Gore Vidal (92 page)

Vidal and Harold Hayes had anticipated broad publicity and squeals of outrage. Walter Cronkite, on the most-watched American television network news program, held up a copy of
Esquire
, whose cover featured Bobby sitting in his brother's White House rocking chair and the headline “When Bobby Kennedy Takes Over,” to illustrate his brief comment on the subject. “
Sorry to hear
about the ulcer,” Hayes wrote to Vidal. But “what do you have to worry about, for God's sake, sitting it out there on the Via Giulia. I'm the one Bobby can get his hands on, not you.” But Hayes was delighted that the article was “raising quite a nice little stink.” Every major magazine and wire service picked up the story. As Vidal had predicted,
Esquire's
circulation for the March issue shot up “conceivably to the highest mark
we've reached,” Hayes reported, “in the past two or three years.” The Kennedys, though, were furious. Vidal inevitably had to pay a price for such mischief-making. Fortunately, it was a price he had been prepared to pay, even if he had not anticipated how definitive a separation from the Kennedys would result from this offense. The 1961 altercation at the White House, unpleasant as it had been, had been a private matter. That the press had picked it up as high-level gossip could hardly be held against Gore. Jackie, in fact, had essentially ignored the incident. Jack had dismissed it as another example of the meaningless bickering people close to White House power were prone to. But this, now, was a direct public attack on a cherished member of the Kennedy clan. Whatever its personal dimension, the attack was political, as if Gore had taken it on himself to affect the family's presidential hopes for Bobby. But since it was an attack on his character, the only response available to the Kennedys was public silence and private fury. And Vidal's attack triggered others. “Did you read the piece on Bobby in
Newsweek?”
he wrote to Louis Auchincloss, himself a distant cousin of Jackie's through Hugh's marriage to Janet. “It is savage and infinitely more documented than my casual commentary.” From New York, Auchincloss expressed his delight with the article, “
which has stirred up
a lot of comment. I must say that I loved it and that ‘Can it, Ethel!' has become to me the symbol of the administration. I am tired of the Kennedys, or rather of Kennedyphilia, and I was happy to have you put the whole business on a frankly sinister basis.” Vidal reported to Hayes in March that “a courier from the White House came through town, met on the sly: ‘outrage' in the palace.” The courier may have been Richard Goodwin, who “came to town and we had dinner…. He reports JFK's ‘outrage' at the piece and so forth. Bobby told a friend of mine (not knowing he was) that he could not retaliate because the attack was ‘frontal,' this means of course that it will be
next
year's taxes that send me to jail. I rather expect some funny business from him but I daresay I'll survive it.” The situation was double-edged. As Gore recognized, some would use his attack on Bobby to condemn both himself
and
Bobby, and to undermine Jack. “The London papers and—of course—
Time
have been here to see me. I expect
Time
will be able to kill two birds with one stone, the Kennedys and me. I don't look forward to their axe-job but then all things pass.” What had now passed conclusively, and perhaps without Gore's full anticipation, was not only his friendly relationship with the President but his friendship with Jackie. The family
demanded total loyalty. Jackie, who understood these matters, had no hesitation about her Kennedy commitment. Later the President's wife was to develop her own special relationship with the President's brother. Gore and Jackie were never to talk to one another again.

