Volume 40, Number 7 · April 8, 1993
Star
By Diane Johnson
Screening History
by Gore Vidal
Harvard University Press, 96 pp., $14.95
Live From Golgotha
by Gore Vidal
Random House, 225 pp., $22.00
Round Up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca—Bogart, Bergman, and World War II
by Aljean Harmetz
Hyperion, 402 pp., $24.95
M.I.A. or Mythmaking In America
by H. Bruce Franklin
Lawrence Hill Books, 225 pp., $17.95
For his delightful, rather reticent memoir Screening History, Gore Vidal apologizes that he has at last succumbed to 'the American writer's disease, the celebration if not of self, of the facts of one's own sacred story.' He has 'always been able to imagine what it is like to be someone else, but now I begin to wonder what it is like to be me, a figure that keeps cropping up in the lives of others, usually wearing an impenetrable disguise.' In fact he does not really succumb to the American writer's disease, which is ordinarily to write about how I became Me. This is an autobiography in the nineteenth-century, or even eighteenth-century mode, about how the writer's case illustrates some trend or constant of human history, more or less as John Stuart Mill wrote an autobiography to illustrate the efficacy of Headstart.
Review, 2777 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |