Vidal's Spidery Glee

摘要

"Entering, as I am, the springtime of my senility": these were the first words out of Gore Vidal's mouth, uttered in his dark mahogany patrician drawl, when he began the wickedly smart Wil-liam E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the His-tory of American Civilization at Harvard in 1991. Once published, they became one of his sharpest, shortest, and most outrageously enjoyable books, Screening History, a cameo-autobiography filtered through his encounters with the movies.