Gore Vidal (119 page)

By early 1974 Jason and Jim Silberman, a taciturn, somewhat shy but sharp editor at Random House, essentially in agreement with Jason, had responded to
Myron
. Unethusiastic, Jason raised questions about plot and pace, particularly that Myra makes her appearance as the other (and more interesting) half of Myron's personality later in the novel than he thought effective. “I couldn't figure out the time sequence,” Gore later wrote to a friend. “My publisher thought the beginning unclear and I kept bring[ing] Myra closer and closer to page one when her original delayed entrance was, to me, gorgeous.” Jason desired more narrative clarity and directness. Gore responded with some conciliatory revision. He soon saw that Jason's dissatisfaction with the novel's mechanics reflected his overall dislike of the genre, which included
Myra Breckinridge
. He wanted another
Burr
. Instead he got what he began to refer to as one of Gore's “Chinese boxes.” Gore's pattern would be to alternate a historical novel with an invention. “We understood this more or less,” Jason recalled. “It seemed Okay.
Myron
was the first one.” But it was just barely okay. Both editor and publishing house knew that the sales for the historical novels would be much greater than for the inventions, though the issue was less sales than temperamental and aesthetic disjunction. As an editor Epstein found it almost impossible to be soothingly supportive.

I can't pretend I like something if I don't like it, and he knew that I felt that way especially about those strange little books. All of them. I just didn't like them…. As an undergraduate I once went to the Chinese opera down here on Chatham Square. I wanted to see what it was. It was so disorienting. First of all, the houselights are on all through the opera. Old Chinese men are sitting around eating oranges, throwing the peels around, paying hardly any attention to what's going on on the stage. The stage is occupied by these people in fantastic costumes shrieking at the top of their lungs incomprehensibly. Men in the orchestra are dressed like the audience and playing
funny-looking violins, squeaking away. It was the strangest experience. Then one of them would topple over on the stage, dead. The prop man, also dressed like someone in the audience, would come out and put a pillow under his head. It was very confusing to me. I'm not good at being shocked. I remember after that I was very upset for three or four days. I couldn't pull myself together. I felt schizzy.

Clearly he could not be an enthusiastic editor for novels one of whose purposes was to shock through aesthetic and moral transgressions. Gore knew how Jason felt about the book. Jason knew that Gore knew. Both had tacitly agreed to accept that as a given and proceed with their personal and professional relationship. For the time being they were contractually bound, though both would find it increasingly difficult to sustain personal harmony within professional dissonance. At best, they assumed, Gore's historical novels would keep them together as editor and author; the inventions would not drive them apart. In March 1974, along with Silberman, a more restrained reveler than his companions, they undertook another eating tour, partly in Gore's mind a celebration of the completion of
Myron
, scheduled for publication late in the year. They concentrated on food, not literature. With relentless aggressiveness, they ate and drank their way across Bordeaux. Jason apparently could consume more food, Gore more alcohol, though both pushed their gourmet adventures into New York publishing-world mythology. Neither accepted even the idea of restraint other than the physical impossibility of having more. Gore dealt with the added pounds by exercise and crash diets either at home or at spas. As to the alcohol, his daily regimen normally, in Rome and at Ravello, included wine and drinks from the later afternoon on. His tolerance was high. “I never saw anybody drink as much as Gore in my life, ever,” Jason later recalled. “We used to go on these gluttonous trips around the south of France. We'd hire a car with a driver because neither one of us could be trusted to drive. Usually just the two of us. Must have been about a half dozen of such trips. Maybe four times. One night we were at Rouen and we'd had a lot to drink. I could not keep my eyes open. I didn't know which way I was walking. At the end of dinner we walked upstairs. Gore had a bottle of Dom Perignon in his hand. He was going to finish it.” But Jason never once saw him drunk. Howard thought “Jason and Gore were pigs. You can quote me. Pigs! And why
wasn't Barbara on the trips? There are some people who know a thing or two.” Gore preferred to be called a glutton. “We were not eating everything in sight, but we were eating great meals.”

