Gore Vidal Read online

  But a sense of doom accompanied him. In Jackson he practiced being almost blind, holding a hand over his right eye, getting around as best he could with only his diminished left. When he visited the Institute for the Blind, he told a boy there that he did not know how long it would be before he himself would be a resident. He had a nightmare: “I dreamed I was blind and in the rotunda—the second story—where the capital met and … some of the boys had kinder hung me over that place for fun.” Two days later he was demonstrating, for the children of the state senator at whose home he boarded, a crossbow that he had bought as a present to send home to his brother. It was a fragile contraption, dependent on worn rubber bands. When the children asked him to shoot it, he said he “did not want to as it was not shooting well. They insisted. I had it standing there on the floor. I dropped the arrow down the barrel…. I glanced down into the barrel to see if it was right, and while I was looking at it, it went off. It shot me in the right eye, blinding me on the instant.” His father took him to New Orleans for medical treatment. Whatever sight he had in his left eye and the flickers of sight briefly restored in his right “gradually faded out.”

  Despite his blindness, his determination to become educated and a leader never weakened. In fact, blindness now became a force of concentration, almost itself a special power. Blindness was awful but also eerie and awesome, connecting him with Tiresias, Samson, and Milton. It was also a darkness against which his accomplishments would only shine the brighter, an unavoidable identification that would make him distinctive. He still hoped to rise to high political office. As a page in the state senate he had refused to sign a petition circulated by the other pages to have their one-dollar-a-day salary supplemented by a twenty-five-dollar bonus each session. He then wrote a bill, increasing salaries from one to two dollars a day. Introduced by a friendly senator, it passed. Back in Walthall, he attended school, with the help of relatives and friends who read to him. The school year was short, the facilities rudimentary. But he soon developed a prodigious memory. He also developed a soft spot for pets—a heifer and a pony, then chickens and roosters—which led to a lifelong slightly guilty passion for cockfighting. At sixteen he had his “first love affair” with a girl with whom he exchanged Valentine’s Day cards every year of his life. For him blindness was not a disability. He would allow no one to make excuses for him. In high school, he helped organize a debating club, soon converted into a moot United States Senate, in which he was the leading speaker. It was exercise. It was sport. It was training for the real thing. When in 1887 a teacher from Kentucky organized the Walthall Normal College, “Guv” began his most intensive three years of formal schooling. Attending political meetings with his father, his uncles, his friends, he learned about politics in the passionate crucible of family, county, state. When he found a copy of the Congressional Record, he memorized the name of every United States senator. From then on, the thing he wanted most was to be one.

  At his graduation from Walthall Normal School in June 1890, he gave such a highly regarded commencement speech on race relations that numbers of people suggested he be sent as a delegate to the state constitutional convention in Jackson. Since he was too young to qualify, the voters instead chose his uncle. Tom Gore became, for the summer months, an assistant to his sister, teaching at Embry, within sight of the house in which he had been born. That October he spent six weeks at the Institute for the Blind in Jackson, learning how to be as self-sufficient as possible, mastering the New York point-reading system for the blind. One of the very few books available contained the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He spent “a good many evenings reading that volume. I learned the Declaration of Independence by heart.” In Jackson he haunted the convention debates. He soon taught in another town at a time of such pervasive statewide poverty that rural schools generally had one two-month session a year or, at most, two. His meager salary was paid in warrants. A fiery populist orator, he was now a leader of the opposition in Webster County. At a large meeting in July 1891 he was nominated for the state legislature. But the new state constitution had added an age qualification. Since he would not be twenty-one until early December, he had to withdraw. In September he sold at discount the warrants he had received for teaching (his sister contributed hers) and left Mississippi for Lebanon, Tennessee, not far from Nashville, to attend Cumberland University Law School. Since there were no law books available for the blind, his roommate read everything aloud to him. When Guv’s money ran out, his father sold a small tract of land to keep him there. In 1892 he returned to Walthall as a law-school graduate. He had twenty-five cents in his pocket. He still hoped to have the brilliant future in Mississippi that people predicted for him. The state convention of the People’s Party made him a presidential elector. He campaigned widely for the ticket. Reading law throughout the year, he helped to try, successfully, two prominent criminal cases. But realistic opportunities for elective office in Mississippi seemed few and far between; the Democratic Party was still formidably entrenched, and many people above him on the slippery pole. The next year, twenty-three-year-old Tom Gore began to cast his ambitions westward.

