by Gore Vidal
I never heard him denounce the Soviet system. On the other hand, he was no enthusiast for our system. He was particularly irritated when he was criticized for not admitting that he had AIDS. “If I do, I cannot reenter U.S. Law says no one with such a disease can be allowed in. So I must be silent.” He had a great deal of property in and around Washington, D.C., where he had installed relatives. He was also eager to get his mother to America if only for a visit. The Soviet authorities were cooperative but the Americans were not. Someone suggested that he appeal to President Carter. This proved to be a disaster. The beloved ex-president-to-be was not yet on view. Instead, “wreathed in malaise” as he called it, he was in no mood to grant favors to someone like Nureyev. Rudi was still in a rage as he described Carter’s treatment of him. He had been summoned to the White House where Carter reminded him that the leader of the free world had quite a lot on his plate and had no time to bother about the mother of a famous dancer. Rudi was shocked by the little man’s bad manners. It was all so like Rudi’s native Siberia where “criminals” were sent and petty bureaucrats ruled. Carter made it very clear that he would do nothing to help Rudi’s mother to visit America. Rudi’s volatile Mongol temperament was aroused: “I expected better from an American president so I cursed him.”
Nureyev pays a final call at La Rondinaia.
“You did what?” I was not certain I’d understood him. He was grinning in memory. “I cursed him first in Russian but there was no translator so I cursed him again in English.” When I asked for some technical details of the curse—bell, book, and candle, say? “I told this Carter he would be punished for not allowing an old woman to come visit her son, for his cruelty and his rudeness and then I said that because of this behavior he would lose the coming election, which he did and all thanks to my curse. Very powerful, these Russian curses.” I told Rudi he should open an office for people who could use his supernatural powers: today, of course, he would be overworked. Then I walked him to the gate of La Rondinaia and, no doubt affected by this talk of curses, I imitated an old Russian friend and made the sign of the cross on his chest: he bowed gravely. He died soon after. Someone who knew him far better than I said it was like a powerful flame going out.
In early 1978 Howard and I bought a house in the Hollywood Hills. The Red Brigades in Italy had kidnapped then murdered the former prime minister Aldo Moro and everyone’s advice was “get out of Italy which is falling into chaos.” Since chaos is the normal state of that oddly happy nation or perhaps I should say entity I did not fear the apparently rising tide of Communism all over the world possibly because I knew so many interested political and media types in Washington whose wild allegations could then be checked by consulting certain wise Italians or, indeed, Europeans of any sort grown sick of our constant howling wolf when, more and more, we were being identified as the wolf advancing upon the house of the three little pigs. When asked what advantage there is to having two houses, one in the Hollywood Hills and the other on the Amalfi coast, I have seldom had an answer. But now, after half a century, I am aware of receiving a wider range of information about what is going on in the world as opposed to the non-news and propaganda of most of our media. Certainly the Italian Communist Party so often demonized by our media was never of any great danger to anyone while radical splinter groups like the Red Brigades could hardly be called Communist: Moro was killed because he favored what Italians call “the historic compromise” between the conservative Christian Democrats and the mildly liberal Communists, each anathema to certain incoherent American activists of the sixties. Had we not intervened so ferociously in the election of 1948 the compromise would have taken place earlier to, one suspects, no great effect, good or bad.
FORTY-THREE
I used to see Moro at the Quirinale palace on the national day of the republic. He was a weary sort of realist with, as someone wrote, “a thousand years of sirocco in his eyes.” He had developed a prose style of total opaqueness. When Luigi Barzini once asked him why, as prime minister, he spoke so cryptically Moro said, “If I spoke clearly about our situation everyone would emigrate.”
Barzini was a witty journalist, son of another famous journalist. During fascism he fell afoul of Mussolini who sent him into “home exile” in the south of Italy; specifically, to Amalfi. Luigi’s wife, a Feltrinelli with money, envisaged a hovel with no running water and so she shipped an entire bathroom of white marble to Amalfi where, like some sinister sculpture, toilet, bathtub, and lonely bidet ended up on the Amalfi beach for many years while the Barzinis enjoyed their exile at a local hotel.
Howard and I bought the house in Los Angeles not to flee the Red Brigades but to prepare for the hospital years which came even sooner than either suspected. Meanwhile we stayed on in Ravello except when work or politics brought me back.
Early 1978 while I was having dinner in Washington with my half sister our mother died in New York, of cancer. I’d not seen her in years but I did read her attack on me in Time magazine printed under the headline “A Mother’s Love.” But I had other things than “love” on my mind.
