Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  By mid-spring Gore turned in In a Yellow Wood to Tebbel, who found it boringly flat, not nearly as taut, as focused, as compelling, as the first novel. “Well,” Tebbel thought, “it’s okay and he’ll do better things.” Wreden did not much care for it either. But their faith in the young writer was not in the least shaken. Putting on a good face, they diplomatically told him they looked forward to bringing it out sometime early in 1947. Tebbel thought Gore “a marvelous talker and conversationalist,” an especially good storyteller. He spoke much about his family, particularly his grandfather. One day after work, Tebbel recalls, he and Gore “were having a drink in the Gramercy Park … and he began talking about homosexuality, though not in terms of himself but about his feelings about gay people and what not. I said to him, ‘Have you ever written about this?’ He said, ‘No, I’ve thought of doing it.’ I said, ‘You really ought to think about writing about this, since you feel this way about it. It’s something maybe you want to write about.’” Precisely what he had already thought about doing is unclear. Stylistically, he told Tutwiler, his next book would experiment with elements of high modernism. “My third book which won’t be started for another year is going to be something wonderful if I can do it at all no chapters no commas except where they are needed for meaning and perhaps no quotation marks: the idea being that a story should be simple and easy to read and not cluttered up with archaic rules … and other things that irritate the eye.” He seems to have had in mind a public flouting of the Exeter rules for good writing, a small bit of revenge against the Hamilton Bissells of the world. Since Joyce and Stein had already paved that road, there would be little danger in taking it himself, other than the possibility of artistic failure. Most likely, though, what he had in mind in his conversation with Tebbel was more dangerous, more fraught with the risks of self-exposure. To mainstream publishers and most reviewers, the subject of homosexuality was anathema.

  Like everyone else at Dutton, Tebbel had no inkling of Vidal’s sexual preferences. Given Vidal’s demeanor and the widely shared stereotypes about homosexuals, Tebbel assumed that his interest in the subject was impersonal, sociological, literary. Probably, Vidal recalls, he talked about and described to Tebbel homosexuals he had met or heard about in Los Angeles in spring 1945. Through Anaïs he had recently been introduced to two social and artistic centers in which homosexuals were explicitly central, some of them queens of the sort he found irksome. At Leo Lerman’s Upper East Side town house the Russian-born eccentric embodiment of artistic camp and Harper’s Bazaar high fashion held court to a huge circle of partying friends and acquaintances from the art, fashion, theater, dance, and literary worlds. The party hardly paused, particularly on Sunday nights. Usually in bed in robe and Turkish fez, Lerman received hordes of guests who wandered through the four-story house, famous people such as Martha Graham, Nora Kaye, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, and Diana Vreeland. Rising New York artistic stars like the lyricist John Latouche found Lerman’s hospitality congenial. So too did young writers like the twenty-one-year-old Alabama-born short-story writer Truman Capote, whom Gore met that spring at a party at Anaïs’s apartment, at which he mostly noticed the strikingly beautiful writer Jean Garrigue, a lesbian Anaïs found attractive. The prancing, handsomely compact Capote, who seemed to Gore excessively and self-promotingly effeminate, an extravagant queen eager to use his mannerisms to make sure people remembered him, immediately saw the author of Williwaw, which was about to come out, as a rival for literary celebrity. Gore had no doubt they would be competing for the same glittering prizes. His first book of short stories about to appear, Capote asked Gore, as they paused for a moment to talk, the self-reflexive question, “‘How does it feel to be an onn-font-tarribull?’”

