by Gore Vidal
According to Barbara, Susan, the winner of so many skirmishes in her long campaign against oblivion, had left no instructions about a “final resting place.” Surviving loved ones are now discussing her passion for Balzac and should they bury her near him in the Père Lachaise cemetery at Paris. If they do, I don’t envy them all that bureaucratic French paperwork. As it turned out, Susan was admitted to the Montparnasse cemetery where she will join Sartre and Beauvoir, not too bad for a graduate of Hollywood High.
“What?” In front of me on the desk is a copy of Palimpsest: A Memoir, published in 1995 and dealing with my first thirty-nine years. I’ve just read the opening pages, curious to see how I had dealt with the all-important problem of memory. Or is it how memory deals with me? I read: “I have always been curious to know where writers are physically situated when they write memoirs. Their placement during works of the imagination is less relevant because the true geography of a fiction is all in the mind but a memoir is set off by a thousand associations, even by objects in a given room.” At the moment, today, in front of me there are several novels by James Purdy on the desk. I’ve been writing about him, and wondering why so unique a writer has been so ignored. But then, “unique” will do it every time hereabouts. Nearby, a volume of Montaigne’s essays, the ultimate touchstone for anyone trying to recollect himself as well as others.
I resist opening Montaigne for as long as possible. I spent an hour once in his sixteenth-century Gascon tower and saw the same view that he saw from his third-floor study window. But where he tells us he had his chicken run, there are now ducks at ground level. Otherwise, inside that round tower room, one can imagine oneself inside his head, preserved in this room as his attempts—essays—inhabit his books. Unable to resist, I turn to the page where he frets about his poor memory. “I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it.” Since I am now thirteen years older than the author of Palimpsest and since most of my contemporaries are vanishing, I am often drawn to Montaigne on the subject of memory and its lapses, not to mention on our common mortality. He is surprisingly sardonic on this last delicate subject: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in,” he writes. “Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years.” Hardly a delusion of mine as I examine a new cancer on my forearm, all the while waiting for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing. I sometimes imitate Montaigne when he notes that: “I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips.” Hence, Susan; I am told that a failed marrow implant, not to mention a harrowingly painful chemotherapy procedure, ended her ordeal. Since “each man bears the entire form of man’s estate,” as Montaigne puts it, I can take part, at a near-remove, in her now abandoned estate so like that of all the rest ever born.
I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my workroom in Ravello: “a white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic gray sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever more hostile sun.” As I quote these lines I will myself back to then where Howard is still alive and our world has not yet cracked open.
Where am I now? I am in a second-floor study that an old friend, Diana Phipps, copied from a picture of Macaulay’s book-lined study. Through the windows in back of my chair, a steady monsoonlike vertical rain has been falling for days, rattling the straight palm trees that hide the road which crosses over from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley.
I have also just found the deed to the house; apparently, I bought it March 24, 1977, not long after we had bought the villa La Rondinaia (“The Swallows Nest”) in Ravello. We moved back here after a routine physical examination; our doctor showed me the X-ray of Howard’s chest: at the top of the right lung was a round object like an eyeball with glaucoma, startlingly white against the black foil of the radiogram. A lifetime of smoking had finally done its work; every attempt to stop the addiction had failed and continued to fail. Even after two “successful” cancer operations, he kept right on smoking and that is how “we” ceased to be we and became “I.”
To my left, as I write this at the partners desk, there is a chair that bars entrance from the study to the door to Howard’s room. Norberto, our Filipino housekeeper, has placed in the chair a puppet Mephistopheles with a white skull-like head and pointed mustache—to ward off the evil eye? But surely that eye has already failed to do its work.
The books here in Macaulay’s study are neither mine nor his, alas, but those of an old friend who has finally gone back East. Apparently, during his Western hegira, he had acquired every Literary Guild book club choice of the last thirty years. They are now stacked in the glass-fronted bookcases until my reference books come from Italy…if I decide actually to live in a so-called “homeland” daily grown ever more repressive.
