by Fred Kaplan
With advance copies of Williwaw available in April, he eagerly awaited the mid-June official publication date. Coming downtown to the Dutton offices one afternoon, he saw through the taxi window a highly publicized young candidate for Congress in Massachusetts walking along Park Avenue, in front of the Raquet Club near Grand Central Station. He recognized him from newspaper photographs, and years later, in his memoir, put his recollection in the present tense: “In the left-over-from-the-war khakis that we all wore, skinny, yellow-faced Jack Kennedy is wandering down the west side of the avenue. In a blaze of publicity, he is now running for Congress. Our fathers are friends, but we’ve never met. As I watch him, I wonder, have I made a mistake…. Shouldn’t I have followed my grandfather Senator Gore’s plan and set out for Congress instead?”
Fortunately, the early word on Williwaw was encouraging. Dutton had scheduled advertisements for the week of publication, two in the daily New York Times, two in the daily Herald Tribune. If reviews and sales were good, other ads would follow. Much depended on what happened in the first weeks after publication. Eager to see copies in bookstores, to have reviews in hand, the young author felt the usual anxieties, though he had reason to be hopeful. So far the in-house response was good, the word-of-mouth positive. Also, he had not only finished his second novel but had begun to think seriously about his third. Both compulsive and excited by his own facility, he had at this moment only the vaguest sense that he himself ought to put up a yellow light, that he might damage his market by making too frequent demands on it. In a Yellow Wood was scheduled for the beginning of the next year. If he began soon to write the novel that he and Tebbel had talked about and finished it quickly, there would be a backlog. But what was most on his mind at the moment was the reception of Williwaw. In late April, advance copies were sent to distinguished people, from Henry Miller to Eleanor Roosevelt. Though she did not usually review fiction, Mrs. Roosevelt may have remembered the author’s connection with her husband’s director of air commerce and with Amelia Earhart. She soon praised Williwaw in her New York World-Telegram column as “vividly engrossing” by an author who “has promise of doing interesting work in the future.” Despite her disappointment with her young lover and her fear that Williwaw’s arctic ice had frozen his heart, Anaïs wrote a testimonial letter of strong praise for a book she quietly disliked. “I feel that, as a novelist and poet, he is strikingly close to that source of emotional power from which comes all great art. Williwaw, a story of conflict and the sea, is written with the simplicity of a legend.”
A rush of reviews from around the country praised the book. Only a few disliked it, though many noticed, in passing and mainly forgivingly, its slightness and underdevelopment. The influential Orville Prescott in the daily New York Times thought it “continually interesting … a good novel” with “sound craftsmanship…. a good start toward more substantial accomplishments. He is a canny observer of his fellow-man. He can write. With such a good beginning there is no reason why he should not go far ahead.” Reflecting its own environment, the Los Angeles Times thought it “clever, hard-boiled, full of punch,” recasting it as if it were film noir, a novel scripted by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. Williwaw “stamps Vidal,” the Boston Globe claimed “as one of the most promising and enterprising young authors to capitalize on his war experience.” The First World War had produced Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Who would the novelists of this next generation be? Few reviewers commented on Williwaw’s nihilistic tone, its bleak view of human nature, almost as if, having won the war, peacetime America could not even recognize a dark account of the war experience. Norman Rockwell sentimentality dominated the national optimism. But there was some room for Williwaw’s amoral realism, especially since it dramatized individual character and psychology rather than national pride. When the reviewer for the influential Saturday Review of Literature emphasized that “it is a novel of great promise by a young man whose skill as a craftsman is more important than his service as a soldier,” Dutton placed more ads in the daily Times and Tribune, new ads in the Sunday book reviews, and a large spread in the Saturday Review. That the author was twenty years old was noted prominently. His photo on the book jacket impressed people with his striking good looks. Having hoped that Williwaw would get them off and running in the race for new voices, Dutton was exuberant. The morning after Prescott’s review appeared, Gore came into the Dutton office. He was surrounded by congratulations. “‘Did you read your review in the Times?’ I said no. And they said, ‘It’s Orville Prescott and it’s very good.’ I said, ‘Who is Orville Prescott?’ I didn’t even know that the daily Times had a book review. I had never heard of Orville Prescott, and they thought I was putting this on…. Here I am associate editor, in title at least, at a publishing house, and I didn’t know the name of the most important and powerful book reviewer and he’d given me a rave review that morning. Not only did I not read the Times, I didn’t know his name.” With a batch of reviews that the publicist had collected, he went into an empty office where a little later Tebbel found him “almost in tears. I was mystified…. But he had found the inevitable bad ones and couldn’t stand it.”
