by Gore Vidal
Life magazine did a famous photograph of twenty or thirty writers honoring Edith and Osbert Sitwell on their first tour of America. Although the N.Y. School did not think much of the Sitwells, Auden and Spender were also on hand. Auden, perched atop a ladder, picked a book off the shelf nearest him and handed it to me: Problems of Men by John Dewey. Riotously funny. Nearby, side by side, sit Jarrell and Schwartz. Tennessee and I are at the rear of this company. He had been amused when his old friend and fellow poet, Elizabeth Bishop, complimented him on a poem of his that she had just read in Mademoiselle. What else had he been doing? she asked. He mentioned A Streetcar Named Desire. Bishop simply smiled fondly and turned to Marianne Moore.
Saul Bellow, a Hudson Valley neighbor, also liked to visit Rome where he paid us a call at our Largo Argentina flat not far from a restaurant run by an order of third-world nuns. Alberto Moravia occasionally joined us, to listen to their hymn-singing, he declared.
Sometime in the early sixties Saul came to me with a play he had written. I had already done two plays on Broadway so he wondered if…The play was called The Upper Depths and was not only funny but original; he had taken on the self-importance of entirely ordinary people who, thanks to the then current vogue for Freudian analysis, regarded themselves and their various tics not only seriously but solemnly because in the fraudulent would-be democracy of the postwar world everyone, by definition, was equally interesting and significant—and so if only enough attention were paid…Saul for a time had been a Reichian and had even sampled that guru’s orgone box. Joseph Anthony, who had directed my play The Best Man, agreed to direct The Upper Depths, a perfect title that metamorphosed into The Last Analysis, dealing with a TV comic far gone in megalomania as he conducts his own psychoanalysis on his own TV program. I still think the original script might work. But Saul never tried the theater again that I know of.
From time to time, even when Saul was well off from the success of his books, he would go back to teaching. When I asked why, he said: “Well, I know all sorts of people here in Chicago and I certainly like them better than that New York crowd but every now and then I want to talk about literature and so, when I do, I can call a class.” Saul’s dislike of New York where he had undergone coronation as the great novelist of his generation had been symbolically shadowed by a review of one of his later novels in The New York Review of Books: V.S. Pritchett’s review was characteristically polite but unenthusiastic; worse, it was entitled “Alien Corn.” Bellow never forgave the Epsteins who were among the founders of the Review or, indeed, the entire New York School that had raised him so high. He retreated to the “real” world of Chicago where he celebrated the likes of Allan Bloom and Leo Strauss in books like Ravelstein.
I seldom saw Saul in the last years. I think that the last time we saw each other was when he came to see me at our Rome flat in Largo Argentina. Since he liked Alberto Moravia (whose first name he always pronounced in three slowly deliberate syllables: Al-Bare-Toe), I took them to a restaurant run by a lay order of beautiful third-world nuns. I fear the two lecherous old masters ogled these psalm-singing nubilities. All in all, a cheery evening. At one point we spoke of death and what each expected to die of. Saul was very positive. “I expect to just wear out.” And so he did, a man of Benthamite utility.
