by Fred Kaplan
Sex between men had a more direct presence that spring of 1943 in his fascination with Somerset Maugham. He had been brought, once removed, into Maugham’s presence through his mother’s bridge-playing partner, Michael Arlen, a Bulgarian-born British novelist of Armenian descent. Arlen’s 1924 bestselling The Green Hat was his most successful in a series of romantic, bittersweet novels about fashionable London life. Arlen and Maugham were friends. Eventually settling in Washington and New York, a stellar figure in what was soon to be called café society, Arlen (and later Maugham) shared with Nina her passion for cards and society. Through his mother Gore had met Arlen at The Homestead, a resort in Hot Springs, Virginia, during a summer holiday in 1939. He found Arlen’s conversation delightful, his literary glamour and popular success enviable. An even more successful novelist than Arlen, Maugham outshone and outsold him. Maugham played bridge with Nina at the Washington and Southampton homes of one of her wealthy friends, and years later Gore was to meet him twice. By his last year at Exeter he had read all Maugham’s novels and most of his short stories. He shared the general high opinion of the autobiographical Of Human Bondage. Two of Maugham’s novels struck an especially responsive chord—Cakes and Ale for its suave depiction of writers and literary society and of an attractive blowsy female with a sexual heart of gold and The Narrow Corner for the homoerotic tension of its dramatization of repressed love between men. Nina and her bridge-playing friends knew from Arlen and others that Maugham’s sexual preference was for hired men. In their suite at the top of Langdell Hall, Gore told the curious but disbelieving Tom McFarland, who had been looking at Gore’s collection of Maugham novels, that Maugham was a homosexual. “I was dubious,” McFarland recalled. “I learned later [that he was right]. Gore was always good with gossip about the famous. He was connected in a way that he would know things. Especially since these things weren’t written about then. I think he used the word ‘homosexual.’ I think I realized that this was an interest of Gore’s. I made the connection immediately. I think Maugham was interesting to Gore in that way…. Gore told me that Somerset Maugham would pay men to have sex. I got the distinct feeling that he was talking about a role model. Not in any sexual way. Somebody who had been able to get through life in difficult circumstances.”
Encouraged by the Review faculty adviser, a Maugham enthusiast, and by his senior-year English teacher, Leonard Stevens, Gore wrote an essay on Maugham for English. It did not touch on Maugham’s sexuality. That would have courted trouble. Finally, in his last year at Exeter, he had in Stevens a teacher eminently suited to his intellectual and creative needs. In order to graduate in June Gore had to pass math, but he also needed one additional credit. Assigned to Stevens’s English 4 for the academic year, he soon discovered that if he could be moved for the spring into English 5, “a special high-powered honors class” that carried one additional credit, he would have that problem solved. For the four fall-term grading periods in English 4, Stevens had given him a C+, then two B’s, and finally a B+. Bingham, Sibley, and Lewis, whose grades were always high, had already been assigned to the honors literature class. Keen to join them there, both to authenticate his claim that he was their equal and to make his June graduation possible, Gore was delighted when Stevens moved him into the elite course. He boasted, prematurely, to his father that now he “will definitely graduate in June (they moved me up to English 5 which corresponds to third year college English),” though, he confessed, his marks were “hitting their mid winter slump: it has happened every year of my school life. I suppose I shall have to begin struggling again.” English 5 was more pleasure than struggle, the readings diverse and challenging, from Plato’s Republic to Conrad’s Lord Jim. Formerly a successful graduate student at Harvard, assistant to the famous scholar of American literature, F. O. Matthiessen, Stevens had given up on getting a Ph.D. partly because of bad eyesight and a young family, mostly because he discovered he loved reading but hated research. He had just that year come to Exeter from teaching at Yale. “Slow-moving, soft-spoken, broadly tolerant and understanding, a bulky man of about 5’10”, he had a large, squarish head and wore thick glasses for his weak eyes,” Hamilton Bissell recalled. “Not handsome but … arresting, with a quick smile, not a grin, with a soft voice and a loud wife,” whose vivacity Gore liked. Stevens “had an infallible judgment about people, especially the students. He could never be conned…. He knew the essence of the Harkness table, which was to think and get other people to think by asking questions. He had a great deal of patience and prudence, but was also strong and would take no nonsense. His notion of respect was that we take the subject seriously, we respect the subject. Gore, of course, came in with a swagger, and Leonard was the perfect teacher for him.”
