Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Taking seriously the threat of postelection chaos, Gore had decided to leave Italy, even if only temporarily. Perhaps he would return after the election or go to Paris or London instead. Election-scare warnings from the American embassy seemed good enough reason to do what he had it in mind to do all along: visit Egypt. Greece was out of the question because of the violent political situation there. In his youthful imagination Egypt glowed with the excitement of Hollywood movies like The Mummy, with the alluring power of its imperial political and cultural role in the history of the ancient world, from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra to Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Since he wanted to see everything, why not the magnificent pyramids, the mysterious temples? Cairo was a short plane ride from Rome. With the manuscript of A Search for the King, he flew into Egypt on April 2, thrilled at the contrast between late-Victorian Cairo and the ancient ruins that surrounded it, a Middle Eastern version of Rome. Still ruled by a remnant of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt unstably combined Turkish and European colonialism, Arab nationalism, tribal customs, and excruciating poverty.

  From his room at the moderately priced El Mint Hotel, near one of the great pyramids, he had a Westerner’s-eye-view of modern Egyptian misery and ancient Egyptian glory. At a club one evening he saw the white-suited, obese King Farouk, the monarch of nightclubs, with the usual European blonde on his arm. “Like a Mafia don, with dark glasses, he was surrounded by plainclothesmen, also in dark glasses.” At the old Shepheard’s Hotel, the historic gathering place for Anglo-Americans, Gore observed with interest the colorful eccentricities of a late-colonial world, partly English, mostly French. Cairo was “like a French provincial village in those days,” he later remarked. Taken up by Mehmed Abib, “a strange little man who was chasing me around … the grandson of the last Ottoman Emperor or Sultan who was married to the sister of Zog of Albania,” he got a fascinating glimpse of Ottoman-Albanian high society, which included “two beautiful Romanov princesses … in exile. A rather exotic foreign enclave with much intrigue.” Abib wooed him “sadly and hopelessly beside the pool at Mena House. He looked like a sensitive dentist. He was the only person I ever met who sighed the way that characters are supposed to sigh in novels.” The pudgy, ineffectual Abib was easy to keep at arm’s distance. After a week in Egypt, Gore wrote to Williams that he feared disease more than he felt tempted by Egyptian opportunities. Perhaps he had Flaubert’s example in mind. “I am glad you did not have carnal associations in Cairo,” Tennessee wrote back, “not only because it would have interfered with the glorious work but because I kept thinking, if Gore is not careful he will catch one of those things from the dirty Egyptians.”

  In Cairo he spent part of each day writing, working at his hotel or in one of the public rooms at Shepheard’s. Finishing A Search for the King on April 8, he quickly wrote a play, a variant on The City and the Pillar and The Season of Comfort, with a bitchy Nina-like mother and a homosexual son, whose father had been homosexual, torn between his relationship with his mother and his love for another young man, named Jimmy. It seemed to him a “powerful play,” though later he was happy to forget most of what it was about. Oddly enough, he wrote to Nina about it, though probably without giving her any details. She knew little to nothing about The Season of Comfort, which was not to be published until the next January. Anticipating a Streetcar Named Desire–like Broadway success, Nina was “thrilled over the play. Air mail me with whom it is,” she wrote to him, “for I am going to N.Y. and want to read it, unless you can send me a copy. I can hardly wait!” She imagined herself its producer or at least an instrumental money-raiser among her theater and society contacts. “I think I am sure of money for it,” she wrote to him. If another one of her financial negotiations with Auchincloss worked out, she hoped “to catch a boat in May.” Fortunately, he did not send her the play. “Bright eyes!” Tennessee wrote him from Rome. “This is glorious news about the play,” though he cautioned that “glorious plays are not usually written in such a short time.” Usually there were innumerable tedious revisions. “Still, by all means send it to me. When a thing goes that quickly it is a good sign, for it means that the impulse was vital and the vision was clear.” The good news was that Helen Hayes was going to star in London in The Glass Menagerie, Williams’s first play, which had initially fizzled on Broadway. The jeep was still his maniacal pleasure. Always warmly attracted to Gore more than either of them found practical, “I close now with an affectionate and mildly libidinous kiss on your soft under lip which I never kissed.”

  Street life in Cairo was exotic, hot, dirty, the April sky relentlessly bright. At first the nights were cold. Then the heat intensified and, without air-conditioning, even the nights were warm. Gore tramped through Cairo, “a ferocious sight-seer,” fascinated by the mixture of old and new, of Arab and European. “I did nothing but sight-see, and then I moved on,” along the Nile to the ancient sites of Karnak and Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, where he was “overwhelmed by a sense of the past, and the knowledge that there is no mystery at all about our estate despite the beautiful progression of the Book of the Dead…. We come and we go and the time between is all that we have.” He was to write later in a pseudonymous fiction that “as the train moved through the outskirts of Cairo,” it was “a strange spectacle by moonlight: thousands of mud hovels, each with the yellow flickering light of a lantern in the window. Dark shapes moved quickly in the shadows; other shapes huddled around tiny fires in front of the huts. The modern city was now only a blur of electric lights in the distance, hidden by this sweep of slums, which were as old as the Bible, unchanged since the days of the Pharaohs.” In his mind, at Luxor, he heard a first-person fictional voice resonating with the possibility of a novel, at least partly set in Egypt, about last things, our end in our beginning, the first stirring of Messiah. He kept in mind for future use the image of the ancient desert landscape. Cairo and environs, especially the atmosphere of seedy intrigue, decadence, and poverty, seemed both exotic and familiar enough to become part of his reservoir of usable experiences. Still, despite its attractions, two to three weeks of Egypt were enough. The heat had become constantly oppressive. It was difficult to sleep, even in otherwise comfortable hotels.

