Gore Vidal (103 page)

As Vidal reworked his first draft at the beginning of June, war broke out in the Middle East. The British novelist Elizabeth Bowen stopped by at the Via Di Torre Argentina to visit. “She was writing
Eva Trout
, which proved to be her last novel, and I was working on
Myra
, and we were talking about the war. I remember sitting there, very friendly on the sofa, and I said, ‘Well, this war could escalate and be nuclear and it could be the end of everything.' She said, ‘Yes, I've considered that. I only hope they wait until I finish my new book. I'm so pleased with it.' I said, ‘That's exactly my feeling. I don't care what they do after the war. I want to finish the book.'” With Rome blazing in the July sun, he finished
Myra
and mailed it to Little, Brown, where he expected that Arthur Thornhill, who had objected to the depiction in
Washington, D.C
., of two boys masturbating, would find it offensive and that Ned Bradford would immediately see its value. He was not concerned, though, that Thornhill's inhibitions would influence his business judgment. He believed he had written a work of both literary distinction and commercial value, especially if its sales were not undermined by the usual narrow-minded, moralistic newspaper reviewers whose standard of “common decency” was one of the philistine mentalities
that
Myra
existed to challenge. Still, he realized that
Myra
demanded an imaginative engagement and a suspension of middle-class prohibitions that might damage its sales. He had in mind suggesting to Little, Brown that they not send out review copies at all but have the book suddenly appear in bookstores with a publisher-created and -driven publicity campaign that would preempt any damage reviews might do. To Fred Dupee, for whom bestsellerdom was suspect, he wrote that “
it is really very
extraordinary and will save me from becoming a Mary [McCarthy] novelist bestseller-fate. I seem to have spent my life in getting into categories which, with some ingenuity, I get out of.” Of course, both Little, Brown and
Myra's
author preferred that it sell every bit as well as
Julian
and
Washington, D.C
. With Dupee he promoted a consanguinity of literary sensibilities. With Little, Brown he wanted a bestseller. “I think the book absolutely riotously funny,” he wrote to Bradford. “But it will be a bit tough to sell to the middle aged ladies who buy novels. That's why I hope the store clerks are well bred and the price sufficiently low to appeal to the young who don't ordinarily buy hardcover books, and men who don't either. If the paperback people are not afraid of censorship, I think we can extract a pleasant fortune from them.”

At the end of July he sent the revised manuscript to Christopher Isherwood, who immediately telegraphed back, “I AM HONORED AND DELIGHTED TO HAVE ANY BOOK OF YOURS DEDICATED TO ME.”
Myra
, among other things, continued the discussion on sex and gender the two writers had begun in 1947. Isherwood was the appropriate dedicatee. Whatever their differences about the degree to which ideology and political action should influence aesthetic matters, it was a subject essentially embedded in both their sensibilities. In August, having read
Myra
twice, Isherwood expressed his total admiration. “
In my opinion it's
your very best satirical work. It's wildly funny and wildly sensible. Even when I was laughing most I was overcome by your wisdom and seriousness.” As Vidal had reason to know, Isherwood rarely gave compliments. But he did share perceptions, one of which Vidal probably both by nature and by inclination (if nature ever succumbed) had nothing to say about, to himself or anyone else. And even the usually frank, self-confident Isherwood provided a hesitant, qualifying, perhaps even self-protective clause. “What makes the book so truly remarkable is that—I know I'm not going to be able to express this as well as I should like, especially in the haste of letter-writing—behind the apparently
fantastic doings and behaviour of Myra-Myron there is an entirely realistic and very subtle psychological self-portrait. The doings and the behaviour are seen, by the time one has finished the book, to be a symbolic play or ballet.” If it was a point the author preferred not to traffic with, it was an important key to the power of the novel that none of the reviewers, even those who had high praise, were to perceive. Beyond the fantasy, the realities the novel grapples with are brilliantly defined.

As soon as the manuscript was in the mail to Little, Brown, Gore and Howard drove northward to Milan, then through the Black Forest—which he had never seen before, though he had written about it in
Julian
(and gotten it wrong, he now realized)—“then by slow degrees to Paris, destroying the liver enroute,” then across to London to participate in publicity, mainly television appearances, for the publication of the British edition of
Washington, D.C
. To his surprise, the British reviews were uniformly better than the American. It soon appeared on British bestseller lists, readers eager to have what appeared to be the inside story of Washington life and American politicians. “Still a good deal of, oh, people can't be that bad!,” he reported to his father. “To which I respond that I regard my characters as, generally, more good than bad, pointing out that it was fate not I who created LBJ, a figure far more lurid than anything a novelist would be allowed to get away with on the page.” Artistic license seemed impossible in what was now becoming, artistically and politically, a licenseless world. The escalation of the war in Vietnam and Johnson's obsession with a disastrous policy sickened Gore. The positive letters he had received in response to his television attacks on the President gave him hope that perhaps the American people had more sense than they were credited with. “
I have never in my life
had such a strange sensation of being trapped in a nightmare and knowing that there is nothing one can do but, in the dream of falling, wait for the crash. I suspect it is all biological; too many people—war and famine. We have the second; the first approaches.” It was the front-page, real-life version of what
Myra-Myron
dramatized.

