by Fred Kaplan
Another friend now became an erratic enemy. Observing Mailer in companionable conversation with Buckley at the convention in Chicago, Vidal had felt that poor recompense for the hospitality he had extended at Edgewater and his generally kind words about Mailer as a writer. He thought less of Mailer’s prose of recent years: it seemed more distended, exaggerated, and Lawrencian in its celebration of male orgasmic power. Mailer of course had not gone over to the enemy ideologically, but as two miscast if not ludicrous minor-party candidates for mayor of New York, Mailer may have felt he and Buckley might talk constructively together. “At that time,” Mailer recalls, he was having “a rapprochement with Buckley and the conservatives. I was trying to have some sort of better relationship with Buckley. The feud started in 1968 when Gore saw me at Chicago talking with Buckley. He must have seen that as some disloyalty or even betrayal. He seemed to me to be piqued by that, and our relationship was never the same thereafter. From that time on, Gore began to make remarks against my writings.” In Vidal’s view, Mailer had been “kissing Buckley’s ass.” In Mailer’s view, Buckley had outdebated Vidal on the ABC news segments. That Buckley had called Vidal a “queer” on national television might not have disturbed Mailer, whose own homophobia was at least equal to Buckley’s. Later, when Buckley hired Mailer’s cousin, Charles Rembar, to represent him in his libel suit against Vidal and Esquire, Gore saw that as the end of what had been a competitive but still respectful relationship. It was one thing to be literary rivals, quite another for Mailer to work actively to damage him. It seemed beyond the pale for someone who represented himself as a political radical, even a socialist, to ally himself with Buckley. Mailer’s antagonism, though, was not ideological; it was personal. Between the end of the 1968 convention and the Rembar recommendation in late 1971, Vidal had driven, Mailer felt, a stake into his heart. In July 1971 he had published in The New York Review of Books an article, “In Another Country,” that covered a number of recent works on the subject of women’s liberation, one of them Mailer’s article in Harper’s with the same title as his extended book version of the next year, The Prisoner of Sex. Vidal thought Mailer’s attitude toward women reprehensible: they were breeding machines who existed to be the fruitful receptacle of the male’s sacred obligation, through the mystery of sexual intercourse, to conceive children. “The Patriarchalists have been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons,” Vidal had written, “at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed…. There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression.” In addition, Mailer’s argument that anything that interfered with conception was evil had its blatant homophobic inferences, which Vidal made explicit in his essay. Mailer’s argument “boils down to the following points. Masturbation is bad and so is contraception because the whole point to sex between man and woman is conception…. He links homosexuality with evil. The man who gives in to his homosexual drives is consorting with the enemy,” an “exemplification of moral weakness.” Like an Old Testament prophet, the supposedly freethinking and politically radical Mailer had chosen to define himself as the voice of the thundering injunction “Thou shalt not spill thy seed upon the ground.” The only place to spill it was into a woman, whether she wanted to receive it or not. Henry Miller depicted women as sexual objects. Mailer claimed they were vessels for fertilization, that women’s wombs belonged to men. Manson enslaved and killed female disciples and enemies, his recent semi-random murder of a movie star slashed into the national consciousness as an example of antifemale brutality. Different as Miller, Mailer, and Manson were, Vidal thought it fair to say, in a polemical essay and in response to Mailer’s views, that there was a logical progression from one to the other. He did not mean that either Miller or Mailer, as individuals, would eventually become Mansons. He did mean that the attitudes of Miller and Mailer contributed to the cultural groundwork that helped Manson come into existence.
