Gore Vidal Read online

  Literary royalty and glamour, however, did half bow, mostly silently, in Gore’s direction: remnants of the Bloomsbury world such as Harold Nicholson, whom he ran into numbers of times, and Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, with whom he later became friendly, the ghosts of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Lehmann had known them all. A member of the Auden generation, he introduced Gore to Stephen Spender, whose friend, the poet C. Day-Lewis, was the object of Rosamond Lehmann’s passion. The new monarchs of British literary society, the exotic Sitwells, were constantly evoked in party conversations, their angular aristocratic presences notable even though Gore did not meet them until later in the year. Such were their powers, particularly Edith’s, that they could make strong literary men quake.

  At another London party he was invited by the wealthy Sir Henry Channon, enthusiastic about the author of The City and the Pillar, to a country weekend late in June at Kelveden, near Plymouth. An American by birth, “Chips” Channon, who had married an heir to the Guinness fortune, had written a successful book on Ludwig of Bavaria and kept an elaborate diary he hoped would one day make him the Saint-Simon of modern Britain. He found Gore’s Nordic-looking crew cut and blond good looks a turn-on. A member of the prewar Cliveden set, Channon had been pro-German. It apparently was not held against him now. Charming, immensely sociable, he gave entertaining, well-attended parties and moved in the highest social circles. “Everyone mocked Chips, but he more than sang for his supper; in fact, he himself provided the supper in his great silver and crystal dining room copied from one of Ludwig’s castles.” Somewhat self-defensively, Gore managed to have Tennessee invited, both of them driven down in the car Channon sent for them. At Kelveden, Gore’s first experience of a British country weekend, they were introduced to Channon’s companion, Peter Coates, though Channon spent much of the time talking about his passion for the playwright Terence Rattigan. “Sexually, he [Channon] preferred men to women and royalty to either,” Vidal later observed. At lunch the talk was of royalty and writers. When Tennessee wanted to know what the royals talked about, their host responded, “Each other.” Channon said that he had gotten many long letters from Proust, none of which he had kept. “How was I to know he was a genius?” In the afternoon Gore and another guest, Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinlech, prompted by Channon and Coates, who teasingly encouraged a winter-spring romance, strolled together through the gardens. Later Gore did his best to entertain with dinnertime stories of Cocteau and the French literary world. Bored, Tennessee retreated to his room and insisted on their leaving before lunch the next day. As Channon escorted them to the car taking his guests back to London, he rushed to greet a newly arrived guest and then returned to say good-bye to Gore and Tennessee. “That is the queen of Spain,” he said.

  Inadvertently Gore became indirectly connected to real royalty through a new friend, Judy Montagu, an intimate friend of Princess Margaret, who eventually was to become his friend as well. In the kitchen of Auburon Herbert’s flat, near Victoria Station, on a sun-bright afternoon, he met the daughter of Edwin Montagu, who had been in Prime Minister Asquith’s cabinet, and Lady Venetia Stanley, from a distinguished aristocratic family. Asquith himself had been in love with Venetia, though Judy’s actual father was probably the Earl of Dudley. Three years older than Gore, she was a tall, plain, handsome woman, with a long equine face and large, square figure, mouse-brown hair, blue eyes. She was a different kind of beauty, with great personal presence. “Very glamorous. She made the weather. A great wit.” Gore and she immediately liked one another. Judy asked Auburon about his sister, who had, they all thought, the misfortune to be married to the difficult Evelyn Waugh. Interested herself in some sort of matrimonial alliance, since her career clearly had to do with existence rather than achievement, Judy told Gore she was going to marry the American journalist Joseph Alsop, whom she had met during his London visits and whom Gore knew from his parents’ Washington world. Alsop had sometimes watched Gore and Jimmie Trimble play tennis at Merrywood. Somewhat impulsively, Gore told her that Alsop’s only romantic attachment, as far as he knew, was to a handsome ex-sailor from Brooklyn named Frankie Merlo. Gore’s precipitate words probably made little to no difference to a marriage proposal unlikely to have been realized anyway. Joe Alsop was to become one of Gore’s Washington friends and, years later, Judy and Gore were to have a friendship in Rome, prefigured by this meeting in summer 1948.

