by Gore Vidal
Although when I set a novel in history I do a great deal of note-taking from the necessary records, when I start an entirely invented book like Myra I seldom start with anything more than a sentence that has taken possession of me. In this case “I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man may possess; clad only in garter belt and one dress shield…” The voice roared on. Who was she? I could only find out if I kept on writing. She was obsessed by Hollywood movies. That was soon clear. No matter how kitsch a film she could swiftly penetrate its mystical magical marshmallow core. Even so, it was not until I was halfway through the story that I realized she had been a male film critic who had changed his sex; Myron had become Myra. Why? I wrote on, laughing.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Politics now interrupts my return in memory to that happy time in Rome. So I must leave Myra Breckinridge, all aroar on her lined yellow pages, while I ponder the film that I saw last night; The Deal stars David Morrissey as the real-life British labor politician Gordon Brown, currently chancellor of the exchequer. The deal is the one allegedly made between him and Tony Blair—two ambitious young politicians—before the election of 1997 that would make one of them prime minister with the understanding that after one or two terms he would step aside and let the other take his place. Though British journalists discuss “the deal” as though they themselves had been witnesses to it, the film looks to be accurate, unlike most American attempts at political dramas of this sort. In the matter of the deal itself, the film shows the studied ambivalence of Tony Blair as he sets forth from Glamis, armed only with a toothy rictus smile and bright vulpine stare; in a telling scene with Brown, he does not quite admit that there ever was such an agreement other than he had felt that Brown was their party’s natural leader: unfortunately, too many others preferred Blair’s easy managerial style to Brown’s old-fashioned seriousness, so he had no choice…At the time of the late election which won Labour a third term, a unique event in that party’s history, Brown was not only the party’s favorite but was also admired for the contribution his chancellorship had made to the United Kingdom’s economic prosperity; while the prime minister, thanks to his passion for the Bushite illegal wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, had appalled many Britons who thought Blair should have stepped aside for the less tarnished Brown; also, Blair was generally believed to have lied to the nation when he maintained that his own attorney general had assured him that his decision to join Bush in the preemptive war on Iraq was legally sound when it was plainly not, according to the attorney general’s actual memo as finally revealed.
Back in 1997 when the BBC invited me to the United Kingdom to cover the election, I went, first, to each party’s initial announcement that it would fight the coming election for control of the House of Commons. The Labour Party met in a handsome eighteenth-century hall. TV cameras were everywhere; print journalists, too. We were led into a sort of back room where on a low dais, faced by rows of folding chairs, sat Tony Blair and his Shadow Cabinet. I sat at the center of the first row a yard away from the Shadow Home Secretary David Blunkett, a blind man with a large black seeing-eye dog. The dog and I made immediate eye contact. The dog was an old hand at political meetings. He was also bored, chin resting on outstretched front paws; he gave me a friendly yawn. I yawned back. He shut his eyes. Almost directly across from me was Blair, looking smaller than life. According to the press his handlers had ordered him to ration his tic-like smile. So, solemnly, tight-lipped, he stared, one by one, at the TV cameras all around the room. But, apparently, my yawn to the dog had set off a Pavlovian response in Blair who managed three yawns in a row with mouth firmly shut, forcing air uncomfortably through his nose and suggesting to me that he has a deviated septum. Back of him, to his right, was Gordon Brown darkly morose as he endured the first phase of the deal: the party leadership of Tony Blair and Labour’s almost certain majority in the next Parliament followed, presumably, by the premiership of the other dealer.
As I recall, Blair took questions from the journalists, who raised their hands; I raised mine, too, but he only took questions from parliamentary journalists whom he already knew. The questions were perhaps more interesting to a foreigner than the answers which were intricately banal. Yet when a mildly sharp question was asked, the ghost of the rictus smile, like a negative undergoing slow exposure, would appear and Blair would say, gently, “Trust me!” That was that. But interesting, even dramatic changes were being made that day. If I had inquired more deeply, I might have unearthed the deal; in itself of no particular interest except to the dealers; yet, politically, Blair versus Brown represented the end of the old class-based party and the rise of a new managerial apparatus that represents administrative numbers rather than any specific class interest.