Furious, brooding, deeply hurt, Mailer waited for an opportunity to respond. The ordinary channels of communication, including a letter to The New York Review, did not seem sufficient. If he considered attempting to speak privately to Gore and exchange grievances, he dismissed that approach. It probably seemed insufficiently public. Mailer wanted the largest possible audience for his counterattack. To humiliate Vidal publicly seemed the next best thing to attacking him physically. From Mailer’s point of view Vidal had called him, more or less, a murderer. He had put him on a level with Charles Manson. It would have been difficult for him not to think that Vidal was deliberately calling indirect attention to his having stabbed his wife over ten years before. For Vidal the distinction between a progression and an equivalence was crucial and obvious. For Mailer the distinction was impossible to see. To Vidal, his essay seemed a fair response to Mailer’s essay in Harper’s. Probably he did not anticipate that Mailer would react with blind pain and rage, and in a later revision he considerably toned down the emphasis on the connection between Mailer and Manson, implying that he had at first not realized how strongly Mailer might react and that, even after Mailer had attempted his revenge, Vidal still had some concern for his feelings. Much of this could have been ironed out privately in the fall of 1971, and Mailer might have given Vidal the opportunity to himself have written to The New York Review to clarify that he did not mean equivalence at all. By temperament Vidal would have found it difficult not to respond to a private request. He generally assumed that intense public debate was inherently objective. He rarely made personal attacks against his opponents, and even in the Buckley bitterness he felt he had at most only counterattacked. But Mailer, having identified himself inextricably with the aggressive pugilist, his favorite self-defining metaphor in those years, was not about to settle for anything less than some form of slugging it out before an audience. In mid-November 1971 Mailer learned that Vidal was about to appear on The Dick Cavett Show, to be taped on November 17 and aired on December 1. That afternoon he called Cavett, a small, slim, light-haired talk-show host with a gift for gracefully combining entertainment with serious cultural discussion and with whom Vidal had a cordial relationship. Janet Flanner, the New Yorker Paris correspondent, was to be the other guest. Could he also appear on the program? Cavett called Vidal just as he was leaving for the studio “to say that Mailer had rung and asked could he be on the program too.” Having just had a relaxing massage, Vidal was in a good mood, happily anticipating a pleasant evening. “Cavett said, ‘Do you mind?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘No.’” Cavett, whose guest Mailer had been numbers of times previously, aware of the Mailer-Vidal hostility, assumed there would be a civilized airing of differences. But Mailer, as he later recalled, had been doing a “slow, intense burn” for four months. “By the time of the show I was explosive. I had been drinking for a few hours before the show, and I confronted Gore in the dressing room before the show. I was steamed up and very angry. I was in battle mode. I ran at him and butted him in the head in the dressing room. Being a very cool professional, Gore just went onstage and acted as if nothing had happened and told some wonderful stories, particularly the one about Eleanor Roosevelt putting flowers in her toilet bowl to keep the flowers fresh. He had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand. I mostly glowered. Soon everyone thought something dramatic was going to happen. At one point I got up and walked across the stage toward Gore. People held their breath. They thought I was going to hit him. What I did was to give him a piece of paper” that had nothing of consequence written on it. “I don’t know how much of the audience response was relief and how much disappointment.”
Actually the audience, the host, and his two other guests were furious at Mailer for what seemed unforgivably boorish behavior. It was also self-destructive. When Gore arrived at the television studio, Mailer already had been sitting in a chair in the green room. “Now, I had figured—I knew Norman’s sensitivities and that he’d be upset about Mailer-Miller-Manson,” Vidal recalled. “But I thought it was all pretty much fair comment and kind
of funny and accurate. So I go into the green room and Norman is sitting watching TV. I was friendly. I came up behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. ‘How are you?’ He gets to his feet with great effort. Then he butted my forehead with his head and I punched his stomach. Norman wrote afterwards, ‘To my surprise, he hit me back.’” Vidal came on first, then Janet Flanner. No one onstage knew what had happened in the green room. Swaggering, attempting to seem menacing, Mailer immediately let audience and participants know he had a grievance against Vidal. “This man” said that he was like Charles Manson. He demanded an apology. The dialogue veered between comic and baffling. Cavett seemed nonplussed by Mailer’s truculence. The mostly unflappable Flanner, a small, elderly American with a European sense of both decorum and frankness, played the witty scold. Mailer’s behavior seemed to her childish and inappropriate. Vidal declined to argue with Mailer, except for a few self-defensive comments. The audience was prepared to be entertained. Instead it was shocked, for much of what Mailer said had no context. When without any explanation Mailer challenged Gore to reveal what he had done to Jack Kerouac, the audience was baffled. “Dick Cavett, sitting there, didn’t know what it was about, and no one in the audience could know,” Gore recalled. “I was talking through him, raising my voice to a decibel level that would erase what he was saying. Mailer claimed that I had destroyed Kerouac. He has a great line, that I destroyed Kerouac by fucking him in the ass. To fuck him in the ass is to take the steel out of his cojones. Mailer was going to say that on TV.” When Mailer tried to pressure Vidal to read his remarks about Mailer and Manson in his essay, a copy of which Mailer provided, Vidal simply disregarded him. Mailer’s babbling about the prerogatives of genius, which seemed his justification for his behavior, reinforced the audience’s alienation. When he turned directly to the studio audience and asked, “Am I crazy or are you crazy?” he was answered immediately with a unanimous chorus, “You are!” Cavett, who had been doing his best to turn the discussion to the light side, could not sustain any of his jokes or use his charm to deflect the attacks or deflate the tension. Finally, angry himself, he responded to Mailer, who had now attacked Cavett as part of a Vidal-Flanner-Cavett conspiracy against him, “Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine.” It was one of the only funny moments on the show. As the camera went to credits and the participants, Flanner, Vidal, and Cavett, standing, talked together, Mailer, with a slight truculence in his stride, noticeably alone, walked off, stage left, by himself.
