Gore Vidal (90 page)

At Delphi he was deeply touched by the ancient mysteries, the prophetic voices, the omphalos representing the beginning and the end. On a moonless midnight in February 1962, with the sky filled with stars, Gore ascended by himself to the ruins of the Temple of Apollo. The clear light seemed illuminated silver against darkness. The Gulf of Corinth breathed in the descending distance. This was a place of classical and stoic sharpness. The temple had, millennia before, been dedicated to the sunlight Gore himself worshipped. But it was also the place of dark, sibylline mysteries. As he stood on the spot where Greek mythology said the world began and where the ancient oracle at Delphi had forecast the future, he felt more strongly than ever the inseparability of past and present, and he felt that the visionary connections he could make through his imagination and artistry were as thrillingly close as he or anyone could ever hope to come to bringing them together. Like the Eleusinian Mysteries, whose site near Athens he had recently visited, this too was an ancient mystery that spoke deeply to him about the powers of the pagan past. It seemed to connect him with his childhood reading, with the strange formative power that
The Spartan
and indeed everything about the classical world had exerted on him from the beginning of his conscious life. The moment was both exhilarating and frightening. Suddenly the dark side of his vision took form. In the starlight, as he walked through the ruins along the Sacred Way to the temple, he could see, as he was to write in
Drawing Room Comedy
, an unpublished play, “the golden eagles of Apollo, circling among the cliffs.” There was a wind in the pine trees, and as he came to the altar, he turned—“and there … was the mountain. And I said, ‘Look, at the strange shape the mountain makes…. See? It's like the wings of a great eagle.'” And then “the eagle seemed to rise higher and higher in the sky, covering all the stars, until at last the great wings shut … peacefully … gently … finally. The wings had now blacked out the sky.”

In Rome he saw familiar places and people, including the Hollywood producer Walter Wanger, ill from his disastrous involvement with
Cleopatra
. “
Takes lots of pills
,” Gore told Elaine. “Hands shake when he discusses Liz and Richard … wanted to hold his head which has tremors like Parkinson's, held it, did no good.” Classical and literary Rome seemed as attractive as ever. As lively as Athens had been, Rome seemed the more livable, partly
because Athens was relatively isolated. If he were to live in either while writing
Julian
, Rome had the advantage of an excellent library at the American Academy. From Rome they went to Capri, to visit Eddie and Mona Williams Bismarck at Mona's magnificent floral gardens and lovely Palazzo Fortina, high up on a cliff from which there was a splendid view of Ischia and the Bay of Naples. All the water for the garden had to be imported from the mainland through a special tunnel and pipeline she had built. Stylish, wealthy, but in her own way reclusive, Mona spent more and more time on Capri, where Gore renewed the friendship that had begun in New York in 1948. “
Week in Capri
with Bismarcks, beautiful, otherworldly.” But “what's other world like? dull.” Capri was a place to visit, not live in, so he thought. When he confided to Mona that he might enjoy a long stay in an apartment in Rome, she suggested someone who could help. By early March they were back at Edgewater, where he found himself happily energetic, for the first time in almost a decade focusing exclusively on fiction.

If having two novels in mind—one partly under way, the other in the planning stage—was a problem, it was neither so great nor so dividing that he could resist (or perhaps even wanted to resist) actually starting in May 1962 to write
Washington, D.C
. With politics mostly behind him or on indefinite hold, with no movie or theater commitments, almost everything literary seemed possible that summer. Probably he wrote the first chapter in May, the storm scene in which Peter Sanford sees in flashes of lightning his sister Enid and Clay Overbury making love, a scene whose coordinates had first come to his imagination when attending his half-sister Nini's wedding at Merrywood in 1957. “I am here for the summer,” he wrote Isherwood, “immersing myself in the novel after nearly ten years' vacation in the theatre. I find planning it hard: it is a time novel; fifteen years, Washington DC, what has become of us, all that. I am using up everything on this one: I have a sense if I don't get to it now, the game is up and I shall have to go on being a rattling public man until some disaster due to one's own eccentricity puts out the light.” He also sent Isherwood a copy of
Three
, which “contains the first third of a novel about the Apostate. It's nicely written, I think.” So nicely written and so compelling that he kept at work at it also, and soon mostly put aside
Washington, D.C
., for increasing immersion in
Julian
. Dutchess County friends and visitors kept the usual social-intellectual life bright. The Dupees and the Roveres were around, as well as Bard College
people, and they all made the regular rounds for Sunday-morning newspapers and brunches and afternoon cocktails and evening parties. With Dupee, who urged him to devote himself full-time to writing, Gore discussed mostly literature and people. Dupee particularly urged Gore to develop and engage what everyone had now recognized was a great talent for the personal essay.

