Volume 44, Number 8 · May 15, 1997
Class Act
By John Bayley
Palimpsest
by Gore Vidal
Penguin, 435 pp., $13.95 (paper)
One of the many fascinating photographs in Palimpsest, perhaps indeed the most fascinating of the lot, is of the author's grandfather, Senator Thomas Pryor Gore, having his portrait painted in old age. Reticently distinguished, the subject sits in his chair, ignoring the canvas, a remarkable likeness of him on a properly heroic scale, and presided over by the artist, Azadia Newman, whom we learn was soon to be married to the film director Rouben Mamoulian. The expression on her beautiful face, with its plucked eyebrows, is quite deadpan. Like a portraitist of the Renaissance she is doing her job, and has no special feelings about it or the sitter. But the photograph seems a revelation not only of the society in which Gore Vidal grew up—a very uncommon one in what Roosevelt was even then calling the Age of the Common Man—but of Gore Vidal's ability to put his reader inside that society, to give us a happy and an unfamiliar sense of familiarity with it.
Review, 4180 words
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