Gore Vidal (81 page)

Twenty years older than Gore, from a prominent Joliet, Illinois, family originally from New England, where his mother's family had been since colonial times, Dupee had been eager from childhood to assimilate into the Eastern intellectual establishment. At Yale he had been delighted to be among the elite, soon becoming friends with other lively students like Dwight Macdonald, with whom, along with Philip Rahv, he was to be one of the co-founders of the
Partisan Review
in 1934. Without much interest in or regard for politics, he had briefly imagined himself a left-wing labor organizer, working for the Communist Party on the New York waterfront, and was for some years a
New Masses
stalwart. From Yale he had gone briefly to Bowdoin College, then to Bard for almost twenty years, where the charismatic teacher impressed students and colleagues with his rueful charm, his delicate irony, his literary sensibility, the teacher rather than the scholar, whose most engaging métier was the classroom, the social gathering, the short essay, the tutorial. As her tutor and the director of her senior thesis at Bard, he had met his wife, Barbara Hughes. Nineteen years younger than he, “Andy” was from a working-class Irish-Catholic New Jersey family, her mother an alcoholic, her maternal grandfather, William Hughes, a self-made man who had become both a socialist and a United States senator. She and her Bard friends “admired and adored” Professor Dupee, a “very attractive, faintly sad and handsome man…. His nervousness, his tenseness, his grace were irresistible,” Andy recalled. Petite, blue-eyed, a lively conversationalist with more courage than wisdom, Andy thought that he might as well marry her as someone else. It seemed the right thing—exciting, bold, pleasurable, a kind of triumph. Fred, who liked the idea, was soon also in love. It would be easy for him to think the changes would be for the better.
By 1958, now with two young children, they had been married twelve years. “It was great marrying Fred,” among other reasons, “because he had all these wonderful friends—Nancy and Dwight and Nathalie and Philip Rahv, for example.” Andy liked and admired Dwight Macdonald, the radical political analyst and perceptive
New Yorker
essayist, though “they all drank a lot and Dwight later drank too much and went to pieces.” Once they had dinner at the apartment of the poet Delmore Schwartz, whose 1938 volume
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
had established him as one of America's best-known young poets and who had succeeded Rahv in 1943 as editor of
Partisan Review
. He and Dupee were old friends. “At dinner, Delmore said to Fred, ‘I always thought of you as someone who suffered more than anyone.'” Fred responded, “‘Oh, I'm very happy.'”

Soon after they met in spring 1958, Gore invited the Dupees to Edgewater. Andy found him enchanting. After numbers of martinis, they drove over to Wildercliff, where they kept drinking. The evening was convivial, happy. Gore seemed to Andy “very imperial and Roman and grand,” handsome and glamorous. They began to tell one another the stories of their lives. Fred, drunk and exhausted, soon went to bed. “Gore staggered out to drive home.” Andy urged him to stay overnight in their guest bedroom upstairs. He refused. As he left, he kissed her passionately, or so she felt it. She fell in love with him “right there and then.” For a while she could not get him out of her mind. Aware of his television and movie career, the Dupees were at first suspicious of his intellectual credentials. Both avid readers, they had not yet bought a television, partly out of principle, mostly out of intellectual snobbishness, and they had indeed vaguely heard of Gore before they met him as someone who wrote television dramas. They were not impressed with his media career, though Fred, always the starry-eyed idolator from a Midwestern small town when it came to the socially elite and to Hollywood stars, held this against Gore only to the degree that it kept him from writing serious literature. Eager to be the writer he defined himself as, temporarily enchained to the money-producing mill, Gore found Fred's company delightful and salutary. With a delicate mentoring touch Fred urged him to return to novels. They began seeing one another regularly. Dupee soon became one of his closest, most admired friends.

