Gore Vidal (112 page)

Though
Two Sisters, A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, A Memoir in the Form of a Novel
, had no place for Jimmie as a character, his singular evocation consorts effectively with the novel's underlying emphasis on doubling and twins. The complicated narrative has doubling, or at least dual
temporalities, built into its structure just as it has a brother/sister pair of twins and two twinlike but not actual twin sisters as a central part of a screenplay within the narrative. The overall narrator who exists “NOW” is a slightly fictionalized version of the author, as is the GV of “THEN,” whom we see mostly through the eyes of Eric Van Damm (who looks physically much like Jimmie Trimble), with whom GV “THEN” was in love as he was also in love with Eric's twin sister, Erica, and with whom he thinks (incorrectly, it turns out) he has fathered a child. The overall frame of the novel in the present of its beginning and end brings an Anaïs Nin—like character named Marietta Donegal to Rome to ask the fictionalized version of Gore Vidal if he will read and then help her to sell to Hollywood a screenplay that Eric wrote in 1948. Marietta, who had lived with GV in Paris for three months in 1948 and also had an affair with Eric, hopes to make a great deal of money from it. Actually, as the author and the reader soon discover, the screenplay,
Two Sisters from Ephesus
, which composes the middle third of the novel, is totally unsuitable for commercial production. Set in Greece in 356 B.C., it exists as a thematic analogue to the rest of the novel, a dramatization of the love/hate rivalry between two sisters that focuses on power, love, and art, represented by the sisters' half-brother, Herostratus, an ambitious, poetic fire-creator and -destroyer whose involvement with his sisters parallels GV's with Eric and Erica. The novel's two sisters from Ephesus purposely suggest Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Lee Bouvier Radziwill, a fascination with the Kennedy-Bouvier world that Louis Auchincloss, after he read
Two Sisters
, fervently hoped Gore had finally gotten out of his system. After
Washington, D.C
. and now
Two Sisters
, as well as his essays on the Kennedys, it seemed to Louis obsessively counterproductive. The Kennedy world, though, plays only a minor role in
Two Sisters
, and probably the general reader did not catch the allusions at all, though the reviewers and the literary/social gossip chamber certainly did. The novel as a whole is not about living people, except for the author himself, whose experiment with mixing fiction and nonfiction, made fashionable by his contemporaries, Mailer and Capote, had to do with his own effort to stretch his imaginative wings by trying something different, to explore his own artistic sources, and to try working through and celebrating the mirrorlike doublings of art and life.

Two Sisters
was neither a critical nor a commercial success, the first of his novels since the success of
Julian
not to make the bestseller list. Little,
Brown was less disappointed than the author, though both had seen the handwriting on the wall from the earliest stages of the book's production. In fact, Little, Brown simply discounted its losses, so Vidal surmised, as an inevitable cost of sustaining a desirable author on its list, and looked forward to a new contract with Vidal that would keep them together for future books. It was not aware that Jason Epstein had renewed his solicitations to tempt Gore to become his author at Random House, though Gore had not yet decided what to do.
Two Sisters
had its admirers, or at least fair attention from reviewers, many of whom thought it bold, experimental, effective in parts, but not sufficiently interesting or successful overall. The difficulty of relating the full-length screenplay embedded in the partly fictional, partly autobiographical narrative to the novel as a whole baffled many.

