by Fred Kaplan
In the morning his father drove him to Rock Creek Park, where his grandparents once again picked up the wreckage of their daughter’s unstable life. It was only a matter of another month before his return to Exeter. There was much he could do at Rock Creek Park, including read to the Senator. Gene Vidal’s decision, though, was less easy than the Gores’, not because he did not have full confidence in them but because the situation confronted him with the opportunity to define himself more sharply as a father. Why not simply take young Gene back with him to East Hampton, to a month on the tennis courts and the beach? He decided, though, to repeat the familiar pattern of leaving him with his grandparents, long understood as the surrogate parents with whom the boy stayed. His parents he visited. At East Hampton Gene had a small rented place and a young wife. At Rock Creek Park the boy could once again be restored to the familiarity of his most stable childhood home. Gene drove on to East Hampton, a decision this most nonintrospective of men was always to regret. Dot was delighted to have Deenie back. Soon Nina drove up. “Go on upstairs. I’ll handle this,” Mrs. Gore told her grandson. From the upstairs room above the front door he watched his mother confront her mother. Nina would be damned if she was going to give up that insurance policy that was hers “by right, and how could I, with any conscience, take her money when she was the guy who had got Hughdie to create a twenty-five-thousand-dollar trust fund for me as part of the prenuptial agreement? … Now you must throw him out.” “He is our grandson,” Mrs. Gore responded. “He stays here.” “I am the mother, under the law I’m his guardian….” “Under the law, this is my house, not yours. Now, you go away.” Nina, stunned, rallied. “‘I’m coming in …’ ‘Oh no you’re not!’ … Dot … slipped inside the house and slammed the door so hard that the house shook.” Nina got back in the car and drove off.
The month at Rock Creek Park was happy, productive, though Gene still felt trapped by his dependency. When not reading to his grandfather, a sort of singing for his supper, he frequently walked from Broadlands Road to the Library of Congress, where he read and wrote for hours at one of the long desks. Keenly aware that he did not have a penny of his own, he knew that even the small amount the trust fund would produce would not be his until adulthood, even if his mother could be prevented from appropriating it permanently. Generous in many ways, the Gores were not generous with money. Anyway, they had only a modest amount. His father could be counted on for little, his Exeter tuition and some pocket money at best. The Aeronautics Research Corporation was far from a smashing success, not to speak of the possibility that, with a young wife, Gene might soon have additional parental responsibilities. There would be no family inheritance, no Auchincloss money: if Gene followed the educational straight and narrow, his minimal expenses would be covered. Otherwise, and beyond that, nothing. The return to Exeter, then, he knew, was inevitable. The idea of college seemed anathema. His only hope was to cash in on his fascination with writing in a way that might get him out of this prisonlike enclosure. “I thought, Well, maybe if I write a book I can write my way out of this. The trap I was in. Because I was penniless…. So I had this blue notebook. Indeed, I’d go to the library reading room and started to write a novel, sort of a mystery story. The main character was called Smyth,” the title Mr. Smyth’s Murder. “That’s all I remember about it. I must have written about thirty thousand words.” Some years later Nina, who found it among a batch of his old papers, threw it away.
Chapter Five
Proudly Unfurled
1941-1943
When Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., returned to Exeter in mid-September 1941, Rosalind and he were a couple, covering the distance between The Madeira School and Exeter by letter and seeing one another during holidays. With Jimmie, who was at St. Albans Upper School, he had no contact. Much as Jimmie had made a deep impression on him, they went their separate ways with no need to be in touch with one another, busy with innumerable schoolboy things and with no indication of romantic longing. In the autobiographical novel The Season of Comfort, the character Jimmie, unmistakably based on Trimble, with whom the main character, based on Gene, has had sex at a place like Merrywood, also enrolls at Exeter. But there the two boys, with vastly different interests, drift apart uneventfully, just as Gene and Jimmie did from 1940 to 1942. At Exeter itself there was no sex for Gene. As far as he knew, for no one else either, though later reports from classmates indicate that some boys were having sex sessions with one another and that there might have been substance to the occasional rumor that some master was too close with a favorite boy. There were a few histrionic queens around. Some of the boys were quick to use the word “fairy” about others. Once a well-developed athlete rubbed his leg against Gene’s in class. But he was not to be tempted, let alone seduced. If there was to be sex, he preferred to do the seducing. But in the competitive Exeter environment he rightly sensed that to be either seducer or seduced would make him dangerously vulnerable. With his reputation for cutting competitiveness, for arrogance and ambition in general, the notion of sex at Exeter seemed folly.
