From the archive: The world according to Gore Vidal

INTERVIEWING Gore Vidal, whether face to face or, as today, with him in Los Angeles and me elsewhere, is like consulting one of the all-seeing, all-knowing, ancient oracles. His voice - velvety, imperious, with the melancholy timbre of a double bass - is at once foreign and familiar, one of the reverberating, unignorable voices of the past century.

In his new, "final" memoir, Point To Point Navigation, Vidal flits backwards, reliving old friendships and poking the embers of unforgotten feuds. But though the past is his ostensible subject he can't quite let the present alone. Even as he moves "graciously, I hope" into life's departure lounge, he can't help but stick his oar in, continuing the fractious dialogue he has maintained with his native land since he was able to talk.

Of late, he says, he's been campaigning and raising funds for the Democrats. Last week he was in Austin, Texas, with the former presidential candidate John Kerry. Rightly, he predicted a victory for the Democrats in the House of Representatives. But that still leaves Bush with two years in the White House and the situation in Iraq unresolved.

Is an American withdrawal now likely?

"I think we're going to be thrown out. And Bush is crazy enough to try yet another war even though we don't have the money for it.

We need a new army of about one million men. Where we'll find them no-one knows!

People are not enlisting, as you might guess. So he'll try something probably and we will be blown up. It would suit his eschatological tastes." Though he talks quite unlike a politician, Vidal very nearly became one. He ran twice for public office, most notably in 1960 when, in upstate New York, he got 20,000 more votes in his bid to enter Congress than JFK did in his successful bid to become president. Kennedy told him to thank his lucky stars. "Hell, you would have hated the House. I did. It's a can of worms." On reflection, Vidal reckoned he was right.

"If I wanted a serious career in politics I would have run again in 1964 and joined the other worms in the can." By then, however, his career as a novelist, which had flagged in the aftermath of the publication of The City And The Pillar, had been resurrected. His third novel, published in 1948 when he was just 23, it was one of the first to deal with homosexuals not as "shrieking queens or lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for marines" but as "normal" all-American jocks of the type he had encountered during his three years in the war.

Though warned of the repercussions one editor told him he would "never be - forgiven for this book" he went ahead anyway. Subsequently, it became a bestseller and Vidal a pariah. The New York Times would not advertise it and for six years none of his novels was reviewed in the American press.

Not surprisingly, therefore, he regards the media in the US as at best feckless and at worst venal. "If I want to find out what's happening in the United States or anywhere I start to read the foreign press. I'd rather read Italian papers than American ones." A case in point, he says, is a report by a Michigan congressman, John Conyers, who went with several other members of Congress to Ohio to determine whether or not the presidential election of 2004 had been stolen by the local Republican Party for Bush. Conyers's report, with an introduction by Vidal, shows how, with the collusion of officials and executives of electronic voting machine companies, the election had indeed been hijacked. Though radio stations have given it the oxygen of publicity, the print media have ignored it.

"The New York Times maintains a sibylline silence as it tends to do when proofs of electoral wrongdoing are nailed, as it were, to the church door, " comments Vidal. "The general liberal what a meaningless word in the American context! line has been: no-one likes sour grapes. So let's just move on quietly as [Al] Gore did in 2000. So what happened next? A blizzard of official lies about weapons of mass destruction. Of collusion between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, two well-known enemies. The wrecking, by Donald Rumsfeld, of Iraq and Afghanistan, two countries that had not and could not have done us the slightest harm. Simultaneously, as their cities were being knocked down at enormous expense to us, the taxpayers' contracts were being given to the vice-president's company, Halliburton, to rebuild those same cities that his colleague at the defence department had knocked down. This is a win- win situation for the higher corruption that governs us."

Vidal makes no attempt to conceal his exasperation and frustration. He was born in 1925, when Calvin Coolidge became president, everyone was doing the Charleston and Scott Fitzgerald produced The Great Gatsby. Now an octogenarian, he has returned to live permanently in America after more than three decades in Italy.

The house in which he lives in the Hollywood hills was bought by himself and Howard Austen, his partner for more than half a century, in preparation for "the hospital years, which came even sooner than either expected".

It was Austen who was the first to fall. He died three years ago, of cancer. The passages in Point To Point about him are unflinching, candid and terribly moving. "These things are grim, " says Vidal, softly. Was it very awful? "'It is the blight man was born for, /It is Margaret you mourn for.' Who's that?" I confess ignorance. "Gerard Manley Hopkins." One senses Austen's death is not a subject on which Vidal wishes to dwell. In the new book, however, he writes tenderly, if unsentimentally, about Austen, allowing him without fanfare to enter the narrative "as he remains permanently present in my memory". Towards the end, Austen asked: "How old am I?" Vidal told him he was 74.

"That's when people die, isn't it?" said Austen. Vidal told him that he hadn't and so far neither had he. "For a moment, " relates Vidal, "he looked puzzled; then he said, 'Didn't it go by awfully fast?' "Of course it had. We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals.

