Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Once he had decided to sail for Europe in mid-February, Gore’s spirits lightened. New York sparkled a bit more brightly in his restless eye. Johnny Kriza provided pleasure, the usual erotic release. Nina, intermittently, got on his nerves. The previous summer she had dried out at Silver Hill, in Connecticut, an expensive retreat for alcoholics, her mind partly on elaborate schemes for becoming a leading figure in creating support systems for alcoholics, partly on legal procedures to get additional money from Auchincloss. Anaïs pulled strings to arrange lectures at college campuses, the most prominent at Harvard at the beginning of January. Soon she was off to California. Parties were still a staple of Gore’s New York activities. He went to one “for Cecil Beaton and found him dull. Had dinner with Glenway Wescott who is charming.” Eager to meet the much-admired novelist Christopher Isherwood, who he hoped would like The City and the Pillar, he was disappointed to learn he had been out of town when Isherwood had passed through. “He is now touring South America with his love, a boy photographer.” He sent Isherwood, as he sent others, including Thomas Mann, advance copies, with handwritten notes and inscriptions. Worried its reception might not be entirely positive, he tried to get endorsements that could be used as blurbs or in follow-up advertisements to help counter negative reviews.

  In January 1948, at the home of the writer Glenway Wescott’s sister, Gore met John Horne Burns, whose successful war novel, The Gallery, he admired a great deal more than he did the thirty-one-year-old Burns himself, “a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great.” He seemed monstrous, envious, bitchy, drunk. With “a receding hairline above a face striking in its asymmetry, one ear flat against the head, the other stuck out,” Burns was “certain that to be a good writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed he named a half dozen celebrated contemporaries, ‘A pleiad,’ he roared delightedly, ‘of pederasts!’ But what about Faulkner, I asked, and Hemingway. He was disdainful. Who said they were any good? And besides, hadn’t I heard how Hemingway once.…” A harbinger of Italian delights, Burns extolled the attractions of Italian boys, whom he called topolini. Gore thereafter referred to them as “mice.” The word itself seemed to bring Italian pleasures closer.

  Hollywood, another exotic landscape, had been on his mind during much of 1947, and still had importance to him even as he prepared for his departure for Europe. Numbers of talented writers, including Isherwood, had found sustenance writing screenplays for the movies. It had occurred to Gore early on that he might supplement his novel-writing income or even if necessary earn his living in Los Angeles. The occasion when he had overheard two scriptwriters working beside the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel stuck in his memory. That his mother was good friends with Doris and Jules Stein could be a help. Before leaving for New Orleans in late summer 1946, he had sent some of the good reviews of Williwaw to Felix Ferry, Nina’s Beverly Hills friend, an agent with Famous Artists Corporation, whom he had met the previous spring. Perhaps a studio might be interested in optioning Williwaw and/or contracting with its author to write scripts. A year later, from Antigua, he had assured the desperate Anaïs that “if I get a Hollywood job then there will be a great deal of money. Think about this for I am serious.” He hoped something could be arranged through a contact at Columbia Studios. Toward the end of 1947 Ferry encouraged the neophyte to provide a story idea that Ferry might try to sell. “A short to the point story with a not too extensive background is one of the most welcome commodities in Hollywood today. Have you any in mind which might do? If so, please put it on four or five pages which would be quite enough to sell the idea, especially when it is as beautifully written as your works are. Then there would be a chance to see you with it and have you come out here to enjoy a little of this season’s sunshine.”

