I enjoyed Vidal's commentary on his friend Paul Bowles. For certain, I find Bowles to be one of the more interesting American artists, as he was an accomplished composer, musician, and novelist. In fact, it was Vidal, who pushed to get Bowles' first novel, The Sheltering Sky to publishers in the United States because they felt it really wasn't a novel! Both men admired each other work.

As a reader, my first exposure to Vidal's writings were his many essays about his beloved Republic. Combine these essays with his many historical novels about the United States, one's education concerning the relatively young “democracy” is almost complete.

The main concerns or themes in this text is the notion of time passing and growing old. At the end of my father's life, after a few beers, he would say, “All my contemporaries are gone.” Vidal refers to his phone book and notices that the vast majority had passed out of his many contacts. This is both sad and a reality that the elderly experience at the end of their lives.

When Gore Vidal passed in 2006, there is no doubt that one of the great American men of letters in the 20^th century would be dearly missed, not only for his educational and literary novels, but his essays describing the current debilitating state of the United States of America.

Reading Point to Point Navigation after Palimpsest was worth the effort and gave me a feeling of completion regarding the great writer, his work and as a human being overall.