by Fred Kaplan
In March 1996 I received the news from a friend in Boston that an item had appeared in the Boston Globe stating that Gore Vidal had been rushed at 6 A.M. the day before to the San Giovanni Hospital in Salerno because of rectal hemorrhaging. His condition was reported as stable. Tests were being done, after which a decision would be made about the length of his hospitalization. I called Barbara Epstein: “He had five polyps removed in L.A.,” she said. “The doctor said don’t fly for six days and no drinking. Three days later he’s on his way back to Rome, an eighteen-hour flight.” On an empty stomach, dehydrated, he ate a portion of eggplant covered with Tabasco sauce, drank a lot of vodka, as he later wrote to Ned Rorem, and took two aspirin, an anticoagulant. “He got home,” Epstein continued, “and had some more drinks because he was exhausted.” When he got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, “he noticed some blood but it didn’t seem very bad, so he went back to bed, woke up in a sea of blood. It all has a happy ending. When I called him, he said, ‘I died!’ At any rate, Howard was totally cool and did all the right things. There’s a guy in the village who got a doctor. They hauled him out, and by six o’clock he was in the emergency room in the hospital in Salerno. They had first given him a coagulant, which of course made him feel immediately better. The bleeding stopped. He spent the night. He’s okay. It was a terrific scare, and it was really because he didn’t listen to the doctor. He’s full of jokes. For a hypochondriac, he really is an iron man. The thought of four men carrying him from La Rondinaia through the gates to the town square—that must have been a sight!”
Vidal’s voice on the telephone a few days later alternated between firm and fading: “I think I’m all right,” he said to me. “Well, I nearly died. I understand now all the Romans taking to the hot bath, Seneca and so on. Bleeding to death is really perfectly pleasant. I always thought it would be painful. It’s not. Curious, no sense of panic at all. ‘Isn’t this a fucking bore?’ as I began to slide out. The thing burned its way through the duodenum into the stomach. The blood went gushing, hit my scars. They all opened up. Half of my red blood corpuscles went down the toilet. Most alarming feeling. It was rather peaceful. I wouldn’t mind dying that way one bit. A hot tub, which I didn’t have but which the Romans did, counteracts the only unpleasant aspect. Your head gets so cold as the blood starts to leave it. In a hot tub you can just put your head back and it warms your head and you have no sense of dying. But at exactly the right moment this doctor who roams the night among various villages—you can never find him because he’s on the road—we found him and he came in no time. But one look at that emergency hospital, I knew I had better get out of there. It was a charnel house. I knew that the toilet could give you AIDS or a thousand other things! So I fled. I should probably issue a press bulletin, saying ‘the account of my death has been greatly underreported.’”
Three months later I came to Ravello for a month of intense discussions. My host at the Hotel Belvedere Caruso in Ravello, after I confirmed to him that, yes, I was writing a biography of Signor Vidal, shook his head apprehensively. Perhaps he had in mind the incident of four months earlier. His concern, of course, was for the subject, not the biographer. In Italy, he told me, it was bad luck for a living man to have his biography written. He hinted that the bad luck usually took the form of an unexpected exit that would not have happened otherwise. It seemed to him a dangerous thing to write the life of a living subject. It had not been, so far, dangerous to me, and Vidal had kept his word. He had been totally cooperative, with one exception. He had not allowed me to see the diary he had kept in 1948. What, that you don’t already know, he asked, would you learn from a list of the boys I had fucked and a litany of complaint about nasty reviews? “There’s nothing more there.” At first I was suspicious. I pressed him about it. Gradually I began to believe him. Now, for the first time, as we settled down to our discussions, he became angry with me to my face. He had just returned to Ravello from a long trip. I was tired also. Late in a long day of taping I pushed him about whether he had had sex with someone whose name had come up. “Goddamn it, I think you’ll never get it through your head that these sexual things aren’t what my life’s about and that you’ll never understand how we deal with these things in my world.” If he meant it as a shot across the bow, he was also genuinely angry, and worried. I told him immediately, with equal expressiveness, that he was wrong. I had seen early on that the best way to deal with Gore’s strong feelings or views when they were presented as a challenge was to state my independent response calmly but firmly, with no delay. He backed off. But he feared that his straight, comparatively bourgeois biographer would write a biography that got him and his life completely wrong. I understood the fear, and have done my best. For four years he answered every question I asked, provided access to friends and documents, spoke at length, drunk and sober, about his life and views. His honesty warranted respect. To the degree that it was preemptive, it was another expression of his superb intelligence. The inevitable happened: I grew fond of him. Had he grown fond of me? There seemed reason to think so, but about personal matters genius is never to be entirely trusted. At a minimum he seemed pleased that the job was finally getting done, and in a professional way. When Reuters cameramen set up their equipment in his study for a sound bite from him on the state of the world, I said, “Tell them something new.” He said, “I’m not in the miracle business.”
