Gore Vidal (100 page)

The lovely summer had actually ended on a bleak, more sobering note
than the posturing of poets, the unexpected death of Harold Franklin in New York. Franklin, who had earned Gore's respect and affection and whom he credited largely for the television career that had saved him from semi-penury in the early 1950s, had “died of a thrombosis three weeks before he was going to be married for the third time,” Gore told his father. “Perhaps he was lucky. But one misses him.” It took Gore a while to shake “the gloomy news.” With Franklin's death he no longer had an agent for American television and movie work, though at least for the time being that did not seem a liability. Actually, the management of the William Morris Agency assumed that someone there would take over from Franklin, especially since their senior literary agent, Helen Strauss, had persuaded the reluctant author to allow her to do the three-book contract he had signed with Little, Brown in December 1962, the first of which had been
Julian
, the second to be
Washington, D.C
. The third was “a novel on a subject to be mutually agreed upon.” An aggressive woman who noticeably enjoyed her power and the perquisites of her job—and whom Herman Gollob, who had worked for her at the William Morris Agency, described as “the Queen Elizabeth of agents”—Strauss, Gore felt, had used her harsh charm to badger him into accepting her offices. He had agreed mostly because it was the inattentive path of least resistance, partly to do her a favor. Since Little, Brown already was his publisher and Gore essentially dictated the financial terms, Strauss had to attend only to contractual paperwork.

Their residence in Paris in spring 1965 made clear to both Howard and Gore how much more they preferred Rome. Howard had found Paris life pleasant, but in Rome he had more friends and a settled domestic routine. Nightlife and cruising were easier, more casual there, and there were “the beautiful Italian boys,” to one of whom Howard had the year before developed an attachment and helped get to England and America. When Dick Poirier visited at Via Giulia and Via de S. Elena, he especially enjoyed Howard's company, his slangy language and good humor. “Some of those idioms in Gore's more comic novels are ones that he could easily have learned from Howard. Howard exposes himself to young people of a certain class who use these sort of raunchy, funny, comic slang terms which Gore was exposed to, I believe, through Howard.” In Rome, Poirier especially enjoyed cruising with him. “That's the way gay life was in Italy in those days. It was very seductive. It was sort of older to younger brother, and in the sixties it still wasn't that easy for a young Italian guy to sleep with a
woman, a young girl. He may have wanted to get married but didn't have much money. This sex for money and favors was sort of a common thing to do…. And you'd meet very, very sweet boys. The other advantage of it was that you didn't need to cruise, that is, you knew where these guys were and you got to know them and they'd introduce you to others, so you'd have a whole social life. That was perfect for Gore, and he liked the types, the Italian boys who were available, as I did. In a sense, whenever we went out, we'd be looking at good-looking people…. In Rome it was the practice to take the boys back to the apartment. He'd pay them and give them clothes. They were very sweet. A few times I'd be sitting out in the front room with Howard. Gore would come in with someone and introduce him. One time he was passing through with someone I had met before and said to me, ‘Say good-bye to Antonio.'”

