Gore Vidal’s Snapshots in History’s Glare (Abrams) is a nicely ironic — let’s hope — title for a once-over-lightly photo album of Vidal’s life and times. A better title would be The Beautiful and the Damned, if Scott Fitzgerald hadn’t already snapped it up.

The golden days of postwar American letters never looked quite so good as in this collection of snapshots of Vidal — who poses with studied aplomb — with Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jack Kennedy, Mick Jagger and dozens of others. The scenes are parties and beaches in New York, California, Florida, the Hamptons, Rome, Amalfi — wherever the beautiful people congregate.

Also on view is correspondence, including a letter from Tennessee Williams whose salutation reads “Fruit of Eden!” Paul Newman turns out to have been a witty correspondent, and Vidal himself can still turn a phrase: “One significant thing we had in common was being the same age. This meant that when I was 17 I enlisted in the U.S. Army, and when Paul was 17 he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and that’s how we won the war, or somebody did.”

Vidal, who has unwillingly entered what he calls “The Cedars-Sinai years,” remains a model of erudite intellectual languor.
A similarly scathing wit can be found in Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker (Scribner), “lost” being defined as poems that Parker published in various periodicals but didn’t collect in any of her three books of poetry. Parker mean is much better than Parker sentimental, and sometimes the combination is particularly poignant, not to mention perennially apt : “Oh, I shall be, till Gabriel’s trump/Nostalgic for some distant dump/And never doomed to weep me dry/For some lost mediocre guy.”

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

halieutics: an article or book about fish or fishing.