At work in the La Rondinaia studio with a white cat waiting for me to thank her for the splendid rat that she has just delivered.
I see that a writer in this morning’s Los Angeles Times chides Sontag for not telling all to everyone about her affairs with so many fascinating women. Rousseau made the same complaint of Montaigne who was equally reticent about his private life. In the decades that I knew Susan slightly I was dimly aware of her private life and had no interest in it—nor anyone else’s for that matter unless it was, in some way, comical. I was also not particularly interested in her meditations on subjects like photography. What did matter to the non-specialized world was her views on war and peace in the Balkans and on the civil war in the Middle East where she sometimes offended the right people. That’s enough of death for now.
I’ve just switched off the television with its endless images of the floods in Southeast Asia. I think fondly of all the winters that Howard and I spent in Bangkok at the Oriental Hotel when it was still just a single high-rise building at the edge of a dark Klong. The manager was a young Swiss married to a Thai girl. I’ve not been back for several years but I am told that the two of them are still there, if somewhat emeritus. They also presided over the glamorous remodeling some years ago.
EIGHT
Outside my windows here, the familiar clatter of rain on palm fronds transports me to Bangkok. The monsoon is early, I think, moving backward in time. I must get dressed for lunch with Crown Princess Chumbhot. Presently—I’m in past time now—I shall leave the W. Somerset Maugham suite where I stay in the old section of the hotel, while Howard is in the new tower. Many suites are named for writers who have stayed in the hotel or its predecessor, starting with Joseph Conrad. Neither of us has ever stayed in the Gore Vidal suite with its view of a series of Klong-side cement factories bedecked with orchids.
We meet in the lobby. A hotel car takes us to lunch through heavy traffic. My mood lightens. Better to be back there in memory than linger here in fact. “Let the dead past bury its dead,” as my grandfather used to intone with measured glee as he gradually took up final residence in that very same past as I am now trying to do.
In the sixties, we acquired a new friend in Bangkok, the old Crown Princess Chumbhot, a tiny woman whose palace looks to my Western eye like no more than several highly polished teakwood boxes gleaming side by side in a sunny garden. Since one must never physically tower over a Thai royal, she had placed a series of stone steps beside her front door where she could station herself in a sort of pulpit and thus greet, sublimely, from above, Western visitors. Her father had been Thai ambassador to London where she had gone to school. She spoke with an Edwardian English accent not to mention wit.
Whenever we arrived at the Oriental, the hotel would alert her and she would then invite us to lunch with various interesting folk both Thai and farang, as foreigners are known. Apropos our last lunch I got two advance calls from the Crown Princess (she had married what was to have been a king of Thailand, thus making her Crown Princess; when her husband w
as passed over for the succession, she retained her title).
“I was very remiss,” said the cool voice on the telephone. “I had asked a few people to our lunch but then I quite forgot to tell you who they are.” I said I’d be delighted no matter who…
“Don’t speak too soon,” she said. “One of the guests is a fellow author, a Mrs. Barbara Cartland.” I was overjoyed. The ongoing pleasure of Bangkok is that people you don’t know, but don’t mind observing if only briefly, keep showing up. I reassured our hostess that I was ready for Mrs. Cartland who was famous for her splendid costumes, intricate wigs, dramatic makeup, Rolls-Royces, and innumerable romantic novels about well-born virgins, male as well as female. A Cartland law of matrimony insisted that the bride be totally virginal and inexperienced on her wedding night while, simultaneously, her groom must be equally virginal but experienced. Millions of Cartland fans were known to debate this contradiction with Talmudic zeal. Later, at lunch, the author herself joined in the debate. “After all, an experienced older lady could have contributed, in the purest way, to the hero’s education.” This was cryptic, to say the least. Mrs. Cartland was also currently celebrated as the mother of Lady Diana Spencer’s stepmother and so, in the eyes of the tabloids, an authority on the royal family whom she ceaselessly defends in the press even when they are not under attack. Recently she had objected to hints in the press that her dearest friend, Admiral the Lord Mountbatten, late Viceroy of India, had had perhaps too great an interest in the welfare of navy lads. She was also outspokenly anti-American because she believed that we had not sufficiently aided England in World War Two. Chumbhot was looking forward to a few decorous fireworks at table.
