Gore Vidal Read online

  This time Gore sailed not to Naples but to Le Havre, where he and Danielian took the ferry and train to London. Lehmann and he put a good face on their relationship, Lehmann the aristocratically self-confident publisher high on the totem pole of an elite, self-assured London literary culture; Vidal the young author determined not to be put down by anyone, but also unwilling to give up entirely on Lehmann. Before the New Amsterdam sailed from New York, he received a telegram: “Suggest you both stay with me first three days no time for letter now All news then Love—John” to which he responded, “BOTH ARRIVING EGERTON AFTERNOON TWENTYFOUR [May] = GORE.” London in May 1949 was more of what he had experienced the previous summer: a round of parties attended by Lehmann’s literary friends, ostensibly to celebrate the London publication of The City and the Pillar, and many of the same people, particularly Judy Montagu, from the London social world. Since Isherwood could not come down from his family home in Essex, they missed one another. Gore hoped he might see him in Paris. The British press on the whole had mostly good things to say about City, a reception Gore found happily different from the American, the start of what thereafter always seemed to him a better public response to his works in Britain than at home. The self-congratulatory Lehmann boastfully admired his own courage in bringing it out.

  Gore soon crossed to Paris. Some of the previous year’s cast had reassembled, particularly Tennessee, who came up for a brief visit from Rome, where he had been since midwinter, and Capote, who had sailed for a long stay in Europe soon after the April lunch with Gore and Alice in New York. Maria Britneva was close by. She had spent much of the fall and winter of 1948 in New York, looking for stage work, enrolling at the newly formed Actors Studio, getting to know Marlon Brando and other New York theater people, strengthening and expanding her relationship with Williams and his friends, including Gore. In New York they had gone to Coney Island together, where she and Gore had had their heads photographed next to one another on comic cardboard bodies. Since she could not be Williams’s lover, she could be loving, useful, and supportive. In spring 1949 she returned to her London home, hoping for theater work there, and welcomed Tennessee in April when he came for the English production of Streetcar. Williams felt sorry for her. “She detests London and has fallen out completely with the Beaumont office so she has no prospect of work here…. Seems to have no interesting friends here, nobody she likes much and her family is quite poor, except for an aunt who treats her rather coolly. Poor child. I think she may go over to Paris with us for a couple of weeks, but when we return to Rome I don’t know what her plans will be. London is just as amazingly dull as ever! And to live here, Oh Jesus!” Capote, with his now signature Bronzini scarf, longer than his body was tall, twirled around him and flowing flamboyantly, pranced happily about Paris. His friends worried that his scarf would catch and choke him to death. His enemies hoped so. When Gore, just arrived and staying, as was Danielian, at the Pont Royal Hotel, made the mistake of showing Capote a draft of his short story, “The Robin,” Capote read it and said, happily, “‘It doesn’t work!’” One evening, with a large group, they found themselves at a well-known dance hall where men danced together. The band played that season’s popular hit, “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo.” An enthusiastic dancer, Capote pulled Gore onto the dance floor. Gore, though he did not mind being admired, did not, unlike Truman, use his body or his movements exhibitionistically. Anyway, he had little talent or interest in dancing, which he had disliked since his Washington dancing-school days. Immediately he turned and left the dance floor. For Capote, who thought himself irresistible, there may have been attraction as well as competition, a hope of conquest as well as an act of payback. Each knew how to get on the other’s nerves.

  When Gore had arrived in Paris, Paul Bowles was there, having come from London, where Lehmann was arranging for late-summer publication of the British edition of The Sheltering Sky. He and Gore took long strolls together. In the bar of the Pont Royal they amused themselves “examining the literary habitués of the place.” Sartre walked by their table “and bowed as he mumbled: ‘Bonjour.’” Both were too startled to say anything. They had assumed he would not recognize them. Eager to return to Morocco, Bowles soon left, repeating his invitation to Gore to visit him in Tangier, where he and his wife Jane had created North African lives and domiciles. Both were deeply attracted to the exotic Arabic world, what seemed to them its power and centricity, a place of primal origins from which Europe and America could be observed at a distance. Morocco provided for Bowles an attractive balance of alienation and familiarity. “I have absolutely no desire to go to any part of Europe, so un-European do I feel these days,” he had written to Gore. A handsome, graceful man, an inveterate traveler whose bags were often packed, he now found Morocco the home to which he always returned, its Anglo-American expatriate colony his social world, its Arabic young men his lovers, its mysterious desert the place where he felt closest to vital life. “I must admit,” he wrote to Gore, “I didn’t think you’d ever show up in Morocco.” Apparently, when Gore had decided not to sail with Williams and Bowles in December, he had hinted he might show up later in Tangier. “Morocco isn’t at all … monstrous,” Bowles wrote to him, “but you doubtless wouldn’t like it—you’re not that depraved yet. But wait.” In Paris, Bowles repeated the invitation. Gore again said he might come.

