Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Actually his description of his mostly ascetic life in Guatemala was of more relevance to him than her. “I’ve been a monk, a saint here,” he wrote back, “but you have every reason to be surprised for I am too. This is the first time in my life. It was something of a test. Now I feel more at peace than ever before.” In fact, what was becoming clear to him was that, whatever Guatemala’s attractions, sexual opportunities there were limited. Commercial sex between men was difficult to come by. Venereal diseases, not held in check by the rudimentary public-health practices, rampaged. In Antigua “there are a number of homosexuals … artists and so on. I enjoy their company but that’s all. They will amuse you I think.” The quick, anonymous encounters he preferred were not readily available. “I was having no sex at all in Guatemala,” he later remarked. “It was driving me crazy, not having sex. Who would I do it with? The natives were too primitive. To a foreigner they were pretty ghastly, and I had never had much traffic with queens in my life, so what was there? And I could end up with clap, or what I thought was clap. Venereal disease was all over. Penicillin wasn’t down there.” In Guatemala City “there was one girl I was quite interested in but nothing ever happened.” With a great deal of sexual energy, he had very few practical outlets for it. “The irony of it all,” Anaïs remarked, “you go to Guatemala and you live like a saint.” But she had no illusions about why or about the future of their relationship. “Now I know that no sooner will I arrive you will turn towards someone, because, cheri, no matter how real your love for me is, you are motivated by compulsions deeper than any love for me, compulsions which have nothing to do with me, of which I am merely a symbolical victim.” She urged him not “to come to NY for me—I’m happier when you are happy and well.”

  In fact, despite his rhetoric, including his reference to their going to France together that next spring, he returned to New York in late December 1946 only secondarily to see Anaïs, primarily to get The City and the Pillar typed. As soon as he arrived, he went to spend Christmas with Nina, who had been spending so much time in New York in order to pressure Hugh for more child support that she had taken a small apartment on Eighty-fifth Street. She had also recently broken her ankle. He had arranged his travel schedule to be with her on the holiday. “She was drunk when I walked in, and she immediately picked a quarrel. She was hobbling around on crutches, and I just slammed the door and left.” Furious, he vowed never to speak to her again. His best revenge, he decided, for a lifetime of such damaging behavior, would be to write The Womb. He had already resolved to return to Guatemala in late February or early March, determined to be away from New York when In a Yellow Wood would be published. Still supportive of his career, hoping for the change that would affirm her view of the kind of novelist he ought to be, Anaïs looked forward to reading the manuscript of The City and the Pillar, which Dutton had scheduled for January 1948. “Are you coming back with your book all finished?” she had asked. “The evolution between Book I and II, and the one within Book II [In a Yellow Wood] itself is so quick and so rich—that I await this one with a sense of anticipatory delight.” She approved of his D. H. Lawrence reading. Probably she hoped that the homoerotic element in The City and the Pillar would have the resonant mystery of the magical relationship between the two main male characters in The Rainbow. “I have no doubt about your writing,” she claimed untruthfully, “but I would like to see you happier in your life—Is a mountain a lake and a book enough?” She again urged that he try psychoanalysis. He predicted a new consanguinity between them. With the publication of City “we’ll both be outcasts…. The deep-rutted critics will be as frightened of me as of you.”