With Bob Bingham he double-dated Wellesley girls a few times. One night he and Bingham slept on a golf course near the Wellesley campus. A few times he went with other boys for sexual romps with Exeter town girls who made it a regular thing to be available at a nearby public park. To one of his roommates “Gore talked about his sexual life, but it was with women. He was rumored to have had some sort of liaison with a town girl, down at Swasey Park. He may have been boasting about how precocious he was.” The formal school dances brought “classy” girls to the campus, including Rosalind. Most Exeter boys panted and groped, usually at arm’s length, as their desires struggled with the mores of their class and time. To the extent that Gene was in love with Rosalind, he was neither frustrated nor distressed. She was a safe, rewarding place to be. Much of his energy went into reading, writing, debating. During the Exeter years he seems to have experienced neither romantic longing nor sexual angst. But he continued to experience classroom distress; brilliant as he seemed to some of his schoolmates, his preoccupation with reading and debating kept him in academic trouble. No amount of intelligence and cleverness could compensate for total unpreparedness. It was only a matter of time before he would be called before the dean again. During the fall semester he failed Latin, math, and English, and got a D—in French, the worst record of his six semesters at Exeter. His grandfather’s encouragement, his mother’s threats, fell on unresponsive ears. But he had a grand time in the debating hall. Within a month of the start of the fall 1941 semester he had been, he told his grandfather, in three “debates … and have made about ten speeches in the Senate. From the general look of things I think I may be President in the spring elections. My speaking has picked up considerably. One Senator said that I was the best orator Exeter has had since Daniel Webster—another said I was the damndest fool they have had since Robert Benchley. It is hard to know which to believe. I think the remark about Benchley hits the mark though.”
At the school lecture series he heard the liberal columnist Max Lerner, a dazzling speaker “regardless of everything else … lecturing about how to jump blithely into the war in one lesson.” Two of his poems were published in the fall Exeter Review, one of them a dark lament for some generalized “we” who “are lost to hope and God” titled “To R.K.B.’s Lost Generation,” a lyric presentation of a comment by Bob Bingham about the post—World War I writers. A comfortable atheist, Gene himself had no reason to lament the loss. The poem appeared on the same page with a prowar sonnet by Tom Lamont whose final couplet concludes, “Thus eager youth forever quits debate,/And fighting with brave certainty meets fate.” At a later Senate debate he was to dub one of Lamont’s allies “The Senator from England.” On December 7 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Gathered with other boys in the common room, ears glued to the radio, Gene heard the President’s speech requesting a declaration of war. Tom Lamont, catching his eye, triumphantly sneered.
The boys now li
ved in an even more stygian darkness than the ordinary New England winter. All lights visible from outside were shut off at dusk. Air-raid wardens patrolled. Shortages of everything appeared. Rationing became a way of life. To help the war effort, some volunteered to do manual labor nearby, including digging out snow-covered railroad tracks. Exeter abruptly terminated the century-and-a-half-old practice of maids straightening dormitory rooms, and each boy now became responsible for his own. Some boys cleaned, some nagged, some dropped their clothes wherever they fell. In the dining hall the always boring food became even more marginal, less various. But everyone adjusted. Debates took on a more determinative force, though they had been quite hot before. Every boy knew that a military uniform was in his not-too-distant future. Like his grandfather, Gene continued to oppose Roosevelt but not the war. In Webster Hall he usually took the conservative side, with a touch of populism. In the Senate, where each senator represented his own views, he opposed New Deal legislation in general. On many issues his positions, indistinguishable from ex-Senator Gore’s, seemed to some in the charged atmosphere laggard if not unpatriotic. “Exeter commences to be very war-like,” he wrote to his grandfather, “and war lord Perry is girding up his loins. Restrictions are being foisted on us right and left; it is said that they may close down the Senate because of recent comments made by the worthy members in strident disapproval of faculty measures. As usual I was loudest; the faculty, like an elephant, remembers.” One evening he trekked across campus to the football field with A. K. Lewis and Nat Davis, both also active debaters. At Gene’s suggestion they climbed to the highest part of the stadium seats. Like Demosthenes orating with pebbles in his mouth to improve his speaking, they were each to improvise and cast their voices as far out as they could. In sequence each voice rolled across the open air and disappeared gradually into the northern darkness. Davis remembered that Gore’s speech had been the best, his voice strongest. As a debater, his younger classmate John Knowles recalled, “Gore was very crisp and very good and very sharp…. What struck me about him was his fierce determination.” He began now regularly to sign his name “Gore Vidal.”
