Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  To Epstein, Gore’s inventions seemed drunken, chaotic, out of control. In fact, they were highly crafted, tightly structured narratives whose antirealistic imaginative flights expressed the same passions and ideas that ran through his essays and, to some extent, also the historical novels. At the beginning of Myron the bewildered main character finds himself suddenly in a totally strange, surreal time and place that he has entered by being pushed (by the not fully repressed Myra within him) through the screen of his television set from his San Fernando Valley home in the year 1964 onto the Hollywood set of a movie that is being filmed in 1948. Myra now attempts to reassert control over her/his body; her long-term scheme is to effect changes in the filming of Siren of Babylon that will help make the movie a success financially, save the movie studio and the studio system, and change the future of Hollywood by restoring the golden age of Hollywood films. The novel is structured partly as a grand psychomachy, a mental as well as physical war between Myron, eager to regain dominance, and Myra, intent on changing history and the world. In the narrative Myron’s and Myra’s voices alternate as they struggle for control, the conforming, brainwashed, unimaginative Myron and the creative, irrepressible, transgressive Myra. In a movie-set world, where the action occurs, a desperate but surrealistically parodic and mockingly absurd struggle occurs between Myra’s effort to undo the wrong path taken in the past and Myron’s effort to prevent her from succeeding. In the end mad (but mostly well-intentioned) Myra is subdued by the bland but brutally patriarchal Myron, who wants to return to his happy normalcy, to the triumphant reign of his social and political values in the age of Nixon. Like Myra Breckinridge, Myron, dedicated to George Armstrong, was thematically autobiographical. It too focused on issues of sexuality, gender, politics, and culture, and it especially dramatized the relationship between the divided mind of the culture and the divided psyche of the individual, an attempt by the author to create a novel that reflected his own hard-earned but still not totally secure sense of a unified and autonomous identity. He himself knew where he stood and how he felt about the critical issues. In a culture that pressured or punished nonheterosexual acts, he had established a situation that gave him great freedom to live his life as he chose. But most of those who desired sexual and political freedom had not. American society did not readily or easily provide the protections of the Bill of Rights to everyone. The pursuit of happiness was a risky venture. Great religious, political, and economic powers prospered by promoting implicit or explicit prohibitions. “Thou Shalt Nots” were written over most doors. The inventions were Vidal’s attacks on the self-serving powers of repression that, in his view, unwarrantedly limited personal freedom. As long as one’s freedom did not come at the expense of another’s, then it seemed to him the highest value. All around him he saw coercive attempts to limit freedom, as Buckley had tried to use the libel laws to suppress his right of free speech. In Myron, in the first edition, the names of the conservative Supreme Court justices, whose legal decisions had supported limitations on privacy, were used mockingly, especially to refer to body parts and sexual acts. In later editions Vidal, rethinking the effectiveness of the joke, substituted normal usage. Satirical representations of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and even Henry James appear. The latter, the suavely mellifluous behind-the-scenes overall boss of the Hollywood studio, is black. The conventions of the realistic novel do not apply. Myron, which unlike Myra was a critical and commercial failure, takes its aesthetic cues from Swift and Sterne, its sensibility from black comedy, its agenda from Vidal’s own politics, its preoccupation with television and movie-screen images and coordinates from the author’s fascination with film. In the end Myron thinks his white-bread, pro-Nixon values are triumphant. He is finally totally in control of himself and “will sign off by saying that the highly articulately silent majority to which I am darned proud to belong are happy with things as they are and that we are not going to let anybody, repeat anybody, change things from what they are.” The final chapter contains only two words, reminiscent of the reverse signatures Bowles and Vidal used when signing their letters: “!sevil aryM.”

  In October 1973 Vidal published in The New York Review of Books an essay, “West Point,” that begins with his own birth and concludes with his father’s death, the first of what was to be a series of essays that synthesized personal history with cultural commentary. For a personal essay “West Point” is dramatically impersonal. By personality and habit Vidal was not introspective. He preferred to turn his intellectual gaze outward, at the material world, at ideas and stories that reflected its structures and belief systems. Politics and society interested him more than psychology. He looked less into himself than at himself. At the same time, family history is central to the story, a way of positioning himself in relation to the military branch of the American empire to which his father and uncle belonged. Like many of his essays, its distinctive feature is that the intellectual exposition has a narrative, and the personal story is illustrative of larger issues and patterns in the national life. The world and its ideas exist most vividly in reference to where the viewer has been and currently stands.

  By 1975, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, his views on politics and society were well known. He had been for twenty years a public man, appearing frequently in the media, print and electronic. He could be counted on to say something cogent and witty about the issues of the day. If he offended some, he entertained and stimulated others. As a visual image he had, so to speak, been aging in public, which gave an added intensity and resonance to his private response to what he saw in the full-length mirror in the apartment in Rome or at La Rondinaia or caught glimpses of reflected in storefront windows or airport passageways. The changes were unmistakable: his hairline had begun to recede, his forehead to have increased in size; black hair revealed gray flashes; olive eyes appeared darker, more prominent, as the eye wells and cheek line deepened and sharpened; the characteristic Gore-family ears seemed larger, the nose more substantial; his skin had begun to lose resilience, to show the breaks and sags of middle age. In his endless cycle of weight gain and weight loss, his posture and walk began to have an even more pronounced forward tilt, as if he were directing his center of gravity to some point slightly ahead of where he actually was; and that impression of slightly forward-propelled movement expressed emblematically the tilt of his personality toward constant engagement with what came next.

