by Fred Kaplan
Back in New York at the beginning of April 1950, he became preoccupied with writing an essay, provoked mostly by his reading of Plato and his discussions with the Moores but also by a piece called “New Innocents Abroad” by William Barrett in the Partisan Review. Vidal had no disagreement with Barrett’s slighting reference to the “scandalous” conduct of American queens in Europe, but Barrett’s general homophobic miscomprehension of the variety and prevalence of homosexual behavior among American men appalled and angered him. “It is their attitude and their influence on society which is of importance, not that of the poor parodied queens who are to the homosexual world what the musical comedy minstrels are to the Negros, the yentas to the Jews.” The statistics from the Kinsey Report needed to be taken into account; practices in other cultures, especially in ancient Greece, needed to become part of the descriptive and definitional discussion. He undoubtedly had in his memory Anaïs’s and Nina’s semi-Freudian simplifications about arrested development and the desirability of psychoanalytic treatment. He had no doubt that his love for Jimmie, whose lost presence and image stayed sharply in mind, had been honorable and natural. And was there anything significantly different between consensual commercial sex with men and the widespread commercial sex between men and women? “I am designing,” he wrote to Lehmann at the middle of April, “a set of Dialogues” as well as an essay “on homosexuality, from a Platonistic and affirmative point of view, suggesting that perhaps Jewish-Christian morality is at fault and not the human race.” They would be grounded in, among other things, the intensive reading he had been doing. “I have been studying hard these last four months all of Plato, all of Vergil (translated since I have forgotten my Latin). Boethius (Consolations) and so on. It has been revelatory and I am still somewhat stunned by it all; to me, in school, the classics consisted of those dreary battles of Caesar recorded in War Office prose.”
For the first time he set out his argument that for many men homosexual acts are normal (natural) expressions of their sexuality, just as are heterosexual acts, and that cultural and social conditions usually determine whether men have sex exclusively with men, with women, or with both. Men who had sex with men did not need to be cured. They were not ill. Queens were another matter. “As a matter of fact, the queen world frightens and depresses me and in its hysteria I see all the horror of the world brought into focus and, when I am particularly tired and despairing, I find myself almost prepared to accept the doctrine of original sin, no longer a Pelagian heretic or a classicist but, like my Italian ancestors, a good Roman Catholic.” But “pederasty among the non-neurotics is by no means a negative act. It is not the result of a delayed emotional development nor is it a substitute for heterosexual relationships; a man is a pederast not out of hatred or a fear of women but out of a natural love for men which is traditional, affirmative and, in the best sense, respectable.” Plato was a more authoritative witness than Barrett. So too was Kinsey. The argument, alas, was put into print only metaphorically, typed rather than published, and though he had had in mind submitting it to Partisan Review, he thought better of it. Probably he remembered the hostile reaction The City and the Pillar had provoked. Perhaps best to wait for another day in which to engage publicly with that issue again. The essay went into his collection of unfinished and/or unpublished manuscripts, a trunkful of which he had arranged with Pat Crocker to send back from Antigua, partly because he expected soon to have ample storage room of his own, mostly because he urged Pat to intensify his search for a buyer for the Antigua house. He needed a sale as soon as possible. “I am now in the throes of buying a place up the Hudson and so must sell, if possible, my Antigua seat.” New York City seemed unattractive even in the spring. “This city depresses me more and more,” he told Laughlin, “and every year there seem to be fewer and fewer people I want to see. The fault is no doubt with me since I have never much subscribed to the egalitarian dogmas: I am one of God’s little misanthropists.”
By May the prospects for buying Edgewater were bright. By June he could “hardly think of anything else,” he told Carl Van Vechten. “My usual hobbyhorses [are] unridden and gathering dust.” With the moral support of Alice, with whom he spent some May and June weekends in Rhinebeck, he moved closer to a purchase. The owner was delighted to have a buyer. The buyer did not think to haggle about the price, since it was so low anyway and no one seemed to think bargaining part of the ambience of the transaction. He visited his mother and grandmother in Washington. They seemed eager that he have Edgewater, which they both thought would be a fine place at which to visit him, perhaps even for substantial portions of the summer, which made them even more willing than they might otherwise have been to lend him $3,000 each. With that $6,000, he applied to the Rhinebeck Savings Bank for a mortgage of $10,000, at the going interest rate of 3 percent, for a semiannual mortgage payment of $300 for the life of the loan. The bank agreed to lend him the money. A little more than two months before his twenty-fifth birthday, the legal papers were signed. Edgewater was his.
