At Home

by Gore Vidal

  As I was leaving the reception area, he made a small speech about the necessity of good Soviet-American relations, the importance of world peace, the necessity of cooperation on environmental matters. Then he lowered his voice. “I have a question to ask you.” He looked about to see if we were being overheard. Thus, I thought to myself, Philby was recruited. Swiftly, I made my decision. If I were to sell out the free world, I must be well paid. I would want a dacha on the Baltic, near Riga. I would want…“How tall,” asked Boris Petrovich, “is Paul Newman, really?”

  VANITY FAIR

  March 1983

  * Frederic Prokosch relied heavily on the two ladies for The Seven Who Fled.

  CHAPTER 14

  AT HOME IN A ROMAN STREET

  For twenty years I have rented a small penthouse on top of the moldering seventeenth-century Origo Palace in the middle of what bureaucratic Romans call the Historic Center and everyone else calls Old Rome. The palace is at the northwest corner of a busy square that has all the charm of New York City’s Columbus Circle, minus Huntington Hartford’s masterpiece, and plus, below street level, three classical temples, home to a colony of cats, a perennial—no, millennial—reminder that this precinct was once sacred to the goddess Isis, and the cat was, and is, her creature. In a nearby street there is a large marble foot on a pedestal, all that is left of Isis’ cult statue. Cats now sun themselves on her toes.

  The west façade of the palace is set in a two-thousand-year-old north-south Roman street that starts a half-dozen blocks to the north in what was the Field of Mars (where the Roman army used to parade and now parliament parades), continues on to the Pantheon and then to us. We live in what was once the vestibule to a huge complex of baths, libraries, concert halls, theaters and, of course, the Pantheon, all built by one Marcus Agrippa, the John D. Rockefeller of his day, who wanted to celebrate his wealth and the emperor Augustus’ glory, in about that order.

  The penthouse is a small, square, rickety, twentieth-century addition to the palace; it is built around a squalid inner court, more than compensated for by two huge terraces at right angles to one another. From the south terrace we can see a corner of the Victor Emmanuel monument, a snowy-white wedding cake in the form of an antique Remington Rand typewriter, a bit of the Campidoglio, the Aventine Hill, the Synagogue, the dome of San Carlo and, directly below us, the eighteenth-century Teatro Argentina, where The Barber of Seville was booed on opening night while Rossini sat next door at Bernasconi’s eating pastry. The pastry is still good at Bernasconi’s, and the theater still functions.

  From the west terrace, Sant’ Andrea della Valle (Act 1, Tosca) fills the sky to the left. We are so close to it that we can identify the wild flowers that grow out of cracks in the dome and lantern. Next, we can see, in the distance, like a gray-ridged soccer ball, Saint Peter’s; then Sant’ Agnese in the Piazza Navona; and, finally, best of all, the fantastic, twisted spire of Sant’ Ivo alla Sapienza, Borromini’s literally off-the-sky masterpiece.

  In summer, when the red sun starts to drop behind Saint Peter’s, birds suddenly appear—real birds, swifts, as opposed to the pigeons that use the terraces as a convention hall. From sunset to dark, the swifts do Jonathan Livingston Seagull free falls and glides with great panache. In winter, they vanish. Although Roman winters are not severe, last January a heavy snow fell on Rome and the single lemon tree on the terrace outside my bedroom window was covered with two inches of snow, framing each gold lemon in white.

  Question I most hear: Why have you spent almost a third of your life in this Roman apartment? I quote Howard Hughes. When asked why he had ended up a long-nailed recluse in a sealed hotel room, he croaked with perfect candor: “I just sort of drifted into it.” That’s almost always the real answer to everything. But there are, of course, a thousand other reasons. Although I have a house in the unfashionable Hollywood Hills, and my subject, as a writer, is the United States, I have never had a proper human-scale village life anywhere on earth except in this old Roman street. In Los Angeles we live in our cars, en route to houses where a pool is a pool is a pool and there are only three caterers and you shall have no other. A car trip to Chalet Gourmet on the Sunset Strip is a chore not an adventure. But a trip down our street is a trip indeed.

  By and large, the shops are exactly like the shops of two thousand years ago, as preserved at Pompeii and Ostia: a single deep room with a wide door that can be shuttered and a counter at the back. Produce is displayed on benches or tables on the sidewalk or in the doorway. Fresh food in season is all-important here, and we talk a lot about food. As I write, we are sweating out the first peas. No one will eat a frozen one deliberately. Sex and politics are not obsessive; but health care is. We are all hypochondriacs. In fact, Italians buy more pills per capita than any other nationality. Luckily, they usually forget to take them. In our pharmacy with its eighteenth-century rococo boiserie, there is a comfortable chair where you sit while the pharmacist takes your blood pressure, not once but, properly, twice. I trust him more than any doctor. We all do.

  I know every shopkeeper in this street, and just about every old resident. We seldom have names for one another, but everyone knows everything about everyone else, and we—the older crowd, of course—study each other closely for signs of debility. We are all diagnosticians. The vegetable man’s tremor is worse, we say to one another at the butcher’s. We discuss Parkinson’s among the Tuscan sausages. The carpenter goes by, green of face—he has been drunk for a week. We feel sorry for the wife. Peccato—“a shame.” But the daughter is married to the hardware-store owner and pregnant again. Will she need a second cesarean?

