Gore Vidal (29 page)

Now on a clear path to graduation, Gore again had time for other things. At the final meeting of the Senate verbal fireworks had flared. The
topic was a bill against lynching. “
Those attending
the meeting might well have thought they had instead wandered into a meeting of the Society for the Preservation of American Wit,”
The Exonian
reported. Vidal took the contrarian states'—rights side against the bill. It passed handsomely. With Bingham, who had again severely criticized one of his stories, he had a “terrific feud,” the climax of which was a single-spaced two-page letter of counterattack by Gore to Bingham, partly humorous, mostly sarcastic. Soon they were amiable again, working together on the class yearbook,
The Paean
. Their arguments about art he thought so good he used them in a discussion with McFarland. Washburn listened. “On the surface and to the casual observer, he would seem to know a great deal about art. Distortions of Greek statues he said were looked upon with horror but we've gotten used to them as we have with Rembrandt's shadow technique. He thinks that distortion today will in time be accepted by the people who will get used to it. He doesn't seem to differentiate between slight distortion for more beauty of former painters and the great distortion for god—knows—what ('design' Vidal calls it).”

Graduation Gore anticipated as celebration and liberation. As to academic prizes, he had no doubt he would not win one, perhaps with the exception of the English 5 composition award which, to his surprise, Bingham and Lewis won. In the informal senior-class ballot for comico-serious designations, his classmates pronounced him class “politician” and class “hypocrite.” For the latter honor Bingham came in third. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it also embodied the reality of perception and attitude. A. K. Lewis was named “wittiest,” Bingham was third in that category and second in most likely to succeed. Washburn had priority as class “grind,” the positive side of which was his being named valedictorian. Running for class orator, Gore came in second to one of his debate opponents, the “interventionist” Irving Murphy, who also beat him out in the informal election for “best speaker.” It was a disappointment. Lewis was elected class historian, Bingham class poet. Along with Washburn, they would have the positions of prominence on class day and at the graduation ceremony.

On a hot mid—June weekend, Exeter green and bright, hordes of parents began arriving. Gene and Kit came up from New York. Nina, waiting out the war on the West Coast, did not attend. On Saturday afternoon, sunny but with a cooling breeze, with eight hundred people watching, Gore marched into the gymnasium in cap and gown for Class Day activities.
As class poet, Bingham read “
very effectively
,” Otis Pease thought. The gist of it was that the dream of the “perfect school” comes true at Exeter. As class historian, Lewis, deadpan, read a humorous account of the qualities of the graduating class; including their aggregate weight and height. Washburn gave a brief valedictory farewell to liberal education for the duration of the war. More long-winded, Irving Murphy insisted on inflating his class oration to match his inflated opinion of how much its members would contribute to American politics and government in the future. He neglected to make any reference to how many of them might make their greatest contribution by being killed. Ten of Gore's classmates were soon to die in the war, including Lew Sibley.

In the late afternoon Bliss Perry and some faculty wives entertained the visitors with punch and cookies on the lawn. That night almost everyone dined at the crowded Exeter Inn, then went to the graduation ball, attended by celebratory boys and lovely girls. For this occasion Gore had a replacement for Rosalind. Kit came as his date. Uninterested in schoolboy dances, Gene Vidal, happy to accommodate his son, stayed at the inn. Seventeen-year-old Gore Vidal had on his arm the most beautiful woman at the dance. Everyone soon knew she was a professional model from New York. People were bowled over. He did not say, as some later invented, “I want you to meet my mother!” The fun and glory were in Kit being his date. “Gore suggested it,” Kit recalled, “and Gene encouraged me. I think he wanted the glamour of taking a model to his dance and telling all his friends.” Graduation on Sunday was “stifling hot, humid.” There was a thunderstorm late in the day. In the morning, at the last Exeter church service Gore was ever to attend, Perry bade farewell to the class. His subject was “faith” in the future. At the ceremony that afternoon he made another speech. Each graduate rose as his name was read, placed cap on head, tassel on left. They then formed a circle on the lawn, where each received his diploma from the hand of the principal. The imminent thunderstorm came as a relief. At dinnertime the rain poured down.

From Union Station in Washington Gore departed, once more by train, for the Army Special Training Program (ASTP) in Lexington, Virginia, set up for educationally advantaged enlistees under the age of eighteen who were too young for regular Army programs. He had enlisted in New
York City on July 29, 1943, his home address his father's 1107 Fifth Avenue apartment. There was one stepsibling there, Vance, another well on its way. The large fifth-floor apartment, with views of Central Park, had a room for Gore, converted from a maid's to a family bedroom. His father's East Hampton summer hospitality was in easy reach.

Most of July, though, he stayed, for the last time, with his grandparents at the large stone house overlooking Rock Creek Park, the happiest home of his childhood. Dot and the Senator were delighted to have him there. With heating oil rationed, it had become difficult to heat the house for the winter. Having thought they had sold it, when the deal fell through they reoccupied the house that summer. Soon it was to be out of their hands forever. Some part of the long summer days Gore spent reading and writing. Late afternoons he went to his grandfather's downtown office to escort him home.

Nina, who with Tommy and Nini, her two children by Auchincloss, had gone from Tucson to Los Angeles, was living now in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. With $1,000 a month from Auchincloss, some additional money for child support, her pension as the widow of a major-general, and complete Army medical care, she could afford a comfortable life in wartime California. She had Hollywood friends, some through Olds, who had consulted on numbers of films, including Clark Gable's
Test Pilot
. She had also met Doris Stein, now her closest friend, the beautiful wife of one of the reigning Hollywood talent entrepreneurs, Jules Stein, later a major player in the making of movies. Having slept with Gable, Nina hoped he might propose to her. They had become intimate drinking buddies. When she played bridge and gin rummy with Michael Arlen, she told him Gore was “working on
a jealous inspiration
inspired by him,” actually his Somerset Maugham novel. Arlen won $400. “I'm the unluckiest gambler in the world,” Nina complained. “I don't know why I do it.” Warmed by the Los Angeles sunshine, she settled in for the duration.

