Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Soon after New Year’s Day 1964, in Rome, he was finally done with Julian. “I have finished the last galley … and sent it off to the publisher,” he wrote to Louis Auchincloss. “I feel like Gibbon—in Geneva, wasn’t it? When he let the empire fall at last. I can’t wait to know what you think of the book. I’m not optimistic about its chances in the bazaars of the republic but, all in all, I think the work is nearly what one wanted—well, finished anyway.” When Isherwood stopped by, exhausted, on his way back to Los Angeles from a visit to India, Gore gave him the revised galleys to take back to New York to deliver to Little, Brown. Having had an incident some years before when some valuable manuscript was nearly lost because of mail and customs complications, he was happy to have a personal courier. Auchincloss, who had loved the early chapters that had been published in 1962 and to whom Little, Brown soon sent bound galleys, thought Julian superb. “The book is a delight. So keen and funny and beautiful. And Julian comes so remarkably alive—what I had thought would be almost impossible.” As useful testimony to his admiration, he sent off a superlative blurb for Little, Brown to use in its advertising. In Boston the Little, Brown people were gearing up for what they now believed was a likely bestseller, a historical novel that would appeal to a variety of audiences, from popular to intellectual, from religious to worldly. The ghost of Nick Wreden would have been pleased.

  When the Little, Brown contract had been signed in December 1962, Victor Weybright, who had encouraged the writing of the novel, partly because he believed that religion was such a popular topic among American book buyers that even Gore’s take on early Christianity would sell, purchased paperback rights for New American Library. Arthur Thornhill’s negotiating magic produced an unusually large payment. For the Little, Brown hardcover edition Gore had foregone any advances against royalties in exchange for a straight 15 percent royalty. He did not want to be indebted to his publisher and could afford to take his profits from earnings, not advances. Whatever it would earn was to be paid to him in once-a-year installments of $15,000. “B-of-M Club is still brooding over Julian, “he told Louis Auchincloss, “fat chance they’ll ever take it. I can see already the letters from Catholic ladies cancelling membership.” He was happily surprised when the Book-of-the-Month Club reviewers selected it for prominence and Little, Brown’s owner again worked his Yankee bargaining and bookkeeping legerdemain. The Club paid $250,000 to make it its main selection, an extraordinary amount in 1964. With his old detested nemesis in mind, Gore suggested to Bradford that they pick a publication day in the New York Times’s rotation of daily reviewers on which Orville Prescott would not be reviewing. “I’m so happy you like the book,” he wrote to his English editor, Dwye Evans at Heinemann. “It was written in blood. I’ve never put so much into anything and I hope it turns out as well as Little Brown believes. I feel almost safe about its British reception—but who knows?” American publication was set for April. Though the signs from America were good, he still felt, after ten years, so aggrieved and resentful about the reception of his earlier novels, particularly the moral outrage at The City and the Pillar and the poor sales of Judgment and Messiah, that he prepared himself inwardly for the worst. Three months later, on a hot summer day at Edgewater, as he stretched out on the grass, he had the supreme delight of reading in The New York Times that Julian was number one on the bestseller list. Exuberant, he took a victory swim out to his island in the Hudson.

