Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Much of the spring and summer of 1988 he spent at Ravello, working on Hollywood and writing essays, a volume of which, At Home: Essays, 1982–1988, Random House published in November 1988. For a man who had claimed he would never write an autobiography, numbers of essays in At Home were noticeably autobiographical, particularly the two that framed the titular theme, “At Home in Washington, D.C.” and “At Home in a Roman Street” as well as “On Flying” and the essays on Prokosch, Williams, and Calvino. So too was Hollywood, in sly, effective ways, particularly the homage paid to Gene Vidal, who appears as Douglas Fairbanks’s trainer, “tall and out of place among the stars … a handsome Army flier who had been an all-American football player at West Point”; and the evocation of Thomas Pryor Gore, who is an important presence in the Woodrow Wilson—Warren Harding world the novel dramatizes. Senator Burden Day “and his blind neighbor, former Senator Thomas Gore, gazed upon the moonlit woods where Gore was building a house. Defeated in 1920 after three terms in the Senate, Gore was practicing law in Washington and for the first time making money. ‘The house will be just out of view, three hundred yards to the northwest of that hill.’ The blind man pointed accurately with his cane…. Although two separate accidents had blinded him by the time he was ten, there was a legend that he had been elected Oklahoma’s first senator by pretending not to be blind. Hence the pretense of reading, of seeing…. Some years earlier, Gore had created a sensation in the Senate by revealing that he had been offered a bribe by an oil company. No one had ever done that before and, privately, Gore’s eccentricity was deplored in the cloakroom. ‘I’d starve if it wasn’t for my friends!’ a Southern statesman had declaimed…. ‘You plan to come back, don’t you?’ Gore looked at him. In the moonlight his single glass eye shone, while the blind one was full and reflected no light. ‘When I went down in the Harding sweep, I thought it was the end of the world. Then I pulled myself together and said to myself, Here you are, fifty years old, and you’ve been a senator since you were thirty-seven and never had a chance to make a penny. So take time off. Build a house in Rock Creek Park. Then go back. I wrote a note and hid it in the Senate chamber, saying I’d be back one day. Funny,’ he held his cane in front of him like a dowsing rod, ‘right after I hid that scrap of paper, I went into the cloakroom to collect my gear—this was the last day of the session—and suddenly I felt two arms around me and I was being given a bear-hug and I said, “Who is it?” and this voice said, “Just an old duffer going off to be hung.” And it was Harding.’ … ‘He [Harding] had so much luck for so long,’ Burden said. ‘Now the people are ready to turn on him.’ ‘Sooner or later, they turn on everybody.’ Gore sighed. ‘I tell you, if there was any race other than the human race, I’d go join it.’”

  That disenchantment was now applied to Vidal’s feeling about his publisher, Random House, and his editor and friend, Jason Epstein. For years he had been complaining about the usual ineptitudes and failures that any large publisher inflicts on its books. His happy experience as a Little, Brown author in the 1960s increasingly became his benchmark against which to evaluate his dissatisfaction. Complaint was inevitable. Until the late 1980s, with the exception of the disagreement with Jason about Creation, it had been about minor failures of the sort authors always have with publishers. They were of less concern to Random House than its occasional discomfort at having locked itself into very expensive multiple-book contracts at a time when changing market and cultural conditions made it increasingly likely that they would not earn back the advances. As popular as Vidal was as a writer of historical novels, the audience was diminishing. Both he and Random House expected bestsellers. Empire, though it was critically praised, did not earn back its advance. Hollywood garnered neither critical nor commercial success, partly because its flaws, among its many strengths, were the kind that an increasingly less patient, less literary market for bestsellers found discouraging. Not tightly organized, partly an afterthought of Empire, less about Hollywood than about Washington, it was, as Epstein felt when he read the manuscript, less commercial than any of the previous historical novels. In addition, it seemed to him that Vidal’s obsession with bisexuality, previously restricted to the “inventions” like Myra and Myron, was now, in Hollywood, becoming central to the historical novels, the result, Epstein thought, of Vidal’s inability to resolve the tension between his male and female sides. He feared that conflation would turn future novels in the series into expanded, historically based versions of the Chinese operas he disliked and whose sales were small. Owen Laster saw the conflict moving toward explosion.

