Gore Vidal (39 page)

Bob Bingham wrote from Harvard, where he thought Gore should enroll and join him in his Shakespeare course with Matthiesson, a Proust, Joyce, and Mann course with Harry Levin, and a novel-writing course with Delmore Schwartz, a rising young critic, poet, and playwright, as Bingham described him, even as, Bingham acknowledged, Gore was. Vidal, though with no intention of ever becoming a student again, attended one of Levin's lectures and had a glimpse of Matthiesson in the hallway. He himself was no genius, Bingham wrote to Gore and, though he hated to admit it, he recognized that Gore was a sort of genius whose energy and vitality did away with the need for basic training. But he still urged him to enroll at Harvard. Gore's energy and vitality could accomplish so much more if they were fed and nourished a bit more before turning them loose on the world. When Gore reported to their former Exeter teacher Henry Phillips that he found Bingham and Lewis working hard at their studies, Phillips remarked, “
It is too bad
, for had they been industrious here, they could have been imaginative at Harvard, where it is more to the point to be so. As it is, they must now reverse the normal roles.” Though Bingham urged him to reconsider his decision not to become a student, Gore's visit reconfirmed his determination to take a different road. Why, he thought, should the author
of a critically acclaimed first novel, with a second finished, a third almost under way, a participant in major New York salons and on speaking terms with world-famous figures, sit at the feet of tedious academics? Gene Vidal reluctantly agreed to give him the railroad bonds he had designated for his college costs. “I then, with my usual flair, thanked him very much and cashed them in.” With the Army money he had saved, with $665.88 in royalties on a sale of 2,811 copies of
Williwaw
and more to come (at 10 percent on a book that sold for $2.50 his accumulation even from good sales could never be huge), and with $14,000 from the railroad bonds, he had a nest egg. In a worst-case scenario he had enough to support himself for at least three years while devoting himself to writing. In the best alternative he would earn enough in royalties so that he would have to spend only a little of what he had. Determined to support himself by writing, he soon resigned from Dutton.

Feeling that New York's distractions undermined his concentration on work, he fantasized about some retreat, a place away from the wear and tear of New York City life, protected, by distance, from time-consuming literary people and politics. Europe still gleamed in his mind's eye. He wanted to travel there at length and settle for a while in Paris or Rome. Much of Europe, though, was still in ruins. Early postwar recovery was barely on its way. Guided tourism, let alone free travel, was discouraged and partly prohibited by military authorities. Europe, then, was out of the question. Perhaps he would try New Orleans or even Mexico, the setting for the novel that he had started in 1944 but abandoned because he could not concretely enough imagine a country he had never visited. As a leitmotif undermining these expectations of travel was the problem of Anaïs. He had resigned from Dutton. Cornelia now recognized he was not likely husband material. But he was still entangled with Anaïs. On the one hand, having been shocked to discover she was more than twice his age (she had shown him a copy of a book that contained her date of birth), he had suddenly a heightened sense of their unsuitability. Her beauty now seemed less powerful, her voice less enchanting. Her lushly subjective romanticism began to get on his nerves. On the other hand, he still felt entangled. Her commitment to him had a totality and generosity he could not readily forgo. She saw and responded to a side of him much of the world knew little about. Like others, she thought him sometimes arrogant, mocking, insecure, assertively ambitious, but she had also seen him moody, gloomy, depressed, worried about his career. He
had confided his anxieties to her in ways he had to no one else, partly because he trusted her, mostly because he felt strongly the genuinely intimate rapport between them. No doubt she still had much to give him of which he still had need. Though he had been unable to agree to her initial terms, her accommodation to his desire that they each carry on separate sexual lives made that less an issue than it had been. He soon sounded her out on whether she wanted to travel with him or join him wherever he came to rest. The former seemed impractical, the latter possible, though much would depend on where. If Europe had been available, she might indeed have agreed to go with or join him, the possibility of returning to France much on her mind. But their discussions now, and their letters once he left, had the resonance of eagles disengaging even when reunion was the topic.