  The herb shop has been doing business for over a century: dark wooden paneling and drawers, porcelain apothecary jars with gilt Latin inscriptions. Two old brothers—not old when I first came—preside over this two-thousand-year-old anthology of herbal remedies and pleasures. An old woman suddenly turns to me, in a state of ecstasy. “I am ninety years old,” she says, “and everything in the street’s changed except this place. It’s the same! The same!” That, I fear, is the retrograde joy of our village life.

  Even our lunatics are always the same. For decades now, the flower woman goes out each day in the bus to the cemetery to steal flowers from new graves; then she returns to the street and sits in the doorway of a deconsecrated church and makes up bouquets (as I write, daffodils, tulips, and mimosa). We are worried lately about her loss of the last set of dentures. True, they did not fit, but she now looks really awful. She has also, overambitiously, acquired more plastic bags than she can carry at one time. This is worrying.

  Then there is the small man in the three-piece suit with the homburg, whose brim is always curled up like Chaplin’s bowler. As he makes his daily progress down the street, he looks very worried. Suddenly he will come up to you and ask the time. “What time is it?” he murmurs urgently. You tell him. He nods three times; patters off. He has never been heard to say anything else.

  Beneath us in the palace, a mother and son live. She is a charming lady, somewhat bent now from a decade of sleeping in a chair so that she can watch over her son, who was sent home from the sort of institution that Governor Reagan shut down in California. At the full moon, he howls; at the dark of the moon, he storms our door, shouting for us to release the beautiful women covered with jewels locked inside. Currently, he has a full beard and looks like Karl Marx.

  Next to the palace is a hole in the wall: the most popular fruttateria in town. Like swifts at sundown, motorcycled adolescents park on the sidewalk and swig fruit drinks. Efforts to get them on drugs or alcohol have so far failed: This is an old city.

  Literature? Two blocks to our north, back of the Pantheon, Thomas Mann lived and wrote Buddenbrooks. Nearby, George Eliot stayed at the Minerva Hotel. Ariosto lived in Pantheon Square; Stendhal was close to us. I myself have written at least a part of every one of my books from Washington, D.C., to Lincoln in this flat. The last
chapters of Lincoln were composed on the dining room table.

  Italo Calvino now lives at the north of the street, and we cher confrère one another when we meet. Then we move on. Yes, we are all growing old. But a baby’s being born to the wife of the hardware-store owner, while a half-dozen babies of a few years ago are now men and women. So—plenty more where we came from. That is the lesson of the street. Meanwhile, what time is it? Free the bejeweled ladies held captive! Daffodils, tulips, and mimosa! What time is it? The same.

  ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST

  October 1985

  PART II

  CHAPTER 15

  THE BOOKCHAT OF HENRY JAMES

  On the evening of January 12, 1905, President and Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt held a reception for the diplomatic corps. After the reeception, a limited number of grandees were given a dinner; among those so distinguished was Henry James, who was staying across the street at the house of Henry Adams. The reception had been boycotted by Adams himself, who found it impossible to finish a sentence once the voluble president was wound up. But Adams sent over his houseguests, James, John La Farge, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

  The confrontation between Master and Sovereign contained all the elements of high comedy. Each detested the other. James regarded Roosevelt as “a dangerous and ominous jingo” as well as “the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented and resounding noise” while Theodore Rex, as the Adams circle dubbed him, regarded the novelist as “a miserable little snob” and, worse, “effete.” As it turned out, snob and jingo were each on his best behavior that night, and James, in a letter to Mary Cadwalader Jones, noted that the president was “a really extraordinary creature for native intensity, veracity and bonhomie.” What TR thought of his guest on that occasion is not recorded, but he could never have been approving of James, who had settled in England, had never roughed it, had never ridden, roughly, up Kettle Hill (to be renamed San Juan, since no one could be the hero of anything so homely as a kettle).

  * * *

  But the true high comedy of that January evening was that the two great men were meeting not as literary lion and president but as book reviewer and author reviewed. Seven years earlier, James had given Roosevelt (an indefatigable writer of echoing banality) a very bad review in the English paper Literature. Although reviews were not signed in those days, concerned authors could almost always find out who had done them in, and if the wielder of the axe were a writer of James’s fame, the secret could never have been kept for long.

  James begins, blandly,

  Mr. Theodore Roosevelt appears to propose—[the first verb is a hint of fun to come] in American Ideals and Other Essays Social and Political—to tighten the screws of the national consciousness as they have never been tightened before. The national consciousness for Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is, moreover, at the best a very fierce affair.

  James then suggests that this approach is not only overwrought but vague.

  It is “purely as an American,” he constantly reminds us, that each of us must live and breathe. Breathing, indeed, is a trifle; it is purely as Americans that we must think, and all that is wanting to the author’s demonstration is that he shall give us a receipt for the process. He labours, however…under the drollest confusion of mind.