It was a friendship complicated, though more so for others, especially Andy, than for Gore, by Dupee's balance of contradictions, the inconsistencies of his life and his difficulty in sustaining its varied elements. Charming,
good-looking, slim, somewhat delicate in appearance, with engaging eyes, Dupee had instinctively raised vulnerability to an art form, eager to be protected by others from whatever threatened his stability, his happiness. Two of the threats came from drink and sex. The former was an occupational and generational hazard. Drunk, Dupee could be unpleasant, aggressive, angry, less than charming. The latter had the hazardous discomfort of ambivalence; the difficulty of sustaining both loyalty to his wife and his other desires caused him occasional embarrassment and much distress. Constantly concerned that people would know about his furtive sexual life, he found the danger of exposure exciting enough, or punishing enough, so that he did the things that would ensure that many of his Hudson Valley friends and some of his New York colleagues knew. When, late in spring 1958, he came to dinner at Edgewater to meet Frederic Prokosch, who had come with Jack Bady for the day from New York, Dupee, Bady recalled, invited him outdoors to show him the stars and explain the constellations. The dinner had not gone well. The Bard guests had been condescendingly disdainful of Prokosch, holding against him his popular success and his expatriatism. When Fred and Jack Bady went outside together, Bady had the impression that Dupee was flirting with him. So too did Gore and Prokosch, who joked and bantered lightly about it afterward. Unlike Gore, Dupee was deeply vulnerable and somewhat romantic. Capable of sudden enthusiasms, he knew how to fall unhappily in love, usually with inappropriate people, none of whom threatened his marriage. Deeply divided, often guilty, never having come to some sort of reasonable détente with society's prohibitions, he felt the necessity to keep up appearances, to subject himself and his family to the strains of his divided personality, his life as only a partly successful balancing act. At home Andy, always forgiving, deeply in love and deeply loved, provided balance, comfort, a sustaining family life that Fred embraced. Lively, literary, and, unlike her husband, not only political but truly radical, the essential and attractive caretaker, she made the marriage and the family work. Not without flirtations and attractions of her own, Andy partied, laughed, argued at home and in the general Bard College and Hudson Valley society with an intensity and vivaciousness that made her presence a complement to her husband's. It was a world they shared. When Gore came into Fred's life, he came into hers as well.

For over half a decade Gore's life at Edgewater had revolved around Alice Astor, John Latouche, and visits from his grandmother, as well as the
refurbishing of the house and its transformation into a comfortable small mansion whose location on the river made it memorable. Most of the major people of those Edgewater years were now dead, distant, or disabled. The Newmans had not become part of the mise-en-scène until 1955. There were still minor improvements to be made on the house, though the problem of the small kitchen was never solved, even though it and the house had been well run for the last two years by the Wheelers, two of Alice's servants whom Gore had employed after her death and whom Howard and Gore later fired when he found them more interested in adjusting the house to their own schedule than to that of its occupants. Starting in mid-1958 Gore's life at Edgewater entered a second stage. His expansive world substantially widened. There were still some Bard College friends, especially the Weisses, and Bard College visitors, such as Robert Lowell, who came over. People visited regularly from New York, some of those he worked with on films or had worked with on television, and literary friends, including Louis Auchincloss, whom he saw, however, more frequently in town. But there were now, he discovered, more people in the country to visit and have visit him.

By the end of the year Gore's Edgewater and Hudson Valley social life was in full flourish, as it was to continue, more or less, for almost five years, especially with the Dupees and Richard and Eleanor Rovere. With the Dupees he discussed mostly literature. Soon after the party for the Tynans, Dupee, “in his cups,” said, “always repeats: we had Jim Farrell, you have Mailer … one every generation … nothing changes.” With Rovere, a political analyst and investigative reporter of distinction, the Washington correspondent for
The New Yorker
, who lived and worked in a handsome, modest house in Rhinebeck between visits to Washington, Gore discussed mainly politics. Well connected, especially interested in Democratic Party affairs, essentially conservative, Rovere had a long friendship with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., with whom he had collaborated on a book,
The General and the President
, about MacArthur and Truman. Gore met the Roveres in 1958 as they were all going through the wedding-reception line of the daughter of Bard College's president. Soon guests at Edgewater, the Roveres “found Gore fascinating and funny and very vain. He would often preen,” Eleanor Rovere noticed, “and he couldn't pass a mirror without straightening his hair or combing it. But he was redeemingly self-conscious and ironic about his own vanity and was very, very funny about it.” With the Dupees they often saw Gore on weekends at Wildercliff, in Rhinebeck, and at Edgewater,
where the Roveres were delighted to meet other guests, often from the entertainment world, particularly Claire Bloom, who soon came up with her husband-to-be, the actor Rod Steiger, and the Newmans. It was heady, amusing, but also somewhat exotically suspect to intellectuals who were not used to celebrities. Often bored, even with guests of distinction, Gore would sometimes on Sunday mornings take them to meet the Dupees or the Roveres. One day he brought Isherwood to Wildercliff to meet Fred. When Isherwood, Andy recalls, saw that the Dupees wrote telephone numbers on the wall in a small alcove where the telephone was kept, he wrote his number on the wall. “It seemed both a shy and an engaging thing to do. ‘Please call me, too,' it seemed to say.”

