Gore Vidal (132 page)

Claire Bloom, with whom his friendship had been nothing if not intimate, visited occasionally in Rome and Ravello. She had begun a relationship with the novelist Philip Roth in the mid-1970s that was to lead to marriage in 1991 and then a well-publicized breakup in 1993. When she had asked Gore's advice about Roth, he replied, “You already have had Portnoy's complaint” in the form of Hilly Elkins. “Do not involve yourself with Portnoy.” Elaine Dundy, her usual ebullient self, visited numbers of times, as did her successor, Kathleen Tynan, now a widow, whom Gore had become fond of. Ken's death in July 1980 was not a personal loss for Gore; they had long ago drifted apart, mostly, Gore thought, because of Ken's difficulties in sustaining friendship. He and Howard saw the Newmans on their visits to Europe and when they were all in Los Angeles. Soon after his performance in
The Verdict
in 1982, Newman had had a heart attack scare. “
He lay in a hospital
bed,” Gore told Judith Halfpenny, “while they went
up with a sort of vacuum cleaner from groin to heart, and cleaned out the valve, all visible on a TV monitor. He saw it all.” As soon as Newman recovered, the four of them met in London. “Our first time there, together, since their honeymoon spent with us 26 years ago. A lot of memory land.” But, as with many friends with busy professional and family lives, they saw one another less often than they once had, and the meetings were brief, the kind of drifting-away that occurs when friends live far apart and the opportunity for intimacy declines.

Maria Britneva came to visit regularly in Rome and at La Rondinaia. But there had been a devastating change for her, much less so for Gore: Tennessee Williams, in February 1983, at the age of seventy-one, had choked to death on a medicinal bottle cap. “How curious that The Bird who most feared suffocation suffocated to death: a good 7 minutes of ghostly awareness,” he wrote to Paul Bowles. “There is a Bowlesian principle at work: what is most feared fearfully happens. I wish I had been less irritable with him in the last few years but the self-pity (so much vaster than my own) [was hard to tolerate].” Williams's later years had been brutally difficult—theatrical failures, drugs, alcohol. In the second of two evocatively beautiful essays on Williams, “Tennessee Williams: Someone to Laugh at the Squares With,” in
The New York Review
in 1985, Vidal had focused on reminiscences of their glory years together and recalled the last time they had met. It had been on a television talk show in the early 1980s. “There were two or three other guests around a table, and the host. Abruptly, the Bird settled back in his chair and shut his eyes. The host's habitual unease became panic. After some disjointed general chat, he said, tentatively, ‘Tennessee, are you asleep?' And the Bird replied, eyes still shut, ‘No, I am not asleep but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.'” Tennessee's death deprived Maria of the focus of her life, though as co-executor she soon perpetuated her intense involvement and manipulative control of Williams's legacy, including her refusal to give permission for his plays to be produced unless she retained control over the production. When producers refused to meet her demand, the productions usually fell through. Gore disapproved, but he still felt loyalty and love for Maria, though “[I]
can't say that the Bird
and I had much connection during the last 20 yrs,” he wrote to Bill Gray. “Friendship with him was always a one-way street; and I tire rapidly. Also, he was not the same person I first knew—to the extent I knew him at all!”

Another of his much-admired older friends from Tennessee's generation
had had his eightieth birthday in 1984. Isherwood, Gore wrote to Paul Bowles, “has decided to be Tithonus. He is amazingly healthy, preserved by alcohol, so life-like.” In fact, he was without health or futurity. Later that year Gore had visited him in Malibu “as he was dying. He was small, shrunken, all beak like a new-hatched eagle…. I sat on the edge of the bed and kept up a stream of chatter like a radio switched on.” Gore, who had just come from London, complained about the fecklessness of the English. “It's just like the grasshopper and the ant, and
they
are hopeless grasshoppers…. The eyes opened on that … and he spoke his last complete sentence to me…. ‘So,' he demanded, ‘what is wrong with grasshoppers?'” Later, in 1996, when the first volume of Isherwood's diaries was published, Gore was startled and pained to see how censorious Isherwood sometimes had been about him (and others) in his private writings, even on days on which they had been convivial together.