  In 1983 Gore had complained bitterly to Laster that Jason and Random House were not behind Duluth. A realist, Vidal knew that Duluth was not destined for mass-market success, but he felt that Random House was not committed to giving it the support it needed to achieve success within its limits. Whereas the book clubs rushed to embrace the historical novels, they would not take any of the inventions. “Owen would come to me,” Epstein recalled, “and say that Gore is giving me a hard time with this. Random House isn’t supporting him, and so on. ‘Well, we’re doing the best we can. But the Book-of-the-Month Club doesn’t want these things.’ It was Duluth. And the reviews of the historical novels were not as good as they had been, which I attributed to the intrusion of this Myra Breckinridge thing…. Then Gore and I had lunch one day, and Gore was very angry. ‘Why can’t you make the Book-of-the-Month Club take my books?’ ‘What am I supposed to do? Put a gun to their heads? They make their own decisions.’ It was well after Duluth. Maybe it was around the time of Hollywood…. Up to that point everything was fine, except for the warnings I was getting from Owen that Gore was unhappy.” Hollywood, which brought them to the edge but not over, seemed to Laster “a softer book than any of the other historical novels. Perhaps Gore was getting tired of the historical project,” though he had received a large advance to write the final volume in the series, The Golden Age. He “was very critical of the way Random House handled Hollywood, particularly publicity and promotion, though I don’t recall a lack of ads…. My theory—I saw it happen with other big authors—is that Jason thought that Gore’s writing was not as good as it used to be, and I sensed that Jason somehow, not meaning to, conveyed this to Gore…. I remember having lunch with Jason and going over the declining sales from the historical novels. There was a lack of the same kind of endorsement of his writing as before that somehow got through to Gore, so the stage was set.” Random House still had a commitment to Vidal. But it was refracted through his editor’s decreased enthusiasm about his potential to be as good and as successful a writer of historical novels as before. A certain mutual weariness, even disenchantment, had set in. Elements of it had been there from the beginning. Vidal had tolerated an editor unenthusiastic about novels he valued greatly. It had been from the start a marriage of demi-convenience, and like an old married couple they had tolerated disaffiliation because each had exercised restraint, neither had desired confrontation, and both had found reasons to assume they would go on together to the end.

  When Vidal proposed in early 1990 that Random House publish a volume of his collected essays, to be called United States (organized on the trope that the one book united three aspects of his career—the personal, the political, and the literary), he was startled when Epstein resisted. It would be too large and expensive. In this case Epstein’s reluctance was partly practical, but perhaps also cranky, a surprising response, since from the beginning Vidal’s essays had attracted him “much much more than his fiction. In his own voice there was no need to pretend,” Epstein observed. “He was an American version of Montaigne.” For his editor, Vidal’s voice as a novelist has never been fully convincing, even in the historical novels, which seemed to him best the closer they came to being essays. “I always thought about Gore that he was not really a novelist, that he had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn’t subordinate himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist. You’ve got to become the p
eople you impersonate, you have to have the ability to let yourself go a little bit and become the characters. He didn’t seem to do that. It was always him wearing different costumes.” But if Random House were to remain his publisher, it would have to bring out the essays. That Epstein allowed himself to express his reservations was self-defeating. “He sat at lunch at the Plaza,” Gore recalled, “with Howard and Owen Laster and me and said, ‘You can’t do it, it’s too large, we can’t afford to make it, we can’t afford to sell it,’ and so on.” But unless Random House drastically overpaid, it was certain not to lose money and likely to gain critical honors. “Obviously, I am not charmed that the collected essays are regarded as a drug on the market,” Vidal wrote to Laster. He brooded on the possibility of changing publishers, or at least changing editors within Random House. The former was impractical though far from impossible, mainly because Random House had rights to his backlist, which he felt crucial to keep in print in as attractive a way as possible. That issue had begun to loom larger and larger, and increasing amounts of Laster’s time, prodded by an anxious author, went into protecting the backlist and keeping it in print. The latter could be done, though the most likely alternative to Epstein, Gary Fisketjon, had moved to Knopf, which now belonged to the same conglomerate as Random House. General policy militated against authors moving from one house to another within the conglomerate. Also, there was a friendship, which Gore still valued, at risk. During the summer and fall of 1990 he worked at a new short novel, another in the invention mode, which he finished that winter. By the summer of 1991, when Laster, Vidal, and Epstein met in New York to determine what to do about the essays, it was now also part of the discussion. When Laster and Vidal offered to take no advance on the volume of essays, Random House agreed to publish it. Probably Epstein had already rethought his position. Since there was little to no financial risk and since he admired the essays, that issue was disposed of, though at the cost of further deterioration in the relationship by the fact of its having been an issue at all. At that lunch “Gore was tense,” Epstein recalled. “I could see that he was in a strange mood, and I sensed there’d been a long series of discussions with Owen about what they’re going to do about this. ‘Let’s wait,’ I said, ‘till we see the next book … and hope for the best.’”

