by Fred Kaplan
With Rosalind on his arm, Gore went to a Christmas-season dance at the fashionable Sulgrave Club. Jimmie was there. They had not seen one another since May 1939 at Merrywood. When he told him of his engagement, Jimmie immediately responded, “You’re crazy!” It was the response of a sensible friend, himself pursued by and pursuing many attractive girls, who also expected to be in the Army within the next year or so. “We went downstairs to the men’s room,” Gore recalled years later, “with its tall marble urinals and large cubicles. I wondered what, if anything, he felt…. Fortunately, our bodies still fitted perfectly together, as we promptly discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly, talking of girls and marriage and coming simultaneously.” The position became a favorite one. “He always told me,” a friend remarked, “when we used to speak about sex in bygone days long ago, he used to say that what he really enjoyed was belly-rubbing. It’s what we all did at school and didn’t know why it was so pleasant. One person gets on top of another and usually inserts his penis between the legs of the other or just lets it ride up and down on the tummy and eventually the friction is so pleasant you get a little come and that’s even more exciting for that gives you more raison.” From Washington, Gore flew to Spokane, the ride arranged by the powerful general of the Ferry Command. To his delight, the Christmas-season festivities had, as USO entertainment, a number of Hollywood stars, particularly the beautiful Joan Leslie and the sophisticated Adolphe Menjou. As the son of the general’s wife, Gore sat with the honored guests. Joan Leslie he immediately fell in love with. A letter from the Senator, who had recently celebrated his seventy-second birthday, reached him in Spokane. The war was on the Senator’s mind, including his own ancestors, some wounded, others killed, who had fought for or against the republic. “I cannot choose but wonder what your eyes will witness before you reach your 72d milestone—as I hope you will. I cannot repress the wish that you may not have to go to the wars. If you do I certainly hope that you come back hale and unharmed, and with your shield. If you should have to go I am sure you will behave as becomes your breed—with a record that every member of your Command would be proud to claim as his own.” From Spokane, Gore went directly back to Exeter for the momentous spring term.
With Washburn the platonic love-hate relationship had intensified during these last months. In fall 1942 they had become roommates, sharing a large three-room suite at the top of Langdell Hall, usually reserved for a master but available because of the war, with another young man, a new student, Tom McFarland, from Birmingham. Bright, assiduously studious, a scholarship boy like Washburn, later to become a renowned Coleridge scholar, McFarland was insecure, talkative, arrogantly competitive, and attracted to his own sex. As with most Exeter boys, self-repression and the discipline of the environment kept that dampened as well as, in McFarland’s case, an innocence about himself and the world. Fascinated by literature, a compulsive scholar, McFarland, whose room was down the suite hallway, noticed Vidal constantly pecking away at his typewriter, with piles of manuscript beside him, or frequently on the move, from one activity to the next. At first “I thought his name was Veedol, the name of a gasoline company of that time. I wrote my mother. No, my mother said, it’s Eugene Luther Vidal. She had read an article in a magazine (I think The Saturday Evening Post) about Gore’s father. My first impression was that he was supercilious.” But he was impressed with Vidal’s collection of books and classical records. “One of the reasons I didn’t know him better was because he was too busy. He was a tornado. One of the reasons I could play the records and read the books was because he wasn’t there—‘I’m not here much,’ he said. He had … lots of Modern Library books. Modern Library Giants. And some records and an old-fashioned phonograph machine…. I remember Strauss waltzes particularly. He was very generous. I could listen to the records anytime I wanted to and I could borrow any of the books I wanted to…. He looked very intense when he was writing.” McFarland recognized the impressive bizarreness of this unpublished schoolboy already thinking of himself as an important writer. Everyone, including McFarland, noticed Wid’s worship of Gore. “With Wid, Gore controlled everything. Wid sort of just put his paws up. It was real hero worship. Anything Gore said was a pearl of wisdom. Gore just totally dominated that relationship. It was in the manner. He treated Wid very superciliously. And Wid always took that.”
Actually, it was not all worship on Washburn’s part. Deeply conflicted about his friend, from early on he hated as much as adored him, aware that this experience was an opportunity for self-exploration, for some evaluation of his own emotional and intellectual complexity. The attraction was not sexual. Wid wanted to know what made someone like Gore, so different from himself, tick. His worship was always made uneasy by mistrust. While he tended, usually, to accept at face value Gore’s exaggerated, even outrageous, statements about his family’s prominence and power, he often saw through the offhand schoolboy claims. When Gore’s exaggerations were meant to be funny put–ons, Wid usually missed the humor. One Sunday at compulsory church services Gore read both their palms. “Vidal has a little X on his upper palm which he says shows a person desiring power; he is going to have two children; he says that a palmist once told him that he would go mad. It will be very interesting to check the above with the facts.” When the roommates were required to be in by 7 P.M. as punishment for untidiness, Gore apparently blamed McFarland but took it out on Wid. “Vidal said that either MacFarland [sic] goes or he is going…. I sat there dumbfounded. I realized more than I ever realized just how low he considers me. I remembered back to first of year when all was roses and he hinted of introducing me to important personages etc at home and took me downtown to eat. I also remembered that the only reason I came back here was because of him. I sighed. Such is Vidal!” The room was inevitably a mess, as were all the rooms of Gore’s life except those—and they were soon all—that someone else cleaned. “Instead of cleaning up room or sweeping it out Vidal brushes his peanuts under the rug, moves a few chairs around in the living room, and then goes. He never touches the broom, he leaves broken Pepsi-Cola bottles in bathroom, never cleans up latter altho he uses it six times as much as anyone else. And yet he has gall to say that he does more than I etc.”