Jason and Barbara Epstein, who usually stayed with the Dupees, now regularly came over to Edgewater. Jason, who had become executive editor at Random House, where he was also in charge of Modern Library books, was eager to have him as a Random House author. The previous spring he had tried to induce Gore to write a book for him. “
Take, say ten
or a dozen of America's presumed leaders and really let yourself go as you did, for example, when you wrote about Mailer…. I don't think we have to ask the question: can this republic survive? In the long run, of course, it won't. Nothing does. But there are questions to be asked about the quality of life here and now and one way to answer them, approximately, is by examining our representative men…. These men can be approached and measured as representatives of a culture and a history in much the way that Proust or Tolstoy or for that matter Mailer can be.” Gore did not take the bait.

I see your point but I suggest that politicians cannot be written about in the same way as one writes about novelists. Why? Because to be a critic one must have at all times the sense of alternative. One says ‘no' to this because one says ‘yes' to that. In literature we call an alternative a touchstone. I do not like the novels of Marquand because I like the works of Proust. One is compared to the other and in the comparison the first is measured (and sometimes the second is illuminated). Or even in the context of the same man's work: I do not like
A Fable
and I do like
Light in August
, two things are compared: one we accept as excellent, the other proved faulty by comparison. By comparing Mailer to myself, to our contemporaries, to Tolstoy I was able to examine his work from a number of angles (alternatives) and I could give him within that frame a mark. Politicians in a society like ours are not so easily explicated. You feel it of little importance what bills they propose, what positions they take: but those actions are
their work … their novels. Motives are always fascinating to speculate on but, finally, they are as irrelevant to the man's effect as the motive of a novelist: it is not why you write it, it is what you write that creates the Kingdom of Heaven. Political motives tend to be simple, in any case: the man wants to prevail. Democratic politicians in this country are perhaps the only true existentialists in the world.

As an essayist, Gore saw clearly that his deepest impulses were satirical, and “like most satirists I am a reactionary: I like the old republic, repelled though I am by many of its manifestations now. I see Caesarism as the alternative, and I cannot make up my mind whether or not it is a good thing (in my bones, I
know
it is bad). Yet under good Caesars we might enjoy a Pax Americana without too much limiting of individual freedom. But under bad Caesars … well, we know what to fear. As I told you when I saw you, in my own divided state these days I would hesitate to engage in such a project unless I was absolutely clear, for good or ill, as to an alternative. Displeasure with what is, is not enough.” And he was still committed to Little, Brown.

In fact, “displeasure with what is”
could
, in certain literary circumstances, be enough, an alternative view he was to find increasingly tenable. The great Roman and British satirists had created enduring literature with an indignation, sometimes “savage,” that had contained no remedial program, no proffer of reasonable alternatives. To see intensely what was wrong was often, actually, more artistically viable than to propose what might be right, or even simply better. The limitations of human nature and the human situation were the raw material for art. But what Epstein proposed was not art; it was social science and intellectual analysis, something that both author and editor knew that Gore sometimes could carry off brilliantly. But except for the occasional essay, this was not what he wanted to do now. He had freed himself from the need to write for money. Ideas fascinated him. But he wanted ideas in the formal structures and with the imaginative opportunities that only literature, particularly the novel, offered. In August 1962, when John Aldridge commented in a
New York Times Book Review
article, “What Became of Our Postwar Hopes?” that Vidal had told him that he had given up on the novel as a currently viable literary form, Gore reacted angrily. Aldridge had either misunderstood or purposely distorted
what he had said. On the contrary, he wrote to the
Book Review
, he was committed to writing novels. Two of them were under way. “
Now, of course
, I never abandoned the novel. In fact, I have just finished writing one,” he exaggerated. “More to the point, I never made the announcement referred to, publicly or privately. I add the ‘privately' because Aldridge always tended to rely too much on what someone said at a party.” He never forgave Aldridge for what he felt was a recklessly damaging slur, especially at a time when he was trying to reestablish himself as a novelist. His response to Jason's proposal had been an indirect affirmation of this commitment. He wanted to put his energies into fiction. It was the form in which his literary ambition had started, and where he expected it to continue and eventually end. Through the summer of 1962 he worked with increasing intensity on
Julian
.