  Epstein hated it. Live from Golgotha, The Gospel According to Gore Vidal, narrated by Saint Timothy, is Vidal’s culminating deconstruction of Christianity, a parodic explosion of the Gospels and Jesus into satiric and science-fiction fragments. It is also a buddy story in which the older “boy,” Saint Paul, and the younger, Timothy, for a while travel together the first-century Christian religious circuit. Paul, who likes boys and Timothy especially, initiates Timothy into hilarious, exciting, and sometimes dangerous adventures as “Saint” (a.k.a. Saul/Paul) attempts to convert the heathen. Jesus’ followers (or adapters) are split into two groups, those who believe that the message of the Jewish Jesus is for Jews and those who believe (as does Saint) “that Jesus had come as the messiah for everyone,” that Jesus is a big, international, multicultural business not to be limited to Jews. The struggle between the warring groups is fought partly over the battleground of Timothy’s attractive body, whose crucial part must be altered in order for the uncircumcised, non-Jewish Timothy to be initiated. “In the beginning was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine.” Poor Timothy! “Little did I realize when I became a Christian and met Saint and his friends that my body—specifically my whang—was to be a battleground between two warring factions within the infant church.” A marketing genius, Saint eventually wins. There is another battle in progress, so Timothy discovers, when, after Saint’s death in Rome, Timothy begins to have strange extra-first-century A.D. visitations, which include a Sony television set, network executives from the twentieth century viciously competing to televise the crucifixion live, and a master computer hack who turns out to be the man who the world thinks was, but actually was not, crucified and who has time-traveled forward to the late twentieth century so that he can, electronically, reach back to the first to eliminate Christianity itself by erasing all records of its existence. In the end Lucky Timothy watches the crucifixion on TV. It is not “live” but taped. The special effects are extraordinarily beautiful. The editor wins an Emmy.

  Not only did Epstein not like Live from Golgotha, he thought it “contemptible.” The condemnation was fueled by a surprising moral outrage at Vidal’s treatment of Paul’s sexuality and by a literalist’s sense of the necessity to be factually accurate. Epstein was, as he read it, “trying very hard to like it, and there were a few funny moments in the beginning. I actually laughed once or twice. I said that to Gore, that I’m enjoying this. I read the rest of it. I had just published a book by Elaine Pagels with a lot about St. Paul in it, which had led me to read other books on early Christianity. So I knew a certain amount about Paul and what was going on with current scholarship and so on. It was shocking. Gore didn’t bother to look anything up. Paul is a revolutionary. When Paul says don’t marry, he says it because if you do you’ll be committed to Rome, not to us. It wasn’t about sex. It was about revolution. I tried to explain that to Gore, and he was very high-and-mighty about that…. Then I wrote a letter, suggesting that he make some changes…. I didn’t think the novel was funny. I thought it was forced and confusing, which I said in a polite way. I knew that that would lead to trouble. I knew that the fuse was getting short there.” Vidal wondered if there had been all along some latent homophobia in Epstein that at least partly explained his dislike of Myron, Duluth, and Live from Gologotha. It also seemed to him possible that Epstein’s hostile response to the last of these reflected visceral disapproval of Vidal’s attack on right-wing Zionism that had begun with “The Empire Lovers Strike Back.” Furious at what seemed to him Epstein’s assumption of superior knowledge, as if the issue were whether or not Vidal’s version of Saint Paul was an “accurate” one, or at least the one that Epstein thought accurate, Vidal’s short fuse—which had burned low during ten years of what he thought his editor’s condescension, distaste for his fiction, and pernicious neglect—detonated into an immediate explosion. In a controlled, furious letter, in response to Epstein’s, he rejected both the criticism and the person from whom it had come. To Epstein, Vidal seemed to be playing, now and for much of his life, the role of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. “‘I banish thee.’ He banished us and doesn’t know about us anymore. He doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s leftover socialism. It doesn’t work. It has nothing to do with what’s going on in this country now. And this endless sneering about America. I don’t think it helps much to do that. This is an interesting country, for better or worse. You might as well figure out what’s going on here and take it seriously.”