Soon most of their Roman hellos and good-byes were taking place in a new, more glamorous flat. The Via Giulia duplex apartment had been attractive, but the flat at Via de S. Elena was only satisfactory, a two-bedroom, triangular-shaped, third-floor walk-up of no distinction though pleasantly decorated, on a street that seemed increasingly noisy, subleased for six months at a price for which Howard soon realized they could get an annual unfurnished rental. In May, while walking Billy on the far side of the Corso Victor Emanuele not far from Via de S. Elena, Howard turned down the Via Di Torre Argentina in the direction of the Pantheon. The landlady of the large corner building, number 21, was putting up a “for rent” sign. A seventeenth-century palazzo, its gray stone and dirty yellow-tinted plaster exterior, as with many Roman buildings, had been darkened by age, neglect, and pollution. Instead of continuing on his walk, Howard stopped to inquire about the apartment. “Gore says it was really the dog who found it, because he led me right there,” Howard recalled, “which he did. He was tyrannical. I went up and looked at this apartment and couldn't believe my eyes. We were paying $350 a month for the three months on the sublease, and the apartment on the Via Di Torre Argentina was a hundred dollars a month, or something like that, for twelve months.” Actually, the rent in lire turned out to be about $270 a month. Beyond the porter's station was a grand staircase and an archaic semi-open iron elevator shaft rising to the sixth-floor penthouse. “As soon as the dog walked into the apartment that first time, he lifted up his leg and pissed. ‘This is my territory.'” When Howard saw the three large bedrooms, the small servant's room, the salon, the dining room,
and the twelve-foot-wide and sixty-foot-long terrace on two sides, looking west and northeast, with magnificent views of Roman rooftops and church domes, he agreed with Billy. So too did Gore. Directly below, where Corso Victor Emanuele and Via Di Torre Argentina met, heavy traffic raced and swerved. The noise would be a problem, but it was a steady, distant hum, and they were high enough so that traffic fumes might not reach them. Across the Corso were the ruins of the Temple Republica. The horizon on two sides was bright with rooftop gardens, the higher sight line an extended sweep of the old city extending toward the Tiber and the hills beyond, “
a fine if jumbled
view of golden buildings, one twisted tower (Borromini's St. Ivo), the green Gianicolo and a dozen domes, the nearest Sant' Andrea della Valle (
Tosca
, Act One), the farthest St. Peter's like a gray-ridged skull.” It was not to be resisted. By late May, Howard was busy furnishing the apartment with tables, mirrors, and chairs from Roman antique shops. “Howard is fixing it up and it should be splendid,” Gore wrote to his half-sister, Nini. Soon the terrace was green and bright with potted plants. Gore built a trellis for vines. “The new place is already livable and with the plants on the terrace looks like a house in the country,” he told his father, whom he urged to visit. “Furnishing a flat here is not unlike writing
Ben-Hur
, only less aesthetic.” Howard had a fine time doing most of the work. A designer friend decorated the studio and living room. Since live-in help was cheap, they found a man to occupy the servant's bedroom in the darker back of the apartment, someone to look after things, especially to water plants when they would be gone. In June they moved in. Gore was pleased and excited. “We're in the new flat,” he told Fred Dupee, “a penthouse on a crumbling palazzo facing Largo Argentina with two huge terraces and a total view of the city…. Life above the Largo is splendid; flowers blooming, bougainvillea splendid.”

Unexpectedly, he had a Roman home. There had never been any intention on either of their parts to settle there permanently. It was simply a place to visit for extended periods, for as long as three to six months a year. Roman fever had possessed him for decades; living there was cheap, the food superb. Italian casualness about consensual sex made that pleasure comfortably available. They did not have to be looking nervously over their shoulders for the puritan gestapo. The loss of the election in 1960, the disaffiliation from the Kennedys in 1961 and 1963 made a holiday from America desirable. Gore still could keep his hand in American politics as a
commentator from abroad, and his interest in as well as repulsion from America's mid-decade nightmare in Vietnam fueled both his sense of the advantage of being at a Roman distance and his compelling interest in being involved. As he worked on
Washington, D.C
., he felt that his residence on a Roman street actually helped clarify his view of Washington. He had no intention, though, of being an expatriate. “Rome? Why Rome? That decision wasn't made,” Howard felt, “and I'm never allowed to make those decisions except if I want to. Sometimes it's just easier to follow. I don't know why I went along. I guess I'm passive. As long as I had my New York life part of the year, I'd be happy to spend three months in Rome in my own apartment. It wasn't seen as a permanent move. As Gore pointed out, what's the difference between having a house in the Hamptons and having an apartment in Rome? It's just one flight. No, Gore didn't have in mind the possibility of permanent residence.” But taking and furnishing the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment was significantly different from previous subleases. The material difference was that they could stay as long as they liked whenever they liked in a place whose furnishings were associated with choices they had made. For Gore the difference was not determinative, but it was unself-consciously compelling. He had distanced himself physically and emotionally from Edgewater. Though the attachment was still strong, the notion of selling it became less forbidding; he had established an alternative. For someone who had felt homeless through much of his earlier life, the drive to create a home for himself was always powerful. Suddenly now, in Rome, he was worrying about whether or not the plants on the terrace would be properly watered when he was gone.