  There were some Paris conquests. One day he strolled near Saint-Germain-des-Prés with a talented young American composer on his arm, Chuck Turner, later to become Samuel Barber’s companion. Bowles’s friend Ned Rorem, a young Francophile composer who had met Gore in New York and admired him, thought them an odd couple. “But then, opposites attract—not that Chuck and Gore were opposites, at least in their physical urges.” For Gore opposites did attract, particularly men on a lower educational and social level than his own. For companionship and intellectual stimulation he had friends like Bowles. Whatever contributed to the decision, he soon left Paris, this time alone. Perhaps Paris life had grown dull; he would certainly have been happy to leave Capote behind. He did not mind in the least traveling alone. Sometimes intensely social, he also liked solitude, his own company. By train he headed south across the Pyrenees for his first visit to Spain, to see the places that had cachet and resonance in his imagination, that he had read about in literature and history, including the evocations of the Alhambra from his childhood reading of Washington Irving. Modern Spanish culture did not especially interest him. Having been disgusted by the cruelty of the bullfight he had seen in Guatemala City, he found the blood-and-sand spectacle viciously primitive, an aspect of Spain connected to the fanaticism of its Catholic heritage that exemplified the kind of religion he especially disliked. From Granada he wrote to John Kelly, complaining that his writing and feelings were “frozen.” “That is nothing to worry about,” Kelly assured him. “It will not hurt you to relax for a while. And if you feel tired of sex, you may be ready for something better in that and other lines.” At Córdoba and Seville he found the great mosques breathtaking, extraordinary architectural structures magnificently decorated. Moorish Spain came alive in his imagination. Why not, he thought, write a novel in the manner of A Search for the King, about Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Spain? The topic lingered for a while in his head, though he was never to write it. “A lovely journey into the heart of Spain,” he wrote to Latouche. “It beateth. I feel as if I were on Mars. The only ‘foreign country’ in the world…. A crown of twigs, dear heart, and an easy birth.” From Seville he took the train to Algeciras on the Mediterranean, Gibraltar “the first big rock to the right.” North African lights glittered across the strait.

  As he had planned, he soon crossed to Africa. Bowles, surprised that the visit was actually occurring, welcomed him to the Moroccan landscape and the Anglo-American expatriate world. A newly fashionable gathering place for what Gore thought of as traveling queens, Tangier had its early post-World War II cast of colorful characters, some always on the
move, some in comfortable houses, attracted by the weather, the beaches, the cheap cost of living, the easy availability of drugs, the Arabic ethos that permitted every sort of sex under terms totally independent of European puritanism. Sir David Herbert, the son of the Earl of Pembroke, Tangier’s “unofficial social arbiter,” and the visiting Cecil Beaton, widely admired for his scenery and costume designs, his photographs and wit, anchored the British social presence; the Bowleses and their traveling compatriots and guests, the American. Paul and Jane both had their homosexual lives, often with long-term companions. Both regularly smoked a North African version of marijuana. Bowles, who was working on a new novel, a short story, and an opera for Libby Holman, was also supervising the renovation of the large house he lived in, high on a steep cliff outside town, with “a sort of lighthouse on the top, with quite the best view here.” A fine but now nonproductive writer, Jane Auer Bowles, eight years older than Gore, born to a Jewish family in New York, had a mysterious Arabic lover who dominated her somewhat unstable life and mind. Hostile to Gore, whom she suspected of having an affair with Paul that threatened their idiosyncratic relationship, the small, dark, unpredictable Jane gave him the creeps. For Paul, Gore had great affection and respect.

