Gore Vidal (25 page)

At Christmas her house was lively with guests, particularly Olds and his West Point friends. One night Gore sat with a group of them who were “
denouncing that Jew
Franklin D. Rosenfeld who had got us into the war on the wrong side. We ought to be fighting the Commies not Hitler. But then FDR was not only a kike, he was sick in the head—and not from polio but from syphilis. Anyway, everything could be straightened out—with just one infantry brigade they would surround the White House, the Capitol, remove the Jews.” It was an odd though not unusual expression of Christmas
goodwill, stronger stuff than Gore had ever heard before. Hugh Auchincloss's soft anti-Semitism had not had the benefit of a military uniform or a sharp mind. A consummate bore to his stepson even when being anti-Semitic, Auchincloss later became the model for the tedious general in
Visit to a Small Planet
. “His stories were never altered. He knew the original Jewish name of every movie star who ever changed his name. That list runs quite long. How he learned them I don't know. He didn't go to the movies. I shouldn't think he read
Silver Screen
. But he had collected some thirty names, and he always started with Kirk Douglas. This was about how the Jews were everywhere. It couldn't be simpler. I wouldn't have said that he would have cut the ribbon at Auschwitz, but at the same time, as a purist, he would suggest some names that others might not know of people who had passed. I can see him writing out a dossier to the authorities at Auschwitz, ‘You may not know, but Kirk Douglas's real name is….'”

Later that spring Gore confided to a new friend at Exeter that he had had “a dream showing his mother standing with a submachine gun pointing at her three husbands,” perhaps an anticipation of his conviction that Olds, whom he found charming but pompous, would suffer the same fate as his father and Auchincloss. At home for the spring vacation, he had overheard, from the next room, Henry Luce, one of Auchincloss's oldest friends, propose to Nina. After they both had graduated from Yale, Hugh had treated Luce to a trip to Europe and provided seed money for Luce's fledgling magazine,
Time
. Clare Boothe Luce, his wife, Luce complained to Nina, did not understand him. Nina turned him down. In June 1942 Nina and Bob Olds married. Gore was not invited to the wedding.

At Exeter Gore had had a difficult term. He had started the new year with his usual plunge into debating. His expectation that he would be president of the Golden Branch proved unwarranted. When his grade reports in February indicated only marginal improvement, he was forced by Dean Kerr “
to stop all outside
activity…. Am working,” he assured his grandfather, “an experience that is not untinged with novelty.” Instead of three failures and a D—, he now got four D's, the lowest passing grade. Still, he got his nose up from the grindstone very soon, shrugging off his grades as a modest practical inconvenience. His poetry was still on his mind, including two new ones about his “reactions in France before the war.” Though he told his grandfather, “with the ‘blithe spirit' of the young, I think they are wonderful,” he could not totally misunderstand the ironic
undertones of the preface Nat Davis wrote, at his request, to a small manuscript volume he had assembled. “These poems … are outstanding not only because of their own merit, but also because of the extreme youth of their author…. Perhaps the greatest gift Vidal makes use of here is his brilliant imagination, which, although it may, like Macbeth's ‘vaulting ambition, overshoot its mark,' lends a color and vividness to the verse…. with his genius expressed haltingly and very dimly at times…. With this genius I can but say that [this] young poet will sometime hang the great and vacant night of American literature with stars.” A new, more credulous friend, Wilcomb Washburn, noted in his diary that Gene boasted that “Putnam would probably publish a volume of his verse…. He has connections and I see no reason why it shouldn't go thru. His poems are good. He wants to win the Pulitzer Prize.”

If there were an institutional Exeter poet, it was Robert Frost, who frequently spoke and read at chapel and special Sunday-night occasions. From nearby Vermont Frost made the trip to Exeter for the sake of both an audience and his slim pocketbook. To the young Exonian literati Frost had little cachet and no authority, a prophet without honor among the young of his own country. On a Sunday night early in May he talked “to a
packed and sweltering
chapel.” Bingham and Vidal had been reading Frost, a book a day, feeling quite superior to a poet whom Lionel Trilling and others had taught them was “an old bucolic cornball,” a boring bit of pastoral Americana. “Oh, God, yes, how we hated Frost the personage,” Vidal remembered. “We all had to go listen to him. It was all right at chapel, since we had to be there anyway. He would come on other occasions. I don't know how they got us all in there. He was a great performer, but once you've seen him a dozen times…. In fact, Bingham wrote a very funny little parody: ‘I see the birches bending row on row/Against the line of straighter darker trees./I like to think Robert Frost's been swinging there.' We were T. S. Eliot men.” At one of his visits, Vidal recalled, Frost shocked one of the masters, a great admirer, when he “went out to piss in the woods beyond the baseball field. Then Frost leaned over and began to lick the bark of the tree. ‘I can taste the sea salt,' he said.”

When, the week after Frost, Ruth Draper, a superb actress and dramatic monologuist, performed, the chapel was again packed. Washburn, a little bored, was happy to be there with his friend. To Gore, Wid was both a comfort and a convenience. From an academic New England family, he had
all the schoolboy discipline that Gore lacked. Constantly insecure, always serious, he had determined never to let lack of hard work prevent his success. Dark-haired, rugged, with a plain, almost handsome face, he excelled on the playing field as well as in the classroom. A “powerful-looking young man, quite big and strong,” Hamilton Bissell recalled, “he was an outstanding varsity football player.” Eager to be rewarded by the Exeter authorities, with not a hint of intellectual or moral rebellion, he found himself fascinated by the attraction of his opposite. An embodiment of the understatement that proper Exonians lauded, Washburn found Gore's mixture of compulsive overstatement and unembarrassed self-projection somewhat confusing. A literalist, Wid could rarely comprehend irony. But regardless of whether some of Gore's claims were put-ons, Wid had no doubt that his new friend was a genius with an original mind. Washburn believed that genius made its own rules. Eager to be accepted, to be praised, he allowed himself to be teased, occasionally to be mistreated. Foreshadowing the anthropologist he was to become, Washburn decided to record and study the practices of this exotic creature. Notebook in hand, he followed the schoolboy great man around. “
My wonder that
he should show an interest in me came to a head when he said I seemed very suspicious of him. I told [him] I wondered if he wasn't play[ing] with me as a cat does with a mouse for mere pleasure or some other object. It can hardly be a genuine interest unless he sees more in me than I think he does. Certain I am that he has his eye on the Presidency of the United States, and, if he doesn't try to become
too
clever, I am not so sure that he won't reach that goal.”

Late in May, as the term came to an end, they went to the Senate banquet together. “I went over to his room before going … because he said ‘he wanted [to] be late so they would notice him more.' We did get there late. He was seated at the left end of the main table and was ignored by all of the speakers. Therefore he lit a cigar, and drew laughter and much attention to him[self]. He looked exactly like a politician up there.” At the end of the month the phenomenon was still under the microscope. “Instead of studying much, he reads about a book a day. He has gotten E and A in every one of his subjects for a month's mark. He tells me he has a library of 7,000 books, his mother 300,000 and his grandfather 500,000…. He gave me my first lesson in speaking today. I read his Litany for Living—a remarkable belief on religion.” Before the term was over, Gore led the Golden Branch debating team to victory on the subject of paying overtime
wages while the nation was at war. “
Vidal stood out
,” the other diary keeper, Otis Pease, recorded. At end-of-term Prize Chapel, Wid “picked up $25 in history prizes,” Gore a $10 debating prize. “Incidentally, he doesn't care to marry (he has no use for women) but he says he probably will—a political marriage with [the] Governor of Virginia's daughter to get his support for Senatorship.” Actually, he and Rosalind had begun to discuss becoming engaged.