In the company of a hundred other seventeen-year-old Washington boys, Gore marched into Union Station early in August “and onto an ancient train that let us off in or near Lexington, Virginia.” Having escaped Exeter, he found himself on August 7 a student of sorts at, of all places, the venerable Virginia Military Institute. The campus was redbrick, traditional, lovely, the air and landscape late-summer green. Everywhere strapping cadets marched, shoulders square, to the beat of a military and scientific
drum. The ASTP students wore Army uniforms without a corps designation. His blond hair now brown, his eyes hazel, his complexion ruddy, his height 5 feet 11¼ inches, a private in the “Enlisted Reserve Corps,” Gore immediately discovered to his shock that this three-month intensive program trained not general officers but engineers. Someone who had sworn an oath never to take another math course, who had little to no background in the sciences, was suddenly plunged into a hastily devised college-level preengineering program intended to teach bright high-school graduates enough physics and math to qualify for the Army engineering corp. They would be expected to assist senior Army engineers in building and/or blowing up bridges around the world. “I am now a goddamned engineer,” he told his father. “First of all we are in regular army uniform all the time. Second we are in the regular army. Third this place trains only engineers. I can't get in the Amgots [American Military Government in Occupied Territories] or foreign language group because they require a BA. Nor in psychology or personnel because they require an MA. Nor in pre—med because they require two years of college.” Could his father help him get a commission or at least a transfer to a situation more appropriate to his abilities?

Classes each day until 3 P.M., then exercise and drill till dinner: physics, trigonometry, military science, engineering, chemistry. At least history and geography had some connection with his interests. The staff came from the regular Virginia Military Institute faculty. One day an elderly colonel accosted him on campus. Why didn't he play football like his father? Two of the faculty were congenial, especially a young English Department teacher, Carrington Tutwiler, a Philadelphian with a doctorate from Princeton, who encouraged his writing. A nephew of the novelist Ellen Glasgow, he was himself literary enough to be interested in a young man who wanted to be a writer. Though Gore worked some evenings on the Maugham novel, a bit of which Tutwiler read, he showed him mainly poetry, which he continued to turn out, much of it increasingly dark in abstractly unfocused ways. Still, it was competent, and impressed Tutwiler. The schedule, however, permitted little time for writing. “
I compose sonnets
in the latrine,” he told his father. In his English class the group of twenty-five students studied Supreme Court decisions for structure and style as well as content, Tutwiler recalled. Actually Gore enjoyed the toughness of the regimen, particularly the physical training. On the first day he took satisfaction in being able to do twenty-five push-ups. By the end of August he had been made a platoon leader,
promoted to corporal. “I'm having a fine time yelling ‘Thirsqawthirplutuneawpresencountedfor,'” he wrote to his father. The food was surprisingly good, with meat plentiful. On weekends he and two roommates spent hours in noisy roadside bars where men in uniform and local ladies flirted, nostalgic wartime popular songs mixing with thick cigarette smoke. “There was a wonderful roadhouse near by which we would get to, with a jukebox and the hot—eyed girls from the neighborhood. It was very erotic, and they were always playing ‘Paper Moon' and ‘Don't Get Around Much Any More.' There was a pleasant air of doom about it.” Weekend passes were easy to get. He caught a mild case of flu. “
I always seem to catch
something when things get a little rigorous…. I am getting high marks in everything but physics. Maybe I'll pass maybe I won't but I'm too damned tired most of the time to care. I really enjoy this business altho I'd like to sit still sometime and think.” Later he had some nostalgic good feeling for the crazily dislocating combination of activities. After Exeter, VMI seemed grown-up, purposeful, even if bizarre.

A sharp pain in his stomach soon proved to be appendicitis. Operated on by an Army doctor, Gore found the aftermath “very unpleasant. I was flat on my back for a week then the Dr. bade me rise and walk, which I did.” When he returned to classes, his physics marks plummeted. The ten days or so he had missed contributed to the decline. Most likely it would have happened anyway. “I dread the outcome. There's a story here that an AST student dropped a pencil in class, and while he was leaning over to pick it up he missed a term.” Not that he was uninterested in physics, an interest that would express itself almost a lifetime later in his manipulation of modern theories as part of the plot of
The Smithsonian Institution
. The physics instructor, Colonel Willard, whose name he was to make use of in
The City and the Pillar
, let them in on a military secret: the atom had been smashed. That it had occurred at the site of what had once been the Los Alamos Ranch School was still top secret. Gore's other grades were still good. He was even elected class president, 85 votes to 22. Despite the appendectomy, he felt physically fine, partly because during the recovery period he was relieved of physical training and marching. “Maybe I should have tried for West Point earlier in life—or played football—there is a certain parallel,” he joked to his father. He had a two-week furlough coming up at the end of August. If he could hang on scholastically, he might make it through. “Privates have happy if short lives.” But, as he feared from the
beginning, he could not sustain adequate grades in subjects he had no aptitude for or interest in. The second half of the intensive physics course was a disaster. So too math. Suddenly, by mid—October, it was all over. As it became evident he would fail these courses, he was quite understandably expelled. This was hardly a blow to his ego, and, as he often did in such situations, he had anticipated the inevitable and made alternative plans. He had been regularly in touch with his father and Uncle Pick. The practical problem was immediate. Assigned to Fort Meade, near Washington, as an expendable infantry private he might spend the rest of the war there or he might suddenly find himself on a troopship to the European front.