Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  As is often the case with writers after a change of location, Gore began to feel strong creative urgings. The previous August he had told Ray White, doing the Vidal volume in the Twayne Modern Authors series, that he had three novels in mind. Since the last three “were written over a long period of time, I’d now like to sit down and write a book straight through to the end. One of the three has a title: Academy of Drama and Modelling, but I can’t say much about it yet, other than I think it will be funny.” Someone he knew in Miami, whom he thought a perfect fool, had had the notion to create a school of drama and modeling, an idea Gore thought wildly funny and “a wonderful idea for a novel.” Aaron Burr was seeping through his unconscious mind into a consciously identified presence. Burr had come to his unfocused attention as early as the day at Newport in the late 1930s when the name, mentioned in conversation, had drifted up to him on the sea breeze. In late 1965, thinking about subjects for a play, Burr came to mind as a possibility, just shortly before Nini named her newborn son Burr. “Just when I contemplate a play about Aaron Burr you re-cast him or pro-create him. Now, hopefully, I won’t have to write it.”

  Before he could commit himself, though, to write anything substantial, he had a duty to perform for himself and his publisher, a whirlwind ten-day publicity tour for the Little, Brown edition of Washington, D.C. Soon after its publication in early February it had appeared on the bestseller list. It was now climbing rapidly toward the top, which puzzled many reviewers, partly because they could not or did not want to believe that its realistic depiction of American political life was truthful. There was a respectable number of very good reviews, though most emphasized its commercial qualities, occasionally ambivalent about whether its riveting readability did not somehow need to be apologized for or at least put in the context of its insufficiencies, especially its exaggerated presentation of Washington sex and greed. From Gore’s viewpoint exaggeration was impossible. Some, like John Kenneth Galbraith, defended John F. Kennedy’s posthumous reputation from the imputation that Washington, D.C.’s Clay Overbury was based on the character of the assassinated President. Gore agreed, but for artistic, not moral reasons. “Clay is not JFK, not remotely,” he responded to Louis Auchincloss, who felt that Kennedy had been maligned. “Nor is he—in his creator’s eyes—a monster. The similarity to Jack is, simply, the way money is used to promote illusions and win elections…. The only deliberate likeness to Jack is the sexual promiscuity and I think I have got the point to each: sex as a means to power not over the woman so much as over the other men involved with her. In any case, no one can say that my explication of that aspect of life is ever pejorative.” Though Auchincloss attempted to deny the realities of Kennedy’s character, he embraced the artistic and thematic achievement of the novel. Gore was the best novelist writing in English about politics since Disraeli, he wrote in a widely read review. Of course, not many readers knew that Disraeli had been a novelist. Years later Auchincloss recounted meeting Robert McNamara in the cloakroom of the Century Club. “Didn’t you know all about Jack’s women in the White House? You were at the White House frequently.” “Yes,” McNamara said, “but we didn’t know that there were that many!” The novel, though, was not about transient politics or judgments about sexual practices. Few reviewers had any sense of its elegiac nature. “My own impression of the book,” Gore told Louis, “is that it is unexpectedly sad, and I can’t think why. My contempt for the empire has always been, I thought, complete but cheerful. Instead I am as gloomy as Tacitus without ever being able for one moment to believe, as he did, that the Republic was much better. I did find it significant that none of the book-men in their chat-pieces seemed aware of the book’s theme.” Some were, but their voices were mostly lost in the sensationalistic chirping about Vidal as Suetonius taking salubrious delight in exposing the flaws of our leaders. He had wanted to be Tacitus.

  In late April he flew to New York for the publicity tour; this was the time to strike. Having limited the tour to New York, Boston, and Washington, he made effective use of television appearances, especially Today and The Merv Griffin Show, where he talked less about Washington, D.C., than about his disapproval of Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, though the segue from one to the other was especially easy. When letters began arriving in response to his attack on the war, he was surprised and pleased that about half approved of what he had said. Certainly his Dutchess County friends did. Just before his departure for New York, Barbara Epstein had described to him a Peace March to Washington that she, the Dupees, and the MacDonalds had participated in and had remarked on the noticeable absence of people like Arthur Schlesinger and Ralph Ellison.

