Gore Vidal (26 page)

At Exeter for the fall term Gore was now, in his idiosyncratic way, somewhat of a campus celebrity. “
I've been doing
a great deal of orating and writing,” he wrote to his father, thanking him for a small birthday check. “I've made four speeches before various crowds up to 500. They seem to like my speaking for though it is more or less the unpopular view point they always stage a very flattering demonstration when I get up to speak. Every day I learn something more about speaking. One of the strangest things is when some one gets up and makes a beautiful factual address and yet is accepted unfavorably by the audience, whereas somebody like me will deliver the most hackneyed overworked speech and they like it. It really is a fascinating study.” Some of the students found him riveting entertainment. When one senator said, “I never liked that isolation pose of yours,” he responded, to applause, “That was no pose; that was my wife.” At a particularly loud moment in debate, he conceded, “I give the honorable speaker the benefit of the shout.” To his grandfather he boasted of his mastery of generational rhetoric: “Gave a speech the other day on the post war world (hollow mockery that it is) but I received the biggest ovation that
I have yet received; they, it seems, liked my ending which was: ‘this is our world, which we shall in a few years guide to our liking. Wars and leadership are not for the old, but for the young who have spirit if not the wisdom of the old. And this world tempered by the fires of war shall be ours, for you and me, and all of us together,
we are history
.' It is nice to tell people what they want to believe.” Watching his performances with a worshipful yet critical fascination, Washburn noted in his diary, “Vidal more bombastic than usual in the Senate.” Gore managed to get reelected senator from Virginia, but his hope of being elected president of the Senate was balked. “Isn't it amazing how the biggest man in the Senate is relegated to third place? I can never fathom the minds of idiots.” With A.K. he made an arrangement that resulted in Lewis's being elected president of Golden Branch in the fall, with the understanding that Lewis would support Gore as president for the spring.

On issues he was both radical and conservative. “
There never would be
peace until the world had a common language, a common currency, and a common government,” he told Washburn, who thought it worth putting in his diary. On the issue of a bill to form a federal board to govern labor, Vidal rose in the Senate “to lead the opposition,”
The Exonian
reported.

He compared Senator Murphy's speeches to the flow of hot lava, in that the further they go, the colder they get. He declared that although he was deeply dissatisfied with the present direction and state of the labor movement, he had by no means worked himself up into a hatred of all labor, as Senator Murphy apparently had. Labor, he cried, has built on this continent a nation of steel: we cannot turn and destroy it now. He contended that Washington bureaus are inefficient, ineffective, corrupt, and addicted to red tape, and denounced them for exemplifying the totalitarianism we are fighting against. President Roosevelt, he accused, is trying to use the war to make himself a dictator.

Smaller government, the division of the country into four self-governing sections, local rule but at the same time “one world,” freedom for labor as well as capital, maximum democracy—the only problem was that the democratic electoral process favored mediocrity. He teased the literal-minded
Washburn, “At heart I'm a dictator.” Washburn may have seen that the knife cut two ways, both a criticism of democracy and an ironic self-exposure that was also self-criticism.

During the November 1942 national elections he had a brush with campaigning in the real world. One of his favorite teachers, Henry Phillips, a handsome classicist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, encouraged Gore to join him in actively supporting the local Democratic candidate for Congress, Chester E. Merrill. Phillips managed the congressman's winning campaign. Eager to pillory the enemy, Gore wrote a satirical article for local newspapers. The New Hampshire Republican senator, Styles Bridges, he thought “a congenital idiot. Am I right?” he asked his grandfather. “He does more steady double talking than any man I've ever seen. If I couldn't make a better speech than he I'd never think of another election again. I asked him a great many embarrassing questions before the Republican rally. He squirmed, and not too artfully…. When I start running I am going to call spades spades, fools fools, new dealers jack assess, and I shall be beaten by a comfortable majority. How much truth can the people stand without choking?” Phillips—who played excellent jazz piano, knew the Manhattan jazz clubs well, coached the school rowing team, and had an understated sense of humor—found the seventeen-year-old an engaging challenge of the sort that made Exeter attractive. Sardonic, witty, reticent, Phillips was also a shrewd analyst of people and communal politics. When Gore challenged his claim that he knew how to make himself popular with his colleagues, Phillips quietly campaigned for an Exeter position for himself, primarily by hosting a clambake. His election confirmed the validity of his object lesson. Gore was impressed. Politics was as much cunning, persuasion, personal amiability as fiery speeches, sharp intellectual insights, dramatic assertions. In Phillips, Gore found a teacher who responded to him with a generous seriousness even when corrective. “
Vidal has long talk
with Dr. Phillips,” Washburn wrote in his diary. “Latter says he's a materialist and should change. V says Phillips should go out in world and do something.” Actually, in his way, Phillips did. Gore wanted a larger, more worldly audience.