  Immediately on Gore’s arrival in Tangier in the last week in June, they made plans for visits to Casablanca and Fez and perhaps a trip into the desert, for which Paul had a mystic feeling and had written powerfully about in The Sheltering Sky, a novel Gore soon read and liked considerably. The July weather was magnificent, unending days of cloudless skies. He thought Casablanca at best interesting. The long-discussed Sahara voyage, though, never occurred, and Tangier, all in all, despite the high-partying British and American social life, felt like a disadvantaged backwater. His small rented house in town was a hovel. Scorpions seemed unattractive companions. Tangier’s dirt and poverty, its crumbling seediness, its absence of rational organization and intellectual culture seemed considerable liabilities, its exoticism, repellent. Unlike Bowles, Gore felt European. As in his visit to Egypt the previous year, he did not find modern Arabic sensibility or culture interesting, let alone alluring. Why should one isolate oneself in Morocco, he felt, if you could be in Paris or Rome or even New York? The handsome local boys were not sufficient compensation, and he did not enjoy smoking kif, Bowles’s favorite drug. Much as he enjoyed Paul’s company, he had little desire to stay for any length of time. A cablegram from Capote to Bowles announced Truman’s imminent arrival, to Gore’s surprise, with his companion, Jack Dunphy. Capote had no idea that Vidal was there. Gore insisted that he and Bowles go down to the dock; in the distance they saw Capote at the prow of the ship, ready for his entrance, looking eagerly toward the shore, Bronzini scarf floating about his neck. From the dock Capote’s small body allowed his shoulders and face to be just visible over the ship’s railing. As soon as he was in range, Vidal and Bowles began waving their arms wildly. Capote saw the two figures, began waving his scarf. When he recognized Gore standing beside Bowles, “he did a little comic-strip routine,” Bowles recalled. “His face fell like a soufflé placed in the ice-compartment, and he disappeared entirely below the level of the railing for several seconds. When he had assumed a standing position again, he was no longer grinning or waving.” Soon recovering his equilibrium, Capote stayed in Morocco for most of the rest of the summer, finding Jane’s company delightful, spending more time with her than with Paul, and enjoying a frenetic whirl of parties and exotic experiences with Cecil Beaton, whom he idolized. Gore left late in the first week in July. Two weeks had been enough. In August, back in New York, he received a letter from Bowles, whose wry report reminded him why he had left Tangier. “Truman gave a mad party … at the cave of Hercules, with a large Arab orchestra, much champagne, and hurricane lamps fainting in the gale. Themistocles passed out on hashish, after drinking several bottles of champagne. Cecil said: ‘How heavenly!’ The Arab orchestra, plus porters and pussycats (Vidalese) had cases of Coca Cola. The sand sifted in and Truman found a huge centipide at his feet, nearly dying of horror. Well, actually it was a night of horror; everything went wrong.” Gore was glad he had stayed only two weeks.

  On a Florida Beach, Gore and Johnny Kriza enjoyed the late-August sunshine. It had been a glorious ride down from New York in Johnny’s big car—which he had named “Floristan”—for a two-week holiday. They stopped at beaches along the eastern coast of Florida, in good-humored high spirits, visiting friends from the ballet world, “receiving the homage of the balletomanes in their beachside houses.” When they had sex together, it was, as they both preferred, casually thoughtless. It had no emotive content, no consequences. “I was, during that time, devoted only to health and beauty,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. Fond of one another, they had fun together, in a time and place where all that mattered was the attraction of well-favored bodies, exercised and tanned in the bright sun. Any obvious shadows seemed to come only from palm trees. The moment was so charged with the present that he and Johnny could find it possible, at a stretch, to think the present might go on forever. Actually, Johnny was not used to doing any thinking at all. For Gore, it would have been unusual, perhaps impossible, for there not to be an elegiac shading to the happy sky.