From London he returned to Rome, the depressing Aegean rains now almost evaporated from memory, for two memorable late-summer holiday excursions. Howard did not accompany him for either, which was often the case when Gore did high-social things of the sort he had begun to do regularly in Rome with the Crespis and Pecci-Blunts, Italian and Anglo-Italian aristocratic families who eagerly solicited him to have a “palace life.”
Beginning in 1966 he had more invitations than he had time or desire to accept. They usually did not include Howard, which neither of them corrected or opposed. It was easier that way, and behind Howard's response was the thought that he might not or would not feel comfortable with such people anyway. If it was the path of least resistance, at least there was little tension about it between them. The early-August quietness in Rome had its self-generated counterpoint, as if no sooner had Gore finished one flurry of activity than he experienced a combination of emptiness and eagerness to be busy at something again. Success rarely bred self-imitation. By personality he desired variety, and boredom frequently seemed an evil to be fled from or worked out of at almost any cost. “I'm now happily in Rome,” he told Nini, “heavily air-conditioned, writing some pieces to go into the next book of essays. If only some kind muse would say, stop, please. You don't need to write any more. Such relief.” The alternative to writing, always available in his thoughts, was, of course, politics. It regularly came to mind, even if its focus had an impracticality evident even to him. As soon as he returned to Rome, he confessed to his father, whom he urged to visit them at the new apartment, “
I am becoming restless
, bored with being (as of last Sunday's
Times
) the #2 bestseller [with
Washington, D.C.]
. Perhaps I should go into the N.H. Primary! Life is so short, temptation so great, satiety so swiftly arrived at.” His two late-summer holidays dramatized other people's satiety, or at least how they overfilled their own personal worlds. With Diana Phipps, whom he saw almost whenever he visited London, he went to Sardinia on a ten-day holiday with British royalty. Through Judy Montagu he had been readily accepted into Princess Margaret's Anglo-Italian circle, the London end of which Diana Phipps had become a part of. The young girl he had met with her parents at “Aunt Mona's” New York mansion just as she was entering adolescence had become an attractive, full-figured, dark-haired young widow with a daughter, who, despite working as an interior decorator to provide income, managed to live a glamorous life with no shortage of eager companions and ready entrée into London society. She entertained regularly with her mother, the Countess Sternberg, now widowed, who lived with her. She bore her own aristocratic background and her personal impressiveness with dignity and freedom. In London she was someone desired and desirable, “stunningly beautiful, dark haired, with a graceful figure, long arms,” as her friend, the writer Antonia Fraser, recalled. Diana introduced Antonia to Gore, the start of another, though less
intense, friendship. Ten years younger than Gore, Diana was one of the most attractive women he knew, and she soon became one of the four or five women in his life to whom he felt an attraction that rose to the level of a serious, even if mostly speculative, interest.

At first they had agreed to spend time together in August at a house in Salzburg that Diana planned to rent. When she made other travel plans, that fell through, but in late August, when she took a house for herself and her daughter on the Costa Esmeralda in Sardinia, next door to where Princess Margaret and her husband were staying, Gore joined her for ten days. Sardinia he thought a ghastly island, “a terrible place, made worse by the quarreling Snowdons. On the evening of the princess's thirty-seventh birthday she and Tony had a splendid row,” he wrote to his father. “They're both nice separately but together hell.” The four of them would go out to dinner every night. “Like so many good-looking women, Princess Margaret likes plain-looking women like Judy,” he remarked years later. “Tony was flipping lighted cigarette butts [at Margaret] at a nightclub on her birthday. Then he got up to dance with Diana. Margaret said, ‘Let's dance.' I said, ‘I don't dance.' Finally, I paid the bill, and Diana … swept a curtsy such as you've never seen since Marie Antoinette and marched out without a word. The next day we went to lunch with Annie Fleming, a witty, rather nasty woman. Political hostess. Widow of Ian Fleming. Before that Lady Rothermere. At lunch was Princess Margaret. She was in good form. She said, ‘I want to apologize to you for our behavior last night. It was intolerable, and I've been trying to write a letter of apology all day. Thank God we meet at lunch and I can say it.' She's well brought up.” Diana herself he thought “in good form.” But, shortly afterward, reading Saint-Simon, he thought that only the French master of social cynicism could have done the royal bickering justice.

