by Fred Kaplan
Successful lives also generate honors, though their number is usually too small, their timeliness not timely enough. Prizes are desirable, but they come to few aspirants, or when they come, the time when they might have produced great pleasure has passed. Defenses are erected, some of them composed of irony or self-deprecation or resentment or exhaustion. Vidal, understandably, seemed hardly ever to get tired of wondering why he was not even more appreciated, and he drew on the usual range of responses to deal with it. In August 1989 he attended a day in his honor at the Edinburgh Festival. In September 1990 he presided as president at the annual Venice Film Festival, where he made a laudatory presentation for best film to Tom Stoppard, whom he admired, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. He then himself received “a prize at Forte dei Marmi, as the most famous writer within forty miles of Vesuvius.” He could always joke about fortune and misfortune. Wit burned away both pretense and ponderousness. On the subject of the Nobel Prize he quipped, “They have a short list and a long list and a non-list. I’m at the head of the non-list.” His often ambivalent, sometimes antagonistic relationship with the academy mellowed slightly. Whereas Bellow, Mailer, and even Updike had begun to appear on undergraduate and graduate reading lists—the first, tentative touches of canonization—Vidal rarely if ever appeared as required reading. Occasionally an adventuresome literature course included Myra Breckinridge. His enthusiasts had found no way to fit his diverse oeuvre into the curriculum, and his presence as a public personality sometimes resulted in weighty academics’ taking him more seriously as an entertainer than as an intellectual. Like most writers he suffered from the popularity of literary and cultural theory in English departments. At the same time he was immensely popular on campuses as a speaker, drawing huge student and public audiences even though he accepted few invitations, mostly to protect his time. That he almost always chose to speak on political rather than literary subjects expressed personal preference and his distaste for writers’ contemplating themselves as writers in public. It contributed, though, to deflecting attention from his literary achievements. To some extent the rise of gay studies helped. He had become an iconic figure in the gay world, perhaps more for his wit, outspokenness, and fame than for his views on sex, which he had laid out clearly once again in “The Birds and the Bees” in The Nation in October 1991.
There were, though, more academic invitations than he desired, including honorary degrees, which he made a point of declining, with the exception of a degree awarded as the culmination in October 1988 of a three-day symposium at Brown University. The Brown program was in honor of John Hay, whom Gore admired. Hay had been one of the central figures in Lincoln. The opportunity to honor Hay made this invitation attractive. In November 1991 he lectured at East Anglia University as a favor to his friend, the critic Lorna Sage. That November he visited Dartmouth University as the centerpiece of a Vidal academic celebration. He did not in the least mind being celebrated and flattered, but he preferred even more to be read, a goal more difficult to realize. He gave during the 1990s almost annual talks to the National Press Club in Washington, which were broadcast on national television. With much to say on political topics, he had a way of saying it that commanded large audiences and that, in his white-haired seniority, made him a favorite of the Washington press corps, particularly because he was always good copy. Using selective forums to keep his name before the public made sense: a series of lectures in Germany and Scandinavia; an appearance at the Cheltenham literary festival; a lecture at the Folger Library, which had organized a series based on the movies that had influenced him; and the Lowell Lecture at Harvard, where he spoke on monotheism and its discontents, attacking the religious right as a threat to liberty, for “Jefferson’s famous tree of liberty is all that we ever really had. Now, for want of nurture … it is dying before our eyes. Of course, the sky-god never liked it. But some of us did—and some of us do. So, perhaps through facing who and what we are, we may achieve a nation not under God but under man—or should I say our common humanity?”
With autobiography increasingly on his mind, he combined an honor that gave him great pleasure with an exploration of the impact that movies had had on him and on the United States in the 1930s and early ’40s. In 1988 Alan Heimart, then the chair of Harvard’s Program in the History of American Civilization, invited Gore to deliver the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization in spring 1991. Most likely, David Herbert Donald, the Harvard professor who had been Random House’s expert reader of Lincoln in 1984 and with whom Gore had developed a friendship centered on their shared interest, had urged that Vidal be invited. Donald, who had written lives of Thomas Wolfe and Charles Sumner, had begun writing a biography of Lincoln. As the Vidal-Lincoln controversy had swirled in academic journals and in The New York Review of Books, Donald had strongly supported Vidal’s depiction of Lincoln as concerned with preserving the Union, not ending slavery. He hoped that Gore’s four lectures would focus on American literature, but he was delighted to have his acceptance regardless of subject, which Vidal soon told his Harvard hosts would be the films of the 1930s and ’40s, under the title Screening History (which became a Harvard University Press book in 1993). “I know what I’d like to do,” he wrote to Donald, “but I’m not sure that I can pull it off: describe the half dozen or so films that shaped me from ten to fourteen.” Sharply evoking the Washington world of his grandfather and the impact of movies on his own development, Screening History argued that Anglophile Hollywood films had helped turn America toward involvement in World War II. Powerful vehicles of cultural, political, and psychological propaganda, films had made history. On Vidal’s way to the theater for the first lecture, Stephen Thernstrom, Heimart’s successor as chairman of the Program in the History of American Civilization, said to him, so he recalls, “‘You know, don’t be upset’—it was a rainy day—‘if there’s nobody there. We had Toni Morrison’ (I had barely heard of her then) ‘and we only had three hundred people.’ I said, ‘You’ll get a lot more with me.’ … Oh, the crowds were very enthusiastic, and a lot of kids. Usually these things draw lovers of literature, which tend not to be undergraduates but mainly graduate students or people from Cambridge, like Marian Schlesinger, who was sitting in the front row. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. Justin Kaplan,” the Twain and Whitman biographer, “was there. And Dan Aaron,” the emeritus Harvard professor of American literature, whose books had contributed to a lively dialogue on literature and politics in America and who had been a friend of Truman Capote and Edmund Wilson. So too were other Boston and Cambridge friends. The neoconservative Thernstrom he soon disliked, sensing antagonism and sabotage. “It was a well-kept secret that I was there, but word did spread, and by the third lecture we filled the Kennedy Center. David Herbert Donald replaced Thernstrom at the podium and did a superb introduction without one note, dates and everything. A lovely gesture.”