  All in all, TR was saintly to put such an un-American reviewer at his dinner table, separated from his own intensely American self by a single (American) lady. Of course, in April 1898, James could not have known that the author, a mere assistant secretary of the Navy, was glory-bound. Yet if he had, the Jamesian irony (so like that of his friends John Hay and Henry Adams, and so deeply deplored, in retrospect, by the President) could not resist serving up such quotes as,

  “The politician who cheats or swindles, or the newspaperman who lies in any form, should be made to feel that he is an object of scorn for all honest men.” That is luminous; but, none the less, “an educated man must not go into politics as such; he must go in simply as an American…or he will be upset by some other American with no education at all…” A better way perhaps than to barbarize the upset—already, surely, sufficiently unfortunate—would be to civilize the upsetter.

  For James, whatever useful insights that politician Roosevelt might have are undone “by the puerility of his simplifications.”

  * * *

  The Library of America has seen fit to publish in one volume all of James’s book reviews on American and English writers, as well as a number of other meditations on literature. To read the book straight through (1413 pages of highly uneven bookchat) is to get to know Henry James in a way that no biographer, not even the estimable Leon Edel, the present editor, can ever capture. Here one can study the evolution of James’s taste and mind.

  As a critic, James began far too young. From age twenty-three to twenty-five, he was reviewing everything that came to hand for the North American Review and The Nation. He was still an American resident: He did not set out from the territory for old Europe until John Hay, then at the New York Tribune, sent him to Paris as a general correspondent (1875–1876). By 1878 he was settled in England, his domicile to the end.

  In London, he wrote French Poets and Novelists, and a long study of Hawthorne. In 1878, “I had ceased to ‘notice’ books—that faculty seemed to diminish for me, perversely, as my acquaintance with books grew.” Fortunately for the readers of this volume, in 1898 James became a householder. In need of money, he went back to book reviewing for a year or two and produced some of his most interesting pieces. Finally, in 1914, he wrote The New Novel, in which he threaded his way, as best he could, among the young Turks—H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett and (they meet at last! the great tradition) D. H. Lawrence, whose Sons and Lovers James remarks “hang(s) in the dusty rear of Wells and Bennett.”

  * * *

  There is a lifelong prejudice in James against the slice-of-life novel as opposed to the consciously shaped work of art. (Yet, paradoxically, he is enthralled by Balzac, on whom he was lecturing in 1905.) In that sense, he is the snob that Theodore Rex called him. Although he is most comfortably at home in fairly high society, his true subject is displaced, classless, innocent Americans with money, at sea in old Europe which, at the beginning of his career, he saw as beguiling and dangerous and, at the end, quite the reverse: Old Europe was no match for young America’s furious energy and ruthless, mindless exertion of force. But the milieu of Sons and Lovers depressed him, as did that of Thomas Hardy, whose village oafs he quotes at length in a review of Far from the Madding Crowd.

  James, justifiably, hated dialect novels, American or English. Hardy’s “inexhaustible faculty for spinning smart dialogue makes him forget that dialogue in a story is after all but episode….” The book “is inordinately diffuse, and, as a piece of narrative, singularly inartistic. The author has little sense of proportion, and almost none of composition.” Worse, the book is much too long (this from James the First not yet Old Pretender), thanks to the tradition of the three-volume novel. “Mr. Hardy has gone astray very cleverly, and his superficial novel is a really curious imitation of something better.”

  Yet with George Eliot, whom he admires, he notes of Silas Marner, “Here, as in all George Eliot’s books, there is a middle life and a low life; and here, as usual, I prefer the low life.” This is James, aged twenty-three, indicating that Eliot does not feel quite at home in middle life much less high life. But twenty years later, a wiser James sums up the great novelist:

  What is remarkable, extraordinary—and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious—is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures or sensations, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multiform life of man.

  In the notorious case of Walt Whitman one can observe James’s evolution from disdainful, supercilious, but observant youth to mystifie
d, awed admirer. Of Drum-Taps he writes (1865),

  It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it….It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind [and] frequent capitals are the only marks of verse in Mr. Whitman’s writing…As a general principle, we know of no circumstance more likely to impugn a writer’s earnestness than the adoption of an anomalous style. He must have something very original to say if none of the old vehicles will carry his thoughts. Of course, he may be surprisingly original. Still, presumption is against him….This volume is an offense against art.

  He scolds Whitman for crowning himself the national poet: “You cannot entertain and exhibit ideas; but, as we have seen, you are prepared to incarnate them.” This was the point, of course, to Whitman; but young James can only groan, “What would be bald nonsense, and dreary platitudes in anyone else becomes sublimity in you.” A quarter century later, Whitman has become “the good Walt.” Of Calamus (Whitman’s highly adhesive letters to the working-class lad Pete Doyle): “There is not even by accident a line with a hint of style—it is all flat, familiar, affectionate, illiterate colloquy” yet “the record remains, by a mysterious marvel, a thing positively delightful. If we can ever find out why, it must be another time. The riddle meanwhile is a neat one for the sphinx of democracy to offer.” When the riddle was “solved” by Dr. Kinsey in 1948, the Republic had a nervous breakdown, which continues to this day.