by Gore Vidal
Currently, two biographers are at work on my sacred story, and the fact that they are trying to make sense of my life has made me curious about how and why I have done—and not done—so many things. As a result, I have begun writing what I have said that I’d never write, a memoir (“I am not my own subject,” I used to say with icy superiority). Now I am reeling haphazardly through my own youth, which is when practically everything of interest happened to me, rather more soon than late, since I was force-fed, as it were, by military service in the Second World War.
My father once told me, after reviewing his unpleasant period in public office, that whenever it came time for him to make a crucial decision, he invariably made the wrong one. I told him that he must turn Churchill and write his own life, demonstrating what famous victories he had set in motion at Gallipoli or in the “dragon’s soft underbelly” of the Third Reich. But my father was neither a writer nor a politician; he was also brought up to tell the truth. I, on the other hand, was brought up by a politician grandfather in Washington, D.C., and I wanted very much to be a politician, too. Unfortunately, nature had designed me to be a writer. I had no choice in the matter. Pears were to be my diet, stolen or homegrown. There was never a time when I did not make sentences in order to make those things that I had experienced cohere and become “real.”
Finally, the novelist must always tell the truth as he understands it while the politician must never give the game away. Those who have done both comprise a very short list indeed. The fact that I was never even a candidate for the list had to do with a choice made at twenty that entirely changed my life.
At nineteen, just out of the army, I wrote a novel, Williwaw (1946): it was admired as, chronologically at least, the first of the war novels. The next year I wrote the less admired In a Yellow Wood (1947). Simultaneously, my grandfather was arranging a political career for me in New Mexico (the governor was a protégé of the old man). Yes, believe it or not, in the greatest democracy the world has ever known—freedom’s as well as bravery’s home—elections can be quietly arranged, as Joe Kennedy somewhat showily demonstrated.
For someone twenty years old I was well situated in the world, thanks to two published novels and my grandfather’s political skills. I was also situated dead center at a crossroads rather like the one Oedipus found himself at. I was writing The City and the Pillar. If I published it, I’d take a right turn and end up accursed in Thebes. Abandon it and I’d turn left and end up in holy Delphi. Honor required that I take the road to Thebes. I have read that I was too stupid at the time to know what I was doing, but in such matters I have always had a certain alertness. I knew that my description of the love affair between two “normal” all-American boys of the sort that I had spent three years with in the wartime army would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land—which has always been more Boeotia, I fear, than Athens or haunted Thebes. Until then, American novels of “inversion” dealt with transvestites or with lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for Marines. I broke that mold. My pair of lovers were athletes and so drawn to the entirely masculine that, in the case of one, Jim Willard, the feminine was simply irrelevant to his passion to unite with his other half, Bob Ford: unfortunately for Jim, Bob had other sexual plans, involving women and marriage.
I gave the manuscript to my New York publishers, E. P. Dutton. They hated it. One ancient editor said, “You will never be forgiven for this book. Twenty years from now you will still be attacked for it.” I responded with an uneasy whistle in the dark: “If any book of mine is remembered in the year 1968, that’s real fame, isn’t it?”
To my grandfather’s sorrow, on January 10, 1948, The City and the Pillar was published. Shock was the most pleasant emotion aroused in the press. How could our young war novelist . . . ? In a week or two, the book was a best-seller in the United States and wherever else it could be published—not exactly a full atlas in those days. The English publisher, John Lehmann, was very nervous. In his memoirs, The Whispering Gallery, he writes, “There were several passages in The City and the Pillar, a sad, almost tragic book and a remarkable achievement in a difficult territory for so young a man, that seemed to my travellers and the printers to go too far in frankness. I had a friendly battle with Gore to tone down and cut these passages. Irony of the time and taste: they wouldn’t cause an eyebrow to be lifted in the climate of the early sixties.” Nevertheless, even today copies of the book still fitfully blaze on the pampas and playas of Argentina and other godly countries. As I write these lines, I have just learned that the book will at last appear in Russia, where a Moscow theater group is adapting it for the stage.
What did my confrères think? I’m afraid not much. The fag writers were terrified; the others were delighted that a competitor had so neatly erased himself. I did send copies to two famous writers, fishing, as most young writers do, for endorsements. The first was to Thomas Mann. The second was to Christopher Isherwood, who responded enthusiastically. We became lifelong friends. Through Joseph Breitbach I was told that André Gide was planning to write an “appreciation,” but when we finally met he spoke only of a handwritten, fetchingly illustrated pornographic manuscript that he had received from an English clergyman in Hampshire.
At fourteen I had read Thomas Mann’s Joseph books and realized that the “novel of ideas” (we still have no proper phrase in English for this sort of book, or, indeed, such a genre) could work if one were to set a narrative within history. Later, I was struck by the use of dialogue in The Magic Mountain, particularly the debates between Settembrini and Naphta, as each man subtly vies for the favors of the dim but sexually attractive Hans Castorp. Later, there would be complaints that Jim Willard in The City and the Pillar was too dim. But I deliberately made him a Hans Castorp type: what else would someone so young be, set loose on the world—the City—that was itself the center of interest? But I did give Jim something Hans lacked: a romantic passion for Bob Ford that finally excluded everything else from his life, even, in a sense, the life itself. I got a polite, perfunctory note from Thomas Mann, thanking me for my “noble work”: my name was misspelled.