  Through Tennessee he met the actor John Gielgud, ineptly directing The Glass Menagerie, and Helen Hayes, the “first lady of the American theater,” starring as Amanda Wingfield in the British production, still in rehearsals. In late July it was to have its opening in Brighton and then London. The rehearsals were going badly. Everyone sensed that they were about to have a failure on their hands, partly because neither Gielgud nor the British theater public had much feel for the American particularities of the play or for Williams’s romantic/gothic sensibility. In addition, Williams had no enthusiasm for Helen Hayes, though Gore rather liked her. With grim imperial omniscience, the actress told the playwright, the director, and the cast that the play would be a failure. She was right. The only pleasure the British theatrical world provided Williams was his meeting with an almost twenty-seven-year-old Russian-born British actress of minor talent and small roles, Maria Britneva. They had probably first met at a party given by Binkie Beaumont, a well-known London theatrical agent. Within days the three were great friends—Tennessee, Maria, and Gore walking the Strand together, eating toffee candy that pulled out one of Gore’s false teeth, laughing, joking, finding themselves immediate comrades in carefree silliness. Petite, slim-waisted, dark-haired, flaming-eyed, with full but sharp lips and a slightly irregular nose, Maria was simultaneously peremptory and responsive. A quick, passionate talker, she was voraciously expansive, enough to have people whom she valued disappear in her embrace. Maria found Tennessee magnetic, sexy, needy. She soon cast herself in the role of devoted sister-caretaker, though she would have liked lover, certainly wife, if Tennessee had been so inclined. Gore liked her free spirits, her ambition, her rashness, her sense of humor. He hoped to see her in London whenever he returned, or, even better, in New York. Williams fled to Paris in mid-July and purposely did not attend the London opening.

  Having had enough of London, Gore himself returned in early July to the Hôtel de l’Université for what he decided would be his last month in Europe. Paris seemed the better place to spend the final weeks. On July afternoons he prowled “the streets, empty of traffic in those days.” Having heard from Jean Cocteau of a male brothel that Proust had frequented, he located the Hôtel Saumon, near the Place de l’Humanité, allegedly “lugubriously furnished with Mother Proust’s furniture.” He went numbers of times, partly for the boys, mostly to question the ancient proprietor, an Algerian. “‘Oh, he [Proust] would just look. That’s all. There were holes—you know, in the walls.’” Through a crack in a door, customers could view and select from the half dozen or so working-class boys who lounged in the sitting room. One day, crossing the Pont Neuf, Gore recognized one of the boys he liked, walking with a baby carriage and a pretty, pregnant wife. The two men smiled at one another and walked on. For the French young man, a student, it was simply a way to earn money. The next year a new, more moralistic government closed the Paris brothels.

  From Paris, Gore complained to Lehmann that Lehmann had cast him in an unfavorable light by widely quoting his having said about someone that “‘I used him.’ … I don’t think it was wise of you to repeat that since, for one thing, you completely misunderstood what I meant…. American is not English even though it has a familiar ring; then, too, I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade. But I don’t think you meant it maliciously since I like you and feel, naively perhaps, that people I like won’t make bitchy remarks.” Lehmann blamed mischief-makers. “Now I think you must surely realize by now that I’m fond of you, and believe in you.” It was not to prove a creditable claim.

  Res
tless, eager to be home, Gore canceled his boat ticket and bought plane passage. He had had enough of living out of a suitcase, even of traveling, though he had proposed to the London editors of Vogue an article for them on Ischia and Capri, which the New York editors had declined to commission. Now he wanted to work on revising A Search for the King, and he had some short stories in mind. The best place to do that would be at home, wherever that was or might be—New York, Washington, East Hampton. He had every reason to feel that his European trip had been successful, the first of many reaffirmations of the vision of himself he had cherished since he had first learned to read and which his 1939 voyage had made a vivid part of his consciousness. At the beginning of August he flew westward. “A note to tell you,” he soon wrote to Lehmann, “I am back amongst my people ready to lead them to the new Sodom, out of this pillarmarked wilderness.”

