Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  In late autumn, at Mailer’s apartment, Norman, Gore, Adele, and Clift each read a part. Elaine was the audience. When Gore, sometime before the reading, had told Sam Spiegel, with whom he was working in New York on the script of Suddenly, Last Summer, that Monty was to be there, Spiegel asked him to report back on Clift’s condition. With constant talk of Clift’s heavy drinking, Spiegel worried about his reliability. “And I said I would, knowing that of course I would lie if I found him drunk, which I did,” Gore recalled. “So I lied to Spiegel with great joy and said, ‘He was wonderful.’ Spiegel deserved everything he got in this way.” At first the reading went well. “Gore was very nice,” Mailer remembered. “He was generous that night, as one can be when talking to an aspirant. He kept saying, ‘Well, this is good, this really ought to go somewhere, and so forth and so on.’ … He was almost always on the generous side. He protects his generous side and doesn’t want people to know too much about it, and of course I loved his arrogance because it came with style. That was part of his charm.” As the reading progressed, Clift, drinking, began to slur his words. He soon passed out. At that point Gore, at his own suggestion, began to read Clift’s part. The play, which he had read in manuscript, he thought not bad at all. Elaine, who did not like it, began to express her criticism to Mailer, who tactfully, even gently, deflected her remarks, reminding her that it was a rough draft of a work in progress. Elaine, Mailer recalled, “was dynamite. You’d get along with her sometimes. Sometimes you’d have a terrible fight. Sometimes you wouldn’t speak for half a year. Sometimes you’d be great friends again. Elaine’s ten kittens in one bag.” She was an honest kitten that night. More in sorrow than anger, as Mailer was bringing the reading to a close, she said, “Norman, this is shit!”

  Roman fever had touched Gore in May 1958, but he still felt passionately about Edgewater, in love with the house and location. He had no reason to think, when he returned from London in March and then from Rome at the end of May, that he would not be able to resume his Dutchess County life. The house had been a blessing to him, even when he could barely afford it. By springtime 1958 the garden and lawn were resplendent, the house handsomely comfortable, much of it Howard’s doing. Though it was a particularly wet summer, Gore easily resumed his usual work schedule, making progress with his plans for Julian. In the fall, urged by Bob Bingham, he became The Reporter’s drama critic, which he was to do for two years, the best of his reviews collected later in his first book of essays. Sam Spiegel began to keep him busy with calls and conferences about Suddenly, Last Summer, a draft of which he had under way by late summer. The writing of Julian was still on hold again. Soon he had no doubt that he genuinely disliked Spiegel, resented his interference, and had little respect for his abilities. Such, however, was the price for augmenting his bank account so that he might in the near future be free to return to fiction. If he resented paying the price, he still paid it energetically, as if he had no choice other than to give to whatever project to which he had committed himself his full focus. Also, despite the demands of these secondary, moneymaking projects, he kept time free to continue and even intensify his reading about Julian. He bought and absorbed every book on the subject he could get his hands on, and he returned to the New York Edition of Henry James, rereading much that he had read before.

  Now, to his delight, he had someone to discuss James with. Before leaving for London late the previous fall, he had met in New York, probably through Andrew Chiappe, Frederick Wilcox Dupee, Gore’s Dutchess County neighbor, a former Bard professor, now a well-known literary critic and Columbia University professor since 1948. The Dupees had recently moved from their Red Hook farmhouse into the newly purchased Wildercliff, a large, lovely riverfront house built in 1798, about ten miles south of Edgewater, sufficiently distant from the railroad tracks so that they were not disturbed by the train. “They bought Wildercliff for $45,000,” their friend, the editor Jason Epstein, recalled. “It was like buying the Taj Mahal. Fred must have had a little family money. But they never had enough to paint it or furnish it.” Gore had followed up their meeting by having Dupee sent a copy of Messiah, which arrived when Gore was still in London. The perceptive, ironic Columbia professor had replied with the well-phrased literary response that Gore eagerly looked for from a distinguished critic, an effective mixture of encouragement and honesty. “I can’t say … that [Messiah] appeals to me as much as your other books, especially Judgment of Paris. Is Messiah too fantastic for a good working fantasy?” If Gore would like, Dupee would be “glad to deliver a short lecture” on several of his theories of fantasy, “if you will bring your notebooks…. Or just come for dinner when you’re in Barrytown and we’ll talk about something else.” Or they could get together for drinks in New York, where Dupee taught three days a week. Eager for literary talk, Gore found Dupee enchanting, the most intellectually interesting company he had ever had, someone whose sensibility and mind were permeated with and totally defined by his commitment to literary high culture. He seemed to have read everything. A slow, readily distracted writer, he had published in 1951 an excellent short book on Henry James.

