Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Though he had six months earlier declined Bowles’s and Williams’s invitation to go to Europe with them at the end of 1948, Gore still had it in mind to go to Europe, probably in spring 1949. He hoped to be in London for the publication of Lehmann’s edition of The City and the Pillar, scheduled for May. Not that he was happy with Lehmann. Indeed, he was simmeringly furious. Soon after his arrival in Antigua, he had written him a friendly letter. “Serene and working for the first time since last May. Started a book on a revolution in a country like Guatemala and a rather humorous story, a bit anti-revolutionary in tone but unpolitical, absolutely unpolitical—to be called, I think, Dark Green, Bright Red—the jungle and blood; any number of other symbols can be safely maintained. I’ll send you Search for the King (how is that title?) around March when I make it ready for press—turned out fairly good they tell me, be out next January. Did you get S of C, and what do you think of it?” On January 3, 1949, Dutton published Season in New York. Within a few weeks Gore wrote Lehmann twice more, tactfully but with an anxious subtext. Are you going to publish Season? Vidal’s next letter crossed Lehmann’s in the mail. “I have such a high regard for your gifts,” Lehmann wrote in the middle of January, “that I cannot conceal my disappointment, which Rosamond shares…. It strikes me as a tired book.” Though not entirely wrong about some of Season’s weaknesses, Lehmann had no eye for its strengths. To Gore, Lehmann was for the moment a hateful semi-enemy. What was the point of having a publisher who disliked one’s work? Isherwood advised him not to “break with John yet. At any rate, not until The City and the Pillar has been published. I think changing publishers is always a pity, anyhow. One suffers for it…. It has to be weighed carefully, like a divorce.” Gore took Isherwood’s advice. Lehmann, who published Dark Green, Bright Red in 1951, was to be out of business as a publisher soon, essentially because he was undercapitalized and overextended. “Bad management,” Graham Watson remarked. “Lehmann went bust because he was an intellectual nonbusinessman and he had a taste for certain types of books, fairly eclectic and fairly intellectual.” To Gore the rejection was both painful and infuriating. Rather than respond to Lehmann, he kept silent for months. In April he wrote to him, “as to The Season of Comfort: I’ve made no attempt to get another [British] publisher for it; on the other hand I’m not anxious, at the moment, to let you see any new work. We both have plenty of time to think all this over.” He had been uneasy about Lehmann from the beginning, but he had had high hopes that as author and publisher they would flourish.

  After two months in Guatemala, Gore returned to New York at the end of February 1949, anxious about reviews of Season and about his health. “Did I tell you I arrived in NYC,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, “with a nasty case of clap contracted from one of the bels of Panajachel?” On Latouche’s recommendation he went to see the omnipresent Dr. Max Jacobson, whom he had first learned about from Anaïs. He was “a friend of the stars. If you went out with Tennessee, suddenly Jacobson would be at the end of the room.” Having chatted with him at numbers of parties, Gore thought him charming. Anyway, he was “the only doctor I knew…. I go over and he’s delighted to see me…. There I was, at twenty-three, ready to become an addict of Max Jacobson, and since I had a long life ahead of me, he’d have a lot of revenue. So he was twinkling. And I said, ‘I’ve got this problem.’ And I whipped out my cock and I said, ‘You know, I’ve got this clap.’ He turned white. ‘For God’s sake, go to a doctor. I mean, I mean … go to a urologist.’ Not interested at all in what would have been a real illness…. It turned out not to be venereal disease. Something to do with strain, as they call it. But it looked like clap and it seemed like clap.” Pat found his evasion worth teasing. “Your disease is a direct result,” he wrote to him, “of your filthy bed habits, your complete lack of taste etc. Body juices indeed. That was pus you were sliding in on.” Having sex with strangers entailed risks. Within limits, they seemed worth taking, especially when the worst consequence was a venereal disease. Sulphur and the newly emerging antibiotics made the threat bearable, the diseases, if treated, manageable. “The mice and pussycats are as rewarding as ever. True love hides but croons from afar,” though this “afar” in spring 1949 seems to have been Houston, where he went on a book-signing and lecturing tour in early April. The Houston “true love” eventually faded entirely out of memory. At parties, at bars, in New York or wherever he traveled, there was the expectation of erotic excitement, of one-night or even fifteen-minute pickups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade.”