When Walter Cronkite held up to his huge television audience the copy of
Esquire
that contained Vidal's article, he was responding not only to its newsworthiness but to the fact that the New York newspapers were on strike. That put a slight additional edge of responsibility on other media. With a print-news blackout in New York that lasted for more than three months in late winter and early spring 1963, the usual vehicles for disseminating information and ideas were sorely missed. Television took up some of the slack. But in a society still anchored to the written word, although the mooring was adrift, the absence of a daily print forum reminded New York's literary culture of just how much it depended on the book-review sections of the major newspapers, especially the
Sunday Times Book Review
. At best the
Book Review
was superficial and capricious, at worst narrow-minded and obtuse. Post-World War II American magazine culture had moved decisively toward the economics of mass circulation.
The Saturday Evening Post
typified Norman Rockwell popular culture.
Vogue
and the other fashion magazines were no longer or hardly publishing fiction. For literary short-story writers the market was bleak; for essayists it was dismal; for book reviewers, critiques mostly had to be of newspaper sound-bite length.
The Saturday Review of Literature
was the only weekly magazine devoted exclusively to reviewing books and highlighting literature and was, in fact, becoming increasingly unviable. In 1952 it had dropped “of Literature” from its title. By 1963 it was of minor influence and soon to disappear. By the early 1960s the two magazines dominating the shrinking market for serious literature and ideas were the venerable
New Yorker
and the brash
Esquire
. Both paid reasonably well. Vidal had been shut out of
The New Yorker
from the start of his career. His attempts in the late 1940s to publish fiction there had been rebuffed. Though he admired the magazine, it was clear from early on that his short stories did not meet the moral standards or fit the literary mold
The New Yorker
embodied. It “was a marvelous support group of middlebrow writers called John like Cheever and Updike,” Vidal observed. “A great showcase, and it gave them money, prestige. After I had a hit play on Broadway and was writing essays for
The Reporter
and
Partisan Review
, Richard Rovere, my neighbor, the Washington correspondent for
The New Yorker
, says you've got to write for
The New Yorker
. And I said, ‘I don't see why I've got to. I've got other places. But certainly the money's better there.' And he said, ‘I'll fix it up for you. Go see Shawn.' I go to
The New Yorker
, and Mr. Shawn is busy. A Miss Edith Oliver will receive me. She's been there forever. She used to do off-Broadway reviews. And she says, ‘Oh, yes, Mr. Rovere said you might be coming in. Tell me, what have you done?' Here I've got a play on Broadway, seven novels, etc., etc. I said, ‘Oh, that's too boring to go into. There's a copy of
Who's Who in America
behind you. Why don't you look me up?' Oliver was brisk. ‘Well, why don't you, the next time you do a piece, if it's not too much trouble, mail it to me here at
The New Yorker?'”
Unlike
The New Yorker, Esquire
sought controversy and emblazoned on its provocative covers the names of writers as diverse but as dynamic and volatile as Mailer, Buckley, and Vidal.

Responding to the opportunity created by the newspaper strike, having for a long time felt the need for a publication that would provide space for full-length essay-reviews, Barbara and Jason Epstein, with their friend the essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, took their courage in their hands. Money was in more limited supply than courage, so the decision in midwinter 1962–63 was to put out one issue of what they had decided to call
The New York Review of Books
. “There had been a lot of talk,” Barbara Epstein recalled, “about how lousy the
Times Book Review
was. Jason put it all together and said this is what we ought to do, and we can get publishers to advertise because they've got no place else to go. We put it all together. But none of us had any money. We first asked Norman Podhoretz to edit the magazine with me. Jason wouldn't do it because he felt it would be a conflict of interest since he was with Random House. Thank God Norman turned us down. Said he couldn't afford it.” Podhoretz also worried that the review might compete for readers and contributors with
Commentary
, whose editor he had become in 1960. The
Partisan Review
editors also had their reservations.
“Partisan Review
stopped being what it used to be with the start of
The New York Review of Books
,” Richard Poirier recalled. “I remember [William] Phillips saying, rather querulously, ‘Who needs
The New York Review of Books?' …
and what he meant was that they didn't need a rival for attracting New York and European talent.” When Podhoretz declined, the Epsteins “asked Bob Silvers, who was an editor at
Harper's
and very smart. What we did was run around to publishers. Jason … got them to advertise.
We called up all the people we knew and admired to contribute—including Gore. They didn't get paid. We didn't get paid. Everyone was so disgusted with the
Times
and eager for us to be a success. We were great friends with the Lowells, and to pay the printer, Cal Lowell [Elizabeth Hardwick's husband, the poet Robert Lowell], who was the only one who had any capital, put up $4,000 to guarantee the bill. He didn't have to pay it actually; it was a guarantee against the printer's bill in case we couldn't pay it. But we got enough advertising.”

