Gore Vidal Read online

  Eager to help Weybright assemble the best writing of the period, Vidal knocked himself out in a venture that seemed worth the effort. “I am going out of my mind,” he had written to Lehmann late in 1951, “New World Writing, lecturing, manufacturing, as well as battling with the last proofs of Judgment.” But it was not a complaint. “The great project of the moment has to do with Signet,” he explained. “Due to MY exertions for the past year, Victor Weybright (whom you met in London recently) is going to put out four collections a year of New World Writing, an American child, in spirit, of New Writing and Horizon.… I shall be, if it succeeds (first issue in April), a permanent sort of reader…. You are of course vital to the undertaking so do be receptive. I think well of it…. There has never been anything like this in America since the great days of the Atlantic Monthly in the last century: a national showcase for the best writers.” To Arabel Porter he wrote regularly, recommending writers, evaluating material, making suggestions, “an editor without portfolio,” as he put it to Aldridge, from whom he diplomatically solicited a contribution. As the April 1952 publication of the first issue became imminent, he concluded that “New World Writing is triumphant, in advance at least.” Though they had agreed there would be no single editor, he felt he had edited the volume and that that should be acknowledged somehow. He also believed that Weybright had explicitly agreed that if the first issue were successful, Gore would formally be appointed editor of future issues. When the first issue came to hand, he was shocked to see Porter prominently proclaimed editor. At the back, in small print, he was thanked, with two others, for helping make the volume possible. It felt like a betrayal. At a party Weybright hosted, attended by most of the contributors, the publisher made a gracious speech thanking them. “Auden stood around sullenly and occasionally muttered, ‘How much are we going to be paid?’” Weybright cheerfully ignored Auden. Angry, Gore reproached Weybright. But, the publisher explained, Porter had to be the editor. “But I did edit it,” Vidal remonstrated. “I asked him afterward, ‘Why have you left me out?’ ‘Well, Gore,’ he said, ‘I can’t make this any single writer’s anthology.’ ‘You mean you can’t make it mine,’ I said. And he stammered around and then said, ‘Well, you are thanked in the first issue.’ … I knew that I’d been fucked yet again.” Still, he hung in with Weybright, whom he otherwise liked. Soon Weybright agreed to publish under the Signet label a number of Vidal’s novels, including The Judgment of Paris, and eventually City. Gore continued during the next two years to do his best for New World Writing. The idea still seemed to him a good one.

  From Edgewater he made frequent trips into Manhattan. Having skipped Key West that winter, he was happy to see, in May 1952, the countryside around the river come alive. “I have been busy,” he wrote to Aldridge, “weeding gardens, composing the journal, studying the daffodils (the first one opened yesterday … awfully odd-looking, too, a kind of hybrid), communing with Weybright on the November issue of N.W.W. and preparing, God help me, a reading at a theater in the Village called The Circle in the Square, booked right after a Welsh road-show named Dylan Thomas.” The combination of country life and city adventures agreed with him. When he came to town, he struck friends and acquaintances as beamingly healthy and attractively young. To Tina Bourjaily, a pretty, amiable woman with striking blue eyes, whose parties he often attended, he seemed “much healthier than anybody else…. There was a great deal of body abuse going on. We didn’t exercise, we drank a lot, we sat around and smoked. He always came in like a fresh breath from the country. Apparently he did a lot of work around Edgewater. He appeared youthful to me. Very youthful and very handsome.” Unlike the discovery and New World Writing crowd, he hardly drank and did not smoke. The Bourjailys had been evicted from their first Manhattan apartment when the young novelist James Jones, who had published From Here to Eternity in 1951, drunk, threw up in the stairwell. Downtown, in their Greenwich Village flat and at other literary parties, floating from apartment to apartment, literary friends had long nights of drinking and conversation that Gore sometimes joined for the company. “What people wanted to do when they got together was to have a drink,” Tina recalled. “We gave parties for almost any reason. A party could be three or four people who just happened to be there. Or calling up others. You could have a few drinks and then flow into the subway and up to somebody’s apartment.” William Styron, Norman Mailer, Herbert Gold—who had just begun his writing career with Birth of a Hero—and even Ralph Ellison were part of the discovery group, the emphasis tilted toward what Gore thought a somewhat too heavy-handed naturalism. Aldridge came in frequently from Vermont, tall, blond, always combing his hair, an eager lady’s man hoping for conquests, including Anaïs Nin, and Tina Bourjaily remembered that he “never went anywhere without a toothbrush and brushed his teeth furiously as if it were his conscience.” Calder Willingham, from Georgia, often visited, his hair red, his neck almost red, with a thin face and curved nose, a clever, amiable man with a great deal of talent as novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Late in the year Gore co-hosted a party at the Bourjailys’ apartment, competing with them to see who could produce the most famous literary names. Gore’s trump card was Tennessee Williams. “Katherine Anne Porter said she didn’t like to go out, even though he invited her. She was another important guest. We were trying to one-up one another,” Tina recalled. “Tennessee Williams and Calder Willingham…. Our apartment was this long flat, a long, long hallway, and then you had the option of going this way laterally to the kitchen or bathroom or bedroom and then two doors came into the living room and dining room. Williams somehow got into the bedroom. There was Tennessee Williams standing alone. I took him out and said to this assembled group full of themselves, ‘This is Tennessee Williams!’ Dead silence. First the poor man got lost in the bedroom, then he came into a room that went absolutely dead when I made the announcement. He was that big a celebrity.”

