Gore Vidal Read online

  John Lehmann came from London to Paris, among other reasons to discuss with his newest American acquisition his hope that he would revise the ending of The City and the Pillar for the British edition. Like Isherwood, he thought the violent ending both off-putting and bad publicity for homosexuals. Early in the year Lehmann had received happily the news “that you and Tennessee are moving in our direction across the globe.” Vidal, though he resented Lehmann’s pressure on him to alter the ending, was pliable or ambivalent enough so that from early on he committed himself to make changes. “I don’t think I need tell you that your book will be a bit of a problem child in London,” Lehmann told him at the beginning of May, “and there are one or two points I am anxious to take up with you in connection with this.” When Gore seemed almost to volunteer changes, Lehmann was pleased. “I’m very much interested to hear that you are thinking of revising the end of The City and the Pillar. I would welcome this, and feel sure that we could easily come to an agreement about when the next text should be ready.” In London, Gore was a subject of friendly gossip. “Christopher came to stay here,” Lehmann wrote to him, and “we talked a lot about you.” From the first, though, Vidal did not trust John Lehmann. “After Isherwood went to America [in 1941],” Lehmann “regularly said that Isherwood had never written anything good since,” Vidal recalled. “Lehmann was a great gossip, and he had implacable malice. He just wasn’t likable. He had some charm and some wit. He was a very handsome man. Extremely…. But there was something off-putting about him. I didn’t like him dictating to me what to do with my book,” though by mid-May Vidal had explicitly expressed himself as “not very happy with [City] as it stands” and preparing “to rewrite [its] ending.” To some extent his accommodation was strategic and deferential. “Would it be possible, if the City is a success, to bring out the first two books? I know nothing of English publishing conditions: perhaps this would not be practical.” Having had Dutton send Lehmann galleys of The Season of Comfort, Gore was eager to have Lehmann commit himself to publish all his novels in England. Lehmann was clear in his own mind that he would make a commitment only to City.

  A tall, handsome, pale-complexioned, peremptory man with receding blond hair and icy blue eyes, the forty-one-year-old Lehmann came from two Victorian publishing and literary families, one of Scottish, the other of German-Jewish origin. His grandparents had been intimates of Dickens, Browning, and Wilkie Collins, among other great figures of nineteenth-century British literary culture. His sisters were the actress Beatrix Lehmann and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. At Eton and Cambridge, Lehmann had expanded his inheritance into more current circles, including Bloomsbury. He had begun working in 1931 for Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which published his poetry, and become a partner in 1938. His greatest success came as editor of the groundbreaking semiannual journal New Writing and Penguin New Writing, and, later, of London Magazine. Well known in the tight-knit British literary world for his interest in homosexual books, he ran his small publishing house from a vantage point of great prestige but from a weak financial-business position. With the end of the war he had begun to give great emphasis to taking on up-and-coming American authors, including Vidal. He had already made up his mind “to capture as many of the new postwar generation of American writers as possible.” Having just returned from a successful book-buying trip to New York, he happily embraced Isherwood, who had been staying at Lehmann’s house at Egerton Crescent in Kensington, and was reunited with his companion Alex Racine, a distinguished Polish-born ballet dancer. Late in May he took the boat-train to Paris, where among other things he signed Tennessee Williams to a publication contract and took Vidal to meet André Gide, who just the year before had won the Nobel Prize. Disappointed that Gide had not read The City and the Pillar, a copy of which he had received from a friend, Gore took pleasure in meeting the acerbic writer. At seventy-nine, Gide was still alert enough to express his formidable personality and mind in the cleverness of his language and the keenness of his satiric eye. Gide’s defense of Communism and his championing of homosexuality had made him controversial, a writer who was both widely hated and deeply admired. He was cher maître to those who admired his courage, a Bolshevik fag to those who detested his politics. To the young American, Gide had fought and had suffered from the French version of the same enemies who so viciously attacked City. As they rang the doorbell in the rue Vaneau, Lehmann noticed Vidal’s excitement. Gide was the first prominent writer he was to meet who combined a literary career and an intense interest in politics and the first who dared, defying convention, publicly to defend same-sex relationships as natural.

