Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  They went frequently to Paris by train. Recognized for his self-reliance, Gene was allowed to go off on his own, which he did enthusiastically. On Bastille Day he stood on the steps of the Grand Palais, watching French military might parade by, awed by its glory, thrilled to recognize in the flesh the French Foreign Legion he had already seen and loved in a movie called Under Two Flags. All Paris seemed like a movie anyway, until he “saw an open car containing a bald man in a business suit. I could spot a politician anywhere in any country. This one was the prime minister of France,” Daladier, an unprepossessing figure who soon had the honor of turning France over to the Germans. The American visitor had a sense that this was a man who made deals, that the next year’s Bastille Day parade would have a very different cast of characters. In his Paris wanderings he went to the Palais Royal, buying quite cheaply, as a favor for Nina, two eighteenth-century silver snuffboxes to add to her collection. To Gene, with European history in mind, they were reminders of the French Revolution, of the guillotine, of aristocratic privilege and political change. To Nina they were just snuffboxes.

  Longer excursions by crowded bus filled with more young Americans, girls from the other school group at Jouy, took them in all directions, south to Orléans, to Touraine, to Blois, to Chartres, out to the Rhine to see the famous Maginot Line, filled with French troops that would stop any invasion from the west; north and east to Arras Cathedral and the battlefield cemeteries of the First World War. Poppies were in bloom. At Chartres they had the shock of seeing an elderly Frenchwoman, squatting, raise her skirts and relieve herself. It was as memorable as the cathedral. On the bus to the Rhine Gene sat next to Zeva Fish, Hammy’s sister, with whom he instantly fell in love. “I thought she was wonderful. I was reading her my poetry, and she thought it was wonderful. She was an older woman, about sixteen or seventeen.” The oldest woman on the bus was twenty-nine-year-old Lee Barlow, whom he thought very pretty. She also wrote poetry. On the bus they had at least two long chats on versification, about which she thought Gene needed to know more if he were going to be a real poet. A college-educated formalist, she decided she needed to teach him the language of prosody and metrics.

  By late July war signals alerted Sofield and Barlow to the likelihood that they might not be able to have the entire summer in Europe. Accelerating their schedule, at the end of the month they went by train to Italy. They anticipated Rome eagerly, the part of the trip to which Gene most looked forward actually about to happen. Almost as if he feared Rome’s splendor would be too much for him, he protected himself as the train went southward by keeping his eyes as much on the fascinating book he was reading as on the vista outside. It was an exotic adventure novel by Frederic Prokosch, The Seven Who Fled, about a journey across an imaginary Asian landscape. In Rome for the next two weeks Gene’s eyes blazed, partly with the splendor of the ancient city, partly with the landscape of the novel, as if he were in two places at once, an increasingly characteristic trope of doubleness. Rome itself dazzled him. A passionate pilgrim, like Henry James, he feverishly exalted in the Roman monuments, the Roman streets, his mind filled with the literature he had read, the history he knew, his first taste of a city he was to visit many times. Eventually it would become one of his homes; now it was a dream realized, a young man’s fascination with the material presence of what before had been only words, thoughts, imagined vistas.

  In the Forum, with pieces of broken marble everywhere, he had his own Jamesian vastation, an epiphanic moment in which his eyes superimposed on the glittering debris the living reality of what had been, as if it were all alive again, as if the informed imagination could make visually real what had been dead for centuries. Walking through the Forum excavation, not yet sequestered from visitors, he picked up a small Roman head. He quickly hid it under his jacket. Ever alert, Sofield made him put it back. From the Roman to the American Senate seemed to him an obvious continuity. He could see his grandfather there. He imagined himself, the supreme orator, in both Roman and American chambers. From the Forum to the Colosseum to the Pantheon, from one shining structure to another, he traversed ancient Rome. The simple storybook accounts of the Roman imperium from his Victorian edition of Stories from Livy provided adequate narratives for his imagination to people Rome visible with Rome past. Great marble statues of emperors and orators seemed almost to accompany him as he walked to them, by them, around them. With his schoolboy Latin he could read the obvious inscriptions. Standing on the rostrum where Mark Antony had spoken of the dead Julius Caesar, he felt the thrill of identification. He haunted the Forum and the Palatine. The Holy City’s Christian churches and priestly presences he hardly noticed. Classical Rome possessed him.

