by Fred Kaplan
To
RHODA,
and to the memory of
JEROME BADANCES
Contents
Prelude
Chapter One Origins, 1776-1925
Chapter Two A Washington Childhood, 1925-1939
Chapter Three First Flight, 1935-1939
Chapter Four Brave New World, 1939-1941
Chapter Five Proudly Unfurled, 1941-1943
Chapter Six A Border Lord, 1943-1946
Chapter Seven Two Eagles, 1946-1947
Chapter Eight The Golden Age, 1947-1948
Chapter Nine Byron Without Greece, 1948-1950
Chapter Ten A Room of His Own, 1950-1955
Chapter Eleven Intolerable Absences, 1955-1957
Chapter Twelve Open and Shut, 1957-1960
Chapter Thirteen Something to Say, 1960-1963
Chapter Fourteen Delphi, 1963-1966
Chapter Fifteen Trapped in a Nightmare, 1965-1968
Chapter Sixteen From Chicago to Ravello, 1969-1972
Chapter Seventeen The View from La Rondinaia, 1972-1978
Chapter Eighteen The Same Sinking Boat, 1978-1986
Chapter Nineteen Scenes from Later Life, 1987-1996
Endnotes
Plate Section
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Author
Also by Fred Kaplan
Prelude
Rock creek park cemetery, washington, D.C., November 1994. I prefer my subjects dead, I had told him. He responded that he perfectly understood but declined to do anything special to accommodate my preference. Now we are experiencing a different aspect of the subject. A few hundred yards away, the sculpture of a veiled, androgynous figure famously signifies the grave site of Henry Adams and his wife. The land slopes aslant the grassy November stubble to the comparatively obscure burial marker of a Marine killed at Iwo Jima fifty years ago. My subject and I are standing amid the dead. We are both very much alive. The object of the visit to Rock Creek Park Cemetery is to certify visually that the site he has requested for his burial is in fact what he had triangulated in his mind, what he had negotiated from afar with the Rock Creek Park Cemetery business office, and to sign the covenants and authorizations. He wants the site roughly equidistant from the famous Adams and the obscure Jimmie Trimble.
One can always be buried, someplace. But to be buried at a particular place for particular reasons takes planning and sometimes luck. The director of the cemetery, partial lord of all he surveys, thinks the site an excellent one. He is both businesslike and officious. Probably it gives him pleasure to anticipate a celebrity burial, the newspaper stories perhaps not far beyond the year 2000 that will identify the cemetery in which the famous writer has just been buried. The cemetery director is a relatively young man, certainly not a day over fifty. If the obituaries have any wit, they will remark that Gore Vidal at last owns property in Washington, D.C. “How do Mr. Vidal and Mr. Austen envision the monument?” Howard Austen has been Gore Vidal’s companion for almost fifty years. There is some matter-of-fact discussion. My opinion is solicited. Since, if I survive my subject, I will someday describe in print the glint of medium-dark marble, the angle at which the two flat stones have been placed, the simplicity of the inscriptions, why not add to the day’s solemn amusement the irony of the biographer being consulted about the burial circumstances? It is one of the rewards for having forgone my preference that my subject be dead.
We chat a little at the grave-site-to-be. With my shoe I prod up some soil and scuff it forward an inch or two across the fields of the republic. It is a bright, mild day that transcends funereal locations. Gore (mostly) and Howard seem satisfied. In the end they will both be here. That is, what remains of them. They have been almost everywhere on this planet, and they have had a few favorite places. The last decades have been spent mostly on a Roman Street and in a Ravello villa. But, about America, Vidal has written, “Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.” For the satirist there is no difference between loving and loathing. They are the same pleasure, the same pain. To be buried in Rock Creek Park Cemetery is to be buried as close to home as possible, a final statement about the pleasure and the pain of our American home. Before leaving the cemetery we stop at a small stone Gothic building, the business office. Here the real business is done. Gore signs various documents. Howard signs. I also sign. The biographer as observer, participant, witness.