  In New York through late summer and autumn 1949, staying sometimes at his father’s apartment, mostly in hotels, he proofread galleys of A Search for the King and finished the revisions of Dark Green, Bright Red for which Lehmann had pushed. “I agree, of course,” Gore wrote to him, “with what you have to say that one should not create characters that are lifeless and dull merely because the originals might appear that way; on the other hand I think creation of character in a novel is very much a business of chance; either the magic happens or it doesn’t. I’m not sure that a ‘real character’ can be created by some correct or logical process, Aristotelian or not. Peter can’t be remade as a character, certainly, but I think what you mean is not that personality should change or grow but that it should be revealed; in that case, I can do something about him. I’m not sure what just yet.” He had not given up hope that Lehmann would publish other of his novels. In early November he sent him the revised Dark Green, Bright Red. “A great deal of work has gone into it and I am pretty well pleased now. I’ve made some cuts and a few additions; most of your objections have been taken care of and Peter is less shadowy, I think.” He soon sent him one of the first printed copies of Search, which Lehmann chose not to publish, though why he selected the less successful Dark Green, Bright Red is unclear, especially since the subject of Search made it a likely read for an English audience. Williwaw had made Vidal well known. The City and the Pillar had made him famous. He himself shared the general lack of enthusiuasm about In a Yellow Wood. Dark Green, Bright Red had mostly its narrative drive to recommend it. That the artistically interesting The Season of Comfort was vastly underrated resulted from the inevitable focus on its psychological mother-son drama. In addition, for a writer so young to have written so much so quickly made many uncomfortable, some resentful. Haste was sometimes evident. Often it made no difference. Partly he was driven by the desire for prominence, and by a seemingly inexhaustible energy, but he also needed to support himself. “Contrary to legend, I had no money. Since I lived on publishers’ advances, it was fairly urgent that I keep on publishing every year. But of course I wanted to publish every year. I felt no strain, though looking back over the books,” he remarked decades later, “I can detect a strain in the writing of them. Much of the thinness of those early novels is simply the pressure that I was under. Anyway, I’ve gone back and rewritten several of them. They are still less than marvelous but better than they were.”

  Even with publishing six novels in five years, he had still earned only modest sums. Though he did well with City, none of the others sold enough to make the bestseller list, let alone provide him with much more than the average $2,000 advances he got for the last three. The nearly 30,000-copy total sale of City netted him approximately $9,000 over a three-year per
iod. The trust fund that Nina had gotten Auchincloss to provide and which she had relinquished when he became twenty-one provided a small sum, varying in relation to the securities markets, usually around a thousand dollars a year. To the extent that he stayed at his father’s apartment, he had a partial rent subsidy, though he preferred to stay there as little as possible. Most of the money he had saved in the Army and from the railroad bonds set aside for college costs had been absorbed by his living expenses. He was economical, but he was not thrifty. Bohemian self-sacrifice and ascetic sparseness did not appeal to him. Though he had no need for luxuries, for first-class travel or deluxe hotels, he still needed money to cover his ordinary expenses. With the exception of a smash bestseller of the sort that stayed at the top for a long time, a novel was not a paying proposition. Publishers had not yet developed the tendency to give highly thought-of “literary” novelists huge advances. Even successful novelists had to scramble for money: some scrambled into university jobs, others into writing for the popular culture. As Gore looked around him in mid-1949 for additional ways to earn money, he took notice of television, a new phenomenon. “All my literary friends,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, whom he urged to find a buyer for his Antigua house, “from Jean Stafford to Truman Capote are writing or trying to write television.” He himself began to make inquiries. Perhaps television, perhaps the movies. “They feel about me, generally, that there is nothing I cannot do (this is said by irritable admirers) or that there is nothing I will not do (more the majority opinion, I think) … the truth is I don’t want to go to work in an office. On such soft negatives are airy empires built.” One of the things he would do, he decided, is write a pulp novel. An idea had come to him in mid-March while on the train to attend the bereaved Mrs. Gore. Before leaving for Europe in May, he had put into Dutton’s hands a commercial fiction of about 55,000 words, dicated into a Dictaphone machine in about a week, called A Star’s Progress, to be published under a pseudonym, the surname taken from the much-frequented Everard Baths. The conspiracy appealed even to the staid Dutton proprietors, who early in July drew up a contract, with an advance of $1,000, for the pseudonymous Katherine Everard. “Very intrigued with new novel, but why assume another name?” Anaïs wrote to him from California. “Why not add to your legend? … I’m flattered that you haven’t proposed to anyone but me—I’m happy too…. I wish I had known of your trip to Spain.”