  At Edgewater that summer he reveled in the satisfaction of being a critical and commercial success again, though now at a level of sales and a uniformity of praise that far exceeded anything he had written before. The reviewers were almost unanimously enthusiastic. Here and there one carped at the length of the novel or at the realistic, mostly critical depiction of fourth-century Christianity. Some found tedious, as Gore feared they might, the philosophical-intellectual dimension of Julian’s mind. But the novel touched both an interest and a nerve as the decade of the sixties began to set its main cultural concerns into sharper visibility. Many read the novel for its historical interest, its vividness of depiction of ancient cultures, its resonating evocation of daily life in Athens, Constantinople, and Antioch. The clever narrative interweaving of three voices gave definition to each voice and point of view. Julian dramatizes the life of the fourth-century Roman Emperor Julian, known after his death by the Christianity he rejected as “The Apostate.” Born in A.D. 331, the nephew of the Emperor Constantine, who had Julian’s father murdered, Julian rose to supreme power in the Roman Empire through a series of stunning military victories in Gaul, the revolt of his troops against orders from Rome to send them to fight in Persia, and the unexpected death of Constantine II. In Vidal’s version Julian is elevated by the insistence of his own troops that he take power, and Julian’s dying wife, Constantine’s sister, advises him to accept the imperial offer. To nip rivals in the bud, Constantine had had Julian’s two children killed. Eager for a scholar’s life, initially educated in a combination of Christian and neo-Platonic ideas, Julian privately had rejected Christianity, which Constantine I had made lawful in 313 and which had since become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. As emperor, Julian publicly advocated a return to a new synthesis of pagan mystery cults and sun worship. A reluctant ruler and a fastidious advocate of personal liberty and public morality, Julian died in battle in 363, sixteen months after becoming emperor, probably killed by his pro-Christian Roman enemies in the ranks behind him. A novel of ideas as well as of historical pageantry, Julian draws on a variety of contemporary historical documents to provide an accurate factual presentation of life and politics in the fourth-century Roman world. For the narrative, Vidal creates his own imagined version of a memoir that Julian may actually have written but no longer exists. In the novel that memoir, written during his last campaign, has survived Julian’s death. Seventeen years later, Priscus and Libanius, who had been in their youths Julian’s friends and teachers, conduct an exchange of letters about the memoir. At Libanius’s request, with which the novel begins, Priscus sends a copy to Libanius who thinks of writing a sympathetic biography of Julian. At the center of the novel is Julian’s first-person account of his life; the memoir is surrounded by and interrupted by Libanius’s and Priscius’s intertextual and extratextual comments.

  As a historical novel, Julian seemed a compellingly successful manifestation of the genre. At the same time, those readers with a feel for their own world sensed as they read that a novel about a society fundamentally divided in sensibility and in philosophical views, tearing itself apart about issues of succession, belief, and performance, and desperately trying to hold itself together as an empire, had enough in common with America approaching the mid-1960s to make the reading experience eerily, if unselfconsciously, contemporary. America itself was about to split apart around the issue of the Vietnam War and empire and simultaneously about whether the country was to be an embodiment of Christian values in the most conventional sense. Both readerships substantially overlapped, as the novel indirectly framed issues and currents in the culture about which many felt uneasy or at least concerned. Beyond that, critics overwhelmingly praised the sharpness, the originality, the credibility of the language of the narrators, as if this English-language novel had so successfully located itself in the minds of people from distant cultures as to make their passions convincingly contemporaneous with its readers’.

  Before departing for his American appearances for Julian and The Best Man, Gore and Howard, early in February, went to Greece. Gore returned to Delphi on a cold, rainy day. He was disappointed to see that the ruins had now been roped off to prevent the damage that came from visitors’ treading on them. But the experience of Delphi still resonated. And the image of the Apollonian eagles with widening, sky-darkening wings stayed vividly in his imagination. In Athens, where he had aches and pains from the flu, he enjoyed Nikos Gatsos’s company and that of his old friend Kimon Friar, who now lived there. “I have been possessed by a play [to be called Drawing Ro
om Comedy], of all things,” Gore told Louis Auchincloss. “Two acts. I am nearly finished with the second. Most ambitious and horribly funny. It will be perfectly unique if I can pull it off. So that’s ahead of us for the fall. Fiction must wait for next winter and more Europe. Then the D.C. novel,” which he had recently resumed working on, though quite tentatively. “So this is the year of the comeback when like some seedy star of an earlier era one lurches back onto the boards to a burst of nostalgia for the grand old trouper. I see it all. Then shut my eyes.” At the end of Drawing Room Comedy the main character, whose eyes are shut by death, remembers a visit to Delphi and the closing wings of the Apollonian eagle that stand for the shutting-down of his life. He has had a massive heart attack at an ordinary dinner party in an Upper East Side Manhattan apartment. Most of the action takes place in the short time that exists between the coronary thrombosis and the exhaustion of his few remaining heartbeats. In the spaces between those last literary heartbeats, Gore must have recalled and felt his father’s near-fatal attack of 1942. The unproduced and unpublished play, which almost reached the New York stage in late 1964, expresses a high artistic moment in Vidal’s lifelong thanatophobia.

