Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Late in May, as the term came to an end, they went to the Senate banquet together. “I went over to his room before going … because he said ‘he wanted [to] be late so they would notice him more.’ We did get there late. He was seated at the left end of the main table and was ignored by all of the speakers. Therefore he lit a cigar, and drew laughter and much attention to him[self]. He looked exactly like a politician up there.” At the end of the month the phenomenon was still under the microscope. “Instead of studying much, he reads about a book a day. He has gotten E and A in every one of his subjects for a month’s mark. He tells me he has a library of 7,000 books, his mother 300,000 and his grandfather 500,000…. He gave me my first lesson in speaking today. I read his Litany for Living—a remarkable belief on religion.” Before the term was over, Gore led the Golden Branch debating team to victory on the subject of paying overtime wages while the nation was at war. “Vidal stood out,” the other diary keeper, Otis Pease, recorded. At end-of-term Prize Chapel, Wid “picked up $25 in history prizes,” Gore a $10 debating prize. “Incidentally, he doesn’t care to marry (he has no use for women) but he says he probably will—a political marriage with [the] Governor of Virginia’s daughter to get his support for Senatorship.” Actually, he and Rosalind had begun to discuss becoming engaged.

  While working in July 1942 on the assembly line at his father’s factory in Camden, New Jersey, Gore was called to the telephone. Kit was on the line with shocking, numbing news. Gene had had a massive heart attack, a coronary thrombosis. An ambulance had rushed him to St. Luke’s; it was not clear he would survive. The train to New York seemed to move excruciatingly slowly. When Gore arrived, his father looked “nearly dead,” his eyes “glazed yellow-gray from drugs,” the hair on his chest now suddenly as white as the hair on his head. Just weeks before, they had played tennis together, his father as usual tutoring him casually in the strokes and strategies of a game that the middle-aged man, who found golf too slow, loved. To Kit “the heart attack was totally unexpected.” Coronary pain had once before constricted Gene’s chest, but he had kept the episode to himself, hoping that it would not happen again. Now “he had a huge hole in the main aorta. Had he not been an athlete he would have been dead…. That saved him.” While his father’s life was at issue, Gore went regularly to the hospital. Semiconscious, his father, who had recognized him when he first arrived, had tried to speak to him. “Haltingly, he told me to work hard. Neither of us had the right script for this scene.” Death seemed unspeakable, a subject they both hated. Though controlled, almost stoical, Kit had bouts of despair. Fortunately, by the end of the week, it was clear that Gene would live. For Kit, who just four months before had become the mother of a boy, the relief was immense, the burden heavy. In addition to being a wife and mother, she was now likely to be a nurse of sorts for some time. The prescription was for a month in the hospital, then a year of recuperative inactivity. Heart patients were thought to benefit from absolute rest. Shocked by his father’s brush with death, Gore felt his own mortality touched.

  With his Exeter friend A. K. Lewis, he had come to New Jersey to sample what they both hoped would be the kind of experience young writers romantically idealize. Eager to have summer work, excited by the notion of contributing to the war effort, A.K. and Gore joined an assembly line “making wingtips for what was designed as a secret glide-bomber.” They earned forty cents an hour. This would be the real world. The work of course proved tediously dull. Only one worker, a mad Englishman, seemed well suited for the job: he was “busy inventing a molded plywood tire. With each awful failure, his confidence grew.” Early in the summer Gore had visited his father and Kit at East Hampton, probably with Rosalind. Gene Vidal was mainly preoccupied, for a second summer, with attempting to outplay the local tennis pro, a young man less than half his age. A heavy smoker since his late twenties, with a history of poor blood circulation, Gene had neither the breath nor the endurance. “What he was fighting was not the boy but age, which he couldn’t face. He had never failed at any athletic task he had set himself. He was taking on the boy tennis pro at East Hampton … and he was out to beat him. The kid was a very good player. My father was forty-five or whatever and moderately sedentary and smoking in those days, and this triggered the heart attack. He’d play until his lips would get blue…. We’d all try to stop him. He had an obsession with beating this kid…. We all thought he was making trouble for himself.”

