Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  If he had no friends yet at Exeter, he had people with whom he was friendly. Both reserved and aggressive, he did not make friends easily. To some his aggressiveness seemed un-Exonian self-promotion, a personal projection that seemed out of place among New Englanders and their ethos. He was used to boasting about his grandfather and father and announcing that he himself expected to accomplish great things. Some he irritated. Others found his elegant abrasiveness interesting. One could never predict what he would say. Or if one were to predict with a likelihood of accuracy, the guess had to be he would say something outrageous or controversial or extravagantly self-regarding by Exonian standards. With a reputation for quips in conversation and barbs in debate, he made some of his classmates anxious. There would be a price to pay if one tangled with him. Used to being conversationally combative, he assumed that everyone would understand he meant nothing personal, that he intended to entertain, persuade, assert himself rather than put others down. Not everyone did. But his skills, his talents, and particularly his devotion to reading and writing made him stand out, attractively even if ambivalently, to some of his talented classmates. With two of them—A. K. Lewis, familiarly known as “A.K.” or “Hacker,” slim, dark-haired, with rimless glasses and cleft chin, the son of a well-known Harvard philosopher, and Robert Bingham, a tall, beefy, pink-complexioned New Englander with blue eyes, light-brown curly hair, a heart-shaped face, and invariably a bow tie—he soon became warmly friendly. Lewis and Bingham spent much time together. Bingham, Lewis recalled, “was very charismatic, with a wonderful sense of humor. I think he had more humor than anybody else I have ever met, humor as opposed to wit; he was a wonderful person and very generous.”

  At home for the Christmas 1940 holiday, Gene began a serious romantic whirl with a young Washingtonian beauty. He had known Rosalind Rust for years, one of the girls at Mrs. Shippen’s mandatory dancing parties, where young people of a certain class began their amatory socialization, one of their first barely articulated negotiations into the marriage market that all were expected eventually to deal in. Prepubescent and pubescent Washingtonians of both sexes learned how to dance and proper dancing etiquette: how to hold one another, at the proper distance, with the right results. Hardly interested in dancing at all, Gene, like many boys, had reluctantly over the years done his required service at dancing school. At the usual round of parties for students home from school for the holidays, he suddenly found himself paying tender attention to a former dancing partner. A student at The Madeira School near Washington, two months older than he, more interested in parties than in books, Rosalind was a talented artist who drew and painted beautifully. Less worldly, more of a teenager, happy at parties and excited about Washington social life, she was the only child of Frances Rust, a well-known socialite long divorced from her now-deceased husband, who had lived a carefree, unproductive life as the favorite son of Washington real-estate magnate H. L. Rust. Having attended Madeira and graduated from Vassar, Frances was “definitely quite a lady,” her grandson recalled, with “a great sense of humor,” both genteel and down to earth. Estranged from her husband’s family, she received nothing from them. Though there was a small trust fund for Rosalind, Frances maintained her social position on very little, just enough for household servants, dinner parties, good clothes, and modest comforts.

  Sixteen-year-old Roz, her wide face accented by strong cheekbones, framed by rust-bronze short hair, had a light complexion, bright eyes, a low sexy voice, and elegantly straight posture. “She had a beautiful face and a beautiful body, with long legs and no breasts,” a friend of her later life recalled. “She’d often wear bangs to accentuate the Slavic look,” her Washington friend, Tish Baldrige, remembered. She was just two inches shorter than the almost six-foot-tall Gene; they were, that Christmas, a striking couple. Attracted to her sexually, he loved her bearing, her beauty, her touch of glamour. Like her mother, she was meticulously groomed, beautifully dressed. Eager to be his own man, to be as independent as possible, being in love with Rosalind seemed a step on the way. When he returned to Exeter at the beginning of January, Roz wrote in her diary, “I am crazy about Dini. I think of him all the time and the wonderful times we had at Christmas.” She found him handsome and enchanting, “very sophisticated looking. He is tall, about 5 ft 11 ½ inches, with rather blond hair, large grey-green eyes, an aristocratic nose and a nice rather mocking mouth…. His eye brows are like this x x x very arched. He can raise his eyebrows one after the other, and wiggle his ears…. Dini is so divine looking.”