When Gore had no weekend guests, he sometimes came alone on Sunday mornings to Wildercliff, where he and the Dupees sat for hours reading newspapers, talking, drinking. Guests at Wildercliff often became Gore's guests also, and some of them friends. The Dupees introduced him to the literary critic Lionel Trilling, one of Fred's colleagues at Columbia, and to Trilling's wife, Diana, who had begun to assert herself as a literary reviewer for
The Nation
. Lionel, Gore liked and respected. Diana he thought pretentious, ludicrously self-important. Philip Rahv, through whom he began an association with the
Partisan Review
, had Gore's immediate respect, and soon his affection. A Ukrainian-born Jewish literary and political dynamo who had come to America as a young man, and a longtime friend of Fred's, Rahv was an essayist of distinction, one of the founding editors of
Partisan Review
, the man Mary McCarthy had left when she married Edmund Wilson. Gore admired Rahv's pithy wit, his sharp one-liners, his political and literary intelligence, though he did not at all share his now-attenuated Marxist-Trotskyite politics. When Vidal referred to George Steiner's recent book,
The Death of Tragedy
, Rahv commented, “One of the get-rich-quick boys.” Rahv invited Gore to contribute to and support
Partisan Review
, both of which he did, the former with an essay, “Love, Love, Love,” the latter with a check for a thousand dollars. Gore found Saul Bellow, who shared a house in nearby Tivoli with Ralph Ellison, “standoffish with me. But couldn't tell whether it was anti-fag or commercial success or both.” Bellow's intellect he admired and enjoyed, especially his sharp comments about books and people.
Dangling Man
and
The Victim
, Bellow's two early novels, he thought deserved their success,
The Adventures of Augie March
, which he admired, a little less so. The less explicitly
intellectual Ellison, whose
Invisible Man
had won the National Book Award the year after
The Adventures of Augie March
, he found charming, his sense of high propriety both engaging and amusing, except when he talked endlessly, boringly, about some subject that interested him. One day Ellison and Paul de Man, the Yale University literary critic and deconstructionist, came by. “Ellison was a very proper man,” Andy Dupee recalled. “To get a rise out of him, Gore teased him” about the contrast between Ellison's formal manners and prejudiced white attitudes about black culture, “and then danced with Ralph's wife, Fanny, in a very suggestive way. De Man and his wife looked very proper, and probably tried not to notice.” Gore especially liked Ellison's wife. Whatever the provocation, Ellison never rose to the bait.

At Edgewater in summer 1958 the Dupees introduced Gore to two of their younger friends, a married couple, both in publishing, Barbara Zimmerman and Jason Epstein, well-educated children of successful, assimilated Ashkenazic Jewish families in the Boston area. Barbara had come to New York in 1950 at the age of twenty-one from a literary education at Radcliffe. In 1951 at Doubleday, where they both worked, she had met Jason Epstein, a recent Columbia University graduate who was serving as a publishing intern. At sixteen he had entered Columbia during one of its most expansively exciting times, when the combination of older students whose educations had been delayed by the war and an exemplary literary-intellectual faculty created one of the golden moments of American higher education. With Columbia his campus, New York City his world, Jason flourished. His four years at Morningside Heights had been the most formative of his life, exposing him to great minds and great books, filling him with enthusiasm for the continuing education of the mind. “The best years of my life,” he recalled. “I never got over them.” Publishing, in the still-old-fashioned world of the fifties, seemed the perfect venue, a world in which literary and intellectual values maintained their traditional prominence. Bestsellers supported but did not dominate editorial decisions. A bright intern could rise quickly. “I thought I'd go to work for a week in publishing. I didn't want to write a Ph.D. I didn't want to be a teacher.” At Columbia his favorite teacher, among figures like Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, Mark Van Doren, and Quentin Anderson, had been Andrew Chiappe, whom Barbara thought “a slightly tragic, slightly comic figure and a nice man…. He was hard to be fond of because he was a very isolated, lonely, needy guy.
Very dandyish, rather arch and very funny.” Through Chiappe, the best man at the Epsteins' wedding in 1953, they met Fred Dupee, whom Jason found “enchanting, indescribable. One of the most intelligent people I've ever known.” Soon Jason published Dupee's
Henry James
in the new Anchor-Doubleday paperback series which, with Chiappe as consultant, he initiated. “Fred was wonderfully attractive, very, very good-looking, and brilliant. The mind was wonderful. I wish he'd written more. What he wrote was wonderful, but he should have done more. That was the pity. The essays were so good. If he had had a little more edge to him, he could have been Orwell or someone like that. He had the right sensibility. Something held him back.” By the mid-fifties the Epsteins and Dupees were warm friends, and both couples, intensely literary, had connections to people who were already part of Vidal's world. Gore, Barbara Epstein remembered, “had movie-star looks…. He had already published quite a number of books. We all fell in love with him…. We were all so young. I was twenty-eight, Gore thirty-three, Jason twenty-nine. We were all very adorable.” With the Dupees they went regularly to Edgewater, usually in the afternoons, each couple with a young child whom Gore mostly ignored. “Jason and Gore liked one another and were very good friends. They had similar temperaments in the sense of being very anarchic and funny and smart.”