  When he suggested she return with him to Guatemala in March and they leave from there for France, she glamorized the invitation into a proposal of marriage that in itself was no proposal at all, neither in her terms nor his. Gore, she wrote in her diary, wants to marry me and lock me up in Guatemala. In fact, waveringly and sometimes inconsistently, both were moving to bring the rhetoric of the relationship to as full a close as they had brought the relationship itself. Her intuition told her it was over. That he wanted to imprison her in marriage and in Guatemala was her way of expressing what was impossible for both of them. He had no desire to do either. His rhetoric expressed his desire to keep her still within his power, to test his strength, and also to let them both go their separate ways. The good things they could do for one another had already been done. There was little more possible. In New York in early March he telephoned her with his last bit of good news. “He fought for me at Dutton,” she wrote in her diary. “And won. They wanted to wait two years to publish Children of the Albatross. They will publish Children of the Albatross now!” The reunion was at first happy but hesitant. Both had accepted the narrower parameters. Gore gave her at last a copy of the manuscript of The City and the Pillar to read. The homosexual relationship seemed to her depressingly grim, the main characters adolescent. But what most upset her was that one of the female characters seemed at least partly based on herself. The character has lines around the eyes, makes vain attempts to disguise her age. To Anaïs it seemed an aggressively hostile parody, a brutal caricature. “No woman wants to read that about herself,” she complained. At the Ritz Bar on Madison Avenue she told him unequivocally and at length that he had betrayed her, that, whatever their differences, this caricature was a deeply painful personal attack that she would never forgive. But she soon partly did. Within a short time she had made enough of an adjustment, encouraged by his protestations and blandishments, by his desire not to let her get fully away just yet, by her own unwillingness to give up on something she had not yet fully given up on, to allow a reconciliation that would permit them still to share something special. When he left to return to Guatemala, he renewed his invitation to her to visit. Partly it was loyalty, affection. Partly it was bravado.

  The reception of In a Yellow Wood in March 1947 was only slightly disappointing, primarily because author and publisher expected so little. Dutton, which had had strong doubts from the beginning, was not surprised that sales were dismal. Vidal’s confidence in the book had diminished at some late stage in the writing or revision. All in all, the reviews were tolerable, a few strikingly good, especially those in the New York Herald Tribune and Chicago Sunday Tribune. Enough were temperately phrased, cordial, if not to the book then to the author, so that little damage was done. A number of reviewers thought it a success within its narrow canvas, its “controlled naturalism,” though others could not disguise their conviction that the author had weakened it by insisting that an unfocused main character somehow could convey interestingly the boredom of his own life. Some sensed that a deep structural flaw in the novel resulted from a failure of initial conception or a change in focus in the writing of the book. Why Vidal should be writing about “a strange, oblique sort of war casualty” the reviewers had little to no grounds on which to speculate. His own hopes for a major success, for greater fame and financial rewards, were now centered on the new book, The City and the Pillar, which he believed a vastly better novel.

  Before returning to Guatemala, he accepted Bingham’s invitation to visit him and A. K. Lewis at Harvard. Bingham urged him to bring a car in which they could drive to Exeter for a day or two. The much-admired Tom Riggs, who had been visiting at Lewis and Bingham, had read a few pages of In a Yellow Wood in an advance copy Gore had sent Bingham, who passed along Riggs’s complimentary comments. Generously, Bingham himself had nice things to say, but, in order not to keep saying only nice things, criticized what he thought an excessive amount of flat description in the first part. Though he recognized that it was part of a stylistic strategy, it seemed to him tedious overkill. They soon drove up together to Exeter, where Gore had the pleasure of showing off a copy to his valued Exeter teachers, George Bennett, Leonard Stevens, and Henry Phillips. Later, when his uneasiness about the defects of the novel became self-critical defensiveness, he remonstrated to Stevens, “‘Sir, if you had read this [in man
uscript], you would never have let me publish it.’” Stevens responded, “‘Well, Gore, you’ve got to study much more about writing. I suggest that you do a lot of reading of Henry James.’” About a year and a half later, Stevens’s widow recalled, “Gore wrote him an eight-page letter … in the manner of Henry James on eating a breakfast—eggs and so on.”