  In mid-March, Gore was in New York and then in Washington, where as part of the publicity for The Best Man film there was a screening and large reception with many well-known political people. “A rather lousy film,” he told Dick Poirier, probably before he had viewed the final cut, which he may have seen for the first time at the Washington screening. On the same day, as he soon learned, his old mentoring friend and admirer, Lucien Price, who had been so laudatory and companionably supportive when Gore’s literary career in the 1950s had looked grim, had died in Boston of a ruptured aneurysm. Price had written several admiring pieces about Gore in the Boston Globe, where he was senior editorial-page editor and a columnist, “and in the dark days was a most bright companion.” Gore was pleased that Lucien had been “able to read at least half of the novel, which would not have been written without his bright example and sly maneuverings.” His schedule in the first half of April brought him once and sometimes twice to Washington, Boston, Chicago, Houston, and Los Angeles, both for The Best Man and for Julian, for newspaper, radio, and television interviews, including The Tonight Show and What’s My Line?, as well as his usual appearances with David Susskind on Open End. With the 1964 party conventions imminent, he had his talk-show eye particularly on the Republican convention. Johnny Carson and he had discovered they admired and challenged one another. Serious books and interesting, controversial authors, especially if they had camera presence, still drew enough viewers so that ratings did not suffer. In fact, there was reason to believe that when Gore was on, Carson’s ratings increased in the major cities, though they also decreased in rural America. When he arrived in Houston the day after a national television appearance with Hugh Downs on Today, where to prove a point about the power of television to sell books he had talked at more than usual length about Julian, the Little, Brown representative who greeted him at the airport told him that every copy in Houston had been sold. Would he please not appear on television again until they could restock the bookstores? Publishers were beginning to learn, though often slow to digest the lesson, about the force of television publicity. By early May, exhausted from over a month of appearances, Gore was happy to rest at Edgewater, though in June he went to Boston for two days of interviews. As Julian climbed the bestseller list, he felt that both it and he had earned its success.

  So too had he earned his brief late-June and July rest at Edgewater, with the usual friends nearby, occasional visitors, and Howard at work making improvements in the Barrytown house and planning renovations at 416 East Fifty-eighth Street that would provide them at last with an apartment there. At 416, when a tenant left and the vacant parlor floor became their two-bedroom apartment, Howard gave up 360 East Fifty-fifth Street. They soon hosted a fortieth-birthday party for Paul Newman at the new apartment. “At last,” Howard felt, “we had this place in New York City that we could call home,” though Gore disliked it from the first moment they occupied it. The apartment seemed dark, closed in, and he did not like the idea of living in New York, though they were to make 416 their base whenever they were in Manhattan until 1970. He much preferred Edgewater. The next year he was to buy 417 East Fifty-eighth Street, another brownstone, for $87,000 and invest $40,000 in improvements. One apartment there, a triplex that Howard thought they might use themselves, they rented to Franklin Roosevelt, Jr. In 1968 Gore could not resist an offer of $250,000 for 417 by developers anxious to use the lot as one of three on which to build an apartment building, though Howard thought selling it a financial mistake. When Fred Dupee had reported to Gore in January 1964 the rumor that Edgewater was for sale, he had responded emphatically, “Edgewater is not for sale; its master, yes!” Both, in fact, were at most occasionally for rent, and Howard was supervising the installation of a swimming pool on the lawn just south of the house in anticipation of cool pleasure during this and future summers. Though they missed Rome, Edgewater was still home for Gore, and Howard enjoyed New York City life considerably. The sublease on the Via Giulia apartment had expired, not to be renewed. For Roman visits Gore would have to stay at a hotel until they located a new apartment, which he had it in mind to do for January 1965. The summer of 1964 and the rest of the year would be mostly at Edgewater and traveling, starting with a mid-July visit to the Republican convention in San Francisco, which he was to cover for The New York Review of Books. He was also to appear there regularly as co-host with David Susskind on an interview and commentary program.

