Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Stunned into feeling and thinking as little as possible, he left Jackson for New York. Gene and Kit, with three-year-old Vance and the infant Valerie, were at East Hampton, where Gore joined them, at some basic level eager to affirm by the very presence of his body in Long Island summer sunshine that he himself at least was alive and well. He had come through the war. He had a life and a future, a book of poems to be published, the offer of an editorial job in New York. The impact of Jimmie’s death he put on emotional hold. In the warm evenings at East Hampton the popular John Drew Summer Playhouse provided theatrical entertainment and theater people, both of which he enjoyed. Someone pointed out Thornton Wilder. And he met a brilliant lyricist named John Latouche, famous for his wit and high spirits, a magnetic figure in New York social and artistic nightlife.

  In the restorative sunshine, on the beach, a happy accident occurred. With no advance warning, suddenly he was introduced to a man with dark hair and black eyes, “who looked more like a pirate than a writer,” named Frederic Prokosch, the novelist whose narratives he had obsessively read without any notion that the “two fascinating words” that made up his name had attached to it a living being with whom one day he might shake hands. Handsome, athletic, proud of his movie-star good looks and his excellent tennis, Prokosch had recently returned from Europe, where he had served during the war as cultural attaché in Stockholm. He had been well known if not famous since the publication of The Asiatics in 1935, The Seven Who Fled in 1937. Born in 1908 in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of a brilliant but repressive linguist of Czech origin who, for their own good, never praised his children, the thirty-seven-year-old Prokosch was literary, successful, magnetic. “I found him a very erotic writer, and there he was sitting on the beach. He had rented a cottage on the beach with a Swedish boy, and I got to know him.” Before the war Prokosch had graduated from Yale, earned a doctorate in medieval English, then studied at King’s College, Cambridge, where he had been great friends with two other literary Americans from Yale, Robert Giroux and John Kelly, both of whom Gore would soon get to know in New York. Like Kelly and Giroux, Prokosch’s main sexual interest was in men. Eager to get away from the Manhattan heat, he had come to East Hampton to enjoy the cool breezes. By temperament a poetic lyricist of solitude and personal voyaging, Prokosch had an immense capacity to be impersonally charming. Gore found him, as he was, “amiable but distant.” An inveterate traveler who delighted in the exotic, a restless man who loved his own loneliness, who struck many as cold and aloof, his highest interest was in reading and in literary culture. When Gore told him how profoundly his “early adolescent self” had been affected by his novels, “he found this amusing: ‘How sensitive you must have been!’ And the pirate laugh would roar.” The meeting was preface to a long, intermittent friendship. With Gore’s own book-in-progress substantially under way but not completely done, the accidental meeting on the beach at East Hampton with a writer whose novels he read and admired gave a small additional affirmation to his own sense of himself as a novelist. It was welcome if for no other reason than that he was having difficulty finishing Williwaw. He did not want it to be another in what seemed to him already an all-too-long list of novels never completed.

  Summer 1945. Manhattan. East Hampton. Suddenly, in August, earth-shattering explosions. New sights for a new world. The war was about to be over. Years of scarcity and sacrifice were at an end, an age of prosperity to begin. For millions of servicemen it was now time to come home. Many already had. But first, a grand cosmic light show. Los Alamos suddenly became a household name. On August 6 the world learned that Hiroshima had been destroyed by a powerful new bomb. The world of TNT had been transformed into the atomic age. On August 9 Nagasaki mostly disappeared. For most Americans it seemed the right thing to have done. The war in the Pacific would not be prolonged by a contested invasion of the Japanese homeland. The mushroom cloud immediately became the talismanic sign of the new age. With his father, who was fascinated by the new technology and informed about the progress of the bomb, Gore had long conversations. News reports touted a golden age of cheap electricity through nuclear power; radioactive fallout was a secret not to become part of public discussion for a year or so. In New York, where he spent part of July and August, Gore had his father’s apartment to himself. Central Park foliage was green, lush, the city filled with servicemen. Raunchy bars and clubs overflowed with men on leave. In the fashionable Astor Hotel one side of the elegantly erotic art deco black bar was for male-male encounters, the other for male-female. The excitement was riveting. In the city he regularly walked from Ninety-second Street through the park or along Fifth Avenue to the glittering, crowded euphoria of a midtown about to celebrate the war’s end. August 14. Japan surrendered. V-J Day. The American party began. Millions filled Times Square. Joining the huge crowd, Gore both watched and participated in the celebration, New York on an all-day all-night binge of revelry, parties in the street, fireworks in the sky, strangers embracing, a grand sense of relief inseparable from pleasure. We had come through. The war was over. The next morning he woke up in bed with a stranger. He had forgotten how they had met.

