Gore Vidal Page 43

  While he and Alice made inquiries and he began gradually during the winter and spring to see the shape of his likely purchase take form, he also had a busy season with writing, friends, and travel. Having written “The Ladies in the Library” at Rhinebeck, he decided to write more short stories, in hope of magazine publication and perhaps a book of stories. Wisely, he made no attempt to revive those he had written at Exeter or to publish “The Dancer,” though he had enough confidence in “The Robin,” his most successful effort, to publish it, albeit not in a prominent place. The short-story form did not intrigue him, but it interested him enough so that his desire to do something successful within it and his hope that he might earn some money to help with expenses encouraged him to write a group of them during the winter-spring of 1949–50. They brought, however, only modest sums, mostly because homoeroticism, their prevailing subject, made them unsuitable for the high-paying-mass circulation magazines such as Mademoiselle or The Saturday Evening Post. They turned out to be almost entirely an artistic venture. Neither as separately published stories nor when published as a collection did they attract the attention The City and the Pillar had. More subtle, more artistically nuanced, the best of them, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” “Three Stratagems,” and the allusive “The Ladies in the Library,” have an indirectness, a delicacy, and an artistic integrity that give their underlying subject a viability it had never before had in American literature. Most of the stories were written in Key West and New Orleans. Always restless, Gore had vaguely expected, when leaving Morocco in July, to spend January 1950 with Bowles in North Africa. As he told Lehmann, “I think Paul Bowles and I will cross the Sahara; I should like to do a journal of that trip, for my amusement anyway. I’ve become awfully fond of journal keeping.” The latter was an exaggeration. Except for the journal he had kept during the first four months or so of 1948, he had at best kept a sporadic record. The Sahara trip dropped from both their agendas, especially because by October Bowles had become strongly attracted to the idea of visting Ceylon. “I still have a mad desire to see that part of the world, even briefly,” he wrote, encouraging Gore to join him.

  In fact, Gore had had no desire to visit Morocco again, and Bowles’s invitation in early December to join him en route to or in Ceylon suddenly seemed just the right thing. Restless, eager not to be in New York for the winter, perhaps with touches of Somerset Maugham in his imagination, he decided to go. Bowles, on his way by slow boat, wrote from Antwerp, suggesting he consider flying directly to Ceylon or alternatively to Naples, where he could meet Bowles’s boat and sail the rest of the way with him. Bowles had half expected to see him in Antwerp or in Naples “on the dock waving.” But he thought it more likely that Gore would “take the high road,” since, unlike Bowles, he did not mind flying, “and be in Ceylon before me.” Gore, though, booked boat passage from New York, with a stopover in Rome and Cairo, on an American President liner to depart on January 9. “I may also do a travel book about Ceylon,” he wrote to Lehmann, “full of pussycat episodes most excitingly handled. Paul’s book [The Sheltering Sky] has been alternately praised and attacked here. Some thought it Kafka; others … Elinor Glyn. I shall be gone thank God when Search,” scheduled for January 10 publication, “appears to the ravenous public.” He spent the evening before departure with John Latouche and the actor Burgess Meredith, who amused them about his recent divorce from Paulette Goddard. “She even wants my donkey, which she hates.” On the morning of departure Gore posted a letter to Bowles telling him he was on his way. When, soon after, with his baggage, he went to the busy pier, he had a rude shock. Somehow he had miscalculated, whether out of some underlying hesitation about going at all or plain fuzzy-mindedness about dates. The boat had departed as scheduled the previous day. He did not look into alternatives. Instead he went to Key West and then New Orleans.