"Oh, " says Vidal, suddenly. "Art Buchwald's just died." As he talks, the TV is keeping him abreast of breaking news. I say that reading Point To Point was like going through an address book and crossing out all those who have died. "That's pretty much how it's done." Like a gatecrasher, death keeps intruding. The truth about Kennedy's assassination still remains elusive, though Vidal is convinced he was a victim of the Mob which was intent on seeking revenge after Bobby Kennedy had locked up a number of Mafiosi. Lee Harvey Oswald, he says, was the patsy he always insisted he was, killed "as planned" by Jack Ruby, a one-time Chicago mobster.

The details, he says, are to be found in Ultimate Sacrifice, a recent book by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. In it, too, is described how the Kennedy brothers plotted to kill Fidel Castro. The web is complicated but convincing.

Other deaths may be less dramatic, less historically significant, but are no less poignant. Vidal appears to have known everyone who mattered in every sphere of life. Once, he was invited by Princess Margaret to a house party at the Royal Lodge near Windsor. PM, as he calls her, told him: "The Queen is uncommonly talented in ways that you might not expect." "In what way?" he asked innocently. "Well, she can put on a very heavy tiara while hurrying down a flight of stairs with no mirror." Princess Margaret, he says, was far too intelligent for the life fate dealt her. "She often had a bad press, the usual fate of wits in a literal society. 'Also, ' she said, 'it was inevitable: when there are two sisters and one is the Queen who must be the source of honour and all that is good, the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.' She was stoic; nothing to be done but one can note her kindness to friends, to those employees whose pensions she paid out of fairly meagre resources, not to mention her steadfast loyalty to a system that never, in the end, did as much for her as she sacrificed for it."

Every other chapter of the memoir, it seems, brings another curtain down: Johnny Carson ("unlike most talk-show hosts John liked his guests to be entertaining"), Arthur Miller ("I praised The Crucible as well as his political courage in the McCarthy years"), Saul Bellow ("At one point we spoke of death and what each expected to die of.

Saul was very positive. 'I expect to just wear out.' And so he did, a man of Benthamite utility") and Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom he fell out in 1961 over a row about Bobby. Vidal and Jackie met just once thereafter, in a lift, 14 years later. No words were spoken until the lift door opened and "she sighed in her best Marilyn Monroe voice, 'Bye-bye'".

"Bye-bye, " repeats Vidal, like the refrain of an old song. He seems weary, but that has been his stock-in-trade for as long as I have known him. What he needs to perk him up is a blank page or an audience or a television camera. He first saw himself on a Pathe newsreel when he was 10. His father, as Roosevelt's director of air commerce and an ardent early aviator, wanted to show that a plane could be as popular, cheap and safe as a Model T Ford. Thus he allowed his young son to take off and land a plane, which led to a summer's fame. In a sense he has never been out of the headlines since. Not so long ago, he says, he watched the footage of the famous flight for the first time in 70 years.

"I am small, blond, with a retrousse nose as yet unfurled in all its Roman glory, " he writes in Point To Point. "I am to fly the plane, and a newsreel crew is on hand to record the event. My father was a master salesman. 'This is your big chance to be a movie star, ' he had said. 'All you have to do is remember to take off into the wind.' As I had flown the plane before, I am unafraid. I swagger down the runway, crawl into the plane, and pretend to listen to my father's instructions. But my eyes are not on him but on the cobra- camera's magic lens. Then I take the plane off; fly it, land it with a bump; open the door; and face my interviewer."

It had been, he told the interviewer insouciantly, as easy as riding a bike. And in a sense, his life has been like that. Well-off enough not to have to worry unduly about money, he could pursue his career as a writer without succumbing to self-censorship. That, perhaps, is why he is such a potent, fearless, unquenchable critic of the neo- conservatives who have the ear of Bush.

There is, he says, not one distinguished writer "or distinguished anything" among them. "The peak for a neo-conservative is to write a long, vicious attack on a liberal in the New York Times for which he will get a great position at the Cato Institute or whatever. And so here's a whole class of bad book reviewers that took over a country and pretended it was an empire, you know, an empire on the march." Marching is not something Vidal will be doing in future. A new titanium knee means he can get about with a stick but otherwise his mobility is limited.

How is he keeping otherwise? "Kept, " he says, meaning, one assumes, alive. Are there any compensations for being 80? "Being 81, " he corrects.

"None. Being dead soon is not the worst thing to look forward to and it sort of wraps up everything rather neatly. By that I mean being eternally present is not my idea of great pleasure. So one knows that one will slip away." Not too soon, I hope. "Well, we'll see, we'll see. On the other hand, since everybody I know is gaga, I don't think you know it when you do." On which happy note he bids me "upwards and onwards", and hangs up.

Point To Point Navigation: A Memoir, 1964 To 2006 is published by Little, Brown at GBP17.99