  The beginning of the new year in New York had its own brightness. Finally, on January 9, 1948, Dutton published The City and the Pillar. All at Dutton held their breath, having moved into what seemed perilous, uncharted waters by publishing a book that made an argument for the legitimization of sex between men. The Macraes were uncomfortable. Advance orders of 5,000 copies, though, were good enough for Wreden to hope it might be a bestseller. Word-of-mouth provided news of the novel’s controversial subject. Vidal’s reputation, as the author of Williwaw and as a well-publicized “enfant terrible,” helped stimulate bookstore interest. He had already pocketed his largest advance against royalties, $2,000, the final $1,000 on the day of publication, replenishing his bank account with enough to pay for much of his European trip. The well-known English publisher and editor John Lehmann, whom Gore was soon to meet, had contracted with Dutton for British rights. A number of foreign-language editions seemed likely. Wreden, though, still worried that his prize author would be damaged by the book’s enemies. Fortunately, readers, despite mixed reviews and occasional sharp attacks, found the subject absorbing. Amanda Ellis, who had befriended Gore in Colorado Springs, came by for a visit, enthusiastic about her former protégé’s success. From Lima, Peru, Christopher Isherwood responded to Vidal’s letter with enthusiastic encouragement and permission to use his praise in advertisements, though he disapproved of City’s ending: it would encourage the widespread prejudice that homosexual relationships always ended miserably, a self-defensive comment echoed by a large number of homosexuals happy to see their sexuality taken seriously in fiction but distressed that society’s impression that homosexuals all come to a bad end would be reinforced by Jim’s murdering Bob Ford. Isherwood, it seemed to Vidal, preferred propaganda to artistic integrity. It was, though, the start of a friendship. “Thank you for what you say about my writing,” Isherwood wrote to him. “That makes me very happy…. It’s nice to be a stimulus—and especially to another writer…. And do please write. I love getting letters, and most of my friends seem to regard me as temporarily dead.”

  From his Pacific Palisades exile Thomas Mann thanked the young writer for his gift copy “with your personal inscription. Your novel, which has afforded me a noble entertainment, is a valuable addition to my English library. The interesting book has my most sincere wishes for the success it deserves.” In his private diary Mann remarked on how much it had stirred the banked fires of his own past, how powerfully and personally he identified with the novel’s subject. From California, Anaïs, to whom Gore had written announcing his bestsellerdom and offering her money, wrote back with congratulatory kindness, especially since she did not like the book and believed it contained a mean caricature of her. “Already I’d heard that you were the best seller! I’m happy because money can be magical when well used—I think it was sweet offering me some—I like your saying it even if I won’t take advantage of it…. Cheri, I feel as exactly close to you as you to me and of the most durable quality…. You have won all your battles, you know—You have more power to love richly than any young man I know—you have physical beauty and charm and a heart and a gifted nature—I should know, who know you deeper—So be happy…. Our only enemy is doubt, lack of confidence—Have faith, have faith.” From Rome, Prokosch, who passed his copy around among eager friends, urged Gore not to worry “in the least about the sex angle—it is obviously treated very cleanly and manfully.” Come to Europe, he urged, delighted to learn at the end of the month that Gore was almost on his way.

  First, though, the newspaper reviews, crucial to the book’s sales, had to be absorbed, confronted, evaluated. It was not an easy and hardly a pleasant experience. Gore had worried about what the reaction might be, what effect it might have on his future. He had thought he had realistically assessed the risks, the parameters of response and their impact. Somewhat naïvely he had assumed that whatever the range of response, its effect would be brief, limited, and manageable. He had hoped for fame and fortune. Now all he could be sure of for the moment was notoriety. As the reviews came in, the Dutton publicity department created its usual excerpts for trade distribution and advertisements. The controversy was a publicist’s delight.
“Some rave about it,” a Dutton advertisement heralded in bold print, quoting one word from the laudatory review in The Atlantic Monthly: “Brilliant”; “Some are shocked,” quoting one word from the hostile review in the Chicago Tribune, “Disgusting—but it became a best seller.” By mid-January City was “a bestseller in New York at the rate of 1,500 a week and should show on the bestseller lists in three weeks, thank God.” Before publication Dutton had increased the first printing from 5,000 to 10,000 copies and the advertising budget, for a book that sold for $3.50, to $5,000, approximately the equivalent of $50,000 today. “The fan mail,” Gore wrote to Pat Crocker, whose copy was avidly passed from hand to hand in their Guatemala circle, “has been amazing, but no enclosed pictures so far.” On February 8 it was number fourteen on a national list of sixteen; by February 22 it had risen to number seven (Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, he noted, was number eleven on the same list). “The book sells merrily; it’s now the #14 bestseller in the country. #2 in New York; #3 in Los Angeles; #1 in San Francisco…. Tell Wickenden,” who had returned to Guatemala, “that The Atlantic Monthly gave me a wonderful review. The rest have been quite awful.”

