Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  With his easy, attractive manner, he began to meet interesting people, some fellow boarders, others in the general run of city life. Distinctively a handsome, formally dressed American, carrying himself as if he were worth knowing, he was soon introduced to Guatemalans from prominent families, particularly to the Vasquez Bruni family members of his own age. A wealthy clan, their Guatemala City town property occupied a full square block. “The family patriarch was of Colombian origin, and he held what seemed to be the lifetime hereditary rank of minister from Colombia to Guatemala.” Mention of his grandfather, of his father’s service in the Roosevelt administration, of the Auchinclosses, would have opened any resistant doors. “There’s a delightful ruling class here which I’ve been running with lately,” he wrote to Gene Vidal. “They own Guatemala, have great plantations etc. I meet the President next week. The nice thing about such a small country is the fact that everyone knows everyone else. There’s a good size foreign colony of diplomats and writers and painters.” In the Vasquez Bruni family “there were three sons—one a true wit named Ricardo,” and a beautiful daughter, Olga, nicknamed “Cookie,” with whom he soon became friendly. The Vasquez Brunis comprised, he thought, “an enchanted world.” Cookie’s closest friend, Felicia Montealegre, an Argentinean, said “with a heavy accent that she was going to go to New York and marry the most famous man there. She went and married Leonard Bernstein.” Another Guatemalan, Mario Monteforte Toledo, was less wealthy but more intellectually interesting. It immediately became clear to Monteforte, though less clear to Gore, that the young American knew nothing about Central American politics. To Monteforte, about ten years older than Gore, his American friend seemed naïve about such things even in his own country. A handsome, energetic essayist and poet, Monteforte was a liberal socialist. President of the Guatemalan Congress, widely regarded as a likely future president of the country, he tempered his hope for social reform with a keen sense of the power of the alliance between Guatemalan social conservatives and foreign economic interests.

  At the boardinghouse Gore met a casually companionable young man, Pat Crocker. A blond Californian expatriate and alcoholic in his late twenties, “short and pink and dumpy,” Pat had come to Guatemala to paint, which he did with more irregularity than talent. Competent enough, he had the virtue of high spirits, reasonable reliability, and an enthusiasm for the country. Gore was soon fondly addressing him as “Dear Blubber.” With only a slightly extravagant touch and tone, his campy humor delightful, Pat was not queen enough to get on Gore’s nerves. His mother, Penny, who had joined him in Guatemala and who looked “just like him,” was as amusingly pleasant and eccentric as her son. They both had found Guatemala blissful, especially its low cost of living. When Gore arrived, Pat already knew the country well. He had a large circle of hard-drinking American expatriates, to whom he introduced his new friend. With excellent Spanish, he was a valuable companion on excursions into the country or when anything came up that needed more Spanish than Gore’s few phrases. In Guatemala City, English mostly sufficed, but not in the country, except in the nearby city of Antigua, the sixteenth-century capital, a town of ten thousand, less than an hour’s drive away. It had become a museum of colonial architectural history. Partly destroyed over the centuries by earthquakes, it had, with its distinguished ruins, magnificent views, and superb climate, become an attraction for wealthy Guatemalans, as well as for European and American expatriates, who found the capital too large and crowded. Five thousand feet above sea level, framed on three sides by huge volcanic mountains, with its romantic ruins, its grid of picturesque streets, its indigenous population of dark-skinned Indians whose lives appeared hardly changed from what they had been a thousand years before, Antigua seemed a small paradise. When Gore arrived with Pat Crocker for his first visit within a month of coming to Guatemala, the city took his breath away. He thought he had never seen a place quite so beautiful.