Biographies, memoirs, volumes of letters by friends and acquaintances keep arriving and are stacked in piles all around my workroom. Sometimes there are unwelcome surprises. Christopher Isherwood, a friend for forty years or so, wrote endless diaries, all reverently published word for word by his heirs. Since Chris seldom awakened without a horrendous hangover, the “hangover diaries,” as I dubbed them, report his morning sickness, as it were, and give no sense of what the often joyous evenings before had been really like. With jaundiced gloom he took us all on. I had thought that between his native shrewdness and whatever Vedanta is supposed to do to heal or palliate the wounded psyche he might have written in a more generous vein. But he is often hard on those who had been good—and often more than helpful—friends like John Van Druten whose play I Am a Camera and subsequent musical, Cabaret, supported Christopher in his final decades. I come off fairly well. My political toughness was admired. But there is something claustrophobic about his total obsession with himself and domestic life. Little news from the outside world got through to him or, if it does, he promptly ignores it. The diaries to one side, he was still, in life, the consummate boy-charmer despite whatever age he had so unexpectedly found himself at. Of his new celebrity as a “Gay Icon” he reveled in the limelight. “Literally,” he said. “When I’m out there on the stage with all the lights blazing away I am so relaxed—so at home—that I am in serious danger of falling asleep.” The obituary style still clings, as it were, to my pen. After a successful prostate operation, he was told to check back, regularly, with the doctor, which he forgot to do. The cancer spread. Soon he was dwindling away. I had just come from London and paid him a visit. He was hardly present. I chattered nervously. Talked of mutual friends whom I had seen. Remarked upon the fecklessness of the British. After the bonanza of striking oil in the North Sea, the Thatcher government seemed to have gone through the money. I was censorious: “A nation of grasshoppers,” I said. The old Isherwood, the Isherwood of legend, suddenly opened his eyes and smiled. “So what,” he asked, “is wrong with grasshoppers?” Thus we parted, each in approximate character.
Although I answer letters from friends and even interesting requests for information, most of the fan mail goes into a large box which is eventually shipped off to the Houghton Library at Harvard. I’ve always kept just about everything that comes my way as did Lord Byron, Thomas Wolfe, and not many others, or so I’ve been told by university archivists. Fortunately, as a twentieth–twenty-first-century writer, ladies and page boys don’t send me locks of hair as they did Byron. On the other hand, Vladimir Nabokov (whom I never met) and I liked to exchange elaborate insults through the press. In an interview he said that Graham Greene’s conversion to Catholicism seemed entirely bogus to him while he had it, on the best authority, that I had gone over to Rome. These épingles as Vera Nabokov termed them ended when I remarked in an interview how odd it was that Russia’s two greatest writers were of African descent. Before he could think of an answer, death ended these joyous exchanges.
Over the years, Louis Auchincloss and I exchanged a number of letters on many subjects from our common family to friends and, best of all, literary matters but where Saul could call a class I was obliged to write letters to only a few people like Louis Auchincloss, Paul Bowles, Isherwood, the Glorious Bird himself as I called Tennessee; we had a number of imaginary characters whose adventures cropped up in our correspondence. One was the mysterious Lesbia Ghoul, a ubiquitous figure forever on the move. April 5, 1948, Tennessee reports: “Lesbia passed through Rome, heavily veiled.” (It was common knowledge that she had more than once submitted her tragic mask of a face to the surgeon’s knife.) The Bird continues: “No sign of Willard. No word. Only a whisper of silk and a few rose leaves floating after. The scent of frangipangi. A few days later a gilt-edged card, saying ‘Sorry’ post-marked Istanbul, dictated, unsigned. With Lesbia one is never certain, such a thin line so easily crossed over! Nerves…”
There were numerous Lesbias and Willards in our peripatetic lives mostly around Europe and, thanks to Paul Bowles’s urgings, Morocco which I disliked as much as the Bird did. But for the pleasure of Paul’s company, each paid him calls, never together as it happened. Also, on the road, hunting in a pack, there were a number of remittance men, writers with no time to write, for which the Bird and I at least were grateful. Mostly Americans, they inclined to alcohol, kif, and to all the needy lads in the postwar poor countries. Since in those days I neither drank, nor smoked pot or kif, I had little in common with most of them. But Tennessee’s love of the grotesque was positively Franciscan and he let them cadge money and not entirely empty bottles from the tourist hotels we stopped at if such places had, as he put
it in that no-known language he sometimes used, progresso libero. In any case, spring and summer were for travel and constant work for each of us: he on his typewriter and I in longhand on yellow legal pads.
