A Puck and a Half : SCREENING HISTORY, <i> By Gore Vidal (Harvard University Press: $14.95; 96 pp.)</i>

In the world according to Gore Vidal, political power may reside in the imperial mansions of Washington, D.C., but the true, imaginative capital of America is Hollywood, California, “the source,” as his sublime creation, the character Myra Breckinridge, once put it, “of all this century’s legends.” Essayist, novelist, social critic and sometimes screenwriter (whose credits include, by his own admission, “such gorgeous junk as ‘Ben Hur’ ”), Vidal has long been one of Hollywood’s most astute connoisseurs. His novel “Hollywood” cleverly counterpoised the rise of silent movies against the United States’ own star-turn in the wake of World War I; his satire “Myra Breckinridge” both celebrated and subverted the sexual sirens of the screen.

Now, in the form of a discursive memoir called “Screening History,” drawn from a series of Harvard University lectures on his own beginnings as a writer, Vidal himself emerges from behind the masks of his fictional alter egos and confesses, “The only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.”

At first, it seems a startling admission, coming from such a patrician literary warrior. But as Vidal conjures up his boyhood haunts in Washington, D.C., movie palaces like the Capitol (where between films historical tableaux of “Living Statues” were enacted), loom as large as the Capitol itself, where he would watch his grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma, act out historical tableaux of quite another sort. As Henry Luce’s “The March of Time” newsreels--the “60 Minutes” of their day, Vidal calls them--mediated between real life and reel life, the two realms blurred. “Is it possible that even when working from memory, I saw the world in movie terms, as who did not or, indeed, who does not?” Vidal asks, even as he succumbs to cinematic flashbacks.

His own mother, a thrice-married flapper, is unsentimentally described as “a composite of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.” His earliest aspiration was to be the mischievous Puck that Mickey Rooney played in the 1935 screen version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (It’s a role he would later play to perfection when making the rounds of the talk shows to inveigh against mortal foolishness.) “The Prince and the Pauper,” which he first encountered in the screen version as a 12-year-old, cast a powerful spell over him: triggering a longing for a twin, teaching him his first lessons in class consciousness, and even, he insists, providing him with his first musings on the finality of death.

Vidal doesn’t care to linger over autobiographical revelation, though, and his nostalgic reverie is just a warm-up for the memoir’s main thesis. “In the end, he who screens the history makes the history,” he proclaims. As evidence, he argues that Anglophiles and royalists on both sides of the Atlantic spent the 1930s turning out historical epics celebrating gallant little England, assuring that when the time came America would leap to the defense of that sceptered isle.

A noninterventionist like his grandfather, Vidal was not eager to follow Franklin Roosevelt, “this larger-than-life King Kong of a newsreel politician,” into battle. Yet even the skeptical Vidal fell under the thrall of historical fantasies like “That Hamilton Woman” as “patriot (Laurence) Olivier . . . warns everyone in sight not to do business with dictators, ever.” As Vidal remembers it, “By the time the war came, we had been obliged to empathize with the British totally and with the French somewhat; with the Germans and the Japanese not at all.”

As an evocative reminiscence, it’s most persuasive, even if Vidal’s logic is not quite airtight. He rightly skewers Hollywood’s long-standing infatuation with English pomp: “On our screens, in the thirties, it seemed as if the only country on earth was England,” he writes. “I recall no popular films about Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln the president. . . . Our history was thought unsuitable for screening.” But Vidal proposes that America’s atavistic yearning for royalty, which has degenerated into the current tabloid obsession with Di and Fergie, goes far deeper than the amorphous conspiracy on the part of expatriate British filmmakers. For when he then goes on to dismiss the red-baiters who accused communists of similarly infiltrating Hollywood during the ‘30s and ‘40s, he has to admit that “you couldn’t get anything of a political nature into any film.” The movies of Hollywood’s golden age may have offered up unconscious propaganda, but no programmatic plot was afoot.

Nevertheless, Vidal maintains that with literacy in decline, film and TV offer the only hope for educating future generations, however poorly the media may have done the job in the past. Although he has labored to keep the historical novel alive, Vidal argues for a whole new curriculum devoted not to the written word but to putting history on the screen--”not only Lincoln but Confucius and the Buddha.” It’s a challenge that neither Hollywood (contentedly churning out “Wayne’s Worlds”) nor the educational Establishment (facing cutbacks right and left) is apt to rise to.

No matter, though. “The Screening of History” may end on a nearly utopian note, but it can also be read simply for its rich load of acerbic Vidalian asides. Before concluding his text, Vidal can’t resist a parting shot at the current resident of the White House. “For George Bush,” he parries, “it is always 1939, the year of ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Young Mr. Lincoln.’ ” A very good year for movies, but a very bad year for forging future Presidents. With that, the puckish Vidal departs, having scored another epigrammatic touche.