Chapter Ten
A Room of His Own
1950-1955
From the air, Edgewater was grandly impressive. Its white colonnade in front of the Parthenon-like façade glittered in the August sunshine. The night before, Miles White—the award-winning theatrical costume designer for Oklahoma! and Carousel, who had met Gore in the late 1940s and shared with him a circle of New York artistic friends—had been at a Manhattan party. A heavy drinker, he had awakened too late to take the only morning train that would get him to Edgewater in time for lunch, the start of a weekend in the country house Gore had bought just a month before. Worried that there would be other guests waiting, embarrassed at the thought that he would disappoint his host, Miles flung himself out of bed. At the Thirty-second Street East River airport he hired a small seaplane to fly him up. The plane held steady to the eastward side of the river, past Hyde Park, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck, the river houses impressive in their wooded settings. Suddenly Miles recognized the railroad bridge and island landmarks. “That’s it!” he shouted. There was the shape of the land and the distinctive building his host had described. As the pilot taxied toward the dock, Gore came out of the house, down the steps by the colonnade. He quickly walked toward the river. Miles got out. As the seaplane taxied off, gaining speed, ascending, the two friends walked up the slope. The waist-high grass still had not been cut.
Soon after he moved into Edgewater in late July 1950, Gore sat down in the large octagonal room at the north end on the first floor and wrote, “She wore her trauma like a plume.” He had not been able to resist that sentence. Just as he had a new house to live in, he had a new novel to write, though he had not intended to write another just then. But they seemed to go together, as if the move had energized his imagination. He had, finally, a house of his own, one he really wanted, a place that had all the advantages and possibilities for anchoring him to a local habitation and a name. Antigua had been too distant, too limited. Though it spoke to his impulse to establish his own domestic space, it did not fulfill that desire. Edgewater he knew from the beginning would be different, would be successful. It did not matter that the grass demanded cutting, the interior was in disrepair, the building needed painting, the New York Central trains shook the building, the front door was blocked by a foot-high mound of compacted soot that made the kitchen the only usable entranceway on the front side of the house. Confident that in due time all this would be taken care of, he was less certain about where he would get the money. Television was a possibility, and he soon adapted two Somerset Maugham stories. “Some network asked me…. I was quite thrilled to be asked to write two of them.” At first he thought they would be used. “I thought they were quite good. But I didn’t do them in the ordinary TV form, and the people couldn’t understand the plays because they weren’t in standard format. I never made that mistake again. But I got paid something.” Even when they fell through, he still had high hopes. “One of those shows,” he wrote to Lehmann, �
�(and they do good things: Conrad, Hawthorne, James) a month and I shall be able to live in style up here, composing slowly and elegantly my first major (it must be everything now, everything!) novel.” He soon wrote another short story, “Erlinda and Mr. Coffin,” “rather long, nonhomosexual, faintly ghostly and legendary in tone.” But “there are no places here that publish longer pieces, aside from the quarterlies which I always regard as a last resort since I feel in need of money rather than prestige these days.” Hollywood was a possibility. For the time being, though, his overtures got nowhere, and he was disappointed that Isherwood made no effort to help him. It did matter, however, that the house was not sufficiently winter-livable. Since he had to put $3,000 into repairs that needed to be done right away, he took the money from his depleted savings. “I’ve bought an 1820 Georgian house on the banks of the Hudson,” he happily complained to John Lehmann. “It is very handsome and fine with an octagonal library and vast white columns, six of them, supporting a Parthenesque facade. I shall die of starvation before many moons have passed but the death will be serene I am sure, with a view of the river and my own seven acres of woods and unkempt lawn.” In the meantime he found himself totally absorbed in and entranced by his new novel, for which he had a title, The Judgment of Paris. Perhaps it would bring in some money beyond the usual modest advance, though his expectations were qualified by the worry that his “Meredithean comedy” was “destined … to be read as little as that great man’s works are.” More important, he felt himself on the verge of a major change in writing style and novelistic vision.