  At his writing table in his room in Guatemala City, through September and October 1946, Gore worked on his new novel, as usual writing on yellow legal-size pads when available or in notebooks with lined pages. That seemed to him appropriate for fiction. What had emboldened him to commit himself to write this novel about love between men may not have been clear even to him, though Tebbel’s encouragement probably played a role. He had cast himself as a mainstream novelist writing about issues the American literary world at large could accept as appropriate for a general readership. He still desired that venue, that view of himself as a writer. But something indefinable had happened, the result of which was his new willingness to take the chance, which he thought manageable, of allowing readers to associate him with the subject. Normally cautious, calculating, shrewd about risks, he thought this now a risk worth taking, partly because he underestimated or did not foresee some of the consequences. Also, as counterpoint to his caution, he had a selective reckless streak, whose operative constituents included anger, arrogance, and courage. It may have been, partly, his experience with Anaïs that propelled him forward: the novel taking shape had as much to do with his view that romantic idealization of love in a sexual relationship was deadly as with homoerotic sex per se. He had seen, he believed, nothing but difficult if not disastrous marriages. Senator and Mrs. Gore had managed a companionable longevity, but that weighed less heavily in the consideration than his parents’ nightmare. If it were better to marry than burn, it would be better not to marry at all, since in American society burning was more likely to occur within than outside marriage. Romantic self-destructiveness, he had good reason to believe, did not distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual, married and unmarried.

  As the novel took shape, he sought to create a homoerotic bildungsroman, a traditional narrative cast against an idyllic background of first love in which two young men, Jim Willard and Bob Ford, with echoes of Jim and Huck in Huckleberry Finn, are separated and take different roads of education and growth, one into a romantic idealization of that early homoerotic experience and a series of homosexual relationships; the other, for whom the early experience is almost forgotten, into the heterosexual world. When they meet again years later, Jim, rejected, deeply disappointed, and in a violent rage, semiaccidentally kills Bob. It is a devastatingly bleak conclusion. The protagonists, at the end, are not defined by their sexual practices; the issue is not sexual orientation but human nature. Nina and Gene, Anaïs and Gore, the two couples most relevant to Gore’s experience, have as much if not more impact on the novel than the experience with Jimmie Trimble. In the natural course of events Jimmie and Gore had separated. Neither had fought the separation. If Jimmie had lived, Gore had no doubt they would have gone their different sexual ways. The novel begins as an imaginative projection of what might have happened to two young men who had had an early $$$nce similar to theirs. It soon transforms their particular sexualities into a universal theme that applies to every possible combination in which romantic love dominates: what begins idyllically ends tragically.

  By early November the novel was “almost complete and I am retitling it The City and the Pillar,” he wrote Anaïs, whom he had seen in New York during a hectic week in late October. He had returned to attend the book parties honoring the publication of her Ladders to Fire. “I am more pleased with this than anything I’ve done.” He prefaced it with a quotation from Genesis, “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt,” partly an allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah, mostly an emphasis on the inherently destructive romantic obsession with the past. “In two weeks I’ll have finished my new novel,” he wrote his father. That “puts me way ahead of schedule. I think I might write a children’s book afterwards.” With a first draft of The City and the Pillar in hand, he already had two more novels in mind, the “children’s book” a sophisticated anticipation of magical realism in a novel about King Richard’s troubadour, to be called A Search for the King. Nina was also very much under consideration. “My next novel will be about mothers,” he told Gene Vidal. “Lurene and N
ina should be interested. I have a theory that parents get as much understanding from children as they give. It is wonderful to me how a woman can live 43 years and learn so little about people and herself … and have such pretensions.” He already had a tentative title, The Womb, a disguised autobiographical narrative about his own struggle to navigate through that narrow passage.

  In a Yellow Wood, which was scheduled for publication in early 1947, now seemed to him unsatisfactory. Some of its flaws he blamed on its having been written in New York City, which he thought uncongenial, actually damaging, as a place for him to write, though he recognized that In a Yellow Wood also suffered from the limits of its initial conception and the structural confusion of his having changed halfway through, under the influence of his relationship with Anaïs, the situation of the main character. By contrast Williwaw, written before he had come to New York, and now City, written almost entirely in Guatemala, seemed to him vastly superior. Still, with In a Yellow Wood scheduled for publication in March, Dutton undoubtedly would not want to bring out The City and the Pillar until the next year. And if he began The Womb, as he felt himself almost compelled to do, he would have that finished much before City was published. “I can’t seem to stop writing books,” he told his father. To constantly have a backlog was unsettling, the long gap between completion and publication discomforting. And in the case of The City and the Pillar, what if another writer were to publish a novel on the same controversial subject? Would it not steal his thunder? Actually, Wreden and Dutton welcomed the delay, nervous that The City and the Pillar might damage their young author’s career. “I took my time to reread [it],” Wreden wrote to him. “You are excellent about cutting and polishing your own stuff. Few people can do it as well as you can. The book is more compact and better for it. I shall not bring up the question again, but do let me know whether you want The City and the Pillar scheduled for January and whether you might, at the last minute, send in your new novel and substitute it for The City and the Pillar.”