Stevens took Gore and his literary efforts seriously, including his essay on Maugham, which began with a sentence characteristic of Vidal’s later style: “I have become increasingly tired of being told that Somerset Maugham is at best a competent writer of words and at worst a cynical master of the cliché.” A judicious overall evaluation of Maugham’s career up to that point, the schoolboy elements are easily outweighed by the intelligence of some of the comments and by the combination of seriousness, personal responsiveness, and syntactical clarity that transforms simplicity into sophistication. The style is more mature than the judgments. Both, though, are impressive. What he did not show Stevens was the novel inspired by Maugham’s Cakes and Ale he began writing that spring. Though he was never to bring it to completion, he was to work on it sporadically for the next two years. In the end he had an approximately 52,000-word manuscript of some thematic and linguistic sophistication, in a cool, direct, witty style, with aspirations to a worldliness that the author’s inexperience could not sustain. “There’s no way of burning it, is there, the Maugham novel?” he was to ask fifty years later.
In its fourth section, where the novel breaks off, the Maugham-like main character departs for the South Pacific. The young Vidal’s imagination has carried his character as far as he can go. The South Pacific is not only beyond his experience but beyond his imagination. Not able to write himself onto that map, he let the character and the novel go, but not before he had created an effective structure in which the third-person narrative is divided into three sections, each told from the point of view of a friend of the main character, the recently deceased world-famous writer James Morrison. The doctor, the sculptor, and the publisher have known him from the start of his career. All are attending his funeral. Some minor touches drawn from Vidal’s life appear—an autumnal scene set in Rock Creek Park, descriptions of Paris that draw on the author’s recollections of his visit in 1939. But the two major elements of the unfinished novel have sustained autobiographical intensity. Modeling the main character on his reading of Maugham’s most successful novel and his personal awareness of Maugham’s life, what Vidal “was trying to write,” he later claimed, “was really Cakes and Ale all over again, with Maugham instead of Hardy, Arlen instead of Hugh Walpole, and myself as Maugham writing it.” In Maugham’s novel the narrator is a version of Maugham himself. Of the three main characters, two are novelists, supposedly modeled on Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole, though the fit is loose; the third the sensually liberated wife of the Hardy-like character with whom the narrator has had an affair many years before. For Vidal, aspiring to be a successful worldly writer himself, what more clever though derivative way to begin than to model his novel on a successful novel, to identify himself with Maugham? The resemblances are vague, though. Vidal’s narrator is a Maugham-like narrator but not a character, let alone a novelist-character, in his narrative. No equivalent of Hugh Walpole exists. James Morrison’s wife, a minor character, has no resemblance to Maugham’s Rosie. The novel is entirely about James Morrison, and the energy of the depiction is less with the development of his career than with Morrison’s and his friends’ efforts to deal with his homosexuality. Morrison is both the public Maugham and the private Maugham, loosely disguised but sympathetica
lly if somewhat clinically defined. The issues are dramatized, or at least discussed: are homosexuals born or made thereafter? What is the appropriate relationship between one’s private sexuality and one’s public career? To what degree does a writer who is a homosexual include (or exclude) that from his public writings? It is more than the seventeen-year-old Vidal can handle, though he does not always fail by much. Vidal clearly enjoys the combination of the fact and the pose of worldly sophistication, of being beyond Romanticism, that the Maughamian example provides. It is more explicit, less tortured, more wittily worldly on the homosexual theme than Fling Out the Banner. Gore’s interest in the subject as early as the spring of 1943 suggests it may have played some role, even if a less than fully conscious one, in his decision to end the engagement to Rosalind.