While working in July 1942 on the assembly line at his father's factory in Camden, New Jersey, Gore was called to the telephone. Kit was on the line with shocking, numbing news. Gene had had a massive heart attack, a coronary thrombosis. An ambulance had rushed him to St. Luke's; it was not clear he would survive. The train to New York seemed to move excruciatingly slowly. When Gore arrived, his father looked “nearly dead,” his eyes “glazed yellow-gray from drugs,” the hair on his chest now suddenly as white as the hair on his head. Just weeks before, they had played tennis together, his father as usual tutoring him casually in the strokes and strategies of a game that the middle-aged man, who found golf too slow, loved. To Kit “the heart attack was totally unexpected.” Coronary pain had once before constricted Gene's chest, but he had kept the episode to himself, hoping that it would not happen again. Now “he had a huge hole in the main aorta. Had he not been an athlete he would have been dead…. That saved him.” While his father's life was at issue, Gore went regularly to the hospital. Semiconscious, his father, who had recognized him when he first arrived, had tried to speak to him. “Haltingly, he told me to work hard. Neither of us had the right script for this scene.” Death seemed unspeakable, a subject they both hated. Though controlled, almost stoical, Kit had bouts of despair. Fortunately, by the end of the week, it was clear that Gene would live. For Kit, who just four months before had become the mother of a boy, the relief was immense, the burden heavy. In addition to being a wife and mother, she was now likely to be a nurse of sorts for some time. The prescription was for a month in the hospital, then a year of recuperative inactivity. Heart patients were thought to benefit from absolute rest. Shocked by his father's brush with death, Gore felt his own mortality touched.

With his Exeter friend A. K. Lewis, he had come to New Jersey to
sample what they both hoped would be the kind of experience young writers romantically idealize. Eager to have summer work, excited by the notion of contributing to the war effort, A.K. and Gore joined an assembly line “making wingtips for what was designed as a secret glide-bomber.” They earned forty cents an hour. This would be the real world. The work of course proved tediously dull. Only one worker, a mad Englishman, seemed well suited for the job: he was “
busy inventing
a molded plywood tire. With each awful failure, his confidence grew.” Early in the summer Gore had visited his father and Kit at East Hampton, probably with Rosalind. Gene Vidal was mainly preoccupied, for a second summer, with attempting to outplay the local tennis pro, a young man less than half his age. A heavy smoker since his late twenties, with a history of poor blood circulation, Gene had neither the breath nor the endurance. “What he was fighting was not the boy but age, which he couldn't face. He had never failed at any athletic task he had set himself. He was taking on the boy tennis pro at East Hampton … and he was out to beat him. The kid was a very good player. My father was forty-five or whatever and moderately sedentary and smoking in those days, and this triggered the heart attack. He'd play until his lips would get blue…. We'd all try to stop him. He had an obsession with beating this kid…. We all thought he was making trouble for himself.”

In New Jersey, A.K. and Gore, sharing a room in a boardinghouse, walked a mile to have their meals. For recreation they mostly read and talked. In Manhattan, while Kit remained at the hospital with her husband, Gore stayed at his father's large apartment, a handsome rental at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninety-second Street, into which they had moved on their recent return from Washington. With views of Central Park and the reservoir, with four bedrooms and three maids' rooms, it occupied the entire fifth floor of an elegant fourteen-story building built in 1925 for the wealthy Barbara Hutton, who occupied an elaborate fifty-four-room apartment with a private entrance on the Ninety-second Street side. By the end of July, bored, restless, his father out of danger, Gore had had enough of wing tips and assembly lines. Leaving A.K., who stuck it out a little longer, he was off to Spokane. His new stepfather, the commanding general at Wright Air Force Base, provided the transportation. At Fort George Wright there was some advantage in being the visiting stepson of the general. Staying at the commanding general's house, reading Daphne du Maurier's novels, he soon found he did not care for his new stepfather nor, he thought, did his
stepfather care for him. Nina was in good form, drinking less, perhaps constrained by the responsibility of her position. As always, she lived either in the past of grievances or in the spontaneity of the present. Eager to have him visit, the bitter argument of the previous summer gone from her mind, she had urged “Dearest Deenie,” as soon as he had enough of factory work, to join them at the base. “
The country is really
lovely around here. I thought when you come out I might take a cottage … On the lake…. Much love—xxx Bommy.” His own situation was much on his mind. If he could manage to accumulate enough credits, he hoped he would graduate the next June. Then, undoubtedly, the Army. But in what capacity? If he failed to graduate, the most dangerous infantry assignment would most likely be his fate. With all the military brass in his family, should he not be an officer, perhaps through one of the programs the Army was establishing for bright young men with officer potential? And what about Rosalind? Could they live on Army pay? One day, on the bus from the base into Spokane, with a clarity that thrilled him with its comprehensiveness, he sketched out in his own mind the literary career he hoped to have. “I put the political career on a shelf in my head. If it would turn out, it would turn out…. It was curious how accurate I was. I would try certain kinds of novels and write essays.”