  Convalescence in East Hampton alternated with Manhattan adventures. For the first time he went to the Everard Baths, the object of a longtired witticism that called it the “Ever Hard,” the famous emporium of grime, steam, and flesh on West Twenty-eighth between Broadway and Sixth, which since its opening in 1888 had descended from elegance to seediness. Its attractions, though, had made it an internationally renowned center of sex for men interested in men. During the war, with hotel rooms costly or simply unavailable, the baths, open all night, were more popular than ever, their clientele even more various. Soldiers with conventional domestic lives found the baths a convenient place for sleep, showers, and sex. The general habitués were a mix of every sort of interest and background. In the showers, the steam rooms, the small pool, in the long corridors and tiny cubicles, valuables checked securely, safely casual and anonymous, wrapped only in white robes, uptown and downtown people, tourists and soldiers, businessmen and show-business stars, workingmen and society nobs met in what had become institutionalized single or multiple encounters. After a night on the town, soldiers and sailors and all the usual clients would end up at the baths, sometimes a tired, often a bacchanalian mix. It “was sex at its rawest and most exciting, and a revelation to me,” Gore recalled. “I felt the way the Reverend Jerry Falwell must feel when he visits the Holy Land.”

  Sometimes the encounter would originate someplace else, at a club or a movie theater, on the street or at the Astor Bar, which became one of Gore’s regular early-evening stops, at times so crowded with uniformed men on the prowl that few civilians dared enter the sacred precinct. One evening at the Astor a small voice from a short, moon-faced, bespectacled man, “a little brown pot, big glasses, unprepossessing,” not in uniform, said, “And so to bed!” Kimon Friar, a Turkish-born, Greek-speaking American poet, translator, and teacher, ten years older than Gore, had noticed under the young man’s arm a copy of Samuel Pepys’s salaciously frank eighteenth-century diary, whose characteristic refrain “And so to bed!” is its signature phrase. Pepys, bed, and Gore’s good looks were incentive for Friar, who immediately in one unstoppable breath told him who he was and what he did, including that he was now an instructor of literature at Amherst College. His best student and close friend, at whose parents’ apartment in New York he usually stayed, was a talented young poet, James Merrill. Friar had “already mastered the art of not listening to others with an air of attention,” Gore later remarked. When Friar proposed they go someplace quiet to talk, Gore invited him home to 1107 Fifth Avenue. Friar, who seemed likable and intellectually attractive, was amazed to learn that a book of Gore’s poems had been accepted for publication. Happy to talk about poetry and art, Gore immediately made it clear that bed together was not in their imminent futures. There was to be no sex. At the apartment Friar looked around at the sweep of rooms, the views of Central Park.
His own immigrant background and hand-to-mouth economic life found it all very upper-class. Still, he had a trump card. James Merrill’s father, one of the founders of a famous Wall Street firm, he said, putting it all in perspective, “is a lot richer than yours.”

  By mid-August Gore was on his way to Camp Gordon Johnston, via a rest and transfer stop in Asheville, North Carolina. As the crowded train rose into the foothills where the Blue Ridge and the great Smoky Mountains meet, he thought the countryside beautiful: pine-covered slopes, the sudden deep green of high valleys, endless curves and mountain vistas. The only thing he knew about Asheville was that the writer Thomas Wolfe had grown up there. Look Homeward, Angel had been not only one of the popular literary novels of his Exeter years but so well thought of that it had been assigned as required reading in English classes. On the one hand he disliked Wolfe’s elaborately lyrical prose, and Exeter classmates had teasingly called to his attention the name of Wolfe’s central character, Eugene Gant. “I think the hero of Tom Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel,” Wid Washburn remarked, “was someone whom Gore didn’t want to share a name with.” That may have reinforced his own name change to “Gore.” While at Exeter he jotted down in a notebook the phrase “Look Downward Angel,” perhaps the title of an unwritten parodic short story. On the other hand, Wolfe and Vidal shared a birth date, exactly twenty-five years apart. There seemed something fateful about that. In Asheville he searched vainly for Wolfe’s childhood home. The “vast resort hotel for damaged officers” where he shared a bedroom with five other men was near George Vanderbilt’s massive Biltmore, at which Henry James had stayed, uncomfortably, in February 1905. From Asheville he went, finally, in the heat of late August, to Camp Gordon Johnston, on Florida’s Gulf Coast, between Panama City and Tallahassee, near Apalachicola Bay and its resplendent beach. Assigned as officer in charge of the mess hall, his light work left him with time and energy to return to the manuscript in the gray accounts ledger he had taken with him. He wanted to finish Williwaw.

