Gore Vidal (33 page)

Wreden had his own proposal for the Dutton proprietors and for Gore. Since Dutton was eager to have new young voices, why not bring onto the staff an energetic young writer who could alert the house to people and projects that would give Dutton a leg up on the postwar world of returning soldiers and the eager anticipation of a new postwar literature? Though it had never occurred to him that he might earn his living as an editor, Gore immediately accepted. The totally unexpected had happened: his book of poems had been accepted for publication, and he had been offered a job. He could join Dutton when he was discharged from the service. In early July, after two months' rehabilitation at Van Nuys, he was called to appear before an examination board of three senior medical officers. He still had occasional aches, pain, and stiffness from swollen joints. The mysteries of rheumatoid arthritis left doctors perplexed, in disagreement about diagnosis and treatment. Fortunately, the Army doctors did him no harm. The board reviewed the records, questioned him. Clearly he would not be sent overseas again, regardless of how long the war lasted. Since there was no cure, he would be entitled, at discharge, to a small disability pension if he would agree to stay in the Army for approximately another two years. If he would forgo the pension, he would be discharged in approximately one year. In any case he would be assigned for six months to “temporary limited service” in a warm, dry climate, “duty not involving excessive physical exertion.” He did not hesitate a moment. “I said, ‘Let me out! I don't want the pension.' I wanted to get out, I wanted to get into the world. Going into the Army at seventeen was a relief. I'd gone into another
prison, but it was a much bigger prison than any school.” The assignment was, inexplicably, to a training center, Camp Gordon Johnston, at Carabelle on the west coast of Florida. With orders to report in mid-August via Fort Dix to the redistribution center in Asheville, North Carolina, for transport to Florida by August 19, Gore said good-bye to Nina, to the Steins, to Hollywood glamour. He had another cross-country train trip ahead of him. Since the eastward route required connections through Chicago, he decided to stop in Jackson, Michigan, to visit his favorite aunt, the sharp-talking Lurene and her husband, Merle. A welcome visitor, he enjoyed the assertion of Vidal family identity, the voluble pride of Lurene in his father and now in him also. Handsome, young, happy to be alive, slim in his brown Army uniform, the world all before him, his war was coming to an end.

As he stood in his aunt's garden, bright with flowers on a sunny July day, someone he vaguely knew from one of the many Washington schools he had been to, though he could not remember which, now a neighbor or visiting a neighbor of Lurene's, joined him. “Oh,” Carter Sparks said, as the conversation went on, “did you know that Jimmie Trimble's dead?” Shock. Silence. Resistance. Numbness. What did that mean? He held the “stark announcement” at a distance, temporarily. The immediate facts were blunt, brief, though it would take much of a lifetime to assemble them more fully. He vaguely knew that Jimmie, whom he had last seen during Christmas 1942 in Washington, had gone from St. Albans to Duke University. Since Jimmie was underage, his mother would not give him permission to enlist. Six months later, at eighteen, he had joined the Marines. With numbers of opportunities to use his baseball skills to stay out of combat, he had insisted that he take the same chances as most others. In August 1944 he became a scout-observer in the South Pacific. From October 1944 to February 1945 he was stationed on Guam, from where he soon wrote to his mother that “
I'll never forgive myself
for refusing to follow your advice to stay in college. After the war we won't receive any credit for having been out here.” At the end of February, while Gore was in the Aleutians, Jimmie landed on Iwo Jima. On March 1 he was killed in heavy action with the enemy. What Gore knew now was the bare fact of his death in action, casually mentioned in an idle conversation by someone who had no idea what their relationship had been, even that they had been friends. How to absorb this? How to deal with it?

Stunned into feeling and thinking as little as possible, he left Jackson
for New York. Gene and Kit, with three-year-old Vance and the infant Valerie, were at East Hampton, where Gore joined them, at some basic level eager to affirm by the very presence of his body in Long Island summer sunshine that he himself at least was alive and well. He had come through the war. He had a life and a future, a book of poems to be published, the offer of an editorial job in New York. The impact of Jimmie's death he put on emotional hold. In the warm evenings at East Hampton the popular John Drew Summer Playhouse provided theatrical entertainment and theater people, both of which he enjoyed. Someone pointed out Thornton Wilder. And he met a brilliant lyricist named John Latouche, famous for his wit and high spirits, a magnetic figure in New York social and artistic nightlife.

