Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Another of his much-admired older friends from Tennessee’s generation had had his eightieth birthday in 1984. Isherwood, Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, “has decided to be Tithonus. He is amazingly healthy, preserved by alcohol, so life-like.” In fact, he was without health or futurity. Later that year Gore had visited him in Malibu “as he was dying. He was small, shrunken, all beak like a new-hatched eagle…. I sat on the edge of the bed and kept up a stream of chatter like a radio switched on.” Gore, who had just come from London, complained about the fecklessness of the English. “It’s just like the grasshopper and the ant, and they are hopeless grasshoppers…. The eyes opened on that … and he spoke his last complete sentence to me…. ‘So,’ he demanded, ‘what is wrong with grasshoppers?’” Later, in 1996, when the first volume of Isherwood’s diaries was published, Gore was startled and pained to see how censorious Isherwood sometimes had been about him (and others) in his private writings, even on days on which they had been convivial together.

  His relationship with Paul Bowles, now the only surviving literary friend from the Williams-Isherwood generation, was largely epistolary, though he had in mind to visit him in Morocco sometime soon. “Have you been keeping up with Tenn’s posthumous-ness?” he wrote Bowles. “He is already neck and neck with Judy Garland and I suspect, in a decade, he will have gone, as they say here, alle stelle, passing Scott and Zelda on the way. Well, he would’ve liked it. Even so, there is something to be said for not being dead.” Their correspondence had some of the flavor of two old veterans of lifelong literary wars exchanging notes about combat and battle fatigue. Bowles’s presence as a writer had dimmed since The Sheltering Sky, and Gore had lent a hand to the incipient Bowles revival, at least as a writer with a cult following, by writing an introduction to the 1979 Black Sparrow Press edition of Bowles’s short stories. “For the American academic,” Gore wrote, as if he were also writing about himself, “Bowles is still odd man out; he writes as if Moby-Dick had never been written.” Bowles appreciated the support, including the strong plug in Gore’s essay on William Dean Howells in the twentieth-anniversary issue of The New York Review. “I’m happy with the preface,” Bowles wrote to him. “No one else could have given me what I wanted.”

  Two deaths hit hard, one of a much-loved nonhuman companion, the other a man he held in warm, high esteem, a paragon of the imaginative life. By early 1983 Rat, a valued member of the family, had developed a fatal tumor. Gore and Howard grieved over his imminent departure and gave him the best medical care. Curtailing their otherwise easily indulged travel desires, they stayed at home or had a sitter for Rat when they went on short trips such as their annual New Year’s visit to Venice. “The Rat continues to die at his own somewhat selfish pace but we worship him,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny at the end of 1983, “and so he has now lived exactly one year longer than the vet gave him. The tumor is huge and the smell frightful but he is lively and unaffected otherwise.” Despite his condition, Gore caressed him as he always had. Some friends found the sight revolting. Gore was lovingly loyal to the end. The tumor on Rat’s lower jaw had grown to “the size of a tennis ball … and the pus and blood grew too much—for us not for him. He continued to eat for two until the end, which occurred in Howard’s arms,” in January 1984. “The vet gave him a shot from the rear, he sighed, shut his eyes, and that was the end of 14 years. If there should ever be another dog, one will take some satisfaction in knowing that he will survive us.” There was not to be a replacement for Rat.