April 5, 1978, I spoke at Arlington Street Church in Boston on behalf of the Boston-Boise Committee. A witch hunt of Salemesque intensity was under way in Boston. Twenty-four men had been arrested at Revere Beach for consorting with local youths (of whom not one was a child): apparently some of the youths rented their favors. During that summer the local police were “cracking down on same-sexualists” at the beach, in the libraries, though not yet in the Irish Catholic Church. Civil libertarians, in order to ensure fair trials for those who had been cracked down upon, formed a group called the National Jury Project to determine whether or not fair trials were possible in so heated an atmosphere to which additional heat would presently be added by the arrival in town of that scourge of Sodom, singer Anita Bryant. Out of the blue, the Boston-Boise group asked me to speak at the church in order to raise money not so much for the defense of the Revere Beachers as to draw attention to the local all-out war on those deemed “homosexual.” Only now, reading old correspondence, am I beginning to grasp why 1,500 people crowded the church to hear me. Unfortunately, I was confronted with every speaker’s nightmare: I had no written text; worse, no close knowledge of the events leading up to my appearance. I was dull. After the speech I was introduced to some members of the Boston-Boise Committee. Boise, Idaho, had recently endured a similar witch hunt where most of the male civic leaders of that city were charged with engaging in sexual acts with willing ephebes. John Gerassi, author of The Boys of Boise, a book that shocked the nation largely because, as was noted at the time, “the guilty parties were all married men with children and grandchildren,” just like the Revere Beachers who were mostly married blue-collar men. At the back of the church an amiable scholarly figure asked me to autograph his copy of Burr. I duly wrote his name, “Robert M. Bonin,” little suspecting how soon our names would be juxtaposed in the Boston press. When I signed that book for Mr. Bonin I had no idea that he was the chief justice of Massachusetts. A week later he was being vilified in the Boston press for having come to hear me speak at a fund-raiser for twenty-four sex criminals, (sic) et cetera…
I promptly wrote Judge Bonin to say how sorry I was to have been used as a pretext to destroy a much-admired jurist. Bonin responded graciously: “I had made other misjudgments but none so rash as underestimating the extensive and intensive aspects of homophobia and anti-Semitism. Massachusetts has its own home-grown and flourishing Generals Brown and Anita Bryants.” Judge Bonin, as a Jew, did not suit the prejudices of the Roman Catholic–WASP judiciary of his state. Bonin’s subsequent letter of resignation to Governor Michael S. Dukakis is balanced and dignified. “The Legislature has spoken. The approval of the Address was unjust and is a bad precedent. Address, without required reasons and trial is a dreadful procedure lacking in due process. I hope it will not be a prologue to future actions against other judges. I cannot conceive of Address for the impropriety of ‘neglectful’ attendan
ce at a lecture.” (“Neglectful” is a weird word to use for hearing a speech in a church.) He also remarks that he had been pre-tried in the media. He quotes Solzhenitsyn: “The press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary…hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the twentieth century and more than anywhere else is this disease reflected in the press.” And so he went, most cheerfully, on his way. It is a wonder that he could have endured such an establishment for as long as he did. Meanwhile, I started to write more and more about contemporary politics.
FORTY-FOUR
A few years ago the BBC wondered if I would do a program on the American South and its families. Incidentally it is only British television that wants to do interesting projects on our native land: with few exceptions, the home team deals only in entertainers if, of course, they can be guaranteed not to entertain. Someone had noticed that although the WASPs are in themselves a small minority in the South they compensate for their fewness in numbers by their webs of cousinage in families which go back to the 1600s like my grandmother Gore, a Kay from South Carolina whose family had emigrated from Bury in Lancashire in the eighteenth century. Since there were so few British settlers in the Southern states there was not much of anyone for these immigrants to marry so they kept marrying into the same families. I have never been able to remember what relation I am to Albert Gore Junior even though his father, a Tennessee senator, once explained it to me on television in San Francisco (no, I don’t recall what he said but he did say that had I been elected to Congress in 1960 “our relationship would have been much closer,” which perhaps says it all).
Once a year the Gores hold a family reunion in northern Mississippi which I eventually attended in the interest of a documentary on me rather than on that white Anglo-Saxon enclave in the Southern states, a project abandoned because the BBC did not want to get involved in the business of race or, as my grandmother Gore liked to say, if any descendant of mine should marry someone colored I’ll come back and haunt ’em. When I was grown I liked to tease her with the knowledge that our blood had been commingled with that of the other race ever since the country began; she would then simply change the subject and complain about how the Civil War was the vengeance of God on a generation of Southern boys who preferred shooting and hunting to going to school. The producers had also been put off by Jimmy Carter himself who had thought the program was to be about me when the subject was about kin and all of us. I had of course sent him a telegram after his disastrous intervention with helicopters in Iran during the hostage crisis, reminding him that honor required his resignation for having disgraced the country. Had he perhaps taken my censure amiss?
Finally, he and I do share a most distinguished ancestor, John Kay of Bury (1733–1764). According to the Dictionary of National Biography, “Kay’s improvements in machinery for weaving continue in use to the present day” (the Flying Shuttle). He was the founder of the first great improvements in the manufacture of cloth by which employment is now given to hundreds of thousands of people while in 1760 his son Robert invented the shuttle drop box. I fear that neither Jimmy nor I have ever lived up to our brilliant heritage.