  In New Jersey, A.K. and Gore, sharing a room in a boardinghouse, walked a mile to have their meals. For recreation they mostly read and talked. In Manhattan, while Kit remained at the hospital with her husband, Gore stayed at his father’s large apartment, a handsome rental at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-second Street, into which they had moved on their recent return from Washington. With views of Central Park and the reservoir, with four bedrooms and three maids’ rooms, it occupied the entire fifth floor of an elegant fourteen-story building built in 1925 for the wealthy Barbara Hutton, who occupied an elaborate fifty-four-room apartment with a private entrance on the Ninety-second Street side. By the end of July, bored, restless, his father out of danger, Gore had had enough of wing tips and assembly lines. Leaving A.K., who stuck it out a little longer, he was off to Spokane. His new stepfather, the commanding general at Wright Air Force Base, provided the transportation. At Fort George Wright there was some advantage in being the visiting stepson of the general. Staying at the commanding general’s house, reading Daphne du Maurier’s novels, he soon found he did not care for his new stepfather nor, he thought, did his stepfather care for him. Nina was in good form, drinking less, perhaps constrained by the responsibility of her position. As always, she lived either in the past of grievances or in the spontaneity of the present. Eager to have him visit, the bitter argument of the previous summer gone from her mind, she had urged “Dearest Deenie,” as soon as he had enough of factory work, to join them at the base. “The country is really lovely around here. I thought when you come out I might take a cottage … On the lake…. Much love—xxx Bommy.” His own situation was much on his mind. If he could manage to accumulate enough credits, he hoped he would graduate the next June. Then, undoubtedly, the Army. But in what capacity? If he failed to graduate, the most dangerous infantry assignment would most likely be his fate. With all the military brass in his family, should he not be an officer, perhaps through one of the programs the Army was establishing for bright young men with officer potential? And what about Rosalind? Could they live on Army pay? One day, on the bus from the base into Spokane, with a clarity that thrilled him with its comprehensiveness, he sketched out in his own mind the literary career he hoped to have. “I put the political career on a shelf in my head. If it would turn out, it would turn out…. It was curious how accurate I was. I would try certain kinds of novels and write essays.”

  At Exeter for the fall term Gore was now, in his idiosyncratic way, somewhat of a campus celebrity. “I’ve been doing a great deal of orating and writing,” he wrote to his father, thanking him for a small birthday check. “I’ve made four speeches before various crowds up to 500. They seem to like my speaking for though it is more or less the unpopular view point they always stage a very flattering demonstration when I get up to speak. Every day I learn something more about speaking. One of the strangest things is when some one gets up and makes a beautiful factual address and yet is accepted unfavorably by the audience, whereas somebody like me will deliver the most hackneyed overworked speech and they like it. It really is a fascinating study.” Some of the students found him riveting entertainment. When one senator said, “I never liked that isolation pose of yours,” he responded, to applause, “That was no pose; that was my wife.” At a particularly loud moment in debate, he conceded, “I give the honorable speaker the benefit of the shout.” To his grandfather he boasted of his mastery of generational rhetoric: “Gave a speech the other day on the post war world (hollow mockery that it is) but I received the biggest ovation that I have yet received; they
, it seems, liked my ending which was: ‘this is our world, which we shall in a few years guide to our liking. Wars and leadership are not for the old, but for the young who have spirit if not the wisdom of the old. And this world tempered by the fires of war shall be ours, for you and me, and all of us together, we are history.’ It is nice to tell people what they want to believe.” Watching his performances with a worshipful yet critical fascination, Washburn noted in his diary, “Vidal more bombastic than usual in the Senate.” Gore managed to get reelected senator from Virginia, but his hope of being elected president of the Senate was balked. “Isn’t it amazing how the biggest man in the Senate is relegated to third place? I can never fathom the minds of idiots.” With A.K. he made an arrangement that resulted in Lewis’s being elected president of Golden Branch in the fall, with the understanding that Lewis would support Gore as president for the spring.

  On issues he was both radical and conservative. “There never would be peace until the world had a common language, a common currency, and a common government,” he told Washburn, who thought it worth putting in his diary. On the issue of a bill to form a federal board to govern labor, Vidal rose in the Senate “to lead the opposition,” The Exonian reported.