  Back in Antigua by the publication date, he was happy to see that the house renovations had been progressing well under Pat’s supervision. Each morning, still in his bathrobe, he would write in the room most distant from the street or in the small cobblestone patio, which Pat had planted with grass and small local plants. “I must construe this home as a symbol,” Gore wrote to Anaïs. Occasionally he reverted to his self-dramatizing, melancholy rhetoric: “But there is no heart to it, of course. These days I am a solo dancer, dancing magnificently with no audience. My attachment to you continues, it grows more poignant, more vast, more hopeless with each day…. It is there, it hurts. I have sometimes the feeling that too much of me was left in the womb … what … was not born at all…. I feel a stranger passing through, the books are only shadows I cast before the sun.” This had little to do anymore, if it ever had, with his relationship with Anaïs. The Womb began to take shape rapidly, hardly a shadow at all, this time a transparently autobiographical bildungsroman, powerfully conceived and brilliantly executed, in which Nina and he have the starring roles, with slightly disguised versions of his father, of the Gores, of Hugh Auchincloss, of Rosalind, even of Liz Whitney in the secondary parts. The portrait of Nina is both powerful and relentlessly devastating, a narcissistically destructive mother from whom her vulnerable son, depicted from birth to his Army service, struggles successfully, though with great pain, to liberate himself. His anger at Nina, his bitterness at what she had not given him, his sense of her lacerating destructiveness, and his ambivalent but deep love for her attained a charged focus. Their innumerable arguments and reconciliations found their novelistic equivalent. Of course, much from the life is eliminated and effectively heightened. Experimenting with stream of consciousness, with indirect monologue, with non-narrated transitions of time and place, the novel has a high modern feel, now much beyond the influence of Maugham, with Joyce, Lawrence, and Mann as part of the palette. Jimmie Trimble is renamed Jimmy Wesson. The relationship of William Giraud and Jimmy Wesson parallels Gore’s and Jimmie Trimble’s, though the novel makes them classmates at Exeter also. Rock Creek Park, St. Albans, Reno, Newport, Merrywood, Exeter, East Hampton are the settings. In a self-exposing monologue, Nina (Charlotte Giraud), fueled by alcohol, excoriates her former husband and her ungrateful child for their failure to appreciate her, to acknowledge her sacrifices, to love her as she deserves. Soon totally alienated from his heavy-drinking mother, William “remember that [her] affectionate moments were as intense, as consuming, as her angry ones. But generally he could only remember the times of anger and destruction.” In the final scene, wounded on a European battlefield, he learns about Jimmy’s death in the Pacific. “Spring, like all other seasons, was bitter.”

  Writing through the late winter and spring of 1946, a little after midsummer he had finished. Along the way he changed the title from The Womb to The Season of Comfort, taking the bitter irony from Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. “My bitterness toward my mother,” he wrote to Anaïs, “is almost gone; it is in the book now and I am pleased with the work. She wants to come here in August and I shall let her.” The intense rhetoric in his letters to Anaïs became slightly less heightened, less self-reflexive, though he repeated numbers of times his invitation to visit him that summer, undoubtedly sometime other than when Nina would be there. There was, in fact, a reasonable amount of social life in Guatemala City and Antigua, with the Vasquez Brunis and Monteforte, and a large community of Americans. He soon started a friendship with Dan Wickenden, a slim, dark-haired, bespectacled American writer of thirty-two whom he had met in a hotel lobby in Guatemala City the previous November. Wickenden was staying on, at least until the spring, working on a novel and enjoying the Guatemalan landscape, which he hoped to make the setting of his next one. A little edgily competitive with one another, they still found much to talk about, particularly literature and their different views about the novel as an art form. Wickenden’s first novel, The Running of the Deer, published in 1937, had been a bestseller, his third, The Wayfarers, in 1945 had been picked by Orville Prescott as the best novel of the year. When in November 1946 Vidal gave Wickenden the manuscript of the unrevised The City and the Pillar to read, Wickenden criticized it on artistic grounds. For a practitioner of and believer in the novel as large, sprawling, epic, with grand characters, City seemed too minimalist, propagandistic. But he admired Gore’s courage in taking on the subject and thought highly of his talent.