  On a stormy Friday morning in September 1985, Gore was driven northward from Rome to a small town on the Ligurian coast to attend a funeral neither he nor anyone else could have anticipated. Two weeks before, at the age of sixty-one, Calvino had had a cerebral hemorrhage at his vacation home, where he had been working on his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered that fall at Harvard. “He was having more trouble than usual with the last,” Gore later wrote to David Herbert Donald, the Harvard historian, “when he got up one morning, told his wife, ‘It’s all clear!’ Sat down and wrote it straight through in a day, gave it to her that evening. She read it: to her horror, he had re-written the penultimate lecture word for word. The next morning came the stroke.” Soon he was in the hospital at Siena. Then he was dead. Much of Italy went into mourning and lamentation, “as if a beloved prince had died,” Vidal was to write in his essay “Calvino’s Death.” The President of the republic had come to the hospital to bid him good-bye. Gore, who had seen him last in May at the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment, where they had talked about Calvino’s trip to America, felt the shock painfully. He and Calvino had developed a bond of mutual respect that served them both well: Vidal with validation as an international author to whose Duluth Calvino had given high praise, Calvino with an American audience. Vidal thought Calvino and Williams the two most talented, accomplished writers he had known. Beyond that, though, there was a current of recognition that had passed between them that allowed Gore to address Calvino as “Maestro” and that had brought the Calvinos, of their own volition, to the ceremony in Ravello bestowing Vidal’s honorary citizenship. There was no jealousy, no competitiveness. For Calvino, and for Chichita, of whom he was very fond, Gore made an exception to his avoidance of funerals. Crowds gathered at the cemetery: the press, local officials, several hundred of Calvino’s friends and colleagues. When Gore arrived, the hearse and the widow were not yet there. “We had to take the body from Siena to this village, which is one hour and a half away from the hospital,” Chichita recalled. “I went with the hearse and I sat with the driver and the hearse was right behind me and it was nightmarish and unreal and I was horrified at the idea of going to the cemetery. I was totally horrified and completely alone. There were masses of people . . . and we got to the cemetery and I think it was my deepest feeling of horror and at the door of the cemetery looming high was Gore. And only Gore. Only he had the idea of waiting for me at the door. The other people were around the inside by the grave site. That’s something I remember forever. It was a subtle thing. He gave me support.” The coffin was placed four inches below the earth. Tiles were arranged over it. Masons covered the tiles with cement. The heat was oppressive. As Gore looked up from the fresh cement, he saw, staring straight at him, Calvino, “witnessing his own funeral.” They stared at one another “for one brief mad moment…. The man I thought was Italo is his younger brother, Floriano.” Later, on the drive back to Rome, under a hot sun, rain started to fall. A rainbow colored the sky in the east.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Scenes from Later Life

  1987–1996

  Webster County, Mississippi. May 1990. Hot weather. Air-conditioning everywhere, the new South inscribed on the old. “White frame houses, gingerbread, front yards, splendid magnolias, mockingbirds.” He had arrived in Webster county with a BBC television crew filming a documentary about his own life.

  Gore had not heard mockingbirds since the Washington summers of his childhood, and he had never been in Mississippi before. The experience, though, had some of the feel of a return, as if his grandfather’s memories, which he had heard so often as a child, were his own. He entered a green, moist, early-summer landscape heavily wooded with ancestral pines. This was where Thomas Pryor Gore had come from. The faces of the almost two hundred descendants of Thomas Tindal Gore who had congregated close to the places associated with Gore family history were eerily like his own. There were, assembled, cousins to every degree. It was one thing to joke about the two hundred similar noses and four hundred ears, another to appreciate the power of genetic inheritance. This was the family whose chromosomes he bore. Here they were in large numbers, proliferating from generation to generation, a community so formidable he had embraced its history but kept himself out of its living embrace. It was a family he wanted in principle, not in person. He had heard much about these people. He had actually, through his grandfather’s recollections, seen these places: the Webster County Courthouse, the nearby Gore family house, the place at
Emry where T. P. Gore was born. Suddenly he was there, in these living representations of the past, vividly evoked in his childhood by the man who had influenced him more than anyone else. And he was among legions of Gores, who welcomed their famous relative with the same combination of curiosity and apprehension with which he observed them, precisely because he had traveled a greater distance than they from the Gore family’s Methodist origins, from the First and Second Great Awakenings that had left their indelible impact on this huge Southern clan. That spirit, he now discovered, was still expressively alive, especially in the younger generation of religious enthusiasts. A few days later, in Jackson, he told Eudora Welty, “sharp of eye, tongue, and full of gossip,” whom he visited at her home, how alarmed he was “by the religiosity of the Gores. Admittedly the reunion was on a Sunday but ten hymns? two family preachers? a lot of blood of the lamb? ‘Well, that’s what we do on Sunday,’ she said; and it was a Sunday. ‘But I think they do it all week,’ I said. ‘They believe. They told me they do.’” That he did not didn’t make him in the eyes of the family any the less a Gore; and that he was a Gore made him better than anyone who was not. Anyway, they would never accept that he was not, deep down, a Christian, ready to be awakened by their solicitations. Blood was stronger than disbelief.

