Gore Vidal (34 page)

But he could not move it that last short distance to its end. The beach was one compensation. Though he had been to Hobe Sound on Florida's east coast, where the Auchinclosses had a home, this was his first experience of the gulf. Always a happy swimmer, he loved the water and the sun. Another compensation was the invitations from solicitous matrons, eager to provide a social life and possible matches, to visit the sorority houses at Florida State University in nearby Tallahassee. With most college-age boys in the service, it was an advantage to have Camp Gordon Johnston close by. The ladies were always “on the lookout for gallant young officers.” Hospitality was welcoming, congenial. With other officers he went to dances and took long walks with flirtatious belles happy to have male companionship. “Spanish moss hung in the middle distance.” The manners and rules were quaintly post-Civil War, picturesquely Victorian. One of his fellow officers, Wade Hampton, who joined him on the Tallahassee visits, had been at Exeter with him. A descendant of a Civil War general and South Carolina politician, he also fantasized about high political office, especially the presidency. For Gore it was a taste of the social attractions of college life without having to be a college student. At the moment, though, his most focused ambition was to finish the novel. During the day his mess-hall duties took some time and little attention. At night there were movies, a seemingly endless supply of Hollywood films shown and reshown at every Army base around the world, the one ready source of entertainment for millions of bored soldiers. One evening he saw
Isle of the Dead
with Boris Karloff, an actor whose performance in
The Mummy
had settled deeply into his memory as a young boy in Washington and had haunted his imagination since. There was something magical, evocative, energizing for him about the performance and the film. “
So Boris Karloff
, as a Greek officer on an island at a time of plague, broke, as it were, the ice,” he recalled. Suddenly he was able
to write again, almost instantaneously, with automatic but determined perseverance. He had “no idea what it was in the movie that did the trick.” Having been assigned as officer of the day to night duty in a room empty but for typewriters, he sat down at a machine, the gray ledger beside him, listening each evening to weather reports. Suddenly “a hurricane was on its way up the Gulf, heading towards us.” Some combination of
Isle of the Dead
, the room filled with typewriters, and the threatening storm energized his creativity. “I zoomed right through the book there.” Within a few weeks he had finished
Williwaw
. He felt immense relief and satisfaction. He had actually completed a novel, at last. And it seemed to him cogent, taut, readable, mature. “With the finishing of this book, my life as a writer began.”

Thin, a little under six feet, with a crew cut, still in uniform, Gore found himself less than two months later, soon after his twentieth birthday, sitting at his own desk in the Fourth Avenue offices of the venerable New York publisher E. P. Dutton. With Pick again stationed at Mitchell Field and his father's Fifth Avenue address available as his home, he had had no difficulty arranging a transfer back into the Army Air Corps to serve once again under his uncle's command. Since he had served as base historian at Fort Peterson, what more suitable light-duty assignment than base historical officer in the Public Relations Office at Mitchell Field? By early August his new home was a barracks on Long Island, his half-time duties mostly routine paperwork. Like innumerable servicemen, he waited to be mustered out as the Army bureaucracy slowly processed millions into the civilian population. With ample free time, he went regularly into Manhattan, staying overnight or on weekend leave in the back bedroom at 1107 Fifth Avenue, sometimes at the Everard Baths or in a hotel. “Gore would come when he wanted to see his publishers or his friends,” Kit recalled, “but he didn't stay very long usually.” At first, though, he had no publisher for the novel. Having hand-copied the portion of
Williwaw
from his notebook and added to it the new typewritten pages, he gave what he thought a clear copy to Robert Linscott, a senior editor at Random House who had been recommended to him. “So Linscott called me in. He couldn't have been nicer, this old man, and said it is customary in publishing to submit a manuscript that
has been typewritten. I thought he lacked dedication and perhaps should find another field of work. So I withdrew haughtily from Random House.” But he soon had it fully typed.