  Her attractions absorbed him during much of the Christmas holiday. As soon as he had confided to her his intimate childhood name, it became an expression of their possessive intimacy, though she soon recognized he was not an easy person to possess, that there was more adult calculation and coolness in his temperament than in hers. “He was so very, very sweet to me during vacation,” she remembered, as she impatiently waited for a letter from him. Back at school she read Jane Eyre, which she found fascinating, in love herself with a man at a distance. When she did not hear from him throughout January, her daydreams intensified, her hopes trembled. She made excuses for him. Eventually letters came. She was more loving than loved, more emotionally eager and expressive than he, partly because she was less self-protective. Though he had no doubt that Roz would never turn into his mother, his distaste for and his distress at his mother’s abusive behavior had left him wary. It had created the possibility that any potential wife might eventually be a real Nina, that any marriage might turn into the nastiness of his parents’ relationship. But having a beautiful girlfriend had attractions. The experience with Jimmie had seemed perfectly natural. The affair now with Rosalind seemed equally natural. His view was that sex was simply bodily pleasure. Have it with whomever you wanted, with whomever it happened. Others or yourself. Male or female. It soon happened with Rosalind, probably that next summer, most likely at East Hampton, where she came to stay with him at his father’s vacation cottage, as she did again the next summer. Kit was not impressed. “She wasn’t my type. I just didn’t take to her particularly…. I don’t remember exactly why. I know I wouldn’t have chosen her for a daughter.” Kit may have preferred to be the only beauty around. At Exeter, where Roz came to dances numbers of times, she attracted admiring attention. She was a girlfriend easy to have. Apparently they had one another with pleasure. Rosalind later told a friend that Gore had been “my first beau and the best man I ever had…. The best man I ever had in bed.”

  After the Christmas holiday he returned to debating and to the library. He borrowed so many books that the librarians grumbled. Of course he returned to classes also, but with even worse results than before, except in art class, his only elective. Like Rosalind, though less talented, he had a facility for painting. Occasionally he daydreamed about becoming a famous artist. Sculpting had become even a greater pleasure than it had been when he had sculpted Lincoln’s head in sand at Bailey’s Beach. With clay and plaster of paris, he spent hours at the art studio in the basement of a classroom building, happy to do the class assignments and more. The result was his only A at Exeter. He was again regularly on and off probation and extra study halls. But when the most feared man on campus, the all-powerful dean of faculty, Edwin Silas Wells Kerr, who had put him on scholastic probation, called him in for what he felt would be a final reckoning that would have him on the next train to Boston, Kerr decided to keep him on the hook rather than expel him. At his room in Langdell Hall Gene now had a typewriter, one of the few boys to have one, not for his class assignments but for his own writing sessions. His first publication at Exeter was not in the literary magazine but in the newspaper at the beginning of March 1941, a long letter to the editors in response to an Exonian editorial by Tom Lamont, the leader behind whom “Give ’em guns, Gunnar” and other prowar boys rallied their impressive forces. With a gift for irony and invective, Gene confessed, after tongue-in-cheek praise for Lamont’s fair-mindedness and restraint, that “there are, howe
ver, one or two places where I disagree with Mr. Lamont. First he states that ‘we have lost another battle.’ This evidently refers to the fall of Greece. The one word in that rather beautiful phrase which I do not understand is ‘we.’ Exactly what does that ‘we’ refer to: The Exonian? The regal house of Morgan? Or to England and the Allies? If that is the case then we must recognize Mr. Lamont as a British subject.” That the fifteen-year-old could write with elegance and precision was clear. Lamont had a sharp tongue, a lively pen. But Gene’s counterattack was strong stuff that alerted his schoolmates he was a formidable person to tangle with.

  Despite his success as a debater, Gene still had as much in mind becoming a successful writer as he did pursuing a political career. Serious as politics were, much as he thought he might one day become a real senator and perhaps—why not?—President of the country, politics demanded elements of manipulation that literature did not. True, politics was the family trade, so to speak, his grandfather the model. Issues engaged him. Competition excited him. The weaknesses and strengths of people interested him. On the debating platform he was sometimes a fiery dynamo, other times a cool satirist, quicker with quips and rebuttals, with dismissive witticisms or self-serving evasions, than his competitors. But after all was said and all pleasure elicited, he still preferred the privacy of reading, the excitement and fulfillment of writing, the thrill of seeing his name in print, the dream of being a great artist like Thomas Mann, whose novels he had been devouring. Though there was nothing prohibitively incompatible between the two, there was, so to speak, already a small flag of caution, of muted warning, of likely distance between the inevitable dishonesty of political performance, of saying what they wanted to hear, and the assumption that literary art was dedicated to the private voice, to personal honesty, to a kind of truthtelling incompatible with political life. To do both would be a difficult balancing act.