  One night that autumn his uncle, John Ellis, stayed with the Thomas Madison family. By chance he had with him a copy of a Texas newspaper in which Guv found the name and address of the secretary of the State Executive Committee of the Texas People’s Party. He wrote immediately, asking what might be a good place in Texas for a young lawyer to settle. The answer, with two names to contact, came back: Corsicana, in Navarro County. The name struck a responsive chord. The previous Christmas a friend who had spent a year in Texas had been reading to him from a book that listed names of Texas counties and towns. Corsicana had stuck in his memory. Accepting an invitation from a populist leader to address the Navarro County convention, he left for Texas in May 1894 with a few dollars for expenses and barely enough for a return ticket. At the convention in Waco he spoke dramatically for William Jennings Bryan: suddenly Tom Gore was in demand as an orator throughout Texas. He spoke and debated until late October, then returned to Mississippi. In Navarro County, the populists won; they did not in Webster. Accompanied by his brother Dixie, Tom returned to Texas at the beginning of the new year. Helped by the Texas-Mississippi network, Dixie became deputy to the Navarro County district clerk. Guv, though, decided to give Mississippi one last chance. Populist sentiment was at its height. It was now or never. Returning to Walthall, he ran for the state legislature in the election of 1895. The Democrats, administering the death blow, accused Gore and the other populists of being “nigger lovers.” Campaigning brilliantly, he still almost won. When the final count was in, he had lost by thirty-two votes. On the last day of the year he left for Texas again. He vowed never to return “until and unless” he had been elected to the United States Senate.

  On the train chugging westward he read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. The Declaration of Independence, On Liberty, and the Lone Star State seemed the right fit. Texas politics and opportunities glittered in the near distance. Perhaps there would not be as many people above him on the greasy pole as in Mississippi. First, though, he had to make a living. At the end of 1896, he and Dixie opened a law office; they soon had many cases but few fees. The nationwide depression of 1893 still pinched the pocketbooks of millions of people. Also, compared to oratory and politics, the law was dull, and he soon felt depressed. With his romantic dreams of high office on indefinite hold, he began to repeat to himself Cardinal Wolsey’s lament, “Farewell, a long farewell to all my greatness.” Handsome, smart, and articulate, he was intriguingly attractive and attracted to women. In 1895 a blind girl in Corsicana accused him of having made her pregnant. Gore tried to get her to abort with medicines. They finally succeeded with a blunt instrument. For whatever his reasons, he would not marry her. Perhaps the thought of a blind man being married to a blind woman seemed devastating to the aspiring politician. Apparently hopeful that a jury would not convict a blind man for seduction and abortion
, he defied her threat to take him to court. At the last minute he begged her not to testify against him. It would ruin his life. Perhaps he promised compensation. When she relented, the case was dismissed. As part of the arrangement, his parents, who had followed their sons to Texas, took the girl in for a short while. In August 1896 he turned down an invitation to give a series of speeches in the main town, Palestine, in nearby Anderson County, because it conflicted with a speaking engagement elsewhere, but his brother Dixie forgot to send the telegram of regret. On his way to the station he received a second telegram, reminding him of the invitation, and he wired to Anderson County that he would come for a week. In Palestine, driven past the large ranch of John Thomas Kay, a white-bearded fifty-four-year-old East Texas pioneer, he asked his host to describe Mr. Kay and his daughter, and a few days later, at a county picnic, he met the dark-haired, dark-eyed, trimly petite, engagingly lovely Nina Belle Kay. “I fell in love with her the moment we met and made up my mind that day to marry her one day if I could.” A serious circumstance conspired against the marriage: Nina’s family did not want her to marry a blind man.