  Just as he had trained himself not to look inward, except intellectually, he also preferred not to look back. He favored a disciplined ruthlessness about memories and feelings. Regret, especially remorse, he feared as disabling, though he could not suppress awareness of and regret at physical changes. That many had thought him a breathtakingly handsome young man was well and good, though he himself maintained that that had been how others had seen him, not how he had seen himself. But now to be unmistakably a middle-aged man, even if one the world thought handsome and distinguished-looking, was an entirely different order of consideration. He had been quite used to his young body; it seemed a little inconvenient and perhaps even a challenge to be asked to get used to this something else. In addition, it made unavoidable the point that there would be transformations beyond this one with which he would also have to deal and which would in turn deal with him.

  Two attenuated presences from the past, who had hardly been in his mind at all, suddenly had definition again. He had not thought of Stanley Sofield or Pat Crocker in ages, neither of whom he had seen since the early 1950s. Sofield had been at the center of his St. Albans School experiences, the teacher there who had made the greatest impression on him and with whom he had kept in touch well into the 1950s. But they had not had any communication for many years. “Most sad about Sofield,” he told Louis Auchincloss in late 1974, who had written him that Sofield had died of a “sudden and merciful” heart attack. “Strange how those teachers confronted during pubescence remain so vividly in the memory while the later ones blur and vanish.” In April 1973 Go
re learned that Pat Crocker, of whom he had been quite fond, had died of cancer in Antigua in December 1972. His mother had been with him for his last three painful months. “He is in a tomb in that beautiful little cemetery in Antigua,” Penny Crocker told him in response to his consolatory letter, a genre that he took to with grace and diligence. Generally it was as close as he wanted to get to the dead. A batch of Gore’s books that had been stored in Pat’s house in Panajachel and twenty of his letters to Pat, which Pat had carefully saved, surfaced. Most of the books had dedications from the author to Gore, including two of Anaïs’s novels, a book of poems by Louise Nicholl, a novel by Somerset Maugham, and Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat. The list evoked much of his youth and early manhood. What, Pat’s executor wanted to know, should he do with the books and letters? “Maybe you would like to file [the letters] away for some future biographer, whose task will not be any the easier from your … awful habit of not dating any correspondence!”

  Time and distance had, long before their deaths, made Sofield and Crocker absences. But Tom Driberg’s sudden exit in August 1976 removed someone who had been a vivid part of Gore’s present life. They had been friends since the 1950s, and during the 1950s and early ’60s had seen each other whenever visiting either America or England. They enjoyed each other’s humor, talent, and capacity for entertaining outrageousness. Each lauded the other’s vividness and capacity as writer and as celebrant. With Gore’s move to Rome, and then the purchase of the Ravello house, they saw one another regularly. Gore was in England often enough. Tom loved Rome and Ravello even more. Whenever he could afford to get away from London (he had to appear regularly at the House of Lords in order to be eligible to collect his much-needed salary), he headed for Malta or Italy. La Rondinaia was a cost-free paradise to which he had an open invitation to come anytime. Driberg’s sex life had had a sort of admirable recklessness, especially for a high-ranking Labour Party politician. Usually when he left after a visit to Ravello, where he had what was thought of as his own bedroom and where he worked on his autobiography, his thank-you letters contained entertaining accounts of his adventures with Italian boys in Florence and Venice and on the train to England. Often they were selfconsciously amusing variants on Lord Bradwell, the peerage to which he had recently been elevated, as dirty old man who was at the same time a romantic idealist perfectly capable of falling in love with his latest working-class passion. Though he had little money, he was generous to those he cared for and sometimes found himself exploited or even victimized. With Gore and Howard he gradually came to be cast partly in the role of avuncular family friend. The age gap between them and Driberg’s declining health elicted Gore’s concern and generosity. As Driberg’s health deteriorated in the early 1970s, Gore became even more solicitous, more hospitable. In August 1973, after another in a series of heart attacks, Driberg convalesced at La Rondinaia. By 1975 he had convinced himself that he could write no place else but there. Gore was happy to accept the claim. The question of how frank he could be about his sex life in his autobiography worried Driberg and became a topic of conversation among his friends. Gore advised him to write everything but reserve publication of the controversial details, such as his having given Prime Minister Bevan a blow job, for posthumous publication. It was, at the same time, both worrisomely serious and high comedy. “Can it be that our little boy is now 70!” Gore wrote to him on his birthday. “It seems like only yesterday you were, in a piping treble, commanding the honest yeomen to drop their trousers. Well, now the halcyon days begin … and I wait impatiently for the next chapter of The Life. Do not be influenced by well-wishing fools who will attempt to bowdlerize.” Most lives in politics and journalism are “very like another but it is Pepys fumbling with serving girls, and Boswell’s dripping cock that command our attention and common humanity. Who can really hear J. Caesar’s self-advertisements? and who can resist Catullus or Horace in their private moods?” Driberg went on with the memoir. He hoped to make good progress at Ravello, where he was scheduled to spend much of August 1976, though Gore had to be away part of the time. But “you can now stay, safely, without me as Anna is a splendid dedicated maid … and of course the Man of God [Michael Tyler-Whittle], the Smiths and Howard are on the scene.” A few days before his scheduled departure Driberg came down to London from Oxford to prepare for the trip. In a cab from Paddington Station to his Barbican apartment he had a fatal heart attack.

