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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Point to
Point Navigation: A Memoir by Gore Vidal |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Quirky Gore Vidal’s
second memoir, Point to
Point Navigation, allows an artist who has supprted himself through
writing to riff with readers. Those readers who are patient enough to go with
the quirky flow of this work will be rewarded. His observations about the
world and people are typically trenchant, and few prominent figures escape
his attention. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 29, pp. 152-3: My very
first publisher, E. P. Dutton, was run by a White Russian called Nick Wreden.
When I was still in uniform, he had taken Williwaw,
my novel about an army ship in the Aleutian Islands during the war. An ursine
figure of jovial disposition, during the days of my blackout by The New York Times Wreden loyally kept
on publishing me. While I was busy writing plays for television, movies,
theater, Wreden had moved on to Little, Brown and despite several published
obituaries of me as a novelist (apparently, once lost to television that was
indeed the end of someone who’d been thought promising), I told Nick that
when I got back to novel-writing I’d come to him. But when, like General
MacArthur, I did return, Nick was dead, and his place at Little, Brown had
been taken by Ned Bradford. I have never needed an editor in the sense of a
Max Perkins who was so necessary, we are assured, to salvage the likes of
Thomas Wolfe, by neatly shaping long flowing works into simple commercial
slices. All I ever needed was an intelligent first reader and, later, a good
copy editor. Bradford proved to be ideal. When he read the manuscript of Julian his only comment was
embarrassingly to the point: “You forgot to tell us why he became a Christian apostate.” I promptly provided the
missing link. The three novels that I published with Little, Brown were each
despite (or because of) the blackout a number-one bestseller on all such
lists except that of the self-styled “newspaper of record.” Unfortunately,
for Little, Brown and, in the long run, for me, I was persuaded to leave my
Boston publisher for the New York—based Random House; there was also The New York Review of Books for whom
I’d been writing since their first issue in 1963. As the co-editor, Barbara
Epstein, was a friend it made sense to be nearby. In those days Howard and I
still lived, despite our first long Roman interlude, on the banks of the
Hudson River at Barrytown. I’ve already noted how hard it is to get out of
politics; perhaps I should have added how hard it is to get politics out of
oneself; almost as difficult as to get prose out of one’s system if one is
primarily a novelist reconstructed as a dramatist, something quite other.
Each has its satisfactions but the autonomy of the novelist, when not impeded
by interested parties, can result in the making of worlds whose anterior form
is like that of the primal biblical myth, chaos. For the absolute dramatist
like Tennessee the written play is a sort of Eden, lacking only living actors
to reenact Adam and Eve and the idea of Lilith as well as the entrance of the
snake to start the drama going, rather as God did. The Glorious Bird—the
name that I called Tennessee—had caught on with many of his friends and, finally,
with him, too. But to acknowledge me as a namer of Beasts diminished him as
Supreme author. So, who was I then?
He found the phrase in a letter to me where I am addressed as “Fruit of Eden’
a many-layered image, of course, at whose core there is what the first couple
was forbidden ever to sample, knowledge. Thanks to the serpent’s crafty
malice Eve fell upon knowledge if not wisdom and thus paradise was lost. This lion in
winter continues to roar on the pages of Point to
Point Navigation. One almost begins to think that Vidal will actually get
to have the last word in confirming his genius. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2007 |
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·
2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Point
to Point Navigation For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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