Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  As editorial director and by personality, Wreden dominated the literary operations of Dutton. He had been brought in recently from Charles Scribner’s Sons, where he had been a director, to run the literary side of the firm. To bolster his authority he was elected vice president and a member of the Dutton board of directors. Together he and Eliot Macrae made all publication decisions of consequence. When Tebbel left late in 1946, Wreden became Gore’s editor, a relationship of mutual respect and affection that lasted for over fifteen years. An expansive man who ate, drank, and smoked enthusiastically, bearlike in size and energy, Wreden was a presence in the publishing world. Articulate and persuasive, often dressed in sports jacket and slacks, he was fair-complexioned, “tall and large, heavy, over six feet,” Tebbel recalled, with “a fascinating voice, a rumble with a very slight accent,” a small dark mustache anchored by a bold nose, sparkling light-blue eyes, thick brows, and unruly curly hair. A White Russian émigré born in St. Petersburg in 1902, he had fled to America as a young man. His father had been surgeon general of the Imperial Russian Army and private physician to the royal family. So too had his grandfather and great-grandfather. After education at a German preparatory school and the Russian naval academy, he had come into active service as a young cadet and then lieutenant in time to fight against the Turks, the Austrians, and the Germans in the Baltic Sea. When the Russians were defeated in 1916, he fought with other royalist cadets against the insurrectionists in St. Petersburg and then gave his loyalty in 1917 to the democratic Kerensky government. When the Bolsheviks took power, he joined the White Russian forces, fighting until 1920. His family lands had been confiscated; his future in the Soviet Socialist Republics was the firing squad. In June 1920, as a mess hand, he landed in New York harbor, where eighteen years before his grandfather had disembarked from a luxury liner as the Russian delegate to the conference of the International Red Cross. Soon he was a longshoreman, then an accountant, then a lumber dealer in North Carolina, where he married and had three children. For a short while he worked for the Civil Works Administration in Texas and began a memoir of his experiences in the Russian Revolution, which he published in 1935. He became a traveler representing publishers, a bookstore manager in Detroit, manager of the well-known Scribner’s bookstore in New York, and then, finally, a Scribner’s director.

  Despite bad teeth, half of which had fallen out because of his terror of the dentist, Wreden was quick to laugh, an avid conversationalist, and an occasional monologuist. “He was a two-fisted drinker, and he liked people and people liked him, so he had a big social life with authors.” He was, Vidal recollected, “a big jolly fat man and rather sly, rather sharp.” A happy member of The Players Club, he loved entertaining and conviviality. His old and new Russian friends, all hostile to the revolution from which they had fled, found a convivial welcome and great quantities of vodka at his Park Avenue apartment, where he lived with his second wife and their three children. Publishing suited him perfectly. So too did Gore. The respect and affection were mutual. Wreden treated Gore with avuncular attachment and commitment, as an important acquisition, a sharp young man who could write powerfully and maybe, as his career developed, brilliantly. In addition, he genuinely liked this handsome, somewhat vulnerable, increasingly well defended young man less than half his age, who had a fine sense of humor, who had read a great deal, who came from an interesting background, and who had great promise. Like Tebbel, Wreden believed that authors of fiction might benefit from suggestions but never from commands; that the editor’s responsibility was to guide, never to lead; that when a writer wrote well, the editor should not get between him and his audience. It was a world of laissez-faire publishing. Editors selected works and writers. If they themselves believed in a writer, they assumed there would be an audience for him. The financial investment for new authors was small: advances against royalties did not involve trips to the bank for either party. If a book earned little, that was acceptable, especially if the book had appreciative reviews, if there were an audience for it, even if small. The first, most important audience was the editor and the publisher. Wreden was enthusiastically on Vidal’s side.