  So too did the dramatic history transpiring in the modern city. It was as if he were living in a newsreel. Everywhere there were Blackshirts. The garlic-smelling August air breathed war. Triumphant Italian nationalism, still drunk on Ethiopian victories, paraded in the streets, flexed its muscles and guns. Pathé News and The March of Time had given Hitler’s and Mussolini’s faces worldwide currency. So too had their politics and armies. If Americans were frightened, they were also fascinated, especially those who lived with and studied political power. In May, as if in preparation for his European trip, Gene had written for his St. Albans English class an essay called “A Comparison Between a Dynastic Ruler and a Totalitarian Ruler,” a strikingly objective analysis of the Emperor Franz Joseph and of Adolf Hitler. He had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a biography of Franz Joseph, and four encyclopedia articles, an ambitious undertaking for a usually indifferent schoolboy. He had also seen the film Mayerling. The subject fascinated him. For the first time his teachers took notice of substance as well as grammar, partly because the timely subject was compelling. Though brief, the essay is divided into three chapters, accompanied by his own competent pencil drawing of Hitler, with enough factual detail to be textured and creditable. The analysis is surprisingly sophisticated, the prose economically effective, occasionally graceful. A report rather than a condemnation, it leaves history to judge whether Hitler is “a madman or a genius.”

  As the train that had taken them from France to Italy made its first Italian stop, “fascist guards gave the fascist salute just as they had done in all those newsreels where Hitler and Mussolini were perpetual Gog and Magog to our days.” One night at the Baths of Caracalla, part of a large audience to see an outdoor performance of Turandot, they suddenly saw in a railed-off box next to theirs Mussolini himself. Resplendent in a white uniform, he seemed almost part of the performance, as if Italian history and Italian opera were indistinguishable. To Gene he looked “almost as worried as Daladier…. At the first interval he rose and saluted the soprano. Audience cheered. Then he left the box…. As he passed within a yard of me, I got a powerful whiff of cologne, which struck me as degenerate. A moment later Mussolini was on the stage, taking a bow with the diva. The crowd shouted ‘Duce’ … he saluted the audience—Fascist arm outstretched. Then he was gone.” Despite the cologne, the young boy thought Mussolini splendid, as spectacle, as politician. “That jaw, that splendid emptiness. After all, I had been brought up with politicians. He was an exotic variation on something quite familiar to me.” The next year Mussolini was to be the dark but white-uniformed inspiration for his first “really ambitious novel,” never to be completed, “about a dictator in Rome, filled with intrigue and passion and Machiavellian combinazione.”

  Summer 1939 was closing around them, the days shorter, European politics dangerous. As they were well-connected Washington children, the American ambassador received them at the embassy, particularly since Ham Fish’s father was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Even in distant, domestic-minded Washington, foreign affairs were now on everybody’s mind. Whether or not Sofield and Barlow read Italian newspapers or tuned in to other immediately available currents, they had reason to be nervous. Rumors of imminent war came from authoritative sources. If war were to be declared, the border between Italy and Franc
e would be closed. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, whose husband had close relations with the State Department, got a message to them, probably through the embassy, urging them “to get out of there quick,” so Lee Barlow remembers. Perhaps Nina was the source of the urgent request that they leave Europe as soon as possible. “She fixed it up through our embassy somehow,” her son remembers. “She would have gone straight to the State Department, to Sumner Welles or someone. All these people were coming to Merrywood. Probably one of them came to Merrywood, the undersecretary of something or even Cordell Hull, and said there’s trouble coming. Try to get them out.” Late in August they made one of the last trains out of Italy. The border closed behind them.