To Epstein, Gore's inventions seemed drunken, chaotic, out of control. In fact, they were highly crafted, tightly structured narratives whose antirealistic imaginative flights expressed the same passions and ideas that ran through his essays and, to some extent, also the historical novels. At the beginning of
Myron
the bewildered main character finds himself suddenly in a totally strange, surreal time and place that he has entered by being pushed (by the not fully repressed Myra within him) through the screen of his television set from his San Fernando Valley home in the year 1964 onto the Hollywood set of a movie that is being filmed in 1948. Myra now attempts to reassert control over her/his body; her long-term scheme is to effect changes in the filming of
Siren of Babylon
that will help make the movie a success financially, save the movie studio and the studio system, and change the future of Hollywood by restoring the golden age of Hollywood films. The novel is structured partly as a grand psychomachy, a mental as well as physical war between Myron, eager to regain dominance, and Myra, intent on changing history and the world. In the narrative Myron's and Myra's voices alternate as they struggle for control, the conforming, brainwashed, unimaginative Myron and the creative, irrepressible, transgressive Myra. In a movie-set world, where the action occurs, a desperate but surrealistically parodic and mockingly absurd struggle occurs between Myra's effort to undo the wrong path taken in the past and Myron's effort to prevent her from succeeding. In the end mad (but mostly well-intentioned) Myra is subdued by the bland but brutally patriarchal Myron, who wants to return to his happy normalcy, to the triumphant reign of his social and political values in the age of Nixon. Like
Myra Breckinridge, Myron
, dedicated to George Armstrong, was thematically autobiographical. It too focused on issues of sexuality, gender, politics, and culture, and it especially dramatized the relationship between the divided mind of the culture and the divided psyche of the individual, an attempt by the author to create a novel that reflected his own hard-earned but still not totally secure sense of a unified and autonomous identity. He himself knew where he stood and how he felt about the critical issues. In a culture that pressured or punished nonheterosexual acts,
he had established a situation that gave him great freedom to live his life as he chose. But most of those who desired sexual and political freedom had not. American society did not readily or easily provide the protections of the Bill of Rights to everyone. The pursuit of happiness was a risky venture. Great religious, political, and economic powers prospered by promoting implicit or explicit prohibitions. “Thou Shalt Nots” were written over most doors. The inventions were Vidal's attacks on the self-serving powers of repression that, in his view, unwarrantedly limited personal freedom. As long as one's freedom did not come at the expense of another's, then it seemed to him the highest value. All around him he saw coercive attempts to limit freedom, as Buckley had tried to use the libel laws to suppress his right of free speech. In
Myron
, in the first edition, the names of the conservative Supreme Court justices, whose legal decisions had supported limitations on privacy, were used mockingly, especially to refer to body parts and sexual acts. In later editions Vidal, rethinking the effectiveness of the joke, substituted normal usage. Satirical representations of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and even Henry James appear. The latter, the suavely mellifluous behind-the-scenes overall boss of the Hollywood studio, is black. The conventions of the realistic novel do not apply.
Myron
, which unlike
Myra
was a critical and commercial failure, takes its aesthetic cues from Swift and Sterne, its sensibility from black comedy, its agenda from Vidal's own politics, its preoccupation with television and movie-screen images and coordinates from the author's fascination with film. In the end Myron thinks his white-bread, pro-Nixon values are triumphant. He is finally totally in control of himself and “will sign off by saying that the highly articulately silent majority to which I am darned proud to belong are happy with things as they are and that we are not going to let anybody, repeat
anybody
, change things from what they are.” The final chapter contains only two words, reminiscent of the reverse signatures Bowles and Vidal used when signing their letters: “!sevil aryM.”

In October 1973 Vidal published in
The New York Review of Books
an essay, “West Point,” that begins with his own birth and concludes with his father's death, the first of what was to be a series of essays that synthesized personal history with cultural commentary. For a personal essay “West Point” is dramatically impersonal. By personality and habit Vidal was not
introspective. He preferred to turn his intellectual gaze outward, at the material world, at ideas and stories that reflected its structures and belief systems. Politics and society interested him more than psychology. He looked less into himself than at himself. At the same time, family history is central to the story, a way of positioning himself in relation to the military branch of the American empire to which his father and uncle belonged. Like many of his essays, its distinctive feature is that the intellectual exposition has a narrative, and the personal story is illustrative of larger issues and patterns in the national life. The world and its ideas exist most vividly in reference to where the viewer has been and currently stands.

By 1975, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, his views on politics and society were well known. He had been for twenty years a public man, appearing frequently in the media, print and electronic. He could be counted on to say something cogent and witty about the issues of the day. If he offended some, he entertained and stimulated others. As a visual image he had, so to speak, been aging in public, which gave an added intensity and resonance to his private response to what he saw in the full-length mirror in the apartment in Rome or at La Rondinaia or caught glimpses of reflected in storefront windows or airport passageways. The changes were unmistakable: his hairline had begun to recede, his forehead to have increased in size; black hair revealed gray flashes; olive eyes appeared darker, more prominent, as the eye wells and cheek line deepened and sharpened; the characteristic Gore-family ears seemed larger, the nose more substantial; his skin had begun to lose resilience, to show the breaks and sags of middle age. In his endless cycle of weight gain and weight loss, his posture and walk began to have an even more pronounced forward tilt, as if he were directing his center of gravity to some point slightly ahead of where he actually was; and that impression of slightly forward-propelled movement expressed emblematically the tilt of his personality toward constant engagement with what came next.

Just as he had trained himself not to look inward, except intellectually, he also preferred not to look back. He favored a disciplined ruthlessness about memories and feelings. Regret, especially remorse, he feared as disabling, though he could not suppress awareness of and regret at physical changes. That many had thought him a breathtakingly handsome young man was well and good, though he himself maintained that that had been how others had seen him, not how he had seen himself. But now to be
unmistakably a middle-aged man, even if one the world thought handsome and distinguished-looking, was an entirely different order of consideration. He had been quite used to his young body; it seemed a little inconvenient and perhaps even a challenge to be asked to get used to this something else. In addition, it made unavoidable the point that there would be transformations beyond this one with which he would also have to deal and which would in turn deal with him.