The previous December, Howard and Gore had flown eastward from Rome on Singapore Airlines, at what seemed a bargain first-class rate, around the world. Other than the brief visit to India, it was their first experience of the Orient, highlighted by their delight in Bangkok, about whose attractions they had heard much from Oliver Evans and Tennessee Williams, among others. “So this Sunday,” Gore wrote to Elaine Dundy, “we start for Teheran and head toward the rising sun, with trepidation as travel narrows the mind while distending the gut.” Vidal’s first visit to Persia, now Iran, brought him to a country he had visited in his reading and imagination while writing Julian. The visit to Iran and then to India, to which they flew from Teheran, was probably the earliest start of the writing of Creation at the end of the decade. The trip was gratifying, liberating. A world that he knew existed suddenly became palpable reality. An idea for a novel about modern India came to mind, and was soon dropped. In India, in Katmandu, he ran into a valued figure from his past, Rosalind Rust, whom he had not seen for almost thirty years. Rosalind, still as beautiful, was now on the far side of her difficult years of divorce and alcoholism. Except for some memories of a brief, intense romance in their adolescence, they had little to share, and the most memorable experience for Gore in Katmandu was the appearance of Jimmie Trimble in a drug-induced dream. Rossellini, who was making a film in India, and Gore met for one in a series of planning sessions about their movie. In New Delhi, just before Christmas, the American ambassador, Kenneth Keating, whom Gore had strongly supported in his senatorial race against Robert Kennedy in 1964, greeted and entertained his distinguished literary visitor.
Their eastward flight eventually flew into the realities of return, first to California, then to New York, and finally back to Rome for much of the year. Some of the inescapable realities were contentious and irritating, particularly the time spent in preparation for the Buckley libel suit, which seemed during 1971 as if it might be as costly and long-lasting as Jarndyce and Jarndyce in Dickens’s Bleak House, and, at the end of the year, Mailer’s attack on the Cavett show. Some of the response to the Bouvier-Kennedy allusions in Two Sisters rose almost to the level of hostility, and Gore’s discussion with Louis Auchincloss about what seemed to Louis his neverending obsession with the Kennedys went on and then expanded into an even more contentious point between the two of them, as well as between Gore and much of the world: homosexuality, heterosexuality, and bisexuality. The text at issue was Shakespeare’s sonnets, which Auchincloss had reluctantly admitted probably had strong homoerotic strains. But, Vidal responded, “in a sense you contradict unwisely: you handsomely ‘prove’ the homoerotic (who thought up that word has saved the pride of thousands of hetero school teachers who cannot imagine a great writer not liking Miriam, the two children and a split-level ranch house) element in the sonnets then try to take it all back on the ground that S suffered a Grotonian panic at the practice. This does not take into much account the attitudes of the period—rather you color it with our own Puritan distortions, forgetting that Cromwell is not yet LP [Lord Protector] of the Realm. There is no evidence of S being a religious fundamentalist and therefore a proto-Puritan. Rather his discomfort was in the great tradition: alarm at his own lust and its unseemliness and its unlikelihood of panning out. Not only were the Elizabethans relaxed sexual opportunists but he was in the THEATRE—and that world hasn’t changed from the days of Dionysus to today.” In Rome, as in Bangkok, sexual opportunism was simply an ordinary way of life for innumerable people, as Gore constantly observed in regard to himself and others. On occasion it ran parallel with interests of the heart. More often it expressed physical desire and the turns of individual personality. For Vidal the subject was interesting, the practice ordinary and hardly worth, on the personal level, describing or commenting on.