In the restorative sunshine, on the beach, a happy accident occurred. With no advance warning, suddenly he was introduced to a man with dark hair and black eyes, “
who looked more like
a pirate than a writer,” named Frederic Prokosch, the novelist whose narratives he had obsessively read without any notion that the “two fascinating words” that made up his name had attached to it a living being with whom one day he might shake hands. Handsome, athletic, proud of his movie-star good looks and his excellent tennis, Prokosch had recently returned from Europe, where he had served during the war as cultural attaché in Stockholm. He had been well known if not famous since the publication of
The Asiatics
in 1935,
The Seven Who Fled
in 1937. Born in 1908 in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of a brilliant but repressive linguist of Czech origin who, for their own good, never praised his children, the thirty-seven-year-old Prokosch was literary, successful, magnetic. “I found him a very erotic writer, and there he was sitting on the beach. He had rented a cottage on the beach with a Swedish boy, and I got to know him.” Before the war Prokosch had graduated from Yale, earned a doctorate in medieval English, then studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he had been great friends with two other literary Americans from Yale, Robert Giroux and John Kelly, both of whom Gore would soon get to know in New York. Like Kelly and Giroux, Prokosch's main sexual interest was in men. Eager to get away from the Manhattan heat, he had come to East Hampton to enjoy the cool breezes. By temperament a poetic lyricist of solitude and personal voyaging, Prokosch had an immense capacity to be impersonally charming. Gore found him, as he was, “amiable but distant.” An inveterate traveler who delighted in the exotic, a restless man who loved his own loneliness, who struck many as cold and aloof, his highest interest
was in reading and in literary culture. When Gore told him how profoundly his “
early adolescent self
” had been affected by his novels, “he found this amusing: ‘How
sensitive
you must have been!' And the pirate laugh would roar.” The meeting was preface to a long, intermittent friendship. With Gore's own book-in-progress substantially under way but not completely done, the accidental meeting on the beach at East Hampton with a writer whose novels he read and admired gave a small additional affirmation to his own sense of himself as a novelist. It was welcome if for no other reason than that he was having difficulty finishing
Williwaw
. He did not want it to be another in what seemed to him already an all-too-long list of novels never completed.

Summer 1945. Manhattan. East Hampton. Suddenly, in August, earth-shattering explosions. New sights for a new world. The war was about to be over. Years of scarcity and sacrifice were at an end, an age of prosperity to begin. For millions of servicemen it was now time to come home. Many already had. But first, a grand cosmic light show. Los Alamos suddenly became a household name. On August 6 the world learned that Hiroshima had been destroyed by a powerful new bomb. The world of TNT had been transformed into the atomic age. On August 9 Nagasaki mostly disappeared. For most Americans it seemed the right thing to have done. The war in the Pacific would not be prolonged by a contested invasion of the Japanese homeland. The mushroom cloud immediately became the talismanic sign of the new age. With his father, who was fascinated by the new technology and informed about the progress of the bomb, Gore had long conversations. News reports touted a golden age of cheap electricity through nuclear power; radioactive fallout was a secret not to become part of public discussion for a year or so. In New York, where he spent part of July and August, Gore had his father's apartment to himself. Central Park foliage was green, lush, the city filled with servicemen. Raunchy bars and clubs overflowed with men on leave. In the fashionable Astor Hotel one side of the elegantly erotic art deco black bar was for male-male encounters, the other for male-female. The excitement was riveting. In the city he regularly walked from Ninety-second Street through the park or along Fifth Avenue to the glittering, crowded euphoria of a midtown about to celebrate the war's end. August 14. Japan surrendered. V-J Day. The American party began. Millions
filled Times Square. Joining the huge crowd, Gore both watched and participated in the celebration, New York on an all-day all-night binge of revelry, parties in the street, fireworks in the sky, strangers embracing, a grand sense of relief inseparable from pleasure. We had come through. The war was over. The next morning he woke up in bed with a stranger. He had forgotten how they had met.

