by Gore Vidal
Childhood memory. I am in “a wood near Athens.” It is Midsummer Night’s Eve. Sun is setting. Mortals are lost in woods where magical creatures now awaken; among them, Puck—boy actor Mickey Rooney, role model to my tenth year. At full moonrise, two towering figures on horseback ride through black woods toward each other, long trains billowing and sparkling against every shade of gray, against absolute black for foil. The sword of light, as I look southward to the Tyrrhenian Sea, is now producing the same effect that Max Reinhardt created on film in 1935.
“Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” At the window, I repeat to myself Oberon’s cold greeting as he meets his estranged wife, Titania. Oberon is the somber hawk-faced lord of the night; Titania his queen. I was never to forget them. Forty-one years later, I flew from Rome to Atlanta, Georgia, to meet the touring company of a play of mine in revival. The Oberon of 1935 had metamorphosed into a former president, invented by me. But then transformation is the name of the acting game; of life, too, if one stares long enough, as I did this morning, at the sword of light, realizing that Shakespeare’s Oberon and my President Hockstader were the same actor, Victor Jory, at different times. As luck would have it, the midsummer night forest king has been preserved on film while my president has long since gone to dust along with his protean impersonator.
At supper, the star of the national production of The Best Man, E. G. Marshall, told me that “Victor found true love last night. In a singles bar.” I smile, with some wonder. Victor was the same age in 1976 that I am in the year 2000; that is, ancient, with dyed black hair. But the image I shall always retain of him is one of shimmering light emergent from grays and black, aquiline face most regal as he summons Puck to fetch him an herb called “love-in-idleness.” Puck takes to the air with a shout, “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes …” And does.
It has taken the television pickup crew from Rome more than forty minutes to set up in the salone where, over the years, I have done so many programs.
A.B. is admirably professional. He has already learned enough Italian to be able to tell the crew what he wants. Today, he is producer-director; questioner.
While A.B. and the crew move furniture about and arrange their lights, I set out for the piazza, which can only be reached by foot; this detail astonishes American visitors not used to walking. But Ravello is a mountain village and we walk almost everywhere, usually up and down steep gray steps.
The long cypress alley from villa to gate glows in the morning sun, dark greens and pallid golds, just as it did that other February morning when I first walked its length and decided that, somehow or other, I would acquire the villa—as yet unseen—at its end. A cypress alley and a view: demure title for an Edwardian novel by one of the young English writers who spent time in Ravello at the start of the century. E. M. Forster wrote “The Story of a Panic” about our woods.
After many attempts at beautification in the last few years, the piazza now has a brand-new pale stone paving whose dark lines suggest a painting by the early Chirico while the ruthlessly restored cathedral looks somewhat astonished, like a recently raped nun. Our retired priest, Don Peppino, strolls on the high porch above the piazza; at least eighty, he looks half his age. When he came to bless the villa one winter, room by room as is the local custom, he was received by an American girl who was house-sitting for us. When he came to her room, she remembered too late that she had left her vibrator on a table. With a straight face, Don Peppino carefully blessed Satan’s instrument, then, as he was leaving the house, he gave her a cheery smile and said, in English, “Be a good girl now.”
At the Bar San Domingo, I order coffee. I am often astonished by the neatness of coincidence in my life. When I look unsuccessfully for one thing, I usually turn up another that is much more useful. Graham Greene used to say that if he couldn’t unravel, at his desk, a tangle in a narrative, the solution would arrive the next morning, after a good night’s sleep. He was, of course, what movie scriptwriters call an “early settler”: one who tends to settle for whatever he thinks of first.
A friend has sent me the playbill of the York Theatre Company’s Taking a Chance on Love. There is a photograph on the cover of John Latouche: he’s seated in a bathtub whose wooden legs appear to be his legs coming through the bottom of the bath. He clutches a Chianti bottle in his left hand; he scowls at us while smoke from a cigarette in his right hand circles his head, upon which, in the original photo, a Santa Claus hat was set, now airbrushed out. Finally, after the next best thing to a revival of The Golden Apple, there is now a revue entitled The Lyrics and Life of John Latouche.