TWENTY
In addition to plays and fiction (that season it was Summer and Smoke and several stories), Tennessee was busy writing letters which I am now, fifty-seven years later, reading for the first time in a New Directions volume. Tennessee was a wonderful letter writer tailoring his text to the recipient’s likes and dislikes. In the spring of 1948 I was twenty-two and my third book, The City and the Pillar, was a bestseller. The remittance crowd was not friendly, to riot in understatement, nor were certain far-flung recipients of the Bird’s letters. He was drawn to what I called monster women of which the most demanding and paranoid was Carson McCullers whose work I admired and often praised: the opening lines of Reflections in a Golden Eye reveal the American manner at its most perfectly focused. But she, alas, disliked me almost as much as she did Truman Capote whose Other Voices, Other Rooms was a greater success than anything Carson was to publish, but whose success she was convinced was entirely due to his unacknowledged borrowings from her work as well as from that of Eudora Welty. It was as if he, too, wanted to be a great Southern lady writer, and so raided their work for notions and pretty things. When Shelby Foote showed Eudora some of the passages from Delta Wedding that Truman had lifted for Local Color, she was serene. “Well,” she said, “at least he took the things I liked best.” Jane Bowles, another difficult serious lady, was also revered by the Bird. I only saw her husband, Paul, when she was otherwise engaged with her remittance men or her lady from the Tangier market who may have poisoned her, with datura leaves, bringing on a debilitating stroke.
Jane and Paul Bowles, having third and fourth thoughts.
One of Tennessee’s earliest letters in this collection is to Carson McCullers. She was still seething over Capote. He introduces me warily. He and I had met at a party for Samuel Barber in the American Academy, I was staying at the Eden Hotel; he’d rented an apartment in the Via Aurora. “…Gore Vidal is here…Vidal is twenty-three [actually I was twenty-two] and a real beauty. His new book The City and the Pillar I have just read and while it is not a good book it is absorbing. There is not a really distinguished line in the book and yet a great deal of it has a curiously life-like quality. The end is trashy, alas, murder and suicide both.” Thus he sets her mind at rest about the competition. Then, like a skilled matador, he lunges for the kill: “But you would like the boy as I do his eyes remind me of yours.” With one shrewd thrust, starting with “beauty” and ending with the ultimate hemorrhage of life’s blood on the subject of eyes, golden and otherwise, he ensured for me her lifelong loathing; yet I remained a public admirer of hers until the end though I do not love her better after death (to reprise a favorite poem of Tennessee’s), nor did I feel too deeply the absence of her company over the ensuing years. In 2003 I attended a seminar at Yale to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The City and the Pillar, sometimes noted in academic circles as the basis for a new discipline called “Queer Studies.” The “trashy ending” had been modified over the years to a fight and a rape. No murder, there was also never a suicide…I was in my youthful way trying to emulate Romeo and Juliet except that each lover was a boy. In other words, the ideal title should have been “The Romantic Agony” but that title had already been used for a collection of essays by the Italian critic Mario Praz.
The Bird was a good critic but he seldom read novels if he could help it. Late in life he finally read The Aspern Papers and marveled at how close the story was to his own Lord Byron’s Love Letter.
I think that what he once said of his own plays was also a factor in his reading: “I cannot write without a character for whom I do not feel sexual desire.” Tennessee would occasionally give me stories he had written and I would do the same with him. Each was brutally frank with the other. I with his “Rubio y Morena,” he as we have seen in the letter to Carson. Of the ending he had also told me, “I don’t think you realized what a good book you had written.”
After Tennessee died, Jay Laughlin his publisher at New Directions asked me to introduce a volume of his short stories, starting with, I think, a bit of juvenilia published in something like Weird Tales and ending with one of his last stories about an old writer racing literally from death as scraps of poems fall from his pockets. As I read the stories I realized that his talent and obsession was playwriting and the magical transference of text from written page to real actors who brought to life his true world both imagined and recalled. I also noticed the profound change in his work which mysteriously coincided with his change of name from Thomas Lanier Williams to Tennessee Williams. The style absolutely changes from…well, rather trashy naturalistic prose to that of a totally different voice quite unlike Thomas Lanier’s.