Apparently, as one way to communicate with Gore, Wid purposely left his diary available for him to read. In late April 1943, Wid wrote, “It’s funny how my opinion on Vidal has changed. 1st practically worship. Second practically hatred. And now I almost think he’s pathetic. He even asked me to type another of his stories (for which I waste a lot of time and get nothing). In the middle of it, he said ‘You’ll be able to write an essay on Vidal’s style some day.’ What colossal conceit. And acting as if I were a very lucky guy to be able to type out one of his rather poor stories. I was generating hatred all the time I was writing it.” At the end of this paragraph, at the bottom of the page, Gore responded, “You poor unhappy person.” When commenting on friends, Gore told him that he had had only five friends in his life, the rest “either admirers, satellites, etc.” A friend had to be an intellectual equal. When he named the five, Wid was not on the list. “I wonder if I could ever hate him so much that I would not rest until he had been overthrown? I wonder; something in me says that hate is too petty a thing but then another says it is the determinant of getting things done. Willpower.” For Wid the advantage was in the model, though he paid a price for his lessons. McFarland kept his distance, emotionally quirky enough himself to be unhappily self-sufficient. Bingham marveled sympathetically at Wid’s ability to live with Gore. Bingham and Lewis, though, operated as his equals. One afternoon Bingham came into the Langdell fourth-floor suite and found Gore in bed, reading. “What are you doing in bed?” “Well, I get so tired standing around.” Wid recorded Gore’s witticisms: “Celibacy is an all-consuming canker.” “Attractive women are never beautiful, and beautiful women are never attractive.” “After a very cultured speaker: ‘His voice brings starch to my shirt.’” “Definition of I
ntellectuals: People who hide trivialities in banalities.” “Two minds with a single lack of thought.” “The destruction of conscience is the beginning of happiness.” Oscar Wilde had become one of his models.
As he assiduously wrote dozens of short stories, some of them dashed off in hours, he knew that his efforts could not be fully separated from his rivalry with Bingham. His closest friend was his most prominent competitor and the Exeter Review gatekeeper. “One would think that with so much in common, the relationship would have been easy; instead, it was edgy,” Vidal recalled. “So competitive was the atmosphere that he and I were soon in a struggle over which of us was going to be The Writer.” Bingham, who had the final say on submissions, exercised his authority vigorously, some—times self—servingly. With the support of Lewis and Sibley, Gore, who had been appointed an associate editor of the Review for 1942—43, finally had a story accepted, “Mostly About Geoffrey,” a slight comic variant on the werewolf legend written in an expressive but compact prose, with a narrative frame both sophisticated and silly at the same time. The story worked, the elements well modulated and balanced. When the Review turned down one of his other submissions, accompanied by a long, critical, self—justifying harangue from Bingham, Gore submitted a story anonymously. Bingham thought it superb. When Gore revealed that the story was his, embarrassed, with some bluster, Bingham backed off. The winter 1943 issue contained two of Vidal’s short stories. The lead story, called “New Year’s Eve,” was an effective depiction of a discomfiting flirtation between an older married woman and a young man in the presence of her Army-colonel husband. The other, “The Bride Wore a Business Suit,” was surrealistically comic, about an absurdly innocent Exeter student who finds himself pressured by her guntoting father into marrying a domineering young woman he has supposedly compromised. The Review faculty adviser, George Bennett, who encouraged Gore’s writing, liked “New Year’s Eve” and compared it to Katherine Mansfield’s stories. Since Gore had not read anything by Mansfield, he took the compliment under advisement. The satiric tone of “The Bride Wore a Business Suit” is light but sharp, a jab at middle-class courtship, marital conventions, and marriage mores. The bridegroom’s main preoccupation is whether or not he will pass Latin, a comic refraction of Gore’s own academic anxiety. Also, he himself had just become inappropriately engaged. The rivalry with Bingham continued. Early in the spring term accusations surfaced at a heated Golden Branch meeting that Bingham had been appointed to the Exeter intercampus debating team in return for Vidal having been made an editor of the Review. If so, the tenuous alliance did not hold beyond the winter issue. Two of Bingham’s stories appeared in the spring 1943 Review, none of Vidal’s.