Unlucky with husbands, Nina Gore Olds found herself suddenly, after less than a year of marriage, husbandless again, though this time not through her own doing. In late April, Bob Olds died of complications from pneumonia after a heart attack at the Tucson, Arizona, Desert Sanatorium. At the end, in great pain, unable to breathe, he had died in an oxygen tent. Nina had stayed with him throughout. Actually Olds had been in ill health for some time, and Nina may have become aware of his condition as early as the previous Christmas. In February 1943, when he was relieved of his command so that he might undergo treatment in Tucson, she had wired her son at Exeter to tell him where she now was and why. That the distinguished Air Force general had succumbed to illness at the age of forty—six was not what Nina had contracted for. Her son had remarked to Washburn that “he pitied the fact that his mother did not marry Luce (Life, Time, Fortune) because then he would be all set.” But the remark was more solipsistic than cruel. He had no reason to dislike the rather likable Olds, two of whose sons, cadets at West Point with whom Gore remained friendly for some years, had just managed to reach Tucson in time to see their father alive. Uncharacteristically, Washburn used the occasion to retaliate. “Because he’s just another step-father, and because I couldn’t honestly say I gave a damn, I expressed no condolences; merely confining myself to remarking when it would come out in Time…. I knew beforehand that such things weren’t the things to be said, but some strange force made me say them.” Gore himself memorialized his second stepfather in a poem, a valorization of the warrior who does not die in battle, the pilot who dies on the ground: “They say that even eagles die./Some die in flight, but oftener I/Am told they’ll die on a stone-sharp cliff/Alone, where those who’ve watched them fly/Can’t see them earth-trapped, and remember,/And remember.”
That he himself might face death in battle was an anxiety shared with his Exeter classmates caught between duty and fear, courage and cowardice. His own view of where he might fit into the military was governed partly by self-interest. Service was unavoidable, even desirable, especially since he understood that any chance for a political career after the war would be damaged if he could not say that he had fought on behalf of his country. With a father and uncle West Point graduates, he had an inescapable family tradition. Short of incapacity, one did one’s duty, and duty had the functional attraction of taking one out of adolescent bondage into adult self—sufficiency. As infantilizing as the Army might be in its control of the daily routines of life, it supplied a salary and sometimes provided adventure, experience, growth, if one did not have to pay too high a price. The price he did not want to pay was to be cannon fodder. Or at least, if he were to be cannon fodder, he preferred to be on the front lines as an officer. To be that, he would have to graduate from Exeter in June and then attend one of the officer-training programs the armed services had initiated. Most were for college students, especially graduates, but with the prestige of Phillips Exeter Academy and the influence, if necessary, of his father and uncle, he might be admitted to one of the programs. The immediate challenge was to graduate from Exeter. English 5 gave him the extra credit he needed, but he still had to pass his other courses. It looked almost certain, though, that he would fail mathematics again. That would be disastrous. At worst he would be drafted into the infantry, destined for the European or Pacific front lines. At best he would have to take some sort of summer makeup program. For the month of April he had gotten an E in math and an E+ in French. History, English, and art seemed secure. Assigned to study hall again, unusual for a senior, he cut back on everything but classes. The French he restored to its usual D status, but it soon became clear there was no likelihood he could pass math. Like Paul in Fling Out the Banner, Gore had been unprepared for so long that no amount of preparation, even if he were capable, could help now. He confessed his miserable situation to the math teacher. With bombs falling and bullets flying, the math teacher took an un—Exonian liberty with the “stern mother’s” usual standards. “All right,” he said. “I agree, you’ll never pass this subject, not in a million years. So I’ll do something unheard of. I’ll pass you with a D in this course. But you must promise me two things. One, you’ll never breathe a word of this to anyone. Two, you’ll never never take another math course again!”