Mild June weather. Williwaw was in the bookstores. From Washington, Cornelia, who had taken a job with the State Department, reported, “My Love, To say that you have fait sensation in Washington is also to say nothing, the moppets are rushing in droves to Brentano’s, they discuss your book instead of the weather, it’s really remarkable.” He had recently been to Washington to visit his grandparents. Nina was back in town, about to resume her East Coast life. Soon she was searching for a house in Washington. Though he had dedicated Williwaw to her, he was convinced she had not read it and never would. That did not prevent her boasting to people about her son’s success. Probably she shared Gore’s view that he owed her for the Hollywood advantages she had made possible for him in 1944-45. At a party at her Washington apartment, Cornelia still felt chemistry between the two of them. “Mother thinks you write like Shakespeare,” she wrote him afterward. “I think that’s quite a nice touch, considering the source, don’t you? You do at that as a matter of fact. Shakespeare, but a fairly dyspeptic Shakespeare. I wish I understood you.” With good-humored irony she signed herself “undyingly passionate.” In New York he found waiting a letter from Henry Miller thanking him for a copy of Williwaw. “Amazing what you have experienced, by the age of twenty. Don’t die there at Dutton’s! A writer needs life, not the aura or ambiance of the literary world.”
Bob Bingham wrote from Harvard, where he thought Gore should enroll and join him in his Shakespeare course with Matthiesson, a Proust, Joyce, and Mann course with Harry Levin, and a novel-writing course with Delmore Schwartz, a rising young critic, poet, and playwright, as Bingham described him, even as, Bingham acknowledged, Gore was. Vidal, though with no intention of ever becoming a student again, attended one of Levin’s lectures and had a glimpse of Matthiesson in the hallway. He himself was no genius, Bingham wrote to Gore and, though he hated to admit it, he recognized that Gore was a sort of genius whose energy and vitality did away with the need for basic training. But he still urged him to enroll at Harvard. Gore’s energy and vitality could accomplish so much more if they were fed and nourished a bit more before turning them loose on the world. When Gore reported to their former Exeter teacher Henry Phillips that he found Bingham and Lewis working hard at their studies, Phillips remarked, “It is too bad, for had they been industrious here, they could have been imaginative at Harvard, where it is more to the point to be so. As it is, they must now reverse the normal roles.” Though Bingham urged him to reconsider his decision not to become a student, Gore’s visit reconfirmed his determination to take a different road. Why, he thought, should the author of a critically acclaimed first novel, with a second finished, a third almost under way, a participant in major New York salons and on speaking terms with world-famous figures, sit at the feet of tedious academics? Gene Vidal reluctantly agreed to give him the railroad bonds
he had designated for his college costs. “I then, with my usual flair, thanked him very much and cashed them in.” With the Army money he had saved, with $665.88 in royalties on a sale of 2,811 copies of Williwaw and more to come (at 10 percent on a book that sold for $2.50 his accumulation even from good sales could never be huge), and with $14,000 from the railroad bonds, he had a nest egg. In a worst-case scenario he had enough to support himself for at least three years while devoting himself to writing. In the best alternative he would earn enough in royalties so that he would have to spend only a little of what he had. Determined to support himself by writing, he soon resigned from Dutton.