Eager to know what his English teachers thought of him, Gore joined Bingham and Lewis in December 1942 in an escapade that apparently Bingham conceived. They broke into the English Department office. Rummaging among the files, they located comments that teachers made for the future reference of interested faculty members only. “A master complained that I
seldom did the required reading but would often be found reading irrelevant books on history or novels not on the syllabus, like Mann's
The Magic Mountain
. Another wrote that as a writer and a speaker I was ‘a soapbox orator.' Some people still think so.” Exeter teachers adhered to the values of Exeter. They did not make exceptions. The exceptionalist got on their nerves. Later Vidal recalled, “There were certain English teachers whom I liked, but I only got one of them in class.” Fortunately, since it would have meant instant expulsion, the culprits were not caught, but Gore had his mind on removing himself anyway, of liberating himself from Exeter, possibly at the end of that very term. The thought of starting either the University of Oklahoma or the University of Virginia in spring 1943 had occurred to him. Harvard was also a possibility. He took the college-board examinations but, he confided to his father, “
the best thing is
to wend my way as comfortably as possible through the war, and come back to Oklahoma, or some place where I have begun to know some people. This living in Washington is like living in a fascinating vacuum, and gypsying around is worse.” Since he would not have a high-school diploma, Virginia was an impossibility. But his grandfather's prominence in Oklahoma made Oklahoma feasible. At his grandson's urging, the Senator wrote the university president, who immediately replied that they would be honored to have his grandson there. The technical impediments could be overcome.

For Gore the impulse was directed toward establishing a home in a state in which he could run for political office. The idea seemed to him a good one. But his wiser grandfather made the argument that at best he could have a year or a year and a half at the university before being drafted. The result would be that he would have completed neither Exeter nor Oklahoma. Incompletion had the scent of failure. It certainly would leave him empty-handed. Why not finish Exeter? The Army would inevitably follow. After that there would be the opportunity to make more rational decisions about his future if, given the military mortality rate, there was to be any future at all. The ex-Senator from Oklahoma was himself “somewhat bitter. He had been defeated in 1936. He also realized that I was an Easterner and would have great difficulty in conning the Jesus Christers which he had spent his life conning…. It wouldn't be much fun to represent them. I was officially headed there. But privately he was discouraging.” What he probably did not tell the Senator is that it would take a large favor or a small miracle for him to graduate at the end of the year. Not only did he need better
grades but he needed one more credit than a normal program for the term would allow. By the time he went to Washington during the Christmas holiday, he still had not decided if he would return to Exeter for his final semester, and before leaving for the holiday he had anguished through the contested Golden Branch election for officers. Suddenly a new party had entered its own slate. “
Vidal tremendously worried
all afternoon,” Washburn, who “went out and got information and several promises to vote for Vidal,” reported to his diary. “He wanted it as culmination to his career at Exeter. He complained about his best friends giving him bad news…. Our members took [our opponents' signs] from the givers in handfuls and tore them up.” In his anger, Gore wrongly accused Lewis of going back on their agreement. But “the boys were effectively on Vidals side…. It was a rout. 40 for Vidal 18 for his three opponents combined. (Sibley voted thrice but….) Watching Vidal's face was most enlightening. Taut, anxious, falsely relaxed, forced smiles; later, when he knew he had been elected, keen smile, sang hymn with gusto.” Gore celebrated by not studying for the next day's French test. With that victory in hand, he pursued his holiday happily, putting out of mind, as best he could, his graduation problem. Perhaps something would work out. Perhaps he would pass math. The same D he had gotten for the fall term would suffice. In fact, his grades had just been the best he had ever gotten at Exeter, including a D in French, a C—in history, and a stunning B+ in English from a new teacher, Leonard Stevens. Even so, he still needed one additional credit.

