Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In New York they lived together for the next month at the Chelsea Hotel. For a moment Gore enjoyed the hope they might go to Europe together in the late winter. Bursting with enthusiasm, he came into Judith Jones’s office at Doubleday. Having left Dutton for what she thought a more literary house, she hoped to lure Gore to their list for his next novel. “Though I shared the office, I was alone in the small room. And he said, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ I thought it was with a girl. ‘And I’m going to Italy with him.’ I said, ‘Yes?’ It was someone in the ballet. He was just—I mean I’ve never seen him that way. Just dancing in seventh heaven, like a guy in love.” “My life is completely governed these days by my grande affaire,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, “and the grande affaire opens on Broadway [in Kiss Me, Kate] in Jan. I’ve gotten so sick of theatre people that I could shriek and that might be a good excuse to come back to Guatemala.” The history of the affair could be reduced to a few sentences. At East Hampton “I fell madly in love with an unfortunately too famous and too desirable dancer and musical comedy star; we dashed off to Bermuda together for September, came back, went through some mutual scenes of hysteria a la Max and, at the moment, are living uneasily together in the Chelsea Hotel while he rehearses and I work on my fifth book and, believe it or not, take four hours of ballet training a day. What will happen to me if I fall in love with a doctor I don’t know: eight years of medicine I guess.”

  Harold went twice a week to a midtown therapist, “Jules Nydes, M.A., Consulting Psychologist.” Always hesitant about psychiatry for himself, Gore had reluctantly gone the previous year to Anaïs’s analyst for a few sessions, an unhappy experience. He worried that analysis would undermine his creativity. Bored with her psychological jargon and her faith in its powers, he had gone mostly to placate her, partly because he recognized his moodiness, felt his depressions, knew indeed that he harbored immense anger against Nina. When the analyst had asked him probing questions, Gore had responded, “Don’t be impertinent!” After a few tense sessions they had parted, the analyst’s final riposte, “You think your shit is better than other people’s shit.” Nina herself, sneeringly hostile when drunk, had off and on urged him to get professional help. Years before, prompted by her friend Sherry Davis, she had had young Gene examined by a psychologist who had concluded that there were no grounds for concern. With the publication of City, Nina was forced to see things in a different light. But whatever her mood of the moment about Gore’s sex life and his male friends, she shared the widespread conviction that homosexuals were sick creatures. If only Gore would shape up, would set his mind to it, he could be perfectly normal. Homosexuality was curable by psychotherapy, so the 1952 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders claimed, and large numbers of young men with doubts about their sexuality sat in analysts’ waiting rooms. A devotee of Freud, Anaïs also believed that Gore needed professional help: homosexuality was arrested development. From his point of view, whatever his problems, they had nothing to do with sexual inclinations and practices. Sometimes with cold logic, other times with angry rhetoric, he signaled how sensitive he was to the subject. He especially resented that what he did not feel as a problem others condemned as either vice or illness. In Harold’s case he urged and arranged therapy not because of Harold’s sexuality but because his irrational behavior threatened their relationship. Desperate, for the moment he was willing to try it himself.

  In early October Harold suddenly disappeared from the Chelsea Hotel and, apparently, from New York. He left no message, no note of explanation, no forwarding address. Angry, hurt, Gore tried to find him. Making an appointment with Lang’s therapist, he sat through an awkward session, hoping he could get Nydes to tell him Harold’s whereabouts. Having guessed why Gore was there, Nydes told him nothing. He returned for one more session. Soon, though, he located someone who reported that the dancer had gone to San Francisco to visit his mother. What to do? He decided to write to him there. “My dear Harold—I suppose that you’re with your mother since someone said you’d gone to California. I hope you plan to continue the analysis; I haven’t talked to your analyst since that’s unethical but I gather … that all was going fairly well. As I told you in my letter I’m going to another [therapist] … and I seem to be getting a grip on myself; as you might have guessed I was quite upset over not having heard from you even though I understood why you were scurrying about. Analysis is quite a frightening experience. I think we’ve both reached a similar impasse when our careers don’t give the same satisfaction, the same forgetfulness as they once did; it’s not a pleasant thing to see oneself but it must be faced sometimes. I think this is the right moment for you; I know it is for me. I hope you go on with it.” The letter was never sent. When Harold returned from California, he focused on rehearsals for the January opening of Kiss Me, Kate and resumed a sex life he had hardly repressed during his six weeks or so with Gore. “He was a star on Broadway in Pal Joey, and at least three times he was arrested in men’s rooms on his way to the matinee,” Gore remarked. “They had to hold the curtain while the police let him go, and if the police didn’t let him go, his understudy would go on. Now, that’s madness. And I’m aware of all this, that he’s so compulsive, so crazed. He was wrecking his career. I don’t think I was being entirely self-centered. What I was saying to Harold is that knowing what I know about you, it’s a very good idea that you go through analysis or something, because something terrible is going to happen within three or four years. It did.” Gore’s own halting experiment with analysis abruptly ended. So too had his grand passion, though not quite as abruptly. While hoping that Lang might return to him, he began writing a play that reflected his feelings of loss. “But I find the theme of elusiveness a little too personal and poignant at the moment to write about. I must wait until I’m settled; until I’ve heard from you. My feelings about you are unchanged; from now on it’s up to you to preserve this: if you want it…. I wish you’d write me.”

