Vale, Vidal.(Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964-2006)(Book review)

Gore Vidal Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 to 2006. Doubleday, 277 pages, $26

August 1968. William F. Buckley Jr. had been goosed, against his better judgment, into a series of television debates with Gore Vidal, set against that year's political conventions. Relations between the two had been degenerating for some time, and in Chicago, their contempts built to detonation.

The terminal exchange came to concern the character of the violence in the streets, where student rioters, protesting Vietnam and other causes, were roughly beaten by the city police. "As far as I am concerned," Vidal snapped viperishly at Buckley, "the only crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself ..." Next came the notorious reply: "Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered." The station cut to the commercial feed, and that was that.

Reviewing the transcripts, the quality of the discourse is not particularly elevated, due mostly to what Buckley later called Vidal's "malevolent inanity," a judgment I share. Vidal's constant refrain was that his adversary was, by turns, a fascist, a racist, an anti-Semite, and, not least, a closet homosexual. He suggests, at one point, that Buckley's ideas were responsible for Sirhan Sirhan and the murder of Bobby Kennedy. The only reason the confrontation is today remembered is because it was so out of character for Buckley; Vidal's invectives were true to form, and by then trite. He later wrote that he never meant to call Buckley a Nazi, but "merely" to suggest that "his views are very much those of the founders of the Third Reich." We are still waiting for someone to have the decency to sock Gore Vidal.

Bill Buckley is only once present in Vidal's new volume of memoirs, Point to Point Navigation. The reference is oblique, and does not touch on the 1968 confrontation-probably because the courts have repeatedly ruled his published thoughts on the matter libelous. And while Navigation does not trade in the same kind of vituperation and lurid sensationalism evinced at that time, it is still a vicious book, and, as often, desperately sad. Here, Vidal seems a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick.

"I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit," he begins. Anything but. There are no ave-atque-vale elements or the richness of a life lived well: Everything is black, black, black. Surely fast-approaching death is harrowing, with its own underlying agonies, and not to be argued with until it has become one's own experience. Still, by any measure, Vidal's treatment of mortality is slight, never extending beyond the intimations.

Instead, and to the exclusion of most else, he goes shoveling around in the cemetery of his memory, indiscriminately, unearthing graves and smashing mausoleums. There are many names on the headstones, celebrity names, dozens and dozens of them--too numerous, and too tedious, to list. Some are disinterred for gossip or little stories, a very few to exalt, and most to scorn. On balance, Gore Vidal has little of interest to say about these people. They are important because they were famous, and because they associated, in whatever way, with Gore Vidal. His self-love is well requited: Among all these people, these celebrity names, he never hesitates to remind you that he is the most extraordinary man he knows. He appears to have never encountered joy or pleasure in anything outside himself--no wonder, then, that he finds himself so dispirited by the prospect of life's end. Nonetheless, he is not quite finished off, and by the close of Navigation one is left with a strange and fitting image: that of Gore Vidal marching triumphantly at the head of his own funeral parade.