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In the introduction to his new book about Gore Vidal, Jay Parini writes of their friendship: "I was looking for a father, and he seemed in search of a son." In a memoir, this would
be a powerful inducement to read on, signalling precisely the kind of complicated relationship one wants in that form. But a word of caution. This is not a memoir. Parini, a novelist and
academic, has written, in essence, a traditional biography; his recollections of Vidal are limited mostly to the rather stagey first-person vignettes – "So this is where you often had
lunch with Capote, in the late 40s?" – which precede each chapter. His talk of his closeness to Vidal, moreover, soon starts to seem to the reader like something of an exaggeration. By
his own telling, Parini played a rather courtly role in Vidal's glorious realm. His subject was famous for his feuds. He and Parini, however, remained pals right until the end, perhaps
for the straightforward reason that his awed biographer knew better than ever to disagree with him. This is not to say that _Every Time a Friend Succeeds_ is a whitewash. Parini, who first
met Vidal in the 80s when he was living near the older writer's vast Amalfi home, La Rondinaia, is certainly too diligent when it comes to his novels, praising even some of the bad ones
(it is with a straight face, for instance, that he compares the oft-derided 1968 gender-bending satire _Myra Breckinridge_ to John Updike's _Couples_ and Philip Roth's
_Portnoy's Complaint_). But about the man, he is mostly clear-eyed, as content to detail the spite and the sulking as the generosity, wit and wrap-around cleverness. If he has an
achilles heel, it is his attitude towards Vidal's sexuality. Obsessed in a quite prurient way with the degree to which he was, or was not, bisexual – as a young man, Gore once had a
girlfriend, after all – Parini's cod psychology is silly, outdated and frequently patronising. In Gore-related matters, to give just one example, Anaïs Nin had her own axe to grind,
having believed herself to have been in love with him (Vidal denied their affair). Yet Parini quotes with approval her view of her friend's homosexuality, something she regarded as
clear evidence of his reluctance to enter the adult world. "His sexuality had been locked into place quite early, and he never shifted beyond it," he agrees. It's a statement
that seems all the more condescending when you consider that Vidal lived happily with the same man, Howard Austen, for more than half a century. Oh, well. The great thing about Vidal is that
his story simply can't be murdered; it survives all retellings, whether by himself – his memoir _Palimpsest_, for all its exaggerations and untruths, is unputdownable – or by a
tin-eared biographer. Parini takes us through all the old familiar territory: the childhood spent mostly with his beloved maternal grandfather, the blind Senator Gore from Oklahoma, in a
grand house in Rock Creek Park, Washington; the teenage love affair with a boy called Jimmy Trimble, who was later killed in the battle of Iwo Jima; his mother's second marriage to Hugh
D Auchincloss, whose stepdaughter, Jacqueline, would go on to marry John Kennedy, and thus enable Gore to get close – though not half so close as he claimed – to Camelot; the astonishing
braveness of his publishing, in 1948, a gay coming-of-age novel, _The City and the Pillar_; the final kiss he gave Howard as he lay dying in 2003 (Vidal would follow him nine years later).
The feuds with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and William Buckley are all present and correct, and there are detailed accounts of his various (unsuccessful) efforts to seek election
("You'll get more with Gore" went his slogan when he stood as a Democrat for Congress in 1960, a line that, unusually for a politician, was something of an understatement).
The book has a cast of thousands: Paul Newman, Christopher Isherwood, Claire Bloom, Paul Bowles, Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan Sarandon, Tennessee Williams… and on, and on. (Among the lovers
Parini claims for Vidal are Fred Astaire, Rock Hudson and Charles Laughton.) An overexcited Edna O'Brien dashes naked on to a filthy Italian beach, "redolent" sewage baptising
her long, red hair. A dying Rudolph Nureyev arrives, stork-like on his sticks, leaning heavily on Vidal to get up the stairs. And here is Princess Margaret, of whom Vidal was stupidly and
snobbishly fond, inviting him to a picnic lunch at the Royal Lodge. Its populous energy only wanes as Vidal gets older, and the grip of his alcoholism fiercer, at which point it becomes
something of a list: of books written, of lectures given, of swanky hotels visited. Does Parini bring us anything new, something we cannot find in any of the other books about or by Gore?
I'm not sure that he does. Like all those who have written about him – I did it myself, when I interviewed him at home in Hollywood in 2008 – he tries very hard indeed to get behind his
subject's imperial facade. This, though, was bound to be a doomed project. In life, Vidal turned away those he liked, and even loved, almost in spite of himself, helpless in the face
of his own thin-skinned prickliness. Parini sees this, and writes of it with appropriate tenderness. He is also surprisingly good on – if mystified by – his union with the long-suffering
Howard, though I really can't go along with his conviction that Austen was some kind of Mrs Micawber figure ("I will never leave Mr Micawber!"). But his determination to treat
Vidal above all else as a serious writer – as a mirror, perhaps, in which he would like to see himself reflected back – pushes out a lot of the Gore gaiety, the sheer magnificence that came
with a sensibility like his. His wit is too thinly spread here, his peerless one-liners – "always a godfather, never a god" – mere isolated blooms on the dusty field of his
splendid loneliness. In spite of his best efforts, Parini doesn't find a soft heart beating within, perhaps for the simple reason, frustrating though this is for the biographer, that it
did not exist in the first place (as Vidal insisted to me in 2008: "[People] don't know how chilly I am! Once you break through the ice, you get to the cold water beneath").
Either that, or the emotional fortifications he constructed to protect it – what Kenneth Tynan called his "superb and seamless armour" – were so impenetrable, it withered and died
for lack of light. _Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies is published by Little, Brown (£25). __Click here to order a copy for £20_