  The Bourjailys themselves Gore became quite fond of, especially Tina, an easy-tempered Midwesterner via California from a strong-willed Scandinavian farming family. She seemed to all of them a beneficent presence. She “looked like a very pretty Zelda Fitzgerald,” Gore recalled. “Tina was slender, vivacious, quick, very droll. Vance was quite slow, and she was very quick. So she was the one.” Vance, who struggled during these years to write his own fiction and who began to look to television to earn a living, functioned effectively as one of the editors of discovery. Gore found him pleasant, amiable. Olive-skinned, Syrian-looking in background, Vance was the son of journalists: his mother had been a popular novelist and then owned a small rural newspaper. He and Tina had married in 1946, in their early twenties, gone to Bowdoin College, then in 1950 moved to New York, where Vance, who had published a first novel based on his war experiences, was to take his turn at the literary wheel of fame and fortune. Tina was to support them, which she did with a job at Woman’s Day magazine. By late 1952 Gore and the Bourjailys were good friends.

  Louis Auchincloss came to the revels; soon the two semi-cousins were companionable both in New York and at Edgewater. Tall, dark-haired, craggy-featured but handsome, always well dressed, with a high-pitched voice whose accent was a mixture of Groton and Upper Manhattan, Auchincloss had decided to combine a legal with a literary career. The upper-class legal and social world was his subject. Gore soon began to use him as his lawyer. If you could not trust Cousin Louis, whom could you trust? Like Vidal, Auchincloss was a great admirer of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Gore immediately thought he was a good writer, an excellent human being. They both enjoyed occasionally gossiping about their shared world. Always ready to argue that every male was potentially homosexual, Gore would teasingly call Louis “Louise.” Their main subjects together were literature, history, and their own careers. Auchincloss was the conduit in the Bourjaily world to the Upper East Side, to occasional dinners and parties that he hosted and introductions that he made. For Auchincloss the Bourjailys were the conduit to Manhattan life below Fourteenth Street, to the l
ess refined but dynamically talented circle of mostly Greenwich Village people, one of whom was Norman Mailer, a swaggering, heavy-drinking young man from a Brooklyn-Jewish background. Handsomely rugged, short, somewhat thickly stolid, pugnaciously physical, with electrically bright blue eyes, Mailer had just published his second novel, the much-reviled, highly political Barbary Shore. He had hoped to duplicate the bestselling success of The Naked and the Dead, which he had published in 1948. Mailer, who seemed both by personality and conviction even more radical than he actually was, had the impression that Vidal was an elitist conservative. “In those days,” Mailer recalled, “before he became a liberal, Vidal was an archconservative, virtually a loyalist. He was well known for that.” Aggressively masculine, Mailer had no sympathy for homosexuals, and The City and the Pillar, as well as Vidal’s obvious attitudes in the public part of his private world, had made his interests well known to his friends and to New York literary society. Mailer flourished in a world in which conquests were everything, women and booze the drugs of choice. For those who were married, “everybody was switching partners,” Tina Bourjaily recalled. “That was the name of the game.” Actually, both Mailer and Vidal were sexual marauders, with only certain minor differences in taste to distinguish them. When they first met, in 1952, at a party at the lower—Fourth Avenue apartment of the actress Milly Brower, they were aware they had much in common, especially an extraordinarily high energy level, an ambitious competitiveness as writers, and the will to dominate circumstances and people. Both were fascinated by power, including their own. “He was a very good-looking young man,” Mailer recalled. “He came over and said, ‘Well, at last we meet!’ He had the same voice then that he has today…. He said, ‘Well, now, Mailer’—mind you, we’re the same age—‘How long did your grandparents live?’ ‘Well, they both died when they were sixty-nine.’ ‘Aha, I’ve got you then. My grandparents lived to a very ripe age. You know what that means?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘I’m going to outlive you. And because I’m going to outlive you I’m going to have the final say on both our careers.’ It was the same Gore even then.”

