Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  The guest of honor at Spoleto was Ezra Pound, attending a performance of his “Villon music and ballet,” which Gore found dull. Pound himself was fascinating. If he wore on his deep-lined, craggy visage the bitter impressions of his years of incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s, he exhibited his scars mostly in silence. “He seldom speaks; poses constantly, chin down, face sombre; wears a black velvet jacket, Lord Byron open shirt; looks spry for his age but old. At the end of the performance, a youth asked him in my hearing, ‘Did you like it, sir?’ A long pause then: ‘mumble mumble technique, but horrible mumble mumble.’ Which struck me as fair criticism.” On the terrace, as the crowd watched the fireworks, the poet was “attended by his faithful old mistress and the usual contingent of Menotti’s gentle young men and stern Principessas. Pound by fireworks was the best part of the festival. He gave us all the poses except hand to cheek. The eyes looked like an old wolf’s mediating one last slaughter. ‘Champagne, maestro?’ Menotti kept repeating nervously but only silence from the old actor. Poets are perfect hell and it seems that the better they are the cornier the performance.” He preferred Yeats to Pound, he wrote to Dupee.

  The lovely summer had actually ended on a bleak, more sobering note than the posturing of poets, the unexpected death of Harold Franklin in New York. Franklin, who had earned Gore’s respect and affection and whom he credited largely for the television career that had saved him from semi-penury in the early 1950s, had “died of a thrombosis three weeks before he was going to be married for the third time,” Gore told his father. “Perhaps he was lucky. But one misses him.” It took Gore a while to shake “the gloomy news.” With Franklin’s death he no longer had an agent for American television and movie work, though at least for the time being that did not seem a liability. Actually, the management of the William Morris Agency assumed that someone there would take over from Franklin, especially since their senior literary agent, Helen Strauss, had persuaded the reluctant author to allow her to do the three-book contract he had signed with Little, Brown in December 1962, the first of which had been Julian, the second to be Washington, D.C. The third was “a novel on a subject to be mutually agreed upon.” An aggressive woman who noticeably enjoyed her power and the perquisites of her job—and whom Herman Gollob, who had worked for her at the William Morris Agency, described as “the Queen Elizabeth of agents”—Strauss, Gore felt, had used her harsh charm to badger him into accepting her offices. He had agreed mostly because it was the inattentive path of least resistance, partly to do her a favor. Since Little, Brown already was his publisher and Gore essentially dictated the financial terms, Strauss had to attend only to contractual paperwork.

  Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Howard had found Paris life pleasant, but in Rome he had more friends and a settled domestic routine. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were “the beautiful Italian boys,” to one of whom Howard had the year before developed an attachment and helped get to England and America. When Dick Poirier visited at Via Giulia and Via de S. Elena, he especially enjoyed Howard’s company, his slangy language and good humor. “Some of those idioms in Gore’s more comic novels are ones that he could easily have learned from Howard. Howard exposes himself to young people of a certain class who use these sort of raunchy, funny, comic slang terms which Gore was exposed to, I believe, through Howard.” In Rome, Poirier especially enjoyed cruising with him. “That’s the way gay life was in Italy in those days. It was very seductive. It was sort of older to younger brother, and in the sixties it still wasn’t that easy for a young Italian guy to sleep with a woman, a young girl. He may have wanted to get married but didn’t have much money. This sex for money and favors was sort of a common thing to do…. And you’d meet very, very sweet boys. The other advantage of it was that you didn’t need to cruise, that is, you knew where these guys were and you got to know them and they’d introduce you to others, so you’d have a whole social life. That was perfect for Gore, and he liked the types, the Italian boys who were available, as I did. In a sense, whenever we went out, we’d be looking at good-looking people…. In Rome it was the practice to take the boys back to the apartment. He’d pay them and give them clothes. They were very sweet. A few times I’d be sitting out in the front room with Howard. Gore would come in with someone and introduce him. One time he was passing through with someone I had met before and said to me, ‘Say good-bye to Antonio.’”