  There was a reconciliation, though it did not last long. “I seem submerged in the dance world,” Gore wrote to Pat Crocker. He had met two more ballet dancers, Leon Danielian and Johnny Kriza, well-known young performers both of whom soon became his friends: Danielian a premiere member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Kriza best known for his title performance in the Ballet Theatre’s production of Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. By the beginning of the new year “the dancer affair” had come “to a painful end and I now have a new lover,” probably Johnny Kriza, “very pleasant, very cozy.” Convenient, companionable sex, it had none of the romantic intensity of his affair with Lang. The City and the Pillar was about to be published, scheduled for January 9. Europe, as always, was much on his mind, though no longer with Harold as his sailing companion. In the late fall Prokosch, from Capri, urged Gore to come to Italy. At first he thought he would go to Guatemala about the middle of February. Since his house in Antigua had been rented, he proposed to Crocker that he stay with him for a month at his house on the lake “on the usual sharing basis: this includes marimba workers etc.” But the idea of Guatemala again soon seemed less and less appealing. By mid-January 1948 he had made up his mind to go to Rome.

  Almost one year before, while Gore was still in Antigua, Prokosch, having decided to live permanently in Europe, had written him that “I very much want you to meet John Kelly, who is an old Yale and Cambridge and Istanbul friend of mine…. Write to me … and tell me all the dirt about Guatemala—more sex details, less architectural.” In spring 1947 Gore went to Cismont, near Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit Kelly, whom he had recently met in New York, the first of numbers of visits and the start of a friendship to last until Kelly’s death in 1966. In his mid-thirties, pudgy, dark-haired, an alcoholic who passionately loved the opera and ballet, Kelly had offered numbers of times that spring to help Gore give “romance” a try. Through Kelly, Vidal met Bob Giroux, Kelly’s friend and his editor at Harcourt, Brace, which was about to publish Kelly’s novel, All Soul’s Night. At Cambridge, K
elly, who had been born in New Jersey in 1913, had studied economics with John Maynard Keynes. A well-read, cultured, witty man with a passion for music and for Times Square sex, Kelly, who was “wildly funny,” Gore later recalled, and had “sad, velvety eyes,” alternated his New York activities with his life as a Virginia country squire. “John was a romantic, a male Anaïs Nin,” Gore recalled, “without being as dumb as she was. A romantic Irish tenor who knew everything in the world about music and a rather good writer, very literary. And very good company till he would try to be romantic. He was easily held off.” Kelly was married to Betty Wagner, a wealthy woman from Staten Island, whose family was the source of his money. Their mansion, Cross Meadows, and the land in Cismont came from Betty’s mother, who had moved there. Kelly had met Betty in Virginia and married her at her mother’s home, which later became his. Actually there were no horses or livestock at the Kellys’. They were, though, in the midst of genteel, high-toned horse country and good friends with many of the local squires. Life at Cismont had English country rhythms: horse training and hunting clubs dominated. When Giroux visited, Kelly would insist he go to the club with him. “‘But I don’t hunt!’ It didn’t matter. They’d all go and, like everyone else, drink so much they couldn’t get on a horse anyway.”

  Admiring and affectionate, Gore found Kelly companionable. His visits to Cismont were restful, even when Kelly made advances, as he did periodically. Gore would say no, and Kelly would drink more and then usually pass out on the floor, where he would sleep for hours. At Cismont he played Wagner and Verdi incessantly. In New York, in a tuxedo, with Giroux or others, he would appear for almost every performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. That his propositions were bumbling, his soul romantic, his epistolary style engaging, added to his charm. “Having spent, it appears, a lifetime with you, the separation is becoming acute,” he wrote after Gore’s first visit. “Will you come for a week-end?” He was also a master of romantic melancholy. “You make me sad, because I want to be with you and I am not. Such feelings alarm me. I cannot bear to think that I am anywhere other than according to my desire.” Thoroughly in love, he nominated himself, through much of 1947, to satisfy Gore’s often-expressed thought that he needed a lover. His comments on Gore’s complaints were often humorous. “What do you mean by ‘intermittent sex’? Do you mean that you have sexual intercourse at irregular intervals, or that the intercourse itself is subject to interruptions? If you find it impossible to communicate on this subject, send me a picture…. I hear my wife coming up the drive, which means lunch, so I shall close in the midst of deep thoughts about you, dear Gore, and in the hope that I shall hear immediately…. You do not always say ‘no.’ I remember that you sometimes write something that looks like, Yes.” The “yes” was to confidences, not intimacies.