  In the sunny apartment, in his book-lined two-level library, Gide, “short-legged, deep-chested, with a large egglike bald head on which was perched a vie de bohème velvet beret,” wearing “a dark green velvet jacket” and large eyeglasses, greeted them. He appeared to have big peasant hands. When Vidal congratulated him on the Nobel Prize, Gide, beaming, responded, “‘Premier le Kinsey Report, après ça le Prix Nobel.’” The open championing of homosexuality was no longer summarily disqualifying, a message Gore was happy to hear. Though limited by his Exeter schoolboy French and Gide’s preference not to speak English (apparently Lehmann did not attempt to act as intermediary), they talked briefly about Oscar Wilde and Henry James, whose popularity among Anglo-Saxons puzzled Gide. He had met the other cher maître at a dinner on New Year’s Eve 1912. Gide, an admirer of Conrad, wrote English well enough for him to have translated Conrad into French. Suddenly the telephone rang. Rather slyly, Gide held the phone so that his visitors could hear the voice, whispering “Henri de Montherlant,” a writer Vidal especially admired. Open on Gide’s desk was a “pornographic novel by an Anglican priest recently retired to the English countryside. The pages were beautifully hand-printed, and there were a number of drawings of boys being debauched. With a grin Gide said he had received the manuscript sometime ago but had not yet decided how to answer its priestly author.” When Vidal asked him, “How did you find Truman Capote?” Gide responded, “Who?” Finally he understood whom Gore was asking about. “‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t met him, but several people have sent me this.’ From his desk he held up the photograph of Truman from Life. He grinned. ‘Is he in Paris?’” Before Gore left, Gide asked if he would like a book as a gift. Corydon, Gore replied, Gide’s best-known explicit defense of homosexuality. Surprised at the request, “I never give that book,” he said, perhaps meaning it was never asked for. He inscribed a copy “avec sympathie.” As they walked down, he said, in English, “Mind the step!”

  American accents dominated the linguistic cacophony of Paris. A half century earlier Henry James had called it “the bark of Chicago in the streets of Venice.” Everywhere Americans heard American voices, especially in restaurants, bars, museums. Sometimes one ran into overly familiar voices, unhappily. A red-faced, drunken American, who had had enough, shouted out in a restaurant as Capote was telling stories at a table in the back, “For Christ’s sake! Wherever I go I hear that American faggoty pansy voice! Can’t I ever get away from you guys?” On his way to New York from Morocco, the composer and writer Paul Bowles, fifteen years older than Gore, came by to see Tennessee. Bowles, who had just finished his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, had agreed to write incidental music for Summer and Smoke, scheduled to premiere in New York in the fall. Vidal and Bowles had met in passing in New York the previous year. Elegantly dressed as always, the thin, blond, rather delicate Bowles and his new friend took a walk “down an empty street off Saint-Germain. Suddenly, a radio is turned on behind a shuttered window and the street is filled with the music of Bizet. Paul complains that composers now think of him as a writer and writers as a composer and that, as a result, he is nowhere.” Bowles had just met Saul Bellow, whose Dangling Man Gore admired. James Baldwin was soon to be in Paris, as was Norman Mailer, whose recently published The Naked and the Dead Vidal thought “a clever, talented, admirably executed fake,” part jealousy, part
accurate analysis. Soon Irwin Shaw was to produce “another one of those monsters called ‘great war novels.’ They’re all so phony, so dull that I wonder that anyone takes them seriously; I suppose,” Gore wrote to Lehmann, “it’s all a part of our manifest destiny, artificial plumes on the eagle’s wings.” The newly arrived Judy Jones ran into her New York friend on a Paris street. “He had a very young man with him,” whom he said he had picked up the night before, “a little disreputable-looking. He could have been a sailor. Gore came and sat with us in the cafe and kept him sort of at another table. I remember his making the kinds of remarks he makes today about young men being just for sex and there’s no love involved. Here was sort of this scruffy-looking character at the next table.”