  With Pat, Gore returned to Antigua, whose beauty this time he found so compelling he immediately began to consider using some of his money to buy a house there. “Pat said there’s this wonderful part of a church for sale. We went out and looked at it and I said, ‘Well, I would love to own it.’ I was feeling very high over The City and the Pillar and thought of it as a place to get away to, so I said I’ll buy it if you’ll live there and help me to fix it up.” Now twenty-one years old, he had never lived in a home in which he had felt secure. From his earliest childhood each of his parents’ homes, from Bancroft Place to Rock Creek Park to Merrywood, had been severely compromised. Either it had been a site of fierce marital battles or someone else’s home in which he was a long-term guest or a residence provided by his mother’s marital adventures or his father’s bachelorhood and remarriage. In her own way Nina found transience attractive, domesticity incompatible with her impatience and volatility. His most settled, congenial home had been his grandparents’ in Rock Creek Park. Thereafter it had been expulsion into institutional dormitories, first St. Albans, then Los Alamos, Exeter, the Army. In New York, welcome as he was at his father’s apartment, he was still a guest. He had grown used to hotels, a habitual traveler occupying rented spaces whose impersonality was part of the price of travel.

  But the notion of having a home of his own spoke to a substantial need for domesticity, for a piece of the earth that had on it his stamp of choice and taste. Why not Antigua? Attractive, distinctive homes were cheap. “There are large palaces for sale for next to nothing,” he wrote to his father.

  During the winter the weather was superb, “dry and warm, rather cool in the evenings…. For swimming there’s Lake Atitlán which is the most beautiful lake in the world.” From New York or wherever else he spent the rest of the year he could fly to Guatemala. “It’d be perfect to work here in the winter and rent it in the summer.” In fact, it might even be profitable, he told his father, who had queried him about opportunities for a Vidal Weldwood factory in Guatemala City. “The place is getting ready for a deluge of Americans leaving America; might not be a bad idea to be first.” In fact, after the church he had first seen proved impractical, he had found through Pat Crocker the house that “I’m tempted to buy if I can get it,” a small building, 4 de la 3a Avenida Norte. It had once served as a convent, attached to the beautiful ruined colonial church of Our Lady of El Carmen in the center of Antigua, a short walk from everything, including the town square. “It’s 300 years old with three rooms and a large walled garden in back; it’s in good repair and I’m told it could be had for less than a thousand dollars. I’ve made friends with some of the wealthier families in Antigua and they are keeping an eye on me to see that I don’t get gypped. I have a feeling however that the owner doesn’t want to sell. I’d like however to live down here … if I had a house.” Unfurnished, some of it dilapidated, without a sufficient kitchen and with no bathroom, it would need major repairs. Pat would be the perfect overseer, with his good Spanish, his ample free time, his permanent residence. In return for living at the house he would take on this and other things, a kind of majordomo whose residence was his payment. If Gore could get the house at a low enough price, the cost of the renovations would be manageable. The price turned out to be $2,500, not including improvements. It still seemed reasonable, “with a beautiful tropical patio and a 16th century chapel and bell tower—the remains of a ruined cathedral.”