His relationship with Paul Bowles, now the only surviving literary friend from the Williams-Isherwood generation, was largely epistolary, though he had in mind to visit him in Morocco sometime soon. “
Have you been keeping up
with Tenn's posthumous-ness?” he wrote Bowles. “He is already neck and neck with Judy Garland and I suspect, in a decade, he will have gone, as they say here,
alle stelle
, passing Scott and Zelda on the way. Well, he would've liked it. Even so, there is something to be said for not being dead.” Their correspondence had some of the flavor of two old veterans of lifelong literary wars exchanging notes about combat and battle fatigue. Bowles's presence as a writer had dimmed since
The Sheltering Sky
, and Gore had lent a hand to the incipient Bowles revival, at least as a writer with a cult following, by writing an introduction to the 1979 Black Sparrow Press edition of Bowles's short stories. “For the American academic,” Gore wrote, as if he were also writing about himself, “Bowles is still odd man out; he writes as if
Moby-Dick
had never been written.” Bowles appreciated the support, including the strong plug in Gore's essay on William Dean Howells in the twentieth-anniversary issue of
The New York Review
. “I'm happy with the preface,” Bowles wrote to him. “No one else could have given me what I wanted.”

Two deaths hit hard, one of a much-loved nonhuman companion, the other a man he held in warm, high esteem, a paragon of the imaginative life. By early 1983 Rat, a valued member of the family, had developed a fatal tumor. Gore and Howard grieved over his imminent departure and gave
him the best medical care. Curtailing their otherwise easily indulged travel desires, they stayed at home or had a sitter for Rat when they went on short trips such as their annual New Year's visit to Venice. “The Rat continues to die at his own somewhat selfish pace but we worship him,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny at the end of 1983, “and so he has now lived exactly one year longer than the vet gave him. The tumor is huge and the smell frightful but he is lively and unaffected otherwise.” Despite his condition, Gore caressed him as he always had. Some friends found the sight revolting. Gore was lovingly loyal to the end. The tumor on Rat's lower jaw had grown to “the size of a tennis ball … and the pus and blood grew too much—for us not for him. He continued to eat for two until the end, which occurred in Howard's arms,” in January 1984. “The vet gave him a shot from the rear, he sighed, shut his eyes, and that was the end of 14 years. If there should ever be another dog, one will take some satisfaction in knowing that he will survive us.” There was not to be a replacement for Rat.

On a stormy Friday morning in September 1985, Gore was driven northward from Rome to a small town on the Ligurian coast to attend a funeral neither he nor anyone else could have anticipated. Two weeks before, at the age of sixty-one, Calvino had had a cerebral hemorrhage at his vacation home, where he had been working on his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered that fall at Harvard. “
He was having more trouble
than usual with the last,” Gore later wrote to David Herbert Donald, the Harvard historian, “when he got up one morning, told his wife, ‘It's all clear!' Sat down and wrote it straight through in a day, gave it to her that evening. She read it: to her horror, he had re-written the penultimate lecture word for word. The next morning came the stroke.” Soon he was in the hospital at Siena. Then he was dead. Much of Italy went into mourning and lamentation, “as if a beloved prince had died,” Vidal was to write in his essay “Calvino's Death.” The President of the republic had come to the hospital to bid him good-bye. Gore, who had seen him last in May at the Via Di Torre Argentina apartment, where they had talked about Calvino's trip to America, felt the shock painfully. He and Calvino had developed a bond of mutual respect that served them both well: Vidal with validation as an international author to whose
Duluth
Calvino had given high praise, Calvino with an American audience. Vidal thought Calvino and Williams the two most talented, accomplished writers he had known. Beyond that, though, there was a current of recognition that had passed between them
that allowed Gore to address Calvino as “Maestro” and that had brought the Calvinos, of their own volition, to the ceremony in Ravello bestowing Vidal's honorary citizenship. There was no jealousy, no competitiveness. For Calvino, and for Chichita, of whom he was very fond, Gore made an exception to his avoidance of funerals. Crowds gathered at the cemetery: the press, local officials, several hundred of Calvino's friends and colleagues. When Gore arrived, the hearse and the widow were not yet there. “We had to take the body from Siena to this village, which is one hour and a half away from the hospital,” Chichita recalled. “I went with the hearse and I sat with the driver and the hearse was right behind me and it was nightmarish and unreal and I was horrified at the idea of going to the cemetery. I was totally horrified and completely alone. There were masses of people . . . and we got to the cemetery and I think it was my deepest feeling of horror and at the door of the cemetery looming high was Gore. And only Gore. Only he had the idea of waiting for me at the door. The other people were around the inside by the grave site. That's something I remember forever. It was a subtle thing. He gave me support.” The coffin was placed four inches below the earth. Tiles were arranged over it. Masons covered the tiles with cement. The heat was oppressive. As Gore looked up from the fresh cement, he saw, staring straight at him, Calvino, “
witnessing his own
funeral.” They stared at one another “for one brief mad moment…. The man I thought was Italo is his younger brother, Floriano.” Later, on the drive back to Rome, under a hot sun, rain started to fall. A rainbow colored the sky in the east.