With Gene he had lunch at a midtown restaurant with his Dutton mentor, Nicholas Wreden, and a senior editor, John Tebbel. Neither was aware that Gore had written a novel; their professional eyes focused exclusively on signing Gene Vidal to write his memoir. “Gore was still in uniform. Nick sat next to the old man, and I sat next to Gore,” Tebbel remembered. “Those two got into a conversation, and Gore and I were talking. He said to me, ‘While I was in Alaska, I wrote a book. Would you read it and tell me what you think of it?' I said, ‘Sure, I'd love to.' And so he brought it down to the office the next day and I read it that night, and when I came in in the morning I said to Nick, ‘We've got to have this book. You've got to read it.' So Nick did read it, and he agreed with me. The editorial board read it, and we bought it right away.” Tebbel suggested minor changes. On October 19, working with his usual dispatch, Gore told Kimon Friar that revisions “
should be finished
this week, much to my relief.” Everything went smoothly. By late November 1945 he had in hand a contract, with the usual royalty starting at a rate of 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies and an advance against royalties of $250, to be paid on the signing of the agreement.
Williwaw
was scheduled for late-spring publication. That lunch meeting also gave focus to the understanding that he would come to work for Dutton as an associate editor. A venerable firm, it still had some of its mechanics and much of its frame of mind in the world of quill pens and handwritten ledgers. In attitude the firm was conservative, its proprietors, the brothers Eliot and John Macrae, a mixture of eccentricity and competence. A spiritualist who had casual conversations with ghosts and had created Dutton's list of books on the occult, Eliot Macrae ran the firm with a successful specialty in true-adventure stories for adults; the occasional bestselling lowbrow novel, such as Mickey Spillane's crime-sex stories; the ongoing sale through innumerable editions of a perennial occult bestseller called
Cosmic Consciousness;
the popularity of Albert Terhune's dog books; and John Roy Carlson's World War II book,
Undercover
, which Tebbel had recently procured and which had already sold over a million copies. The most valuable Dutton property was
Winnie-the-Pooh
. Gore soon proposed to Wreden and Tebbel that he edit and Dutton publish an anthology of war verse. They liked the idea.
Williwaw
was scheduled for June 1946 publication,
his volume of poems for summer 1947. Gore suggested to Kimon Friar that they collaborate as co-editors of the anthology. “
I envision a collection
of the better poetry written in the times of war since the
Iliad
. Less Kipling and more Spender, more of your metaphysical people. On the other hand as this would not come out until 1947 at the earliest the subject of War might be anathema. Therefore one might think of a collection of poetry from this last war by people one has never heard of; in other words a portrait of the recent war in poetry written by the people who fought in that war or suffered in it.”

Suddenly he was not only being published, he was publishing others. Every Thursday he came into Dutton from Mitchell Field or from his father's apartment for editorial-board meetings. Regular office routine would not begin until his discharge. At the end of each week he collected his $35 weekly salary, paid in cash in a sealed envelope, perhaps an expression of the firm's old-fashioned attitude, as if the world even of paychecks seemed insufficiently Victorian, too modern for a business whose ideas as well as origins predated the Civil War. Both unreconstructed Virginians, the Macraes felt that publishing was a profession for gentlemen. A short trim man with a straightforward manner, Eliot kept Confederate battle flags in his “very literary looking” book-lined office. The Macraes preferred manly books. On the surface
Williwaw
was just that, though its jaundiced view of the Army and of human character might have distressed them if they had read beyond the surface. Excellent readers, Wreden and Tebbel knew it indeed was not a gentleman's book in the old-fashioned sense, but they were keen on bringing into Dutton new voices. Gore could help identify them. Both had come to Dutton within the last two years. Tebbel, unlike Wreden, soon left publishing for a career as a freelance writer and teacher of journalism. Originally from Michigan, he had worked at a half dozen major newspapers, most recently at the
New York Times
, and had been managing editor of
The American Mercury
, H. L. Mencken's distinguished satirical magazine. Thirteen years older than Gore, anticipating a great career for the young writer, Tebbel liked him immediately. They were soon friendly, almost exclusively at or after work, when they would sometimes finish the day after one of Gore's office visits with drinks at the Gramercy Park Hotel and dinner at a local restaurant. Gore's lively conversation amused Tebbel, though he seemed “rather shy and sometimes even tentative, even about his own work. Obviously he believed in it very much, but he did not have the
kind of personality he has now. I don't know when it changed. Probably he changed slowly. In those days he was a little tentative. He believed in himself, but he didn't push himself and he was not really, at least publicly, egotistical. He was good company.”