  Eager to get away from the cold Edgewater winter, Gore went to Key West in early January 1953 for almost three months, as he was to do for a shorter period in 1954, stopping in Washington to pick up his grandmother, who drove down with him. In South Carolina they stopped to visit some of Dot’s cousins. When she told him, “You mustn’t stir up more snakes than you can kill,” he asked her “if this was an old South Carolina saying. She said, ‘No, I think I just made it up.’” In Key West the sunny warmth pleased both of them. Since Dot did not care for Gore’s favorite, the Southernmost, they stayed at a place more attractive to her, almost as close to the beach, dining at the Tradewinds. “I am in the throes of losing weight on the beach at Key West,” he wrote to Arabel Porter, “small lumps of lard upon the sand to extend the image wilfully.” The topic and the theme were beginning to become a recurrent one, the natural tendency of his body to thicken around the middle, much as his grandfather Gore’s had, now regularly asserting itself against his thin frame. Only severe dieting helped. “I hope in a few weeks to be a slim golden youth again or at least a faintly decrepit facsimile. Let me know what goes on in New York.” He was at work on a new novel, to be called Messiah, and was planning the second of his Edgar Box mysteries. The tentative title was Kill Him in the Shell, to be set in East Hampton. He was also preparing an essay on the contemporary novel for New World Writing, a longer, more subtle version of the lecture he had honed over the years, to appear under the pseudonym Libra. He had no difficulty writing in his motel in the morning, enjoying the beach and good company for the rest of the day. Tennessee, recently returned from Rome, frequently met them at South Beach. “We made our way through sailors on the sand to a terraced restaurant where the Bird sat back in a chair, put his bare feet up on a railing, looked out at the bright blue sea, and, as he drank his first and only martini of the midday, said, with a great smile, ‘I like my life.’” While the early-retiring Dot slept, Gore, with Tennessee, Frankie, and other friends, enjoyed lively nights at the Key West bars.

  Generally there was no emotional price to pay for his sexual adventures. One of his Key West encounters, though, which took place in 1953 or 1954, was costly. Some months after leaving Florida, he was told by a woman he had known in Key West that he was the father of the child she was bearing. She asked him to pay for an abortion. The claim was credible enough for him to accept the likelihood that it was so. Worried, he confided in Tina Bourjaily. The woman, he told her, was a waitress whom “he’d had an affair with…. ‘We humped for two weeks … and Gore’s going to be a daddy.’ … It was a worry. He wasn’t being boastful at all. I thought he was anxious about what was going to happen. It wasn’t something that should happen. This was a real problem. Here he was having a heterosexual relationship, and it went bad.” In New York, anxious and distressed by what might happen, he asked Louis Auchincloss’s advice. “I was feeling a bit of strain and a bit lost about how you go about these things. I didn’t know what the repercussions were going to be.” Louis advised that he send an untraceable money order for the $780 for which he had been asked. He did. A local Key West doctor apparently performed the abortion, at least so Gore was told. With brutal animus, some Key West enemy made sure later that year that he heard a nasty ad hominem story. “It’s about the sickest story that I’ve ever heard. A faggot doctor-abortionist had a Christmas tree, and on it was a fetus and he said that’s Gore Vidal’s child.” There is no certainty there was any child at all. He may have been the victim of an extortion scheme. Or of a cruel practical joke or a combination of both. Whatever the reality, it was a painful experience that reinforced some long-standing attitudes. He had no doubt that he did not want to be a father. He had seen too much of bad parenting in his own life to take the risk of repeating what he had experienced with a child of his own. Also, the domestic arrangements required by the effort to be a responsible parent were inconsistent with the flexibility to travel for work and pleasure as he desired. He preferred to be mentor rather than parent, and when he sometimes referred to Howard as his child, it was in that sense—someone to whom he was teaching the manners and mores of the sophisticated world. The issue of metaphoric parenthood, however, became a concern and gradually a preoccupation, partly related to his role as a novelist-creator, later to be a central theme in Two Sisters and Burr.