Now on a clear path to graduation, Gore again had time for other things. At the final meeting of the Senate verbal fireworks had flared. The topic was a bill against lynching. “Those attending the meeting might well have thought they had instead wandered into a meeting of the Society for the Preservation of American Wit,” The Exonian reported. Vidal took the contrarian states’—rights side against the bill. It passed handsomely. With Bingham, who had again severely criticized one of his stories, he had a “terrific feud,” the climax of which was a single-spaced two-page letter of counterattack by Gore to Bingham, partly humorous, mostly sarcastic. Soon they were amiable again, working together on the class yearbook, The Paean. Their arguments about art he thought so good he used them in a discussion with McFarland. Washburn listened. “On the surface and to the casual observer, he would seem to know a great deal about art. Distortions of Greek statues he said were looked upon with horror but we’ve gotten used to them as we have with Rembrandt’s shadow technique. He thinks that distortion today will in time be accepted by the people who will get used to it. He doesn’t seem to differentiate between slight distortion for more beauty of former painters and the great distortion for god—knows—what (’design’ Vidal calls it).”
Graduation Gore anticipated as celebration and liberation. As to academic prizes, he had no doubt he would not win one, perhaps with the exception of the English 5 composition award which, to his surprise, Bingham and Lewis won. In the informal senior-class ballot for comico-serious designations, his classmates pronounced him class “politician” and class “hypocrite.” For the latter honor Bingham came in third. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it also embodied the reality of perception and attitude. A. K. Lewis was named “wittiest,” Bingham was third in that category and second in most likely to succeed. Washburn had priority as class “grind,” the positive side of which was his being named valedictorian. Running for class orator, Gore came in second to one of his debate opponents, the “interventionist” Irving Murphy, who also beat him out in the informal election for “best speaker.” It was a disappointment. Lewis was elected class historian, Bingham class poet. Along with Washburn, they would have the positions of prominence on class day and at the graduation ceremony.
On a hot mid—June weekend, Exeter green and bright, hordes of parents began arriving. Gene and Kit came up from New York. Nina, waiting out the war on the West Coast, did not attend. On Saturday afternoon, sunny but with a cooling breeze, with eight hundred people watching, Gore marched into the gymnasium in cap and gown for Class Day activities. As class poet, Bingham read “very effectively,” Otis Pease thought. The gist of it was that the dream of the “perfect school” comes true at Exeter. As class historian, Lewis, deadpan, read a humorous account of the qualities of the graduating class; including their aggregate weight and height. Washburn gave a brief valedictory farewell to liberal education for the duration of the war. More long-winded, Irving Murphy insis
ted on inflating his class oration to match his inflated opinion of how much its members would contribute to American politics and government in the future. He neglected to make any reference to how many of them might make their greatest contribution by being killed. Ten of Gore’s classmates were soon to die in the war, including Lew Sibley.
In the late afternoon Bliss Perry and some faculty wives entertained the visitors with punch and cookies on the lawn. That night almost everyone dined at the crowded Exeter Inn, then went to the graduation ball, attended by celebratory boys and lovely girls. For this occasion Gore had a replacement for Rosalind. Kit came as his date. Uninterested in schoolboy dances, Gene Vidal, happy to accommodate his son, stayed at the inn. Seventeen-year-old Gore Vidal had on his arm the most beautiful woman at the dance. Everyone soon knew she was a professional model from New York. People were bowled over. He did not say, as some later invented, “I want you to meet my mother!” The fun and glory were in Kit being his date. “Gore suggested it,” Kit recalled, “and Gene encouraged me. I think he wanted the glamour of taking a model to his dance and telling all his friends.” Graduation on Sunday was “stifling hot, humid.” There was a thunderstorm late in the day. In the morning, at the last Exeter church service Gore was ever to attend, Perry bade farewell to the class. His subject was “faith” in the future. At the ceremony that afternoon he made another speech. Each graduate rose as his name was read, placed cap on head, tassel on left. They then formed a circle on the lawn, where each received his diploma from the hand of the principal. The imminent thunderstorm came as a relief. At dinnertime the rain poured down.