Convalescence in East Hampton alternated with Manhattan adventures. For the first time he went to the Everard Baths, the object of a longtired witticism that called it the “Ever Hard,” the famous emporium of grime, steam, and flesh on West Twenty-eighth between Broadway and Sixth, which since its opening in 1888 had descended from elegance to seediness. Its attractions, though, had made it an internationally renowned center of sex for men interested in men. During the war, with hotel rooms costly or simply unavailable, the baths, open all night, were more popular than ever, their clientele even more various. Soldiers with conventional domestic lives found the baths a convenient place for sleep, showers, and sex. The general habitués were a mix of every sort of interest and background. In the showers, the steam rooms, the small pool, in the long corridors and tiny cubicles, valuables checked securely, safely casual and anonymous, wrapped only in white robes, uptown and downtown people, tourists and soldiers, businessmen and show-business stars, workingmen and society nobs met in what had become institutionalized single or multiple encounters. After a night on the town, soldiers and sailors and all the usual clients would end up at the baths, sometimes a tired, often a bacchanalian mix. It “was sex at its rawest and most exciting, and a revelation to me,” Gore recalled. “I felt the way the Reverend Jerry Falwell must feel when he visits the Holy Land.”

Sometimes the encounter would originate someplace else, at a club or a movie theater, on the street or at the Astor Bar, which became one of Gore's regular early-evening stops, at times so crowded with uniformed men on the prowl that few civilians dared enter the sacred precinct. One evening at the Astor a small voice from a short, moon-faced, bespectacled man, “a little brown pot, big glasses, unprepossessing,” not in uniform, said, “
And so to bed
!” Kimon Friar, a Turkish-born, Greek-speaking American poet, translator, and teacher, ten years older than Gore, had noticed under the young man's arm a copy of Samuel Pepys's salaciously frank eighteenth-century
diary, whose characteristic refrain “And so to bed!” is its signature phrase. Pepys, bed, and Gore's good looks were incentive for Friar, who immediately in one unstoppable breath told him who he was and what he did, including that he was now an instructor of literature at Amherst College. His best student and close friend, at whose parents' apartment in New York he usually stayed, was a talented young poet, James Merrill. Friar had “already mastered the art of not listening to others with an air of attention,” Gore later remarked. When Friar proposed they go someplace quiet to talk, Gore invited him home to 1107 Fifth Avenue. Friar, who seemed likable and intellectually attractive, was amazed to learn that a book of Gore's poems had been accepted for publication. Happy to talk about poetry and art, Gore immediately made it clear that bed together was not in their imminent futures. There was to be no sex. At the apartment Friar looked around at the sweep of rooms, the views of Central Park. His own immigrant background and hand-to-mouth economic life found it all very upper-class. Still, he had a trump card. James Merrill's father, one of the founders of a famous Wall Street firm, he said, putting it all in perspective, “is a lot
richer than yours
.”

By mid-August Gore was on his way to Camp Gordon Johnston, via a rest and transfer stop in Asheville, North Carolina. As the crowded train rose into the foothills where the Blue Ridge and the great Smoky Mountains meet, he thought the countryside beautiful: pine-covered slopes, the sudden deep green of high valleys, endless curves and mountain vistas. The only thing he knew about Asheville was that the writer Thomas Wolfe had grown up there.
Look Homeward, Angel
had been not only one of the popular literary novels of his Exeter years but so well thought of that it had been assigned as required reading in English classes. On the one hand he disliked Wolfe's elaborately lyrical prose, and Exeter classmates had teasingly called to his attention the name of Wolfe's central character, Eugene Gant. “I think the hero of Tom Wolfe's
Look Homeward, Angel,”
Wid Washburn remarked, “was someone whom Gore didn't want to share a name with.” That may have reinforced his own name change to “Gore.” While at Exeter he jotted down in a notebook the phrase “Look Downward Angel,” perhaps the title of an unwritten parodic short story. On the other hand, Wolfe and Vidal shared a birth date, exactly twenty-five years apart. There seemed something fateful about that. In Asheville he searched vainly for Wolfe's childhood home. The “vast resort hotel for damaged officers”
where he shared a bedroom with five other men was near George Vanderbilt's massive Biltmore, at which Henry James had stayed, uncomfortably, in February 1905. From Asheville he went, finally, in the heat of late August, to Camp Gordon Johnston, on Florida's Gulf Coast, between Panama City and Tallahassee, near Apalachicola Bay and its resplendent beach. Assigned as officer in charge of the mess hall, his light work left him with time and energy to return to the manuscript in the gray accounts ledger he had taken with him. He wanted to finish
Williwaw
.