Feeling that New York’s distractions undermined his concentration on work, he fantasized about some retreat, a place away from the wear and tear of New York City life, protected, by distance, from time-consuming literary people and politics. Europe still gleamed in his mind’s eye. He wanted to travel there at length and settle for a while in Paris or Rome. Much of Europe, though, was still in ruins. Early postwar recovery was barely on its way. Guided tourism, let alone free travel, was discouraged and partly prohibited by military authorities. Europe, then, was out of the question. Perhaps he would try New Orleans or even Mexico, the setting for the novel that he had started in 1944 but abandoned because he could not concretely enough imagine a country he had never visited. As a leitmotif undermining these expectations of travel was the problem of Anaïs. He had resigned from Dutton. Cornelia now recognized he was not likely husband material. But he was still entangled with Anaïs. On the one hand, having been shocked to discover she was more than twice his age (she had shown him a copy of a book that contained her date of birth), he had suddenly a heightened sense of their unsuitability. Her beauty now seemed less powerful, her voice less enchanting. Her lushly subjective romanticism began to get on his nerves. On the other hand, he still felt entangled. Her commitment to him had a totality and generosity he could not readily forgo. She saw and responded to a side of him much of the world knew little about. Like others, she thought him sometimes arrogant, mocking, insecure, assertively ambitious, but she had also seen him moody, gloomy, depressed, worried about his career. He had confided his anxieties to her in ways he had to no one else, partly because he trusted her, mostly because he felt strongly the genuinely intimate rapport between them. No doubt she still had much to give him of which he still had need. Though he had been unable to agree to her initial terms, her accommodation to his desire that they each carry on separate sexual lives made that less an issue than it had been. He soon sounded her out on whether she wanted to travel with him or join him wherever he came to rest. The former seemed impractical, the latter possible, though much would depend on where. If Europe had been available, she might indeed have agreed to go with or join him, the possibility of returning to France much on her mind. But their discussions now, and their letters once he left, had the resonance of eagles disengaging even when reunion was the topic.
To escape the New York summer weather he went, soon after his return from Washington, to East Hampton, where he stayed, as usual, with Gene and Kit. Probably he saw Nina, who was visiting friends in nearby Southampton. Williwaw was a boasting point. His own attraction to sun and sand soon had him tanned, relaxed. His father’s membership gave him the advantages of the exclusive Maidstone Club. The John Drew summer theater had its usual entertainments, part of a lively summer scene that included theater and ballet people from New York. Anaïs came to spend a week in a rented room “in a picturesque cottage.” She recorded in her diary that Gore “suggested I spend a week out there.” His version is different. “It was her idea, not mine, for her to come. We go together to the public beach by back roads. I am terrified I’ll be seen with her—an older woman, who was less than radiant in the full sunlight. I cringe at my snobbism.” A folie à deux, each should have known better. Anaïs disliked East Hampton. It seemed pretentious, arrogant, monotonous, the people “zombies of civilization in elegant dress with dead eyes.” Anxious, out of place, unrenewed, she needed sleeping pills. When she rode through town to the beach on a rented bicycle, she guessed, correctly, that he felt ashamed of her, that he thought her cycling inappropriate, because either she seemed too old for cycling or it was socially embarrassing, or both. “A group of us would gather at the beach. Gore would walk down from his chic beach club and join us.” Mostly he left her alone, to her chagrin, her pain. At the club, on the beach, he had handsome young male companions, a friendly, athletic type from Michigan, William Beaumer, and “a beautiful-looking man,” the same age as Gore, Andres Devendorf, whose wealthy father owned a luxurious East Hampton home. Gore’s ready practical tolerance for privilege appalled Anaïs. Whereas upper-class privilege affronted her romantic idealization of feeling, of spirit, of soul, to Gore it was a cultural and social given he could readily tolerate, even enjoy. Having lived at Merrywood, spent summers in Newport, Maidstone seemed to him just another upper-class Wasp watering hole. It was not so much that Anaïs was out of place in East Hampton but that they were, as a couple, mostly slipping away.
