Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  When Walter Cronkite held up to his huge television audience the copy of Esquire that contained Vidal’s article, he was responding not only to its newsworthiness but to the fact that the New York newspapers were on strike. That put a slight additional edge of responsibility on other media. With a print-news blackout in New York that lasted for more than three months in late winter and early spring 1963, the usual vehicles for disseminating information and ideas were sorely missed. Television took up some of the slack. But in a society still anchored to the written word, although the mooring was adrift, the absence of a daily print forum reminded New York’s literary culture of just how much it depended on the book-review sections of the major newspapers, especially the Sunday Times Book Review. At best the Book Review was superficial and capricious, at worst narrow-minded and obtuse. Post-World War II American magazine culture had moved decisively toward the economics of mass circulation. The Saturday Evening Post typified Norman Rockwell popular culture. Vogue and the other fashion magazines were no longer or hardly publishing fiction. For literary short-story writers the market was bleak; for essayists it was dismal; for book reviewers, critiques mostly had to be of newspaper sound-bite length. The Saturday Review of Literature was the only weekly magazine devoted exclusively to reviewing books and highlighting literature and was, in fact, becoming increasingly unviable. In 1952 it had dropped “of Literature” from its title. By 1963 it was of minor influence and soon to disappear. By the early 1960s the two magazines dominating the shrinking market for serious literature and ideas were the venerable New Yorker and the brash Esquire. Both paid reasonably well. Vidal had been shut out of The New Yorker from the start of his career. His attempts in the late 1940s to publish fiction there had been rebuffed. Though he admired the magazine, it was clear from early on that his short stories did not meet the moral standards or fit the literary mold The New Yorker embodied. It “was a marvelous support group of middlebrow writers called John like Cheever and Updike,” Vidal observed. “A great showcase, and it gave them money, prestige. After I had a hit play on Broadway and was writing essays for The Reporter and Partisan Review, Richard Rovere, my neighbor, the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, says you’ve got to write for The New Yorker. And I said, ‘I don’t see why I’ve got to. I’ve got other places. But certainly the money’s better there.’ And he said, ‘I’ll fix it up for you. Go see Shawn.’ I go to The New Yorker, and Mr. Shawn is busy. A Miss Edith Oliver will receive me. She’s been there forever. She used to do off-Broadway reviews. And she says, ‘Oh, yes, Mr. Rovere said you might be coming in. Tell me, what have you done?’ Here I’ve got a play on Broadway, seven novels, etc., etc. I said, ‘Oh, that’s too boring to go into. There’s a copy of Who’s Who in America behind you. Why don’t you look me up?’ Oliver was brisk. ‘Well, why don’t you, the next time you do a piece, if it’s not too much trouble, mail it to me here at The New Yorker?’” Unlike The New Yorker, Esquire sought controversy and emblazoned on its provocative covers the names of writers as diverse but as dynamic and volatile as Mailer, Buckley, and Vidal.

  Responding to the opportunity created by the newspaper strike, having for a long time felt the need for a publication that would provide space for full-length essay-reviews, Barbara and Jason Epstein, with their friend the essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, took their courage in their hands. Money was in more limited supply than courage, so the decision in midwinter 1962–63 was to put out one issue of what they had decided to call The New York Review of Books. “There had been a lot of talk,” Barbara Epstein recalled, “about how lousy the Times Book Review was. Jason put it all together and said this is what we ought to do, and we can get publishers to advertise because they’ve got no place else to go. We put it all together. But none of us had any money. We first asked Norman Podhoretz to edit the magazine with me. Jason wouldn’t do it because he felt it would be a conflict of interest since he was with Random House. Thank God Norman turned us down. Said he couldn’t afford it.” Podhoretz also worried that the review might compete for readers and contributors with Commentary, whose editor he had become in 1960. The Partisan Review editors also had their reservations. “Partisan Review stopped being what it used to be with the start of The New York Review of Books,” Richard Poirier recalled. “I remember [William] Phillips saying, rather querulously, ‘Who needs The New York Review of Books?’ … and what he meant was that they didn’t need a rival for attracting New York and European talent.” When Podhoretz declined, the Epsteins “asked Bob Silvers, who was an editor at Harper’s and very smart. What we did was run around to publishers. Jason … got them to advertise. We called up all the people we knew and admired to contribute—including Gore. They didn’t get paid. We didn’t get paid. Everyone was so disgusted with the Times and eager for us to be a success. We were great friends with the Lowells, and to pay the printer, Cal Lowell [Elizabeth Hardwick’s husband, the poet Robert Lowell], who was the only one who had any capital, put up $4,000 to guarantee the bill. He didn’t have to pay it actually; it was a guarantee against the printer’s bill in case we couldn’t pay it. But we got enough advertising.”

