Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  From early on, his grandmother read to him. These sessions soon turned into reading lessons as well as entertainment. “Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called ‘The Duck and the Kangaroo.’” When, just after his sixth birthday, he began first grade at the Potomac School on California Street near Connecticut Avenue, he could read somewhat, mostly because of his grandmother, partly because his grandfather had, during the previous year, already pounced. Every possible reader had for years been pressed into service for the eight hours or so each day that the Senator “read.” “‘Milton’s daughters,’ he would say with a sweet smile … ‘went blind reading to their father.’” When his own two children had proved abysmal readers, Mrs. Gore continued as she had for thirty years. So too did the Senator’s longtime secretary. Mrs. Gore had developed the skill of reading to her husband while her mind was totally someplace else, but she longed for relief. To those who read to him, he was “a gentle and amusing tyrant … hard going, if you did not.” At last, the blind man decided, he could start to reap the benefit of having an intelligent grandson. Little Gene could start fulfilling the role his grandfather had had in mind for him from the moment he had been cradled in a bureau drawer at Rock Creek Park. Actually, Nina and Gene now, finally, had an apartment of their own, on Bancroft Place above Dupont Circle, close to the Potomac School. But Deenie still spent much of his time at Broad Branch Road, looked after by his grandmother. Falteringly, he had begun to read out loud to his grandfather, applying the rudimentary skills his grandmother had taught him. The Senator slowly, patiently, nurtured his oral reading and his enthusiasm for books. In a house filled with bookshelves, the Senator knew the location of each volume. He would ask the boy to go to a particular shelf and get such-and-such a book down. Then he would tell him where to turn to in the book. Then the command was, “Read!”

  Little Gene did his best, sounding out long or difficult words syllable by syllable. Gradually he improved his facility and speed. The boy had the advantage of the Senator having to teach him phonetically. When he stumbled, his grandfather would sound out the syllables. “I can still remember pronouncing long words, syllable by syllable. Not until I had got the sense would we move on.” As a reward for what was initially, at five, hard and sometimes boring work (he could understand only part of what he read), the Senator would tell him stories, which he had started doing long before the boy could read at all. “Baby Gene,” said a Washington newspaper feature article about the Senator, “runs among the stacks of books…. ‘Tell me a story, Dad,’ begs little Gene, bored with playthings. The Senator, eyes tightly closed, says nothing. ‘Dad,’ insists the boy, shaking him. ‘Oh, Dad! Please tell me a story!’ Silence. Baby Gene regards his grandfather with interest, observes naïvely: ‘Why do you keep your eyes closed? You can’t see anyway.’ Sen. Gore, amused, opens his blind eyes, begins sententiously: ‘Once upon a time….’” And the Senator would invent stories, “just to take the curse off some of the stuff I had to read … about boys who lived up a tree in Mississippi and how they lived in the woods. He would interject these amidst bimetallism, to hold my interest with it.” The Senator loved fact, information, analysis, the Congressional Record. He also, paradoxically, was a “passionate sight-seer…. One of my first memories is driving with him to a slum in southeast Washington. ‘All this,’ he said, pointing at the dilapidated redbrick buildings, ‘was once our land.’ Since I saw only shabby buildings and could not imagine the land beneath, I was not impressed.”

  Potomac School was mostly, in his memory, a blur. His fictional alter ego had been “sick to his stomach the first day, and all his memories after that were a confusion: noise, paste, paper, sandboxes.” Later he recalled that “as we came downstairs, one of the teachers belted out ‘Celeste Aïda’ on the piano. As a result, it is the only Verdi opera I don’t care for.” Even first-grade classes in those distant days were highly structured. For some reason, his best grades were in citizenship, mathematics, and music, his lowest in composition, reading, and spelling, as if this were some alternative Eugene Luther Vidal, later to be exchanged for the real one. His handwriting was already dreadful. His mother suddenly became concerned about him, particularly his grades. Why wasn’t he making more of an effort? If he didn’t do better, he would be punished. She decided a change of school was called for. Abruptly, for the next year, he was enrolled in the second grade at The Landon School for Boys, though the record is as much a blur and a blank as his memory. His home address was now again 1500 Broad Branch Road, Rock Creek Park. For third grade, Nina moved him again, this time to the larger Sidwell Friends School, where he was to stay for grades three through five. He had occasional conversations with Mr. Sidwell himself, “an ancient Quaker whose elephantine ears were filled with hair while numerous liver spots made piebald his kindly bald head.” At all three schools reading was taught phonetically. Early on, at Potomac or Landon, he was taught by the Calvert method. “With Calvert you cut out pictures of Greek gods and you glued them into books,” he recalled, “a form of teaching which doesn’t exist anymore. They tried to make it interesting and visual, but you also had to know about syllables, that a sentence was made up of words which were made up of little syllables, like a train.” During his first two years at Sidwell Friends the real Eugene Luther Vidal materialized, with A’s in reading, history, and spelling and respectable grades throughout, except for the constant dismal D’s for penmanship. On the playing fields he was noticeably uninterested, his marks low. In fifth grade all his marks plunged. Though forced to be there in body, he had withdrawn his mind. At home, at Rock Creek Park, he read to his grandfather and now, also, for long hours to himself. He soon began to write, bits of prose stories and poems. He had decided to do at school only what he was forced to. What he wanted was to read. The Senator had no objections. On the contrary: reading had become a strong bond between them. Nina, though, was appalled. She did not want a son who shut himself up with books, who did not “mix,” one of her favorite words. Since she read little to nothing, a son who read a great deal worried her. He could not be up to any good or fit into her world. Irritated, she constantly urged him to play outdoors. She wanted him to get better grades, to be popular in ways that fit her values. School was the training ground, the entranceway to success, power, and glamour. Little Gene was simply not trying hard enough to do the right thing. Frustrated, disappointed, with an explosive temper, more volatile because of alcohol, she felt compelled to exhort, then criticize, then hit. His fictional surrogate in The Season of Comfort is beaten at least once a month, at one time with a switch from a dogwood tree “until blood came, until his bare legs bled…. The light of her cigarette burned red in the dark … and when he tried to hold the stick she burned one of his hands.”