  From Saint-Malo they crossed the Channel. In London they found a gloomy, disappointed Britain preparing for war. From an ancient Bloomsbury bed and breakfast on Russell Square, with a “fascinating primitive bathroom,” all soon to be turned into rubble, Gene quickly saw as much of London as he could. He had little time. The city was mostly shut down. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, he stood in front of 10 Downing Street watching Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister whom he had often dressed up as and imitated, leave en route to Parliament to tell his nation that war was inevitable. “Thin little man. A wing collar, huge Adam’s apple, uncommonly small head. No cheers, no jeers. The crowd simply sighs, in unison, on exhalation. Terrible, mournful sound. Chamberlain tries to smile; winces instead. Is driven off.” Sofield and the Barlows rushed to the American embassy to get tickets for Lee and the boys to depart immediately. The two men, who needed to arrange for the bicycles and other luggage to be sent separately, would take a later ship. At Liverpool on September 3, the day Britain and France declared war, the boys were on a British vessel, the Antonia, sailing out into the Irish Sea. Wartime exigencies applied on the crowded boat. Nazi submarines prowled the North Atlantic. Soon they witnessed the almost incomprehensible: the Antonia’s sister ship, the Athenia, had been torpedoed on the final day of its eastward voyage from New York to Liverpool. “Longboats carrying passengers to the dull, misty green Irish shore. Consternation about our ship.” They saw the Athenia turn up and then slip beneath the water. The sky and the smooth sea were gray. Some passengers on the Antonia urged that they turn back. The captain decided to go on. Soon they were sailing a zigzagging evasive pattern that added days to the voyage. Since the protocols and strategies for crossing the Atlantic in wartime had not yet been worked out, no one knew what to expect. But there were no further sightings or incidents.

  Life settled down to the usual shipboard routine except that, to Gene’s annoyance, the canteen ran out of chocolate, a major disappointment. To him it seemed mostly an adventure, not true history since he was not reading about it in a book, where real history exists. After a few days the adventure seemed ordinary, even boring, certainly not as scary as the countless scary movies he had seen. At night they sailed without lights. He and Lee Barlow walked the deck in the darkness. She tried, again, to teach him versification. When she insisted on absolute metrical regularity, he cited a Keats sonnet as evidence that great poets sometimes write irregular lines. And why did he need to know the name of a metrical pattern in order to write poetry in that pattern? They were at a standstill. As they kept walking the deck in the darkness, the Antonia zigzagged westward. Soon the passengers discovered they were heading for Montreal, not New York. The eight-day trip took two weeks. From Montreal they took the train to Washington, where one of the first things Nina required was that Gene get his hair washed and cut at the Mayflower Hotel. As he looked down into the washbasin at the dirty water, his dark hair turning blond again, he realized, happily, that he had not washed his hair in three months. It had been a blissfully successful first European visit. His only problem was that he had been booked, involuntarily, for a further westward voyage. It was to, of all places, Los Alamos, New Mexico.

  Chapter Four

  Brave New World

  1939-1941

  On a high mesa in the wilderness of New Mexico, thirty-five miles from Santa Fe, the eight-hundred-acre Los Alamos Ranch School was a quintessential American institution. Founded in 1917 by Ashley Pond, an educated Midwesterner from Detroit, it was now in the hands of an ex-Marine, ex-forest ranger named Albert James Connell, who, like Pond, proclaimed to the effete Eastern world that a rough outdoor life would turn sickly boys into healthy men. Muscle tone was everything. Deep breathing expanded the soul. Boys needed a rigorous schedule, tough conditions, exposure to the elements, survival skills, the transforming beauty and isolation of the Western wilderness. The smiling ghost of Teddy Roosevelt provided guidance and gave his blessing. What they needed also was distance from the effeminizing influence of women. Having served in Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders,” Pond believed that “boys became men more easily when separated from oversolicitous mothers.” If America was being feminized, the Los Alamos Ranch School would save some of its sons. At night, with lights out, there would be only darkness and bright stars, swirling snows in winter, high pastures in spring, muddy dirt roads and clouds of dust as the seasons changed, a happy community of no more than forty-four boys whose parents would gladly pay the highest fee of any preparatory school in the United States to allow their children to breathe freely, their wayward sons to become straight arrows. The magic mesa, jutting out from the main range of the Jemez Mountains, surrounded by the Santa Fe National Forest, was partly a magic mountain, in some cases a sanatorium for the body, but in most, as the school grew, a place where “character” would be developed. Indeed, most of the boys were healthy enough when they arrived. By the 1930s “a lot of the people sent there were kids who were having trouble elsewhere, almost like remittance men from privileged families,” one of the students recalled. What they needed to learn was discipline, toughness, manliness.