I have just read a letter from the Bird to Oliver Evans, a poet-critic who thought, in his innocence, that Anaïs Nin was a great novelist. The Bird had just read The Judgment of Paris. With this seventh novel I had, without knowing it, much less planning it, found my voice: certainly, there was no dramatic change of name though publishing friends had assured me that the notoriety of The City and the Pillar would exclude me from serious attention and so perhaps I should pick a new name. I did: for three mystery novels that were glowingly reviewed in The New York Times. A decade later when I republished all three in a single volume over my own name, the Times attacked the three that they had so recently hailed as by someone else. But the Bird had, in his vague intuitive way, sensed something was happening when he read Judgment. On February 20, 1952, he wrote Evans who had complained about the book, “I am impressed by Gore’s new book. I cannot quarrel with your analysis of it, but I am deeply impressed by the cogency of the writing and the liquid smooth style. And I think your article proves that you can do a piece on him. Give him my love. Say that the Bird gives her blessing.” Thank God, poor Oliver left me alone. The Judgment of Paris and its successor Messiah has each had a long underground life, particularly Messiah. But by 1954 I had written my first play for television and Tennessee who had always thought me intended for dramatic writing was proved correct based on no evidence at all except his own peculiar intuitions. On January 30, 1950, he had written Laughlin that I had been in Key West and written “a really excellent story, the best thing he has ever done in my opinion”; “Three Stratagems” was published in the New Directions anthology 12 (1950) and also in a collection of stories called A Thirsty Evil. Tennessee then mentions an odd book that I think I had dictated as an experiment, the tale of a street hustler called Some Desperate Adventure. Since I have completely forgotten it I’ve sent away to Harvard for a copy. Tennessee is proving more and more on target as the years pile up between us. “It was the most honest expression of Vidal that he has yet offered. I am encouraging him to do it as a play. It could be terrifying as a study of the modern jungle. Vidal is not likable, at least not in any familiar way, but he and Bowles are the two most honest savages I have met. Of course Bowles is still the superior artist, but I wonder if any other living writer is going to keep at it as ferociously, unremittingly as Vidal?”
Well, thanks, Bird, from way up here in the awful year 2005.
TWENTY-ONE
Over the years I suppose that I exchanged more letters with Tennessee’s other honest savage, Paul Bowles, than ever I did with the Bird whose wisdom—now so terminally late in the game—I appreciate. For some reason Paul and I got into the habit of reversing names. He was Luap Selwob and I Erog La-div.
We first met in the forties in New York City when he was composing music for plays, among them Streetcar. Yes, in those days plays were literally melo-dramas; dramas with musical accompaniment somewhat on the order of the Warner Brothers movie music of the day which drove Bette Davis wild. During the shooting of Dark Victory, Geraldine Fitzgerald was on the set when Davis, having gallantly seen her husband off to New York and then plantin
g a number of irises while going blind from some sort of fatal movie disease, makes her way, unsteadily, to the staircase. Out of view, the grips and everyone else nearby (was Ronald Reagan on hand? He plays a drunken playboy in the film; and is very good) gathered to watch Davis make her last climb up those stairs and to her stoic death.
Fitzgerald told me that “halfway up the stairs Bette stopped and turned to fix the director, Irving Rapper, with her famed steely gaze. ‘Now tell me, Irving, before I waste any more time on acting, who is going up these stairs to die, me or Max Steiner?’ ” Like most of the great actresses she hated the schmaltzy movie music that was added later by some director-editor in order to nudge—shove—the audience into sobs or laughter. “What that awful music does,” Davis said to me when she was playing in The Catered Affair, the first film that I ever wrote for MGM, “is erase the actor’s performance, note by note,” which was certainly true of Steiner’s lush orchestrations but hardly true of the more evocative music that Bowles and Virgil Thomson and other “real” composers composed for the immediate postwar theater and films. But soon original theater music was dropped; union costs were too high for so precarious a medium where a single journalist on the warpath could shut down a production and often did, particularly in the case of the Bird and any other writer thought to be a same-sexualist. The fifties inaugurated an all-out war on the fags, which did much harm to the theater, an institution already besieged by movies and then swamped by television.