After Blair and Labour won in 1997, the journalist-politician Roy Hattersley wrote that Blair had “taken the politics out of politics”: he’d made New Labour out of Labour. Once elected, Blair called in Hattersley for a chat. Blair was sunny. “I didn’t, as you wrote, take the politics out of politics, but I was one of the first to notice that politics had already been taken out of politics.” Why? Because a majority of the voters now believe that they are middle class. Since this is demonstrably untrue (today many “poor” Americans think of themselves as in the top percentiles of income), Blair’s analysis is as applicable to the United States as it is to the United Kingdom. Particularly when he made the point that in political systems like ours you cannot have a real political party without a class base. Old Labour was real; it was made up of real working people. While FDR’s Democratic Party coalition lasted triumphantly until his heir Lyndon Johnson did the one saintly thing of his checkered political career and intoned: “We shall overcome,” knowing, as he said to friends at the time, that by enfranchising African American voters he had lost the white Southern vote to the Republican Party—perhaps for all time. FDR’s party of northern city machines plus organized labor plus repressed African Americans in the South was unbeatable for decades until Johnson—well, no good deed, et cetera.
The U.K. has no bloc of potential power quite like the African subjects of the old Confederacy. Even so, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can now claim a class basis for their incoherent factions, only a possible collision between Bush imperialists and Dean anti-imperialists. So, as things fall apart, only the center appears to hold…barely. Good luck, Britannia. Good luck, Uncle Sam.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I first knew Rome in 1939, a city where peasants, reeking of garlic, came to market rather like their counterparts (less the garlic) in Washington, D.C., while Mussolini’s Blackshirts were everywhere. Then there was the Rome of 1948–1949 inhabited by Tennessee and Frederick Prokosch, a poet-novelist, while such composers as Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber were to be found at the American Academy. Life was still wartime austere but the dollar exchange rate was all in our favor which made life easy for us if not the Romans. Tennessee took a ground-floor flat in the Via Aurora a block or two from Via Veneto and the gardens of the Villa Borghese. I stayed nearby in the Hotel Eden, living off the fortune I’d earned from The City and the Pillar, a vast $20,000. Although I was supposed to have gone to Harvard after I got out of the army in 1946, joining many of my Exeter classmates, I had decided that after a lifetime of being institutionalized (imprisoned is more like it) in a half-dozen boarding schools, summer camps, the awful Los Alamos Ranch School where each boy had his own horse (mine was an ambulatory boneyard aptly called Two-bits)—the Ranch School was seized by the army and became the birthplace of the atomic bomb—then after nearly three years in the army, the thought of four years at Harvard was unbearable. Former Exeter classmates thought I was plainly doomed (I had no trust fund). I would “live by writing,” I said. And so I did to their amazement—even chagrin since many of them had literary ambitions but some of the most talented had lost their nerve in the war. Though “nerve” is hardly the word. “Will” is possibly better. A friend at school, Bob Bingham, was energetically ambitious prewar,
but when the war ended and he tried his hand at novel-writing somehow he was out of focus. He had had a bad time of it in the infantry in France where Lewis Sibley, another classmate, was killed: Sibley was already a distinguished poet at seventeen. A year ago I read some of his poems over WBAI radio in New York. The response was as wonderful as it was sad. The infamous “Battle of the Bulge” in France during winter must have been a particular horror for barely trained eighteen-year-old soldiers. Later, I was shown some of Sibley’s letters. The army with its unerring gift for placing people where they would be least useful and most vulnerable had made the nearly blind Sibley a scout. His reported adventures began when his only pair of glasses was broken and the army’s difficulty in supplying him with a new pair reduced his utility as a scout in freezing weather. That he should not, near-blind as he was, have been placed in the infantry was a sign of the general madness of that Good War as it lurched toward a victorious conclusion thanks to Soviet ground troops. Eisenhower, for political reasons, had held