Much of the New York intellectual and literary world was enthusiastic. Through the Epsteins and Hardwick, the editors had a deep circle of friends, among them Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Fred Dupee, and Gore Vidal, all of whom wrote essays for the first issue, which appeared in late February 1963. Vidal, who reviewed sharply a volume of John Hersey's essays,
Here to Stay: Studies in Human Tenacity
, was pessimistic about the
Review's
future. “
What did you do
for the Jason-Silvers review?” he wrote from Rome to Dupee. “I did Hersey, but wrote Bob he was out of his mind if he thought American publishing would greet warmly Aunt Mary, Dwight, you, me, et al. They would pay, I think, for us to shut up.” But when the end of the newspaper strike brought back the
Sunday Times Book Review
, the new
Review
still seemed viable. “So then we decided to do another issue,” Barbara Epstein recalled. “We paid the contributors nothing for the first, then I think five cents a word for the second. Bob Silvers was working so hard he got sick. We raised real money over the summer of 1963 and started publication in September…. We raised only $115,000. You couldn't start a little shoeshine stand on that today. Then we got a publisher, Whitney Ellsworth, who came to do the business side. Then after two or three years we were in the black. It was all so cheap. Paper was cheap. We took next to nothing, But we paid the authors.” From Rome, with the first issue in hand, Gore again wrote to Fred Dupee. “I like [your essay on
Black Beauty]
much the best of the pieces in the
Review
. I hear that Silvers is ill; I hope not seriously; he is needed. I hope they
don't
ally with
The New Rep
. The whole point is that here at last is a literary review, the only one on a national scale, and if it is to be an adjunct of a liberal paper, no matter how good-natured, it is promptly limited and who needs it? I can't see myself writing for
N.R;
one always could and didn't because there wasn't … oh, to hell with it. The thing's bound to go wrong. The stars are wrong.” But
the stars were propitiously aligned. Within two years of its initial publication,
The New York Review
became the most widely read, most influential American literary-intellectual journal.

With Barbara Epstein as his editor, Vidal and
The New York Review of Books
were to become almost synonymous. Many of his best essays were to appear there. And though the relationship was to have its rough moments, it was to prove a reasonably smooth, substantially beneficial author-journal engagement. Soon after the editors decided in late spring 1963 to try for an ongoing permanence, Barbara suggested to Gore that he write a review essay of a new book of stories by John O'Hara, a writer whose work, he was to conclude, “cannot be taken seriously as literature, but as an unconscious record of the superstitions and assumptions of his time.” This was to be the way in general in which his essay contributions originated. Barbara proposed that he might be interested in reviewing such and such a book or books. Constantly alert to appropriate topics for him, she then sent him, if he indicated interest, the appropriate volumes. Responsive to his sensibility and his strengths, she had the advantage of knowing him well, both personally and professionally. Though in 1963 Gore's friendship with Jason was the primary of the two, in later years that altered. Eventually it changed conclusively. As an editor Barbara had a sharp sense of structure and tightness but she also knew when to hold back, and Gore had no strong feeling early on that he was being edited in any substantial way. Since he conceived his literary essays as encompassing a general evaluation of the writer's career or a broad overview of the topic, the ample lead time the
Review
provided suited him perfectly. There would be a target date but never a deadline. Before writing, he would read the author's entire
oeuvre
. He would carefully conceive, write, and rewrite, with concentrated focus, in what Fred Dupee thought of as his brilliantly informal style. “He always praised my tone,” Gore gratefully recalled, “and he said, ‘You write like some great conversationalist lying relaxed in a hammock, talking whatever comes into your head, and it is perfect for its subject,' something like that. It was the ease of my voice he praised. He usually gave no compliments to anybody.” Barbara agreed with Fred. She knew she wanted Gore to become an ongoing
New York Review of Books
writer, and she knew how to make it likely to happen. Publishing circumstances were in their favor.
Esquire
provided Vidal with a forum for political articles. So too did
The Nation
. Now he had a desirable home for his literary essays.