  Having published a devastatingly lucid article about Goldwater in Life in 1961 and devoted the less notorious part of his article “The Best Man: 1968” to the political chances of New York’s Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Vidal would be on the scene at the Cow Palace in San Francisco for Rockefeller’s humiliation by the Republican right wing. Having believed and predicted in 1963 that Rockefeller would be the Republican presidential nominee in 1968, Gore was able to observe what was to him the chilling triumph of the revivified Republican conservative movement. Goldwater supporters dominated the convention. Well organized, with deep roots in the increasingly powerful Sunbelt; xenophobic; anti-immigrant; fearful of Communism abroad; eager to scale down big government, decrease taxes, and improve business profits at home; strongly beating the drums of battle for their fallen hero, Joseph McCarthy; most of all advocates of Christian morality and tight social control as the key to American prosperity—they hissed down Rockefeller, who represented to them Eastern liberal Republicanism and personal immorality. Rockefeller had recently divorced and remarried. That was disqualification enough. “Who present that famous day can ever forget those women with blue-rinsed hair and leathery faces and large costume jewelry and pastel-tinted dresses with tasteful matching accessories as they screamed ‘Lover!’ at Nelson? It was like a TV rerun of The Bacchae, with Nelson as Pentheus.” As a well-known liberal television personality and political commentator associated with the Democratic Party who did occasional man-on-the-street interviews and appeared each night from a convention-hall studio, Vidal himself was no more popular than Rockefeller among those Republicans for whom the media people seemed mostly devilish enemies. The atmosphere was tense, confrontational, the majority of delegates committed to a Manichaean battle between the forces of good and evil. Goldwater’s slim chance to win the election made no difference to his supporters. Only ideology mattered. They were there to make a point, and to capture and revivify the Republican Party for the conservative movement.

  Susskind’s program at the Cow Palace was, of course, a sideshow, though prominent political people eagerly appeared for the advantage of the exposure. Norman Mailer, writing about the convention, “wanted to be on with us every five minutes, and we were glad to have him,” Vidal recalled. Mailer had become a pugnaciously outspoken television regular in New York, always eager to appear, often on Susskind’s show. “One night—I think
it was the night Goldwater was nominated—David and I were worn out. We hadn’t had a proper dinner since we got there because we’d go from the convention to broadcasting to interviewing. So we didn’t go on. Norman was upset: ‘Gore, this is the most important night of our lives.’ I said, ‘David and I are tired. We’ve been on every night.’” Still friendly, their ordinary discourse was banter, competitive witticisms, and Mailer had met his third wife, a young English journalist named Jean Campbell, at a party Gore had given at the 360 East Fifty-fifth Street apartment in spring 1961. “Oh, yes, she was very attractive, very bright,” Vidal recalled. “Her grandfather was Max Beaverbrook, and her father’s family were the Argyles. She was in her twenties, a working journalist. She was having an affair … with Henry Luce. And she didn’t have much time for anybody else until she met Norman. She promptly broke up with Luce and married Norman.” Gore, who thought Campbell striking and interesting, gave Mailer the impression that night at Gore’s apartment that he himself was amorously interested. “I think Gore had had some idea of possibly having some sort of liaison with her…. But Jean and I really hit it off, and we just left the party together and started living together a few days later and eventually got married and were together for the couple of years we were together. And we saw a fair amount of Gore after that.” When he left the party with Campbell, Mailer thought Gore looked startled. “I think he’s always had sexual interest in women. I don’t think it ever came to the point of critical interest. I don’t think it ever reached critical mass, put it that way. A great many women have adored him and are very loyal to him. Elaine Dundy used to adore him…. A lot of women have liked him a great deal. My present wife likes him. Yes. He’s charming with women.” In 1964 Mailer and Campbell were still married. Later, when she was living in Rome, Gore asked her, “‘What on earth attracted you to him?’ ‘I had never gone to bed with a Jew before.’ I told Philip Rahv this. ‘She might have tried out a few of us before she went off with Norman. To give her a little wider range of choice.’”