back General Patton’s army so that the British Montgomery could at least look competent and the Russians could get to Berlin first, all of which did nothing much for American morale. Anyway, Sibley, wearing new glasses, was duly massacred just as another schoolmate—from St. Albans, not Exeter—was being embraced in a foxhole on Iwo Jima by a Japanese with grenades on his belt that democratically blew out both their stomachs. It is my impression that the so-called “best and brightest” were routinely killed off which might explain the notoriously low level of those now in political life and, to be fair, in the arts as well. Recently, I looked through the 1943 yearbook of our graduating class. As I looked at the pictures, trying to figure out who was who, I was struck by how old we all looked. For the most part, our graduating class averaged seventeen years old; yet there was a photo of three seniors standing side by side; they look as if they are in their early forties. Of course within months of graduation we would all be in the war and so it is possible that kindly fate was telescoping for us the selves that we might have become. Since a number of us would soon be dead, we were being allowed by a jocular nature—or by a magic Kodak—to see ourselves not only grown up but middle aged as well. There is a picture of Bingham and me on a lawn in back of Langdell Hall where I roomed. I am lying on the grass with a book, he is standing over me. We were both editors of the Exeter Review, the school’s literary magazine which gave rise, under Bingham’s managing editorship, to more intricate rows than any I was ever to encounter, grown up, on the board of Partisan Review. In a way it was nice of fate to give us all a preview of what we were not apt to live long enough to experience for real. Bingham ended up as an editor at Max Ascoli’s The Reporter and, later, as a sort of managing editor at The New Yorker. We saw little of each other, once grown. Then, one day I got a letter from him to announce that he had a brain tumor and it looked as if he was going to precede me into the long night. Bob and his wife came to Rome but I was away and Howard took them out to dinner. I asked Howard for details. “Well, it was like they had made themselves up to look older, with gray hair and all that.” Rather the way the 1943 yearbook had added a dozen or more years to those of us perhaps most vulnerable to an early death and so presumably curious to get a preview of what we might have become.
I recall in grade school that often a class would vow that in twenty years we would all meet again to see what time had done. But at Exeter, even without the devouring war in wait to pounce, we had no time for such sentimentality. Although most of my relationships with classmates were fairly amiable, once the war was done, I saw Bingham only a few times over the years with another classmate, A. K. Lewis, who had worked with me in the summer of 1942 at a Camden, New Jersey, factory where molded plywood wing tips for fighter planes were made. I was hopeless at the work; he was not. Years later he wrote the script for a wonderful movie called Klute. At Exeter we had made a schoolboy bet about which one of us would lose his hair first. Thirty years later, in Hollywood, he paid me the $100 that he owed me and I spent it on our dinner.
Bob Bingham is standing; I am on the grass—outside Langdell Hall where I lived at Exeter. We are about to quarrel over which stories were to appear in the next issue of the Exeter Review which we coedited much of the time, a nice preparation for later serving on the board of Partisan Review.
I have not gone to any of our class reunions. I can’t think why.
Back to Rome in the sixties. Like Venus, Myra Breckinridge rose or rather leapt from her sea of yellow legal pads. Meanwhile, Roman life agreed with both Howard and me. All sorts of people that we knew and did not know came through town: memorable was Isherwood on his way back from a first visit to India whose Vedanta texts he had written so much about. Overwhelmed by the subcontinent’s proverbial teeming millions, he foresaw, with some equanimity, the eventual dying out of the fragile white race. “But we must,” he said solemnly, “set aside reservations for the better-looking blonds, the Danes and so on. They must be preserved like rare unicorns. Certainly, the Indians will enjoy them in their reservations along with all that snow we’ll shovel in to provide the right Arctic touch.”
I gave the completed Myra to my editor Ned Bradford at Little, Brown—a Boston publishing house. I hoped that Ned and the publisher, Arthur Thornhill, would not be too upset by Myra’s exuberant pansexuality. Fortunately, they were not.
