TWO SISTERS by Gore Vidal. 256 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.
On its handsome jacket, Two Sisters is called "A Novel in the Form of a Memoir." Inside, however, a subtitle asserts that the book is "A Memoir in the Form of a Novel." Either one will do, although readers who know something about the author's life and works may prefer the second. Outwardly combining a tale of two status-seeking females in ancient Greece with what appear to be recollections from his own life, Vidal contrives to use himself both as narrator and fictional character.
Two Sisters is frequently open, particularly about bisexuality and Vidal's by now familiar and overexposed cynicism. Some parts are guarded and smirky for the lucky few. For example, not many readers will link the name of the real lady (N.A. Steers) to whom the book is dedicated with a later reference to "the heroine of a droll revision of the Cinderella story" whose stepsisters Vidal describes as "the two most successful adventuresses of our time."*
Vidal has every right to pay his personal respects, as well as to insinuate longstanding feuds into his book. Yet the thin veil of fiction that he swirls so adeptly around the pale data of his life is disappointing. It will seem particularly so to those who fell for Myra Breckinridge's critical dictum that
"the only useful form left to literature in the post-Gutenberg age is the memoir: the absolute truth, copied precisely from life, preferably at the moment it is happening."
Though Vidal's Myra is one of the most amusing idealists in American fiction, the absolute obviously does not exist in literary or any other form. But the relative truth about Two Sisters is that it is mainly a put-on of the roman à clef, a teasing mix of characters that do and do not resemble real people. As always, what Vidal puts on is stylishly cut. Basically there is the "now" of his own voice and the "then" of the book's principal fictional creation, a journal written by Eric Van Damm, who was killed and incinerated when he fell off a roof while filming a fiery riot.
Eric is the startlingly handsome twin brother of startlingly beautiful Erika, and the father of her child after a love affair of many years. The Vidal of the novel-in-the-form-of-a-memoir—or vice versa—had sex with Erika too. He was also attracted to Eric, though they never quite made it to bed. In addition, there is Marietta Donegal, an aging mystical novelist who was once lover to both men. The incest angle is best read as a suborbital send-up of Ada, Vladimir Nabokov's incestuous riddle of time and memory. For starters there is Van Damm and Nabokov's Van Veen.
The centrally placed conceit of Two Sisters is somewhat trickier. It is Eric's film script, The Two Sisters of Ephesus.
It is included in its entirety along with Eric's journal entries describing his dealings with a not very comic but triumphantly obscene caricature of a fly-by-night movie producer named Murray Morris.