Gore Vidal (136 page)

Vidal believed that that was precisely what he had spent his lifetime doing. In his judgment it was Epstein who neither understood America nor him, as a political commentator and certainly not as a writer. He immediately instructed Laster to find another publisher. This was the right time to move. Random House would publish
Live from Golgotha
in 1992,
United States
in 1993. After that, a new publisher should be in place, one who would be energized by the excitement of having Vidal's name on its list. His backlist should be moved as soon as possible. Harry Evans, who had become the Random House publisher in 1990 after a career in British journalism and who was married to Tina Brown, the editor of
The New Yorker
, intervened. He was eager to keep Vidal, whom he admired as a literary star. He proposed that he himself become Vidal's editor, though the actual hands-on editing would be done by Sharon Delano, a manuscript and magazine editor in her mid-forties who had been at
The New York Review of Books
for twelve years and was happy to take on an association with a famous writer whom she admired. It was on Evans's part an attempt to flatter and conciliate, not at all a commitment to involve himself actively in publishing Vidal or to guarantee the support Vidal wanted. He was, though, persuasive; Vidal, persuadable. “
As you know or do not
know,” Gore wrote to Richard Poirier, “I was all set to leave RH, thanks to J., but then Harry (The Consort) Evans persuaded me to stay and showed enthusiasm for my new comic invention, loathed by J. (his comments are wondrously off-the-wall: they also proved to be terminal). Anyway, all is past tense between us and Barbara makes no attempt to shift tenses so that's that. The
only
pleasure of age is shedding baggage.” Jason was stunned. He had no desire to end the friendship. He did not want Gore to leave Random House either, though he would not oppose that, if Gore wanted to leave, and of course he did not oppose Evans's successful intervention. But he had assumed that the personal and professional relationships were separable. Gore believed they
were not. Jason felt pained that he had been banished from any contact with someone he still cared about. Gore was too deeply hurt to continue the relationship. He felt he had been betrayed. It was a bitter end to a long friendship.

Full, active lives inevitably generate grievances, the lives of professional writers especially. Vidal's grievances were, no more and no less than for most, the residue of effort and risk. They were also sometimes energizing. Personal ruptures in lifelong relationships, though, were slow to come, no matter how long or deep the resentments. There were only two of any significance in his lifetime. The first was with his mother, the second with Jason. “I fear as fond as I am of the Epsteins,” he told Halfpenny in May 1991, as he felt the rupture coming, “the statute of limitations has run out, and I can break away. Jason, all gloom in any case, should quit, cloudy trophies from his past, his glory; and I shall proceed to my end-game without Old-Man-of-the-Sea encumbrance.” With Barbara, no matter what his grievances against
The New York Review of Books
, he was able to separate the personal from the professional. Still, the years had produced a long list of complaints against the
Review:
“
My Barbara grows
more [edgy] with time's passage,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny in May 1991. “The
Review
more irrelevant. I more irritable. She turned down one of my best pieces [“Reflections on Glory Reflected and Otherwise”], the only really memoiristic thing I've done but as it might give offense to the people amongst whom her uneasy collaborator Bob Silvers might climb socially, it will not do. For the record, they turned down ‘The Holy Family' (Bob Silvers was making eyes at Bobby Kennedy then), French letters (too boring), ‘Pink Star and Yellow Triangle' (can't think why—though she did say that if I removed the analogy between Jews and fags, as neither group had anything in common: I agreed that I saw nothing to generalize about but Hitler had, so …). ‘Armageddon?' (Jews would be upset), ‘The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas' (I forget why that wouldn't do), now ‘Glorious Reflections' and a piece on Mencken. So I have called it quits…. The
NYR
grows not only duller and duller, the fate of most papers, but the writers do not question the status quo and the examined life is too dangerous for their pages. Also, they have got the
New Yorker Magazine—Encyclopedia Britannica
syndrome: every piece must contain every little fact and citation on earth for the great archive in the sky. Look how they overloaded poor Joan Didion in her piece on New York City. She is one of the few good
essayists in the language, which means she is, simply, a seductive and unique voice. You can still hear her piping through the Treasurer's Report, but barely. I am forbidden politics, now the domain of the Catholic Garrulous Wills [Garry Wills], a sharp interesting writer at times, but he has never been outside the library to look at the country he generalizes so hugely about. He also believes that America is a truly Christian religious nation, quite underestimating the spontaneous hypocrisy of the lower orders when polled—so like that of their masters. But then like all our other tenured commentators, he must maintain the fiction that the US is a classless society (under God), something he probably believes and Arthur Schlesinger, say, who follows the party line in print, does not.” Each time Vidal swore never to write again for the
Review
. Each time, patiently persuaded by Barbara, he relented. The stakes, of course, were not as high with the
Review
as with Random House. It was easier to publish essays in other magazines, as he increasingly did in
The Nation
, soon in
The Times Literary Supplement
, and especially in
Vanity Fair
, whose admiring publisher and editors were eager to print anything he offered them. Because of the backlist, moving to a new publisher was more formidable. And he had apparently never (or at least since the late 1960s) cared for Jason to the degree that he cared for Barbara. She had become and remained family, like his sister, even more like Howard. Disagreements, even disappointments, did not threaten the personal tie.