TWENTY-NINE
My very first publisher, E. P. Dutton, was run by a White Russian called Nick Wreden. When I was still in uniform, he had taken Williwaw, my novel about an army ship in the Aleutian Islands during the war. An ursine figure of jovial disposition, during the days of my blackout by The New York Times Wreden loyally kept on publishing me. While I was busy writing plays for television, movies, theater, Wreden had moved on to Little, Brown and despite several published obituaries of me as a novelist (apparently, once lost to television that was indeed the end of someone who’d been thought promising), I told Nick that when I got back to novel-writing I’d come to him. But when, like General MacArthur, I did return, Nick was dead, and his place at Little, Brown had been taken by Ned Bradford. I have never needed an editor in the sense of a Max Perkins who was so necessary, we are assured, to salvage the likes of Thomas Wolfe, by neatly shaping long flowing works into simple commercial slices. All I ever needed was an intelligent first reader and, later, a good copy editor. Bradford proved to be ideal. When he read the manuscript of Julian his only comment was embarrassingly to the point: “You forgot to tell us why he became a Christian apostate.” I promptly provided the missing link. The three novels that I published with Little, Brown were each despite (or because of) the blackout a number-one bestseller on all such lists except that of the self-styled “newspaper of record.” Unfortunately, for Little, Brown and, in the long run, for me, I was persuaded to leave my Boston publisher for the New York–based Random House; there was also The New York Review of Books for whom I’d been writing since their first issue in 1963. As the co-editor, Barbara Epstein, was a friend it made sense to be nearby. In those days Howard and I still lived, despite our first long Roman interlude, on the banks of the Hudson River at Barrytown. I’ve already noted how hard it is to get out of politics; perhaps I should have added how hard it is to get politics out of oneself; almost as difficult as to get prose out of one’s system if one is primarily a novelist reconstructed as a dramatist, something quite other. Each has its satisfactions but the autonomy of the novelist, when not impeded by interested parties, can result in the making of worlds whose anterior form is like that of the primal biblical myth, chaos. For the absolute dramatist like Tennessee the written play is a sort of Eden, lacking only living actors to reenact Adam and Eve and the idea of Lilith as well as the entrance of the snake to start the drama going, rather as God did. The Glorious Bird—the name that I called Tennessee—had caught on with many of his friends and, finally, with him, too. But to acknowledge me as a namer of Beasts diminished him as Supreme author. So, who was I then? He found the phrase in a letter to me where I am a
ddressed as “Fruit of Eden,” a many-layered image, of course, at whose core there is what the first couple was forbidden ever to sample, knowledge. Thanks to the serpent’s crafty malice Eve fell upon knowledge if not wisdom and thus paradise was lost.
THIRTY
In rereading and writing about the Bird I am often surprised at how much Christian imagery, Old and New Testament, kept leaking into his work. But then—his sister, Rose, to one side—his maternal grandfather, Dakin, an Episcopal clergyman, was his favorite relative. The old man often joined him in Key West where, in due course, I met him. Recently an archivist at Harvard came across a short story that I had written about the old man, based on an anecdote that Tennessee had told me. When Tennessee was in his adolescence, visiting his grandparents in Mississippi, two men came one day to see the Reverend Dakin. He was, Tennessee later discovered, being blackmailed for an adventure with a boy. Apparently, this was not their first visit but it was the last. The Reverend gave them what he had in the bank and then, when they were gone, he took all his sermons out onto the front lawn and burned them. I found this story hard to forget and it was the eighth and last of the short stories that I was to write in my first phase as a prose writer. When it came time to include it in a volume entitled A Thirsty Evil, collegiality required me to show it to the Bird who said I must not use it. Since his grandfather was nearly blind and not apt ever to come across a New Directions anthology of contemporary literature…But, the Bird stopped me right there and hissed, “There is always Edwina,” known to the world as Amanda in The Glass Menagerie. I did point out that since she had not sued her son for his portrait of her in that first play she would hardly take up arms to protect her father. But the Bird was firm even after I changed boy to girl. And so the story was obliged to wait half a century for publication by Harvard.