  Sometimes indifferent, at other times bossy, Nina was frighteningly unpredictable. Occasionally she was companionable, chatty in a way the boy liked, especially as he got older and more curious about the adult world. “My mother didn’t play with me. But she talked. She was very interesting. I knew all about being a kid. I wanted to know about being an adult. She gave a crash course….” His father was as smooth, as soft-spoken, as ever. Consequently, Nina sometimes was furious at both of them, and by the early 1930s Gene and Nina found it increasingly desirable to spend time apart, much more than business and different social schedules dictated. When Gene did not act decisively enough to meet Nina’s demands, her nervous system always required that she do something, such as change Deenie’s school or come up with some slogan or strategy. What she hotly favored one day she often seemed to have forgotten the next. One thing her son could count on, though: she would be neither approving nor dependable. The action or word that on one occasion would produce no response on another would result in what he began to identify as a Nina-like scene. He could see it coming: a carping, self-aggrandizing tone, an abruptness of gesture, a twist of her cigarette. At the Bancroft Place apartment the mahogany coffee table had two deep burns from Nina’s cigarettes.
It seemed best to stay away from her as much as possible. He had an attractive alternative. At Rock Creek Park he could play in the woods and walk down the steep lawn to the stream filled with salamanders, water moccasins, crayfish, frogs. It was rock-littered, iron brown. At the edge of the woods stood a dilapidated slave cabin, somehow connected to a war from long ago that the boy soon began to romanticize, unlike his grandfather, who detested the war from whose aftermath his entire generation had suffered. His grandmother thought that the Confederate boys had reaped well-deserved disaster, the result of their love of fighting, gambling, whoring, and shiftlessness. In the center of the woods a spring bubbled up from the gray sand out of which “I used to build elaborate sand cities, usually in the style of those I read about in … Arabian Nights, a book I never ceased to read and reread.” He liked to sculpt in sand and soon to paint. Near the house, which had a circular drive in front and a small fountain, stood a sweet-smelling rose garden. Toward the border of the woods a small vineyard of purple grapes glowed, clusters of which he would cut for his grandfather and himself to eat. Inside, in the entrance hall, smells from the kitchen met the other odors of the house: the perfume of cut irises in a bowl, newly applied floor wax, the musty mysteriousness of thousands of dusty books.

  He began to read voraciously, in good weather by the stream, otherwise in an attic alcove window from which he had a view of the grounds. Newspapers covered almost every inch of the attic floor, old clippings, the Congressional Record. Undusted shelves lining the room were heavy with books that the Senator incessantly collected. When “campaigning, the first thing he would do is get a telephone book and locate the used bookstores,” with the help of his secretary, his last assistant, Roy Thompson, recalled. “If there was one close by, we went to that. Many times he knew the bookstore and the proprietor. He’d say, ‘What have you got?’ Meaning what have you got in the fields that I want, history, government, and so on. Finally, he’d have six or eight books. The Senator would pile them up and say, ‘Now, how much for the lot?’ Then he’d pay, have them wrapped up and have them sent home to him—to his house, not his office…. These books, usually still in their original packages, would be at home in Washington. He’d say to me, ‘Do you know where the books are that we got in Cleveland?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, Tot will know. There’s a book in there I want.’ We’d open the package, and there would be the book. He always remembered what books he had.” Soon the boy could find them as readily as his grandfather. Upstairs or outside he would read to himself, downstairs in the drawing room, by the fireplace, to the Senator. It seemed a touch of paradise. In a short story of his young adulthood he returns to the house in Rock Creek Park and meets his youthful self, as if that part of him were still there in what he came to remember as the place in which he had spent his childhood. He hears, from the top of the hill, his grandmother’s voice calling him to dinner.