To escape the New York summer weather he went, soon after his return from Washington, to East Hampton, where he stayed, as usual, with Gene and Kit. Probably he saw Nina, who was visiting friends in nearby Southampton.
Williwaw
was a boasting point. His own attraction to sun and sand soon had him tanned, relaxed. His father's membership gave him the advantages of the exclusive Maidstone Club. The John Drew summer theater had its usual entertainments, part of a lively summer scene that included theater and ballet people from New York. Anaïs came to spend a week in a rented room “
in a picturesque cottage
.” She recorded in her diary that Gore “suggested I spend a week out there.” His version is different. “It was her idea, not mine, for her to come. We go together to the public beach by back roads. I am terrified I'll be seen with her—an older woman, who was less than radiant in the full sunlight. I cringe at my snobbism.” A
folie à deux
, each should have known better. Anaïs disliked East Hampton. It seemed pretentious, arrogant, monotonous, the people “zombies of civilization in elegant dress with dead eyes.” Anxious, out of place, unrenewed, she needed sleeping pills. When she rode through town to the beach on a rented bicycle, she guessed, correctly, that he felt ashamed of her, that he thought her cycling inappropriate, because either she seemed too old for cycling or it was socially embarrassing, or both. “A group of us would gather at the beach. Gore would walk down from his chic beach club and join us.” Mostly he left her alone, to her chagrin, her pain. At the club, on the beach, he had handsome young male companions, a friendly, athletic type from Michigan, William Beaumer, and “a beautiful-looking man,” the same age as Gore,
Andres Devendorf, whose wealthy father owned a luxurious East Hampton home. Gore's ready practical tolerance for privilege appalled Anaïs. Whereas upper-class privilege affronted her romantic idealization of feeling, of spirit, of soul, to Gore it was a cultural and social given he could readily tolerate, even enjoy. Having lived at Merrywood, spent summers in Newport, Maidstone seemed to him just another upper-class Wasp watering hole. It was not so much that Anaïs was out of place in East Hampton but that they were, as a couple, mostly slipping away.

By late August, as he made travel plans, neither of them really desired that they include her. Late in the summer he was on his way to New Orleans. He and Anaïs were still intimate friends, still allies. In anticipation of hostile reviews of her new novel, he had left with her a long letter in its defense, to be sent to newspapers if necessary, that made clear, even if it exaggerated, his admiration for her as a writer, as a literary personality, and as a modern woman. “
New Orleans,” he soon wrote her
, “is quite lovely and the food marvelous and I am relaxing mightily…. I am at peace and contented by motion. I think of you as you know for you have no competition. Like a true Celt I draw closer when I am alone.” Yucatán had been in his mind as an exotic place he would like to visit. His plane from New Orleans took him to Mérida, his first visit to Mexico. Soon he was in “a Palace in an ancient city surrounded by a jungle. I expect to be here 2 weeks. For 3 dollars I have a most royal suite with ceiling so high there is an echo. The town is pretty and old. I am beginning to work again…. I think of you often,” he wrote to Anaïs, “and, strangely, so newly arrived, look forward to getting back. The sun is marvelous. I have no pain. Write, Cherie, all my love, Gore.” To some extent he wrote what he knew she wanted to hear. It was partly a role he played. But he played it with no one else. The special relationship was attenuated but still extant. Having brought with him a small batch of novels, he immersed himself in D. H. Lawrence, whom he was to keep reading for the next few months.
The Plumed Serpent
seemed particularly appropriate, and Lawrence provided a fictional version of the bisexual current that had been part of his tension with Anaïs, who herself had, years before, written a book about Lawrence. Though she genuinely missed him, she had no illusions about their future together. “I was afraid to say how much I missed you that you might interpret it as calling you back— But I am not calling you back, just following you in your wanderings … steeling myself for the truth, the future. You know, you
must not, out of your deep gentleness and tenderness, sustain this illusion that I have no competition.”