Contemplating the American scene in the 1940s, Stephen Spender deplored the machinery of literary success, remarking sternly that “one has only to follow the whizzing comets of Mr. Truman Capote and Mr. Gore Vidal to see how quickly and effectively this transforming, diluting, disintegrating machinery can work.” He then characterized The City and the Pillar as a work of sexual confession, quite plainly autobiography at its most artless. Transformed, diluted, disintegrated as I was, I found this description flattering. Mr. Spender had paid me a considerable compliment; although I am the least autobiographical of novelists, I had drawn the character of the athlete Jim Willard so convincingly that to this day aging pederasts are firmly convinced that I was once a male prostitute, with an excellent backhand at tennis. The truth, alas, is quite another matter. The book was a considerable act of imagination. Jim Willard and I shared the same geography, but little else. Also, in the interest of verisimilitude I decided to tell the story in a flat gray prose reminiscent of one of James T. Farrell’s social documents.
In April 1993, at the University of New York at Albany, a dozen papers were read by academics on The City and the Pillar. The book has been in print for close to half a century, something I would not have thought possible in 1948, when The New York Times refused to advertise it and no major American newspaper or magazine would review it or any other book of mine for the next six years. Life magazine thought that God’s country was being driven queer by the young army first mate they had featured only the previous year, standing before his ship. I’ve not read any of the Albany papers. For one thing, it is never a good idea to read about oneself, particularly about a twenty-one-year-old self who had modeled himself, perhaps too closely, on Billy the Kid. I might be shot in the last frame, but I was going to take care of a whole lot of folks who needed taking care of before I was done.
There were th
ose who found the original ending “melodramatic.” (Jim strangles Bob after an unsuccessful sexual encounter.) When I reminded one critic that it is the nature of romantic tragedy to end in death, I was told that so sordid a story about fags could never be considered tragic, unlike, let us say, a poignant tale of doomed love between a pair of mentally challenged teenage “heteros” in old Verona. I intended Jim Willard to demonstrate the romantic fallacy. From too much looking back, he was destroyed, an unsophisticated Humbert Humbert trying to re-create an idyll that never truly existed except in his own imagination. Despite the title, this was never plain in the narrative. And of course the coda was unsatisfactory. At the time it was generally believed that the publishers forced me to tack on a cautionary ending in much the same way the Motion Picture Code used to insist that wickedness be punished. This was not true. I had always meant the end of the book to be black, but not as black as it turned out. So for a new edition of the book published in 1965 I altered the last chapter. In fact, I rewrote the entire book (my desire to imitate the style of Farrell was perhaps too successful), though I did not change the point of view or the essential relationships. I left Jim as he was. I had no choice: he had developed a life of his own outside my rough pages. Claude J. Summers, in his book Gay Fictions, recently noted that of the characters:
only Jim Willard is affecting, and he commands sustained interest largely because he combines unexpected characteristics. Bland and ordinary, he nevertheless has an unusually well-developed inner life. Himself paralyzed by romantic illusions, he is surprisingly perceptive about the illusions of others. For all the novel’s treatment of him as case history, he nevertheless preserves an essential mystery. As Robert Kiernan comments (Gore Vidal), Jim Willard is Everyman and yet he is l’étranger . . . the net effect is paradoxical but appropriate for it decrees that, in the last analysis, we cannot patronize Jim Willard, sympathize with him entirely, or even claim to understand him. Much more so than the typical character in fiction, Jim Willard simply exists, not as the subject of a statement, not as the illustration of a thesis, but as himself.
Recently, I received a note from a biographer of Thomas Mann. Did I know, he asked, the profound effect that my book had had on Mann? I made some joke to the effect that at least toward the end of his life he may have learned how to spell my name. “But he didn’t read the book until 1950, and as he read it he commented on it in his diaries. They’ve just been published in Germany. Get them.” Now I have read, with some amazement, of the effect that Mann’s twenty-one-year-old admirer had on what was then a seventy-five-year-old world master situated by war in California.
Wednesday 22, XI, 50
. . . Began to read the homoerotic novel “The City and the Pillar” by Vidal. The day at the cabin by the river and the love-play scene between Jim and Bob was quite brilliant.—Stopped reading late. Very warm night.
Thursday 23, XI, 50
. . . Continued “City and Pillar.”
Friday 24, XI, 50
. . . In the evening continued reading “The City and the Pillar.” Interesting, yes. An important human document, of excellent and enlightening truthfulness. The sexual, the affairs with the various men, is still incomprehensible to us. How can one sleep with men—[Mann uses the word Herren, which means not “men” but “gentlemen.” Is this Mann being satiric? A rhetorical question affecting shock?]