  For Pond, books were an abomination. Nature and hard work provided lessons enough. An avid enthusiast of the Boy Scout movement, Connell had the brilliant idea to organize the school as an active troop, the only mounted troop in the country. Everyone would dress, including the teachers, in the same khaki uniform: short pants and shirt, with wide-brimmed Stetson hat, bandanna on the weekends, black tie on school days. The only concession to winter was woolen underwear. In warm weather the Scouts would be encouraged to go shirtless. Each boy would have a horse. Saddles needed to be polished. Salubrious packing trips into the valleys and mountains demanded perfection, outdoor spit and polish. The ranch, with its own water, electric, and sanitation systems, with “complete machinery for harvesting crops, hauling fuel and supplies, and building, maintaining, and clearing roads,” needed to be worked. The boys would play their part. Schooling was at first barely relevant, then secondary. This was not to be a dude ranch but an authentic experience. When Connell took over the school from Pond, the ex-Marine realized that to be successful a ranch needed experienced hands and that to attract boys from well-to-do families who could afford the necessarily high tuition he also had to provide college preparation. These boys, who were not going to grow up to be ranch hands, needed to qualify for the prestigious universities of the country, to take their place in the national hierarchy as befitted their backgrounds. Eager to make a success of the school, he transformed Pond’s vision of a ranch in which the boys did all the work into a school in which employees ran the ranch, occasionally helped by the boys. By the mid-1920s Connell had assembled a capable staff, under the headmastership of a smart Latin teacher from Yale, Lawrence Hitchcock. Connell took care of recruitment, business, discipline, outdoor chores, and expeditions; Hitchcock guided the academic program. Soon the schedule was in place: half a day devoted to studies, half to becoming a self-reliant American male.

  As an isolated school run by idealistic male romantics, the ranch on the high mesa had the feel of a muscular monastery, the kind of semiclosed male society in which Connell flourished. Married teachers were not encouraged, though one traditional family, Pond’s daughter Peggy and her husband, the science teacher Fermor Church,
raised three children there. Connell’s compelling interest was in boys, their growth and maturation, their moral and physical well-being. A strict disciplinarian, imperious and mercurial, he enjoyed dominating them, teaching them what he thought of as manly things, particularly the skills of outdoor life and the high principles of Scouting, in both of which he had a mystical belief. When the boys cooked over an outdoor fire on their Saturday full-day trips or their overnight excursions to the high valleys, they did it, as they did everything else, A. J. Connell’s way. Any boy who dared cook over an open fire rather than smoldering coals or whose skillet was the least bit dirtied by fire would know Connell’s wrath. Verbally sharp, he made sure that everyone knew he did not believe in accidents. If something went wrong, it was always someone’s fault, usually yours. He regularly proclaimed that “I know what’s best for boys.” Having named them “gibbons,” he made regular efforts to catch them at what he assumed all gibbons do, bursting into a suspected boy’s room to surprise the masturbating offender. “I’ve caught ’em at it,” he would say. He also had his soft side, his gentle aspect, expressed in his fondness for colorful fabrics for his apartment, for hypnotic music like Ravel’s “Bolero,” for campfire songs and stories. He admired muscles, his own and the boys’. He had an eye for masculine attractions. The boys were subject to weekly physical inspections in the nurse’s office by two of the masters. Connell, though, was usually there—to make certain proper procedures were used, to check out the boys’ muscle tone, to ascertain just how much each had grown since the last examination. Some of his colleagues found it bothersome. Oscar Steege, the history master, thought “there was an erotic element in Connell’s touching the boys,” though he restricted his touch to arms, chests, and backsides, “and perhaps some of the boys felt this. … It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem necessary…. That he had a sexual interest in the boys was generally recognized by us at the school. And there was some unhappiness about this. Not that there were any overt incidents at all. That never happened. But he loved to touch them. I saw that.”