Successful lives also generate honors, though their number is usually too small, their timeliness not timely enough. Prizes are desirable, but they come to few aspirants, or when they come, the time when they might have produced great pleasure has passed. Defenses are erected, some of them composed of irony or self-deprecation or resentment or exhaustion. Vidal, understandably, seemed hardly ever to get tired of wondering why he was not even more appreciated, and he drew on the usual range of responses to deal with it. In August 1989 he attended a day in his honor at the Edinburgh Festival. In September 1990 he presided as president at the annual Venice Film Festival, where he made a laudatory presentation for best film to Tom Stoppard, whom he admired, for
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
. He then himself received “
a prize at Forte
dei Marmi, as the most famous writer within forty miles of Vesuvius.” He could always joke about fortune and misfortune. Wit burned away both pretense and ponderousness. On the
subject of the Nobel Prize he quipped, “They have a short list and a long list and a non-list. I'm at the head of the non-list.” His often ambivalent, sometimes antagonistic relationship with the academy mellowed slightly. Whereas Bellow, Mailer, and even Updike had begun to appear on undergraduate and graduate reading lists—the first, tentative touches of canonization—Vidal rarely if ever appeared as required reading. Occasionally an adventuresome literature course included
Myra Breckinridge
. His enthusiasts had found no way to fit his diverse oeuvre into the curriculum, and his presence as a public personality sometimes resulted in weighty academics' taking him more seriously as an entertainer than as an intellectual. Like most writers he suffered from the popularity of literary and cultural theory in English departments. At the same time he was immensely popular on campuses as a speaker, drawing huge student and public audiences even though he accepted few invitations, mostly to protect his time. That he almost always chose to speak on political rather than literary subjects expressed personal preference and his distaste for writers' contemplating themselves as writers in public. It contributed, though, to deflecting attention from his literary achievements. To some extent the rise of gay studies helped. He had become an iconic figure in the gay world, perhaps more for his wit, outspokenness, and fame than for his views on sex, which he had laid out clearly once again in “The Birds and the Bees” in
The Nation
in October 1991.

There were, though, more academic invitations than he desired, including honorary degrees, which he made a point of declining, with the exception of a degree awarded as the culmination in October 1988 of a three-day symposium at Brown University. The Brown program was in honor of John Hay, whom Gore admired. Hay had been one of the central figures in
Lincoln
. The opportunity to honor Hay made this invitation attractive. In November 1991 he lectured at East Anglia University as a favor to his friend, the critic Lorna Sage. That November he visited Dartmouth University as the centerpiece of a Vidal academic celebration. He did not in the least mind being celebrated and flattered, but he preferred even more to be read, a goal more difficult to realize. He gave during the 1990s almost annual talks to the National Press Club in Washington, which were broadcast on national television. With much to say on political topics, he had a way of saying it that commanded large audiences and that, in his white-haired seniority, made him a favorite of the Washington press corps, particularly because he was always good copy. Using selective forums to
keep his name before the public made sense: a series of lectures in Germany and Scandinavia; an appearance at the Cheltenham literary festival; a lecture at the Folger Library, which had organized a series based on the movies that had influenced him; and the Lowell Lecture at Harvard, where he spoke on monotheism and its discontents, attacking the religious right as a threat to liberty, for “Jefferson's famous tree of liberty is all that we ever really had. Now, for want of nurture … it is dying before our eyes. Of course, the sky-god never liked it. But some of us did—and some of us do. So, perhaps through facing who and what we are, we may achieve a nation not under God but under man—or should I say our common humanity?”

With autobiography increasingly on his mind, he combined an honor that gave him great pleasure with an exploration of the impact that movies had had on him and on the United States in the 1930s and early '40s. In 1988 Alan Heimart, then the chair of Harvard's Program in the History of American Civilization, invited Gore to deliver the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization in spring 1991. Most likely, David Herbert Donald, the Harvard professor who had been Random House's expert reader of
Lincoln
in 1984 and with whom Gore had developed a friendship centered on their shared interest, had urged that Vidal be invited. Donald, who had written lives of Thomas Wolfe and Charles Sumner, had begun writing a biography of Lincoln. As the Vidal-Lincoln controversy had swirled in academic journals and in
The New York Review of Books
, Donald had strongly supported Vidal's depiction of Lincoln as concerned with preserving the Union, not ending slavery. He hoped that Gore's four lectures would focus on American literature, but he was delighted to have his acceptance regardless of subject, which Vidal soon told his Harvard hosts would be the films of the 1930s and '40s, under the title
Screening History
(which became a Harvard University Press book in 1993). “
I know what I'd like
to do,” he wrote to Donald, “but I'm not sure that I can pull it off: describe the half dozen or so films that shaped me from ten to fourteen.” Sharply evoking the Washington world of his grandfather and the impact of movies on his own development,
Screening History
argued that Anglophile Hollywood films had helped turn America toward involvement in World War II. Powerful vehicles of cultural, political, and psychological propaganda, films had made history. On Vidal's way to the theater for the first lecture, Stephen Thernstrom, Heimart's successor as chairman of the Program in the History of American Civilization, said to him, so he recalls,
“‘You know, don't be upset'—it was a rainy day—‘if there's nobody there. We had Toni Morrison' (I had barely heard of her then) ‘and we only had three hundred people.' I said, ‘You'll get a lot more with me.' … Oh, the crowds were very enthusiastic, and a lot of kids. Usually these things draw lovers of literature, which tend not to be undergraduates but mainly graduate students or people from Cambridge, like Marian Schlesinger, who was sitting in the front row. I hadn't seen her in a long time. Justin Kaplan,” the Twain and Whitman biographer, “was there. And Dan Aaron,” the emeritus Harvard professor of American literature, whose books had contributed to a lively dialogue on literature and politics in America and who had been a friend of Truman Capote and Edmund Wilson. So too were other Boston and Cambridge friends. The neoconservative Thernstrom he soon disliked, sensing antagonism and sabotage. “It was a well-kept secret that I was there, but word did spread, and by the third lecture we filled the Kennedy Center. David Herbert Donald replaced Thernstrom at the podium and did a superb introduction without one note, dates and everything. A lovely gesture.”