Gore Vidal (48 page)

A greater barbarity threatened. The strength of the national Communist parties among the working classes in Europe was epitomized by the possibility that the party would actually win the Italian election in April. In America, the Communist threat in Europe seemed almost to bring the red tide to American shores. The Bolshevik scare dominated American headlines, the Marshall Plan and McCarthyism opposite sides of the same exaggerated anxiety. Americans in Italy “were told the communists were going to win and that there'd be a bloodbath,” Gore later wrote. The Gores, in Washington, now very conservative, were eager for their grandson's views. “This country is all wrought up about Europe, Asia, and the whole world.
There is a great deal of war talk in the air,” the Senator wrote to him, urging him to “remain in Italy until after the election … unless you think that it is too dangerous?!?!?” From New York, Gene Vidal, who gave him the bitter news that
City
, sinking fast, was number ten in the
Herald Tribune
and last in the
New York Times Book Review
bestseller rankings, also had the dreaded Communists in mind. “You must be wading in Communists according to the most recent war scare via our DC Administration. The elections in Italy are supposed to be something.” When Gore mentioned he might leave because of the threat of postelection violence, Tennessee was baffled. The Russians “are not a predatory people,” he announced. “‘I don't know why there is all this fuss about international communism.' I disagreed. ‘They've always been imperialists, just like us.' ‘That's not true. Just name one country Russia has tried to take over? I mean recently.' ‘Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,' I began … ‘And what,' asked Tennessee, ‘are they?'”

In late March, as another manifestation of his desire to meet the famous, gently teased by Prokosch, who gave him “
the impression that
this sort of busyness was somehow vulgar,” Gore visited George Santayana. The eighty-five-year-old Spanish-born American writer, philosopher, and Harvard professor put the likely Communist takeover into larger perspective. A hard-headed, rational Catholic whose religious faith did not require that he believe in miracles, Santayana had retired to spend his last years at the Convent of the Blue Nuns on the Celian Hill, having discreetly left the Bristol Hotel soon after the Germans occupied Rome. When Gore expressed his residual “America First” horror at the possibility that Italy might go Communist, “Santayana looked positively gleeful. ‘Oh, let them! Let them try it! They've tried everything else, so why not communism? After all, who knows what new loyalties will emerge as they become part of a—wolf pack.'” What seemed his cynicism revolted the American innocent who had been brought up in an environment in which the only political leader worse than Roosevelt was Lenin, a difference of degree, not kind. Santayana seemed to Vidal to look exactly like his grandmother, except bald. “He wore a dressing gown; Lord Byron collar open at the withered neck; faded mauve waistcoat. He was genial; made a virtue of his deafness. ‘
I
will talk. You will listen,'” he always made clear to his American visitors among whom were Edmund Wilson, who seemed to Santayana very self-important, and the poet Robert Lowell, his “new friend” who would have a difficult life as a
Catholic in Boston. “The black eyes shone with a lovely malice.” On Gore's first visit one of the Irish nuns, “a small figure, glided toward” him, asked him his business, and brought him to Santayana, who after a few questions was interested or bored enough to invite him back to his cell. It had an iron bed with a screen around it. There were few books other than his own. He was reading Arnold Toynbee's
A Study of History
, which he separated from its binding, tearing away each page so that he could hold one at a time. Another day Gore brought with him Barber, Prokosch, and Williams, the playwright a reluctant visitor. Williams stared “
at the old man
with great interest.” Neither had any idea who the other was. Afterward Williams remarked, “‘Did you notice how he said ‘in the days when I had secretaries,
young men?'”
Santayana probably had no idea what
The City and the Pillar
was about. Gore, though he had read
The Last Puritan
as an adolescent, had not understood or sensed its homoerotic element. Another time they talked about Henry James, whom Santayana had known. “He gave a sort of imitation of Henry's periphrastic style; then sighed. ‘Oh, the James brothers!' He sounded as if he were invoking the outlaws.” Reminiscing about his youth, Santayana told him, Vidal later wrote, that there had been “an opening at Harvard in philosophy and not in architecture, which is what he really wanted to do. Since he was very well read and a thoughtful man and a poet, with secondary but real gifts, he said, ‘Oh, well,' and became a philosopher. To the horror of William James,” with whom he never got along. Serious, innocent, fatuous, the young Gore Vidal, thinking of his own ambition, complained, “In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly.” The response was immediate. “‘It would be insufferable if they did
not
.'” At the third, final visit, in the beginning of April, as Gore rose to go, Santayana said, “‘I shall give you a book,'” and took a copy of his autobiographical
The Middle Span
from the bookcase. “‘What is your name?'” he asked. “‘I shall write for you. I rarely do this.' … ‘For Gore Vidal, George Santayana, April 1, 1948.' ‘It is your April Fool's present.'”

