Gore Vidal (64 page)

At Columbia University one evening in February 1952 Gore joined Malcolm Cowley, the literary and cultural critic born in 1898, who had analyzed the post–World War I generation in
Exile's Return
, and the much younger John Aldridge for a forum discussion of the state of the novel. The relationship with Aldridge had grown more complicated than simply critic-pseudo-novelist and novelist-occasional-critic jockeying for position and
prominence. Initially Vidal had thought Aldridge might do something important for him and other writers of his generation. If Aldridge was to be the preeminent critic of his time, the new Edmund Wilson, then his imprimatur would be valuable. By 1952 Vidal was beginning to see that Aldridge would not rise to Wilson's level. He later began to think of him as another version of Orville Prescott; it was becoming clear that Aldridge might become an enemy, certainly not a supporter. After their correspondence in 1948, they had met in New York in fall 1949, having lunch and spending part of an afternoon wandering around the midtown bookstores, at each of which Gore looked for his own books. “Maybe he thought it would be impressive,” Aldridge later remarked, “if the stores had his books. I think he wanted my support, and for a long time I think he thought he had it. I reviewed about three of his books in the
Times
, always somewhat mixed. But he seemed to think that that was just fine.” Aldridge's review of
The Judgment of Paris
was not unfriendly, but it was condescending and had in it distant homophobic touches. As always, his main thrust was “values,” the absence of moral values in contemporary fiction, equating a novel's value quotient with its literary merit. Latent in Aldridge's emphasis was the likelihood that writers who were homosexual, such as Williams, Isherwood, and Vidal, would fall damnably short as artists simply on that basis. At Columbia each of the participants had given a brief talk about the novel and then squared off in an amiably contentious performance, Gore much the best public performer of the three. “On the strength of that,” Aldridge recalled, “we were invited to Princeton to do the same thing again. Cowley said we were ‘the happiness boys.' We were anything but spreading happiness; we were talking about the contemporary novel.”

That spring, at Princeton, the critic R. P. Blackmur, who had arranged the rematch, introduced them for another semistaged literary slugfest. They were joined by the young novelist William Styron, who had recently published
Lie Down in Darkness
and whom Gore rather liked. As the well-attended discussion turned hot, Gore said to Styron, “‘Do you notice that there's basically no interest in you and me and only in the two critics?' A college audience took them seriously and Styron and me as people of no consequence. Producers of raw material, which they in turn shaped. Values, Values, Values. Then Aldridge said that there weren't many values anymore in a modern society like the United States because there was no class system, except there were pockets like the Army where there was hierarchy and a
class system and you could write about class. And Cowley got up and said, ‘Values, Values, Values.' He had kind of a funny lisp on V so it sounded like a W. ‘There are plenty of values. Everywhere you look there's a value of some kind.' And I got up and said, ‘Mr. Aldrich was born in Sauk City, Iowa, or some such place, and was a brief time in the East and then he came back and taught in some Middle Western place. Since he's never knowingly encountered the class system, he doesn't think it exists.' I said, ‘Anyway, I'm glad he's here at Princeton, where there are so many members of a class higher than he, and all eager to condescend to him.'” Afterward they went to the Nassau Tavern. Blackmur, with whom Gore would have liked to have talked about Henry James, had left immediately after introducing the speakers. He was stuck again with Cowley and Aldridge, among others. The principals kept hammering at the putative gap between values and literary merit. “I had to leave early,” Aldridge recalled. “But he and I were going at it strongly. I was talking about my old theme of values. ‘Oh, God,' he said, ‘you need values to get out of bed in the morning.'”