FORTY-FIVE
As I now pack up the books and pictures that Howard and I acquired at La Rondinaia since we moved in thirty-three years ago I keep thinking of my one conversation with John Steinbeck at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan. We were both talking about houses and the urge to put down roots “for good.” I’d just got Edgewater on the Hudson. I could not imagine wanting to live anyplace else. Yes, summers were too hot and winters too cold but it was a perfect house in so many ways. I suspect that it really was what I’d always wanted and that is why I still dream that I have somehow got it back and am moving back in again and, of course, Howard is still alive. Steinbeck was of the same mind. He said, “How many times I’ve settled somewhere for good and never wanted to leave until the inevitable day comes when I move on and the place is emptying out and we are suddenly all gone and living in a new place.” As I write this, I am getting ready to move on and a third of my life is being packed up and I am again transient—neither here nor there. These rehearsals for death take more and more out of one until at the end there is, I suspect, nothing at all left except Howard’s old dressing gown hanging on the back of his bathroom door, a refuge for moths, which Rita maintains are fireflies on the ground that I could not know the difference.
Here I am packing up some pictures and 8,000 books, the end of an era for me on the Amalfi coast, ready to face the future in the Hollywood Hills with a new knee made of titanium.
FORTY-SIX
A television crew has come and gone. There is to be a program on Italo Calvino, the first in Italy. So we go into the salone and eerily the camera is set up on the exact spot where he and his wife, Chichita, sat at dinner on the day that I was made an honorary citizen of Ravello. There had been music in the piazza. From Rome had come the Calvinos, Luigi Barzini, the critic Alberto Arbasino. Speeches were made. Barzini nicely compared me to Marion Crawford, an American novelist who had lived up the coast at Sorrento and whose house by the sea had been envied by Henry James who did not in the least envy Crawford’s worldly novels. A year or so later I was to preside over the transformation of the Crawford villa into a museum by zealous admirers from the University of Naples. Each Italian village seems to have a tutelary foreign writer in place. Capri is celebrated for Norman Douglas whose family, though from Scotland, had lived in the mountains above Feldkirch while he himself was associated with the Amalfi coast or Siren Land as he called it and, finally, Capri. I had a number of occasions to meet the old man who was supported by an admirer, Kenneth Macpherson; then one day they were all gone. Graham Greene lived at Annacapri on the top of the hill. Occasionally he would ring me and I’d ask him to stay in Ravello on his way to his Capri house but he would always become oddly coy: “You see I am traveling with an old friend to whom I am not married and there are those who object to this sort of irregular relationship.” I told him that I was not an objector but we never saw him in Ravello nor he us on Capri. But he and I saw a great deal of each other in Moscow when Gorbachev held an antinuclear meeting in the Kremlin for well-wishers of his glasnost and perestroika. Graham spoke for culture, a perfect fifteen-minute speech without a note. When, admiringly, I remarked on this to Norman Mailer, he said, “Every Englishman can talk for fifteen minutes on any subject without a note.” It was on this trip that Greene got to see the spy Philby again and came to the conclusion that not only was Gorbachev going to rid us of the cold war but that only the KGB, from which he came, was sufficiently educated and competent to govern the post-Soviet nation. All in all, Graham proved a fairly competent prophet. In those days he lived in the south of France where he was quietly feuding with an old friend of mine, Anthony Burgess, who had made the mistake of describing Graham’s conversation while drinking. Graham had many tall tales to tell but he disliked seeing them later in print. I defended Anthony, warily. Graham was suddenly accusing: “But you like to go on television and I don’t.” I said I liked to talk publicly about politics, and street corners were no longer desirable venues. “Burgess,” he said, “is on television all the time in France.” “What,” I asked, “does he talk about?” Graham scowled and whispered, “His books.” I agreed that this was insufferable. “I never do television,” said Graham, “and, as you see, if I can help it, I never let them photograph me.” Since our arrival at the Kremlin Graham had been constantly televised and photographed which I reminded him of. “Ah,” he said cryptically, “this is the east and those things don’t matter here.” Whether or not they did, he was hugely popular with the east Europeans at the conference where he was a Burgess-like presence. He was particularly exciting on the subject of Castro with whom he had fought side by side in Oriente Province during the revolution. I could not tell if he was making it up as he went along or whether or not he was actually callin
g upon memory. His eyes were curiously glazed, like mica.
FORTY-SEVEN
Opposite my desk as I write, two pieces of parchment testify that I am an honorary citizen of Ravello as well as of Los Angeles, and my favorite award: a hammered silver plaque from the cities of Magna Graecia for Creation and my contribution to the classical world. I think the award was presented in Crotone where Pythagoras died. Certainly his cult still haunts the coast which I shall soon be leaving for a more satisfactory world. Yet again.
As I look about my study I see a row of books bound in dark blue leather. Something annoys me. I open Montaigne’s essays in the Screech translation. The source of annoyance is there. But where? Why? The book falls open, automatically, at his essay on Lying which I often reread when faced with the excess of lies in our public life.