Saturday evening 25, XI, 50
. . . in May 1943, I took out the Felix Krull papers only to touch them fleetingly and then turn to Faustus. An effort to start again must be made, if only to keep me occupied, to have a task at hand. I have nothing else, no ideas for stories; no subject for a novel. . . . Will it be possible to start [Felix Krull] again? Is there enough of the world and are there enough people, is there enough knowledge available? The homosexual novel interests me not least because of the experience of the world and of travel that it offers. Has my isolation picked up enough experience of human beings, enough for a social-satirical novel?
Sunday 26, XI, 50
Busy with [the Krull] paper, confusing.
Read more of Vidal’s novel.
Wednesday 29, XI, 50
. . . The Krull papers (on imprisonment). Always doubts. Ask myself whether this music determined by a “yearning theme” is appropriate to my years. . . . Finished Vidal’s novel, moved, although a lot is faulty and unpleasant. For example, that Jim takes Bob into a Fairy Bar in New York.
I am pleased that Mann did not find the ending “melodramatic,” but then what theme is more melodramatically “yearning” than Liebestod? In any case, the young novelist who took what seemed to everyone the wrong road at Trivium is now saluted in his own old age by the writer whom he had, in a certain sense, modeled himself on. As for Mann’s surprise at how men could sleep with one another, he is writing a private diary, the most public act any German master can ever do, and though he often refers to his own “inversion” and his passions for this or that youth, he seems not to go on, like me, to Thebes but to take (with many a backward look) the high road to Delphi, and I am duly astonished and pleased that, as he read me, he was inspired—motivated—whatever verb—to return to his most youthful and enchanting work, Felix Krull.
Some of my short stories are almost as lighthearted as Thomas Mann in his last work. One of them, “The Ladies in the Library,” is an unconscious variation on Death in Venice. Three variations on a theme: Mann’s Hans Castorp; then my own, Jim Willard; then a further lighter, more allegro version of Jim in the guise of a character whom Mann appropriately called Felix—Latin for “happy.”
The Threepenny Review
Summer 1995
* ANTHONY BURGESS
Although in life Anthony Burgess was amiable, generous, and far less self-loving than most writers, I have been disturbed, in the last few years, to read in the press that he did not think himself sufficiently admired by the literary world. It is true, of course, that he had the good fortune not to be hit, as it were, by the Swedes, but surely he was much admired and appreciated by the appreciated and admired.
In my lifetime he was one of the three “best” novelists to come out of England (all right, the other two are the Swedized Golding, and Iris Murdoch) but he was unlike the whole lot in the sense that one never knew what he would do next. He resisted category.
To me this is a great virtue, and a tiny source of income for him because he was the only writer of my time whose new book I always bought and always read. On or off form, there was bound to be something that he had come up with that I did not know—or even dream of—while his Enderby series are even finer comedies than those by the so much admired E. Waugh.
I was both moved and alarmed that one of his own last reviews in The Observer was of my collected essays in which appeared a long piece on his first volume of memoirs: I recalled him personally, with fondness; reported on his life and work; remarked, of the memoir, that he had no sense of humor.
In his review of me he quotes this, remarking that, once, he did have a sense of humor. I almost wrote him to say that I was referring only to the autobiography. Now I know that he had known for some time that he was dying of cancer, no rollicking business.
I cannot think what English book reviewing will do without him. He actually read what he wrote about, and he was always interesting on what he read. He did not suffer from the English disease of envy that tends to make so much English reviewing injurious to the health of literature.
When I first met him in 1964, he was about to be famous for A Clockwork Orange. He was, however, truly notorious because he had reviewed, pseudonymously, several of his own books in a provincial newspaper. “At least,” I said at the time, “he is the first novelist in England to know that a reviewer has actually read the book under review.”
Shakespeare, Joyce, Roman Empire (of the imagination), Malaysia; the constipated Enderby, whose fine poems were often included in the prose text. He ranged throughout language, a devoted philologist, and throughout music as a compo
ser.
Once his first wife snarled—when it became clear that I was eight years younger than he—that I ought not to have got some Book Club selection when he had written so much more than I. Neither of us quite sober, we began to compare units of production. When it became clear that I was ahead, he said with quiet pomp, “I am really a composer.” I was left without a single choral work, much less a fanfare, to put in the scales.
At one point when we were both living in Rome, whenever I would be offered a twelve-part television miniseries on the Medici or the Huns, I’d say, “Get poor Burgess,” and so they did. When I made the mistake of using the phrase “poor Burgess” in an interview, he wrote, “I can’t say that I liked that ‘poor Burgess’ bit. Happily, I left Gore out of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the contemporary novel.” In due course, he transcended Italian television and did, for the RSC, the finest version I have ever seen of Cyrano de Bergerac. Many parts, not so poor Burgess.
I ended my review of Anthony’s autobiography—much of it about how he lost faith in God—by making a play on the title Little Wilson (Burgess’s real name) and Big God. I suggested that the book might better have been called Little Wilson and Big Burgess, “who did it his, if not His, way.”
I saw him a year or two ago. We were being jointly interviewed by BBC Radio. “Odd,” he said, “I keep looking at my watch. It’s like a tic. I wonder why?” For once, I made no answer.