  Twenty years older than Gore, from a prominent Joliet, Illinois, family originally from New England, where his mother’s family had been since colonial times, Dupee had been eager from childhood to assimilate into the Eastern intellectual establishment. At Yale he had been delighted to be among the elite, soon becoming friends with other lively students like Dwight Macdonald, with whom, along with Philip Rahv, he was to be one of the co-founders of the Partisan Review in 1934. Without much interest in or regard for politics, he had briefly imagined himself a left-wing labor organizer, working for the Communist Party on the New York waterfront, and was for some years a New Masses stalwart. From Yale he had gone briefly to Bowdoin College, then to Bard for almost twenty years, where the charismatic teacher impressed students and colleagues with his rueful charm, his delicate irony, his literary sensibility, the teacher rather than the scholar, whose most engaging métier was the classroom, the social gathering, the short essay, the tutorial. As her tutor and the director of her senior thesis at Bard, he had met his wife, Barbara Hughes. Nineteen years younger than he, “Andy” was from a working-class Irish-Catholic New Jersey family, her mother an alcoholic, her maternal grandfather, William Hughes, a self-made man who had become both a socialist and a United States senator. She and her Bard friends “admired and adored” Professor Dupee, a “very attractive, faintly sad and handsome man…. His nervousness, his tenseness, his grace were irresistible,” Andy recalled. Petite, blue-eyed, a lively conversationalist with more courage than wisdom, Andy thought that he might as well marry her as someone else. It seemed the right thing—exciting, bold, pleasurable, a kind of triumph. Fred, who liked the idea, was soon also in love. It would be easy for him to think the changes would be for the better. By 1958, now with two young children, they had been married twelve years. “It was great marrying Fred,” among other reasons, “because he had all these wonderful friends—Nancy and Dwight and Nathalie and Philip Rahv, for example.” Andy liked and admired Dwight Macdonald, the radical political analyst and perceptive New Yorker essayist, though “they all drank a lot and Dwight later drank too much and went to pieces.” Once they had dinner at the apartment of the poet Delmore Schwartz, whose 1938 volume In Dreams Begin Responsibilities had established him as one of America’s best-known young poets and who had succeeded Rahv in 1943 as editor of Partisan Review. He and Dupee were old friends. “At dinner, Delmore said to Fred, ‘I always thought of you as someone who suffered more than anyone.’” Fred responded, “‘Oh, I’m very happy.’”

  Soon after they met in spring 1958, Gore invited the Dupees to Edgewater. Andy found him enchanting. After numbers of martinis, they drove over to Wildercliff, where they kept drinking. The evening was convivial, happy. Gore seemed to Andy “very imperial and Roman and grand,” handsome and glamorous. They began to tell one another the stories of their lives. Fred, drunk and exhausted,
soon went to bed. “Gore staggered out to drive home.” Andy urged him to stay overnight in their guest bedroom upstairs. He refused. As he left, he kissed her passionately, or so she felt it. She fell in love with him “right there and then.” For a while she could not get him out of her mind. Aware of his television and movie career, the Dupees were at first suspicious of his intellectual credentials. Both avid readers, they had not yet bought a television, partly out of principle, mostly out of intellectual snobbishness, and they had indeed vaguely heard of Gore before they met him as someone who wrote television dramas. They were not impressed with his media career, though Fred, always the starry-eyed idolator from a Midwestern small town when it came to the socially elite and to Hollywood stars, held this against Gore only to the degree that it kept him from writing serious literature. Eager to be the writer he defined himself as, temporarily enchained to the money-producing mill, Gore found Fred’s company delightful and salutary. With a delicate mentoring touch Fred urged him to return to novels. They began seeing one another regularly. Dupee soon became one of his closest, most admired friends.