Working through the summer of 1966 on
Washington, D.C
., he slowly brought the book to a close. “
Not since Tolstoi
and
Anna Karenina
has a writer so much hated his book while doing it. Let us hope the issue is as happy for me as it was for him,” he wrote to a young academic who had sent a list of questions in preparation for writing a book about him. In mid-September he “put the date on top with relief: the novel is finished or at least the last chapter is finally written and the rest of it is in fifth and penultimate draft. Four years since I started work, and I must say I would gladly have burned the whole thing a dozen times. Others can now do it for me.” He felt less happy with the manuscript than he had with
Julian
. “I have never had
such a difficult time,” he confessed to Nini, “shuffling and re-shuffling, unable to say precisely what I mean yet unable to capture that tiresome ambivalence which keeps me from being one of those great vivid
definite
figures, like Norman or even Saul.” He expected it would “be rather worse reviewed than usual. New Frontiers men will be upset; and of course it is ‘clinical.'” He had meant
Washington, D.C
. as a meditation on the passage of time and the changes that had characterized post-World War II American public life. “I'm afraid,” he told Nini, “that where I thought I would be at my best and most lucid I've simply bungled the job … that is, philosophically, the catching of the wheel as it turns in the night, the sense of a republic becoming an empire, the loss of the private conscience which so entirely informed a TPG or an Eleanor Roosevelt and does not, as far as I can see in these swinging times, obtain for anyone including myself except upon desperate occasions when one must be, if not right, good, and define the term. Not easy. But the book reads rather well; my dread narrative gift sweeps all, alas, before it. I think if I knew the subject less well I might have imagined it better. You'll be amused to find that the political tone is downright reactionary when not ‘pragmatic' as they used to say at Camelot. But we are all prisoners to our age and the best of us never sees more than a bit of sky over the wall.”

Its strong autobiographical base reverberated with his own feelings while he was conceiving and writing the novel. The elderly Senator Burden Day and the Blaise Sanford family (Blaise, his daughter Enid, and son Peter) are the most important characters in
Washington, D.C
. The setting is the capital of the country for the ten-year-or-so period that surrounds World War II. Franklin Roosevelt, Burden's political nemesis (as he was Senator Gore's), is a hovering, pervasive shadow as well as a real presence. Burden's story is one of personal and political defeat. His defeat is also, secondarily, at the hands of the new generation, represented by his assistant and then replacement, Clay Overbury, a John F. Kennedy figure. It is clear that Overbury will be not only senator but President. Blaise becomes Overbury's intimate ally and supporter; and not because Overbury has become his son-in-law, a marriage he initially opposes. Indeed, his willful, promiscuous, and explosive daughter, Enid, Overbury's wife, is institutionalized by Sanford and Overbury to advance Overbury's career. Blaise's son, Peter, Enid's sister, whose growth and education into manhood and political awareness comprise one of the important strands of the novel, cannot save
her, though he can save himself by becoming independent of his father and molding his literary and moral sensibility into a post-World War II career that has at least the possibility of major accomplishment in the next generation. Nina, who was out of Gore's life, was not out of his thoughts. In the character of Enid, she is central to the novel. Senator Gore and Gore family history weave through the plot. Senator Day lives at a recognizable version of the Gores' Rock Creek Park house. Laurel House is clearly Merrywood. Elements of prominent Washington people and places appear, most of them modestly disguised, all subordinated to the novelist's imaginative overdrive as he makes fictional wholes out of real fragments. Historical figures appear directly or indirectly, a development of what he had first done in
Julian
, Vidal's own characteristic variations on the traditional genre of the historical novel taking shape. The influence of Thomas Mann is in the deep background; Henry Adams's Washington novel,
Democracy
, and Adams's view of America's political leaders pervade the foreground. Adams's anti-Semitism, still vigorously alive in 1930s Washington,
Washington, D.C
. exposes and condemns. In the favorable depiction of the Jewish character Irene Bloch, an ambitious hostess based on a well-known socialite of his Washington world, Vidal's detestation of prejudice and injustice has some of the force of personal experience, even if obtained through various substitutes, especially Howard. “My novel presents an accurate view of the anti-Semitism of that society and how Irene, as I call her, triumphs in the book,” Vidal commented, “and how Gwen [Cafritz] is Irene in life, and Gwen loved it.” The depiction of widespread Washington anti-Semitism would disturb some readers, especially reviewers who preferred to think that such sentiments did not exist in the nation's capital.