  Ambitious, encouraged, Vidal began to write a second novel, with the working title The Myriad Faces. With ample energy and time, he had no reason to discount his assumption that what writers do is write as productively as they can. Immensely facile once under way, he felt an access of energy partly derived from having at last finished a full-length novel. He had proved to himself that he could do it. Though years later he was comfortable admitting he had failed to complete any of the novels he had started before Williwaw, that winter he went so far as to tell Carrington Tutwiler, with whom he had resumed contact, that he had actually finished the Somerset Maugham novel. A vivid anecdotalist and storyteller who occasionally exaggerated to make his point or for self-promotion, he was a dedicated non-liar who rarely lapsed. Partly he wanted to distinguish himself from Nina, whose lies tormented his childhood. Mostly, telling the truth was a way of making the world more reliable, of feeling reasonably confident he could proceed on the basis of what he had been told and what he had told others. It was also self-assertion—he was not afraid of the truth, about himself and others. His interest was in knowing it rather than distorting or evading it. His lie to Tutwiler suggests the high level of anxiety his inability to finish any novel before Williwaw had created. Even with Williwaw scheduled for publication in June 1946, he still needed to soothe that wound by telling Tutwiler he had finished the Maugham novel and voluntarily discarded it, presumably because it was not up to his own high standards. The new novel was well under way before the end of the year, its initial premise the depiction of “myriad faces,” the multiple daily roles of a war veteran who embraces the nondramatic anonymity of middle-class life as a Wall Street broker. “It’s an idea that has always intrigued me: the different faces that one person assumes during a day, the different reactions that people have to him.” He was hoping to follow the anticipated success of Williwaw in June with an even greater success soon afterward. He was eager for acceptance, critical acclaim, the presence and reputation that comes from having a list of books already published, the financial reward that would enable him to live on royalties and devote himself exclusively to writing. He wanted not a single book but a career in the larger sense, like Somerset Maugham, though more literary, an American Thomas Mann who would write both contemporary and historical novels. In Washington, still in uniform, he visited his grandparents. “I sit with Dah in the living room of his flat in Crescent Place…. Dah rocks in his Mission chair. Discusses my political career and what he calls ‘the New Mexico option,’ because ‘Oklahoma is too volatile.’ He always winced at the thought of his Bible-loving constituency. ‘Of course, you were born in New York. Why not take advantage of that? Why not get yourself a district in the city? You pay Tammany Hall your first year’s salary and, except for city matters, they leave you alone.’ I thought this a dead end.” His mind was not on politics or a political life but on being, for now, “just literary.”

  New York City life flowered around him, the city, alive with returning servicemen, now about to become its early postwar self. Rationing was over. Military victory was also economic triumph. Soon there would be the first new cars, houses, home appliances in over five years. Factories would begin to turn out civilian clothes. No other industrial country had survived the war with its productive capacity intact, let alone immensely increased. No other country had the atomic bomb. If there were foreign enemies, they were powerless against America. If there were problems at home, like labor unions beginning to insist on a greater share for the workingman in America’s prosperity, they would have to be dealt with. For the moment, in the first flush of the war’s ending, national tensions were in temporary harmony. In a few years the United Nations Headquarters Tower would dominate the view from midtown to the East River. New York’s economic power and international fame made it America’s magnet city. Theater, ballet, art,
music, literature, publishing, fashion—young people from every section of the country came to have their chance at the arts and at modern life. New York’s energy gave it an electric excitement.

  More quickly than most, Gore now had a job in an industry thought of as glamorous and a beginning as a soon-to-be-published writer. With his father’s spacious Fifth Avenue apartment available to him, he had suitable housing. Handsome, articulate, with a slightly aggressive but still amiable social manner, he felt at ease with a variety of people with different backgrounds. At the baths, at one-night pickups brought to inexpensive Times Square hotels, he had all the sex even his expansive, virile desires could accommodate. That part of life, sex but not love with strangers, was easy, quick, mechanical, pleasurable in the most uncomplicated way. At Dutton he had his Thursday editorial meetings, his reports on manuscripts, his camaraderie with Wreden, Tebbel, and Louise Nicholl. Still in uniform, he had to spend part of his time at Mitchell Field, but his New York social life was expanding. He was meeting people of interest, some of them writers. With evenings at clubs like the Blue Angel, where John Latouche knew everyone, he was soon getting to know and be known to everyone. To help increase circulation in his right leg, still inhibited by the remnants of rheumatoid arthritis, he enrolled for ballet lessons, paid for by the G.I. Bill, at the George Chafee Studio on Fifty-sixth Street. There he met a tough young Irish boy from New Jersey with whom, among others, he regularly had sex for a while. The lessons were his entrée into the ballet world. For Gore, as for many others, the 1944 ballet Fancy Free, soon transformed into the Broadway musical On the Town, became the New York anthem, heralding an American Golden Age.

  By Christmas there were two new attractive women in his life. Cornelia Phelps Claiborne he had known vaguely in his Washington childhood, partly as a friend of Rosalind Rust, mostly as someone trained in the same dancing-school and party rounds as he. She was the daughter of Cornelia Enson, an intellectually accomplished Washingtonian who had gotten a doctorate in economics from Columbia and made a considerable amount of money investing. Her daughter’s paternal roots anchored her in the Virginia Claibornes, whose history and social prestige originated in the eighteenth century. Thomas Jefferson’s friend William Charles Claiborne had been appointed governor of the Mississippi Territory, then been elected governor of and senator from Louisiana. With residences in New York (where she lived on East Sixtieth Street over the Copacabana nightclub) and Washington, the driving, ambitious Cornelia Enson had become Mrs. William A. Moncure by the time Gore renewed his relationship with her daughter. Two years younger than Gore, Cornelia had attended the demanding St. Timothy’s School in Maryland, where “the girls had to confess and were punished for thinking things they weren’t supposed to think” and where the longstanding rule that girls had to wear shifts even when privately bathing remained in effect until her second year. Relentlessly literary, Cornelia benefited from rigorous classes in English literature. In 1943 she went to Vassar, along with her St. Timothy’s classmate and friend Betty Pollock, who remembers Gore visiting in uniform sometime in late 1945. With Betty Pollock, Cornelia and Gore’s former girlfriend Rosalind had formed a Vassar trio in 1943-44, “so bright and full of energy and full of life.” The three of them, Pollock recalled, “were born mutinous and rebellious and bred to be successful.” Dark-haired, clear-complexioned, quite beautiful, Cornelia had a luminous smile and shining gray-green eyes. Tall, with a fine figure, she limped slightly, probably the result of a childhood illness. She also had high literary ideals and ambitions. Serious, witty, charming, she expected to be a famous poet. By late 1945 she had had enough of Vassar. The glamour of her mother’s New York social life and the cultural excitement of Manhattan were irresistible.