Peter and Iris joined me at a table in the bar. “They make pastry every morning,” I said, playing to Peter’s regnant vice, gluttony.
“I’ll have one,” he said. “And a cappuccino. Where’s A.B.?”
“At the house. Setting up lights. Look.” I pushed the playbill at him. “Just arrived. Right on cue.”
“I did hear something about this.” Peter stared at Touche’s picture. “Weren’t you at the opening of The Golden Apple?” Peter is as vague about time as I but then how could he—we—not be?
“Yes. We were both there. Now, after forty years or so, Touche is being rediscovered …”
But Peter had put the playbill to one side in order to describe, as visitors tend to do, the horrors of air travel in our long-awaited twenty-first-century future. Suddenly, we all—the quick if not the dead—awakened in the year 2000 where everything was supposed to work fabulously well. Instead, we find that we are trapped in a technological Calcutta. Crowded air terminals whose vast, confusing distances must be negotiated on foot by the anxious traveler who moves from delay to cancellation to, at the bitter end, lost baggage after a harrowing flight in a narrow ill-maintained metal cylinder, breathing virus-laden recycled air, all the while wondering anxiously if he has boarded one of the now too frequent carriers doomed to be hurled from sky to earth as overworked pilot loses his bearings, or a structural fault, known but unattended to, causes a fiery wire in the fuselage to make exciting contact with fuel supply. Commercial aviation (my father’s invention as much as it could be said to be anyone’s) is now the one thing that binds together huddled masses and huddled—what? asses?—in a unanimous spirit of perfect hatred for the disintegrating process. Worse, there is no alternative means of travel. Railroads were deliberately allowed to become extinct along with travel by ship while even the humble plebeian Greyhound bus has been encouraged to wither away. The crowded skies over our Calcutta-world are like some demented pinball machine where the marbles are shot into ever-wilder trajectories until one hits another and the search begins for tape recordings of the pilot’s last musings, often to be found full fathom five in deepest ocean.
But Peter had a new horror story. “Each time I fly, there is, of course, the problem of fighting terrorism. To do so, you must have complete identification, including a photograph.”
“I can’t think why he fumes so.” Too young to recall what it was like to live in a free country, Iris is quite accustomed to being stopped and asked why she wants to fly, say, from Newark to Philadelphia, admittedly a high-security route irresistible to bomb-carrying Arabs bent on destroying all that is good on earth for the sheer joy of serving Allah.
Peter gave me a meaningful look. “Iris doesn’t believe me when I say how different things used to be. Remember what it was like when after the ship’s party, you could take a nap and wake up at sea, without a ticket or a passport, and then be issued both, paid for with a check.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t remember those days and neither do you. You’re talking about the twenties. Our parents—if they had the money—enjoyed that kind of liberty. We had Hitler and Mussolini to contend with.”
August 1939: With a number of boys from a Washington school, I crossed from Italy into France on the last train before the border was shut. Fascist police examined our maroon-colored American passports with apparently the same intensity
that an employee of Continental Airlines had recently studied Peter’s passport and baggage at the gate to the admittedly top-secret shuttle from Washington to New York, known to the FBI as the terrorist-targeted “Mata Hari run.”
“I’m afraid,” said Peter, “I was short-tempered. I asked this person when he thought that these travel restrictions might be lifted. I got a long speech to the effect that terrorists were everywhere, all set to blow American carriers out of the sky it if weren’t for tight security like this. I pointed out, sweetly, let me say …”
“You may say,” said Iris. “But we reserve the right to wonder.”
“Sweetly,” he repeated, both amused and annoyed at the memory. “I said that since it was notoriously easy to get a forged driver’s license or passport, all this nonsense was simply the state’s deliberate harassment of its citizens. The man then howled. Yes, howled. Didn’t I know the threat to the United States from them? Who, I asked, were they?”
“You are an idiot, Peter.” Iris looked mildly alarmed at so much banked fury.