  Chapter Nine

  Byron Without Greece

  1948-1950

  As glasses tinkled at a Georgetown party in December 1948, John Galliher, a friend of Nina’s, introduced Gore to a slim, dark-haired, small-voiced woman with whom, Galliher immediately reminded him, Gore had something in common. They shared a stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss. Nineteen-year-old Jackie Bouvier had heard much about her slightly older, enviably successful quasi-relative who had already published three novels. Her mother was Nina’s successor. Gore had indeed heard something about the family that had moved into Merrywood soon after his departure. In the back of Miss Bouvier’s mind was the hope he might be helpful to her getting started in a career, perhaps journalism or photography, something to do with the arts, most likely in New York. After a few pleasant words about Merrywood, still her official residence, they may indeed have identified their shared inheritance—fractured families, difficult mothers, problematic childhoods. Nina was not at the party. But Galliher, Gore remembers, said to him years later, “Gore, I’ve gone to bed with your mother, and I’d like to go to bed with you.” “It doesn’t sound like me,” Galliher remarked, meaning only the wit. But the fact and the desire were real. “Nina and I were friends,” he recalled, “and it was like having another lovely glass of champagne. It wasn’t a very serious performance…. It was always a possibility with me or another man. It was just a pleasant occasion. She was an interesting lady. And Gore was also very attractive then, a very handsome man and great fun to be with.” A wealthy Washingtonian, somewhat younger than Nina, Galliher had become her devoted friend. They shared a life of parties. “She was so beautiful, a very handsome woman…. She played cards and backgammon and she was a good dancer. All those things. A social woman…. She went everywhere…. She was very smart, fun to be with, ready to play and have fun and to have an interesting social life. And she was a very earthy, sexual woman too…. Nina didn’t talk much about Gore to criticize him. I remember only something about her talking about Gore and a ballet dancer. She said that was really too much. We never went into details. ‘A ballet dancer. Really! This is too much! What now! Really!’ she said. You know, like that.”

  After the party, planning to spend Christmas and the first few months of 1949 in Antigua, Gore took a cab to Union Station to catch the overnight train to New Orleans. With The Season of Comfort about to appear, he was eager to be away. Perhaps he feared Nina’s likely reaction, especially since things had been going comparatively well between them. That summer she had been eager for him to return home, mostly because of their shared anxiety about the Senator’s health, partly because she genuinely missed him. When the Gores had gone to Florida that past June, she had been afraid “Dad will never get back alive.” Crippled, aged, the Senator was a painfully unhappy sight to his grandson on his visits to Washington between his return from Europe in August 1948 and his departure for Guatemala in late December. As Nina went off to Yale for her reformative course on alcoholism, she wanted to know when Gore would be “heading home—I have a yen to see you.” Volatile, unpredictable, still drinking heavily, she had given him good reason to think the relationship would soon explode again, as it regularly had over the’ years, particularly with the publication of Season. Certainly he wanted to be out of New York when the book appeared.

  At first he had thought of going to Europe, this time with Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, who had urged him to join them on a winter transatlantic crossing that would take them to North Africa, and then Williams to Italy. Nina had written Gore a damaging letter urging him to attend to his “mental health.” She meant his sexual proclivities, which, as a believer in psychoanalysis, she considered an illness that needed to be cured. With the publication of The City and the Pillar he had, so to speak, come out. She had not previously been aware, at least consciously, that he was not “a regular guy.” Now, to her mind, his troubled personality was the source of their mother-son difficulties.