  Much of the New York intellectual and literary world was enthusiastic. Through the Epsteins and Hardwick, the editors had a deep circle of friends, among them Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Fred Dupee, and Gore Vidal, all of whom wrote essays for the first issue, which appeared in late February 1963. Vidal, who reviewed sharply a volume of John Hersey’s essays, Here to Stay: Studies in Human Tenacity, was pessimistic about the Review’s future. “What did you do for the Jason-Silvers review?” he wrote from Rome to Dupee. “I did Hersey, but wrote Bob he was out of his mind if he thought American publishing would greet warmly Aunt Mary, Dwight, you, me, et al. They would pay, I think, for us to shut up.” But when the end of the newspaper strike brought back the Sunday Times Book Review, the new Review still seemed viable. “So then we decided to do another issue,” Barbara Epstein recalled. “We paid the contributors nothing for the first, then I think five cents a word for the second. Bob Silvers was working so hard he got sick. We raised real money over the summer of 1963 and started publication in September…. We raised only $115,000. You couldn’t start a little shoeshine stand on that today. Then we got a publisher, Whitney Ellsworth, who came to do the business side. Then after two or three years we were in the black. It was all so cheap. Paper was cheap. We took next to nothing, But we paid the authors.” From Rome, with the first issue in hand, Gore again wrote to Fred Dupee. “I like [your essay on Black Beauty] much the best of the pieces in the Review. I hear that Silvers is ill; I hope not seriously; he is needed. I hope they don’t ally with The New Rep. The whole point is that here at last is a literary review, the only one on a national scale, and if it is to be an adjunct of a liberal paper, no matter how good-natured, it is promptly limited and who needs it? I can’t see myself writing for N.R; one always could and didn’t because there wasn’t … oh, to hell with it. The thing’s bound to go wrong. The stars are wrong.” But the stars were propitiously aligned. Within two years of its initial publication, The New York Review became the most widely read, most influential American literary-intellectual journal.

  With Barbara Epstein as his editor, Vidal and The New York Review of Books were to become almost synonymous. Many of his best essays were to appear there. And though the relationship was to have its rough moments, it was to prove a reasonably smooth, substantially beneficial author-journal engagement. Soon after the editors decided in late spring 1963 to try for an ongoing permanence, Barbara suggested to Gore that he write a review essay of a new book of stories by John O’Hara, a writer whose work, he was to conclude, “cannot be taken seriously as literature, but as an unconscious record of the superstitions and assumptions of his time.” This was to be the way in general in which his essay contributions originated. Barbara proposed that he might be interested in reviewing such and such a book or books. Constantly alert to appropriate topics for him, she then sent him, if he indic
ated interest, the appropriate volumes. Responsive to his sensibility and his strengths, she had the advantage of knowing him well, both personally and professionally. Though in 1963 Gore’s friendship with Jason was the primary of the two, in later years that altered. Eventually it changed conclusively. As an editor Barbara had a sharp sense of structure and tightness but she also knew when to hold back, and Gore had no strong feeling early on that he was being edited in any substantial way. Since he conceived his literary essays as encompassing a general evaluation of the writer’s career or a broad overview of the topic, the ample lead time the Review provided suited him perfectly. There would be a target date but never a deadline. Before writing, he would read the author’s entire oeuvre. He would carefully conceive, write, and rewrite, with concentrated focus, in what Fred Dupee thought of as his brilliantly informal style. “He always praised my tone,” Gore gratefully recalled, “and he said, ‘You write like some great conversationalist lying relaxed in a hammock, talking whatever comes into your head, and it is perfect for its subject,’ something like that. It was the ease of my voice he praised. He usually gave no compliments to anybody.” Barbara agreed with Fred. She knew she wanted Gore to become an ongoing New York Review of Books writer, and she knew how to make it likely to happen. Publishing circumstances were in their favor. Esquire provided Vidal with a forum for political articles. So too did The Nation. Now he had a desirable home for his literary essays.