During the Easter break Gene Vidal, sufficiently recovered from his heart attack to come down to Washington, had a pointed conversation with his son about his engagement. Though usually inattentive, almost indifferent, to other people’s personal lives, including his son’s, Gore’s father suddenly had an important point to make. Washburn, in fact, noticed that there were “apparently strained relations between father-son,” probably about the engagement. How in the world could Gore, his father wanted to know, support two seventeen-year-olds on an Army private’s salary or on any civilian salary he could expect to make? The discouragement was couched entirely in financial terms. Gore could expect help from neither side of his family. Resistant, he defended his commitment. Rosalind would remain with her mother while he was away. His pay would help cover some expenses. If he were an officer, his salary would be higher. After the war he fully expected to earn, though he did not quite know how, the approximately $500 a month they agreed would be sufficient. In love with Rosalind, he did not want to give her up. To Gore, eager for independence, the engagement represented a movement toward adulthood. He did have some unexpressed hesitations, though his impulse was always to affirm what his parents opposed, oppose what they affirmed. He carefully explained to his father exactly how he would work out the financial challenge. But that neither Rosalind nor her mother thought it a problem already troubled him. Rosalind’s “fascination with making it go ahead” and her mother’s enthusiasm “gave me a certain pause. She saw me as a rich boy. I sure as hell wasn’t. Needless to say, between my father and the Senator the poverty of our family was brought home to me.”
Working long, almost inspired hours at his writing table at Exeter, he felt increasingly certain what he wanted most in this world, other than to be President, was to be a writer, to have the writing life, and if unlike Henry James he could never imagine himself “just literary,” nevertheless that vision of himself that he had synthesized on the bus trip into Spokane the previous Christmas dominated his consciousness. The kinds of experiences, the freedom to travel, the disregard for anything but sustenance income that might advance his career as a writer would be less sustainable if he were married. As to sex, he believed he could have its pleasures as well with Rosalind as with Jimmie, or with some version of both, as he desired. He did not think himself caught between one or the other. Either or both were suitable. But his struggle to become a successful writer would be against a resistant, nonsupportive world. His family might be right to discourage his taking on a responsibility that would limit him. No doubt the Senator and even Gene Vidal “both intended to live a long time and they would give me nothing in between. It was very clear I was on my own. One can fight the world better than two.”
With some displaced but compulsive self-focus, he read and reread that winter—spring of 1943 a controversial popular novel, Robert Newman’s Fling Out the Banner. It “had an enormous influence on me … I remember being very shaken by it.” Set at Exeter, the novel dramatizes four interlocking subplots: the disintegrating love affair between the main character, Paul, whose consciousness is the focus of the narrative—an aspiring writer, an avid student of literature, an excellent amateur boxer—and a tall, slim, beautiful town girl, Liz, who has lovely legs and brilliant posture; the relationship between Paul and his football-playing roommate, Boss McKenzie, who commits suicide after a series of rebellious acts, the last of which is a sexual encounter with one of his male teachers; the attempt of the homosexual teacher, Protius, to seduce Billings, an innocent young student; and Paul’s attempt to work through his need to liberate himself from Exeter, from Liz, and from his adolescence in order to become both an independent adult and a successful writer. After a troubled reconciliation Liz and Paul break up at Paul’s insistence: he is not ready for a commitment to her and he is troubled by inner conflict, some of which may be sexual. It may have to do with his feelings for Boss, it may not. Paul remembers Boss’s earlier statement that we all have something of that in us. In one of the two dramatic final scenes of the novel, Boss drives off alone, fatally cracking up Protius’s car and himself. He dies in the Exeter hospital. When Billings, in tears, tells Paul that Protius has raped him, Paul and other seniors punish Protius for this infraction of the code of conduct. They lure him to Paul’s room, tie, gag, and beat him, shaving his eyebrows and a part down the center of his hair, a visible disgrace they think will make it impossible for Protius to stay at Exeter. In the final chapter, which takes place in the Exeter chapel, Paul calculates the hundreds of hours he has perforce spent there. “The eight o’clock bell began to ring and he started for his first class. It was math. And, on the way, he remembered that he was unprepared.” In the end Paul punishes Protius for raping the young boy; life and society punish Boss for his instability, his rebellion, his self-punishing sexual involvement with Protius. Narrated in a plain, flat style, with echoes of Hemingway in the prose, Fling Out the Banner seemed to some a roman à clef, with potentially identifiable Exeter models. To many it was a realistic introduction into mainstream fiction of the forbidden topic of sex between men.
As Gore brooded over Fling Out the Banner, the identification he made between himself and Paul and between Roz and Liz was painfully strong. How he actually communicated his decision to end the engagement has been repressed—“blan
ked out.” Neither the documents of the time nor Vidal’s recollection permits an account. He may indeed have allowed Rosalind to become aware of the disengagement by the absence of reaffirmation, by his silences and his physical distance. Perhaps there was a direct communication, even a scene, between them, though the latter is unlikely. By the end of the Easter 1943 school break he knew he would not go ahead with the relationship, that he was in fact committed to their separation. It was not a question of postponement, of the possibility of resumption later. Once having made the decision, he made it forever. For him it was totally over, a termination that, as with all such transitions, he would make as abruptly as possible, with both eyes on the future. He preferred to be emotionally efficient, even if that efficiency appeared ruthless. As Washburn had remarked about him, if the end were literary greatness, then the means required creative efficiency.