Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  His outward gaze was mostly turned toward New York, his inward focused on intense reading. Still, the Weisses were fun and nice, and Gore’s larger New York City literary life, soon to be extended to television and then the movies, seemed exotic to them. When Ted asked him to satisfy one of his students’ curiosity about Tennessee Williams, Gore graciously responded,

  As for Tennessee, you may pass on to the young man the information that he reads a great deal of verse, almost no prose of any kind, that the greatest single literary influence on him was Hart Crane (he set out to be a poet, not a playwright) and a later but less influential mentor has been Rilke, in translation. He admires Sartre’s plays, despite a fierce snub we both received from that busy little Caesar (I don’t share Tenn’s admiration) one afternoon in Paris. Among contemporaries T.W. personally likes Carson McCullers, Windham and myself … putting up with those works of ours he cannot bring himself to read with good humor and right feeling. He does not like novels though he will read short stories with some pleasure. He has had little personal contact with other theatre writers. He once wrote O’Neill a fan letter after The Iceman Cometh, getting a long response, shakily written. I read it but can’t remember what it said. So much for my talents as a recollector of the great.

  Down the road from Edgewater, near the entrance to the Bard campus, Gore and Howard found a better use for Bard than its academic resources. At Adolph’s, a small tavern and student hangout, Howard met some of the more adventuresome members of a faculty and student body that had its fair share of men interested in men. Some he occasionally brought back to Edgewater.

  Though he never spoke at Bard, Gore had begun to supplement his income and cultivate his audience by lecturing. “My life has been desperately busy these last few months,” he told Lehmann. “Every other week I go out to lecture to Ladies’ clubs: the Midwest, New England, the South, all over. I do it all in a sort of daze, for the money. I have also had my father move one of his small factories within two miles of my house, to provide me with a sinecure, which it will do very nicely as soon as the troubles stop but after six months they still persist.” Late in 1951, on his way to Philadelphia to lecture, as he drove through Manhattan under the elevated subway tracks, he banged his car into a steel post. Miraculously the car was intact and no one else hurt. His ribs, though, were badly bruised. He simply drove on. Fortunately, if the police had been involved (apparently they were not), at least he now had a driver’s license. A fast driver who frequently exceeded the speed limit, he had recently been stopped for speeding on his way to Joe O’Donohue’s in Red Hook. “The state trooper called me over and said. ‘You’re speeding. I have to give you a ticket. Where is your license?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ He thought I was either joking or I didn’t have it with me. He chose to interpret it that I didn’t have it with me. I had the registration. ‘Okay,” he said, ‘the magistrate is over there. You go and pay your fine for speeding.’ So I went to the justice of the peace with this thing and I said I’ve been speeding. And he said, ‘Well, where’s your driver’s license?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ He said, ‘You mean you don’t have it with you.’ ‘No, I never got one.’ ‘You never got one!’ and he became extremely interested in the case…. ‘Well, why didn’t you get a driver’s license?’ ‘It just never occurred to me.’” With aching ribs, he drove on to Philadelphia and gave his lecture. Isherwood, who had just been at Edgewater for a visit, was there with John Van Druten to attend an out-of-town performance of Van Druten’s adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera. To Gore, who joined Isherwood at the theater, it seemed more Van Druten than Isherwood. Still aching, he drove back to Edgewater, where the doctor diagnosed and taped up four broken ribs. “I am in physical discomfort most of the time with these ribs but,” he told Lehmann stoically, “that sort of thing is not eternal.”

  At Williams College, where he went to lecture in mid-May 1951, the bookstore manager, Raymond Washburn, a Vidal enthusiast, eagerly greeted him. He had been to Edgewater for a visit, where Gore had introduced him to his grandmother, whom he found “characteristically fascinating.” They had all gone over to Alice’s for lunch. Latouche’s “conversational ability” impressed Washburn. “I’m not sure,” he wrote to Gore, “I could survive a long siege of it, for either my mental capacities would shrivel away (what few there are) being blanched in the reflective glory of his verbal acumen, or the constant assaults upon my ears would soon leave me deaf and dumb.” From Barrytown, Gore took the train to Williamstown, where Washburn and others had arranged a meeting with students eager to talk to him about the ongoing public discussions he had been conducting with John Aldridge on the future of the novel. That evening he gave a talk on literary reputations, mostly to faculty, one of whom, Richard Poirier, who had just come to Williams and was the same age as Gore, persistently took him to task for his undervaluation of Faulkner. Faulkner had been the subject of Poirier’s recent Ph.D. dissertation. He “didn’t really care much for Faulkner,” Gore later remarked. “I had been brought up by a family from that area. He was so startling and exotic to Northerners but was too down-home for my taste.” In the argument that developed, Gore challenged Poirier to name one writer not sanctioned by academia that he liked. Had he read Meredith? Poirier had not. “Your view on every writer is exactly that of every English teacher.” Poirier kept pushing. “How do you explain the lack of acceptance and popularity of Faulkner in this country? He has greater fame in France.’ Gore wouldn’t have any of this,” Poirier later said. “‘But Faulkner has been accepted here,’ he said. ‘He’s a revered figure.’ Then, as he went on, I began to see that what he was really saying is that Faulkner’s reputation was quite adequate to the attainment. And this was the beginning of my friendship with him and my deep reverence for his sweetness…. He was immaculate-looking, stately-looking, princely. He looked like a young prince. He had a wonderful voice and inflection, and above all he was always very, very gracious and charming, as I’ve always thought him to be.” In New York, in fall 1951, when they ran into one another at one of Poirier’s hangouts, the popular Blue Parrot, they joked pleasantly together, the start of a friendship.