One of the art-life doubles of
Two Sisters
soon showed up in Europe, making her appearance in both dimensions. In
Two Sisters
, Anaïs Nin, as Marietta Donegal, is Vidal's slightly parodic version of the Anaïs he had known since 1945. In the early 1960s, like Marietta, she had tried to persuade him to produce, by which she meant finance, a script she had co-authored for which she had a French director who she hoped would make movies of all her novels. Gore had declined to help. Now, in mid-1970, she had another request to make. Still searching for literary vindication, she had begun in 1966 to publish edited versions of her diaries, the materials carefully selected to be as favorable to herself as possible. The three volumes that had appeared had helped reawaken and create an interest in her work. She had begun to become a cult figure of sorts. Her enthusiasts found her romantic subjectivity and her preoccupation with feminine sexuality compelling if not liberating. For the first time she had an audience, for her diaries more than for her fiction, especially in Europe. In Rome in 1970, soon after the publication of
Two Sisters
, Gore received a telegram from Anaïs. She needed his permission to include in volume four, covering the years 1944–47 and scheduled to appear in mid-1971, what she had written about him. At the bar of the familiar Pont Royal Hôtel in Paris, after examining the text she provided, he gave his permission to include everything except a few lines that mentioned a third party. Anaïs, who seemed as beautiful as ever, gave him a “
hard look
.” She had been told that Marietta Donegal had been based on her. Was that true? “‘I don't read that sort of book—but I was told it was a hideous caricature.” She seemed to accept Gore's explanation that the character's “philosophy,” not her personality or person, was loosely
based on hers. No reader, though, could have mistaken the numerous ways in which Marietta Donegal resembled Gore's view of Anaïs, and many reviewers had highlighted the identification. The rest of the portrait, he told her, was fiction. “She took that well enough. She was aware that we no longer felt the same way about things. ‘Anyway, you said—I was told—that I wrote well.'” If he had actually said that, he took it back in a review of volume four, “Taking a Grand Tour of Anaïs Nin's High Bohemia,” that he published in the
Los Angeles Times
in September 1971, an act of distancing probably intended to break forever whatever bond remained between them. The indirect hostility that had resulted in Marietta Donegal now became explicit, though, as often the case with Gore, it was accompanied by sound judgment and some retrospective tenderness. The diaries, he wrote, had promised that one day Anaïs would be established “as a great sensibility. Now here they are, and I am not so sure…. Not only does she write an inflated, oracular prose, but she is never able to get outside her characters” and unable to reveal their interiors. “Anaïs is dealing with actual people. Yet I would not recognize any of them (including myself) had she not carefully labeled each specimen…. I do not recognize Anaïs—or myself—in these bitter pages. Yet when I think of her and the splendid times we had so many years ago, I find myself smiling, recalling with pleasure her soft voice, her French accent, and the way she always said ‘yatch' instead of ‘yacht.' That makes up for a lot.” Furious, Anaïs felt that it ended everything, of which, anyway, there was little left. They never saw or spoke to each other again.

Another old friend, Paul Bowles, Gore had genuine affection for and no desire for distance from. He was happy to let their shared past stand. Bowles's differentness he respected, though it helped keep their meetings infrequent. At Christmas 1969 he and Howard, soon after a two-week trip to India—Gore's first to Asia or the Far East—went to Morocco, where they spent three days in Tangier and saw Bowles for dinner each night. Jane, who had been seriously ill for more than a decade and who was to have only three years more of life, was a long-term patient in a hospital in Spain. Bowles, now at work on his autobiography, had been spending part of each year in California, where Oliver Evans, teaching there himself, had arranged a position for him at California State University at Northridge. The rest of the time Bowles spent in Morocco, where his life had become a ritualized work schedule balanced by his love of North Africa and his addiction to kif.
The modest teaching salary far exceeded what he earned as a writer. “I had dinner with him,” Gore recalled, “the day before he went over to Northridge for his first class. He said, ‘What should I teach?' I said, ‘How do I know? I've never taught.' He said, ‘Well, I think I'm going to teach me. What do you think?' ‘Well, at least you know the subject.' And he taught himself. That's about all they ever got out of him. Bowles, Bowles, Bowles. He was probably a lot better subject than the ones they wanted him to teach.” At Paul's urging, Gore, who never smoked cigarettes and found that he could not inhale, tried the mild narcotic again and disliked it as much as ever. They still enjoyed one another's company, their differences mostly entertaining, a mutually playful respect that expressed itself, among other ways, in the nicknames they used in their correspondence by reversing the letters of their names. Gore was “Erog,” Paul “Luap.” Bowles, who immediately before Gore's arrival had read the Buckley—Vidal
Esquire
articles, enjoyed being brought up to date, something difficult to be in isolated Morocco. When a young American poet and Bowles admirer, Dan Halpern, came by, Vidal submitted to a lengthy interview for
Antaeus
, a magazine that Halpern, encouraged by Bowles, was about to start. The names of friends from their New York world of the 1940s and '50s came up in their dinnertime conversations. The next summer, when Gore found a blank piece of “John Treville Latouche” stationery, which gave him a start, he used it to write a note to Bowles, who thought for a moment that he was being written to by a ghost. With Howard they took a drive to Bowles's favorite point from which to view the Mediterranean, Gibraltar visible to the north. Standing there, Bowles remarked that he felt he was at the center of the world. In North Africa, Vidal felt displaced, off-center. His omphalos was at Delphi.