In October, Gore called from Ravello, just after he had returned from a brief Venetian holiday. “You nearly had an ending to the biography yesterday. You could have called it Death in Venice. At ten o’clock in the morning, in a driving rain, we left the Gritti Palace. There’s an airport out on the Lido, which is the other end of the lagoon. Bumpy little speedboats, and we came into the wooden wharf there. Someone should have been there to help us off the boat. It’s jumping up and down. Nobody. I got out and went straight into the lagoon between the wharf and the boat, scraping my foot and hand. One foot was on the wharf and one was on the boat. I was then suddenly upon neither, heading towards Neptune’s cavern. All I could think of was that I was diving into cholera; hepatitis A, B, C, and D; diving into tetanus. I immediately swam to the surface, which is difficult to do wearing a raincoat filled with water. I could reach up—it’s a wooden wharf with pilings. So I reached up to the wharf itself, but I was so heavy from the water in my clothes and the driving rain is falling. So I tried to pull myself up and couldn’t, and then about four men came rushing down and they dragged me up onto it, where I lay, right hand and left foot bleeding. I also banged the back of my head. I’m still wondering if I have a concussion. I just thought, ‘Well, Death in Venice. Why not? It gives Fred a lyric ending.’” Later he wrote to Ned Rorem, “Two close calls in one year. What can this mean?” Said Andreas Brown, owner of New York’s Gotham Book Mart and Vidal’s admirer, when he heard of the incident, “Vidal tries to walk on water—and fails.”
On December 10, 1996, my wife and I were attacked on the New York City subway. I was stabbed in the chest. My clothes were drenched with blood. The bleeding was painless. As I was stretched out on the subway floor, my wife pressed her scarf tightly against the wound. When I didn’t lose consciousness, I knew I was not going to die. One of my concerns, as I was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, was how much this would delay writing the book. I had hoped to begin writing on the first day of 1997. A few days later, Vidal called. Now that you too have almost bled to death, he commented, you’ll be able to write more effectively about my experience. A fax soon followed: “There is no end to your thoroughness as a biographer! When I told you, after nearly bleeding to death in March, that it was a remarkably painless, even sleepy way to go, I knew that sooner or later you would check out the story and so you most dramatically have…. When Barbara was filling in Murray Kempton with the first details, he said wearily, ‘That’s enough. I’m already a Republican.’” Gore seemed very relieved not to have lost another biographer. Amid the jokes, he was unmistakably compassionate. On
New Year’s Day I went to the keyboard and wrote the prelude. I had told him at the start that I preferred my subjects dead. I now told him that he had become an exception to my preference, though I still hoped to be at his funeral rather than he at mine.