Home for Christmas 1941, he had a new temporary home to go to, his mother’s attractive Georgetown house, into which she had moved from Merrywood. Nina was in love with a handsome Air Force brigadier general, Robert Olds, who had achieved fame as a Flying Fortress pilot and now had the responsibility of creating and running a vast air-transportation network called the Ferry Command. Its first job was to deliver bombers to England. Nonstop goodwill flights to South America had earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross. Many thought the forty-four-year-old General Olds, who had been General Billy Mitchell’s aide, would soon command the entire Army Air Corps. Previously married, with four grown sons, always attracted to and attractive to ladies, Olds looked forward to marrying the vivacious Nina Gore as soon as legal niceties permitted. Her affair with Olds had precipitated her decision to divorce Auchincloss. Of her three husbands, she later told her son Tommy, “Olds was the one she loved the best. She had a crush on Vidal. I think my father was more of a pragmatic situation, kind of with their both falling into it…. And of course the bucks were there, so there was a financial reason, since my mother didn’t have any resources. She loved Olds very much,” though she had “more passionate sex” in extramarital affairs than with any of her husbands.
At Christmas her house was lively with guests, particularly Olds and his West Point friends. One night Gore sat with a group of them who were “denouncing that Jew Franklin D. Rosenfeld who had got us into the war on the wrong side. We ought to be fighting the Commies not Hitler. But then FDR was not only a kike, he was sick in the head—and not from polio but from syphilis. Anyway, everything could be straightened out—with just one infantry brigade they would surround the White House, the Capitol, remove the Jews.” It was an odd though not unusual expression of Christmas goodwill, stronger stuff than Gore had ever heard before. Hugh Auchincloss’s soft anti-Semitism had not had the benefit of a military uniform or a sharp mind. A consummate bore to his stepson even when being anti-Semitic, Auchincloss later became the model for the tedious general in Visit to a Small Planet. “His stories were never altered. He knew the original Jewish name of every movie star who ever changed his name. That list runs quite long. How he learned them I don’t know. He didn’t go to the movies. I shouldn’t think he read Silver Screen. But he had collected some thirty names, and he always started with Kirk Douglas. This was about how the Jews were everywhere. It couldn’t be simpler. I wouldn’t have said that he would have cut the ribbon at Auschwitz, but at the same time, as a purist, he would suggest some names that others might not know of people who had passed. I can see him writing out a dossier to the authorities at Auschwitz, ‘You may not know, but Kirk Douglas’s real name is….’”
Later that spring Gore confided to a new friend at Exeter that he had had “a dream showing his mother standing with a submachine gun pointing at her three husbands,” perhaps an anticipation of his conviction that Olds, whom he found charming but pompous, would suffer the same fate as his father and Auchincloss. At home for the spring vacation, he had overheard, from the next room, Henry Luce, one of Auchincloss’s oldest friends, propose to Nina. After they both had graduated from Yale, Hugh had treated Luce to a trip to Europe and provided seed money for Luce’s fledgling magazine, Time. Clare Boothe Luce, his wife, Luce complained to Nina, did not understand him. Nina turned him down. In June 1942 Nina and Bob Olds married. Gore was not invited to the wedding.