By late August, as he made travel plans, neither of them really desired that they include her. Late in the summer he was on his way to New Orleans. He and Anaïs were still intimate friends, still allies. In anticipation of hostile reviews of her new novel, he had left with her a long letter in its defense, to be sent to newspapers if necessary, that made clear, even if it exaggerated, his admiration for her as a writer, as a literary personality, and as a modern woman. “New Orleans,” he soon wrote her, “is quite lovely and the food marvelous and I am relaxing mightily…. I am at peace and contented by motion. I think of you as you know for you have no competition. Like a true Celt I draw closer when I am alone.” Yucatán had been in his mind as an exotic place he would like to visit. His plane from New Orleans took him to Mérida, his first visit to Mexico. Soon he was in “a Palace in an ancient city surrounded by a jungle. I expect to be here 2 weeks. For 3 dollars I have a most royal suite with ceiling so high there is an echo. The town is pretty and old. I am beginning to work again…. I think of you often,” he wrote to Anaïs, “and, strangely, so newly arrived, look forward to getting back. The sun is marvelous. I have no pain. Write, Cherie, all my love, Gore.” To some extent he wrote what he knew she wanted to hear. It was partly a role he played. But he played it with no one else. The special relationship was attenuated but still extant. Having brought with him a small batch of novels, he immersed himself in D. H. Lawrence, whom he was to keep reading for the next few months. The Plumed Serpent seemed particularly appropriate, and Lawrence provided a fictional version of the bisexual current that had been part of his tension with Anaïs, who herself had, years before, written a book about Lawrence. Though she genuinely missed him, she had no illusions about their future together. “I was afraid to say how much I missed you that you might interpret it as calling you back— But I am not calling you back, just following you in your wanderings … steeling myself for the truth, the future. You know, you must not, out of your deep gentleness and tenderness, sustain this illusion that I have no competition.”
In Yucatán he found the ruins of Mayan civilization architecturally and historically interesting. But his curiosity about them was not compelling. His model for such things was, as always, Rome. He liked the warmth, the visual beauty, but Mérida was not, for him, a livable city. Within a few weeks he was in flight again, farther south, this time to Guatemala City. To his pleasure he found that the largest city between Mexico City and Lima, Peru, was wonderfully attractive, with an “old city” that had survived disastrous earthquakes and gleaming new buildings that were beginning to dominate the skyline. “This place is growing more on me every day,” he told his father. “You have never seen any place so clean and in spots ultramodern. The food is good. The pastry in one shop better than anything I’ve ever eaten. There are book stores, movie houses, modern hospitals etc.” Guatemalan politics, though, were primitive, brutal, a hissing snakepit. Behind the scenes the Un
ited Fruit Company, with huge banana plantations and its own railroads, controlled the country. Governed by the liberal administration of President Juan José Arévalo, Guatemala was still economically a feudal regime. The closely allied military and the old colonial families who owned the coffee plantations had a tight grip on power. Indian labor, on which the plantations depended, was poorly paid and sometimes coerced. The strong reform groups to the left, including the partly legitimized Communist Party, were pushing for expropriation of unused land, for a more even distribution of wealth, for greater democracy. When Gore arrived in Guatemala City in mid-September 1946, the Arévalo government and the old oligarchy were in the early stages of a struggle. Within five years it would explode into revolution, repression, and death. In the bright sunshine, the dark night of Guatemala was soon to begin.
In a short time Gore had a comfortable room in a boardinghouse run by a Guatemalan businessman, Carlos Urruella. The city was exotic yet civilized, urbane yet comfortable, everything inexpensive. “Labor is cheap: a cook for ten a month. Prices on everything else have gone up but are still way below NYC etc standards,” he wrote to his father. He could almost live, if he were prepared to be economical, on the hundred dollars a month the Auchincloss trust fund provided. Now that he was of age, at his insistence Nina had begrudgingly turned it over to him. Ironically, some of the fund was invested in United Fruit. Celebrating his twenty-first birthday in Guatemala City, he quickly established his usual schedule, writing part of the day, then walking, touring, stopping at bars, restaurants, sampling the nightlife. What did not grow on him was bullfighting, which seemed to him animal torture. When he attended his first, he walked out.