  In February Harper’s Bazaar had paid Gore $25 for one of his poems, “Walking,” which it published that October, an evocation of historical layering set in a New Mexican landscape reminiscent of Los Alamos. It gave him great pleasure finally to have a poem appear in print, especially in such a widely read magazine, though his sights were now mostly set on fiction, the novels and short stories for which, it must have occurred to him, Harper’s Bazaar would be the perfect venue. Lerman, one of the literary editors of Harper’s Bazaar with Mary Louise Aswell, under the leadership of George Davis, had made the magazine into the premier marketplace for quality short fiction. Gore, though, had not written any stories since Exeter. Or at least there were no later ones extant, since most of what he had written in the Army, other than Williwaw, had disappeared with the loss of his trunk. But it was not out of the question that Harper’s might publish a portion of a novel or that he might write new short stories soon. As part of his work for Dutton he helped Harold Vinal, the editor of the poetry magazine Voices, find young poets to freshen its stale lineup. Five of his own poems appeared in the summer 1946 issue, the last poems he was ever to try to publish. Soon he became even better friends with Louise Townsend Nicholl, Dutton’s poetry editor. A plump, graying woman of fifty-five, Nicholl was a distinguished minor poet who had published widely in prestigious magazines, had brought out three volumes of poems that Dutton had published, was active in the Poetry Society of America, and became the first woman to win an Academy of American Poets fellowship. More traditional than Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, she had a fine ear and a spare precision of language that expressed feeling by understatement. Her imagination never soared. But its closeness to the concrete and the natural anchored its metaphysical resonances in the things of this world. Her clear syntax and sharp particularity made her eminently readable, both sophisticated and accessible. Gore admired her poems and liked her. “We were great buddies … friends for years.” Tebbel liked her also. “A very gentle, pleasant woman, with a sweet voice; she of course knew many poets. She handled all the poets that we had, and it’s through her that we got poets we never would have had otherwise. Dutton and poetry were her life.” Gore recalled that every day “she took the train from someplace in New Jersey to Dutton and back again. I don’t think she went anyplace else in her life. Unmarried, she was satisfied with the Grand Central Station Stauffer’s, where she’d buy pumpkin pies and take them back to New Jersey. I said the least you can do, living in your mother’s big old house in New Jersey, is make your pumpkin pies.” But, like most editors, “she had too much to read.” More like his grandmother than the other women in his life, she made a happy contrast with Nina and Anaïs.

  The other artistic salon at which he found himself had been created in a more elegant East Side Beekman Place brownstone than Lerman’s by the formidable Peggy Guggenheim, who actually had more shrewdness than money. Her wealthy father had descended with the Titanic. She and her sister somehow had been left very little. With a sharp eye for personalities and value, she had been collecting modern paintings as well as talented people. Ultimately the paintings were to make her fortune. Having married, among others, Max Ernst, she specialized in surrealist art. When she returned from Europe to American safety during the war years, she opened an art gallery devoted to “Art of This Century.” She had Jackson Pollock paint large murals in the foyer of her residence so that visitors would not be bored while waiting for the elevator to take them up to the salon. To the young Vidal “she looked like W. C. Fields, with a huge nose. She tried to have a nose job before cosmetic surgery had become superb, and it was botched. It was worse than what she had started with. What she started with was perfectly alright but she wanted perfection.” Full-figured, passionate about her two miniature dogs, with what Anaïs called her “clown face,” Peggy was obsessed with modern art and its makers. Well known in the New York artistic world as “the queen of foreigners,” she particularly attracted Europeans to her parties, painters like Léger and Duchamp and surrealist poets like André Breton. Soon herself to establish permanent residence in Venice, she amused herself in New York’s dynamic art culture until France and Italy once again became viable.

  With Anaïs, who
introduced him to her, Gore found Peggy Guggenheim’s foreign-inflected salon alluring. At one party he met Parker Tyler, “pastry-pale, beady-eyed, thin-lipped,” the author in 1947 of Magic and Myth of the Movies, with whom he shared a preoccupation with film, and whom he would one day transform into a fictional character of sorts in Myra Breckinridge. James Agee, the Time film critic who had published, under the title Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his article on Alabama sharecroppers, with photographs by Walker Evans, seemed “sadly amiable.” Gore noticed that his eyes were bloodshot. In Agee’s presence the poet, editor, and novelist Charles Henri Ford, a close friend of Tyler’s, leeringly remarked to Gore, “You can’t be a good writer because you have such lovely legs,” then danced off. Gore said to Agee, “‘I’d like to break Charles’s legs.’ Agee was soothing; then he said, most thoughtfully, ‘These fairies can be surprisingly tough.’”