In Yucatán he found the ruins of Mayan civilization architecturally and historically interesting. But his curiosity about them was not compelling. His model for such things was, as always, Rome. He liked the warmth, the visual beauty, but Mérida was not, for him, a livable city. Within a few weeks he was in flight again, farther south, this time to Guatemala City. To his pleasure he found that the largest city between Mexico City and Lima, Peru, was wonderfully attractive, with an “old city” that had survived disastrous earthquakes and gleaming new buildings that were beginning to dominate the skyline. “
This place is growing
more on me every day,” he told his father. “You have never seen any place so clean and in spots ultramodern. The food is good. The pastry in one shop better than anything I've ever eaten. There are book stores, movie houses, modern hospitals etc.” Guatemalan politics, though, were primitive, brutal, a hissing snakepit. Behind the scenes the United Fruit Company, with huge banana plantations and its own railroads, controlled the country. Governed by the liberal administration of President Juan José Arévalo, Guatemala was still economically a feudal regime. The closely allied military and the old colonial families who owned the coffee plantations had a tight grip on power. Indian labor, on which the plantations depended, was poorly paid and sometimes coerced. The strong reform groups to the left, including the partly legitimized Communist Party, were pushing for expropriation of unused land, for a more even distribution of wealth, for greater democracy. When Gore arrived in Guatemala City in mid-September 1946, the Arévalo government and the old oligarchy were in the early stages of a struggle. Within five years it would explode into revolution, repression, and death. In the bright sunshine, the dark night of Guatemala was soon to begin.

In a short time Gore had a comfortable room in a boardinghouse run by a Guatemalan businessman, Carlos Urruella. The city was exotic yet civilized, urbane yet comfortable, everything inexpensive. “
Labor is cheap
: a cook for ten a month. Prices on everything else have gone up but are still way below NYC etc standards,” he wrote to his father. He could almost live, if he were prepared to be economical, on the hundred dollars a month the Auchincloss trust fund provided. Now that he was of age, at his insistence
Nina had begrudgingly turned it over to him. Ironically, some of the fund was invested in United Fruit. Celebrating his twenty-first birthday in Guatemala City, he quickly established his usual schedule, writing part of the day, then walking, touring, stopping at bars, restaurants, sampling the nightlife. What did not grow on him was bullfighting, which seemed to him animal torture. When he attended his first, he walked out.

With his easy, attractive manner, he began to meet interesting people, some fellow boarders, others in the general run of city life. Distinctively a handsome, formally dressed American, carrying himself as if he were worth knowing, he was soon introduced to Guatemalans from prominent families, particularly to the Vasquez Bruni family members of his own age. A wealthy clan, their Guatemala City town property occupied a full square block. “The family patriarch was of Colombian origin, and he held what seemed to be the lifetime hereditary rank of minister from Colombia to Guatemala.” Mention of his grandfather, of his father's service in the Roosevelt administration, of the Auchinclosses, would have opened any resistant doors. “There's a delightful ruling class here which I've been running with lately,” he wrote to Gene Vidal. “They own Guatemala, have great plantations etc. I meet the President next week. The nice thing about such a small country is the fact that everyone knows everyone else. There's a good size foreign colony of diplomats and writers and painters.” In the Vasquez Bruni family “there were three sons—one a true wit named Ricardo,” and a beautiful daughter, Olga, nicknamed “Cookie,” with whom he soon became friendly. The Vasquez Brunis comprised, he thought, “an enchanted world.” Cookie's closest friend, Felicia Montealegre, an Argentinean, said “with a heavy accent that she was going to go to New York and marry the most famous man there. She went and married Leonard Bernstein.” Another Guatemalan, Mario Monteforte Toledo, was less wealthy but more intellectually interesting. It immediately became clear to Monteforte, though less clear to Gore, that the young American knew nothing about Central American politics. To Monteforte, about ten years older than Gore, his American friend seemed naïve about such things even in his own country. A handsome, energetic essayist and poet, Monteforte was a liberal socialist. President of the Guatemalan Congress, widely regarded as a likely future president of the country, he tempered his hope for social reform with a keen sense of the power of the alliance between Guatemalan social conservatives and foreign economic interests.