  Soon most of their Roman hellos and good-byes were taking place in a new, more glamorous flat. The Via Giulia duplex apartment had been attractive, but the flat at Via de S. Elena was only satisfactory, a two-bedroom, triangular-shaped, third-floor walk-up of no distinction though pleasantly decorated, on a street that seemed increasingly noisy, subleased for six months at a price for which Howard soon realized they could get an annual unfurnished rental. In May, while walking Billy on the far side of the Corso Victor Emanuele not far from Via de S. Elena, Howard turned down the Via Di Torre Argentina in the direction of the Pantheon. The landlady of the large corner building, number 21, was putting up a “for rent” sign. A seventeenth-century palazzo, its gray stone and dirty yellow-tinted plaster exterior, as with many Roman buildings, had been darkened by age, neglect, and pollution. Instead of continuing on his walk, Howard stopped to inquire about the apartment. “Gore says it was really the dog who found it, because he led me right there,” Howard recalled, “which he did. He was tyrannical. I went up and looked at this apartment and couldn’t believe my eyes. We were paying $350 a month for the three months on the sublease, and the apartment on the Via Di Torre Argentina was a hundred dollars a month, or something like that, for twelve months.” Actually, the rent in lire turned out to be about $270 a month. Beyond the porter’s station was a grand staircase and an archaic semi-open iron elevator shaft rising to the sixth-floor penthouse. “As soon as the dog walked into the apartment that first time, he lifted up his leg and pissed. ‘This is my territory.’” When Howard saw the three large bedrooms, the small servant’s room, the salon, the dining room, and the twelve-foot-wide and sixty-foot-long terrace on two sides, looking west and northeast, with magnificent views of Roman rooftops and church domes, he agreed with Billy. So too did Gore. Directly below, where Corso Victor Emanuele and Via Di Torre Argentina met, heavy traffic raced and swerved. The noise would be a problem, but it was a steady, distant hum, and they were high enough so that traffic fumes might not reach them. Across the Corso were the ruins of the Temple Republica. The horizon on two sides was bright with rooftop gardens, the higher sight line an extended sweep of the old city extending toward the Tiber and the hills beyond, “a fine if jumbled view of golden buildings, one twisted tower (Borromini’s St. Ivo), the green Gianicolo and a dozen domes, the nearest Sant’ Andrea della Valle (Tosca, Act One), the farthest St. Peter’s like a gray-ridged skull.” It was not to be resisted. By late May, Howard was busy furnishing the apartment with tables, mirrors, and chairs from Roman antique shops. “Howard is fixing it up and it should be splendid,” Gore wrote to his half-sister, Nini. Soon the terrace was green and bright with potted plants. Gore built a trellis for vines. “The new place is already livable and with the plants on the terrace looks like a house in the country,” he told his father, whom he urged to visit. “Furnishing a flat here is not unlike writing Ben-Hur, only less aesthetic.” Howard had a fine time doing most of the work. A designer friend decorated the studio and living room. Since live-in help was cheap, they found a man to occupy the servant’s bedroom in the darker back of the apartment, someone to look after things, especially to water plants when they would be gone. In June they moved in. Gore was pleased and excited. “We’re in the new flat,” he told Fred Dupee, “a penthouse on a crumbling palazzo facing Largo Argentina with two huge terraces and a total view of the city…. Life above the Largo is splendid; flowers blooming, bougainvillea splendid.”

  Unexpectedly, he had a Roman home. There had n
ever been any intention on either of their parts to settle there permanently. It was simply a place to visit for extended periods, for as long as three to six months a year. Roman fever had possessed him for decades; living there was cheap, the food superb. Italian casualness about consensual sex made that pleasure comfortably available. They did not have to be looking nervously over their shoulders for the puritan gestapo. The loss of the election in 1960, the disaffiliation from the Kennedys in 1961 and 1963 made a holiday from America desirable. Gore still could keep his hand in American politics as a commentator from abroad, and his interest in as well as repulsion from America’s mid-decade nightmare in Vietnam fueled both his sense of the advantage of being at a Roman distance and his compelling interest in being involved. As he worked on Washington, D.C., he felt that his residence on a Roman street actually helped clarify his view of Washington. He had no intention, though, of being an expatriate. “Rome? Why Rome? That decision wasn’t made,” Howard felt, “and I’m never allowed to make those decisions except if I want to. Sometimes it’s just easier to follow. I don’t know why I went along. I guess I’m passive. As long as I had my New York life part of the year, I’d be happy to spend three months in Rome in my own apartment. It wasn’t seen as a permanent move. As Gore pointed out, what’s the difference between having a house in the Hamptons and having an apartment in Rome? It’s just one flight. No, Gore didn’t have in mind the possibility of permanent residence.” But taking and furnishing the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment was significantly different from previous subleases. The material difference was that they could stay as long as they liked whenever they liked in a place whose furnishings were associated with choices they had made. For Gore the difference was not determinative, but it was unself-consciously compelling. He had distanced himself physically and emotionally from Edgewater. Though the attachment was still strong, the notion of selling it became less forbidding; he had established an alternative. For someone who had felt homeless through much of his earlier life, the drive to create a home for himself was always powerful. Suddenly now, in Rome, he was worrying about whether or not the plants on the terrace would be properly watered when he was gone.