  Probably of Scots origin, the Kay family had come to Texas from Anderson County, South Carolina. Born about 1842, the seventh child of James Warren Kay and his second wife, John Thomas Kay had fought at Bull Run. He had survived a long war. Like many, he eventually preferred the hard but independent life of a Texas pioneer to poverty at home. About 1875, after selling his interest in his family land to one of his brothers for fifty dollars, John, with wife (in late 1868 he had married Marcella McLaughlin, a beautiful Mississipian of Creole origin), three children, and livestock, traveled by covered wagon to Palo Pinto County in North-Central Texas. The fifty dollars was all the money he had in the world. Along the route the grass was lush, water and firewood plentiful. But West Texas was harsh. The first winter they burrowed into a sod dugout and cooked on buffalo chips. More at home in farming than grazing country, they soon resettled in East Texas, near Palestine, in Anderson County, which had been named after Kay’s home county in South Carolina. The land was rich, the hills rolling and wooded. In 1877, while still in Palo Pinto, Marcella gave birth to twin daughters, one of whom died. The surviving twin was Nina Belle Kay. When she met Thomas Pryor Gore in the summer of 1896, Nina Belle was the attractive daughter of a now moderately prosperous East Texas farmer. Her mother had died the previous year. Her father and four brothers “told her that if you marry that blind boy you’re going to end up on a street corner with a tin cup. Just begging. She went ahead and did it anyway,” her grandson later commented, “and never regretted it.” They married on December 27, 1900. Her family’s opposition was overcome only at the death of Nina Belle’s father in the summer of 1899.

  Between 1896 and the beginning of the new century T. P. Gore worked hard at law and politics. At first things looked promising. While Dixie minded the office, Tom worked the political hustings. The brilliant blind orator was much in demand. But, as in Mississippi, the leaders of the Democratic Party did not favor divisive populists undermining them from the left. When, in 1898, he ran for the House of Representatives as the Populist Party candidate, he lost decisively. Texas soon began to seem another dead end, as did his allegiance to the Populist Party. Early in the new century he shed both. With his bride, he decided on a new start, this time not to the west but a short distance to the north. Oklahoma was still a territory, actually two, one of them reserved for Indians, including those who had been driven from the Mississippi lands on which the Gores had settled. Politics and opportunity were more fluid there. Land could be staked. Everyone knew that the territories would eventually become a state. State political offices as well as land would be up for grabs. There would not be as greasy a pole to climb. With his bride beside him, Gore moved to the Oklahoma Territory. After settling in the new town of Lawton, about a hundred miles south of Oklahoma City, where he staked land and opened a law office with Dixie, he immersed himself in territorial politics and soon mastered its complications. Within a few years he became the best-known political orator in the area and a popular guest speaker in nearby states. The decision to shed his Populist Party affiliation came at the cost of his father’s bitter criticism: when T.P. joined the Democratic Party, an angry Thomas Madison Gore denounced him at a public political meeting. “Guv” was still, though, against and for all the same things he had always been. But now he had a chance for political office, for the beginning of a real public career. Soon he was one of the most powerful political leaders in the territories, instrumental in the flourishing drive for statehood. In 1905 Thomas Madison died. In November 1907 the legislature of the newly created state of Oklahoma chose thirty-seven-year-old Thomas Pryor Gore as one of its two United States senators.

  The Vidal family saga is quintessentially European. The name itself began to appear widely in Spain, France, and Italy about the twelfth century, either a corruption of the Latin vitalis or a translation of the Hebrew word for life. By the late Middle Ages some of the many Vidal families throughout the Mediterranean world were Catholic in origin, others Hebrew. Originally the latter may have been Jews living in the Roman Empire or Jews who had journeyed to and then stayed in the empire after its fall. Some Jewish Vidals became converts to Catholicism, often for convenience or safety. Many settled in France as well as Italy. After the expulsion from Spain in 1492, large numbers of Spanish Jews also settled in France, Italy, and Greece. Like the Jews who already resided in the Roman world, some retained their Hebraic identity, others converted to Catholicism. After a time both the original and the new conversos often lost awareness of their family’s origins. They usually became merchants, tradesmen, and manufacturers. Some became priests. There was no better place to hide their origins than in the Church itself.

