One of the few people Vidal speaks with regularly on the telephone is Barbara Epstein, his longtime friend and editor at the New York Review of Books. "Like many people in Los Angeles, he's in exile," she says of Vidal. "Los Angeles is a place of exile. In a way, I think the one fits in the other very nicely."
Perhaps home, for Vidal, is exactly that -- exile -- a home that is not a home, from which he spies, somewhere in the nowhere of the distance, a better world.
But Vidal is not sentimental. The closest he comes is in his dreams. On good nights, as he sleeps in a second-floor bedroom down the landing from his study, he dreams of his father. "I'm always happy to see him again," Vidal says. "He starts climbing up a hill, and I follow him up, and it gets more and more full of bushes and so on. And then he vanishes." The landscape is not Los Angeles and not Ravello. "It's placeless," he says. "It's just a hill. It's wild country. When you dream of your father after a certain age, you're having a death dream. Any more of these doctors, and it won't be a dream."
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Contact the writer at steven .barrie-anthony@latimes.com.