Chapter One
Origins
1776-1925
Gore Vidal’s last name is his father’s family name, his first his mother’s. Born October 3, 1925, at West Point, New York, he was named, and thirteen years later baptized by the canon of Washington’s Episcopalian National Cathedral Church, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr. His father, who had a poor memory for such things, could not remember for certain whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther. He mistakenly put Louis rather than Luther on his son’s birth certificate. His exasperated son remarked, years later, that since his father was then an instructor at West Point, “He might have asked the head of his department what his name was. ‘You know, I’ve forgotten my name. Could you tell me?’” At his baptism the Luther was restored. He also added, as another middle name, his mother’s maiden name. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, the young boy’s highest model of worldly achievement, was a United States senator. Then, at the age of sixteen, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., decided that a partial act of self-naming would anoint him with the best of both traditions. He wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author or national political leader. “I wasn’t going to write as Gene since there was already one. I didn’t want to use the Jr.” He dropped his first two names and the Jr. Thenceforth he was, so to speak, just Gore Vidal.
The Gore family saga is aggressively American, mostly Southern and Southwestern. When, in the early seventeenth century, the first Gores arrived in America from their Protestant Anglo-Irish origins, one brother went to New England, the other to Maryland, apparently never to meet again. The brothers probably came from Ireland, where the English Gores (of whom there were many) had been awarded land for service to the crown. They settled in Donegal, resolutely Anglo-Irish and anti-Catholic. Where they originally came from in England is unclear; so too is the nature of their service to the crown, though it probably had something to do with putting down the Irish. In Maryland, James Gore flourished, the patronymic father of seemingly innumerable farmers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, politicians—three hundred years of ambitious, stubbornly assertive individualists. English and Irish origins faded into family legend and historical mist. They later associated themselves with the category Scots-Irish, which proved useful to those who wanted to make clear that though they were from Ireland, they were not Catholics. From generation to generation American Gores were to have names like James, Thomas, Manning, Austen, Albert, Notley, Elias, Ellis, Ezekiel.
The immigrant James and his immediate descendents leased and owned substantial tracts of land in what is now part of central Washington and in the Georgetown-Rock Creek Park area. They fought in the French and Indian and then in the Revolutionary War, by the time of the latter apparently staunchly anti-British. They were fruitful and multiplied. As each died, land had to be divided or sold or both. Each needed a property, a stake, an opportunity. Fortunately, there was always land to the west. Toward the end of the French and Indian War, one of the immigrant James’s grandsons, Thomas, was granted or bought land in South Carolina. Selling extensive property in Maryland, part of the large family moved, before the Revolution began, southward and westward, to Chester County, near Spartanburg, in northwestern South Carolina. Thomas Tindal Gore, perhaps Thomas Gore’s nephew, the son of his brother Manning, was born in South Caroli
na in the celebratory year 1776, and became the patriarch of the next generation. With his wife, by whom he had eight sons and five daughters, he raised cotton along the fertile banks of the Sandy River. In 1817, in wagons, Thomas Tindal moved his family south and westward, probably looking for better land, more land, more autonomy, some release for a combination of restlessness and ambition. His willful individualism traveled with the word of his Methodist God and the assumption that the Gores were a chosen people. Once more there was someplace better to the west. White American settlers and their government in Washington had from the beginning conspired to buy or conquer (whichever was more practical) the lands between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River.