In early September, in Venice for a short holiday, he attended a masked ball where he had a wittily acerbic exchange with one of America's peculiar variants on its own royalty, Clare Boothe Luce, who had been ambassador to Italy and whom Gore had known over the years through the Auchincloss connection with Henry Luce. The overheard conversation in 1942 in which Luce had proposed to Gore's mother had stayed in his mind, an ironic subtext to his awareness of Clare's successful careers as playwright, journalist, and diplomat, and the advantages of her husband's power. “I said,” he wrote to his father, “
I felt novels were finished
. She said, ‘Yes, but
there's still a kind of fiction people love!' ‘Yes,' I said,
‘Time
magazine.' ‘No,' she said, ‘I meant fiction.' ‘I know,' I said, ‘I meant
Time.'
‘Don't be naughty,' she said, ‘I meant detective stories.' Then she insisted we be photographed together in the room where Browning died.” Venice itself, though, seemed perfect, a city that transcended human affectations. “So it goes,” he wrote from both sides of the ironic divide to Fred Dupee, who, like Gore, would have felt the glamour and at the same time mocked himself for having felt it. “So it goes. A summer of Capri,” where he had visited Eddie and Mona, who at seventy-six still seemed “extraordinarily beautiful…. Sardinia, Venice, the life of the beautiful people, almost as tiring as Red Hook-Rhinebeck.”

While the perfections of Venice occupied his eyes, his mind was partly on
Myra
. To Fred he sent a postcard the illustration of which was Carpaccio's painting of St. Jerome leading a lion into a monastery, the monks fleeing in terror. “Old Gore leading
Myra Breckinridge
into the literary arena.” It seemed unlikely that many readers would flee in terror, and many might buy the novel anyway, though Little, Brown and he did anticipate moral disapproval from certain quarters and legal pressure from others. Censorship would not be an issue in the United States, where
Myra
seemed certain to meet the legal standard that judged a work in its entirety. Arthur Thornhill, encouraged by Ned Bradford, who thought
Myra
brilliant and funny, quickly overcame his squeamishness about associating Little, Brown with a novel some would define as pornographic. Brilliant at his business, he was soon to sell Little, Brown to Time Warner, which allowed Bradford, who had an interest in the sale, to write good-humoredly to Gore “
from one millionaire
to another.” Britain was another matter entirely. Some of the monks did flee in terror. Gore's ongoing London publisher, Heinemann, declined to publish
Myra
, mostly because it feared that an association with the book would affect Heinemann's reputation in a way that would damage sales. A smaller but less timid publisher, Anthony Blond, stepped in, provided that Gore would respond satisfactorily to pages of objections raised by its own lawyers, some of which had to do with obscenity, some with libel. Under pressure from an increasingly nervous Blond, Vidal made numerous changes to minimize the possibility of the government prosecuting publisher and author for obscenity. He resented the attempts at what he felt to be censorship, though he uneasily cooperated, to his lasting regret. The issue of libel was resolved quickly with Little, Brown via a request that Gore sign a
statement holding the author entirely responsible if he and Little, Brown should be sued. Reasonably confident that America's libertarian libel laws, especially in regard to public figures, made a suit unlikely, Gore agreed. Britain's much narrower libel laws presented a different challenge. They regularly forced publishers into nervous self-censorship whenever manuscripts referred to living people. Blond feared that he would be sued. Undercapitalized, he might be driven into bankruptcy by legal fees even if he successfully defended himself. Blond's lawyer's objections, though, were comic. Would the publisher not be vulnerable to be sued for libel by Ava Gardner since Myra fantasizes having an affair with her? Apparently the lawyer did not know that Ava Gardner existed to be fantasized about. Otherwise, she and her Hollywood studios would soon be out of business. Most of the objections were of this sort. A few, though, had enough surface plausibility for Gore to agree to make some minor alterations that satisfied the publisher. Apparently the changes as a whole did not satisfy W. H. Smith, Britain's largest bookseller, which refused to sell
Myra
except on special order. Legal censorship still existed, though by 1968, the year also of John Updike's
Couples
and one year before Philip Roth's
Portnoy's Complaint
, larger changes were occurring. In distant Australia,
Myra
itself became the text of a court case resulting in a ruling that allowed Australian readers to determine what books they would read. Extralegal voluntary moral censorship, like W. H. Smith's, often in the form of economic pressure, increasingly became the major weapon of those who believed that elite ethical police should make decisions about what books could be available to the public.