  On the morning of March 16, 1949, seventy-eight-year-old Senator Gore, at home in his ground-floor apartment on Crescent Place and Wisconsin Avenue, while teasing his wife at breakfast, suffered a fatal stroke. The long-articulate life fell into silence. The day before, his assistant, Roy Thompson, had brought him his income-tax forms to sign, his signature the last official act of his life. On the morning of St. Patrick’s Day the Senator’s ex-son-in-law and his grandson came down together by train from New York. Gene Vidal had known and liked Senator Gore since the early 1920s. To his grandson he had been the most formative positive influence of his early life. Dot “wept quietly, but talked coherently.” Visitors came to pay their respects to the widow, many of them ancient Washingtonians whose hands also had once held the reins of power. The Oklahoma Senate and House delegations paid a call. Always the consummate politician’s wife, Dot “greeted each by name. Never got a name wrong. Remembered to repeat Mr. Gore’s good opinion of the visitor.” There was no body to view. When Gene and Gore arrived, the remains were en route to Oklahoma for a ceremonial funeral.

  Much remained, however, for Gore of his grandfather’s legacy, including the all-too-ready availability of self-assertion through lineage, a calling card that if left too often at too many doors might indeed not serve him well. At Exeter his frequent reference to his family had impressed some but offended many. It was a temptation difficult for a young man to resist. Later that calling card was to be used more selectively, and indeed transformed into a playing card in a self-conscious literary and political strategy, Senator Gore as both a point of reference through which to make his own political positions more rhetorically effective and Senator Gore (and his Washington world) transformed into fiction and memoir. The imprint was deep, perhaps the best of it the influence of T. P. Gore’s love of argument, his attachment to fact and rational analysis, his deep engagement with history and books, his sensitivity to language, particularly to irony, and his satiric humor. “If there were any other race but the damned human race, I’d go join it,” the Senator had said, a disenchantment with human nature as deep as Jonathan Swift’s and Mark Twain’s. Years later, in Chicago, Saul Bellow asked the visiting Gore Vidal if Bellow could bring his young son with him to the hotel to say hello: “I want him to meet someone really cynical!” Gore responded with a gentle but firm corrective: “Realistic!” Unlike cynicism, realism had comic potential, perhaps most happily illustrated by one of T. P. Gore’s campaign-trail stories about “the hitchhiker [in the 1930s] who was hitching a ride out on the highway in Oklahoma, and a big, long Cadillac with a chauffeur stopped, and the man in the back said, ‘Do you want a ride?’ The hitchhiker said, ‘Oh, yes, that would be great.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you. It’s campaign now, and I’m a Republican. I’ve got a Republican badge on here, and I don’t allow anyone to ride in my car unless they wear a Republican badge. Would you mind?’ ‘Oh, no, no.’ He got in. They went several miles down the rode, and the hitchhiker said, ‘Oh, stop the car!’ ‘Why?’ ‘See that peach orchard out there? The peaches are just becoming ripe, and I want to get some.’ The man said, ‘Do you own this place?’ He says, ‘No, I don’t, but I’ve been a Republican for ten minutes, and I’m just dying to steal something.’”

  In early April, Senator Gore’s friends and family gathered to take him the last solemn mile. Dot was her usual brave, composed self. Gore was
not there. If Dot had known that he was only four hundred and fifty miles away, in Houston, she might have found his absence even more difficult to understand. At the end of March, having been invited to sign books and lecture, he spent ten days or so on the road, first in New Orleans, then mostly in Houston and Dallas. None of this was especially memorable except for the few days in Houston, which “was a crazy town, fascinating, very Trimalchian. I had quite a good time there,” mostly partying, enjoying his status as a visiting literary celebrity. Sylvia and Ted Brown, former New Yorkers with whom he stayed, hosted a reading, a book-signing, and a well-attended cocktail party at their bookstore, the main intellectual-social center for Houston writers and readers. One of the ballet companies was in town. So too was a beautiful, wealthy Houstonian who was in love with Leon Danielian and hoped he would marry her. Leon was on tour in Canada. Gore happily had her on his arm at numbers of parties, especially the late-night revelry the ballet company enjoyed and at which Gore was welcome. In Oklahoma City, the Senator was being buried. In Houston, Gore partied, to the “chagrin” of his grandmother, to his own as well, he later said. Partly he wanted to avoid seeing his mother: mostly he combined resolute stubbornness with an overwhelming fear of death, the power of which he first felt fully at this time and which for the rest of his life kept him away from almost every funeral he could reasonably have been expected to attend. Confinement in a narrow coffin surrounded by earthy darkness was an imaginative claustrophobe’s worst nightmare. “I didn’t want to go. My thanatophobia took over. I always was afraid of death and funerals. Going back to my first knowledge that there was such a thing. Why do anything about it?” But his grandmother may have felt equally strongly that his place was with her in Oklahoma City. His fear may have been incapacitating. It also may have had in it some combination of defiance and denial.