  In New York she and Gore at first made a social, then an amorous couple. With her well-connected mother, distinguished name, and high social standing, Cornelia was invited everywhere in the 1945–46 social season. Suddenly New York ballrooms were again illuminated. Corsages, fancy dresses, society orchestras, bright glittering eyes—the marriage market bustled once more. Resplendent in his youth and his Army uniform, Gore was an attractive escort. The handsome couple danced at the Cotillion Room and sipped drinks at the Café Pierre. Society-page montage photos in New York newspapers showed them at nightlife play in sequences that included the likes of Mrs. Anthony D. Duke and John Jacob Astor. Photographed at the Wedgwood Room at the Waldorf-Astoria, Cornelia was described as “one of this season’s most popular debutantes.” Gore escorted her in December to the Liberty Ball at the main ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, the delayed coming-out dance for about fifty “young ladies of society. The two of you walked out on the stage,” he recalled, “and she does her curtsy to society and that’s the debut. I think I walked out on the stage with her.” Gore seemed eligible, attractive, someone even to fall in love with. To Cornelia he also had the distinction of being a young writer about to publish his first novel and an editor at a major publishing house. More aggressively literary than he, she had greater interest in Dostoyevsky than in society dances. She talked irrepressibly about literature, sometimes excessively, as her less literary friends, even including Gore, remarked. Soon they both were entranced, particularly Cornelia who for a short time imagined that Gore and she might marry. Adept at keeping different kinds of friends apart, he kept her mostly unaware of his other lives, including another, even more magnetically attractive woman he had met the previous month and who, in December, he was seeing a great deal of.

  Anaïs Nin came into Gore’s life through the agency of Kimon Friar one Sunday afternoon in mid-November 1945. Accepting Friar’s invitation to hear him lecture at the 92nd Street YMHA on the depiction of love in Plato’s Symposium, Gore found himself, in his warrant officer’s uniform, seated next to the one unoccupied chair at the end of a long seminar table. At the head, Friar waited to begin his performance. Behind him assorted people sat in haphazard rows of folding chairs. Suddenly a slim, mediumtall, dark-haired, doe-eyed woman, dressed in a close-fitting black dress, slid into the empty seat next to his. She wore a distinctive heart-shaped, white-veiled hat modeled after the headdress most associated with the executed Scots Queen, Mary Stuart. With tight-drawn, porcelainlike skin, silver-polished nails, penciled arched eyebrows, she was beautiful enough to seem, in a certain light, ageless. If he knew that she was the already legendary, mostly unpublished writer, Anaïs Nin, whom Kimon probably had mentioned to him, he did not let on. He could not know that her husband, Hugh Guiler, was sitting on one of the folding chairs behind them, his characteristic position in relation to his wife.

  Anaïs’s side of the twenty-year-old marriage had gone through a stellar list of serious lovers, including the writer Henry Miller, the analyst Otto Rank, and most recently the critic Edmund Wilson, and a longer list of transient sexual encounters. The most devastating affair had been with her father, a professional concert pianist who, after deserting his young children, had engaged with his grown daughter in a mutual seduction. Seeking revenge for his mistreatment of her as a child, Anaïs used the affair to inflict as much pain on her father as she could. Born of mixed Spanish-Cuban origin in Paris in 1903, she had been brought up mostly in New York by her mother, who supported the family giving music lessons and borrowing from relatives. As a young bride Anaïs began with her banker husband, whose family opposed the marriage, a long residence in Paris, where she used his salary to support Henry Miller, among others. When war broke out, she and Hugh returned to America to live in the newly revived bohemian world of Greenwich Village. At her studio she had a secondhand printing press on which she set type for her own diary and thinly disguised fiction. Depressed by the difficulty of finding an audience for her work, she lived on hope, despair, and, occasionally, the injections of Dr. Max Jacobson, a reckless New York doctor who had become well known for dispensing energizing drugs to many of New York’s creative dynamos. They had little money now, mostly because Anaïs supported some of those she slept with. Sexually driven
both for pleasure and self-assertion, she idealized all-absorbing romantic love and attempted to anchor what she believed her literary genius in her ongoing diary, in which she wrote her feelings in a romantically lush prose style. Her fiction reworked her diary entries, many of which she changed to make more flattering to herself. She hoped to publish, if not all, then at least long sections. The diary would, she felt certain, convince the world of her genius.