  Inviting her to visit in late-summer 1951, Gore wrote to Anaïs, who was spending much of her time in California, that Edgewater is “a perfect summer house, airy and full of green light.” It was a happy refuge, especially from discussions about values, a perfect place for work. Though there was still a distance to go, the house was shaping up. Basic repainting had been done, repairs made, sufficient furniture was in place. Howard, with Alice’s help and Nina’s suggestions, began to redecorate. “My mother, her twelve-year-old son, a colored cook and her twelve year old daughter are all in the house for the summer,” he told Anaïs, “and I rather like the activity: I feel quite patriarchal. Not easy to work but soon, when the library floor is painted and the new shelves are put up, I will lock myself away and begin my Messiah novel.” But money was very tight. The $1,000 advance for Death in the Fifth Position helped. So too did Dutton’s willingness to advance money on a monthly basis. The small amounts from the Auchincloss trust took care of the very low mortgage payments, but austerity was still necessary. Howard paid his own bills in New York. Eager to get out of the mailroom at Lever Brothers, when he was turned down for every job he applied for in advertising, on Gore’s recommendation he changed his name on his résumé from the identifiably Jewish Auster to Austen. Whether that change made the difference or not, he got the next two jobs for which he applied, first as a sales and display assistant at Helena Rubenstein, then as an advertising-agency account assistant at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. Whenever there were joint activities, Gore paid, as he did for everything at Edgewater. He had a strong sense of possession, a country squire comfortable in a house that increasingly reflected his vision of himself.

  At Columbia University one evening in February 1952 Gore joined Malcolm Cowley, the literary and cultural critic born in 1898, who had analyz
ed the post–World War I generation in Exile’s Return, and the much younger John Aldridge for a forum discussion of the state of the novel. The relationship with Aldridge had grown more complicated than simply critic-pseudo-novelist and novelist-occasional-critic jockeying for position and prominence. Initially Vidal had thought Aldridge might do something important for him and other writers of his generation. If Aldridge was to be the preeminent critic of his time, the new Edmund Wilson, then his imprimatur would be valuable. By 1952 Vidal was beginning to see that Aldridge would not rise to Wilson’s level. He later began to think of him as another version of Orville Prescott; it was becoming clear that Aldridge might become an enemy, certainly not a supporter. After their correspondence in 1948, they had met in New York in fall 1949, having lunch and spending part of an afternoon wandering around the midtown bookstores, at each of which Gore looked for his own books. “Maybe he thought it would be impressive,” Aldridge later remarked, “if the stores had his books. I think he wanted my support, and for a long time I think he thought he had it. I reviewed about three of his books in the Times, always somewhat mixed. But he seemed to think that that was just fine.” Aldridge’s review of The Judgment of Paris was not unfriendly, but it was condescending and had in it distant homophobic touches. As always, his main thrust was “values,” the absence of moral values in contemporary fiction, equating a novel’s value quotient with its literary merit. Latent in Aldridge’s emphasis was the likelihood that writers who were homosexual, such as Williams, Isherwood, and Vidal, would fall damnably short as artists simply on that basis. At Columbia each of the participants had given a brief talk about the novel and then squared off in an amiably contentious performance, Gore much the best public performer of the three. “On the strength of that,” Aldridge recalled, “we were invited to Princeton to do the same thing again. Cowley said we were ‘the happiness boys.’ We were anything but spreading happiness; we were talking about the contemporary novel.”