  For six weeks Bowles anticipated Vidal’s arrival in Ceylon. In the middle of January, the departure-day letter in hand, Bowles finally wrote to him, “Is it true that you will actually arrive here? I hope you’ll let me know the disembarkation date well in advance so that I can meet you at the boat…. You must be staying a while in Egypt en route. But you hate it there. So perhaps not…. It will be wonderful to see you here.” In late February, furious, the usually placid Bowles expressed his disappointment. “What nonsense! Missed the boat, indeed! How was I to know that? I was literally expecting you from one day to the next, put off trips in order to make them with you when you came. I wrote you in Rome. Perhaps the American Embassy knows enough to forward it to New Orleans.” “He was quite rightly pissed off,” Gore later remarked. By the end of the letter, though, his anger had cooled. “You never would have done any work if you’d come, so perhaps it’s just as well,” though there may have been something of a taunt in his observation that “one is at a premium here among the collegians, and can pick and choose. The only trouble is that one chooses everyone. So, as I say, perhaps it’s just as well for your own peace of soul that you stayed in God’s country.”

  In fact, there was enough to pick and choose from in Key West and New Orleans, though Gore was still passionate enough about his Houston friend to have told Lehmann in early November, exhausted from revising Dark Green, Bright Red, that “in a few days I retire to Houston for love and a rest from work.” He does not appear to have gone to Houston then. With his bags packed in January, the boat to Ceylon having left without him, he went by bus to Key West, eager for the warm sunshine and Tennessee Williams’s company. To Williams’s surprise, “after writing me only three days previously that he was catching a boat for Ceylon, close on the fugitive heels of Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal suddenly startled me out of my wits and my power of speech when he stalked into the living room a few days ago without ringing or knocking and immediately began to browse through my manuscript which I was checking over. He said he had missed the boat.” In Key West, Gore regaled himself “among the husks of mermaids,” enjoying what were mostly fair to good reviews of Season that Dutton forwarded. “I now think that perhaps Search is a good though slight book,” he told Lehmann, to whom he had sent a copy in the hope he might publish it. “It was certainly wonderful fun to write and my fears about it came, I think, from a sense of having cheated, having avoided a major theme in favor of something less demanding, less painful.” Once Williams got over the shock of Gore’s sudden appearance, they had a good time together at the beach and at bars. “In those days there was nobody in the town. The streets were empty,” Gore recalled. “You could park anywhere. South Beach was where we went.” Both were brown from the sun, slim and muscled from swimming. Williams’s rented house on unfashionable Duncan Street became a daily stop for conversation, for drinks, for quick-witted camaraderie.

  At Key West, while Williams worked on The Rose Tattoo, Gore began the short stories he eventually published under the title A Thirsty Evil. “I am working slowly, quietly,” he told Lehmann, “with greater concentration than I used to in the mad gaudy days of the early books. I’ve just done a very fine short story,” probably “Three Stratagems,” “in a way the best thing I’ve written: Tenn agrees too. I am brooding about what to do next. I have a hundred plans.” They did not include staying in Key West, which he left at the end of January, mostly because New Orleans, especially during Mardi Gras, offered more opportunities for adventure and entertainment. Also, Williams was soon to go to New York, which Gore had no intention of returning to until spring. “Vidal has departed,” Williams wrote to Donald Windham. “The queens took a dim view of him, which doesn’t matter…. I miss him, for it is comforting to know somebody who gets along worse with people than I do, and I still believe that he has a heart of gold.” As always, “New Orleans was wonderful.” Vidal was soon comfortable enough in a nondescript furnished apartment in a roominghouse at 812 Dauphine Street, in the midst of the French Quarter attractions. “I had half of one floor overlooking the street. Very comfortable,” he recalled. “You went out to eat. Very cheap.” Soon after ar
riving, he wrote to Lehmann that “the Endless Quest for the Beloved has brought me to this city where, contrary to popular opinion, no men of letters save myself decorate the streets and boites, although, at Mardi Gras, I believe Glorious Williams will be among us here.” At least he was closer to Houston. “Haven’t seen the Beloved yet. The B. is in Houston. Lad of Houston ere we part give me back oh give me back….” For the time being he stayed in New Orleans, where he had numbers of friends, especially Bob Tallant, the novelist, and Olive Leonhardt, the painter he had met in Guatemala and to whom he had introduced Anaïs in 1947. Much of the local camaraderie was at bars, where he observed his New Orleans friends drink at a volume so great that he could not keep up with them. “All alcoholics and all dead long, long before their time.”