Howard and I arrived for lunch with a relative of the hotel manager’s wife; she was another British-educated Thai lady attached to the court. Chumbhot was waiting for us in her stone pulpit. She led us inside where, suddenly, the Thai lady, no young woman, promptly dropped onto all fours in front of Chumbhot who stood very straight like an effigy to herself. The lady then proceeded to writhe like some beached crab across the floor until she arrived at Chumbhot’s feet. Then, limbs intertwined, she slowly rose. For a moment I feared that she was going to levitate like Saint Teresa who was so famous for her levitations that the Pope sent for her. But then, just as she was entering his presence, she began uncontrollably to rise in the air, higher and higher. “Oh, Lord,” she cried, “not now, not now!” But at the Crown Princess’s gesture, the court lady remained earthbound. Also on hand for lunch was Chumbhot’s nephew, the architect Tri, whose Royal Yacht Club Hotel has apparently been swept away by the tsunami.
Since Bangkok traffic was the worst in the world in those days, one is never on time. But Mrs. Cartland, stepgrandmother to the new Princess of Wales, arrived more than two hours late. Chumbhot was royally gracious but seething. The heat of the day, despite fans in the sitting room, did not improve the general mood. But should Cartland misbehave Chumbhot and I had prepared a trap.
While waiting for Cartland, Chumbhot and I talked of Kukrit Pramoj who had been prime minister during many of the bad years of the American war in Vietnam, where he maintained a kind of suave neutrality despite his dislike of our crude imperialism not to mention his simultaneous Thai edginess about the Communist empire to the north, the China of Mao Tse-tung. Kukrit also published a major newspaper while supervising a dance company that he’d founded in order to preserve ancient Thai dances. He had, with brio, played the part of a prime minister in The Ugly American: “It was bliss,” he reminisced. “One rests in an air-conditioned trailer, unavailable for a real prime minister, and one’s hair is constantly trimmed, no matter how sparse.” He was amused by his co-star Marlon Brando.
The Thai royal family number in the thousands and are ranked according to which king they descend from: Rama One or Two or Three and so on. Kukrit and Chumbhot liked to quarrel over which of the two was the most royal. The current king is revered by all and treated like a living god, even by the sharp-tongued Kukrit who always spoke respectfully of his kinsman though less admiringly of the beautiful queen and her plastic surgeons. Apparently, one day during the Vietnam War, the queen called out some units of the army in the northeast of the country and went to war on her own against Communist rebels. It was said that her troops had also leaked over into Laos. Somehow or other, Kukrit persuaded the warrior queen to come home and peace was restored.
Since Thailand, also known as Siam, has never been conquered or colonized by Europeans, it has developed a society unlike any other in Southeast Asia. There are no resentments of the European powers or the “white race.” The Chinese, of course, are regarded with a somewhat beady eye while Kukrit liked to repeat an old Thai saying: “If you are in the jungle with only a stick to defend yourself and you are suddenly approached by an Indian and a cobra, kill the Indian first.” But diplomacy and subtlety are the principal Thai weapons of defense; and so they kept the American war party at a distance during the Vietnam episode.