  The year before Driberg’s death Gore had brought together in London about fifty of his British friends for an elegant fiftieth-birthday party. The party had been his own idea. It seemed appropriate to celebrate and memorialize the passage of his half a century. It was almost inconceivable to him that the face he looked at in the mirror each morning when he shaved was the latest, stranger version of a face he had grown used to in a different version long ago. Recently, when he had grown a beard, it had been almost entirely white. He shaved it immediately. The fact of being fifty was ominously distinctive, unlike any other birthday, and rather than retreat into glum solitude he had decided on a celebratory event, both acknowledgment and defiance. His last big birthday bash had been twenty-five years before, at Johnny Nicholson’s café in New York. This guest list would be vastly different. Of the three most prominent people in his life in 1945, one was dead. From the other two, Anaïs and Nina, he had been long estranged. Only two people who had attended the 1945 festivities, Tennessee and Howard, were there now, and practical considerations made the list mainly British. Kathleen Tynan, whom Ken had married after his divorce from Elaine, and Diana Phipps handled the party arrangements. Gore made suggestions for the guest list. He arrived in London a full week before the party, mostly to do some television appearances, including Vidal, Profile of a Writer for German television, part of which was to be filmed at his favorite London bookstore, Heywood Hill. The weather was foul, rainy and dark, John Saumurez Smith, the proprietor, recalled, and a fiftieth birthday was not entirely a happy occasion. The cameras inside the shop began filming him as he came to the outside front and walked through the door. As he entered, he said to the German camera crew, “What’s new from Auschwitz?” Stunned silence. The camera crew did not know whether to laugh or to cry. On the morning of the day of the party, as he and Howard descended in the small mirrored elevator from their suite at the Ritz Hotel, the elevator stopped on its way to the lobby. Jackie Kennedy stepped in, alone. It was a complete surprise to both of them. Since they had last talked, people had reported to him over the years that she had begun to deny she had ever even known him. He turned his back, his face to the mirror, and semiconsciously ran his hand through his hair. As the lift door opened, they let her exit first. “Bye-bye,” she said.

  The responses to the invitations went to Diana Phipps. Princess Margaret came, smoking her usual endless chain of cigarettes. Lady Diana Cooper, whose husband had been Churchill’s ambassador to France and who had known Gore since 1949, walked up to him, unaware he was talking to the princess, and began talking to him. “Oh, it’s you!” Lady Diana dryly said when she noticed Margaret, and curtsied. Evangeline Bruce, wife of the American ambassador to Britain, with whom Gore had become friendly, attended, as did old London friends, including John Lehmann, now retired from publishing; and John Bowen, mostly writing for theater and television, and his companion David Cook; and the Tynans, he angular, tall, and bizarrely colorful, she sharply attractive. From Gore’s Hollywood world Lee Remick, slightly reminiscent of Diana Lynn, was in town, and arrived with her husband. Diana Phipps and Claire Bloom were in good spirits. Marguerite Lamkin came, Speed Lamkin’s sister, now a London socialite who still occasionally worked as a drama coach and had helped Claire perfect the American accent for her successful London performance in Streetcar the previous year. Gore, who had known Marguerite in New York in the 1950s, had brought them together. Antonia Fraser arrived with the playwright Harold Pinter, whom she had recently met. Gore and Pinter immediately discovered a shared passion for radical politics. The ubiquitous Maria,
Lady St. Just, entered on the arm of Tennessee Williams. All week Maria spent with Gore as much free time as he had. In evening dress, assembled in private rooms at Mark’s in Mayfair, the guests had drinks, then went in to dinner. “I looked across the room and saw Gore with Princess Margaret on one side of him and Tennessee Williams on the other,” John Bowen recalled. Princess Margaret “was constantly needing a light. She had a long cigarette with a holder. Tennessee Williams just giggled at her.” Claire, who thought the party stunning, “was thinking how incredible it was that anyone could be as old as fifty.” Adept at light verse, the novelist Clive James, a close friend of Diana’s, read a birthday poem he had composed, “To Gore Vidal at Fifty,” with lines as effervescent as “A Marvellous Boy whose golden aureola/Still scintillates as fresh as Pepsi-Cola.” The poetic tribute was not entirely unserious: