Gore Vidal (17 page)

Nina had already disappointed his transatlantic hopes at least twice. She “would announce trips to Europe and then cancel them. So my hopes would be high and then they would be dashed. In 1938 the
Gripsholm
, a Swedish boat, had scheduled a tour of Scandinavia. We were all set to go on that. But her exciting life always intervened so that was canceled.” Then, in spring 1939, two St. Albans schoolmasters, Stanley Sofield and his friend and camp partner, Thomas Jefferson Barlow, eager themselves to see Europe again before borders closed and only military ships sailed, organized a
student trip. The ostensible aim was to study French, the larger plan to see as much of Europe as possible. Even at modest cost to the students, it would allow them (and Barlow's wife) to travel free, perhaps even to profit. Sofield invited “Gene-y with the light brown hair.” Nina said yes, perhaps among other reasons because she had decided against his wishes to remove him from St. Albans School. Dissatisfied with his mediocre grades, constantly arguing with him, unhappy with his bookish tendencies, she thought it best to move him again, this time far away. Why not allow him this European trip? It would provide a break and a distraction, a way of compensating for the impending dislocation, of making a point of her generosity and reasonableness. It would also clear the field for her infidelities. She preferred not to have Gene around to take notice of them. In her eyes, he was spying on her. Hughdie was less of a problem. “As her character was stronger than his,” Gore Vidal later remarked, “she got away with almost anything and could have to the end,” which was not far off. The war, though, was imminent. Since his father would pay the small cost, as the divorce agreement required, everything was easily settled. Sofield and Barlow were delighted to have him, along with about sixteen other boys, most but not all from St. Albans, who would at first spend four weeks “perfecting their French,” as the phrase of the day had it, at Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles, a short distance from Paris. From Jouy they would take frequent field trips and then, done with France and French lessons, they would go to Italy. Though Gene may have been brooding about the consequences of his impending exile from Washington in the fall, he put it mostly out of mind. Bad as it was, he would still see Jimmie, who was to continue at St. Albans, during school holidays. That the coming war might change all that never occurred to him. Whatever his remonstrances, and they were vigorous, he had no thought of a serious rebellion. What good would it do anyway? Only time would provide him with independence. Efficiently and enthusiastically, he focused on the grand European adventure.

Life at the École de Jouy-en-Josas, a few buildings and a small campus vacant of its usual people, was both familiar and exotic. Each morning there were classes in history and French, the afternoons free or booked for excursions. Dormitory routine, as familiar as at home except for there being only one unreliable toilet for everyone, had four boys to a room in a manor house with a domed ceiling. Classes, taught in French, were also held there in the smaller of two buildings, the larger occupied by female counterparts from a
New England school. One of his roommates was Hammy Fish from St. Albans. In their private room Tom Barlow and his wife, Lee, had a busman's honeymoon, having married the previous year. On a schoolmaster's salary any trips, let alone European honeymoons, were hard to come by. The study-abroad trip had been Barlow's conception. Tall, ramrod straight, a dignified Kentuckyan with “an aquiline Greek nose and dark eyes,” Barlow was amiable but disciplined. Sofield was short, round, bespectacled, more indulgent. They made a good team. Oliver Hodge, a bilingual French teacher from Chattanooga, a close friend of theirs, provided language expertise. Each boy had a bicycle for local transportation, particularly regular visits to Versailles, though Gene often also walked the short distance to the pastry shops and the local sights. With a sharp sweet tooth, he found the pastry as memorable as anything else in the royal city. Moist baba au rhum melted in his mouth, disappeared almost immediately. “Very thin, tall, a good-looking boy,” he could afford to indulge.

They went frequently to Paris by train. Recognized for his self-reliance, Gene was allowed to go off on his own, which he did enthusiastically. On Bastille Day he stood on the steps of the Grand Palais, watching French military might parade by, awed by its glory, thrilled to recognize in the flesh the French Foreign Legion he had already seen and loved in a movie called
Under Two Flags
. All Paris seemed like a movie anyway, until he “saw an open car containing a bald man in a business suit. I could spot a politician anywhere in any country. This one was the prime minister of France,” Daladier, an unprepossessing figure who soon had the honor of turning France over to the Germans. The American visitor had a sense that this was a man who made deals, that the next year's Bastille Day parade would have a very different cast of characters. In his Paris wanderings he went to the Palais Royal, buying quite cheaply, as a favor for Nina, two eighteenth-century silver snuffboxes to add to her collection. To Gene, with European history in mind, they were reminders of the French Revolution, of the guillotine, of aristocratic privilege and political change. To Nina they were just snuffboxes.

Longer excursions by crowded bus filled with more young Americans, girls from the other school group at Jouy, took them in all directions, south to Orléans, to Touraine, to Blois, to Chartres, out to the Rhine to see the famous Maginot Line, filled with French troops that would stop any invasion from the west; north and east to Arras Cathedral and the battlefield cemeteries
of the First World War. Poppies were in bloom. At Chartres they had the shock of seeing an elderly Frenchwoman, squatting, raise her skirts and relieve herself. It was as memorable as the cathedral. On the bus to the Rhine Gene sat next to Zeva Fish, Hammy's sister, with whom he instantly fell in love. “I thought she was wonderful. I was reading her my poetry, and
she
thought it was wonderful. She was an older woman, about sixteen or seventeen.” The oldest woman on the bus was twenty-nine-year-old Lee Barlow, whom he thought very pretty. She also wrote poetry. On the bus they had at least two long chats on versification, about which she thought Gene needed to know more if he were going to be a
real
poet. A college-educated formalist, she decided she needed to teach him the language of prosody and metrics.

By late July war signals alerted Sofield and Barlow to the likelihood that they might not be able to have the entire summer in Europe. Accelerating their schedule, at the end of the month they went by train to Italy. They anticipated Rome eagerly, the part of the trip to which Gene most looked forward actually about to happen. Almost as if he feared Rome's splendor would be too much for him, he protected himself as the train went southward by keeping his eyes as much on the fascinating book he was reading as on the vista outside. It was an exotic adventure novel by Frederic Prokosch,
The Seven Who Fled
, about a journey across an imaginary Asian landscape. In Rome for the next two weeks Gene's eyes blazed, partly with the splendor of the ancient city, partly with the landscape of the novel, as if he were in two places at once, an increasingly characteristic trope of doubleness. Rome itself dazzled him. A passionate pilgrim, like Henry James, he feverishly exalted in the Roman monuments, the Roman streets, his mind filled with the literature he had read, the history he knew, his first taste of a city he was to visit many times. Eventually it would become one of his homes; now it was a dream realized, a young man's fascination with the material presence of what before had been only words, thoughts, imagined vistas.

In the Forum, with pieces of broken marble everywhere, he had his own Jamesian vastation, an epiphanic moment in which his eyes superimposed on the glittering debris the living reality of what had been, as if it were all alive again, as if the informed imagination could make visually real what had been dead for centuries. Walking through the Forum excavation, not yet sequestered from visitors, he picked up a small Roman head. He quickly hid it under his jacket. Ever alert, Sofield made him put it back.
From the Roman to the American Senate seemed to him an obvious continuity. He could see his grandfather there. He imagined himself, the supreme orator, in both Roman and American chambers. From the Forum to the Colosseum to the Pantheon, from one shining structure to another, he traversed ancient Rome. The simple storybook accounts of the Roman imperium from his Victorian edition of
Stories from Livy
provided adequate narratives for his imagination to people Rome visible with Rome past. Great marble statues of emperors and orators seemed almost to accompany him as he walked to them, by them, around them. With his schoolboy Latin he could read the obvious inscriptions. Standing on the rostrum where Mark Antony had spoken of the dead Julius Caesar, he felt the thrill of identification. He haunted the Forum and the Palatine. The Holy City's Christian churches and priestly presences he hardly noticed. Classical Rome possessed him.

So too did the dramatic history transpiring in the modern city. It was as if he were living in a newsreel. Everywhere there were Blackshirts. The garlic-smelling August air breathed war. Triumphant Italian nationalism, still drunk on Ethiopian victories, paraded in the streets, flexed its muscles and guns. Pathé News and The March of Time had given Hitler's and Mussolini's faces worldwide currency. So too had their politics and armies. If Americans were frightened, they were also fascinated, especially those who lived with and studied political power. In May, as if in preparation for his European trip, Gene had written for his St. Albans English class an essay called “A Comparison Between a Dynastic Ruler and a Totalitarian Ruler,” a strikingly objective analysis of the Emperor Franz Joseph and of Adolf Hitler. He had read Hitler's
Mein Kampf
, a biography of Franz Joseph, and four encyclopedia articles, an ambitious undertaking for a usually indifferent schoolboy. He had also seen the film
Mayerling
. The subject fascinated him. For the first time his teachers took notice of substance as well as grammar, partly because the timely subject was compelling. Though brief, the essay is divided into three chapters, accompanied by his own competent pencil drawing of Hitler, with enough factual detail to be textured and creditable. The analysis is surprisingly sophisticated, the prose economically effective, occasionally graceful. A report rather than a condemnation, it leaves history to judge whether Hitler is “a madman or a genius.”

As the train that had taken them from France to Italy made its first Italian stop, “
fascist guards
gave the fascist salute just as they had done in all
those newsreels where Hitler and Mussolini were perpetual Gog and Magog to our days.” One night at the Baths of Caracalla, part of a large audience to see an outdoor performance of
Turandot
, they suddenly saw in a railed-off box next to theirs Mussolini himself. Resplendent in a white uniform, he seemed almost part of the performance, as if Italian history and Italian opera were indistinguishable. To Gene he looked “almost as worried as Daladier…. At the first interval he rose and saluted the soprano. Audience cheered. Then he left the box…. As he passed within a yard of me, I got a powerful whiff of cologne, which struck me as degenerate. A moment later Mussolini was on the stage, taking a bow with the diva. The crowd shouted ‘Duce' … he saluted the audience—Fascist arm outstretched. Then he was gone.” Despite the cologne, the young boy thought Mussolini splendid, as spectacle, as politician. “
That jaw
, that splendid emptiness. After all, I had been brought up with politicians. He was an exotic variation on something quite familiar to me.” The next year Mussolini was to be the dark but white-uniformed inspiration for his first “really ambitious novel,” never to be completed, “about a dictator in Rome, filled with intrigue and passion and Machiavellian
combinazione.”

Summer 1939 was closing around them, the days shorter, European politics dangerous. As they were well-connected Washington children, the American ambassador received them at the embassy, particularly since Ham Fish's father was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Even in distant, domestic-minded Washington, foreign affairs were now on everybody's mind. Whether or not Sofield and Barlow read Italian newspapers or tuned in to other immediately available currents, they had reason to be nervous. Rumors of imminent war came from authoritative sources. If war were to be declared, the border between Italy and France would be closed. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, whose husband had close relations with the State Department, got a message to them, probably through the embassy, urging them “to get out of there quick,” so Lee Barlow remembers. Perhaps Nina was the source of the urgent request that they leave Europe as soon as possible. “She fixed it up through our embassy somehow,” her son remembers. “She would have gone straight to the State Department, to Sumner Welles or someone. All these people were coming to Merrywood. Probably one of them came to Merrywood, the undersecretary of something or even Cordell Hull, and said there's trouble coming. Try to get them out.” Late in
August they made one of the last trains out of Italy. The border closed behind them.

From Saint-Malo they crossed the Channel. In London they found a gloomy, disappointed Britain preparing for war. From an ancient Bloomsbury bed and breakfast on Russell Square, with a “fascinating primitive bathroom,” all soon to be turned into rubble, Gene quickly saw as much of London as he could. He had little time. The city was mostly shut down. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, he stood in front of 10 Downing Street watching Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister whom he had often dressed up as and imitated, leave en route to Parliament to tell his nation that war was inevitable. “Thin little man. A wing collar, huge Adam's apple, uncommonly small head. No cheers, no jeers. The crowd simply sighs, in unison, on exhalation. Terrible, mournful sound. Chamberlain tries to smile; winces instead. Is driven off.” Sofield and the Barlows rushed to the American embassy to get tickets for Lee and the boys to depart immediately. The two men, who needed to arrange for the bicycles and other luggage to be sent separately, would take a later ship. At Liverpool on September 3, the day Britain and France declared war, the boys were on a British vessel, the
Antonia
, sailing out into the Irish Sea. Wartime exigencies applied on the crowded boat. Nazi submarines prowled the North Atlantic. Soon they witnessed the almost incomprehensible: the
Antonia's
sister ship, the
Athenia
, had been torpedoed on the final day of its eastward voyage from New York to Liverpool. “
Longboats
carrying passengers to the dull, misty green Irish shore. Consternation about our ship.” They saw the
Athenia
turn up and then slip beneath the water. The sky and the smooth sea were gray. Some passengers on the
Antonia
urged that they turn back. The captain decided to go on. Soon they were sailing a zigzagging evasive pattern that added days to the voyage. Since the protocols and strategies for crossing the Atlantic in wartime had not yet been worked out, no one knew what to expect. But there were no further sightings or incidents.