Taking seriously the threat of postelection chaos, Gore had decided to leave Italy, even if only temporarily. Perhaps he would return after the election or go to Paris or London instead. Election-scare warnings from the American embassy seemed good enough reason to do what he had it in mind to do all along: visit Egypt. Greece was out of the question because of the
violent political situation there. In his youthful imagination Egypt glowed with the excitement of Hollywood movies like
The Mummy
, with the alluring power of its imperial political and cultural role in the history of the ancient world, from Shakespeare's
Anthony and Cleopatra
to Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra
. Since he wanted to see everything, why not the magnificent pyramids, the mysterious temples? Cairo was a short plane ride from Rome. With the manuscript of
A Search for the King
, he flew into Egypt on April 2, thrilled at the contrast between late-Victorian Cairo and the ancient ruins that surrounded it, a Middle Eastern version of Rome. Still ruled by a remnant of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt unstably combined Turkish and European colonialism, Arab nationalism, tribal customs, and excruciating poverty.

From his room at the moderately priced El Mint Hotel, near one of the great pyramids, he had a Westerner's-eye-view of modern Egyptian misery and ancient Egyptian glory. At a club one evening he saw the white-suited, obese King Farouk, the monarch of nightclubs, with the usual European blonde on his arm. “
Like a Mafia don
, with dark glasses, he was surrounded by plainclothesmen, also in dark glasses.” At the old Shepheard's Hotel, the historic gathering place for Anglo-Americans, Gore observed with interest the colorful eccentricities of a late-colonial world, partly English, mostly French. Cairo was “like a French provincial village in those days,” he later remarked. Taken up by Mehmed Abib, “a strange little man who was chasing me around … the grandson of the last Ottoman Emperor or Sultan who was married to the sister of Zog of Albania,” he got a fascinating glimpse of Ottoman-Albanian high society, which included “two beautiful Romanov princesses … in exile. A rather exotic foreign enclave with much intrigue.” Abib wooed him “sadly and hopelessly beside the pool at Mena House. He looked like a sensitive dentist. He was the only person I ever met who sighed the way that characters are supposed to sigh in novels.” The pudgy, ineffectual Abib was easy to keep at arm's distance. After a week in Egypt, Gore wrote to Williams that he feared disease more than he felt tempted by Egyptian opportunities. Perhaps he had Flaubert's example in mind. “
I am glad you did
not have carnal associations in Cairo,” Tennessee wrote back, “not only because it would have interfered with the glorious work but because I kept thinking, if Gore is not careful he will catch one of those things from the dirty Egyptians.”

