Gore Vidal (60 page)

At Edgewater he was delighted to have guests and to be a guest, mainly at Alice Astor's. With her help he soon had furniture, delivered by truck from the warehouse where she kept large numbers of things she had been collecting, particularly because she had a mania for buying furniture and had in mind furnishing a grand London house to which she would someday retire. “A sofa and some beds were delivered, all on loan. Like a set director, she did all the rooms and then from time to time she'd come over and take the furniture away.” One of the beds went upstairs to the third floor, into a bedroom assigned to John Latouche. He was expected so frequently that he was to have his own designated room. Actually, he stayed more often at Alice's nearby and was a frequent visitor at her suite at the Gladstone Hotel. They had become lovers sometime earlier that year. It seemed clear that Alice, as usual, was the pursuer, Latouche the pursued. That his two best friends were for the time being best friends was a great convenience for Gore, who regularly had dinners and lunches with them at Rhinebeck and had them over to Edgewater, where he finally, sweating heavily, cut the waist-high grass himself. Day visitors from the city came and now, with the extra beds, overnight guests, though the small, inconvenient kitchen and his rudimentary skills as a cook made most meals semi- (or even non-) events. “Life in the mansion is serene,” he told Pat Crocker. “Numerous visitors and a ruinous series of repairs, however, are reducing me to a wreck and I can't wait until I make some more money, to finish the house up.
Vogue
is doing a piece on it which should be very chic, so chic
that I will then have to pay double for everything from the local cretins.”
Vogue
never published the piece, and, despite the expense, he was still eager to have visitors. “
My dear Carlo
,” he wrote to Carl Van Vechten, as he did to numbers of friends, “if you are mobile some day in the week, or over a weekend, come up here and sit between the columns and contemplate the river. The directions are simple: get on the Taconic Parkway and follow it until it ends at Red Hook, then drive through Red Hook toward Barrytown (clearly marked at various intersections). Go to the railroad station, cross the tracks, turn left and there I am, the only house on the river at that point. Do come.”

When there were no visitors, he embraced the solitude that Edgewater provided, the opportunity for long periods of reading and writing, particularly the former. The autodidactic impulse, from childhood on, was strong. This time, though, the reading, connected to the new novel, had a purpose, part of an effort to recast himself as a novelist. He had begun to feel frustratingly disappointed with what he called “the national style,” the flat, spare, unpoetic, naturalistic prose associated at its best with Hemingway, which had come to dominate American literature in the 1930s and 1940s. Within it he had written two bestsellers, but he had a low opinion of the artistic merit of
The City and the Pillar
, he thought
In a Yellow Wood
a dismal failure, he still deceived himself into thinking
Dark Green, Bright Red
a success, and he himself missed the desirable differentness and perhaps new opportunity represented by
A Search for the King
. What he did see clearly, he told Lehmann, is that “I am not a naturalistic writer…. and it took me some time to discover that I was never going to master that method, that my own gifts, such as they are, are of quite a different sort than I had first suspected. The enormous aesthetic failure of
City
finally convinced me of this.” Whatever reputation
Williwaw
had earned him had been “swept away by the scandalous success of a naive and hastily written book which, though eminently true philosophically, was not well done, and, in consequence, I was regarded as a most barbarous sort of young naturalist, a pale Dreiser and a queer one at that. It has been a very humiliating experience for me, these last two years, to endure the reputation of that book and to realize, worst of all, that it is now considered worthy and rather dull, well-meaning…. Read with a friendly eye, dear John, my nervous apologies; I am not frank often and, in letters at least, never coherent for I write them late at night, groggy with fatigue, rage and pleasure.”