  To celebrate the ratings Wreden hosted at his Park Avenue apartment a dinner party for a number of his bestselling authors, including Cleveland Amory, whose The Proper Bostonians was on the nonfiction bestseller list. Kit and Gene walked over with Gore from the Vidals’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. Gene queried Wreden about how the book business worked. “You know, it astonishes me in a country the size of the United States how few copies you can sell of anything,” Gene remarked. “Of anything! I could make a celluloid napkin clip and sell more copies of it in the country tomorrow than you can sell of a book, and you have more means of publicity with a book than I would have with my celluloid napkin clip. But I would know how to sell it.” Gore was lively, amusingly conversational. Mostly, though, the talk was about success, not about how small even bestseller sales were, and not about reviews.

  The bad ones, though, were difficult to shake off. He did his best, writing to Pat Crocker that they were “flatteringly violent,” essentially of two kinds, both more unrelentingly hostile than he had anticipated: the homophobic Middle American outrage—epitomized by review headlines such as “A Sordid Picture of the Male Species,” “Tragedy of Perversion,” and “Abnormal Doom”—and the attacks on the novel’s artistry, most of which had an ummistakable moral underpinning, but a few of which, notably Leslie Fiedler’s in The Hudson Review, found City’s failures to be entirely aesthetic. With great praise for the novel’s honest embrace of “drabness” and for its effective dramatization of “seedy torment,” Fiedler gave it the respect of serious literary criticism: “the book cannot even hold rigidly to the impersonality it proposes, the scarcely more than animal awareness of its athletic protagonist; there are, on the one hand, long artificial speeches diagnosing homosexuality and proposing Utopias for its free play, and there is, on the other hand, the suggested symbolism of the novel’s name—an illegitimate device, proposing to supply with the five words of a title a dimension of symbolism that the book otherwise ignores.” In brief, Fiedler argued, the novel’s admirable sincerity had expressed itself in a flat naturalism that fell short of effective dramatic and symbolic representation. The problem was in the young writer’s artistry, not his subject. It was a conclusion to which the author himself would give serious even if self-defensive attention. Gore, though, insisted on blaming Cornelia, as managing editor of The Hudson Review, for Fiedler’s harsh review, an expression of his increasing anger at what he had begun to feel, after the publication of City, was a homophobic cabal to wound him by attacks or eliminate him by silence.

  Some of the hostile reviews combined moral outrage with aesthetic criticism, the most damaging of these by C. V. Terry in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, so brief that it signaled contempt, so clever that it allowed its moral disapproval to be carried simply by indirection, misrepresentation, and code words: “Presented as the case history of a standard homosexual, his novel adds little that is new to a groaning shelf. Mr. Vidal’s approach is coldly clinical … this time he has produced a novel as sterile as its protagonists.” Like character like author, every reader was meant to assume. When Gore wrote a sharp letter of protest to the New York Times, the Review declined to print it. The daily New York Times expressed its disapproval by silence. No review at all. The Times management had a commitment to their version of “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” An admirer with close contacts at the newspaper’s executive level reported that the decision had been made by the owner himself, Julius Ochs Adler, who had decided that the Times would accept ads for The City and the Pillar but not review it. Good reviews were few and far between, mostly notably in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Saturday Review, and Atlantic Monthly, which called it “a brilliant exposé of subterranean life among New York and Hollywood expatriates from normal sex … an attempt to clarify the inner neuroses of our time, of which the increase in homosexuality and divorce are symptoms.” Like other thoughtful readers, the Saturday Review commentator called attention to the culturally revealing coincidence that Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking statistical study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, had been published within a month of City. If Kinsey’s statistics were correct, Vidal’s dramatization spoke to a sexual activity so much more widely practiced than had heretofore been believed that the society would be better served by open, enlightened discussion than by medieval repression. The New York Times, self-consciously and self-righteously inconsistent, decided it would review but not accept ads for Kinsey’s scientific study.