Webster County, Mississippi. May 1990. Hot weather. Air-conditioning everywhere, the new South inscribed on the old. “
White frame houses
, gingerbread, front yards, splendid magnolias, mockingbirds.” He had arrived in Webster county with a BBC television crew filming a documentary about his own life.

Gore had not heard mockingbirds since the Washington summers of his childhood, and he had never been in Mississippi before. The experience, though, had some of the feel of a return, as if his grandfather's memories, which he had heard so often as a child, were his own. He entered a green, moist, early-summer landscape heavily wooded with ancestral pines. This was where Thomas Pryor Gore had come from. The faces of the almost two hundred descendants of Thomas Tindal Gore who had congregated close to the places associated with Gore family history were eerily like his own. There were, assembled, cousins to every degree. It was one thing to joke about the two hundred similar noses and four hundred ears, another to appreciate the power of genetic inheritance. This was the family whose chromosomes he bore. Here they were in large numbers, proliferating from
generation to generation, a community so formidable he had embraced its history but kept himself out of its living embrace. It was a family he wanted in principle, not in person. He had heard much about these people. He had actually, through his grandfather's recollections, seen these places: the Webster County Courthouse, the nearby Gore family house, the place at Emry where T. P. Gore was born. Suddenly he was there, in these living representations of the past, vividly evoked in his childhood by the man who had influenced him more than anyone else. And he was among legions of Gores, who welcomed their famous relative with the same combination of curiosity and apprehension with which he observed them, precisely because he had traveled a greater distance than they from the Gore family's Methodist origins, from the First and Second Great Awakenings that had left their indelible impact on this huge Southern clan. That spirit, he now discovered, was still expressively alive, especially in the younger generation of religious enthusiasts. A few days later, in Jackson, he told Eudora Welty, “
sharp of eye
, tongue, and full of gossip,” whom he visited at her home, how alarmed he was “by the religiosity of the Gores. Admittedly the reunion was on a Sunday but
ten
hymns? two family preachers? a lot of blood of the lamb? ‘Well, that's what we do on Sunday,' she said; and it was a Sunday. ‘But I think they do it all week,' I said. ‘They believe. They told me they do.'” That he did not didn't make him in the eyes of the family any the less a Gore; and that he was a Gore made him better than anyone who was not. Anyway, they would never accept that he was not, deep down, a Christian, ready to be awakened by their solicitations. Blood was stronger than disbelief.

A hundred years before, his grandfather, another nonbeliever, had left Mississippi with a copy of John Stuart Mill's
On Liberty
in his hand and the Constitution of the United States in his pocket. The noisy, smoke-belching train had taken the blind young man westward across the river to Texas and the Oklahoma Territory, where he found a bride and a career. His grandson had carried those Gore genes into places the Senator's world had given birth to, a culture whose frontier antecedents lived unmistakably in the configurations of the present. When his grandfather left Mississippi, not even radio had existed. When he died, the faces and voices of the Senator and his grandson had been in newsreels in a thousand movie theaters. Both had “lit out for the territory,” each in his own way. Though the place names were different, the spirit was the same. T. P. Gore had never once left North
America. Going abroad was something he simply had no interest in. Foreign shores were inferior to American. His grandson carried America with him wherever he went. As for Henry James and Mark Twain, living abroad emphasized for Gore the intensity of his relationship with “home.” In America he was an American who lived abroad. In Europe he was an American writer. When in his later years T. P. Gore returned to Mississippi, he was idolized by the Mississippi Gores. His grandson was shown “the fireplace from which he was given a piece of wood on a return trip.” “
I did have an eerie
feeling,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny, “with so much kin assembled in a drab new cube of brick in the heart of Houston, Miss, where I stayed with 4th generation Dr. Gore, an amiable highly educated man, as the Gores all seem to be, mostly lawyers, doctors, preachers, one general. No entrepreneurs, I was told with mock despair. They had not gone into trade and made money, ever. T. P. Gore was their idol. The new idol is 7th cousin Albert Gore.” At Yazoo City he was shown the monument to his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Tindal Gore, who, coming from Alabama to settle in Mississippi, had bought a vast tract of land from a soon-to-be-dispossessed Chickasaw Indian. At the courthouse Gore made an impromptu speech. Then he and the camera crew rolled away, down the interstate to Jackson, completing the documentary film,
Gore Vidal's Gore Vidal
, a late-twentieth-century monument to Thomas Tindal's descendant. Gore Vidal may have been aware that every turn in his own life away from a political career had been a turn away from what the Gore family reunion represented. The South is a different place from the rest of the country, he was fond of saying, and if Lincoln had been wiser, he would have let it go. It was his grandfather's South that was different, he began to realize, and as he and Eudora Welty agreed, the modern Deep South was becoming like much of the rest of the country. He had made the one visit of his lifetime.