As editorial director and by personality, Wreden dominated the literary operations of Dutton. He had been brought in recently from Charles Scribner's Sons, where he had been a director, to run the literary side of the firm. To bolster his authority he was elected vice president and a member of the Dutton board of directors. Together he and Eliot Macrae made all publication decisions of consequence. When Tebbel left late in 1946, Wreden became Gore's editor, a relationship of mutual respect and affection that lasted for over fifteen years. An expansive man who ate, drank, and smoked enthusiastically, bearlike in size and energy, Wreden was a presence in the publishing world. Articulate and persuasive, often dressed in sports jacket and slacks, he was fair-complexioned, “tall and large, heavy, over six feet,” Tebbel recalled, with “a fascinating voice, a rumble with a very slight accent,” a small dark mustache anchored by a bold nose, sparkling light-blue eyes, thick brows, and unruly curly hair. A White Russian émigré born in St. Petersburg in 1902, he had fled to America as a young man. His father had been surgeon general of the Imperial Russian Army and private physician to the royal family. So too had his grandfather and great-grandfather. After education at a German preparatory school and the Russian naval academy, he had come into active service as a young cadet and then lieutenant in time to fight against the Turks, the Austrians, and the Germans in the Baltic Sea. When the Russians were defeated in 1916, he fought with other royalist cadets against the insurrectionists in St. Petersburg and then gave his loyalty in 1917 to the democratic Kerensky government. When the Bolsheviks took power, he joined the White Russian forces, fighting until 1920. His family lands had been confiscated; his future in the Soviet Socialist Republics was the firing squad. In June 1920, as a mess hand, he landed in New York harbor, where eighteen years before his grandfather had disembarked from a luxury liner as the Russian delegate to the conference of the International Red Cross. Soon he was a longshoreman, then an accountant, then a lumber dealer in North Carolina, where he married and had three children. For a short while he worked for the Civil Works Administration in Texas and began a memoir of his experiences in the Russian Revolution, which he published in 1935. He became a traveler representing
publishers, a bookstore manager in Detroit, manager of the well-known Scribner's bookstore in New York, and then, finally, a Scribner's director.

Despite bad teeth, half of which had fallen out because of his terror of the dentist, Wreden was quick to laugh, an avid conversationalist, and an occasional monologuist. “He was a two-fisted drinker, and he liked people and people liked him, so he had a big social life with authors.” He was, Vidal recollected, “a big jolly fat man and rather sly, rather sharp.” A happy member of The Players Club, he loved entertaining and conviviality. His old and new Russian friends, all hostile to the revolution from which they had fled, found a convivial welcome and great quantities of vodka at his Park Avenue apartment, where he lived with his second wife and their three children. Publishing suited him perfectly. So too did Gore. The respect and affection were mutual. Wreden treated Gore with avuncular attachment and commitment, as an important acquisition, a sharp young man who could write powerfully and maybe, as his career developed, brilliantly. In addition, he genuinely liked this handsome, somewhat vulnerable, increasingly well defended young man less than half his age, who had a fine sense of humor, who had read a great deal, who came from an interesting background, and who had great promise. Like Tebbel, Wreden believed that authors of fiction might benefit from suggestions but never from commands; that the editor's responsibility was to guide, never to lead; that when a writer wrote well, the editor should not get between him and his audience. It was a world of laissez-faire publishing. Editors selected works and writers. If they themselves believed in a writer, they assumed there would be an audience for him. The financial investment for new authors was small: advances against royalties did not involve trips to the bank for either party. If a book earned little, that was acceptable, especially if the book had appreciative reviews, if there were an audience for it, even if small. The first, most important audience was the editor and the publisher. Wreden was enthusiastically on Vidal's side.