  Though he complained in late winter 1963 that “I have an ulcer, don’t drink, have a short temper and constant melancholy without the fine ups and desperate downs of the grape,” his melancholy did not prevent him moving ahead briskly with Julian and having a busy Roman social life. Henry James was sometimes on his mind, including James’s heavy London social schedule. “In a way I’m grateful for the ulcer: no drinking for months which will give me courage not to dine out 174 times (the Master’s number) this season.” He reminded himself that he had come to Rome for a “quiet time.” Somewhat shy, sometimes reticent, qualities he managed often to obscure by overcompensation, he hoped for some happy balance between sociability and work. In his daily schedule, writing, reading, and exercise took priority. He walked everywhere. In the afternoon he went daily for workouts to a newly opened American-style gym run by an American named Ed Cheever. The weather felt to him like the Hudson River Valley in October, which he liked. But he also enjoyed visitors and visiting, though usually late in the day. There were ample opportunities for both. A solid three hours of writing in the morning usually exhausted his primary creativity; then there was correspondence and, with long calls to Britain and America ruinously expensive, almost all communication was by mail. Dinner was sometimes at the flat, where the maid Vitalia cooked, though Howard did the shopping and occasionally cooked also. Often, though, it was at a trattoria, particularly his favorite, La Carbonara, where, as in Rome in general, the dollar went a long way, and it was not expensive to indulge his usual desire to be host. Even the large Via Giulia apartment was reasonable, the equivalent of about $200 a month, though they had had to commit themselves to paying for a full year despite their intention to occupy it for only half that time. It “was sublet from an old English gentleman who had been married to an Italian,” Howard recalled. “He worked for the British diplomatic corps. The William Morris office in Rome went to an agency and got it for us. It was on the ground floor, a garden floor, with a long big hall, with a staircase going up to another floor, where there were the two bedroom suites and, I guess, a servant’s room in the back. To the left was the main salon and the dining room and the garden on two sides. The bedrooms were just above that. It was a strange-shaped apartment, but it was, for Rome, very elegant and with lots of space.”

  Soon after they settled in, the British novelist Angus Wilson stopped by for a visit. “He has gained weight,” Gore wrote to Louis Auchincloss, “and looks rather like Margaret Rutherford” and “sounds like the Queen…. He is the most operative man-of-letters since Hugh Walpole, but flawed by intelligence. I do like to see and hear him; less to read his novels, but the stories were marvelous.” Wilson was, he told Dupee, “in that euphoric state the British fall into the moment they get out of England, rather like the Institute” (Rovere’s joking name for when Gore, Fred, and he would get together) “at the second martini on a summer’s day…. Since he is the best of talkers and very quick, one forgives the busy-ness, which goes even beyond Mailer if only because Angus has a plan of battle for a war he means to win as opposed to Norman’s doomed uprisings, invariably put down by govt. troops. With firm resolve, Angus has attended every writer’s conference in every country, addressing each provincial literary parliament in its own language, including Danish.” Terry Kilmartin, the influential editor of The Observer and translator of Proust, with whom Gore had become friendly in London and for whom he had begun to review, stopped by, eager to talk about literary things and people. A visit from Tom Driberg, regularly to drop in on Gore’s Italian life, was imminent. The Anglo-Italian connection immediately became part of his Roman world. The centuries-long British presence still flourished. There were the famous ghosts from the past, the artistic and the aristocratic English who had intertwined their lives with the Italian world. Gore knew very well where Keats was buried, where Turner painted, where Byron flamed. But the current British presence in Rome was less literary than social, often on the highest levels, mainly centered around the estimable Judy Montagu, Gore’s friend from his London visits in the late 1940s. Having moved to Rome in the 1950s, Montagu had taken up residence on the Isola Tiberina, a perfect combination of seclusion and accessibility not far from Via Giulia, in a charmingly complicated duplex apartment with medieval vaulted ceilings, whose ancient Roman foundations had probably been part of the Temple of Aesculapius. Attached to her island and to Roman history, married to the American painter and photographer Milton Gendel, who had lived in Rome since 1950, she anchored the British Anglo-Roman social world, partly by the force of her own intelligent graciousness but also by her friendships with and social command of distinguished visitors, the foremost of which was Princess Margaret. She and the princess “were best friends, and Judy was the mistress of the revels,” Gore recalled. The Princess was a regular visitor at Isola Tiberina, with her husband Tony Armstrong-Jones. So too were other interesting English, from Diana Cooper to Evelyn Waugh to Iris Tree. The art historian John Pope Hennessy visited regularly. Italian aristocrats and artists were often in attendance. Peggy Guggenheim came from Venice. As jet travel promoted international connections, Montagu’s American friends, including Arthur Schlesinger’s wife, who had become the president of the Tiber Island Historical Museum Association, also made Isola Tiberina one of their destinations. Soon Gore and Judy were having amusing lunches together, often just the two of them. “She was quite unattractive,” Howard, who rarely got to see her alone, recalled. “She had a horsey face, but thoroughly enchanting…. She was about five foot six, with a decent figure but nothing you would look at. She didn’t dress badly, but she wasn’t stylish. She and Gore were buddies. She had a very good sort of masculine sense of humor. A very upper-class lady. Gore adored her, and she adored Gore.” Judy, Gore wrote to their mutual friend, Tom Driberg, “is splendid company, as always, an island of illuminating malice in a pasta-sea.”