Another friend now became an erratic enemy. Observing Mailer in companionable conversation with Buckley at the convention in Chicago, Vidal had felt that poor recompense for the hospitality he had extended at Edgewater and his generally kind words about Mailer as a writer. He thought less of Mailer's prose of recent years: it seemed more distended, exaggerated, and Lawrencian in its celebration of male orgasmic power. Mailer of course had not gone over to the enemy ideologically, but as two miscast if not ludicrous minor-party candidates for mayor of New York, Mailer may have felt he and Buckley might talk constructively together. “At that time,” Mailer recalls, he was having “a rapprochement with Buckley and the conservatives. I was trying to have some sort of better relationship
with Buckley. The feud started in 1968 when Gore saw me at Chicago talking with Buckley. He must have seen that as some disloyalty or even betrayal. He seemed to me to be piqued by that, and our relationship was never the same thereafter. From that time on, Gore began to make remarks against my writings.” In Vidal's view, Mailer had been “kissing Buckley's ass.” In Mailer's view, Buckley had outdebated Vidal on the ABC news segments. That Buckley had called Vidal a “queer” on national television might not have disturbed Mailer, whose own homophobia was at least equal to Buckley's. Later, when Buckley hired Mailer's cousin, Charles Rembar, to represent him in his libel suit against Vidal and
Esquire
, Gore saw that as the end of what had been a competitive but still respectful relationship. It was one thing to be literary rivals, quite another for Mailer to work actively to damage him. It seemed beyond the pale for someone who represented himself as a political radical, even a socialist, to ally himself with Buckley. Mailer's antagonism, though, was not ideological; it was personal. Between the end of the 1968 convention and the Rembar recommendation in late 1971, Vidal had driven, Mailer felt, a stake into his heart. In July 1971 he had published in
The New York Review of Books
an article, “In Another Country,” that covered a number of recent works on the subject of women's liberation, one of them Mailer's article in
Harper's
with the same title as his extended book version of the next year,
The Prisoner of Sex
. Vidal thought Mailer's attitude toward women reprehensible: they were breeding machines who existed to be the fruitful receptacle of the male's sacred obligation, through the mystery of sexual intercourse, to conceive children. “The Patriarchalists have been conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons,” Vidal had written, “at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed…. There has been from Henry Miller to Norman Mailer to Charles Manson a logical progression.” In addition, Mailer's argument that anything that interfered with conception was evil had its blatant homophobic inferences, which Vidal made explicit in his essay. Mailer's argument “boils down to the following points. Masturbation is bad and so is contraception because the whole point to sex between man and woman is conception…. He links homosexuality with evil. The man who gives in to his homosexual drives is consorting with the enemy,” an “exemplification of moral weakness.” Like an Old Testament prophet, the supposedly freethinking and politically radical Mailer had chosen to define himself as the voice of the thundering injunction “Thou shalt not spill thy seed upon the
ground.” The only place to spill it was into a woman, whether she wanted to receive it or not. Henry Miller depicted women as sexual objects. Mailer claimed they were vessels for fertilization, that women's wombs belonged to men. Manson enslaved and killed female disciples and enemies, his recent semi-random murder of a movie star slashed into the national consciousness as an example of antifemale brutality. Different as Miller, Mailer, and Manson were, Vidal thought it fair to say, in a polemical essay and in response to Mailer's views, that there was a logical progression from one to the other. He did not mean that either Miller or Mailer, as individuals, would eventually become Mansons. He did mean that the attitudes of Miller and Mailer contributed to the cultural groundwork that helped Manson come into existence.