  Working through the summer of 1966 on Washington, D.C., he slowly brought the book to a close. “Not since Tolstoi and Anna Karenina has a writer so much hated his book while doing it. Let us hope the issue is as happy for me as it was for him,” he wrote to a young academic who had sent a list of questions in preparation for writing a book about him. In mid-September he “put the date on top with relief: the novel is finished or at least the last chapter is finally written and the rest of it is in fifth and penultimate draft. Four years since I started work, and I must say I would gladly have burned the whole thing a dozen times. Others can now do it for me.” He felt less happy with the manuscript than he had with Julian. “I have never had such a difficult time,” he confessed to Nini, “shuffling and re-shuffling, unable to say precisely what I mean yet unable to capture that tiresome ambivalence which keeps me from being one of those great vivid definite figures, like Norman or even Saul.” He expected it would “be rather worse reviewed than usual. New Frontiers men will be upset; and of course it is ‘clinical.’” He had meant Washington, D.C. as a meditation on the passage of time and the changes that had characterized post-World War II American public life. “I’m afraid,” he told Nini, “that where I thought I would be at my best and most lucid I’ve simply bungled the job … that is, philosophically, the catching of the wheel as it turns in the night, the sense of a republic becoming an empire, the loss of the private conscience which so entirely informed a TPG or an Eleanor Roosevelt and does not, as far as I can see in these swinging times, obtain for anyone including myself except upon desperate occasions when one must be, if not right, good, and define the term. Not easy. But the book reads rather well; my dread narrative gift sweeps all, alas, before it. I think if I knew the subject less well I might have imagined it better. You’ll be amused to find that the political tone is downright reactionary when not ‘pragmatic’ as they used to say at Camelot. But we are all prisoners to our age and the best of us never sees more than a bit of sky over the wall.”

  Its strong autobiographical base reverberated with his own feelings while he was conceiving and writing the novel. The elderly Senator Burden Day and the Blaise Sanford family (Blaise, his daughter Enid, and son Peter) are the most important characters in Washington, D.C. The setting is the capital of the country for the ten-year-or-so period that surrounds World War II. Franklin Roosevelt, Burden’s political nemesis (as he was Senator Gore’s), is a hovering, pervasive shadow as well as a real presence. Burden’s story is one of personal and political defeat. His defeat is also, secondarily, at the hands of the new generation, represented by his assistant and then replacement, Clay Overbury, a John F. Kennedy figure. It is clear that Overbury will be not only senator but President. Blaise becomes Overbury’s intimate ally and supporter; and not because Overbury has become his son-in-law, a marriage he initially opposes. Indeed, his willful, promiscuous, and explosive daughter, Enid, Overbury’s wife, is institutionalized by Sanford and Overbury to advance Overbury’s career. Blaise’s son, Peter, Enid’s sister, whose growth and education into manhood and political awareness comprise one of the important strands of the novel, cannot save her, though he can save himself by becoming independent of his father and molding his literary and moral sensibility into a post-World War II career that has at least the possibility of major accomplishment in the next generation. Nina, who was out of Gore’s life, was not out of his thoughts. In the character of Enid, she is central to the novel. Senator Gore and Gore family history weave through the plot. Senator Day lives at a recognizable version of the Gores’ Rock Creek Park house. Laurel House is clearly Merrywood. Elements of prominent Washington people and places appear, most of them modestly disguised, all subordinated to the novelist’s imaginative overdrive as he makes fictional wholes out of real fragments. Historical figures appear directly or indirectly, a development of what he had first done in Julian, Vidal’s own characteristic variations on the traditional genre of the historical novel taking shape. The influence of Thomas Mann is in the deep background; Henry Adams’s Washington novel, Democracy, and Adams’s view of America’s political leaders pervade the foreground. Adams’s anti-Semitism, still vigorously alive in 1930s Washington, Washington, D.C. exposes and condemns. In the favorable depiction of the Jewish character Irene Bloch, an ambitious hostess based on a well-known socialite of his Washington world, Vidal’s detestation of prejudice and injustice has some of the force of personal experience, even if obtained through various substitutes, especially Howard. “My novel presents an accurate view of the anti-Semitism of that society and how Irene, as I call her, triumphs in the book,” Vidal commented, “and how Gwen [Cafritz] is Irene in life, and Gwen loved it.” The depiction of widespread Washington anti-Semitism would disturb some readers, especially reviewers who preferred to think that such sentiments did not exist in the nation’s capital.