  Literary and national politics, though, overlapped. Gore had certainly enjoyed Harold Hayes’s account at the beginning of April of a conversation with Barbara Epstein and the publisher of The New York Review of Books at the George Polk Memorial Press awards luncheon. “Miss Epstein was going on,” Hayes told him, “about how wonderful [Esquire’s] cover was and the illustrations inside.” Hayes asked the publisher, referring to “The Holy Family,” “‘Why’you-all hadn’t taken that piece?’ The publisher turned to Miss Epstein and asked, ‘Why hadn’t we all taken that piece?’ She said, ‘Our reasons are private.’ A stunning mot juste and one I will try to remember for my own purposes.” From Gore’s perspective the editors had succumbed to a desire not to offend the Kennedys, particularly the powerful senator from New York, though an assumption that the author’s tone would be held against the Review suggests a sensitivity that focused on larger concerns of influence and constituency. Certainly many of the Review’s liberal pro-Kennedy readers hoped that Robert Kennedy would become a rallying figure for opposition to the Vietnam War and would find a way to wrest the 1968 Democratic nomination away from Lyndon Johnson. His earlier career and character, they felt, could easily be disregarded. “You can’t really separate the personal from the professional relationship,” Barbara Epstein of course knew. “I was upset about it…. I hate not to publish anything by Gore. He’s of great value to me as a contributor and as a friend.” Actually, its publication in Esquire rather than in The New York Review of Books worked to Vidal’s advantage. It gave the article more national presence and readers, almost as if it had found its true best home, for which it should have been intended originally. The same could not be said about another essay, “French Letters: The Theory of the Novel,” that Barbara Epstein had urged him to write that late winter and early spring of 1967, which the Review, after initial enthusiasm, turned down. The change in reading tastes and the decline in readership associated with two oppositional phemonena—the increasing dominance of mindless television and the rise of a self-consciously arcane, theory-dominated approach to writing and discussing novels epitomized by “The French New Novel”—both worried and angered Vidal. Whatever merit could be discovered in writers like Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Saurraute, and John Barth, they seemed intent on turning the novel into a specialty genre for an intellectual elite. To Vidal and others, their theorizing seemed “portentous.” And television and other electronic communications seemed likely to put an end to literature as they had known it. “Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end.” As he wrote to Fred Dupee, “I struggled 2 months with the piece on the New French Novelists, a labor of hate and exhausting. The result is a bit dense but I think pretty good.” At first Epstein found the article “very good, indeed,” though a little long. Then the editors turned it down, perhaps because one or more found the subject itself boring. “That was a big mistake,” Epstein later acknowledged, “because it was a very good article.” Its most appropriate venue had somehow for the moment lost its sense of itself and its good judgment. Encounter published it in December 1967.

  As soon as Gore returned to Rome in early May, he sat at his large writing table in the sunlight that came across the terrace from the long Roman skyline and began to write Myra Breckinridge. The most immediate specific stimulus was his response to a request from
Ken Tynan to write an erotic sketch for a musical sex show, to be called Oh! Calcutta!, which Tynan hoped would be theatrically innovative and immensely profitable. Always short of money, Tynan, who had remarried, had recently borrowed £1,000 from Gore. Harold Pinter was “co-devising and co-directing,” Tynan explained. “It’s to be an erotic evening with no purpose except to titillate, arouse and provoke … the whole thing very elegant and perverse, every heterosexual fetish fully catered for and no crap about art.” By the late 1960s Broadway and even London West End censorship had loosened enough to make the production possible. Tynan invited a dozen writers to write a sketch that would dramatize the writer’s favorite erotic interest. “A sketch on the organization of an orgy, for instance, might be attractive,” he wrote to Gore. The sketches would be the basis of a revue that would represent the usual standardized erotic interests. “Generally, he wanted something far out for Oh! Calcutta!” Vidal recalled. “Myra’d do business for spanking. After all if she were just dildo wielding….” But as soon as Vidal got going on the sketch, “it got more interesting and I certainly wasn’t going to waste it on a review-sketch.” Almost immediately he had left Tynan’s request far behind. Into his conscious mind came a sentence, “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess,” as if that were the talismanic combination of words in which was contained the entirety of a novel, few of the details of which he yet knew. Cool and analytical as he could be as a writer, he believed in and gave authority to his unconscious. “It’s the conscious mind I don’t believe in,” he later seriously quipped. There were some things that were clear to him from the moment he began something not for Tynan but for himself and a larger audience. This would be a comic novel, satiric, parodic, fearless, he hoped, in its imaginative engagement with cultural tropes about gender, sex, politics, literature, and film. His recent reading of the French novelists, both the fiction and the theories, was much on his mind, stimulating within him a self-consciousness about the process of writing so strong that it would be part of the fictional narrative. Myra, he quickly decided, would be Myra’s own journal, written for publication, and Myra would have some of her creator’s awareness of recent trends in writing and theorizing about the novel. He would not be bound by the conventions of realistic fiction. At certain points in the narrative Myra and her creator would overlap. He could flow into and out of her as he thought desirable; as a character, she would be in the tradition of Moll Flanders, Pamela, Becky Sharp, Isabel Archer, Kate Croy—the powerful feminine figures of the literary past. In regard to the author-character relationship and the usual coordinates of the realistic novel, the model would be Laurence Sterne and Tristram Shandy. Myra Breckinridge would be an “invention,” and though what would come after was not in his mind at the moment, he would later write a series of such novels, from Myron, a sequel to Myra, to The Smithsonian Institution, all of which assumed the imaginative freedom to rearrange the usual coordinates of time, space, and cause and effect. The tonal model would be Jonathan Swift, particularly “A Modest Proposal,” and also Gulliver’s Travels. As wonderful as the world might be, it was also a hateful world whose depredations could best be evoked in literature with Swiftean “savage indignation,” with no-holds-barred satiric aggressiveness and parodic anger. Gore was himself angry, and very disappointed in what human beings had done and were doing to our planet. His own country was among the most powerfully predatory destroyers. Its puritan tradition devoured people’s natural instincts and chances for happiness by rigid, self-serving moralism. Its expansive and self-deluding greed was making dollar materialism more triumphant than ever. In Vietnam we were destroying a semi-helpless people, wasting our own substance, coarsening our national life, dividing America with an intensity that threatened national chaos. And literature seemed to be fading away into either an artifact from the past or the preserve of an elite few.