A great admirer of Mann, he now also began reading everything by George Meredith—“the Milton of novelists”—Flaubert, Smollett, Scott, and Henry James, the last having been recommended to him rather slyly by his Exeter teacher Leonard Stevens, with whom he still corresponded. On one of his trips to Southampton he bought the complete New York Edition “for $125. I had $300 in the bank. That's all I had.” He now read James through from beginning to end and added, to his exposure to the seriousness of Jamesian high comedy, a careful reading of the bawdy intellectual comedy of a group of Latin authors, particularly Petronious and Apuleius. They seemed models for some synthesis of his own that would capture in modern terms the tradition in fiction that brought together humor, satire, and high intellectual seriousness about society, culture, and the human condition. He had no doubt about his own narrative skills; he knew how to tell a story. With a gift for language, for the sharply witty phrase, the turn of words that captured an intellectual or a social reality, he realized now that he had been sacrificing this talent on the altar of somber naturalism. As a poet he had expressed linguistic and tonal rhythms gracefully. Why could he not create a more supple, expressive prose that would bring into his fiction the virtues of his talents as a poet? In conversation he had a gift for being both funny and truthful at the same time. Why could he not write fiction that would embody that aspect of himself, completely suppressed in the naturalistic mode, that expressed the seriousness of sharp wit and high comedy? As he began writing
The Judgment of Paris
, sitting in the quiet beauty of the octagonal room, looking out at the early-autumn Hudson River landscape, he knew he was making a decisive change in his artistic self-definition. “
My place is
incredibly beautiful,” he wrote to Lehmann; “the leaves are turning and I composing, slowly,
The Judgment of Paris.”

On Labor Day, 1950, a month after his occupying Edgewater, a significant piece of the puzzle of Gore's life began to fall into place. Walking down a corridor in the Everard Baths, wrapped in the usual towels, his eyes met those of a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, Howard Auster. “I saw Gore coming down the corridor, and he was really something. Good-looking. Somehow our eyes struck. In the corridor. Towels here and a schmatte there. Then we started talking and ended up in bed. And it was just
a total disaster.” But in a larger sense it quickly became a great success. “There was an enormous attraction, but it wasn't physical. But it didn't matter, you know. It was a kind of relief. I felt like I had met a soul mate…. At the end—and you never exchange names—I couldn't resist, and I said, as I was putting my clothes back on, ‘Now, listen, tell me who you are?' And he said he was a student at the University of Virginia. On the chair was a copy of
The New Yorker
and a book and maybe a copy of another prestigious magazine. I said, ‘Ya know, you're full of shit!' He said, ‘What do you mean?' I said, ‘No one who's a student at the University of Virginia reads
The New Yorker
magazine.' I thought he might say, ‘Well, fuck you. Who are you to know?' Instead he was delighted. He said, ‘You wanna have lunch tomorrow?' I said, ‘Yeah,' and I gave him the number of the Lever Brothers mailroom, where I was working, and he called the next day at twelve o'clock precisely. He said, ‘Come on over to the Plaza.' ‘Okay.' ‘One o'clock or whatever.' So I went over. He started the control-freak business right at lunch. An artichoke with hollandaise. The most gentile of vegetables.”

Born into a working-class Jewish family, commuting daily from his parents' Bronx apartment to his job in Manhattan, Howard Auster was barely a third-generation American. His maternal grandparents had come from the Polish Pale, his paternal from Marienbad, impoverished Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants whose family histories in America embodied the usual pattern of immigration, return, desertion, remarriage, ghettoization, and gentile-phobia in the first generation, slow assimilation in the second and third. His maternal stepgrandfather worked a rented farm in the northeastern Bronx, then gradually sold off pieces of property he had bought or claimed he owned as the urban population expanded northward. The extended-family life at the isolated farm was Howard's most attractive childhood memory, a brief period of stability. For his mother, Hannah Olswang, born in 1908, the farm provided a refuge from her marital miseries during the first six years of Howard's life. Eager to be free of her parents' heavy-handed constraints, without education or vocation, at eighteen she had married Harry Auster, a compulsive gambler who earned his living as a taxi driver. Two years later she bore their only son. Having assimilated Hollywood images of glamour, Hannah, using the name Ann and changing Auster to Austen, worked as a hatcheck and cigarette girl at a
nightclub, the first step, she hoped, toward a show-business career. A pretty young woman, she could dance and sing well enough to make the dream but not its realization possible.