  A hundred years before, his grandfather, another nonbeliever, had left Mississippi with a copy of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in his hand and the Constitution of the United States in his pocket. The noisy, smoke-belching train had taken the blind young man westward across the river to Texas and the Oklahoma Territory, where he found a bride and a career. His grandson had carried those Gore genes into places the Senator’s world had given birth to, a culture whose frontier antecedents lived unmistakably in the configurations of the present. When his grandfather left Mississippi, not even radio had existed. When he died, the faces and voices of the Senator and his grandson had been in newsreels in a thousand movie theaters. Both had “lit out for the territory,” each in his own way. Though the place names were different, the spirit was the same. T. P. Gore had never once left North America. Going abroad was something he simply had no interest in. Foreign shores were inferior to American. His grandson carried America with him wherever he went. As for Henry James and Mark Twain, living abroad emphasized for Gore the intensity of his relationship with “home.” In America he was an American who lived abroad. In Europe he was an American writer. When in his later years T. P. Gore returned to Mississippi, he was idolized by the Mississippi Gores. His grandson was shown “the fireplace from which he was given a piece of wood on a return trip.” “I did have an eerie feeling,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny, “with so much kin assembled in a drab new cube of brick in the heart of Houston, Miss, where I stayed with 4th generation Dr. Gore, an amiable highly educated man, as the Gores all seem to be, mostly lawyers, doctors, preachers, one general. No entrepreneurs, I was told with mock despair. They had not gone into trade and made money, ever. T. P. Gore was their idol. The new idol is 7th cousin Albert Gore.” At Yazoo City he was shown the monument to his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Tindal Gore, who, coming from Alabama to settle in Mississippi, had bought a vast tract of land from a soon-to-be-dispossessed Chickasaw Indian. At the courthouse Gore made an impromptu speech. Then he and the camera crew rolled away, down the interstate to Jackson, completing the documentary film, Gore Vidal’s Gore Vidal, a late-twentieth-century monument to Thomas Tindal’s descendant. Gore Vidal may have been aware that every turn in his own life away from a political career had been a turn away from what the Gore family reunion represented. The South is a different place from the rest of the country, he was fond of saying, and if Lincoln had been wiser, he would have let it go. It was his grandfather’s South that was different, he began to realize, and as he and Eudora Welty agreed, the modern Deep South was becoming like much of the rest of the country. He had made the one visit of his lifetime.

  It had been a walk down “memory lane” (a phrase he was becoming fond of), down those pathways his grandfather’s stories had provided him. He had always valued highly his own and his family’s past, partly because of the childhood instability his parents’ temperaments and divorce had forced on him. The past provided an anchor. The Gore clan was a stable family he could both be a part of and keep at a distance. Given his strong historical temperament, it was natural that family history would interest him as history. The family sagas on both sides had resonant depth. They made his presence and his statements as an American even the more formidable. Some of his ancestors had done illustrious things. A few had been famous. The association did him credit, and as a man who lived by creating stories, by holding an audience with what he wrote and what he said, the family histories provided additional illustrative coordinates that made his tales shine more brightly, sharply, engagingly. His personal history was also a family story that preceded even his grandparents’ generation, and he had become aware as early as the 1960s that he could not tell, perhaps even know, his own story fully enough if he did not know his family’s origins. Much Gore family history was palpably there for him from the start. He had grown up among its latest expressions, particularly at Rock Creek Park. Vidal family history was more elusive. Family legend provided some detail. Still, little was known of what had transpired before 1848. Gene and Pick had been mostly uninterested; there was little reason to believe that the generation of Vidals after his own would have any interest at all. But it mattered to him. While Gene was alive, Gore had begun to look into Vidal family origins. His father gave what little help he could. Some of the details would always remain elusive or vague. By the late 1960s, after two visits to Feldkirch and the search for documents in Italy and Switzerland, he had begun to put together the general story, some aspects of which fascinated him, particularly that the family’s likely origin was Sephardic Jewish and that Vidal had been a prominent name in Northern Italy, particularly in Venice, a city he visited regularly and for which he had great affection. “So I’m a Jew after all,” he commented. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always suspected Norman Mailer was Greek Orthodox from Russia. So we’ll just change roles at the end. I’ll work out the transfer.”