  Years later in Venice, Peggy, remembering spring 1946, remarked to Gore, “‘Oh, you were with Anaïs. I always wondered about that. She was very stupid, wasn’t she?’ That was Peggy’s conversational style. I said, ‘Yes, I suppose all in all I have to say yes. She was fairly stupid.’ ‘I suspected that. You must not have liked that, did you?’ And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t notice it for a while.’ ‘Well, yes,’ she said, ‘I know.’ She was thinking of all the dumdums she had put up with, like Jackson Pollock. Her biggest affair was Beckett. ‘I was in love with him for six months,’ she said. ‘That’s longer than I’ve ever been in love with anybody in my life. I suddenly realized that he didn’t want me, he wanted a boy.’ I said, ‘That’s not unreasonable, Peggy.’ ‘Well, I didn’t say it was unreasonable. I was just slow to understand. Anyway, I was in love for six months. That’s the maximum in my life.’”

  Through Anaïs he had met Maya Deren, a beautiful surrealist filmmaker of Russian-Jewish background influenced by Cocteau. Fascinated by film and psychological imagery, herself a surrealist of sorts, Anaïs fantasized she might be elevated into fame and fortune by the transforming magic of Maya’s camera lens. Deren’s films had the potential to provide the best cinematic representation of her own subjectively imagistic fiction. She hoped that one of her novels or pages from her diary might provide the script for a Maya Deren movie. She imagined herself in the starring role. At Friar’s lecture in November 1945 she had introduced Gore to the filmmaker. At Maya’s Greenwich Village studio she had the opportunity to share with him her admiration for Deren’s aggressive promotion of her own artistic career, a lesson to them all, Anaïs concluded. Fascinated himself by movies, though of a different sort, Gore happily accepted Deren’s invitation to perform with Anaïs and others in one of her films. Without dialogue, usually running between fifteen and thirty minutes, they embodied the director’s general instructions to the performers, most of them friends, to respond to a situation, some small portion of which she would film. Film stock was expensive. She had little to waste. In March, Gore found himself milling around with Anaïs under hot lights at a large party scene with thirty or so of Maya’s friends. “Gore and I decided to act pretty well as we do when we are together, a mixture of playfulness, key words, seriousness, and connections with what we are writing,” Anaïs wrote in her diary. Interested in the spontaneous, insistent but always vague, the energetic Deren kept them at it for twelve hours. Finally she filmed a segment, part of a film she called Ritual in Transfigured Time. Later Gore noticed, disappointingly, he was onscreen for only a few seconds. When initially asked to appear in the film, starring Maya and a black woman, Gore remarked, “‘If only my grandmother could see me now.’ The Gores were Reconstruction Southerners…. They did not believe in equality. In response to my teasing on the subject, Dot said, ‘If any of my descendants ever mixes our blood with theirs, I’ll come back and haunt him.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ve got a lot of haunting to do right now since half the mulattoes in Mississippi are related to us.’ She changed the subject.” Gore’s Greenwich Village world, especially its surrealist component, would have seemed even more bizarre to Dot, though she would have readily understood its politics. When Anaïs at last saw the finished film, she was furious. Maya’s magic camera had been less than flattering to her friends, especially Anaïs.

  With days at Dutton, occasional evenings with Cornelia, filmmaking with Maya, parties with Anaïs, at her apartment, at restaurants, at Peggy Guggenheim’s, at Leo Lerman’s, at the lively Blue Angel nightclub, where he saw John Latouche and met the stage designer Oliver Smith and probably Smith’s cousin, the composer and writer Paul Bowles, New York kept Gore busily engaged. When he became friendly with Stanley Haggard and his boyfriend, Woody Parrish-Martin, who designed the dust jacket for Williwaw and In a Yellow Wood, he floated the idea of the three of them getting a brownstone which, with Anaïs, they would share. He knew about such an arrangement in Brooklyn Heights. The idea never took off. Work at Dutton made him restless, impatient for more time for writing. Tebbel’s suggestion that he write about sex between men began to loom larger, to point in a dangerous direction.

  Except for his relationship with Anaïs, he did not want to complicate friendship with sex. The division seemed sensible, a way of maximizing his opportunities and rewards through efficient separation and distribution. Romance was not out of the question. But it was generally undesirable, and he had enough of something of that sort with Anaïs. For companionship, though, he had almost unlimited energy. When Dutton published in spring 1946 a popular bestseller called The Manatee, he met the author’s stepdaughter, Constance Darby, a close friend of Judith Jones. He found her vivacious gaiety compelling. Connie “hated her stepmother and I hated The Manatee, so we had a lot in common,” he recalled. When they introduced him to their other closest companion, Sarah Moore, also recently graduated from Bennington, he had three new friends. “Judy was a great beauty. And Connie was kind of rowdy, charming.” Sarah, the daughter of the composer and Columbia music professor Douglas Moore, was “a mater dolorosa, a lady of the sorrows.” Gore was “sort of fascinated by her,” Jones remembered. “She had a very quirky mind, very intellectual, very critical. She sometimes looked like a Charles Addams woman, long dark hair, slightly—well, not quite sinister—but as if she didn’t quite belong to the world, and that sort of fascinated Gore…. There was something wonderfully outrageous about her. She dared to be a maverick.” Connie, seriously literary, worked as an editor for Lippincott. He found her “the most fun of the three. She had great energy and she was very funny.” With a capacity for drink and wit, “she was always able to spar with him in a lively way, and to get him sometimes, and he liked it,” Jones recalled. “He really admired her…. She wasn’t naturally a pretty girl…. But she radiated such personality and she seemed very feminine. She was very blond. Fair-skinned. She tended towards plumpness. She kind of bustled…. Nothing bothered Connie.” Like Gore, the three graces were also just turning twenty-one.

  That summer at Douglas Moore’s Riverside Drive apartment, which the young women occupied while the Moores were away, they regularly hosted dinners and parties. Publishing people and writers came. Judy did the cooking. “I was always the cook. I liked to cook. I just was very adventuresome as a cook. Nothing fazed me, I don’t know why.” A great deal of liquor and ice disappeared. People enjoyed getting drunk. At the piano Connie played beautifully and sang Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” The only song she knew, she played it at every party. No one minded. It became a signature melody for those warm evenings. Below the high west windows the Hudson picked up the last of the sunlight, the rising moonlight. Palisades Park glittered in the darkness of the Jersey shore. A ferry visibly made its way across to the amusement park. “They were great parties,” Gore remembered. Judy, whom he adored, fascinated by the camellia-white luster of her skin, had been having an affair with the poet Theodore Roethke, her former Bennington teacher. He was a fellow guest one of Gore’s evenings there. Judy watched closely. “I wouldn’t say they took to each other. It was always Gore goading what he thought of as the so
rt of square heterosexual male…. Roethke was about fourteen years older than I was. I remember an atmosphere. There was strain, apprehension between them.” Both playful and competitive, Gore enjoyed, as he often did, ratcheting up the verbal interplay to what others thought a contentious level. Apparently Roethke did not like being called “our senior poet.” The inaccuracy of the description had a mocking edge. “I think [Gore] loved to sort of shock people, their complacency. I think he thought he was good for all of us, shaking us up.”

  “Roethke and I didn’t take to each other at first,” he remembered, “but then we did. She was having a big affair with him. Yes, I was teasing him. I didn’t know he was insane, nor did Judy.” Perhaps he resented Roethke’s influence over the three young women. “And the great day [came the next year, 1947] when we went to the Gotham Book Mart, he and I, to kiss the ass of Cyril Connelly in order to get into Horizon. So we went with Judy and all of literary New York was there and everybody thought this odd little man was a fag. So there were Theodore Roethke and I turning on the charm like nobody’s business, me armed with my short stories, Ted with his poems, and Connelly was very polite to us. Then, before we knew it, Cyril had gone off with Judy, leaving a stunned Roethke, poems in hand.”