  So too with Dan Wickenden and Cornelia Claiborne. Gore had continued his friendships with both when he returned from Guatemala in late summer 1947. At home in Westport, Connecticut, assiduously at work on his latest novel, Wickenden saw Gore only a few times in New York. But they continued the correspondence about themselves as novelists that they had begun when Wickenden had left Guatemala. Genially but aggressively, Wickenden attacked his friendly rival. Mostly Gore defended his work, particularly In a Yellow Wood and The City and the Pillar, both of which Wickenden thought enervated. Wickenden set out at length what he thought were the weaknesses of Vidal’s novels and Vidal’s view of the novel as a literary form, in constant unfavorable contrast to himself and his own vision of the novel as bourgeois upbeat epic on the level of entertainment in which fullness, vigor, raw life were everything. His own novels were stabs in that direction, with the merit of energy rather than art. When he began a chapter, he rarely knew where it would end. Vidal’s novels seemed to him too controlled, too intellectually programmatic, too unlike his own. Rising to the challenge, Vidal defended himself, though not at as great length as Wickenden attacked. His counterattacks, equally self-defensive, did not fully conceal an underlying disquiet, not about his bleak themes but about his flat tightness of tone and language. At work on A Search for the King, he hoped for more resonance. The imminent publication of City was much on his mind. Wickenden did not in the least disapprove of its subject matter. In fact, he admired that aspect of the novel and anticipated that it might be a great success.

  By this time Cornelia, whether she had read City in manuscript or not, had fully realized that Gore’s sexual inclinations would keep them, at best, friends and social companions. “I don’t need to write to you of my heart because you are always there, but you never answer,” she told him in fall 1947. Aware of his involvement with Anaïs, she felt baffled about the nature of the attraction and assumed it had to be sexual. But she could not quite see what Gore saw in Anaïs, or so she told him. Actually, by the time she was aware of it as a relationship, it was already mostly over. Gore himself, though, kept Cornelia’s attention. His combination of self-involvement and talent impressed and baffled her. “You have a Christ complex, an Oedipus complex, a Hitler complex, and a complex complex. There really isn’t anything wrong with you at all if you could forget about all these complexes.” But she had become quite certain she was not “capable of making [him] stop being wretched … so there isn’t really much point in trying.” But she believed in his powers, his talents. “You can be a great writer and a great man. It’s so unbelievable that anyone is capable of doing both [literature and politics] that you really should try it…. It would encourage humanity a great deal.” Busy as managing editor of The Hudson Review, Cornelia herself continued to be intensely literary—editing, writing poetry, wondering where her situation and talents would take her.

  Still optimistic that the subject of City would not be held against him, in autumn 1947 Gore applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1948. The project was his novel in progress, A Search for the King. The success of Williwaw and In a Yellow Wood might make him an attractive candidate. Whom to ask for recommendations? Since Orville Prescott had reviewed Williwaw favorably in the New York Times, Gore thought it reasonable to ask him. Prescott said yes, though apparently Gore did not read sharply enough between the lines of his assent. “I would be glad to serve as a literary reference to you in your application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, providing that my having read your first book qualifies me. Unfortunately, I did not get around to In a Yellow Wood.… By the way, could it be possible that you are writing too quickly? It seems to me that your rate of output is amazing. But then, everyone has to perform his own job of work in his own way.” Gore soon learned that Capote had also applied. Whatever his own chances, he was happy not to be dependent on any support other than his savings and his writing. He hoped that his royalties would make viable his determination to devote himself fully to writing. By early December 1947, before the recommendations were due, advance copies of City became available. Prescott, who a few months later felt such moral outrage that he declined to review it, may have known enough about it from word-of-mouth or his own reading for it to have influenced his letter of recommendation. Wreden wrote a smashingly laudatory letter. So too did Nathan Rothman, who had praised In a Yellow Wood in The Saturday Review of Literature, and Bob Giroux, who recommended Gore “in the highest terms.” But Prescott damned him with less-than-faint praise. “I do not know enough about Mr. Vidal to feel justified in urging his project upon you. An historical novel about Richard I and Blondel seems to me so conventional and even popular a literary project that it might well take its chances with others of its type. So, I can only say that I know Mr. Vidal to be a gifted young man and to suggest that his need for a scholarship and your own opinion of the merit of his work in progress should be the deciding factor.” It was a killing letter, against the ethical grain of the widely accepted understanding that if one cannot write a good recommendation one should decline to write at all. Gore did not get the fellowship. Neither did Capote. “Shocked, we compared notes. Studied the list of those who had received grants. ‘Will you just look
,’ moaned Truman, ‘at those ahh-full pee-pull they keep giving muh-nee to!’” A promising young writer, E. Howard Hunt, to become infamous decades later in the Watergate investigations, received a Guggenheim Fellowship that year.