At Edgewater he was delighted to have guests and to be a guest, mainly at Alice Astor’s. With her help he soon had furniture, delivered by truck from the warehouse where she kept large numbers of things she had been collecting, particularly because she had a mania for buying furniture and had in mind furnishing a grand London house to which she would someday retire. “A sofa and some beds were delivered, all on loan. Like a set director, she did all the rooms and then from time to time she’d come over and take the furniture away.” One of the beds went upstairs to the third floor, into a bedroom assigned to John Latouche. He was expected so frequently that he was to have his own designated room. Actually, he stayed more often at Alice’s nearby and was a frequent visitor at her suite at the Gladstone Hotel. They had become lovers sometime earlier that year. It seemed clear that Alice, as usual, was the pursuer, Latouche the pursued. That his two best friends were for the time being best friends was a great convenience for Gore, who regularly had dinners and lunches with them at Rhinebeck and had them over to Edgewater, where he finally, sweating heavily, cut the waist-high grass himself. Day visitors from the city came and now, with the extra beds, overnight guests, though the small, inconvenient kitchen and his rudimentary skills as a cook made most meals semi- (or even non-) events. “Life in the mansion is serene,” he told Pat Crocker. “Numerous visitors and a ruinous series of repairs, however, are reducing me to a wreck and I can’t wait until I make some more money, to finish the house up. Vogue is doing a piece on it which should be very chic, so chic that I will then have to pay double for everything from the local cretins.” Vogue never published the piece, and, despite the expense, he was still eager to have visitors. “My dear Carlo,” he wrote to Carl Van Vechten, as he did to numbers of friends, “if you are mobile some day in the week, or over a weekend, come up here and sit between the columns and contemplate the river. The directions are simple: get on the Taconic Parkway and follow it until it ends at Red Hook, then drive through Red Hook toward Barrytown (clearly marked at various intersections). Go to the railroad station, cross the tracks, turn left and there I am, the only house on the river at that point. Do come.”
When there were no visitors, he embraced the solitude that Edgewater provided, the opportunity for long periods of reading and writing, particularly the former. The autodidactic impulse, from childhood on, was strong. This time, though, the reading, connected to the new novel, had a purpose, part of an effort to recast himself as a novelist. He had begun to feel frustratingly disappointed with what he called “the national style,” the flat, spare, unpoetic, naturalistic prose associated at its best with Hemingway, which had come to dominate American literature in the 1930s and 1940s. Within it he had written two bestsellers, but he had a low opinion of the artistic merit of The City and the Pillar, he thought In a Yellow Wood a dismal failure, he still deceived himself into thinking Dark Green, Bright Red a success, and he himself missed the desirable differentness and perhaps new opportunity represented by A Search for the King. What he did see clearly, he told Lehmann, is that “I am not a naturalistic writer…. and it took me some time to discover that I was never going to master that method, that my own gifts, such as they are, are of quite a different sort than I had first suspected. The enormous aesthetic failure of City finally convinced me of this.” Whatever reputation Williwaw had earned him had been “swept away by the scandalous success of a naive and hastily written book which, though eminently true philosophically, was not well done, and, in consequence, I was regarded as a most barbarous sort of young naturalist, a pale Dreiser and a queer one at that. It has been a very humiliating experience for me, these last two years, to endure the reputation of that book and to realize, worst of all, that it is now considered worthy and rather dull, well-meaning…. Read with a friendly eye, dear John, my nervous apologies; I am not frank often and, in letters at least, never coherent for I write them late at night, groggy with fatigue, rage and pleasure.”