  Though he had vowed never to write his autobiography, and during the 1970s and ’80s believed he would not, he was actually, in limited ways, in the process of doing precisely that. “I’m not going to write a memoir,” he told Halfpenny in 1985, soon after Walter Clemons contracted to write his life, “and biographers no longer do any research. So I’d better fill in gaps for them now.” He had been providing his version of some of the gaps in essays, particularly “West Point” and “On Flying,” a graceful evocation of his father’s career in the early days of commercial aviation. His own youth had also begun to take on quasimythic proportion in numbers of memoiristic essays, particularly those on Tennessee Williams. Vidal had been both participant and eyewitness in the making of legends. The autobiographical essays he had begun to write were both literary history and personal memoir. “Yes,” he admitted, “I am getting very autobiographical, but if I don’t do some of it, others will invent everything as they have already invented so much.” When the BBC and Italy’s RAI-TV offered him in 1985 the opportunity to write and narrate a two-hour TV documentary on Venice, he happily agreed. From the start of his Italian life, Venice had been a place he identified with, an irresistible lure for visits, especially with Barbara Epstein, and during the Christmas-New Year holiday, always with Howard, sometimes with American friends. Once, Jason Epstein recalled, “I was in Venice with Gore and an old [female] friend whom I happened to be traveling with and we were crossing the Rialto Bridge. There was a bunch of sailors. ‘Seafood,’ Gore said, and they both took off after them, leaving me behind.” One of Gore’s favorite stories about Tennessee and Maria was set in Venice. They “were sitting on the beach … and this very thin, elegant woman is walking along the beach. Maria, Lady St. Just, turns to Tennessee and says, ‘That is Anorexia Nervosa.’ Tennessee says, ‘Oh, Maria, you know ev
eryone!’” Harry’s Bar, Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo, the luxurious Gritti Palace Hotel, long walks in the cold weather with touches of snow lining the canals, the pleasures of the Venetian opera house—the epicurean’s Venice was also the historian’s and the writer’s, the setting of Mann’s Death in Venice, the piazza that Henry James in The Wings of the Dove describes as the drawing room of Europe. Deepening the Venetian imprint was Gore’s awareness that Vidals had come to that city when it was relatively young, as early as the fourteenth century. “Most of May—June [1985] in Venice and Crete and Naxos (we do the empire, too),” he told Halfpenny. “It is not easy among so many false notes to know which chords are least banal. I write, which I didn’t want to do; and act, which I ought not to do.” Among the true and revealing notes was the segment of film in which he discusses his Venetian ancestry. The camera takes him to the famous library where the records of the noble Venetian families are preserved. He is searching for evidence to tie him by lineage to Venetian fame. Alas, he tells his audience, as he runs his finger up and down the columns of the golden book, the name Vidal is not there. By the end of the year the documentary appeared on British and Italian television. George Armstrong wrote the text for the American and British print versions. Gore wanted them to be identified as co-authors. The British publisher refused, demanding Vidal’s name alone, though he agreed to the formula “Edited by George Armstrong.” Gore gave the entire royalty to his friend. “It is a picture book for Xmas, to go round the world with the various showings of the two films, a perfect non-book and so I have done nothing,” except the preface. The project had been “a lot of work, and I grow old,” he complained. “The energy isn’t the same.”