  If the dark side of the Kennedys casts a shadow in the novel, it is in Vidal’s concern that Robert Kennedy, waiting in the Senate, will capitalize on his brother’s assassination and the turmoil of Vietnam to make himself a viable candidate for the presidency in 1968. Gore had come to detest Lyndon Johnson, the peace candidate of 1964 who had cravenly embraced a war America later learned even he did not believe in. But there was no reason to think he would not run for reelection. The only foreseeable opposition to Johnson within his own party was the Kennedy mystique. Senator Eugene McCarthy and the New Hampshire primary were a year in the future. In a cogent, sharply structured essay, “The Holy Family,” written in fall 1966 and published in Esquire in April 1967, the legend-making power of the dead JFK to make RFK a contender underlies Vidal’s overriding concern with the question of “what sort of men ought we to be governed by in the coming years…. But if it is true that in a rough way nations deserve the leadership they get, then a frivolou
s and apathetic electorate combined with a vain and greedy intellectual establishment will most certainly restore to power the illusion-making Kennedys.” The immediate issue was the Kennedy mystique, the more important concern the difficulty of a democracy’s elevating appropriate people to positions of high leadership. “Holy family and bedazzled nation, in their faults at least, are well matched,” he wrote. It was not a message everyone wanted to hear or be associated with, including the editors of The New York Review, which turned down the essay, the first of Vidal’s that the Review declined. “The fierceness and relentlessness of tone,” as if he were out to get Kennedy, Barbara Epstein explained early in October, had put the editors off. He agreed to do revisions. The editors had discussed and discussed the piece. Barbara, clearly upset, wrote to him in November about the revised version. She was afraid that they just could not publish it. She was sick about the whole thing, aware of how much work he had put into it originally, and how much anguish it had cost him to cut it. But there were no extra-editorial reasons for their decision, she claimed; the essay simply was not successful in its own terms. He did not believe her claim that it had been declined for aesthetic reasons.

  By mid-November 1966, Little, Brown was printing galleys of Washington, D.C., Thornhill and Bradford anticipating a bestseller. Robert Fetridge, the brilliant, heavy-drinking Little, Brown publicity director, began to plot his strategy, which included sending Roman coins to reviewers and bookstore managers. At the same time, Gore was in California with a strategy of his own, an extensive cross-country speaking tour, mostly at universities, that would put him before huge audiences of young people, partly in anticipation of the appearance of the novel but mostly to have a sense of what was going on in the country. “The thought of all those students across the country is beginning to alarm me,” he had written to his father in June. “I’m not sure I have their range. Anyway it will be instructive, for me.” The New York-based Harry Walker Agency, “Representing Distinguished Platform Personalities,” handled the arrangements, initially to Gore’s dissatisfaction. They quickly learned, though, what was wanted. Too often, he felt, his representatives coasted on the arrangements he had made and on the attraction of his name. At the beginning of October he had spent a week in Britain at interviews and receptions arranged by Heinemann to publicize the British edition of his second volume of essays, which Little, Brown had brought out as Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship. By mid-October, he was in New York for a two-week lecture tour of New York, New England, and Ohio; in early November, via the Midwest, to San Francisco, where he began a seventeen-campus series of California lectures, which returned him to New York in December, with an appearance en route in Little Rock. His topic throughout was mostly politics. Literature he wrote about. Politics and contemporary life seemed more appropriate for large audiences, among other reasons because he felt he had a significant message to deliver about the national abuse of power embodied in America as an imperial nation. The campus audiences were astoundingly large, irrepressibly enthusiastic, especially in California, where he realized to his delight that he was immensely popular with college students. The center had moved considerably to the left. The Vietnam War dominated what was a genuine but dangerously volatile national debate. Change seemed possible. Issues of domestic and international justice dominated the discussion. As he saw the audiences of thousands that attended his lectures, felt the touch of crowds of admirers eager for his presence, his words, and his autograph, his latent political ambitions again revived. Perhaps the Exonian senator from Virginia could become the Democratic senator from California, though the practical obstacles were substantial. For the time being, as the trip came to an end, the possibility lodged in a distant but still-active part of his mind. When he returned to New York, he had been on the road for over two months. Seemingly inexhaustible, he was now exhausted. But it had been exhilarating. The news in New York was excellent. Washington, D.C., had been bought by the Literary Guild book club. In Washington, before Christmas, Nini and Little, Brown co-hosted a huge dinner party in Gore’s honor, many of the guests well-known Washington people. Howard, who had spent much of the fall at Edgewater, closed the house, “amongst frozen pipes,” and left for Rome. By early in the new year both had returned to Via Di Torre Argentina and Italian sunshine.