A great admirer of Mann, he now also began reading everything by George Meredith—“the Milton of novelists”—Flaubert, Smollett, Scott, and Henry James, the last having been recommended to him rather slyly by his Exeter teacher Leonard Stevens, with whom he still corresponded. On one of his trips to Southampton he bought the complete New York Edition “for $125. I had $300 in the bank. That’s all I had.” He now read James through from beginning to end and added, to his exposure to the seriousness of Jamesian high comedy, a careful reading of the bawdy intellectual comedy of a group of Latin authors, particularly Petronious and Apuleius. They seemed models for some synthesis of his own that would capture in modern terms the tradition in fiction that brought together humor, satire, and high intellectual seriousness about society, culture, and the human condition. He had no doubt about his own narrative skills; he knew how to tell a story. With a gift for language, for the sharply witty phrase, the turn of words that captured an intellectual or a social reality, he realized now that he had been sacrificing this talent on the altar of somber naturalism. As a poet he had expressed linguistic and tonal rhythms gracefully. Why could he not create a more supple, expressive prose that would bring into his fiction the virtues of his talents as a poet? In conversation he had a gift for being both funny and truthful at the same time. Why could he not write fiction that would embody that aspect of himself, completely suppressed in the naturalistic mode, that expressed the seriousness of sharp wit and high comedy? As he began writing The Judgment of Paris, sitting in the quiet beauty of the octagonal room, looking out at the early-autumn Hudson River landscape, he knew he was making a decisive change in his artistic self-definition. “My place is incredibly beautiful,” he wrote to Lehmann; “the leaves are turning and I composing, slowly, The Judgment of Paris.”
On Labor Day, 1950, a month after his occupying Edgewater, a significant piece of the puzzle of Gore’s life began to fall into place. Walking down a corridor in the Everard Baths, wrapped in the usual towels, his eyes met those of a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, Howard Auster. “I saw Gore coming down the corridor, and he was really something. Good-looking. Somehow our eyes struck. In the corridor. Towels here and a schmatte there. Then we started talking and ended up in bed. And it was just a total disaster.” But in a larger sense it quickly became a great success. “There was an enormous attraction, but it wasn’t physical. But it didn’t matter, you know. It was a kind of relief. I felt like I had met a soul mate…. At the end—and y
ou never exchange names—I couldn’t resist, and I said, as I was putting my clothes back on, ‘Now, listen, tell me who you are?’ And he said he was a student at the University of Virginia. On the chair was a copy of The New Yorker and a book and maybe a copy of another prestigious magazine. I said, ‘Ya know, you’re full of shit!’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘No one who’s a student at the University of Virginia reads The New Yorker magazine.’ I thought he might say, ‘Well, fuck you. Who are you to know?’ Instead he was delighted. He said, ‘You wanna have lunch tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I gave him the number of the Lever Brothers mailroom, where I was working, and he called the next day at twelve o’clock precisely. He said, ‘Come on over to the Plaza.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘One o’clock or whatever.’ So I went over. He started the control-freak business right at lunch. An artichoke with hollandaise. The most gentile of vegetables.”
Born into a working-class Jewish family, commuting daily from his parents’ Bronx apartment to his job in Manhattan, Howard Auster was barely a third-generation American. His maternal grandparents had come from the Polish Pale, his paternal from Marienbad, impoverished Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants whose family histories in America embodied the usual pattern of immigration, return, desertion, remarriage, ghettoization, and gentile-phobia in the first generation, slow assimilation in the second and third. His maternal stepgrandfather worked a rented farm in the northeastern Bronx, then gradually sold off pieces of property he had bought or claimed he owned as the urban population expanded northward. The extended-family life at the isolated farm was Howard’s most attractive childhood memory, a brief period of stability. For his mother, Hannah Olswang, born in 1908, the farm provided a refuge from her marital miseries during the first six years of Howard’s life. Eager to be free of her parents’ heavy-handed constraints, without education or vocation, at eighteen she had married Harry Auster, a compulsive gambler who earned his living as a taxi driver. Two years later she bore their only son. Having assimilated Hollywood images of glamour, Hannah, using the name Ann and changing Auster to Austen, worked as a hatcheck and cigarette girl at a nightclub, the first step, she hoped, toward a show-business career. A pretty young woman, she could dance and sing well enough to make the dream but not its realization possible.