Suddenly in August, tired and overweight, he went to Key West, where he was, he told Alice Dows, “so bored—but then again never so healthy and
thin:
it is like being reborn. I need another ten days or so and then I should be able to face everything in the fall, even an election!” But he was not in the end to be tempted by the Democratic nomination for the Senate. The odds against winning were too great. By the end of the month he had said no to that. There were the usual invitations to appear on television, some of which he accepted, particularly Susskind's
Open End
and
The Tonight Show
, partly because he thought it good for his career, mostly because he often had something he wanted to say. Through the fall he worked as diligently as he could on
Julian
. But there were pesty interruptions, many simply the inevitable requirements of daily life at Edgewater or at the apartment in New York. One was the sad occasion of Eleanor Roosevelt's death. At Hyde Park, in the rain, he attended the funeral on November 10. This was one of the rare occasions on which he wanted to pay his last respects in the traditional way. The Roosevelt family had invited him to both the public and the private ceremonies. As he drove through the heavy traffic, the crowds were almost impenetrable. The rain kept falling. For him it was a dismal, funereal day filled with thoughts about the death of a great American who had been a friend both to his father and to him. He “
stood alongside
the thirty-third, the thirty-fourth, the thirty-fifth, and the thirty-sixth Presidents of the United States, not to mention all the remaining figures of the Roosevelt era who had assembled for her funeral…. She
was like no one else in her usefulness. As the box containing her went by me, I thought, well, that's that. We're really on our own now.”

Other interruptions arose from the temptations of ordinary social life. Some were business details, many of which Howard handled. But his temperament and his situation made Gore constantly available to calls, to requests for help, for participation in one thing or another, whether personal or social or political. Just before mid-November he went for five days to “The First
Show
Magazine Inter-American Symposium,” at Paradise Island in the Bahamas, one of those irresistible invitations. Among the nineteen North American participants were Max Lerner, whom he had heard lecture at Exeter, the playwright Edward Albee, the composer Aaron Copland, and the dancer Katherine Dunham. Arthur Schlesinger and William Styron attended. So too did Norman Podhoretz, the young editor of the New York Jewish intellectual magazine
Commentary
, and Richard Goodwin, now a member of the Kennedy administration, who when he had come to Dutchess County in 1960 as a Kennedy advance man had stayed at Edgewater. Nini was delighted to accept his invitation that she join him there. (Later Gore discovered that the symposium had been sponsored by the CIA.) Though he had sufficient discipline to shut himself off for a certain number of hours each day, usually from morning into midafternoon, the discipline took its toll, the interruptions still came.

Since he could write anyplace, he began to think more and more about spending half of the next year abroad, in one of the places that had always gripped his imagination, where he could work on
Julian
free from the pressure of interruptions, some of them inevitably irresistible, that he had at home. Athens had appealed to him. Rome was always close to his heart, “Roman fever” a lifelong happy disease. He had no intention, though, of living abroad permanently. His thought was to spend part of the next year in Rome, with frequent pleasurable visits to Greece and other places. That seemed acceptable to Howard, who was not enthusiastic about even that schedule. Howard saw no reason, for himself, to leave Edgewater and New York. What would it mean to his own latent desire to have some sort of career, particularly to sing professionally, though he recognized that his difficulty with stage fright and his lack of training were formidable obstacles? Still, he had a full life at home. If he went abroad with Gore, that life would have to be re-created. They would be thrown back more on one
another, Howard particularly on Gore. Was that a commitment he wanted to make, an experience he wanted to embrace? In the late fall, suddenly, Howard became ill. Potentially life-threatening cancer seemed likely. “At first Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital was so crowded they couldn't take him in,” Gore recalled. In the three weeks that it took to get admitted, during which they worried that this might be cancer, Gore tried every conceivable contact that might help expedite admission. “We pulled all sorts of strings.” Finally, in late November, he had this “big thing cut out of his throat, a benign growth but a huge one on the thyroid…. Frank Merlo,” Tennessee Williams's longtime companion, “had just come to the hospital to die, so Tennessee and I would go there together. He'd visit Frank, and I'd visit Howard.” During the surgery Gore paced the halls, the streets. Suddenly one of the foundations of his life was threatened, and though there were never explicit words to this effect between them, clearly the threat was to the one person in the world he cared most about. “I remember once,” Joanne Woodward recalls, “when Howard had a cancer and there was the possibility … He was terrified. Oh, he loves Howard very much. I don't know that he would ever say that…. Sex is sex, right! But … Howard's the only person I know with whom he's had a long-term relationship. I'm sure it wasn't a sexual relationship. Gore found in Howard the perfect caretaker of the legend.” The growth was removed, the surgery successful. By Christmas he was out of the hospital.