  Eugen Felix Vidal, Gore Vidal’s great-grandfather, who in 1849 emigrated from Feldkirch in German-speaking Austria to the American Midwest, was a Catholic whose ancestors for five hundred years were apothecaries and merchants. Some had married women whose names suggest they were from once Jewish families. Not unexpectedly, converso families often intermarried, and the pattern continued long after Hebraic origins had become only a rumor or been forgotten. Local oral memory kept alive the rumor that Eugen Felix Vidal’s Catholic family was of Jewish origin. That the Vidals who emerged in the late eighteenth century in Feldkirch were apothecaries and merchants makes it likely that they descended from the Renaissance Vidals who were apothecaries, a profession that had orginally been largely in the hands of Jews. Eugen Felix Vidal’s family in America inherited a sixteenth-century stained-glass medallion, about six inches in diameter, that shows a bearded man, wearing a hat, standing behind a counter, surrounded by jars, drugs, and other apothecary paraphernalia. His name is boldly printed: Casper Vidall. The date is 1589. This Casper Vidall had prospered as a pharmacist in Feldkirch in the late sixteenth century, the scion of a line of drug-manufacturing and -dispensing Vidals. The name then disappears from Feldkirch records, to reappear at the beginning of the nineteenth century when Johann Vidal, from nearby Forni Avoltri, reestablished the family name in Feldkirch. At first he was a successful grocer; then he bought the local pharmacy, first working with a partner who was an apothecary, then by himself. Most likely he hoped that one of his sons would become a doctor or a pharmacist and eventually run the business. After marrying a daughter of the former mayor, he bought a large, centrally located building, soon renamed Vidalhaus, for home and business. When his first wife died, he married Elizabeth Herzog, a German-speaking Catholic from the Tyrol. Their first child was born almost exactly nine months later, in October 1821. Twelve years later Johann Vidal died, leaving a widow who struggled to keep the business going and to support eight children. Around 1848 Elizabeth declared the pharmacy bankrupt and sold Vidalhaus.

  In August 1849, a year of political turmoil in Europe, Johann Vidal’s oldest son, twenty-eight-year-old Eugen Felix Vidal, a student at the University of Lausanne on Lake Geneva, married the Swiss-born Em
ma Traxler von Hartman and began to look westward for better opportunities. What Eugen was studying at the university is not clear, though perhaps it was medicine, a speculation that surfaced years later among the American Vidals. That would have been especially plausible for the son of a pharmacist. Emma came from a Swiss family of some interest. Her grandfather, Josef Traxler, was a member of Louis XVI’s Swiss guard at Versailles, who escaped the democratic slaughter and fled to Madrid, where he served Charles IV, the Spanish king. When Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, Josef Traxler raised a regiment at his own expense to fight for King Charles and was killed in battle, leaving behind a widow, Isabel, and daughter, Caroline. Either before or after his death, the Traxlers claimed reimbursement from the Spanish crown for the cost of the regiment the lieutenant colonel had raised. Payment was not forthcoming, the Spanish treasury empty. Isabel returned to Lucerne, where she struggled with heavy debt and little income. In Switzerland, the young Caroline also became an Army bride. Eventually, she suffered the same misfortune as her mother. Having married one of her father’s Swiss Army comrades, Colonel Ludwig von Hartman, she found herself, after some years, the Widow Hartman. She had three daughters to raise. If Spain, though, would repay Josef Traxler’s heirs, all would be well. The Traxlers and their descendents never stopped hoping. In the meantime, Caroline Traxler Hartman’s daughter Emma, born in Switzerland in 1828, met Eugen Felix Vidal. When, in 1849, they married in Feldkirch, the only money they had was the elusive Spanish repayment. They soon decided that America was a better bet. Having determined that the prospect of opening a cheese factory in Wisconsin appealed to him more than remaining in the land of his ancestors, he and his bride and his mother-in-law, with a subsidy from the city of Feldkirch, emigrated to the American Midwest.