In summer 1952 Gore went up to Putney, Vermont, to participate in the Windham College Writers Conference, which Aldridge directed, where he met and rather liked Aldridge's new wife. The novelist Vance Bourjaily, whose
The End of My Life
had established him as one of the writers who, along with Vidal and Norman Mailer, Aldridge had written about in
After the Lost Generation
and whom Gore had recently gotten to know in New York, was there. “
I went to Vermont
to lecture under Aldridge's auspices,” he wrote to Anaïs, “a cold brilliant lecture which was completely hated, to my surprise since I made a number of what, I thought, were illuminating remarks on the literary art … but then of course illumination is the last state of being tolerable to our countrymen, especially writers and would-be writers, my audience.” When, that same summer, John Bowen—a young English writer who had just graduated from Oxford and had favorably reviewed
The City and the Pillar
under the title “Kiss Me, Hotlips, I'm Asbestos”—came up for a weekend visit on his way to take up a graduate fellowship at Ohio State University, Gore and he swam out to the small island in the river. “There was a middle-aged Swede … there at the same time,” Bowen recalled. “I only remember an open fire. The middle-aged Swede I think had the vague idea that I'd been invited to go to bed with him, but I was prudish then, perhaps even more so than now. And so I disappointed him.” He and Gore liked one another immediately, and when
they began to correspond, Bowen regularly addressed him, though they were about the same age, as “uncle” and Gore addressed Bowen as “nephew.” He “was standing to me in an avuncular relationship because I knew nothing about the United States. So it became a joke between us that he was acting as my uncle, standing in loco parentis, being my American uncle.” With Bowen the relationship was clearly noncompetitive. With some of his American contemporaries, many of whom Gore was seeing at literary gatherings in New York, the story was more complicated.

Encouraged by Vidal and the challenge of bringing new writers to the attention of the large audience for paperbacks, Victor Weybright in late 1951 decided to see if he could get a paperback literary serial,
New World Writing
, off the ground. Edited out of the Signet-Mentor offices, it would appear four times a year in book form with original material by a mix of new names and the best-known writers of the day. At the same time Ian Ballantine's Pocket Books decided to sponsor, with John Aldridge and Vance Bourjaily as editors, a similar paperback anthology,
discovery
. Suddenly both were competing for material. Authors were being pursued for contributions. Publisher-sponsored parties at which liquor and conversation flowed brought potential contributors together.
New World Writing
had the advantage of Weybright's experience and Gore's contacts, which he immediately put to the service of the new venture, excited by its prospects, by its potential impact on the literary scene, and by the satisfactions of his own central role. Weybright, who now had the first of Gore's Edgar Box novels in hand, consulted frequently with him about the new project, usually at lunch in Manhattan. Gore thought of himself as the unofficial editor, though it had been agreed that there would be no formal editor. Arabel Porter, Weybright's assistant, an intelligent, hardworking cross between a secretary and an editor in charge of reprints at Mentor, would be the coordinator. Soon busy writing letters to friends and acquaintances, Gore helped obtain contributions for the first volume, with additional material for volumes to follow, from Isherwood, Williams, Auden, Kimon Friar, and Carson McCullers, among others, then poems by Ted Weiss and Louise Nicholl, even a story by Bob Bingham, who was in New York working as an editor for
The Reporter
. “
Material is being collected
now,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. “Chris (who is most enthusiastic) will let some of the fabled diary be done. Tennessee's
Lawrence play will be done in toto. There's an essay on Carson by Oliver Evans, an essay on architecture by Philip Johnson … and stories by Gore Vidal et al.” “Erlinda and Mr. Coffin” appeared in the first issue, “The Ladies in the Library” later.
discovery
had the attraction of Vance and Tina Bourjaily, who at their Greenwich Village apartment hosted ebullient parties, the venue for a great deal of heavy-drinking literary sociability. It also had the disadvantage of the two editors' not seeing eye to eye on much. At one of the Bourjailys' parties Gore met a young lawyer, Louis Auchincloss, a talented short-story writer just about to publish
Sybil
, his second novel, to whom Gore was related by his mother's marriage to Hugh. Gore pulled him in as a contributor.