  He would have liked also to defy the critics, many of whom did not find Season convincing. Some could not understand why a book focusing on a mother-son relationship was stubbornly antipsychological, especially the abrupt ending. Others found the novel excessively psychological. Amid substantial praise there was a backwash of reservation from those who felt its stylistic modernisms forced and awkward, its psychological insights routine, its energy level low. His Houston friends may not have celebrated his visit any the less fulsomely because the headline editor for the Houston Post had called it, in bold print, “An Error for Gore Vidal, A Mother, A Son and a Debacle.” The reviewer had concluded that “the entire book is so fuzzy, so uncertain as to be unworthy of a review of this length.” Vidal himself, the Houston Post insisted, as did many of the negative reviews, “is important as one of the nation’s most promising writers.” Undoubtedly “a writer of genius,” claimed the dyspeptic New York Post reviewer, who found himself “disliking intensely every character in Gore Vidal’s novels.” There was also widespread praise for Season, laudatory reviews in the Herald Tribune and Saturday Review, among others. Even among the harsh critics, including those who urged him to return to the realism of Williwaw, a general consensus existed that a major novelist had emerged with the promise of a substantial oeuvre. Eager savants tried to predict and influence its direction. On one side was the alliance of John Aldridge, soon to publish his influential After the Lost Generation, and the Orville Prescotts of the newspaper reviewing world. On the other, those who placed primary emphasis on the novel as an aesthetic entity, to be judged not by moral content but on artistic merit. Aldridge believed that the worthiness of a novel importantly resided in its value structure, the degree to which it represented some culturally desirable and sanctioned moral stance. Prescott insisted that the values had to be those of his conservative middle-class constituency. With Aldridge, Gore did a tentative dance for a while, beginning with the critics’s favorable comments in Harper’s, which had occasioned the beginning of their relationship. Gore had some residual hope that despite his emphasis on values—often a code word for ideological litmus tests, including homophobia—Aldridge would be an ally, someone with whom he could have constructive dialogue about his work and the novel as a literary form. From Paris the previous year he had been both friendly and frank when he had written to Aldridge, “I’d like to talk to you about writing. I seem to have no very firm convictions only a kind of luminous tenuous attitude.” Over the next three years they were to see one another occasionally in New England and New York, to correspond at some length about their different views of art and, inevitably, to end as enemies.

  After The City and the Pillar, though Gore had a supporter at the New York Times—the poet and editor Harvey Breit, who soon managed to get the Times to publish his feature profile of the young novelist—he began to hate the Times in general. Prescott refused to review anything of Vidal’s. Even Breit’s effort fell short of satisfaction. When the interview-article came out early in February 1950, Vidal felt that each of his “bejeweled epigrams was ruined by Mr Breit’s poor memory; each time he very nearly got the point, he came close enough to make me look a trifle more foolish than usual. I think the whole interview makes me look marvelously clever, brilliant and pretentious.” Like most writers, he needed the New York Times’s support, the visibility and sales its favorable reviews generated. Like many, he came to hate its conservatism, its hostility, and, worst of all, its neglect. Not to be reviewed, or not to be reviewed prominently enough, was a form of erasure. Somewhat battered but still standing, he had enough vulnerability to be hurt, enough resoluteness not only to keep going but to recast the moment into an overview of the longer perspective. “Thus do I,” despite the onslaught, “most ancient and revered of young authors, speak, dedicated as I am to longevity and performance and hopelessly jaundiced,” he wrote to his lukewarm British publisher. He feared that having exposed himself with The City and the Pillar to a homophobic culture, he would be forever anathema to the champions of Middle American normalcy. He would be living for a long time, as he had not fully enough anticipated, though he had been warned, with the backlash against his third novel. He tried to keep his sense of humor. “The critics still regard me,” he wrote to Pat Croker, “as a variety of poison oak and the girls are waiting for me to lead them like a Priapic Piper into the new Sodom, with milk and honey blest.” He could neither mollify the critics nor satisfy the girls. At least Dutton and Nick Wreden stood strongly behind him, though sales of Season were modest compared to those of City and Williwaw. A Search for the King was scheduled for January 1950 publication. Except for minor revisions, he had finished Dark Green, Bright Red. Before leaving for Guatemala the previous December, he had met with Wreden at The Players to complain about Dutton’s sales efforts and the long delay between his completion of a novel and its publication. Wreden had been sympathetic, conciliatory, constructive. But Dutton, in essence, had done and was doing its best. Though Gore had flirted with switching from Dutton to Doubleday, he was realistic enough to realize that the change probably would do him little to no good. There seemed no pressing enough reason to fly from one evil to another. He did his best to publicize himself, something for which he had a natural talent, refined by his publicity-conscious political family and childhood. Since he had been proclaimed by numerous commentators as an important literary voice of the new generation and since “New Writers” was a topic that caught people’s attention, he worked up a lecture, a version of which a Dallas newspaper published in coordination with his visit, on “The Young Writer in America.” It was his first literary essay as a professional writer.