  Through the Bourjailys, Gore met Francis Markoe, an elderly Yale-educated Francophile with a passion for Racine, amateur theatricals based on sixteenth-century masques, and young men. Markoe had an attractive house and guest cottage with a Chinese garden at Water Mill, near Southampton. He was “really a great old-fashioned queen,” Gore recalled, “very exuberant, an old-school Edwardian sort of style; he would go on about the king’s guardsmen.” The Bourjailys were Markoe’s guests for much of the summer. Gore, who had had lunch there in summer 1952, had invited Markoe to Edgewater, which he visited the next summer, driving up from Water Mill in his chauffeured car with his own guests, the Bourjailys and their infant daughter. Howard was there and some of Gore’s ballet friends. The Bourjailys recalled that Gore was very kind to their little girl. Vance remembered Markoe “being very excited to learn that I knew Gore and very eager to meet him…. Mr. Markoe … by being on the state parole board—he’d gotten all the prisoners when they came out of prison—and he liked them—he would pick somebody that he’d met from this group and offer him a job as a chauffeur or a houseboy. He got men that way. He had some money growing up that he’d run out of; then he married a wealthy older woman.”

  One afternoon at Edgewater in 1953, Markoe and the Bourjailys were visiting for the weekend. As they played croquet on the lawn sloping down to the river, Gore knocked Tina Bourjaily’s ball into a berry bush. “For a long time there was a thorn in my finger that never came out. He had forced my ball into the bush, and I had gone in after it…. He had no sympathy whatsoever for my ripped fing
er. I did get my ball back in play.” The visitors noticed that Edgewater was underfurnished. “It was elegant, except that you were waddling around in an unfurnished palazzo.” While they slept in the guest room in “a four-poster bed that belonged to Mrs. Astor,” the Bourjailys had the characteristic Edgewater experience of being shocked awake by the noise from the New York Central. At night Vance and Gore swam out to the island in the river. Tina and Frank Markoe sat on the lawn, talking. “We thought it would be fun to light little balls of newspaper for them to see, and we lit them all along the columns so that it was dazzling flame. It was very theatrical. We hoped that they could see it from the water. You couldn’t burn the place down. We were sitting there, and Mr. Markoe said to me, ‘There’s only one commandment I’ve never broken: I’ve always honored my mother and father.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, all those others!’” In a lighter key, Gore was working on his new Edgar Box mystery, with the revised title of Death Likes It Hot. Soon after Markoe’s Edgewater visit, Gore drove down to Water Mill for a weekend. The gardens were lovely, the house charming, the entrance hall decorated with a mural depicting naked men. Markoe put on two plays on the lawn, in both of which he performed, one a Racine drama, the other something Vance had written based on an idea as old as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that was again popular: visitors to earth from outer space. Gore complimented Markoe for his “startlingly excellent performance in Racine: I think it as good as the Comedie.” In Vance’s play “Mr. Markoe was a visitor from outer space wanting to blend into this strange little planet he’d landed in. He thought the appropriate dress for the part was a baseball umpire’s; that was his costume. I can’t remember what occurs in the play.” The Bourjailys were delighted to see Gore again. Conservative communities, Southampton and East Hampton were still almost exclusively a combination of summer enclaves for wealthy old East Coast families and quiet year-round working-class villages. The first early wave of artistic people had just begun to flow in. The Bourjailys had been pleased to have Adele and Norman Mailer’s company for some weeks at Markoe’s earlier in the summer, though much of Markoe’s high-social community had been scandalized. It seemed clear to Tina that Markoe “lusted after Gore like crazy, but I don’t think he ever got him. He was almost seventy at the time…. One day, when Gore was there, I went over to the house by mistake. Mr. Markoe was walking around in a short smock. He climbed up on a ladder, to get some china, I think. He didn’t have anything on under this short smock, so I said, ‘Excuse me!’ He was all visible. It was part of the show for Gore…. I think Gore was more amused than anything. It was kind of sweet and pathetic.”