  Already in the spring of 1941 he had a public and a private voice. At his desk he wrote short stories, the first of dozens written at Exeter, and continued to consider himself a poet, though most of the few hundred poems he was to write had already been written. He added some to his pile, but at a much slower rate than before. As a poet he mastered a clear line and a vague lyricism, though his verse, even at its most lyrical, had a flatness of diction and metaphor that might have raised the question of whether he would not be better off writing prose altogether. Some of the flatness was purposeful, calculated restraint and understatement. But it did not work. Poetic structure escaped him as well. The shorter poems kept their form, but coherence generally came at a heavy price. Many of them, emotionally and philosophically abstract, dramatized heavy seriousness without human particularity. The poems drifted, floated, or fell heavily. The insufficiency of their language and vision betrayed them. They were competent without being real. Self-doubt about the poems crept into his consciousness, though not to the extent that he no longer thought himself a poet. But though he could not put his finger on the faults of his poetry, he began to rethink his literary career. He continued to show his poems and to seek their publication for the next half dozen years, but he began even during his first year at Exeter to give more attention to writing short stories and brief essays, having in mind that he might publish them in the campus literary magazine and beyond, in commercial magazines that actually paid money. And why not a novel? He was still fascinated with Napoleon, and the Mussolini he had seen that summer night in 1939 at the open-air opera in Rome came to mind as a likely model for a pseudohistorical novel. “So I invented a dictator in a southern country like Italy, a Mediterranean country. It was one of half a dozen novels that I started and never came near to finishing…. I did about twenty thousand words.”

  Some of his new friends were part of the Exeter literary circle. Bingham, an avid, ambitious writer, who had staked out for himself the generally accepted expectation that one day he would be famous, wrote for the newspaper and The Phillips Exeter Review. He served on both editorial boards. Another new friend, Lew Sibley, slight, bespectacled, handsome, an aesthetic-looking young man from nearby Newport, New Hampshire, whom he met through A. K. Lewis, had the reputation of being a brilliant poet. “An unassuming New Englander, he had a rather effeminate manner,” Lewis recalled, “but Lew did not present himself as a homosexual or a homosexual target, and he clearly was not…. But he was utterly gentle in appearance, even fragile.” Lewis himself had a gift for comic prose, for humorous essays and stories. They were already, as Lower Middlers who entered as freshmen in 1939, active on the newspaper staff and the literary magazine. Both excellent students, they soon were made editors of the Review. It made sense for Gene to join them there. By the end of the spring term, Bingham, who was assistant managing editor, had helped get him on The Exonian staff, though only, as a start, onto the business board. That Tom Lamont was president of the Review board may have kept him off the literary staff, though not entirely out of its pages. The next fall he was to have a poem published there. Bingham, one of the Review editors with Sibley and Lewis, may have felt sufficiently competitive with his friend to have conspired with Lamont, even if tacitly, to keep him off. Gene was to publish only three short stories there during his entire Exeter career, though he submitted dozens, all better than most of those published. When, the next year, Bingham replaced Lamont as president, he made certain that his ambitious friend published there only occasionally.

  A hot, humid early-August night at Merrywood. Summer 1941. Nina, amid packing cases and luggage, smoked and paced and drank. She had asked for a divorce. She was leaving Auchincloss. Old Mrs. Auchincloss, in Florida, had offered her money, security, to stay. Another divorce for her son did not sit well with the wealthy matriarch. Nor with the Gores, who thought their daughter should leave well enough alone. There were children, two and four years old, but she was adamant. Just a week before, a separation and trust agreement had been signed, including a small fund for Gene, which Nina was to control, that would generate about $100 a month. For once, she said, she was going to do something for herself. Her life had been one long series of sacrifices for other people, especially for Deenie. She had married Auchincloss only for his sake, to give him a good, secure home. Anyway, she was madly in love with someone else.

  A car pulled up to the mansion on the Potomac Palisades. Gene Vidal, returning with his son from a vacation trip to Quebec, dropped off young Gene at Merrywood. Quebec had been pleasurable, its European resonances fascinating. Kit had had the good sense to allow father and son to go off together. Hot, irritable, perhaps concerned that the trust agreement was not as generous as she would like, Nina was delighted to have her ex-husband there to fight with, to rake up old coals, to assert her fortitude in the face of the injustices of decades. As usual, Gene declined to fight. Nina zeroed in on an insurance savings policy. Gene Vidal had been paying the premiums, the accumulation of which was to go toward their son’s expenses for college or career. Nina, though, wanted the policy signed over to her. As she talked, glass of Queen Anne scotch in hand, she continued packing silver and linen. She needed the money. It rightly should be hers anyway, she argued. Soon Gene left. In a rage, Nina turned on her son. When words proved insufficient, she threw her liquor glass at him once again. Though she could no longer actually hit him, she could still inflict pain. Furious, hurt, he picked up his unpacked suitcases and strode out of the house. With luggage in hand, at night, with no money, he walked along a country lane to the River Road, then, sweating heavily, the three miles to the Chain Bridge across the Potomac. A taxi appeared. He explained as much as needed to the driver, who accepted his signet ring, his tenth-birthday present from his father, as guarantee of the fare. Fortunately, Gene remembered the name of the hotel at which his father was staying. When the taxi pulled up, his father paid the driver. Young Gene got back the signet ring. Exhausted, he slept that night on the sofa.