  Observing his grandfather impressed him deeply. There was his massive appearance: elderly, dignified, a stentorian voice, pithy, colloquial, with the touch of a Southern accent, which became more pronounced when constituents visited. Suddenly he transformed himself into a folksy Southwesterner from the Bible Belt. A rather “subdued household” became lively with homey good cheer. The atheistic Senator, one of whose favorite jokes was that “the one thing that an all-powerful God can’t do is make a year-old heifer in a minute,” suddenly seemed a good-natured believer. His wife was also a nonbeliever. “They saw the worst of religion in the Bible Belt. And he never let on that he was not with them,” his grandson recalled. “My mother would complain as a child that she couldn’t read the funny papers on Sunday. A lot of things were forbidden on the sabbath. They were trying to conform for fear that the neighbors would find out if they didn’t. A lot of snooping going on. If you were doing the forbidden things on the sabbath, you were in trouble in Oklahoma. I think there were only two or three times that I went with him to church. A Methodist church. It was only because he knew the preacher.” As soon as the constituents left, quietness returned. The accent became more Washington than Southwestern. His performance might have been different for the various Oklahoma Indian chiefs who visited and whose interests Gore represented. Four Indian headdresses, gifts from grateful constituents, impressed the young boy. Later they were given to the Smithsonian. Then there was his grandfather’s blindness. It was both familiar and fascinating, the mesmerizing glass eye, the Senator’s earlymorning magical transformation into a dignified politician. His secretary recalled shopping with him in New York. “This store had thousands of glass eyes, different shapes, different colors. He’d put this one in and ask me, ‘Does it match?’ One eye was gone. There was just a socket. The other one was there, but he couldn’t see with it.” With his cane held in front of him, “he had a sense of the presence of things. I can remember only one time when he came in with a bump on his head. Someone had left a door open, and he ran into it.” His sense of smell and touch were keen. He humorously remarked that since he “could touch a piece of furniture and estimate its age … that if he ever ran out of a job he could make a living working for an antique dealer.” The mother of a classmate of young Gene’s “would take him around the house and he’d touch things and say, ‘Oh, no, this is a new remake of an old design.’ He could tell,” Wilson Hurley recalled, “by the flattening of the grain of wood in the furniture how long the furniture had been in use.”

  Most impressive of all, there was his grandfather as politician, a man of power to whom the people and the halls of power were an extension of the home in which he lived. The telephone frequently rang with calls from famous Washingtonians. In November 1930 political power became palpable for the five-year-old boy: Oklahoma reelected the ex-Senator. Early in the new year, he returned to the Senate chamber to reclaim, triumphantly, the piece of paper he had secreted in his desk ten years before. He was also happy to reclaim his salary of $15,000, having the previous year lost most of his money in the stock-market crash. Little Gene went to the opening session of the new Senate. Later he created a semifictional account of watching his grandfather on the day of his celebratory return to that large gray-green room of “white skylights and green carpets.” From the balcony, as his grandmother held him on her knees, he could see “rows of desks and grown men [who] sat at them or else wandered about the room talking to one another.” The newly elected senators ceremoniously entered, none of them more distinctive than his grandfather. Soon Little Gene regularly accompanied him to his Senate office and onto the Senate floor. Occasionally he would see him ascend, as senators did in rotation, to the chair of the Vice President, the presiding officer. One hot summer day Little Gene walked down the Senate aisle without shoes and wearing only short pants, to be stopped short by the usually inebriated Vice President, who remonstrated to Gene’s grandfather, “Senator, this boy is nekkid!”

  One of the advantages of his grandfather having been reelected was that Little Gene could get books from the Library of Congress in his grandfather’s name. The attic at Rock Creek Park overflowed with historical works. But since the practical, puritanical Senator had little to no use for fairy tales and fiction, it was thin in the kinds of stories most vividly represented in the child’s imagination by The Arabian Nights. To the surprise of the Library of Congress, requests began to come from Senator Gore for the novels of L. Frank Baum. Little Gene read them one after another. He invented additional characters, one of them “a nymph who lived in Rock Creek and ate only watercress…. At seven or eight I asked my father if there was any possibility that Oz existed. He said no. Oz was just a fiction, a dream. He tried to console me by saying that science was just as interesting and exciting as the world of magic. But I saw through that one.” The same year his grandfather reentered the Senate, Little Gene wrote a “novel,” which he read aloud to the family, “closely based on a mystery movie” he had seen. “The character based on my grandmother kept interrupting everybody because ‘she had not been listening.’” The family found it hilarious. He
also bought books with the occasional silver dollar his grandfather gave him for his services as reader. Soon he had a small library of his own. It included adventure bestsellers of the day like the Tarzan series, popular classics like Prince Valiant, and cartoon books in a series called “Big Little Books.” The Washington News contained comic strips, “Popeye” and “Dick Tracy,” which he did not like, and “Maggie and Jeeves” and “Li’l Abner,” which he enjoyed. From the radio, which the blind Senator Gore often found companionable, came The Shadow and Amos ’n Andy, two of the most popular, unforgettable programs of the day. “The whole house was built around the evening hour when my grandfather would have his one drink of the day … and listen to Amos ’n Andy.” He also discovered movies. Beginning the year his grandfather returned to the Senate, Little Gene became obsessed with the silver screen. The past walked and talked in the darkness of a movie theater, in films which he was to see between 1932 and 1935 like The Last Days of Pompeii, Roman Scandals, The Mummy, The Crusades, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Marie Antoinette. It was the beginning of one of his most intense periods of movie-watching.