  But he could not move it that last short distance to its end. The beach was one compensation. Though he had been to Hobe Sound on Florida’s east coast, where the Auchinclosses had a home, this was his first experience of the gulf. Always a happy swimmer, he loved the water and the sun. Another compensation was the invitations from solicitous matrons, eager to provide a social life and possible matches, to visit the sorority houses at Florida State University in nearby Tallahassee. With most college-age boys in the service, it was an advantage to have Camp Gordon Johnston close by. The ladies were always “on the lookout for gallant young officers.” Hospitality was welcoming, congenial. With other officers he went to dances and took long walks with flirtatious belles happy to have male companionship. “Spanish moss hung in the middle distance.” The manners and rules were quaintly post-Civil War, picturesquely Victorian. One of his fellow officers, Wade Hampton, who joined him on the Tallahassee visits, had been at Exeter with him. A descendant of a Civil War general and South Carolina politician, he also fantasized about high political office, especially the presidency. For Gore it was a taste of the social attractions of college life without having to be a college student. At the moment, though, his most focused ambition was to finish the novel. During the day his mess-hall duties took some time and little attention. At night there were movies, a seemingly endless supply of Hollywood films shown and reshown at every Army base around the world, the one ready source of entertainment for millions of bored soldiers. One evening he saw Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff, an actor whose performance in The Mummy had settled deeply into his memory as a young boy in Washington and had haunted his imagination since. There was something magical, evocative, energizing for him about the performance and the film. “So Boris Karloff, as a Greek officer on an island at a time of plague, broke, as it were, the ice,” he recalled. Suddenly he was able to write again, almost instantaneously, with automatic but determined perseverance. He had “no idea what it was in the movie that did the trick.” Having been assigned as officer of the day to night duty in a room empty but for typewriters, he sat down at a machine, the gray ledger beside him, listening each evening to weather reports. Suddenly “a hurricane was on its way up the Gulf, heading towards us.” Some combination of Isle of the Dead, the room filled with typewriters, and the threatening storm energized his creativity. “I zoomed right through the book there.” Within a few weeks he had finished Williwaw. He felt immense relief and satisfaction. He had actually completed a novel, at last. And it seemed to him cogent, taut, readable, mature. “With the finishing of this book, my life as a writer began.”

  Thin, a little under six feet, with a crew cut, still in uniform, Gore found himself less than two months later, soon after his twentieth birthday, sitting at his own desk in the Fourth Avenue offices of the venerable New York publisher E. P. Dutton. With Pick again stationed at Mitchell Field and his father’s Fifth Avenue address available as his home, he had had no difficulty arranging a transfer back into the Army Air Corps to serve once again under his uncle’s command. Since he had served as base historian at Fort Peterson, what more suitable light-duty assignment than base historical officer in the Public Relations Office at Mitchell Field? By early August his new home was a barracks on Long Island, his half-time duties mostly routine paperwork. Like innumerable servicemen, he waited to be mustered out as the Army bureaucracy slowly processed millions into the civilian population. With ample free time, he went regularly into Manhattan, staying overnight or on weekend leave in the back bedroom at 1107 Fifth Avenue, sometimes at the Everard Baths or in a hotel. “Gore would come when he wanted to see his publishers or his friends,” Kit recalled, “but he didn’t stay very long usually.” At first, though, he had no publisher for the novel. Having hand-copied the portion of Williwaw from his notebook and added to it the new typewritten pages, he gave what he thought a clear copy to Robert Linscott, a senior editor at Random House who had been recommended to him. “So Linscott called me in. He couldn’t have been nicer, this old man, and said it is customary in publishing to submit a manuscript that has been typewritten. I thought he lacked dedication and perhaps should find another field of work. So I withdrew haughtily from Random House.” But he soon had it fully typed.