  Vidal believed that that was precisely what he had spent his lifetime doing. In his judgment it was Epstein who neither understood America nor him, as a political commentator and certainly not as a writer. He immediately instructed Laster to find another publisher. This was the right time to move. Random House would publish Live from Golgotha in 1992, United States in 1993. After that, a new publisher should be in place, one who would be energized by the excitement of having Vidal’s name on its list. His backlist should be moved as soon as possible. Harry Evans, who had become the Random House publisher in 1990 after a career in British journalism and who was married to Tina Brown, the editor of The New Yorker, intervened. He was eager to keep Vidal, whom he admired as a literary star. He proposed that he himself become Vidal’s editor, though the actual hands-on editing would be done by Sharon Delano, a manuscript and magazine editor in her mid-forties who had been at The New York Review of Books for twelve years and was happy to take on an association with a famous writer whom she admired. It was on Evans’s part an attempt to flatter and conciliate, not at all a commitment to involve himself actively in publishing Vidal or to guarantee the support Vidal wanted. He was, though, p
ersuasive; Vidal, persuadable. “As you know or do not know,” Gore wrote to Richard Poirier, “I was all set to leave RH, thanks to J., but then Harry (The Consort) Evans persuaded me to stay and showed enthusiasm for my new comic invention, loathed by J. (his comments are wondrously off-the-wall: they also proved to be terminal). Anyway, all is past tense between us and Barbara makes no attempt to shift tenses so that’s that. The only pleasure of age is shedding baggage.” Jason was stunned. He had no desire to end the friendship. He did not want Gore to leave Random House either, though he would not oppose that, if Gore wanted to leave, and of course he did not oppose Evans’s successful intervention. But he had assumed that the personal and professional relationships were separable. Gore believed they were not. Jason felt pained that he had been banished from any contact with someone he still cared about. Gore was too deeply hurt to continue the relationship. He felt he had been betrayed. It was a bitter end to a long friendship.

  Full, active lives inevitably generate grievances, the lives of professional writers especially. Vidal’s grievances were, no more and no less than for most, the residue of effort and risk. They were also sometimes energizing. Personal ruptures in lifelong relationships, though, were slow to come, no matter how long or deep the resentments. There were only two of any significance in his lifetime. The first was with his mother, the second with Jason. “I fear as fond as I am of the Epsteins,” he told Halfpenny in May 1991, as he felt the rupture coming, “the statute of limitations has run out, and I can break away. Jason, all gloom in any case, should quit, cloudy trophies from his past, his glory; and I shall proceed to my end-game without Old-Man-of-the-Sea encumbrance.” With Barbara, no matter what his grievances against The New York Review of Books, he was able to separate the personal from the professional. Still, the years had produced a long list of complaints against the Review: “My Barbara grows more [edgy] with time’s passage,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny in May 1991. “The Review more irrelevant. I more irritable. She turned down one of my best pieces [“Reflections on Glory Reflected and Otherwise”], the only really memoiristic thing I’ve done but as it might give offense to the people amongst whom her uneasy collaborator Bob Silvers might climb socially, it will not do. For the record, they turned down ‘The Holy Family’ (Bob Silvers was making eyes at Bobby Kennedy then), French letters (too boring), ‘Pink Star and Yellow Triangle’ (can’t think why—though she did say that if I removed the analogy between Jews and fags, as neither group had anything in common: I agreed that I saw nothing to generalize about but Hitler had, so …). ‘Armageddon?’ (Jews would be upset), ‘The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas’ (I forget why that wouldn’t do), now ‘Glorious Reflections’ and a piece on Mencken. So I have called it quits…. The NYR grows not only duller and duller, the fate of most papers, but the writers do not question the status quo and the examined life is too dangerous for their pages. Also, they have got the New Yorker Magazine—Encyclopedia Britannica syndrome: every piece must contain every little fact and citation on earth for the great archive in the sky. Look how they overloaded poor Joan Didion in her piece on New York City. She is one of the few good essayists in the language, which means she is, simply, a seductive and unique voice. You can still hear her piping through the Treasurer’s Report, but barely. I am forbidden politics, now the domain of the Catholic Garrulous Wills [Garry Wills], a sharp interesting writer at times, but he has never been outside the library to look at the country he generalizes so hugely about. He also believes that America is a truly Christian religious nation, quite underestimating the spontaneous hypocrisy of the lower orders when polled—so like that of their masters. But then like all our other tenured commentators, he must maintain the fiction that the US is a classless society (under God), something he probably believes and Arthur Schlesinger, say, who follows the party line in print, does not.” Each time Vidal swore never to write again for the Review. Each time, patiently persuaded by Barbara, he relented. The stakes, of course, were not as high with the Review as with Random House. It was easier to publish essays in other magazines, as he increasingly did in The Nation, soon in The Times Literary Supplement, and especially in Vanity Fair, whose admiring publisher and editors were eager to print anything he offered them. Because of the backlist, moving to a new publisher was more formidable. And he had apparently never (or at least since the late 1960s) cared for Jason to the degree that he cared for Barbara. She had become and remained family, like his sister, even more like Howard. Disagreements, even disappointments, did not threaten the personal tie.