  With a draft of The City and the Pillar finished in late November, he focused on completing the purchase. “Everyone compliments me on how cheaply I got the place,” he reported to his father. “It seems that the rush for Antigua land is begun and prices are beginning to go up. I plan to spend another 2500 on putting in a bathroom, etc. I have my own water. It’s all one story.” A guest the next summer recalled that “there was an atrium, and the whole convent was built around this atrium. During the earthquake a pillar had fallen across the atrium, the whole open part, and it stayed there. It was like part of it then. It just became automatic that you’d step over this fallen pillar that had been there for a hundred and fifty years.” Gore’s enthusiasm may have made it seem less the odd commitment that it was for a young man of twenty-one who had been in Guatemala for less than three months. The need to have a place of his own compelled him into an engaging recklessness. He sent drawings of the floor plan to Anaïs as well as Gene. Though much of the fire had gone out of the relationship with Anaïs, there were still warm coals or at least warm rhetoric. “My plans,” he told her, “are to return to NYC next month back here in March (with you I hope) after the book and then around May to France. This is a beautiful place and were it not for you I should never return to New York and that ghastly world.” But before he could live comfortably in the house, the renovations had to be completed, especially the installation of a bathroom, a functional kitchen, and an additional room to serve as his study. “There was a garden right next to a big chapel that went with the house. There was a sliver of garden behind it, an oblong in which I had put one big room with the little garden leading up to it, and that’s where I worked. The other rooms were on the street.” Pat was put to work almost immediately. Monteforte, who frequently came to Antigua to see his Indian mistress, stopped by, the first of many visits. As had become usual, they argued about politics. Sitting in the patio, bounded by the high wall of a ruined church, or “under a pepper tree, near an ugly square fountain like a horse trough,” they had happily contentious discussions in which Gore took his grandparents’ anti-Communist, anti-Rooseveltian high line that emphasized economic self-reliance. Monteforte argued for a socialistic reorganization of economic inequities and teased him about his friendship with the wealthy Vasquez Bruni family who, of course, opposed land reform. Why don’t you tax, Gore responded, the United Fruit Company? Who would prevent you? “‘Your government,’ Monteforte explained. They had kept the former dictator in power. ‘Now they’re getting ready to replace us.’ … ‘Why should we care wh
at happens in a small country like this?’ Mario gave me a compassionate look—compassion for my stupidity. ‘Businessmen. Like the owners of United Fruit. They care. They used to pay for our politicians. They still pay for yours.’”

  Work on the house, as usual with such things, went more slowly than had been anticipated. The cost increased beyond the estimates. From Washington, Dot provided her usual loving voice and “a small check” to buy something for the Antigua house. It “sounds so intriguing. I feel that I have to go right down there.” She also provided home news: the Senator, who had been very ill, would never be his old self again; Nina was in New York “trying to get something [more] out of Hugh for the children,” a persistent activity. Gore’s mind, though, was mostly on the attractions of Guatemalan life, on the satisfaction of having finished The City and the Pillar, and on bringing to some sort of new equilibrium his relationship with Anaïs. He had no regrets about buying the house. “There are warm springs and pools within a short walk…. The most beautiful lake in the world is 3 hours by bus. You have never seen such beauty—deep blue surrounded by smoking volcanos.” At Lake Atitlán, he met the Danish writer Karl Eskelund, author of My Chinese Wife. “He’s getting me published in Scandinavia and you too,” he wrote to Anaïs, “when he sees you.” Gore himself planned to see her soon. He needed to return to New York to have The City and the Pillar typed. He had raised the thought that she might return with him to Antigua. But, sensibly, she did not want to. In December in New York Connie Darby had expressed to Anaïs her puzzlement at Gore’s buying a house in Guatemala. Like many, Connie still assumed that Gore and Anaïs were lovers. “Just had a disturbing talk with Connie,” Anaïs wrote to him, “who … was filled with compassion for you and I being separated, thinks something has gone wrong, was shocked at your buying a house so far from me—so I guess I may have to explain the truth—for I can’t bear this misunderstanding anymore—or Connie’s pity. You are quite happy, at peace and working without me—and I don’t like long distance relationships—please tell her the truth—or do you want me to?” Throughout the autumn his letters to Anaïs had continued to represent his commitment to her in terms far stronger than the reality warranted. Though she still desired that he commit himself to her, she had not the slightest hope he would. What had happened in East Hampton had “left quite a scar— Like a nightmare, in which my desire to be near you, my willingness to relinquish everyone, everything, was answered by complete frustration.” She had determined to change the terms and rhetoric of her passion for him. “My intuition tells me you are romancing—don’t be afraid to tell me—I can take it now…. Passion … purifies everything…. One is only good and chaste after passion…. I feel now like a saint—and not when I live like a nun…. America is the most impure country in the world, because it is ashamed of passion, of nature…. Tell me how you are—I won’t be jealous—! I know—I love you deeply, cheri, my mystical sex follows you in your long voyage.”