  That spring, at Princeton, the critic R. P. Blackmur, who had arranged the rematch, introduced them for another semistaged literary slugfest. They were joined by the young novelist William Styron, who had recently published Lie Down in Darkness and whom Gore rather liked. As the well-attended discussion turned hot, Gore said to Styron, “‘Do you notice that there’s basically no interest in you and me and only in the two critics?’ A college audience took them seriously and Styron and me as people of no consequence. Producers of raw material, which they in turn shaped. Values, Values, Values. Then Aldridge said that there weren’t many values anymore in a modern society like the United States because there was no class system, except there were pockets like the Army where there was hierarchy and a class system and you could write about class. And Cowley got up and said, ‘Values, Values, Values.’ He had kind of a funny lisp on V so it sounded like a W. ‘There are plenty of values. Everywhere you look there’s a value of some kind.’ And I got up and said, ‘Mr. Aldrich was born in Sauk City, Iowa, or some such place, and was a brief time in the East and then he came back and taught in some Middle Western place. Since he’s never knowingly encountered the class system, he doesn’t think it exists.’ I said, ‘Anyway, I’m glad he’s here at Princeton, where there are so many members of a class higher than he, and all eager to condescend to him.’” Afterward they went to the Nassau Tavern. Blackmur, with whom Gore would have liked to have talked about Henry James, had left immediately after introducing the speakers. He was stuck again with Cowley and Aldridge, among others. The principals kept hammering at the putative gap between values and literary merit. “I had to leave early,” Aldridge recalled. “But he and I were going at it strongly. I was talking about my old theme of values. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘you need values to get out of bed in the morning.’”

  In summer 1952 Gore went up to Putney, Vermont, to participate in the Windham College Writers Conference, which Aldridge directed, where he met and rather liked Aldridge’s new wife. The novelist Vance Bourjaily, whose The End of My Life had established him as one of the writers who, along with Vidal and Norman Mailer, Aldridge had written about in After the Lost Generation and whom Gore had recently gotten to know in New York, was there. “I went to Vermont to lecture under Aldridge’s auspices,” he wrote to Anaïs, “a cold brilliant lecture which was completely hated, to my surprise since I made a number of what, I thought, were illuminating remarks on the literary art … but then of course illumination is the last state of being tolerable to our countrymen, especially writers and would-be writers, my audience.” When, that same summer, John Bowen—a young English writer who had just graduated from Oxford and had favorably reviewed The City and the Pillar under the title “Kiss Me, Hotlips, I’m Asbestos”—came up for a weekend visit on his way to take up a graduate fellowship at Ohio State University, Gore and he swam out to the small island in the river. “There was a middle-aged Swede … there at the same time,” Bowen recalled. “I only remember an open fire. The middle-aged Swede I think had the vague idea that I’d been invited to go to bed with him, but I was prudish then, perhaps even more so than now. And so I disappointed him.” He and Gore liked one another immediately, and when they began to correspond, Bowen regularly addressed him, though they were about the same age, as “uncle” and Gore addressed Bowen as “nephew.” He “was standing to me in an avuncular relationship because I knew nothing about the United States. So it became a joke between us that he was acting as my uncle, standing in loco parentis, being my American uncle.” With Bowen the relationship was clearly noncompetitive. With some of his American contemporaries, many of whom Gore was seeing at literary gatherings in New York, the story was more complicated.

  Encouraged by Vidal and the challenge of bringing new writers to the attention of the large audience for paperbacks, Victor Weybright in late 1951 decided to see if he could get a paperback literary serial, New World Writing, off the ground. Edited out of the Signet-Mentor offices, it would appear four times a year in book form with original material by a mix of new names and the best-known writers of the day. At the same time Ian Ballantine’s Pocket Books decided to sponsor, with John Aldridge and Vance Bourjaily as editors, a similar paperback anthology, discovery. Suddenly both were competing for material. Authors were being pursued for contributions. Publisher-sponsored parties at which liquor and conversation flowed brought potential contributors together. New World Writing had the advantage of Weybright’s experience and Gore’s contacts, which he immediately put to the service of the new venture, excited by its prospects, by its potential impact on the literary scene, and by the satisfactions of his own central role. Weybright, who now had the first of Gore’s Edgar Box novels in hand, consulted frequently with him about the new project, usually at lunch in Manhattan. Gore thought of himself as the unofficial editor, though it had been agreed that there would be no formal editor. Arabel Porter, Weybright’s assistant, an intelligent, hardworking cross between a secretary and an editor in charge of reprints at Mentor, would be the coordinator. Soon busy writing letters to friends and acquaintances, Gore helped obtain contributions for the first volume, with additional material for volumes to follow, from Isherwood, Williams, Auden, Kimon Friar, and Carson McCullers, among others, then poems by Ted Weiss and Louise Nicholl, even a story by Bob Bingham, who was in New York working as an editor for The Reporter. “Material is being collected now,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. “Chris (who is most enthusiastic) will let some of the fabled diary be done. Tennessee’s Lawrence play will be done in toto. There’s an essay on Carson by Oliver Evans, an essay on architecture by Philip Johnson … and stories by Gore Vidal et al.” “Erlinda and Mr. Coffin” appeared in the first issue, “The Ladies in the Library” later. discovery had the attraction of Vance and Tina Bourjaily, who at their Greenwich Village apartment hosted ebullient parties, the venue for a great deal of heavy-drinking literary sociability. It also had the disadvantage of the two editors’ not seeing eye to eye on much. At one of the Bourjailys’ parties Gore met a young lawyer, Lou
is Auchincloss, a talented short-story writer just about to publish Sybil, his second novel, to whom Gore was related by his mother’s marriage to Hugh. Gore pulled him in as a contributor.