  Back in Cairo he had enough energy to book a flight to Paris, where after a brief stint at the Pont Royal Hotel in whose downstairs bar Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir frequently sat, he soon set himself up at the Hôtel de l’Université, a small boardinghouse-hotel on the Left Bank, run by a good cook. Tennessee, up from Rome, joined him there. “There were a bunch of English and Americans … and then the academics or academics-to-be and then Tennessee and me.” They shared the second floor. Gore usually wrote in the back. The more social and alcoholic Tennessee drank with visitors in the front. There were “two rooms and a bath for him on the street side and one room and a bath for me in the back, with the stairwell between.” One of the raffish hotel’s attractions, Williams remarked, was that “‘it suited Gore and me perfectly as there was no objection to young callers.’” Busy traffic pounded the stairs. “The Bird and I did like the same type, and we would pass boys back and forth. Once, after an unsuccessful evening’s prowl of Saint-Germain, we returned to the hotel, and the Bird said, ‘Well, that just leaves us,’ to which he says I said, ‘Don’t be macabre.’” Apparently, though, Gore had little difficulty making up for his Egyptian abstemiousness. In a short while he had all the usual one-incident pickups, most of them French trade, and at least one affair in which the affections if not the heart were touched. Still open to or at least occasionally brooding about the possibility of romance, he attracted some who invested romantic feeling in him.

  Almost as quiet as Rome, in spring 1948 the streets of Paris were uncrowded, the city experiencing the predawn of its postwar awakening. For visiting Americans the favorable exchange rate, French eagerness to be in the cultural-tourism business again, the enthusiasm of once more renewing the historical Franco-American handshake—all this gave Paris
a roseate early-morning glow. Suddenly transatlantic ships were coming into Le Havre, planes landing at Orly, ferries crossing the Channel. American artists and writers, having been excluded by a brutally long war, wanted to be in Paris again.

  Having finished a draft of The Search for the King, Gore began to rework the manuscript. When he gave the play he had written in Cairo to Tennessee to read, the latter “pronounced it the worst play he’d read in some time, and I solemnly abandoned playwriting for good, after first pointing out to him that a literary form which depended on the combined excellence of others for its execution could hardly be worth the attention of a serious writer, adding with deliberate cruelty that I did not envy him being stagestruck and his life taken up with such frivolous people as actors and directors.” It was not a renunciation Vidal was able to sustain. What sustained him most in Paris was the pleasure of simply being there at a golden time. The chestnut trees were in bloom, the food wonderful. Elegantly shabby, Paris looked lovely. “We lived as if it would be forever summer.”

  His long-hoped-for meeting with Christopher Isherwood happened accidentally, in late April, at the Deux Magots café, where Isherwood and Bill Caskey, an American ex-merchant marine and professional photographer, were sitting. As Gore walked by, he recognized from photographs the well-known forty-four-year-old Isherwood, just one year younger than Nina, author of successful novels and the celebrated Goodbye to Berlin. The British-Hollywood expatriate had already entered literary mythology as the third in the Auden-Spender triumverate. Well read in a way that none of Vidal’s American writer friends were, Isherwood, with his humor, his delight in word games, parodies, spoofs, and class-conscious ironies, delighted Gore. “‘I am American literature,’” Gore announced one day. “‘I feared as much,’” Isherwood said. “Although the voice was controlled, I saw the mounting terror in his eyes as we deconstructed American literature not only past but yet to come, making, as we did, spacious room for ourselves among the ruins.” At that first meeting Vidal seemed to Isherwood “a big husky boy with fair wavy hair and a funny, rather attractive face—sometimes he reminds me of a teddy bear, sometimes of a duck.” His talk about sex seemed youthful, cute, silly, with phrases like “peeing machines,” “mice,” and “we looked at each other and our tails started to wag,” and his disbelief in romantic love and certainty (if it existed) about its tragic, doomed nature, left Isherwood skeptical. He himself, who had no difficulty reconceptualizing marital romance into a homosexual variant whose model combined romantic devotion and domestic harmony, lived with the rough, irritable Caskey, who thought Gore the typical product of an American prep school. Gore thought Caskey suffered from a case of “terminal jealousy.” What Isherwood respected immediately, though, was Gore’s courage. “I do think he has that—though it is mingled, as in many much greater heroes, with a desire for self-advertisement,” he wrote in his diary. With youthful self-enthusiasm and bestseller narcissism, Gore asked for advice on “‘how to manage my career.’”