  One night on Bourbon Street he noticed in a tight pair of Levi’s an acquaintance from Exeter, J. Winter Thorington, an Alabamian from Birmingham. Stepping out of the shadows and startling Thorington, Gore said, half jokingly, “I’d never have taken you for a hustler.” Thorington responded, “Well, I’m not trying to be a hustler.” As for Gore, it was Thorington’s first Mardi Gras, one that stuck in his memory as the wildest of the many he was to attend. “I remember the weather at Mardi Gras 1950 was just perfect,” another friend of Gore’s recalled, “absolutely perfect.” They went together to bars and parties and ate, Thorington recalled, “at some of the great restaurants and went to several spots around town and I really thoroughly enjoyed it.” Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop was a favorite. “Yes, he did like to pay for sex, and he told me the reason why. He said that he liked it that way because then nobody owed anything to anybody…. I remember on one occasion when there was a hustler involved. We did go back to that place at 812 Dauphine Street. I was a little surprised, to be honest about it, as to his being a bit cool toward the guy after everything was all over and we were walking back up toward Canal Street…. He didn’t seem interested in carrying on a conversation, so I just did it myself…. He probably figured that everything was even Steven at that stage of the game and he didn’t owe him any conversation or any money or anything else.” When Thorington needed to interrupt his stay by driving back to Montgomery, Gore went for part of the ride. He had never seen the eighty-mile stretch between New Orleans and Gulfport. “I was curious because we were in Gore country. The Gores are from the northern part of Mississippi, but we have relatives all over the Delta, and I’d never seen the Delta. That was my real reason for the trip.” From Gulfport he took the bus back to New Orleans, from which at the end of February he went by bus to Houston, presumably to pursue the now totally unremembered romantic object. Apparently his Texas affair did not prove satisfactory, the experience disappointing and still unresolved. “Houston is all very strange and sad and baffling,” he told Lehmann. “I am in one of those curious situations when I don’t at all know what is happening. Are there schools where one can learn to be ruthless? Well, all this will pass…. What will one be like at eighty? with the Nobel and a secretary?”

  Working on the short stories in the morning, he had time on his hands the rest of the day, part of which he spent socializing, much of which he spent reading. He went regularly to the public library, reading fiction widely, from Dickens’s Hard Times to Calder Willingham’s new novel, which, to his disappointment, he thought “a piece of total trash; I haven’t the nerve to write him what I think, and he awaits with some interest, I think, my comments.” For the first time he was also studying Plato, especially the Symposium, which excited him a great deal, particularly because its depiction of human sexuality encouraged his own similar consideration of the subject. Heretofore he had lived his bisexuality, from Jimmy to Rosalind to Anaïs to Harold to his Houston romance, with modest to nonexistent defensiveness, but recently, and especially now while reading the Symposium, his ideas on the subject began to become self-consciously coherent. Inevitably they were self-justifying, but now had reference to a body of literature and to a set of historical examples that provided a cultural and intellectual framework. He began to think seriously about human sexuality, the relationship between the body’s natural responsiveness and cultural conditioning, about sex, gender, and society. His enthusiasm for his view of the subject had its aggressive side, which new friends in New Orleans—long-term British visitors Geoffrey and Penelope Moore—sometimes found tedious but hardly alienating, mainly because they did not take seriously his argument that “all the great literary people in the world have been homosexual.” Both the handsome, pipe-smoking Geoffrey, five years older than Gore, who taught at Tulane and ran a literary radio-interview program for the university, and Penelope, a talented journalist, enjoyed his argumentativeness. They both had been successful debaters at Cambridge. It seemed excessive to them when Gore, a formidable debater also, argued that heterosexuality was “a bad thing.” But it was a legitimate debater’s point, especially when the argument was almost always the other way around. The mysteries of homosexual cruising, though, were much beyond Moore’s romantic puritanism. “My idea of homosexuality was derived from obvious queens, which we used to call them at Cambridge, and there was Gore coming from the YMCA, all muscular, and he used to say, ‘Oh, you are so cozy about this kind of thing. Look, there’s a boxer there, there’s a football player,’ and so he educated us.” When the three went out together, Gore would say, “‘You don’t believe me, do you? You don’t believe me. Look at that chap over there, that guy over there. I’ll get him before the night is through. I’ll get him.’ And there was this great brawny thing. I took it all as a joke, you see. But he was dead, dead, deadly serious…. Probably the act of penetration was pretty repellent to me, and so he said, ‘Oh, we don’t do that! We don’t do that!’ ‘What the hell do you do?’ And he used a curious expression: ‘Belly rubbing,’ which apparently meant kind of masturbating against each other without using hands. I had never heard of that.”