  I think it would be a good idea if you put off Europe as long as you can and take advantage of perhaps becoming comfortable with yourself—Europe will still be there! We come from pretty tough stock, and you will, with luck, have fifty years more of living with you—and those providence puts in your circle. Sweetie you have too much ability to permit letting the ropes to be fouled. It is awfully tough, though, on super sensitive folks like us. I’ve always wanted the moon—and it is usually cheese. You are young enough to orient. Do! There is a man that has done a great deal of good for several friends of mine, Lawrence Kubie, an analyst, top flight—in tele. book—on my cuff talk to him too—you know there is nothing like getting confidence and a feeling of security—don’t overlook anything that might help—and you know as feeble as it may be darling, when you put your hand out and mine can be there it will be—Love—Bommy.

  Kubie, Gore knew, had advised Tennessee Williams to give up writing and boys.

  At first Gore enthusiastically accepted Williams’s and Bowles’s invitation. Then he changed his mind, partly because he had it in mind to write a new novel, this one set in Guatemala. It made more sense to spend the winter there than traveling in Europe. Perhaps Nina’s advice gave him pause. Certainly it would be cheaper to live in his own house in Antigua, the rent from which produced very little profit and which he had again been giving serious thought to selling. On the train to New Orleans he began to write Dark Green, Bright Red.

  The late summer and fall of 1948, after the return from Europe, had been mostly uneventful but pleasurable, except for his increasing frustration with Lehmann’s resistance to publishing any of his novels other than City. With City, Lehmann was cautious on moral grounds, but, “considering that [John Horne Burns’s] The Gallery doesn’t appear to have made a single moral ripple, I think with care we ought to be all right.” Vidal had hoped Lehmann would bring out The Season of Comfort, a copy of which Gore had had Nick Wreden send him in October. The verdict on that was still out. For a short time he was “in the midst of my I AM A FAILURE mood, a chronic disease with me.” All his real illnesses, he told Lehmann, “have been related back to my revolting liver,” the result of the hepatitis attacks of summer 1947, “and that is currently being treated.” Lehmann was not having his complaints either. “Good God, if I’d managed to get three books out by the time I was 23, and had the fun with one and the success or scandal you’ve had with another, I should not have been depressed but almost unbearably conceited. I feel sure it must be a purely physical reaction, simply coming from doing too much and living too scandalously.” By October, Gore was busy “getting the two books ready and fooling with a hopeless play. I’ve written two short stories; the only new work since spring. One gets very well-paid for such things and I’m planning more when I really learn how to write them.” One, called “The Robin,” partly about the horror of death, dramatizes the decision of two boys to put a wounded bird out of its misery, their emotions hovering between compassion and cruelty, shame and pleasure. “Not much news,” he wrote Pat Crocker in the late fall, “many parties, much intrigue and little work.” In fact, if the latest potential buyer for the Antigua house was serious, why not s
ell it? “Since I am embarked on my annual response (a peculiar Freudian slip) I mean to say romance, I shall undoubtedly be in New York forever.”

  In late summer he had spent time at East Hampton, staying at his father’s rented place and visiting Nina in Washington and Southampton. With two young stepsiblings at the Fifth Avenue apartment, he stayed for a while at the Chelsea Hotel, then for a brief time in Tennessee’s apartment while Williams was away, then in a sublease on East Fifty-second Street, downstairs from the ballerina Nora Kaye, who had been married to one of the literary heroes of his adolescence, James T. Farrell, everything of whose he had read at Exeter. One night her bathtub overflowed, flooding his apartment, leaving them both discomfited but even friendlier. Anxious, as always, about his career, still angry about City’s hostile reviews, perhaps what Nina thought his discomfort with himself was his ongoing preoccupation with his personal and professional pulse. Articulately egomaniacal, he was clever at both self-assertion and accommodation. Nina, a real and a necessary foil, unable to make peace with let alone lovingly accept his sexual preferences, inevitably fueled (sometimes with alcohol) the worst in her and in him. On the one hand she could boast publicly about the success of her son the bestselling author whose name frequently appeared in the newspapers. On the other, she could glower bitterly, in bars and cocktail lounges, about her son “the faggot,” one of the undeserved blows fate had inflicted on a blameless mother.