The fact of his own aging sustained itself, the thought of aging challenged his thanatophobia. It would be the one death he could not avoid, the funeral to which he would have to go. “I do mean to go on and on,” he had written Elizabeth Hardwick in 1975. “As Geo. Sand’s husband said, ‘She turns on the faucet in the morning and runs smoothly until lunch.’ Perhaps I should start eating a proper lunch. It’s very odd, writing in middle age when youthful ambition/vanity is satiated, abandoned, and succeeded by what? The dread tap? All those words running out in the form of sentences.” Sometimes his jokes helped. So too did liquor. He had gone much into adulthood before he drank alcohol at all, other than the occasional social drink. But wine had become a pleasure, a habit, a necessity in the 1960s. By the 1980s he had become by most people’s standards a heavy drinker, encouraged and made tenable by his having either by inheritance or adjustment a high tolerance. Amounts that drove most others under the table found him not only sitting upright but, except for an occasional slurring, absolutely lucid. A history of heavy-drinking Gores and his mother’s alcoholism forced him to give thought to his own drinking habits. No matter how much he consumed, he did not feel that drinking controlled him. He was not an alcoholic, he believed, if he restricted drinking to nonworking hours, which he actually did quite easily. Wine did not appear until late lunch, serious drinking of whiskey and vodka not till after dinner, at restaurants or in the living room or in his study, with visitors, or with Howard, whose tolerance was far less than his for both alcohol and late hours. When Gore wanted to sleep, he found alcohol a better soporific than pills. If some health problem incompatible with alcohol arose, he stopped for as long as medically necessary. When he wanted to lose weight, usually in preparation for public appearances, he went off alcohol for long periods, with no apparent difficulty. “I drank like a boy all summer,” he had written to Halfpenny in October 1991, “until I looked again like Farouk. Now I have stopped forever.” Unfortunately, heavy consumption contributed considerably to weight gain, and in the 1990s the cycle became increasingly telescoped. When I asked him in 1998, after he had stopped drinking for a time, whether he planned to start again, he responded, “I will immediately resume. I’m not about to give up my life.” He resumed drinking and regained weight soon after he had devoted weeks or months to losing it. “What’s happened in old age is that I don’t go off that often to lose it, so I’ve been permanently heavy, where in the past only partly or impermanently heavy.” Nothing about living seemed attractive enough to compete with the pleasures he still enjoyed, particularly drinking and eating whatever he liked. “One gets more done without drinking,” he had told Halfpenny in August 1990, “and the memory blossoms but I shall resume once I’ve remembered all I want to, and sink myself into whiskey where one’s sense of time is so altered that one feels in the moment immortality—a long luminous present which, not drinking, becomes a fast-moving express train named … Nothing.”
If by the late 1990s he was too heavy to be handsome, his looks were still interesting, remnants of white hair, sharply accentuated nose and ears, piercing olive eyes, a topheaviness that had presence, a voice that riveted with depth and dramatic phrasing. He had almost persuaded himself not to care anymore about his appearance. In 1984, while losing weight, he had dyed his hair “for the first time…. The gray about the face had gone disagreeably white, and though I don’t mind looking—or being—middleaged, I draw the line at being aged before the frost is indeed on the pumpkin. The result is like having an old friend back in town…. It is not until one sees oneself on TV, over the years … that you feel really old and crumbling.” In the 1960s he had told Halfpenny, who had just seen a videotape of Fellini’s Roma, that he “still worked out in a gym and there was sex and motive. At 60 I said to hell with it and people now make most unkind references to my lack of beauty. I find myself peculiarly unbothered, so much for vanity which is only useful—necessary—if you’re after something. No pursuit, no beauty. I am a utilitarian finally.” It did not depress him. Even long interviews with his biographer about his past did not seem to darken his mood, though they were part of a consciousness of how quickly, these days, the clock seemed to be moving. “My makeup is rather cheerful…. Luckily, I have anger [which helps me escape depression]. But it passes very quickly.” But “why would I be depressed about anything? I’ve never been seriously ill since 1947. Maybe I would be if I had cancer or something and was dying.” But his attentive analysis and description of what it felt like to be growing old transformed the subject of dying into a life force. Still capable of great energy and motion, he hardly hesitated to travel long distances to pursue his interests, both political and literary, though even first-class air travel seemed different from what it had once been. Here the difference resulted from changes within him. On an airplane, “I used alcohol. Now I’m scared of that. I do sleep. With age, something happens with your sense of time. You get up in the morning and suddenly you’re getting back to bed again. And the day is over—all old people report this, ad nauseam. But no less true for that. So a long, boring flight isn’t that long. You haven’t even finished the book you’ve brought with you because you tend to stare straight ahead. Old age is like early youth. Idyll of woolgathering.” Yet he was capable of sharp creative focus whenever he had a task at hand, especially writing, which he kept at, mostly successfully, with extraordinary vigor. It was, at least for the time being, the old age of a productive writer. He still had something to say and wanted to be heard.