  Having discovered that the well-known young novelist was in town, Moore, who wanted him for his radio broadcasts, had telephoned. Gore came over to the small patio apartment on Ursulines Avenue in the slave quarter. They all took to one another right away. “He was just mad about her,” Gore recalled. “She was a lean brown woman, rather sort of athletic, with a sexy look in her eye, not beautiful but handsome and well made … and a bit passive.” Gore often came to their place for dinner and drinks, or they went to restaurants. “He kept dropping in. We’d just look up, and there was Gore. We never made any appointments. He was just there. He was very welcome, anytime.” Moore, late in March, had Gore on his radio program, Looking at Books, to discuss the state of the novel, a version of his talk on novelists of the 1940s. Both young, attractive, articulate—one with a crisp British accent, the other a deep-toned American voice—they dazzled the local audience and enjoyed being written up handsomely in the two local newspapers. New Orleans seemed marvelous to both of them, pristine, unspoiled. “We used to see the cat girl and hear the old musicians play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’ in the Quarter. Those were grand old days,” Moore recalled. “You never had to bother then about being mugged or anything like that, or at least we never bothered, and we never were. It was a great life.” For Gore also, who planned to stay in New Orleans until the warm weather in April. Afterward, he told Lehmann, “I may do a short Hollywood stint this spring for cash; plans are uncertain, at the moment, depending on Houston … among other things.”

  The short stories were going well. When he sent “Three Stratagems” to James Laughlin, Laughlin liked it and accepted it for fall publication in New Directions’ New World Writing #12, an annual anthology. “It’s one of the few serious short stories I’ve ever written,” he told Laughlin, “and I’d not like to see it die somewhere among the lingerie of Mademoiselle or on the front shelves of the Lady of the Gotham Book Mart.” Sales of Search seemed likely to be about 10,000, less than he had wanted but about what his novels since City had averaged. He had in mind two new ideas, one a novel about the Roman emperor Julian, still
quite vague in conception, the other about a charismatic, apocalyptic religious figure in modern America, perhaps a new messiah whose views would turn Christianity on its head. The latter would be, he partly joked, his masterwork, “the monster which I’ve been sniffing around for five years, the story of the second coming. Pray for me…. Soon I shall begin work on The First and the Last; it may very well be the last novel for, if I do it right, I shall have nothing else to say for many years to come. Not, as Mr Maugham has remarked, that that is any reason to stop.” With Lehmann there had been something of a rapprochement, with a touch of personal affection, as if now it were an old friendship that transcended serious annoyances, though Lehmann, soon to be out of business anyway, still declined to publish anything since or before City except Dark Green, Bright Red. Vidal himself was beginning to develop some perspective about his novels, including City, whose message he considered on target but whose aesthetic success he thought modest. “You know,” he wrote to Lehmann, “I’ve had to learn how to write since Williwaw and it’s not been easy. Most people seem to be born knowing their way through literature, the young lions at least, like Truman. I have had to fuss and groan no end, these last four years especially, and, at last, a natural manner seems to have been shaped, both literate and true. But then who can tell? … I am as usual in one of my melancholic reveries in which I feel like going off to a war. How awful to be Byron without Greece!”