  They had dinner together the next two nights. Eager to talk about other writers and about Isherwood’s Hollywood life, Gore learned that Isherwood and Gore’s English publisher, John Lehmann, were great friends. The next afternoon they went out to Versailles, where Gore had last been in summer 1939. Isherwood found it disappointing, too “big and barracklike.” “I don’t know when I’ve met anyone I liked so much in such a short time,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. When Isherwood left for England, he took with him a copy of Gore’s play, the idea of which, he soon responded, was “very interesting and even potentially great.” But “the basic weakness seems to me to be in the character of the mother…. She simply isn’t interesting; too bitchy. She should be a genuinely tragic figure…. I even think there should be a big scene between her and Jimmy…. I don’t mean that you should be more shocking, more outspoken, but I want you to be more human.” Isherwood read it as a play-in-progress. So too, and much more so, was the relationship. “I am so glad,” he wrote from London, “we met in Paris, and I hope we’ll see more of each other from now on. I don’t feel like I’ve really talked to you yet.” They both looked forward to Vidal coming to London in June.

  In Gore’s conversations with Isherwood, Truman Capote’s name had come up. Vidal was irresistibly drawn to the slightly sore subject of his competitor, among other reasons because Capote was about to arrive in Paris. Somewhat disingenuously, Vidal had written to Lehmann in London, “If you see Truman Capote before he comes over here give him my number. I look forward to seeing him.” It could only have been on the principle that it is best to have your enemy in sight and in front of you, though they were not in any manifest way enemies yet. They were slightly friendly catty rivals, each of whom, traveling in some of the same literary circles, accepted the necessity of occasionally running into one another. When Capote, who was having lunch at the Deux Magots with his friend Johnny Nicholson—who later that year opened Café Nicholson in New York—introduced him to Gore, Nicholson immediately saw that “they weren’t friends.” Gore was “very handsome, very distinguished-looking, very proper. No way was he bohemian-looking.” But “Truman had written his book. So we had two rivals. That I knew. They were two personalities,” though “at that time they were very proper with one another.” They were also each looking over his shoulder at the other’s progress. Eager to combine histrionic charm with sharp intelligence, Capote treated every situation as a stage performance whose message was the assertion of his desirability and brilliance. Like Vidal, he believed in advertising himself. Unlike Vidal, he had a mystical faith in his ability to make reality conform to his desires. A performance personality, he frequently improvised, sometimes recklessly, often cleverly, softly blurring the boundary between convincing others and convincing himself. If he could do one, he could do the other. Soon after arriving in Paris, Capote was in high form, entrancing Vidal and Williams “with mischievous fantasies about the great.” He flashed a brilliant amethyst ring. “‘From André Gide,’ he sighed.” Soon after Truman and Gore met Camus at a publisher’s party, Truman began telling everyone that Camus had fallen madly in love with him. “Apparently the very sight of him was enough to cause lifelong heterosexual men to tumble out of unsuspected closets,” Vidal later wrote. “The instant lie was Truman’s art form, small but, paradoxically, authentic. One could watch the process. A famous name would be mentioned. The round pale fetus face would suddenly register a sort of tic, as if a switch had been thrown. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, I know her intimately!’”

  His lies infuriated Vidal, who, though he thought he had amiable relations with Capote, soon discovered that his rival was bad-mouthing him everywhere and at every opportunity. “All the writers are here,” Gore wrote to a new correspondent, the critic John Aldridge, “and the atmosphere is heavy with competitiveness. Someone might one day remark in print that American writers are the most highly competitive and mutually antagonistic in the world.” Though some found Capote charmingly entertaining, Vidal was not alone in thinking him offensive. The novelist Calder Willingham, with whom Gore had become casually friendly in 1947—48 in New York, found Capote as untenable as did Vidal. He is “insincere, extremely mannered … snobbish,” Willingham wrote to Vidal. Though attractive, clever, and “an excellent talker,” he “tries too hard to be charming … busy all the time at the job of getting ahead…. Also, he uses his homosexuality in this; he uses it as comedy, and plays the role of the effeminate buffoon, thus making people laugh at him. It gets attention.” One of the dangers to Vidal was his own potential overreaction. Sometimes quick to anger, his counterattacks occasionally strained other people’s credulity: Capote could not be as bad as all that. To some, such as Sandy Campbell, Tennessee Williams’s friend, Gore seemed “obsessed with Truman and his success.” He “talked about Truman continually, putting him down, insisting that Truman had never met Gide, Cocteau, etc.” But, later, “I realized from Truman’s demeanor, his sudden quietness, his failure to make any claim of friendship or acquaintanc
e [with Gide when they ran into him in Taormina in 1950], that they had never met before. What I had taken to be one of Vidal’s jealous libels was true.” As to Capote’s claim of an affair with Gide, Gore himself shortly had a chance to put it to the test.