  It was a friendship complicated, though more so for others, especially Andy, than for Gore, by Dupee’s balance of contradictions, the inconsistencies of his life and his difficulty in sustaining its varied elements. Charming, good-looking, slim, somewhat delicate in appearance, with engaging eyes, Dupee had instinctively raised vulnerability to an art form, eager to be protected by others from whatever threatened his stability, his happiness. Two of the threats came from drink and sex. The former was an occupational and generational hazard. Drunk, Dupee could be unpleasant, aggressive, angry, less than charming. The latter had the hazardous discomfort of ambivalence; the difficulty of sustaining both loyalty to his wife and his other desires caused him occasional embarrassment and much distress. Constantly concerned that people would know about his furtive sexual life, he found the danger of exposure exciting enough, or punishing enough, so that he did the things that would ensure that many of his Hudson Valley friends and some of his New York colleagues knew. When, late in spring 1958, he came to dinner at Edgewater to meet Frederic Prokosch, who had come with Jack Bady for the day from New York, Dupee, Bady recalled, invited him outdoors to show him the stars and explain the constellations. The dinner had not gone well. The Bard guests had been condescendingly disdainful of Prokosch, holding against him his popular success and his expatriatism. When Fred and Jack Bady went outside together, Bady had the impression that Dupee was flirting with him. So too did Gore and Prokosch, who joked and bantered lightly about it afterward. Unlike Gore, Dupee was deeply vulnerable and somewhat romantic. Capable of sudden enthusiasms, he knew how to fall unhappily in love, usually with inappropriate people, none of whom threatened his marriage. Deeply divided, often guilty, never having come to some sort of reasonable détente with society’s prohibitions, he felt the necessity to keep up appearances, to subject himself and his family to the strains of his divided personality, his life as only a partly successful balancing act. At home Andy, always forgiving, deeply in love and deeply loved, provided balance, comfort, a sustaining family life that Fred embraced. Lively, literary, and, unlike her husband, not only political but truly radical, the essential and attractive caretaker, she made the marriage and the family work. Not without flirtations and attractions of her own, Andy partied, laughed, argued at home and in the general Bard College and Hudson Valley society with an intensity and vivaciousness that made her presence a complement to her husband’s. It was a world they shared. When Gore came into Fred’s life, he came into hers as well.

  For over half a decade Gore’s life at Edgewater had revolved around Alice Astor, John Latouche, and visits from his grandmother, as well as the refurbishing of the house and its transformation into a comfortable small mansion whose location on the river made it memorable. Most of the major people of those Edgewater years were now dead, distant, or disabled. The Newmans had not become part of the mise-en-scène until 1955. There were still minor improvements to be made on the house, though the problem of the small kitchen was never solved, even though it and the house had been well run for the last two years by the Wheelers, two of Alice’s servants whom Gore had employed after her death and whom Howard and Gore later fired when he found them more interested in adjusting the house to their own schedule than to that of its occupants. Starting in mid-1958 Gore’s life at Edgewater entered a second stage. His expansive world substantially widened. There were still some Bard College friends, especially the Weisses, and Bard College visitors, such as Robert Lowell, who came over. People visited regularly from New York, some of those he worked with on films or had worked with on television, and literary friends, including Louis Auchincloss, whom he saw, however, more frequently in town. But there were now, he discovered, more people in the country to visit and have visit him.