  He compared Senator Murphy’s speeches to the flow of hot lava, in that the further they go, the colder they get. He declared that although he was deeply dissatisfied with the present direction and state of the labor movement, he had by no means worked himself up into a hatred of all labor, as Senator Murphy apparently had. Labor, he cried, has built on this continent a nation of steel: we cannot turn and destroy it now. He contended that Washington bureaus are inefficient, ineffective, corrupt, and addicted to red tape, and denounced them for exemplifying the totalitarianism we are fighting against. President Roosevelt, he accused, is trying to use the war to make himself a dictator.

  Smaller government, the division of the country into four self-governing sections, local rule but at the same time “one world,” freedom for labor as well as capital, maximum democracy—the only problem was that the democratic electoral process favored mediocrity. He teased the literal-minded Washburn, “At heart I’m a dictator.” Washburn may have seen that the knife cut two ways, both a criticism of democracy and an ironic self-exposure that was also self-criticism.

  During the November 1942 national elections he had a brush with campaigning in the real world. One of his favorite teachers, Henry Phillips, a handsome classicist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, encouraged Gore to join him in actively supporting the local Democratic candidate for Congress, Chester E. Merrill. Phillips managed the congressman’s winning campaign. Eager to pillory the enemy, Gore wrote a satirical article for local newspapers. The New Hampshire Republican senator, Styles Bridges, he thought “a congenital idiot. Am I right?” he asked his grandfather. “He does more steady double talking than any man I’ve ever seen. If I couldn’t make a better speech than he I’d never think of another election again. I asked him a great many embarrassing questions before the Republican rally. He squirmed, and not too artfully…. When I start running I am going to call spades spades, fools fools, new dealers jack assess, and I shall be beaten by a comfortable majority. How much truth can the people stand without choking?” Phillips—who played excellent jazz piano, knew the Manhattan jazz clubs well, coached the school rowing team, and had an understated sense of humor—found the seventeen-year-old an engaging challenge of the sort that made Exeter attractive. Sardonic, witty, reticent, Phillips was also a shrewd analyst of people and communal politics. When Gore challenged his claim that he knew how to make himself popular with his colleagues, Phillips quietly campaigned for an Exeter position for himself, primarily by hosting a clambake. His election confirmed the validity of his object lesson. Gore was impressed. Politics was as much cunning, persuasion, personal amiability as fiery speeches, sharp intellectual insights, dramatic assertions. In Phillips, Gore found a teacher who responded to him with a generous seriousness even when corrective. “Vidal has long talk with Dr. Phillips,” Washburn wrote in his diary. “Latter says he’s a materialist and should change. V says Phillips should go out in world and do something.” Actually, in his way, Phillips did. Gore wanted a larger, more worldly audience.

  Eager to know what his English teachers thought of him, Gore joined Bingham and Lewis in December 1942 in an escapade that apparently Bingham conceived. They broke into the English Department office. Rummaging among the files, they located comments that teachers made for the future reference of interested faculty members only. “A master complained that I seldom did the required reading but would often be found reading irrelevant books on history or novels not on the syllabus, like Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Another wrote that as a writer and a speaker I was ‘a soapbox orator.’ Some people still think so.” Exeter teachers adhered to the values of Exeter. They did not make exceptions. The exceptionalist got on their nerves. Later Vidal recalled, “There were certain English teachers whom I liked, but I only got one of them in class.” Fortunately, since it would have meant instant expulsion, the culprits were not caught, but Gore had his mind on removing himself anyway, of liberating himself from Exeter, possibly at the end of that very term. The thought of starting either the University of Oklahoma or the University of Virginia in spring 1943 had occurred to him. Harvard was also a possibility. He took the college-board examinations but, he confided to his father, “the best thing is to wend my way as comfortably as possible through the war, and come back to Oklahoma, or some place where I have begun to know some people. This living in Washington is like living in a fascinating vacuum, and gypsying around is worse.” Since he would not have a high-school diploma, Virginia was an impossibility. But his grandfather’s prominence in Oklahoma made Oklahoma feasible. At his grandson’s urging, the Senator wrote the university president, who immediately replied that they would be honored to have his grandson there. The technical impediments could be overcome.