  From the start, as Myra came to life in his imagination, she joined in his mind with the idea for a novel about an academy of modeling and drama. In 1952, in an early draft of Judgment, he had had what he had thought a “wildly funny chapter” depicting “a perfect heterosexual marriage between Myra and Myron and they constantly quarrel…. So Myra and Myron entered my head at the time of Judgment of Paris and … it was excised from it at Anaïs’s request on my behalf, for my own good. Such a serious book, any glint of humor she loathed.” The conversation between scriptwriters that he had heard in 1945 by the Beverly Hills Hotel swimming pool about The Sirens of Atlantis surfaced. Somehow it was to be part of the mix, for the novel would be permeated by film culture and history, from Fay Wray to Maria Montez. Parker Tyler, whom he had met decades before at Peggy Guggenheim’s New York salon, had written a now-out-of-print Freudian study, The Magic and Myth of the Movies, which he had on hand to bring in as a semi-parodic presentation of the high culture’s intellectualization of Hollywood. Breckinridge itself was a name with two associations, one immediately available from his historical reading, the first and only Vice President of the Confederacy. Years later, when he was sent an obituary of John “Bunny” Breckinridge, who had died at the age of ninety-four, he was prompted to recall another overheard conversation. “I do remember—my mother’s circle at the Beverly Hills Hotel, they loved talking about our feathered friends, referring to fairies—one might have been Bunny Breckinridge of San Francisco. I was then in the Army. So they could talk fearlessly in front of me since I was no longer a child. I don’t remember the sex change at all. I don’t think that was discussed. Bunny Breckinridge was a famous queen who had married and gone to prison in that order or, if not in that order, the other way around, and all the ladies had met him, including my mother, and that was all, and then I never thought of him again. I was halfway through Myra Breckinridge before I realized that Myra had been a man.”

  From new moon in April to new moon in May, he wrote the entire first draft of Myra Breckinridge, an imaginative riff more deeply absorbing and fulfilling than any single writing experience he had ever had before. As he wrote, he felt his expressive powers at their height. He was writing from deeper, more spontaneous sources than had readily been reachable in previous attempts. For the first time he was decisively and totally liberated from the narrow realism from which he had started. Williwaw was light-years away. The experience was liberating. The restraints he had felt before no longer restricted him. At forty-two, he now had an increased, more sharply formed, perhaps even more courageous commitment to self-expression that took chances both with artistic form and with self-revelation. The change in cultural climate that the sixties had brought had also contributed to making Myra possible. The erotic elements seemed appropriate, actually necessary, essential to the thematic challenge in which titillation became the lure with which to implicate readers and make them aware of the damage society had done to our natural selves. Myra (who had once been Myron) was more victim than victimizer. The sex-change operation embodied his/her capability for bisexual roles. But in her tormented expression of sexual and psychological instability, it also disembodied society’s self-destructive rules about sex and gender. Deeply anti-Christian, the novel attacked a civilization that had forced many people to be at lifelong war with themselves. And the individual internal war mirrored the warlike predilections of the society in general, of which Vietnam was but the most recent, though one of the worst examples. So self-distressed and self-destructive was the polity that the best way to capture it in fiction was with this kind of extrarealistic, imaginative explosion into transgressive literary language and aesthetic form. And the appropriate tone that would effectively match the dark vision had to be comic: the comedy of despair, laughter that went beyond tears. The outrageous was aesthetically appropriate, from jokes to darkness.