Howard's father, born in 1905, left fatherless at the age of about five and working for his living by the time he was twelve, embraced his working-class ethos and his gambler's compulsion. His own father, who had immigrated from Austria, had started a small business in New York. When he went to Europe for a visit, he never returned, leaving his wife and five children to fend for themselves. As if his first family never existed, he remarried. Without education or vocational skills, his deserted wife sent her children to work as soon as possible. A rigidly Orthodox Jew, she pronounced anathema on whoever did not follow the rules, including her eldest daughter, who later became the mainstay of the fragmented family, the only aunt Howard remembered with any fondness. His grandmother “didn't know what Judaism meant. She just followed the forms. She also never learned English.” Uninterested in religion except insofar as not wanting to offend the neighbors, Ann and Harry Auster struggled financially, fought bitterly, separated, reconciled, loved one another after their fashion, and set themselves up in the shadowland between working-class and lower-middle-class venues, mostly in the Pelham Parkway area of the Bronx. For Harry, life was mostly sporadic work, heavy gambling, the daily sports pages, and the poolroom. For Ann the hair tint of the day, the newspaper gossip columns, her work at nightclubs on the lowest rung of showbiz life were all major preoccupations. Though money was always short, each summer they went to the Jewish Catskills for a holiday, the high point of their year. At Public School 105, Howard, without much assistance from his parents, performed adequately. “I don't think my father ever read a book in his life. He did, though, help me in my early years in school. I remember I was having trouble learning the alphabet. He took pieces of cardboard and wrote out the letters and taught them to me by rote. That was it. I suppose the main part of it was my fault: He wanted me to be interested in baseball and sports, which he never played. He liked pool and he liked gambling, and I felt that I disappointed him.”

At about five or six Howard “discovered masturbation. But not with my hand. It was rubbing against something. I didn't know what it was. And I was doing it on my bed one day in this terrible one-room apartment we lived in then on Stratford Avenue, and they came in. I didn't stop. I was
happily humping away. Well, my father didn't do anything. My mother hit me. I don't know what consequences this later had on my life. Of course, it made sex all the more interesting.” Initially Ann Auster seemed glamorous to her young son. “My mother getting dressed up and beating up every eyelash to go out at night. She was a bit of a flapper.” And at first his father had appeared strong, exciting, someone to look up to. Soon, however, both parents seemed dull, hostile, rejecting. Like his mother, perhaps in imitation of her, he discovered early on that he had a good voice and loved singing popular and Broadway-musical songs. But “my mother was totally discouraging, except that I do remember, which shows you the extent of their religiosity, that when it came time for my bar mitzvah—‘Well, what'ya wanta do? I'll give you singing lessons or a bar mitzvah!' That's how deeply religious they were. I would have loved singing lessons. But I said, to please her—I'll have a bar mitzvah. I'll go to six weeks of Hebrew school.' Of course she loved giving the party. They showed off. I was aware that I liked singing, and I wasn't as diffident then. Earlier there was this kid's hour on radio. I got her to take me for an audition. I was so sure I would pass it. And I guess I didn't at all. And coming home on the train I remember that my mother would not talk to me. To this day I don't know why I didn't pass the audition. I remember being nervous beyond belief.” For some years thereafter “that rejection inhibited me from singing. It was like a little secret of mine. The fear of criticism, and of course when my sexual thing came along, this was another way of just exposing myself.” As he went from grade school to Christopher Columbus High School, he felt that his parents disapproved of him, that their world was small and boring. At about ten he had discovered that he liked sex, especially with boys and men, the secretive, transgressive element a great thrill, partly connected in his mind to his mother's having hit him when she found him masturbating. “I did it once, I think, with the super's son—that was enjoyment. I did get blown in the park, I must have been eleven, by a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old guy. But I really did the seducing…. I was really very aggressive about it as a child. Far more then than I would ever dream of being now. And that kind of sex was so exciting. I continued that in high school.”