I intervened, to ward off stroke. “I must say, the Washington–New York shuttle must have been having an uncommonly quiet day for the two of you to have held a seminar.”
Finally, on the torn-up private road to our gate, Peter calmed down. “The worst thing about an encounter like that, with this airline idiot, is that there’s no way to conclude it.”
“What do you mean? Here you are. Concluded.”
“No, it’s not over. The man still doesn’t realize that everything he thinks is true is untrue.”
“How do you know what he really thinks?”
Peter stumbled over a hoe that some less than dedicated farmer had left in the rutted roadway. Iris steadied him. “The worst thing is,” he said, turning to me, “I keep right on talking to this fool in my head. I go on and on trying to get in a last word but he’s always ready with some stupid line that he’s learned like a parrot.”
“Feel compassion,” I said. “As if you were a Republican candidate for president this year.”
The villa is built on a stone shelf, its back attached to the mountain. To the left, a terrace of olive trees and a drop to the sea; to the right, a porous cliff covered with ivy, home to violent bees that produce no honey. Rose bushes are sprouting shiny new red leaves. The first daffodils are coming up. Two camellia trees, for some secret eco-reason of their own, have shifted their flowering from late March to mid-February. Between them grows a datura tree, somewhat the worse for wear. When we first came, it put forth powerfully scented white blossoms, like elongated bells. Then the soft pithy branches dried up and broke off and the velvety skin-smooth leaves developed holes.
“Every morning, when I pass the datura, I think of Paul Bowles.”
“Bowles?” Peter stopped his inner quarrel with airline security. “Why Bowles?”
“Because Paul’s wife, Jane, fell in love with a terrible woman in Tangier called Cherifa. Jane was besotted with her. Jane even used to take her place, selling barley or whatever it was in the marketplace while Cherifa would go off for mint tea, leaving the Jewish princess from New York to sell grain to the veiled ladies of Islam. Auden always maintained that only lesbians were capable of grand passion. ‘Look at Tristan and Isolde,’ he would say. ‘Whole thing actually takes place in a girls’ school. Tristan is the head girl, good at games, and Isolde is the passionate clinging beauty, fearful of the king—the headmistress. Naturally, the lovers are immolated by their passion.’ Unfortunately, this particular romantic agony of the soul came to a crescendo when Jane told Cherifa that she was in her will. Cherifa promptly turned murderess. Very Bowlesian this. Both Jane and Paul liked to set themselves up so that others could victimize them. At first, the sly Cherifa resorted to magic pills and potions. Only when they failed did she turn to that most effective killer: a tisane made with leaves of the datura tree. Cherifa offered Jane her poison-leaf tea, which Jane, love-glow in her eyes, drank. And drank.”
“So what happened?” Iris was fascinated and even Peter seemed to have put Continental Airlines on hold.
“Jane didn’t die right away. But she lost part of her vision. Then she had the first of a series of strokes that eventually landed her in a Spanish Catholic nursing home, where she died. Paul liked telling the story of Cherifa and Jane. With no moral, of course.”
I plucked a leaf from the datura; there were lacelike holes in the leaf’s deep green. I gave it to Peter, who put it in his pocket. “What happened to Cherifa?” he asked.
“I don’t recall.”
Just before last Christmas, I was in Seattle to give a speech. For old time’s sake I went into what had been the Snake Pit Bar of the Olympic Hotel. The lowlife bar of the war years is now an elegant oyster bar where I ordered Dungeness crab and looked about the room in search of myself, a nineteen-year-old first mate of an Army ship en route to the Aleutian Islands. My last night ashore, I had discovered the brightly lit bar, packed with soldiers, sailors, marines. Strong smell of beer, sweat, wet wool, vomit, cigarette smoke. Contemplating so many ghosts, I opened my newspaper and read that Paul Bowles was dead; promptly, his unlikely dapper ghost made an appearance at a bar that was definitely not his style even though a handsome military youth called Harry Dunham had been Paul’s one great attachment—Latouche’s as well. Harry had been married to an agreeable plainly pretty or prettily plain young woman, Maggie, who died not too many years after her husband’s death in New Guinea. Harry was killed by the Japanese at Port Moresby. In Paul’s first novel, The Sheltering Sky, he calls his protagonist Port Moresby. Good name.