  For Gore the impulse was directed toward establishing a home in a state in which he could run for political office. The idea seemed to him a good one. But his wiser grandfather made the argument that at best he could have a year or a year and a half at the university before being drafted. The result would be that he would have completed neither Exeter nor Oklahoma. Incompletion had the scent of failure. It certainly would leave him empty-handed. Why not finish Exeter? The Army would inevitably follow. After that there would be the opportunity to make more rational decisions about his future if, given the military mortality rate, there was to be any future at all. The ex-Senator from Oklahoma was himself “somewhat bitter. He had been defeated in 1936. He also realized that I was an Easterner and would have great difficulty in conning the Jesus Christers which he had spent his life conning…. It wouldn’t be much fun to represent them. I was officially headed there. But privately he was discouraging.” What he probably did not tell the Senator is that it would take a large favor or a small miracle for him to graduate at the end of the year. Not only did he need better grades but he needed one more credit than a normal program for the term would allow. By the time he went to Washington during the Christmas holiday, he still had not decided if he would return to Exeter for his final semester, and before leaving for the holiday he had anguished through the contested Golden Branch election for officers. Suddenly a new party had entered its own slate. “Vidal tremendously worried all afternoon,” Washburn, who “went out and got information and several promises to vote for Vidal,” reported to his diary. “He wanted it as culmination to his career at Exeter. He complained about his best friends giving him bad news…. Our members took [our opponents’ signs] from the givers in handfuls and tore them up.” In his anger, Gore wrongly accused Lewis of going back on their agreement. But “the boys were effectively on Vidals side…. It was a rout. 40 for Vidal 18 for his three opponents combined. (Sibley voted thrice but….) Watching Vidal’s face was most enlightening. Taut, anxious, falsely relaxed, forced smiles; later, when he knew he had been elected,
keen smile, sang hymn with gusto.” Gore celebrated by not studying for the next day’s French test. With that victory in hand, he pursued his holiday happily, putting out of mind, as best he could, his graduation problem. Perhaps something would work out. Perhaps he would pass math. The same D he had gotten for the fall term would suffice. In fact, his grades had just been the best he had ever gotten at Exeter, including a D in French, a C—in history, and a stunning B+ in English from a new teacher, Leonard Stevens. Even so, he still needed one additional credit.

  On the train ride to Washington he contemplated Rosalind. Arm in arm, they soon dropped in on Mrs. Rust, who had just finished dining with friends at the Statler Hotel. Excited, the two seventeen-year-olds announced they had decided to get married. Handsome, precocious, a glamorous couple, with Army service in his near future, why not marry right after graduation in June (he did not say if he were to graduate)? Why not take this step into adulthood, liberation, self-possession? Delighted, Mrs. Rust assumed that Gore’s well-known, high-powered Washington family would support the couple until the groom came into the money she assumed he would inherit. “Mrs. Rust was concerned about money,” Rosalind’s friend Tish Baldrige recalled. “Gore’s family had the semblance of money, though, and anybody in those days who had good family breeding … was considered to be rich. They were rich in many ways, not in monetary ways but in respect and recognition.” At Rock Creek Park, where he stayed with his grandparents, the announcement was met at first with deafening silence, then frosty disapproval. Was their grandson going to indenture himself to an early, moneyless marriage? There would not be a penny from the Gores. “Be not fruitful, do not multiply” became the Senator’s maxim. His own disappointing children had married prematurely. Nina strongly expressed her opposition. She had heard, she said, with unself-conscious irony, that there was alcoholism in the Rust family. “She hated Rosalind, who I must say quite openly hated her … and said Rosalind’s mother was an alcoholic, which wasn’t true. My mother had that one mixed up. Rosalind’s father was an alcoholic and had died early. I suppose she was thinking she wouldn’t want two alcoholics’ children to marry in case at a drop of a match, we’d both blow up…. I think she talked directly to Rosalind. Rosalind was a match for her. She wasn’t afraid of anything and had much better manners than my mother. She could be very cool, very attentive and non—committal. My mother would end up battling Rosalind and get only a sphinxlike smile out of her. Rosalind handled her very well.”