THERE IS A POIGNANT sense of a final farewell in this second volume of memoirs by America’s last great man of letters. Gore Vidal is 81 and bluntly admits that he is moving graciously “towards the door marked Exit”.

Death is the leitmotiv, with most of the people whom he recalls meeting — from Greta Garbo, Princess Margaret and Rudolf Nureyev to Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams — now dead. Vidal is rereading Montaigne’s Essays to provide him with the perfect lens and oven-ready wisdom to face his own mortality as he confronts the spectres of cancer and diabetes.

These conditions do not make him share Montaigne’s observation that “however decrepit a man may be, he still thinks he has another 20 years”. The shadow of death means that this book has no time for throat-clearing. This is the last performance, possibly the last word, certainly the last time to delve deep into anecdotage in a life that has been well lived among some of the most famous, while pursuing a serious literary life on paper, on stage and on film.

The central tableau of Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, is the lingering and courageous death of Howard Auster, Vidal’s devoted boyfriend, who lived with him for 53 years.

Auster received only a brief mention in Vidal’s first volume of memoirs, Palimpsest, but this time his death from cancer at the age of 74 is recorded with pain and pathos.

Yet, as always with this quintessential American chronicler, a steely objectivety underpins the reportage. Auster, riddled with malign cells, dies as Vidal is briefly away from his bedside and returns to find that his heart has stopped. His grey eyes remain open and Vidal movingly insists that “he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes”. The day before they had sat together watching the television news chatting to the screen as much as to each other. When the TV was switched off, Vidal had asked Auster if he wanted to talk.

“There was a long silence, then he shook his head. Why not? ‘Because there’s too much to say’.” After Auster’s death the devoted nurse attending him wept. Gore could not. “I envied him — the Wasp glacier had closed over my head.”

It is like a scene from a film, and film is what Vidal believes is the most important thing in his life besides Sex and Art. (And, yes, he does capitalise them.) Movie stars flicker through the memoir from Paul Newman on holiday in Greece to Orson Welles close-up on set.

Movie star, novelist, historian, political activist and polemicist, Vidal’s defining gift is to express himself with greater fluency, potency, erudition and sharp focus than God should allow one man. He is original, funny and outrageous. Try: “Altruism is a brief phase through which some adolescents must pass. It is rather like acne. Happily, as with acne, only a few are permanently scarred.”

Bon mots and witticisms aside, there is no one in America who has valued and used modern and classical history and literature in a more potent, political way, essentially as a stir-it-up-man for the liberal Left, castigating corporate America for polluting the country’s idealism and core values. But, as he self-deprecatingly says, it is his novels that are the rub. He is too self-knowing and interested in the truth not to admit the limitations of a man of letters in today’s world.

He insists that there is no such thing as a famous novelist. Only movie stars are properly famous.

Writers like him, who love reading and literature, philosophy and history, are a dying breed in the video age. The potency of the printed word alone is over as far as the greater public is concerned. There is only film fame, he suggests. And film has obsessed him and played a huge part in his life. As a child he would watch five films a day in the cinema.

An unmistakably patrician tone pervades this book at every turn. It is, at times, very funny. How was the 20th century, as eager interviewers tend to ask him. “Well, it could have been worse,” he says with calculated understatement waiting to be asked what Marilyn Monroe was really like: “As I barely know her, I tell him.”

This is Vidal at his best: puncturing pomposity and relishing the rich contradictory nature of himself and America, both things that he loves. He is fearless, courageous, campaigning, waspish and wise. The combination is rare and dynamite. Be bold and buy this book — be Gored to avoid being bored.

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