  At a large, shabby, heavily curtained apartment in the rue du Bac, Vidal was introduced by John Lehmann to Denham Fouts, a semilegendary, cadaverous opium addict from Jacksonville, Florida, who had spent much of his life as the consort of numbers of wealthy older men. His own preference was for young boys. From his glory days with British lords and King Paul of Greece, he had fallen on hard times. During much of the war he had lived with Isherwood in Los Angeles, the basis for the character Paul in Down There on a Visit. Irregularly supported by his longtime friend and companion, Peter Watson, the wealthy backer of Horizon who had recently set him up in his Paris apartment with an impressive Tchelitchew painting hanging over his bed and a large fluffy white dog, Fouts stayed in bed during the day, took brief walks at night, his “nocturnal Proustian life,” as Isherwood called it, and smoked as much opium as he could afford. On his table was the Life magazine photograph of the ubiquitous Capote. Bright light hurt his eyes; he blinked a great deal. Solemnly he passed the pipe around to Gore, who with Lehmann sat on the edge of the bed. “It made me deathly ill, and I never tried it again,” Vidal recalled. Fouts was to appear as the central character in his short story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal.” Later that year he died in Rome.

  There were, for Vidal and other American writers, French voices, but they were often voices with a purpose, particularly because American money and American art were a formidable presence in war-impoverished France. When the flamboyant surrealist novelist, moviemaker, and dramatist Jean Cocteau wanted to obtain the French rights for A Streetcar Named Desire for Jean Marais, he invited Tennessee Williams to a splendid lunch. Tennessee, who brought Gore along to translate, was so ignorant of French that he could not tell how limited Gore’s was. “Marais looked beautiful but sleepy. Cocteau was characteristically brilliant. He spoke no English but since he could manage an occasional ‘the’ sound as well as the final ‘g,’ he often gave the impression that he was speaking English. Tennessee had no clear idea who Cocteau was, while Cocteau knew nothing about Tennessee except that he had written a popular American play with a splendid part in it for his lover…. No one made any sense at all except Marais who broke his long silence to ask, apropos the character Stanley Kowalski, ‘Will I have to use a Polish accent?’” However, if there were no practical incentives, the French, especially the literary establishment, preferred to keep their distance. American voices were barely tolerable. When Tennessee threw a large party at the Hôtel de l’Université, hordes of French actors came, hoping to get a part in Cocteau’s version of Streetcar. Through a French intermediary or, so he claimed, by telegram, Williams had invited the one person he most wanted to meet, the novelist and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who with his companion Simone de Beauvoir and his rival Albert Camus dominated early post–World War II French culture. When Sartre did not appear at Williams’s party, “one of the guests went to fetch him.” He “refused to come. Very French. Williams was highly pissed off.” He surmised, probably correctly, that Sartre “regarded me as too bourgeois or American or God knows what.” In general, Vidal later commented, “the French gods kept their distance from all of us.”

  With hot weather in Paris, sharing colds and stomach problems with everyone he knew, Gore was relieved to visit London in mid-June. For the time being he was not writing anyway. Nina, traveling with friends, had shown up in Paris for a couple of days. In London he stayed with Racine (“a very ladylike man and a marvelous Blue Beard and a much admired dancer”) and the less likable Lehmann at 31 Egerton Crescent, near Harrods. Low on cash, he was happy to save. What he had in the bank in New York was not readily available, and he preferred to live off new income, if possible. Nothing more was forthcoming in royalties from Dutton until October. Lehmann, though, had a small amount of sterling for him, part of his advance for the British edition of City, handled through his recently obtained British agent, Curtis Brown, which acted as Dutton’s representative in England. With prices low, a little sterling went a long way. The young man the agency assigned to handle his account, Graham Watson, twelve years older than Gore, found him a challenge and a pleasure to work with, though there was little work at the moment. He also thought him “enormously handsome.” Lehmann’s office, “a small operation” at 8 Henrietta Street, was on the ground floor of the Curtis Brown building. To Watson, “Lehmann was a charmer. I liked him very much. He had very sort of blue eyes, very, very blue eyes. Somehow one felt, ‘Watch it!’ He was Okay. Very much, of course, in literary London at the time.” As soon as Gore arrived, Lehmann was quick to take possession of the ration book he had been given at the border. Food was scarce. “To an American eye, English life was of a terrible rationed drabness.” In exchange he got “a mess of fish with one egg clotted over it at breakfast. I ate the rationed egg and left the fish.” Watson first met Gore at the Hyde Park Corner apartment of the aristocratic Edward Montague, who had gone to prison for eighteen months for an affair with a young boy, which became a “notorious court case…. I think it was Montague who asked me to meet Gore, and there was this bit of rough trade there…. I don’t know whether it was Gore’s rough trade or Montague’s rough trade.” It was part of normal activity for both of them. About those who had homosexual affairs or romances, the same ongoing curiosity and gossip occurred as about heterosexual relationships. And Gore, who sometimes could gossip as avidly as Lehmann, immediately found himself the youthful student in a long-established, stratified, but unified London literary society. Enmities were long-standing. Friendships durable. School ties binding. Privileged families and aristocratic names had special social prerogatives. The ruling powers exacted their tributes. A quick learner, Gore was soon getting the hang of it.