  Through Pat, Gore also met the painter Bob Hooton, another American expatriate, as well as, in Antigua and at Panajachel on Lake Atitlán where Pat had a house, a varied group of American writers, painters, tourists, residents—a supportive, gossipy, heavy-drinking community that saw one another at parties, in the marketplaces, and at restaurants. Though more Pat’s friends than Gore’s, they were an active part of his quiet but still necessary social world. Not that he would have liked it noisier, but he was all too soon becoming uncomfortably aware of the limitations of Antigua. Full of intellectual energy, he found few people he could talk with about subjects that interested him. Local gossip and conversation with boozy expatriates only went so far. “There are some intelligent people: an elderly witty de Charlus French Count, a Socialist President of Congress etc etc but nothing more meaningful than good company.” Work preoccupied him, obsessed him. But he still wanted more stimulating company and activities than Antigua provided. Movies, theaters, concerts—there was almost none of that. Landscape and weather were proving not to be theater enough.

  Restless, he flew to New York in early April. Staying at his father’s apartment, he had in hand now most of the reviews of In a Yellow Wood, a batch of which he sent down to the Gores in Washington, who impatiently awaited his visit. The Senator had become preoccupied with the practical details of his grandson establishing a political career in New Mexico, a subject that Gore had evaded by his flight to Guatemala and which seemed even less likely now with the imminent publication of City. The Senator, who knew little about the potentially disqualifying novel, spun his clever political webs, sketching out the strategy that would have Gore a presidential elector in 1948, then a congressman or senator, then (though never explicitly stated) President. By the end of the month Gore was on his way back to Antigua via New Orleans, where he paused for a brief visit. Anaïs suddenly appeared, on her way to California on a two-month-long car trip with her newest lover, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old recently divorced Californian, Rupert Poole, who desired to put Anaïs more in touch with the mystical earth, “a better balance between body and spirit.” Neither artistic nor intellectual, Poole lacked a profession, even an avocation. In a 1941 Model A Ford roadster they chugged into New Orleans. Anaïs introduced the two men, who got along quite casually and comfortably. Gore took them to meet a painter friend of his, Olive Leonhardt, who had done a surrealistic portrait of Anaïs, though they had never met. After hesitations and reservations, Nin was eventually to commit herself to a bigamous marriage to Poole, whom she loved. At the same time she remained married to Hugh Guiler, maintaining, at great cost, separate East and West Coast lives. When she soon wrote to Gore in terms that indicated her genuine passion for Rupert, he urged her to seize the opportunity for the fulfillment she had always been pursuing.

  Completing the revisions of Season in Antigua in May 1947, Gore looked forward to a summer of work and relaxation. Dot and the Senator, eager to visit their favorite grandson, made plans to travel to Guatemala by boat from New Orleans at the beginning of September. July and August they expected to spend in Florida (where they would visit the Senator’s brother, Dixie), Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and return to Santa Fe in late September or e
arly October, perhaps with Gore. The Senator still hoped his grandson would follow his advice and establish himself in New Mexico. The Gores never got to Guatemala, their grandson never got to New Mexico. In Oklahoma, Mrs. Gore, widely recognized in her circle as perhaps the worst driver in the United States, slammed into the back of a truck, hurting them both seriously, but especially the Senator, who spent months in St. Anthony’s Hospital in Oklahoma City. The event eerily replicated an automobile accident, after which they had been reported to have been killed, when Gore was at St. Albans. Soon after his return to Antigua, his father wrote to him about a visit to Washington, where he had had dinner with his former in-laws and seen Nina. “The Gores seemed well but Nina seemed at her worst. I barely know her anymore. I hope that the change is due to a hangover.” It hardly made her son feel regretful about his depiction of her in Season. But he had other reasons for discomfort, an uneasiness, an anxiety, a depression that seemed to have settled on him and which he could not readily shake. “Remember,” his father wrote to him, “the more unusual the person the more serious ups and downs he has. You were about due for a temporary one.” His savings-account balance was being depleted faster than he had anticipated, mostly because of the cost of the house. When Gore morosely complained about his dwindling money, Gene characterized his son’s letter as “rather sad” but sharply asserted that “it is difficult for me … to feel sorry for anyone under forty years of age who is healthy.” Eager to do a little complaining of his own, he responded to Gore’s comment that his “house [in Guatemala] was handsome, living was cheap and the weather serene,” “we have a lousy but comfortable house [in East Hampton], living is shockingly expensive, and the weather has been the worst in many years.”