  The previous fall, at the invitation of a young instructor, he had given an early version of it, called “Writers of the 40s,” at City College of New York. In Houston he gave the lecture at the University of Houston and in Dallas at the Cokesbury Auditorium. In New York late in the month he went up to New Haven to lecture at Yale’s Dwight Hall, sponsored by the Graduate School, where his friendly professorial audience gave him high praise. “I liked [your lecture],” one wrote to him, “because it was fearlessly presented, uninhibited by acade
mics, fresh and youthful, assailable in only a few spots. I would advise a slower reading of it next time. It is too full of vitamins to be digested at the rate you deliver it.” Washburn, Bingham, and Lewis were being lectured at by professors at Harvard. Here Gore was lecturing to the Yale equivalent of those lecturing to his former Exeter colleagues. The observation gave him pleasure. So too did a late-night telephone call from a distant but familiar voice. “So that’s what you thought of me!” After all these years, a friendly Liz Whitney was on the other end of the line. She had recognized herself as one of the minor characters in The Season of Comfort.

  As the weather turned warmer, Gore looked forward to his mid-May departure for Europe, first to London for Lehmann’s publication of City, then to Paris, probably to Rome, perhaps Spain, and Morocco to see Paul Bowles. When Leon Danielian, “very chatty, very sociable,” also planning a European trip, suggested they sail together on the New Amsterdam, he was delighted to have Leon’s company. Even with Capote he could be amiable enough, as he was at a lunch hosted at a midtown restaurant in early April by another young Southern writer, Speed Lamkin. Short, porcine, effeminate, Speed seemed to Gore one more of the apparently endless train of new writers about to burst, so each thought, into glory and wealth, “new comets about to flash from darkness to darkness.” Actually he did not think Lamkin formidable competition. Lamkin had invited Vidal, Capote, and Alice Astor, the glamorous, understated, beautiful mother of Ivan Obolensky, one of Speed’s good friends from Harvard. Lamkin “had me and Truman Capote to lunch,” Gore recalled, “and he told everybody he had both of us because we weren’t speaking. ‘I just couldn’t figure out which one I wanted for lunch, so I had both of them.’ That was his glamorous week.” Suddenly Gore and Alice Astor caught one another’s eye and began to talk. Slim, medium-tall, dark-haired, with deep brown eyes and a touch of mysterious exoticism, she seemed to Gore compellingly attractive in a way that touched his feelings and his curiosity. Like Anaïs, at certain angles, in a certain light, she was beautiful, both abstractly distant and absorbingly receptive, intensely there and someplace else. Her low-toned, English-accented voice charmed with its distinctive sensuality. Remarkably young-looking for her age, she was forty-six, the same age as Anaïs and Nina. Wealthy, a lover of the arts, three times divorced and about to be divorced from her current husband, highly placed in the New York and London social worlds, she apparently found Gore as absorbing as he found her. He wanted to know her better. Since he was sailing in mid-May, it was obvious that they had only the opportunity of this one meeting now. But he had intimations of a friendship to come.