On the train ride to Washington he contemplated Rosalind. Arm in arm, they soon dropped in on Mrs. Rust, who had just finished dining with friends at the Statler Hotel. Excited, the two seventeen-year-olds announced they had decided to get married. Handsome, precocious, a glamorous couple, with Army service in his near future, why not marry right after graduation in June (he did not say
if
he were to graduate)? Why not take this step into adulthood, liberation, self-possession? Delighted, Mrs. Rust assumed that Gore's well-known, high-powered Washington family would support the couple until the groom came into the money she assumed he would inherit. “Mrs. Rust was concerned about money,” Rosalind's friend Tish Baldrige recalled. “Gore's family had the semblance of money, though, and anybody in those days who had good family breeding … was considered to be rich. They were rich in many ways, not in monetary ways but in respect and recognition.” At Rock Creek Park, where he stayed with his
grandparents, the announcement was met at first with deafening silence, then frosty disapproval. Was their grandson going to indenture himself to an early, moneyless marriage? There would not be a penny from the Gores. “Be
not
fruitful, do
not
multiply” became the Senator's maxim. His own disappointing children had married prematurely. Nina strongly expressed her opposition. She had heard, she said, with unself-conscious irony, that there was alcoholism in the Rust family. “She hated Rosalind, who I must say quite openly hated her … and said Rosalind's mother was an alcoholic, which wasn't true. My mother had that one mixed up. Rosalind's father was an alcoholic and had died early. I suppose she was thinking she wouldn't want two alcoholics' children to marry in case at a drop of a match, we'd both blow up…. I think she talked directly to Rosalind. Rosalind was a match for her. She wasn't afraid of anything and had much better manners than my mother. She could be very cool, very attentive and non—committal. My mother would end up battling Rosalind and get only a sphinxlike smile out of her. Rosalind handled her very well.”

With Rosalind on his arm, Gore went to a Christmas-season dance at the fashionable Sulgrave Club. Jimmie was there. They had not seen one another since May 1939 at Merrywood. When he told him of his engagement, Jimmie immediately responded, “You're crazy!” It was the response of a sensible friend, himself pursued by and pursuing many attractive girls, who also expected to be in the Army within the next year or so. “
We went downstairs
to the men's room,” Gore recalled years later, “with its tall marble urinals and large cubicles. I wondered what, if anything, he felt…. Fortunately, our bodies still fitted perfectly together, as we promptly discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly, talking of girls and marriage and coming simultaneously.” The position became a favorite one. “He always told me,” a friend remarked, “when we used to speak about sex in bygone days long ago, he used to say that what he really enjoyed was belly-rubbing. It's what we all did at school and didn't know why it was so pleasant. One person gets on top of another and usually inserts his penis between the legs of the other or just lets it ride up and down on the tummy and eventually the friction is so pleasant you get a little come and that's even more exciting for that gives you more
raison
.” From Washington, Gore flew to Spokane, the ride arranged by the powerful general of the Ferry Command. To his delight, the Christmas-season festivities had, as USO entertainment, a number of Hollywood stars, particularly the beautiful
Joan Leslie and the sophisticated Adolphe Menjou. As the son of the general's wife, Gore sat with the honored guests. Joan Leslie he immediately fell in love with. A letter from the Senator, who had recently celebrated his seventy-second birthday, reached him in Spokane. The war was on the Senator's mind, including his own ancestors, some wounded, others killed, who had fought for or against the republic. “
I cannot choose
but wonder what your eyes will witness before you reach your 72d milestone—as I hope you will. I cannot repress the wish that you may not have to go to the wars. If you do I certainly hope that you come back hale and unharmed, and with your shield. If you should have to go I am sure you will behave as becomes your breed—with a record that every member of your Command would be proud to claim as his own.” From Spokane, Gore went directly back to Exeter for the momentous spring term.