First the Thomas Tindal Gores went to Alabama, on the northwestern border of Alabama with Mississippi, where whites were rapidly replacing Indians. Apparently Thomas Gore kept an inn and ran a livery barn in Pickens County. In 1830 he was elected a county commissioner and then ran for the Alabama state senate. In 1840 the patriarch took part of his family directly westward into north-central Mississippi to Choctaw County, which had once been the heartland of the Choctaw Indian nation. Some Choctaws remained behind, never to be assimilated, but most were forced farther west, by economic and military pressure, across the river to what was later to be part of Oklahoma. With other white settlers, the Gores seized the opportunity. Thomas Tindal Gore purchased from a Choctaw Indian for two hundred dollars a large property along the Yalobusha River in what is now Calhoun City, then a hardscrabble frontier town in a county in which the land was tough, resistant, and hilly, and no one wealthy. As the Gores moved westward, they farmed whatever was the best local crop of the region. They preached the Word. They healed the sick. They were quicktongued, sharp-witted, smart. They talked and argued and argued and talked, sometimes for sport, always with passion. Thomas Tindal Gore’s descendants were soon to fight (and some to die) in the Civil War, regional patriots, small slaveowners, hill-country farmers, Methodist ministers, noticeably idealistic, argumentative, hot-tempered, and clannishly loyal. “If a snake should bite one Gore, the entire family would swell from it.” They were mostly unionists who found themselves trapped by local patriotism and pressure into fighting an enemy with whose underlying principle of national union they agreed. When the war came, they did their duty. They cared little about freeing slaves; they themselves had few or none. Plantation life and rule from Richmond were as alien as Northern factories and rule from Washington. But local autonomy was a rallying principle. Fighting for home rule, numbers of Gores were killed in battle.
Thomas Tindal’s thousands of Calhoun County acres had to be divided among a large number of heirs, the most memorable of whom was Ezekiel Fletcher Gore, Gore Vidal’s great-great-grandfather, an evangelist at the distant end of the Second Great Awakening, nicknamed “Rock,” a Methodist minister of stubborn rectitude. With his Georgia-born wife, Mary Green, he populated this new world with twelve children. He was an indefatigable circuit rider with a flair for the dramatic. On one occasion he was summoned by the organizing committee of a revival to breathe new life into a passionless series of meetings. They did not know if he would come. “The next day the eleven o’clock hour was approaching, the congregation had assembled, and no word from ‘Rock’ Gore. As several men … stood outside looking in the direction from which he would arrive, they saw him rounding a curve in the road with his horse at full gallop. He rode up, tossed the bridle reins to someone nearby, took his Bible and went into the Church singing one of the great old revival hymns.”
The next generation brought Ezekiel Gore’s strong-principled religious assertiveness into the tumultuous post–Civil War politics of northern Mississippi. His numerous children were always politicians, and imbued their politics with the same passionate rhetoric that their grandfather had brought to his religion. The Civil War had impoverished a never particularly prosperous county. Postwar recovery was slow, cash scarce, crops poor. Reconstruction seemed to most Southern whites an abomination, though Choctaw County had relatively few blacks to enfranchise. And with the end of military rule in 1869, the Democratic Party that had dominated the county before the war gradually regained control, though not before the 1874 Reconstructionist Mississippi state legislature divided the county and named the northern part Sumner, after the Massachusetts abolitionist.
Republicans began to disappear from Mississippi. In 1882 the leaders of Sumner County succeeded in having its name changed to the less offensive Webster. Daniel had some of the mitigating afterglow of a belated Founding Father. Reconstruction had been beaten back, and demographics made white power secure; only 25 percent of the county’s ten thousand residents were black. The pervasive problem was agricultural depression. People lived spartan lives, close to the proverbial bone. Material sophistication hardly rose above the level of their pioneer grandparents’, though Ezekiel’s sons were slightly better off than the average. Children of the Book, they were bookish enough to pursue professions as well as farm. To some extent they all became caught up in the tumultuous political events that dominated Webster County in the 1880s.