The issue of honors and prizes was given an ironic twist when United States: Essays 1952–1992 was awarded the National Book Award for criticism. To Gore, Jason, who had not wanted to publish it, seemed all too self-congratulatory, as if he were totally responsible for its existence and success. But the award forced on Gore additional confirmation that many discriminating readers thought more highly of his essays, somewhat of an afterthought in his career, than his fiction. It was fine to be thought the Montaigne of the twentieth century. Yet to the extent that it deflected attention away from his achievements as a novelist, his reputation as an essayist was not an unmixed blessing. When he decided not to attend the award ceremony, he deputized Harold Evans, representing Random House, to read his brief acceptance speech and accept the award for him. The distance from Rome to New York was not so small that he could not use it as a justification for declining to appear, though certainly he had motives in addition to inconvenience: “Unaccustomed as I am to winning prizes in my native land,” he had Evans say to the audience in November 1993, “I have not a set piece of the sort seasoned prize winners
are wont to give. Who can forget Faulkner’s famed ‘eternal truths and verities,’ that famed tautology so unlike my own bleak ‘relative truth.’ As you have already, I am sure, picked the wrong novelist and the wrong poet, I am not so vain as to think that you’ve got it right this time either. Incidentally, I did attend the first National Book Award forty years ago—that was also my last experience of book-prize-giving. My date was Dylan Thomas, dead sober for a change and terrified of everyone. The winner in fiction was my old friend James Jones, for From Here to Eternity. His victory was somewhat marred by Jean Stafford, one of the judges, who moved slowly if unsurely about the room, stopping before each notable to announce in a loud voice, ‘The decision was not unanimous.’ But Jimmy won, and Dylan and I retired to a tavern in the Village, and the rest was biography. In any case, I am delighted that you have encouraged Random House to continue publishing three-and-a-halfpound books by elderly writers.”
Vermillion, South Dakota. June 1994. He had agreed to receive an honorary degree from the state university where his father had graduated almost three quarters of a century before. Fifty years ago, in his Army uniform, he had flown in from Colorado with his Uncle Pick, to Sioux Falls. “Fifty years later, just like clockwork,” he told reporters, “I returned.” In Madison, South Dakota, he saw again the house in which Gene Vidal was born, the Midwestern center of his father’s generation of Vidals. Except for Aunt Margaret, they were now all dead. In his imagination, though, the Vidals and the Gores had recently been given additional life. The autobiographical impulse, pushing irrepressibly to the writerly surface, beginning with Two Sisters in 1970 and in the various memoiristic essays, had become insistent. Perhaps he might have declined to write a memoir if Walter Clemons had made effective use of material he had collected and the material Vidal had collected for him, including the bulging files in the archive at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which contained boxes of Gore and Vidal family documents. But Clemons’s efforts had moved from frustration to paralysis. By 1990, though he had interviewed dozens and collected additional documents, he had apparently not written a word. “Of course you’re worried about the progress of the book,” he wrote to Vidal in late 1990, five years since the beginning of the project, “and my ability to finish it. So am I. But I am working night and day to deliver a sizable portion in January.” Little, Brown also began to express concern. “After four years of meeting every famous person I have known,” Gore wrote to Louis Auchincloss, “Walter C has not written one word, nor, I fear, will he. He is diabetic, a progressive disease. My luck in these matters has always been bad. This was the moment for such a work to halt my slow fade to black but it was not to be.”