  Literary London assembled at Egerton Crescent, partly to meet Vidal and Williams, mostly to see one another. Williams, in London to attend The Glass Menagerie rehearsals, was co-guest of honor at a party Lehmann threw for his two American authors. Isherwood, who had come down from his family home in Cheshire, greeted Gore affectionately. They had exchanged a number of letters since Isherwood had left Paris, particularly about Gore’s play. “Why not come over,” Isherwood had urged. “London is well worth seeing, if Truman and Caskey haven’t wrecked it by then!” Isherwood himself had not seen London since his departure with Auden for America in 1939, an expatriation that had seemed wartime desertion to some of his countrymen. Graham Greene, V. S. Pritchett, and William Plomer came to Lehmann’s party. “V. S. Pritchett was amiable,” Gore recalled. “The novel. Yes. Yes! The novel. ‘Ought to have a lot of sex in it,’ I proclaimed. ‘Oh, quite. Yes, yes a lot,’” Pritchett responded. The author of Brighton Rock seemed as “gray-green as his name.” E. M. Forster’s arrival caused a stir. He was less than warm to Isherwood, who had recently sent Forster at his King’s College, Cambridge, residence a copy of his latest novel. From across the room “Christopher asked, ‘Morgan, did you get the copy of Prater Violet I sent you?’ … Forster went on chatting to William Plomer and seemed not to have heard. Christopher swallowed more gin. ‘Morgan!’ … ‘Yes, Christopher.’ Morgan’s twinkle never ceased. ‘I got it.’ Then he turned back and continued his conversation with Plomer, leaving Christopher garroted in plain view.” It was an explicit lesson in literature as blood sport. “Forster had d
eveloped … an unremitting censoriousness. He was always in court, seated on the high bench, passing judgments, a black cloth on his head. Christopher was hanged not so much for Prater Violet but for having left England before the war.” Later that night Isherwood, drunk, beat up Caskey. The next morning he told Caskey that Gore had done it.

  Forster, who had read Streetcar, was “very excited at meeting Tennessee,” Gore later wrote in his memoir, “which I considered unfair since I had read and admired all his books while Tennessee, I fear, thought he was in the presence of the [creator] of Captain Horatio Hornblower…. Forster, looking like an old river rat, zeroed in on Tennessee and said how much he admired. Streetcar. Tennessee gave him a beady look. Forster invited us to King’s for lunch. Tennessee rolled his eyes and looked at me. ‘Yes, I said quickly.’” It turned out a sour disappointment. Gore, who admired Forster’s novels, already disliked Forster. His malicious humiliation of Isherwood the night before had been off-putting. Still, eager to know a writer he admired, to have a sense of personal relationship that suited his own hope for achievement and importance, he accepted the invitation for a reluctant Williams and for himself, aware that Forster’s interest was in Williams. The next morning he dragged the always-late Tennessee to the railroad station. They had missed the first train. Relieved, Williams refused to wait. “‘But we have to go,’ I said…. ‘Your fan is a very old man, sitting on a stone lion and waiting for you, not me, to come to lunch.’ … Tennessee was not moved by the poignant tableau. ‘I can’t,’ he said, gulping and clutching his heart…. ‘Besides,’ said Tennessee primly, wandering off in the wrong direction for the exit, ‘I cannot abide old men with urine stains on the trousers.’” Faced with unattractive alternatives, Vidal went by himself. “Forster’s look of disappointment was disheartening.” After a bad boiled lunch they went to Forster’s rooms, where he showed the young novelist a copy of the manuscript of his unpublished homoerotic novel, Maurice, which, he said, he had declined to publish while his mother was alive. When, as Forster took him dutifully around Cambridge, Gore used the Americanism “pretty” in a positive sense, he had the distinct impression that to the censorious Forster he had doomed himself forever to nonexistence.