In Cairo he spent part of each day writing, working at his hotel or in
one of the public rooms at Shepheard's. Finishing
A Search for the King
on April 8, he quickly wrote a play, a variant on
The City and the Pillar
and
The Season of Comfort
, with a bitchy Nina-like mother and a homosexual son, whose father had been homosexual, torn between his relationship with his mother and his love for another young man, named Jimmy. It seemed to him a “powerful play,” though later he was happy to forget most of what it was about. Oddly enough, he wrote to Nina about it, though probably without giving her any details. She knew little to nothing about
The Season of Comfort
, which was not to be published until the next January. Anticipating a
Streetcar Named Desire
–like Broadway success, Nina was “thrilled over the play. Air mail me with whom it is,” she wrote to him, “for I am going to N.Y. and want to read it, unless you can send me a copy. I can hardly wait!” She imagined herself its producer or at least an instrumental money-raiser among her theater and society contacts. “I think I am sure of money for it,” she wrote to him. If another one of her financial negotiations with Auchincloss worked out, she hoped “to catch a boat in May.” Fortunately, he did not send her the play. “Bright eyes!” Tennessee wrote him from Rome. “This is glorious news about the play,” though he cautioned that “glorious plays are not usually written in such a short time.” Usually there were innumerable tedious revisions. “Still, by all means send it to me. When a thing goes that quickly it is a good sign, for it means that the impulse was vital and the vision was clear.” The good news was that Helen Hayes was going to star in London in
The Glass Menagerie
, Williams's first play, which had initially fizzled on Broadway. The jeep was still his maniacal pleasure. Always warmly attracted to Gore more than either of them found practical, “
I close now with
an affectionate and mildly libidinous kiss on your soft under lip which I never kissed.”

Street life in Cairo was exotic, hot, dirty, the April sky relentlessly bright. At first the nights were cold. Then the heat intensified and, without air-conditioning, even the nights were warm. Gore tramped through Cairo, “a ferocious sight-seer,” fascinated by the mixture of old and new, of Arab and European. “I did nothing but sight-see, and then I moved on,” along the Nile to the ancient sites of Karnak and Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, where he was “overwhelmed by a sense of the past, and the knowledge that there is no mystery at all about our estate despite the beautiful progression of the Book of the Dead…. We come and we go and the time between is all that we have.” He was to write later in a pseudonymous
fiction that “as the train moved through the outskirts of Cairo,” it was “a strange spectacle by moonlight: thousands of mud hovels, each with the yellow flickering light of a lantern in the window. Dark shapes moved quickly in the shadows; other shapes huddled around tiny fires in front of the huts. The modern city was now only a blur of electric lights in the distance, hidden by this sweep of slums, which were as old as the Bible, unchanged since the days of the Pharaohs.” In his mind, at Luxor, he heard a first-person fictional voice resonating with the possibility of a novel, at least partly set in Egypt, about last things, our end in our beginning, the first stirring of
Messiah
. He kept in mind for future use the image of the ancient desert landscape. Cairo and environs, especially the atmosphere of seedy intrigue, decadence, and poverty, seemed both exotic and familiar enough to become part of his reservoir of usable experiences. Still, despite its attractions, two to three weeks of Egypt were enough. The heat had become constantly oppressive. It was difficult to sleep, even in otherwise comfortable hotels.

Back in Cairo he had enough energy to book a flight to Paris, where after a brief stint at the Pont Royal Hotel in whose downstairs bar Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir frequently sat, he soon set himself up at the Hôtel de l'Université, a small boardinghouse-hotel on the Left Bank, run by a good cook. Tennessee, up from Rome, joined him there. “
There were a bunch
of English and Americans … and then the academics or academics-to-be and then Tennessee and me.” They shared the second floor. Gore usually wrote in the back. The more social and alcoholic Tennessee drank with visitors in the front. There were “two rooms and a bath for him on the street side and one room and a bath for me in the back, with the stairwell between.” One of the raffish hotel's attractions, Williams remarked, was that “‘it suited Gore and me perfectly as there was no objection to young callers.'” Busy traffic pounded the stairs. “The Bird and I did like the same type, and we would pass boys back and forth. Once, after an unsuccessful evening's prowl of Saint-Germain, we returned to the hotel, and the Bird said, ‘Well, that just leaves us,' to which he says I said, ‘Don't be macabre.'” Apparently, though, Gore had little difficulty making up for his Egyptian abstemiousness. In a short while he had all the usual one-incident pickups, most of them French trade, and at least one affair in which the affections if not the heart were touched. Still open to or at least occasionally
brooding about the possibility of romance, he attracted some who invested romantic feeling in him.