  By the end of the year Gore’s Edgewater and Hudson Valley social life was in full flourish, as it was to continue, more or less, for almost five years, especially with the Dupees and Richard and Eleanor Rovere. With the Dupees he discussed mostly literature. Soon after the party for the Tynans, Dupee, “in his cups,” said, “always repeats: we had Jim Farrell, you have Mailer … one every generation … nothing changes.” With Rovere, a political analyst and investigative reporter of distinction, the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, who lived and worked in a handsome, modest house in Rhinebeck between visits to Washington, Gore discussed mainly politics. Well connected, especially interested in Democratic Party affairs, essentially conservative, Rovere had a long friendship with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with whom he had collaborated on a book, The General and the President, about MacArthur and Truman. Gore met the Roveres in 1958 as they were all going through the wedding-reception line of the daughter of Bard College’s president. Soon guests at Edgewater, the Roveres “found Gore fascinating and funny and very vain. He would often preen,” Eleanor Rovere noticed, “and he couldn’t pass a mirror without straightening his hair or combing it. But he was redeemingly self-conscious and ironic about his own vanity and was very, very funny about it.” With the Dupees they often saw Gore on weekends at Wildercliff, in Rhinebeck, and at Edgewater, where the Roveres were delighted to meet other guests, often from the entertainment world, particularly Claire Bloom, who soon came up with her husband-to-be, the actor Rod Steiger, and the Newmans. It was heady, amusing, but also somewhat exotically suspect to intellectuals who were not used to celebrities. Often bored, even with guests of distinction, Gore would sometimes on Sunday mornings take them to meet the Dupees or the Roveres. One day he brought Isherwood to Wildercliff to meet Fred. When Isherwood, Andy recalls, saw that the Dupees wrote telephone numbers on the wall in a small alcove where the telephone was kept, he wrote his number on the wall. “It seemed both a shy and an engaging thing to do. ‘Please call me, too,’ it seemed to say.”

  When Gore had no weekend guests, he sometimes came alone on Sunday mornings to Wildercliff, where he and the Dupees sat for hours reading newspapers, talking, drinking. Guests at Wildercliff often became Gore’s guests also, and some of them friends. The Dupees introduced him to the literary critic Lionel Trilling, one of Fred’s colleagues at Columbia, and to Trilling’s wife, Diana, who had begun to assert herself as a literary reviewer for The Nation. Lionel, Gore liked and respected. Diana he thought pretentious, ludicrously self-important. Philip Rahv, through whom he began an association with the Partisan Review, had Gore’s immediate respect, and soon his affection. A Ukrainian-born Jewish literary and political dynamo who had come to America as a young man, and a longtime friend of Fred’s, Rahv was an essayist of distinction, one of the founding editors of Partisan Review, the man Mary McCarthy had left when she married Edmund Wilson. Gore admired Rahv’s pithy wit, his sharp one-liners, his political and literary intelligence, though he did not at all share his now-attenuated Marxist-Trotskyite politics. When Vidal referred to George Steiner’s recent book, The Death of Tragedy, Rahv commented, “One of the get-rich-q
uick boys.” Rahv invited Gore to contribute to and support Partisan Review, both of which he did, the former with an essay, “Love, Love, Love,” the latter with a check for a thousand dollars. Gore found Saul Bellow, who shared a house in nearby Tivoli with Ralph Ellison, “standoffish with me. But couldn’t tell whether it was anti-fag or commercial success or both.” Bellow’s intellect he admired and enjoyed, especially his sharp comments about books and people. Dangling Man and The Victim, Bellow’s two early novels, he thought deserved their success, The Adventures of Augie March, which he admired, a little less so. The less explicitly intellectual Ellison, whose Invisible Man had won the National Book Award the year after The Adventures of Augie March, he found charming, his sense of high propriety both engaging and amusing, except when he talked endlessly, boringly, about some subject that interested him. One day Ellison and Paul de Man, the Yale University literary critic and deconstructionist, came by. “Ellison was a very proper man,” Andy Dupee recalled. “To get a rise out of him, Gore teased him” about the contrast between Ellison’s formal manners and prejudiced white attitudes about black culture, “and then danced with Ralph’s wife, Fanny, in a very suggestive way. De Man and his wife looked very proper, and probably tried not to notice.” Gore especially liked Ellison’s wife. Whatever the provocation, Ellison never rose to the bait.