  With Gene he had lunch at a midtown restaurant with his Dutton mentor, Nicholas Wreden, and a senior editor, John Tebbel. Neither was aware that Gore had written a novel; their professional eyes focused exclusively on signing Gene Vidal to write his memoir. “Gore was still in uniform. Nick sat next to the old man, and I sat next to Gore,” Tebbel remembered. “Those two got into a conversation, and Gore and I were talking. He said to me, ‘While I was in Alaska, I wrote a book. Would you read it and tell me what you think of it?’ I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to.’ And so he brought it down to the office the next day and I read it that night, and when I came in in the morning I said to Nick, ‘We’ve got to have this book. You’ve got to read it.’ So Nick did read it, and he agreed with me. The editorial board read it, and we bought it right away.” Tebbel suggested minor changes. On October 19, working with his usual dispatch, Gore told Kimon Friar that revisions “should be finished this week, much to my relief.” Everything went smoothly. By late November 1945 he had in hand a contract, with the usual royalty starting at a rate of 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies and an advance against royalties of $250, to be paid on the signing of the agreement. Williwaw was scheduled for late-spring publication. That lunch meeting also gave focus to the understanding that he would come to work for Dutton as an associate editor. A venerable firm, it still had some of its mechanics and much of its frame of mind in the world of quill pens and handwritten ledgers. In attitude the firm was conservative, its proprietors, the brothers Eliot and John Macrae, a mixture of eccentricity and competence. A spiritualist who had casual conversations with ghosts and had created Dutton’s list of books on the occult, Eliot Macrae ran the firm with a successful specialty in true-adventure stories for adults; the occasional bestselling
lowbrow novel, such as Mickey Spillane’s crime-sex stories; the ongoing sale through innumerable editions of a perennial occult bestseller called Cosmic Consciousness; the popularity of Albert Terhune’s dog books; and John Roy Carlson’s World War II book, Undercover, which Tebbel had recently procured and which had already sold over a million copies. The most valuable Dutton property was Winnie-the-Pooh. Gore soon proposed to Wreden and Tebbel that he edit and Dutton publish an anthology of war verse. They liked the idea. Williwaw was scheduled for June 1946 publication, his volume of poems for summer 1947. Gore suggested to Kimon Friar that they collaborate as co-editors of the anthology. “I envision a collection of the better poetry written in the times of war since the Iliad. Less Kipling and more Spender, more of your metaphysical people. On the other hand as this would not come out until 1947 at the earliest the subject of War might be anathema. Therefore one might think of a collection of poetry from this last war by people one has never heard of; in other words a portrait of the recent war in poetry written by the people who fought in that war or suffered in it.”

  Suddenly he was not only being published, he was publishing others. Every Thursday he came into Dutton from Mitchell Field or from his father’s apartment for editorial-board meetings. Regular office routine would not begin until his discharge. At the end of each week he collected his $35 weekly salary, paid in cash in a sealed envelope, perhaps an expression of the firm’s old-fashioned attitude, as if the world even of paychecks seemed insufficiently Victorian, too modern for a business whose ideas as well as origins predated the Civil War. Both unreconstructed Virginians, the Macraes felt that publishing was a profession for gentlemen. A short trim man with a straightforward manner, Eliot kept Confederate battle flags in his “very literary looking” book-lined office. The Macraes preferred manly books. On the surface Williwaw was just that, though its jaundiced view of the Army and of human character might have distressed them if they had read beyond the surface. Excellent readers, Wreden and Tebbel knew it indeed was not a gentleman’s book in the old-fashioned sense, but they were keen on bringing into Dutton new voices. Gore could help identify them. Both had come to Dutton within the last two years. Tebbel, unlike Wreden, soon left publishing for a career as a freelance writer and teacher of journalism. Originally from Michigan, he had worked at a half dozen major newspapers, most recently at the New York Times, and had been managing editor of The American Mercury, H. L. Mencken’s distinguished satirical magazine. Thirteen years older than Gore, anticipating a great career for the young writer, Tebbel liked him immediately. They were soon friendly, almost exclusively at or after work, when they would sometimes finish the day after one of Gore’s office visits with drinks at the Gramercy Park Hotel and dinner at a local restaurant. Gore’s lively conversation amused Tebbel, though he seemed “rather shy and sometimes even tentative, even about his own work. Obviously he believed in it very much, but he did not have the kind of personality he has now. I don’t know when it changed. Probably he changed slowly. In those days he was a little tentative. He believed in himself, but he didn’t push himself and he was not really, at least publicly, egotistical. He was good company.”