At Exeter Gore had had a difficult term. He had started the new year with his usual plunge into debating. His expectation that he would be president of the Golden Branch proved unwarranted. When his grade reports in February indicated only marginal improvement, he was forced by Dean Kerr “to stop all outside activity…. Am working,” he assured his grandfather, “an experience that is not untinged with novelty.” Instead of three failures and a D—, he now got four D’s, the lowest passing grade. Still, he got his nose up from the grindstone very soon, shrugging off his grades as a modest practical inconvenience. His poetry was still on his mind, including two new ones about his “reactions in France before the war.” Though he told his grandfather, “with the ‘blithe spirit’ of the young, I think they are wonderful,” he could not totally misunderstand the ironic undertones of the preface Nat Davis wrote, at his request, to a small manuscript volume he had assembled. “These poems … are outstanding not only because of their own merit, but also because of the extreme youth of their author…. Perhaps the greatest gift Vidal makes use of here is his brilliant imagination, which, although it may, like Macbeth’s ‘vaulting ambition, overshoot its mark,’ lends a color and vividness to the verse…. with his genius expressed haltingly and very dimly at times…. With this genius I can but say that [this] young poet will sometime hang the great and vacant night of American literature with stars.” A new, more credulous friend, Wilcomb Washburn, noted in his diary that Gene boasted that “Putnam would probably publish a volume of his verse…. He has connections and I see no reason why it shouldn’t go thru. His poems are good. He wants to win the Pulitzer Prize.”
If there were an institutional Exeter poet, it was Robert Frost, who frequently spoke and read at chapel and special Sunday-night occasions. From nearby Vermont Frost made the trip to Exeter for the sake of both an audience and his slim pocketbook. To the young Exonian literati Frost had little cachet and no authority, a prophet without honor among the young of his own country. On a Sunday night early in May he talked “to a packed and sweltering chapel.” Bingham and Vidal had been reading Frost, a book a day, feeling quite superior to a poet whom Lionel Trilling and others had taught them was “an old bucolic cornball,” a boring bit of pastoral Americana. “Oh, God, yes, how we hated Frost the personage,” Vidal remembered. “We all had to go listen to him. It was all right at chapel, since we had to be there anyway. He would come on other occasions. I don’t know how they got us all in there. He
was a great performer, but once you’ve seen him a dozen times…. In fact, Bingham wrote a very funny little parody: ‘I see the birches bending row on row/Against the line of straighter darker trees./I like to think Robert Frost’s been swinging there.’ We were T. S. Eliot men.” At one of his visits, Vidal recalled, Frost shocked one of the masters, a great admirer, when he “went out to piss in the woods beyond the baseball field. Then Frost leaned over and began to lick the bark of the tree. ‘I can taste the sea salt,’ he said.”
When, the week after Frost, Ruth Draper, a superb actress and dramatic monologuist, performed, the chapel was again packed. Washburn, a little bored, was happy to be there with his friend. To Gore, Wid was both a comfort and a convenience. From an academic New England family, he had all the schoolboy discipline that Gore lacked. Constantly insecure, always serious, he had determined never to let lack of hard work prevent his success. Dark-haired, rugged, with a plain, almost handsome face, he excelled on the playing field as well as in the classroom. A “powerful-looking young man, quite big and strong,” Hamilton Bissell recalled, “he was an outstanding varsity football player.” Eager to be rewarded by the Exeter authorities, with not a hint of intellectual or moral rebellion, he found himself fascinated by the attraction of his opposite. An embodiment of the understatement that proper Exonians lauded, Washburn found Gore’s mixture of compulsive overstatement and unembarrassed self-projection somewhat confusing. A literalist, Wid could rarely comprehend irony. But regardless of whether some of Gore’s claims were put-ons, Wid had no doubt that his new friend was a genius with an original mind. Washburn believed that genius made its own rules. Eager to be accepted, to be praised, he allowed himself to be teased, occasionally to be mistreated. Foreshadowing the anthropologist he was to become, Washburn decided to record and study the practices of this exotic creature. Notebook in hand, he followed the schoolboy great man around. “My wonder that he should show an interest in me came to a head when he said I seemed very suspicious of him. I told [him] I wondered if he wasn’t play[ing] with me as a cat does with a mouse for mere pleasure or some other object. It can hardly be a genuine interest unless he sees more in me than I think he does. Certain I am that he has his eye on the Presidency of the United States, and, if he doesn’t try to become too clever, I am not so sure that he won’t reach that goal.”