  Gore soon came to value the Kinsey connection. In spring 1949 he was to talk at length to the avid scientist in the mezzanine of the Astor Hotel. Clipboard in hand, the tired-looking “gray-faced man” with a crew cut, wearing a polka-dot bow tie, was interviewing homosexual artists for a book on the relationship between sexuality and creativity. He was eager to talk to Vidal, to whom he had written, complimenting him on City, which he had read carefully, expressing his hope that “we will have a chance to meet someday.” Kinsey “told me that I was not ‘homosexual’—doubtless because I never sucked cock or got fucked. Even so, I was setting world records for encounters with anonymous youths…. I tried to tell Kinsey about Jimmie. But I had not yet read Plato; I had no theory. Kinsey gave me a copy of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, with an inscription complimenting me on my ‘work in the field.’” Gore gave Kinsey an autographed copy of The Season of Comfort. In the long interview at the Astor, he may indeed have told him much about the novel’s heroine. Nina knew all she wanted to know about City and The Season of Comfort from what others told her. Gene said almost nothing to his son about City, other than that it was “interesting,” his nonconfrontational way of saying he had nothing happy to say about his son’s sexuality. His wife, Kit, assumed that he was deeply disappointed, among other reasons because he had hoped that Gore would marry and make his own father a grandfather. “Yes, you had to assume that the author of The City and the Pillar was either homosexual or very observant,” Kit remarked. “Gene wasn’t enthusiastic.” He feared that the book would damage Gore’s career. In Washington his grandparents passed over City and its reviews in silence.

  As he sailed out of New York harbor in mid-February 1948, bound for Naples, the twenty-two-year-old author leaned against the railing, salt spray rising from waves breaking against the Neue Helena. He happily posed for a photograph. With a black tie against his white shirt, plaid-patterned sport jacket, a look of anticipation and certitude in his eyes, he felt every bit the well-brought-up young American artistic entrepreneur off again to see the world. The City and the Pillar had risen to number five on the Times bestseller list. His intention was to go to Rome. Naples was an accidental destination. At last he was on his way again, this time to the place to which he had frequently dreamed of returning, the Europe of his childhood reading, of his fascination with ancient history, of the happiest ex
perience of his school days, his summer 1939 visit to France and Italy. Had Europe been available in 1946, he never would have gone to Guatemala at all; now he was back on course. He had with him in his cabin the manuscript of his novel-in-progress, A Search for the King, which he would work on during the two-week voyage, and a diary he had started to keep at the beginning of the year to record his ascension to bestsellerdom and his triumphal progress, including this grand European tour. Probably he had Byron in mind. The entries for the first six weeks of the year, so Vidal recalls, had less to do with triumph than with anguish, a linguistic grinding of his teeth in response to City’s stormy reviews. The diary for 1948 is the one document that Vidal declined to make available to his biographer.

  After a placid two-week-long winter crossing the port of Naples came into sight on the first of March. Wind and sea spray brought him for the first time to southern Italy. From a distance, sunlight and steel-gray sky made monochromatically bright the high outcropping of Capri to the south, Ischia to the north. The curve of the Bay of Naples seemed graciously cupped. Vesuvius’s flat volcanic peak, slouching dramatically in the background, highlighted the city’s low silhouette, its pre-highrise skyline. As the ship came into the harbor, the still-unreconstructed devastation of the port provided the prelude to a mostly bombed-out city, people living and working in partial ruins. “The whole waterfront had been smashed up, bombarded.” Impoverished Italy had barely begun reconstruction. At the Excelsior Hotel, where he stayed for the night, extensive repairs were under way, the bath-room half paved with marble, the rest raw cement. With a group of fellow passengers from the Neue Helena, he went to a live sex exhibition, a specialty performance at the local whorehouse for hard-currency tourists.