There were moments of depression, of course, sometimes with work, often with the realities that the passage of time imposed on body and mind. His father’s death had shaken him. The memory of Jimmie Trimble had begun to haunt him, emblematic of choices he had made in regard to conventional notions about love, sex, and relationships, notwithstanding the familial intimacy between Howard and himself. At occasional moments he was not happy with his choices, though he rarely had any sense that they could have or should have been otherwise. Sometimes his imagination and emotional engagement with the past created dislocation. “The sun has set behind St. Peter’s,” he wrote in Two Sisters. “The low-swarming birds are gone. In the west cobalt blue has become neon rose. The moon’s dead face reflects the now hidden sun. I am depressed, partly at time’s passage … and at the glum realization that I forgot to arrange to have sex today…. Where am I? Well, I have gone inside, turned on the lights in the living room, look for comfort to the Amalfitan stone lion which dominates the room … look at the marble head of Jove bought from a dealer now disappeared and wish for the hundredth time that the marble did not so much resemble those Ivory Soap Parthenons I used to carve in the third grade. The room’s yellow walls usually cheer me but not now.” Though by temperament he was cheerful and focused, sometimes the mirror of mind and memory dramatized change, eventual dissolution. But if it was his enemy, it was also his subject; a creative balance between elegy and celebration was his aim for both himself and his fiction. Two Sisters had been partly an effort at that. So too now was the new novel, of a very different sort, he had begun planning for and working out mentally.
Aaron Burr had been on his mind for a long time, and earl
y in 1970, in Los Angeles, he bought from a rare-book dealer a small library of books about Burr and his world, including some manuscript letters that Burr had written. In 1965 Gore had considered writing a play based on Burr’s life, and in November 1970, coincidentally, Roger Stevens, still eager to have Gore return to the theater and deeply involved in the creation of the Kennedy Center in Washington, urged him to write a play about the Jefferson-Burr controversy. Stevens sent him a biography of Burr he had recently read. “Whether you do or don’t write a play on the subject, I think you’ll find it fascinating reading.” Gore, at his writing table at Via Di Torre Argentina, with his view of Rome through the high windows, had already begun preparing himself for what he now began to glimpse might be a desirable return to and reinvention of himself as a historian of American history.
Rome still seemed as good a place as any to write about America, and the choice of Rome as his residence maintained its viability, though his desire for a country home persisted. More and more he felt he needed some place to get away to, especially during the hot months, and daily living in an increasingly crowded, noisy, even dirty city had its aesthetic and practical difficulties. The terrace that extended the sky also extended the busy street. As wonderful as was the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment, Roman traffic below sometimes seemed as if it were going to drive up to and around the huge terrace. He had no desire to give up the Rome apartment. On the contrary, it had become home, handsomely decorated and furnished with books, antique furniture, and art objects, from Roman to baroque, that reflected the world he and Howard had become part of. It gave a rich cultural glow to their daily life. Outside, their local Roman streets provided a neighborhood, a variety of small shops and enduring people with whom, over the years, they became familiar and to whom they themselves were familiar, readily accepted neighbors. At favorite restaurants, in his international milieu, Gore, as Tennessee Williams had remarked, was becoming the “grand seigneur,” a projection of authority, accomplishment, and charm, a presence that friends enjoyed, that enemies disliked but respected. Wherever he was, he was very much there. The Klosters apartment seemed fine for occasional visits. The West Cork house had been a poor choice that never got off the ground. The prospect of residence and citizenship in Switzerland or Ireland soon lapsed. The bureaucratic legalisms and his own indecisiveness were too difficult to overcome. Having resided in Italy part of the year since 1963, formal Italian residency would be easy to effect, and Italian citizenship was a possibility that he had intermediaries look into in early 1972, though he went no further than inquiries, partly because by the mid-1970s the Vietnam horror ended, even if the ending itself was horrible. He was additionally content to reside in Italy for a substantial part of each year because suddenly, in late 1971, Howard found what seemed the perfect country place for them.