A.B. led Peter and me into the salone while Iris settled by the fire in the study. From past adventures, the three-man crew was very much at home with our numerous flawed electrical outlets, which they had once so excitingly burnt out.
“We’ll do this in sections, if you don’t mind.” A.B. and the soundman wired Peter, who stood staring straight ahead, frowning, talking to himself. I caught a sentence: “If you spent as much money on the prevention of accidents as you do on the retrieval of wreckage …” This was promising. He might yet win what could be a world-class mano a mano exchange.
A.B. looked at the portable monitor: then, “I’m going to be a voice off-camera. So look at each other when you talk, or wherever seems natural.”
Since neither Peter nor I liked to know in advance what we were going to be asked, A.B. started us off cold. “Let’s get Pearl Harbor out of the way. Mr. Sanford, American Idea has endorsed, I suppose that is the word, a recent book by Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit, in which, after years of research, he has come to the conclusion that although the Roosevelt Administration knew that an attack was coming, they did not warn …”
With practiced ease, Peter made his case or, rather, his defense of the admiral who had written an indictment of Roosevelt in the pages of the usually pro–New Deal American Idea.
At burdensome length, Peter and I put the case for Roosevelt’s amoral mastery of world politics and his ability to get what he wanted. I admired him quite as much as I deplored him.
A.B. was cheerful. “We have plenty of time to edit. I’ve got a great editor. He’ll get rid of most of this.”
“Why cut?” Peter rubbed his eyes.
“Pearl Harbor?” A.B. made a comic face. “Pearl Bailey is better known.”
“Was,” I said, “until she died.” The past for Americans is a separate universe with its own quaint laws and irrelevant perceptions.
Our cook served lunch to us in the dining room, where we sat on metal chairs that I had found in a Rome antique shop. “They were made for the Maharajah of Jaipur,” said the shop owner, smoothly. “Around 1857, I should say.”
“No.” I was delighted to see the chairs in life rather than on-screen. “They were made around 1957. At Cinecittà. Here in Rome.” Once the owner was satisfied that I had served time, for art’s sake, as MGM’s contract writer on Ben-Hur in Rome, he graciously increased his price. In those profligate
days, if one wanted metal chairs, for a film, one got them. Now, of course, the green wood beneath what looks to be hammered silver is warping and strange bubbles are distorting the elegant ram’s-headed backs to the chairs. Peter and Iris and A.B. dutifully appreciated those outward and visible signs of the glory that was Cinecittà where, at the same time Ben-Hur was being made, a plump young man with large dark eyes was preparing La Dolce Vita and visiting, secretly, with my connivance, our top-secret imperial sets, which later turned up in a number of other Roman films though in none, alas, by Fellini.
“I suppose I’ve come in late,” said A.B., “but why are you two so much concerned with what Roosevelt did or did not do at Pearl Harbor?”
“You’ve come in far too late.” Peter was gruff. “He did what no president has ever done. Set us up. To be attacked.”
“But didn’t it all end well? We won the war. We got the world. We saved as many of Hitler’s victims as we could. So some old ships got sunk.”
The cook’s show dish is baked eggplant, layered with slices of hardboiled eggs and black olives. Peter had a second helping. “Some three thousand men got sunk, too,” he said. “And died.”
“Drop in a bottomless bucket.” A.B. was blithe.
Even I winced at that. “The fact that you take all this so casually is the principal fallout.” I became sententious: something that can happen when one means exactly what one says with no iron door left ajar to escape through, like quotation marks.
After lunch, A.B. and I went out on the balcony that overlooks the sea.
He shuddered with cold; the sun was about to slip behind the high cliff to our west. Inside the salone, the TV crew had set up a new lighting arrangement. A.B. looked at me curiously. “You are in your parallel universe. What does ours seem like to you?”