Angry and impatient, he recognized that he himself was partly to blame. He had not bothered to get evaluations and recommendations, so to speak. “The only revelation is my stupidity in bypassing a half-dozen experienced biographers in favor of one who had not written anything longer than a 1500 word personality piece,” he wrote to Bill Phillips, Clemons’s editor at Little, Brown. Clemons was notorious in the New York literary world for his writer’s block. His literary columns for Newsweek often provided anxious deadline jitters and delays for author and editors. Decency, charm, and intelligence, for which Clemons was beloved by many, were insufficient to the challenge. He had wanted to do it. Vidal had said yes. “Walter maintains that he is writing the book,” he wrote to Halfpenny in late 1991, “and Little Brown is bearing down on him hard but the fact that after five years he has only got up to Williwaw indicates that though he can do research and write beautifully 1500-word cover-stories for Newsweek, he has no idea how to master a biography, particularly one so long and varied. I still hope but he dithers.” The dithering continued. Finally, “after 7 years,” Vidal wrote to Janet Caro, who had worked for him in the 1960 campaign, “Walter will present Little, Brown with a m.s.: God knows what it will be like. He’s very thorough. Good critic. But, as he says sadly, the book is ‘external’ as I have never had a break-down, divorce, autistic child. I’ve seriously handicapped him but there it is.” Clemons did not fulfill his promise. By late 1992 Vidal had begun to curse himself and feel cursed. “Nine years and we never saw a page. 1985 to 1994. I rang him and I said I’d wish you’d get out of this. He said no on the phone. I said, ‘It’s quite clear you’ve done nothing. You will do nothing.’ He said, ‘I don’t think we should be having this conversation.’ And I said, ‘I wish we weren’t having it. We’re having it because you have reneged. You won’t admit that you’ve done nothing.’ Then he said, ‘I’m committed to handing in three hundred pages in February.’ That’s after nine years, three hundred pages. ‘I will hand it in then. If they like it, I will go on. If they don’t, I’ll withdraw.’ He gave them nothing because there was nothing, and he was out.” In early 1994, through an intermediary, Jay Parini, Vidal’s friend and literary executor, Vidal queried this author: was he interested in becoming Vidal’s biographer? I was. Two conditions: that Vidal provide full access to documents and people and that he agree in writing not to attempt to see the manuscript in any stage of its creation, that his first sight of the book in any form be on its date of publication. He agreed. Before I could approach Clemons about the availability of his files, which ostensibly contained interviews with people who had since died, Clemons, in summer 1994, at the age of sixty-four, suddenly died of a diabetic seizure. His heir refused access to any of his materials, to the puzzlement and anger of both biographer and subject. George Armstrong, also a friend of the executor, who had moved from Rome to New York in 1993, tried unsuccessfully to act as intermediary. Whatever Clemons had collected remained moldering in cartons in a Long Island City cellar.
Having taken the autobiographical route in Screening History, Vidal had decided by late 1991 to do his version of what Clemons was failing to do, though he would insist that it was an impressionistic memoir, not an autobiography, the latter a genre that he believed required a more formal structure and more accurate details. “Screening History was my trial run. It was interesting to do because I hadn’t done anything like that. I hadn’t really told a sustained narrative about myself, about crossing the Atlantic, about seeing Mussolini. Then I found that that was interesting to do and I had no other forum. It wasn’t stuff I was going to introduce into a fiction. And then I decided, well, I would take it on myself, see what I could do with it.” The chapter in Screening History that had focused on a 1937 film version of The Prince and the Pauper proved seminal. As he rewatched the film and wrote the chapter, he was suddenly more intensely preoccupied, both imaginatively and intellectually, with his relationship with Jimmie Trimble than he had been at any time since Jimmie’s death in 1945. Trimble had been absorbed into his consciousness, an ongoing emotional and literary touchstone who had made his first posthumous appearance in The City and the Pillar in 1948, dedicated to him, and had appeared irregularly but frequently thereafter in Vidal’s fiction, particularly in Season of Comfort, Washington, D.C., and Two Sisters, and he was to appear centrally in the 1998 novel, The Smithsonian Institution. The memoir, to be called Palimpsest (referring to script written over partly erased script so that the earlier, somewhat hidden version still exists), which Vidal worked on from 1992 to 1994, presented a selective anecdotal account of Vidal’s life until the age of thirty-nine. Structured as a narrative that moves between the present act of writing and the characters and incidents from the past, the Vidal of the present is as much a part of the narrative as the Vidal of the past. His parents and grandparents play prominent roles; Gore family history is central to the story. Neither euphemism nor self-analysis had any appeal to him. As Judith Calvino remarked, “I’ve always thought that Gore is a man without an unconscious and I do believe that. That is what allows him to be so impersonally personal. There are no bad things lurking somewhere in his body or his mind. He was born without it or he got rid of it…. Gore can transmit his warmth in different ways. Sometimes brutal. But he’s not without warmth. Nobody else in the world
would say what Gore says, ‘Tell [my biographer] everything, whatever comes to your mind.’ We all have our dark side that we want to hide. Maybe Gore doesn’t have it. That is the most amazing feature of Gore. His absolute originality. He’s a man who looks constantly at the truth with such cold eyes that very often he gets at the truth and then he’s not afraid of writing about it or being written about…. He’s courageous. He was always like that. A man of dangerous attraction.”