Chumbhot said, “Is it true that Mrs. Cartland was not invited to the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana?” How well I thought the late Truman Capote could have handled all this. He lived for gossip and he was also a marvelous liar. No fact ever gave him pause. When truly inspired, like Joan of Arc attending to her voices, he would half shut his eyes and start inventing stories about people whom he had often never known or, indeed, even heard of. Although he felt himself to be the heir to Proust, a reference I once made to Madame Verdurin drew a blank. I saw him perhaps every other decade, usually by accident. Jackie Kennedy, whom he claimed to have known since childhood, actually met him at a lunch in New York just before the 1960 election. Truman had spun a number of fantastic stories to a table of bemused ladies. At the end of lunch, he asked Jackie if she had a car and, if so, could she drop him off on her way home? She had. She did. In the car, he gave a great dramatic sigh. “Now you’ve seen me singing for my supper!” He became Pagliacci. Since Jackie had enjoyed him, I warned her, “Just remember all those scurrilous stories you found so interesting about other people he’ll now start to invent about you.” Luckily, Jackie was never innocent about the Capotes whom she regarded as so many denizens of a zoo which she liked occasionally to patronize. When Jack and Jackie moved to the White House, her stepsister observed that, “This will be the most disdainful administration in history.”
Chumbhot is waiting for my answer. Am I to turn Capote-esque? “No,” I said, “Mrs. Cartland was not invited.” I recalled Princess Margaret, cigarette holder in one hand, a gin and tonic in the other. It was her gift to extract some joy from whatever hand, no matter how bad, life had dealt her. “Of course we were going to invite the old thing,” she said, “but the bride’s family said that if she came, they wouldn’t and since you can’t have a wedding without a bride…”
Finally, Mrs. Cartland, escorted by an amiable grown son, made her entrance on a sudden gust of hot air from the garden. As tribute to the heat she wore neither hat nor wig, only wavy tufts of pale hair adorned her gleaming rosy pate.
“The traffic!” Cartland was accusing.
“Good afternoon.” Chumbhot was demure. In Bangkok, “The traffic!” is almost a greeting. A stickler in print for etiquette, preferably royal, Mrs. Cartland did not curtsey to Chumbhot, so different from the court lady’s beached-crab number: Autre temps as E. Nesbit’s Psam-mead liked to murmur at such moments. Mrs. Cartland and son were apparently in the neighborhood in order to check on the distribution of her books throughout Southeast Asia, a formidable task, they sighed, considering her alleged popularity.
In the dining room. I sat on Chumbhot’s left, Mrs. Cartland, a monument draped in damp pastel colors, on her right. Conversation did not flag. Mrs. Cartland was indignant at the way the press had been treating “Dickie.” Dickie Mountbatten. “All this nonsense about his…private life. Perfect nonsense! And then they dare to write about Nehru and Edwina [this was Lady Mountbatten], too vile, really.” Mrs. Cartland was beginning to shake with ind
ignation. I couldn’t help but think that if the diarist of that period, Chips Channon, was reliable in these matters the press was surprisingly accurate and rather mild. What was common knowledge in a certain world was plainly not to be shared with Mrs. Cartland’s virginal readers. Chumbhot, who knew the same gossip that the press was working from, said, innocently, “Have you no laws in England to protect the royal family? Don’t you have…what is the phrase?” She turned to me.
“Laisse majesté, which you have in Thailand,” I added.
“Yes, we do. But what, Mrs. Cartland, do the English do to journalists who attack the Queen?”
“Since Her Majesty does nothing but good, they never do.”
I turned to Chumbhot. “What do they do to the press in this country?” was my contribution.
“Oh, I think we still kill them.” This made for a more serious mood. As Mrs. Cartland restlessly stirred her soup, she began on the American influence on the British press, getting it somewhat backward, I thought. She expressed outrage that Charles and Diana were being persecuted by the press when she had never seen a more loving devoted couple. She was, she confessed, very close to them and knew how hurt they were with the press telling ridiculous stories about them. “From that glorious moment in the abbey when they were pronounced man and wife, the troubles began in our press. Or, I should say, the American press.”
Chumbhot picked up our previously agreed-upon cue. “How lovely the abbey must have been. We saw it only on television, of course, but you were there.” She smiled her gentle tiger smile. Cartland stammered “Yes yes yes…then to read in the dreadful press—”
“Do tell us what the abbey was like, with the divine music, the service…”
Mrs. Cartland was having trouble with a quail’s egg. She coughed and cleared her throat. Chumbhot looked at me. I nodded, “Go!”