Endnotes
I have collected about two thousand of Vidal’s letters, most of them unpublished. These letters and oral interviews provide the evidentiary backbone of the narrative. The letters have been obtained from individuals, usually the recipients, except for those in libraries, particularly the Wisconsin State Historical Society, the University of Wisconsin, Madison (abbreviated as W); Princeton University Library (P); Columbia University Library (C); University of California at Los Angeles (UC); University of Texas Library (T); Carl Albert Congressional Research Center, University of Oklahoma (O); the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University (WF); University of Delaware Library (D); the Houghton Library at Harvard University (H); Beinecke Library, Yale University (Y); Christ Church College Library, Oxford University (CC); and The American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming (WY). LB refers to the Little, Brown archives. A selection of Vidal’s letters to Christopher Isherwood has been published in The Times Literary Supplement, 12/20/1996, 14–15, to Louis Auchincloss in The New Yorker, 6/9/1997, 76–77. My citations from the letters are endnoted by the names of the correspondents and the date; faxes are treated as letters; the library source of letters and other unpublished material is indicated by the appropriate abbreviation. In all instances Gore Vidal has been abbreviated as “GV.” Since Vidal rarely dates his letters, I have had in most cases to establish a date (often approximate; “nd” stands for “no date”) through whatever means available. Unpublished memoirs and diaries are endnoted simply as “unpublished diary of” and any other pertinent information. Published sources are documented in the conventional citation form. The direct citations for all published and unpublished materials (with the exception of oral interviews) are presented in endnotes that are grouped by chapter and keyed to the page in the book on which the quotation or paraphrase appears. Only books from which I have quoted are cited in the endnotes.
Approximately 250 interviews with the subject have produced about 2,000 pages of transcription. I have interviewed about 150 others. Oral sources for the exposition are listed chapter by chapter in a paragraph at the beginning of each chapter division that precedes the endnotes. An oral source is simply stated as “interview with” and the date of the interview provided. In all cases I am the person d
oing the interviewing. Since the reader cannot check my quotations and paraphrases for accuracy except against my transcriptions and tapes, it seems senseless to add pages by attaching the interview note directly (by whatever method) to the quote or paraphrase and keying it by page number. In most cases the person whose words I quote is identified by name in the exposition. I have not stated at the beginning of each chapter that material in this chapter is drawn from interviews with Gore Vidal. That would take up space with the obvious and provide a list of dates that cannot be of any use to the reader. The tapes, transcriptions, and photocopies of letters eventually will be deposited in the Gore Vidal Archive at the Wisconsin State Historical Society at the University of Wisconsin.
Chapters One through Three draw extensively on Gore-family documents held privately by Bill and Lois Gore of Natchez, Mississippi; the Gore Vidal collection of Gore family documents, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; and the Eugene Luther Vidal Papers, at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming. The Natchez Gores provided assistance with Gore-family genealogy and expert guidance at the various Gore-family sites in Webster and Calhoun counties. The Vidal Collection in Wisconsin contains originals and copies of Gore-family and Vidal-family documents, which include genealogical narratives; letters between family members about genealogical issues; birth, baptism, marriage, and census records; documents from Spanish, Swiss, and Italian archives in regard to the Traxler and Vidal families; and newspaper clippings. The most prominent documents are: T. P. Gore, Autobiographical Fragment, 31 pages, nd; Mary Gore Cooper, Gore Family, 15 pages, nd, and History of the Gores in Webster County, nd, unpaginated; Feldkircher Anzeiger, “The Farewell to the Old Building of the Chamber of Commerce on the Schlossergasse,” 16 pages, 6/19/1954. The following published material on Gore and Vidal family history has either been quoted or drawn from: Monroe Lee Billington, Thomas Gore, The Blind Senator from Oklahoma. Lawrence: Kansas, 1967; Kay-Quarterly, Newsletter of the Kay Family Association, 24 (summer 1994) and various genealogical documents provided by the Kay Family Association; Robert Cicero Latham, The Dirt Farmers in Politics: A Study of Webster County, Mississippi, During the Rise of Democratic Factionalism, 1880–1910. Phd. dissertation. Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University; T. T. Montgomery, The Growth of Oklahoma. Oklahoma City, 1933; Ken Nail, History of Calhoun County, Calhoun County School District, 1975; Schweizerisches Geschlechterbuch Almanach Genealogique Suisse, XII, Zurich, 1965; Webster County History Association, The History of Webster County. Curtis Media Corporation, 1985. Gore Vidal’s memoir, Palimpsest (abbreviated M), New York, 1995; his Screening History (SH), Cambridge, 1991; Two Sisters, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (TS), Boston, 1970; and his essays, most collected in United States, Essays 1952–1992 (US), New York, 1993, are important biographical sources in Chapter’s One through Three and throughout.