Born in Alabama in 1837, Thomas Madison Gore, Ezekiel’s eldest child, Gore Vidal’s great-grandfather, came to Mississippi as an infant in his grandfather and father’s entourage. His education was rural. Law and politics fascinated him. As a young man he resented the idea of the Confederacy. He sat all day, hesitating, on the steps of the Choctaw County courthouse. Finally, he bit the bullet and enlisted as a private. The bullet bit back. He was wounded at the battle of Chickamauga. Later, he joked that “as far as he knew he was the only corporal in the entire Confederate army as everyone else that he met in later years was at least a colonel.” He earned his living first as a schoolteacher, then at the intersection between politics and law. On the last day of December 1865 he married Carrie Wingo, two years his junior, a strikingly beautiful South Carolina—born Mississippian. In 1868 Carrie gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Mary, then in 1870 a son, Thomas Pryor, to be followed by two more sons, Ellis in 1874 and Richard (nicknamed Dixie) in 1883. In 1876 Thomas Madison Gore was nominated as the Democratic Party candidate for chancery clerk in Webster County. The nomination automatically meant election. That autumn the Thomas Madison Gore family moved to Walthall, the newly named county seat, where he took up his official duties. In a scarcity economy, political office was a valuable economic asset. Thomas Madison was reelected chancery clerk four times. But Democratic politics, simmering, soon boiled over. In Mississippi, dissident Democrats objected to what seemed the indifference of large agricultural and business interests, whose powerful political network controlled the state, to the interests of the small farmer. Proudly independent farmers lost their land. Sharecropping became a widespread humiliation. It seemed as if the state was being run by monopolies and banks.
The dissidents gathered force through the 1880s. In Webster County, farmers joined “The Great Agricultural Relief,” which became “The Farmer’s Alliance,” part of the fabric of the emerging national populist movement that advocated political and monetary policies to help the farmer through hard times. Passions were high. Articulate, principled, and ambitious, Thomas Madison Gore gave his heart to the People’s Party. As a dissident Democrat, he lost his party’s chancery-clerk nomination in 1887. In 1890 the entrenched political powers organized a state constitutional convention. Outraged by the Democratic Party’s support of even more restrictive suffrage (the final guarantee that Reconstruction had been defeated), appointed rather than elected judges (who would do the will of their masters), and tax breaks for corporations, Webster County populists rebelled. The powerful and rich were conspiring to keep them poor. They did not favor blacks having the right to vote, but they would be damned if they would allow their own franchise to be restricted in order to keep blacks disenfranchised. At a mass meeting at Walthall in July 1890 they resolved “That in order to preserve our Constitutional liberties, we oppose any amendment … that would lessen, impair or increase
the vote of any legal voter.” The new, more restrictive constitution was approved anyway. In Webster County the Democratic Party soon insisted that members sign pledges of support for its candidates. In July, at Walthall, the dissidents legally created the Webster County Populist Party, whose platform advocated “equal rights to all and special privileges to none, public control of communications and transportation, and election of United States senators by direct vote of the people.” Thomas Madison’s fate was sealed: he was never elected to public office again.
Born in December 1870, Thomas Pryor Gore, Gore Vidal’s grandfather, was soon anointed “Guv” by his ambitious father, in anticipation of what the family felt sure would be his destiny. Young Tom remembered the garden where they lived in Walthall, overflowing with trees and flowers. “Somebody who loved the beautiful had lived at that place.” Later he remembered vividly the colors and the shapes of the garden. As a six-year-old, in the same year he started school and learned to read, he heard his first political speech. When his grandmother, Rock Gore’s pious wife, died in 1878, he went to the funeral. He never forgot that the gruel that she had once made for him was “the best stuff” he had ever tasted. At his father’s knee he learned Webster County politics. At nine he suffered what seemed a minor injury to his left eye when a stick he and a playmate were throwing hit his lower lid. He could still see through it, but with diminished sight. Though his right eye was fine, premonitions of blindness began to haunt him. At school he became obsessed with rereading a story “about a blind swan and another about a boy who had lost both eyes accidentally at different times.” In 1881 he got his first job, as a printer’s “devil,” setting type for a local Walthall newspaper. Later that year he was thrilled to be appointed a page in the state senate in Jackson. Within three days he learned all the senators’ names.