Eager to help Weybright assemble the best writing of the period, Vidal knocked himself out in a venture that seemed worth the effort. “
I am going out
of my mind,” he had written to Lehmann late in 1951, “New World Writing, lecturing, manufacturing, as well as battling with the last proofs of
Judgment.”
But it was not a complaint. “The great project of the moment has to do with Signet,” he explained. “Due to MY exertions for the past year, Victor Weybright (whom you met in London recently) is going to put out four collections a year of
New World Writing
, an American child, in spirit, of
New Writing
and
Horizon
.… I shall be, if it succeeds (first issue in April), a permanent sort of reader…. You are of course vital to the undertaking so do be receptive. I think well of it…. There has never been anything like this in America since the great days of the
Atlantic Monthly
in the last century: a national showcase for the best writers.” To Arabel Porter he wrote regularly, recommending writers, evaluating material, making suggestions, “an editor without portfolio,” as he put it to Aldridge, from whom he diplomatically solicited a contribution. As the April 1952 publication of the first issue became imminent, he concluded that
“New World Writing
is triumphant, in advance at least.” Though they had agreed there would be no single editor, he felt he had edited the volume and that that should be acknowledged somehow. He also believed that Weybright had explicitly agreed that if the first issue were successful, Gore would formally be appointed editor of future issues. When the first issue came to hand, he was shocked to see Porter prominently proclaimed editor. At the back, in small print, he was thanked, with two others, for helping make the volume possible. It felt like a betrayal. At a party Weybright hosted, attended by most of the contributors, the publisher made a gracious
speech thanking them. “Auden stood around sullenly and occasionally muttered, ‘How much are we going to be paid?'” Weybright cheerfully ignored Auden. Angry, Gore reproached Weybright. But, the publisher explained, Porter
had
to be the editor. “But I
did
edit it,” Vidal remonstrated. “I asked him afterward, ‘Why have you left me out?' ‘Well, Gore,' he said, ‘I can't make this any single writer's anthology.' ‘You mean you can't make it mine,' I said. And he stammered around and then said, ‘Well, you are thanked in the first issue.' … I knew that I'd been fucked yet again.” Still, he hung in with Weybright, whom he otherwise liked. Soon Weybright agreed to publish under the Signet label a number of Vidal's novels, including
The Judgment of Paris
, and eventually
City
. Gore continued during the next two years to do his best for
New World Writing
. The idea still seemed to him a good one.

From Edgewater he made frequent trips into Manhattan. Having skipped Key West that winter, he was happy to see, in May 1952, the countryside around the river come alive. “
I have been busy
,” he wrote to Aldridge, “weeding gardens, composing the journal, studying the daffodils (the first one opened yesterday … awfully odd-looking, too, a kind of hybrid), communing with Weybright on the November issue of
N.W.W
. and preparing, God help me, a reading at a theater in the Village called
The Circle in the Square
, booked right after a Welsh road-show named Dylan Thomas.” The combination of country life and city adventures agreed with him. When he came to town, he struck friends and acquaintances as beamingly healthy and attractively young. To Tina Bourjaily, a pretty, amiable woman with striking blue eyes, whose parties he often attended, he seemed “much healthier than anybody else…. There was a great deal of body abuse going on. We didn't exercise, we drank a lot, we sat around and smoked. He always came in like a fresh breath from the country. Apparently he did a lot of work around Edgewater. He appeared youthful to me. Very youthful and very handsome.” Unlike the
discovery
and
New World Writing
crowd, he hardly drank and did not smoke. The Bourjailys had been evicted from their first Manhattan apartment when the young novelist James Jones, who had published
From Here to Eternity
in 1951, drunk, threw up in the stairwell. Downtown, in their Greenwich Village flat and at other literary parties, floating from apartment to apartment, literary friends had long nights of drinking and conversation that Gore sometimes joined for the company. “What people wanted to do when they got together was to have a
drink,” Tina recalled. “We gave parties for almost any reason. A party could be three or four people who just happened to be there. Or calling up others. You could have a few drinks and then flow into the subway and up to somebody's apartment.” William Styron, Norman Mailer, Herbert Gold—who had just begun his writing career with
Birth of a Hero
—and even Ralph Ellison were part of the
discovery
group, the emphasis tilted toward what Gore thought a somewhat too heavy-handed naturalism. Aldridge came in frequently from Vermont, tall, blond, always combing his hair, an eager lady's man hoping for conquests, including Anaïs Nin, and Tina Bourjaily remembered that he “never went anywhere without a toothbrush and brushed his teeth furiously as if it were his conscience.” Calder Willingham, from Georgia, often visited, his hair red, his neck almost red, with a thin face and curved nose, a clever, amiable man with a great deal of talent as novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Late in the year Gore co-hosted a party at the Bourjailys' apartment, competing with them to see who could produce the most famous literary names. Gore's trump card was Tennessee Williams. “Katherine Anne Porter said she didn't like to go out, even though he invited her. She was another important guest. We were trying to one-up one another,” Tina recalled. “Tennessee Williams and Calder Willingham…. Our apartment was this long flat, a long, long hallway, and then you had the option of going this way laterally to the kitchen or bathroom or bedroom and then two doors came into the living room and dining room. Williams somehow got into the bedroom. There was Tennessee Williams standing alone. I took him out and said to this assembled group full of themselves, ‘This is Tennessee Williams!' Dead silence. First the poor man got lost in the bedroom, then he came into a room that went absolutely dead when I made the announcement. He was that big a celebrity.”