Gore Vidal (46 page)

First, though, the newspaper reviews, crucial to the book's sales, had to be absorbed, confronted, evaluated. It was not an easy and hardly a pleasant experience. Gore had worried about what the reaction might be, what effect it might have on his future. He had thought he had realistically assessed the risks, the parameters of response and their impact. Somewhat naïvely he had assumed that whatever the range of response, its effect would be brief, limited, and manageable. He had hoped for fame and fortune. Now all he could be sure of for the moment was notoriety. As the reviews came in, the Dutton publicity department created its usual excerpts for trade distribution and advertisements. The controversy was a publicist's delight. “Some rave about it,” a Dutton advertisement heralded in bold print, quoting one word from the laudatory review in
The Atlantic Monthly:
“Brilliant”; “Some are shocked,” quoting one word from the hostile review in the
Chicago Tribune
, “Disgusting—but it became a best seller.” By mid-January
City
was “a bestseller in New York at the rate of 1,500 a week and should show on the bestseller lists in three weeks, thank God.” Before publication Dutton had increased the first printing from 5,000 to 10,000 copies and the advertising budget, for a book that sold for $3.50, to $5,000, approximately the equivalent of $50,000 today. “
The fan mail
,” Gore wrote to Pat Crocker, whose copy was avidly passed from hand to hand in their Guatemala circle, “has been amazing, but no enclosed pictures so far.” On February 8 it was number fourteen on a national list of sixteen; by February 22 it had risen to number seven (Capote's
Other Voices, Other Rooms
, he noted, was number eleven on the same list). “The book sells merrily; it's now the #14 bestseller in the country. #2 in New York; #3 in Los Angeles;
#1 in San Francisco…. Tell Wickenden,” who had returned to Guatemala, “that
The Atlantic Monthly
gave me a wonderful review. The rest have been quite awful.”

To celebrate the ratings Wreden hosted at his Park Avenue apartment a dinner party for a number of his bestselling authors, including Cleveland Amory, whose
The Proper Bostonians
was on the nonfiction bestseller list. Kit and Gene walked over with Gore from the Vidals' apartment on Fifth Avenue. Gene queried Wreden about how the book business worked. “You know, it astonishes me in a country the size of the United States how few copies you can sell of anything,” Gene remarked. “Of anything! I could make a celluloid napkin clip and sell more copies of it in the country tomorrow than you can sell of a book, and you have more means of publicity with a book than I would have with my celluloid napkin clip. But I would know how to sell it.” Gore was lively, amusingly conversational. Mostly, though, the talk was about success, not about how small even bestseller sales were, and not about reviews.

The bad ones, though, were difficult to shake off. He did his best, writing to Pat Crocker that they were “flatteringly violent,” essentially of two kinds, both more unrelentingly hostile than he had anticipated: the homophobic Middle American outrage—epitomized by review headlines such as “A Sordid Picture of the Male Species,” “Tragedy of Perversion,” and “Abnormal Doom”—and the attacks on the novel's artistry, most of which had an ummistakable moral underpinning, but a few of which, notably Leslie Fiedler's in
The Hudson Review
, found
City's
failures to be entirely aesthetic. With great praise for the novel's honest embrace of “drabness” and for its effective dramatization of “seedy torment,” Fiedler gave it the respect of serious literary criticism: “the book cannot even hold rigidly to the impersonality it proposes, the scarcely more than animal awareness of its athletic protagonist; there are, on the one hand, long artificial speeches diagnosing homosexuality and proposing Utopias for its free play, and there is, on the other hand, the suggested symbolism of the novel's name—an illegitimate device, proposing to supply with the five words of a title a dimension of symbolism that the book otherwise ignores.” In brief, Fiedler argued, the novel's admirable sincerity had expressed itself in a flat naturalism that fell short of effective dramatic and symbolic representation. The problem was in the young writer's artistry, not his subject. It was a conclusion to which the author himself would give serious even if self-defensive
attention. Gore, though, insisted on blaming Cornelia, as managing editor of
The Hudson Review
, for Fiedler's harsh review, an expression of his increasing anger at what he had begun to feel, after the publication of
City
, was a homophobic cabal to wound him by attacks or eliminate him by silence.

Some of the hostile reviews combined moral outrage with aesthetic criticism, the most damaging of these by C. V. Terry in the
New York Times Sunday Book Review
, so brief that it signaled contempt, so clever that it allowed its moral disapproval to be carried simply by indirection, misrepresentation, and code words: “Presented as the case history of a standard homosexual, his novel adds little that is new to a groaning shelf. Mr. Vidal's approach is coldly clinical … this time he has produced a novel as sterile as its protagonists.” Like character like author, every reader was meant to assume. When Gore wrote a sharp letter of protest to the
New York Times
, the
Review
declined to print it. The daily
New York Times
expressed its disapproval by silence. No review at all. The
Times
management had a commitment to their version of “All the News That's Fit to Print.” An admirer with close contacts at the newspaper's executive level reported that the decision had been made by the owner himself, Julius Ochs Adler, who had decided that the
Times
would accept ads for
The City and the Pillar
but not review it. Good reviews were few and far between, mostly notably in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Saturday Review
, and
Atlantic Monthly
, which called it “a brilliant exposé of subterranean life among New York and Hollywood expatriates from normal sex … an attempt to clarify the inner neuroses of our time, of which the increase in homosexuality and divorce are symptoms.” Like other thoughtful readers, the
Saturday Review
commentator called attention to the culturally revealing coincidence that Alfred Kinsey's groundbreaking statistical study,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, had been published within a month of
City
. If Kinsey's statistics were correct, Vidal's dramatization spoke to a sexual activity so much more widely practiced than had heretofore been believed that the society would be better served by open, enlightened discussion than by medieval repression. The
New York Times
, self-consciously and self-righteously inconsistent, decided it would review but
not accept ads
for Kinsey's scientific study.

Gore soon came to value the Kinsey connection. In spring 1949 he was to talk at length to the avid scientist in the mezzanine of the Astor Hotel.
Clipboard in hand, the tired-looking “
gray-faced man
” with a crew cut, wearing a polka-dot bow tie, was interviewing homosexual artists for a book on the relationship between sexuality and creativity. He was eager to talk to Vidal, to whom he had written, complimenting him on
City
, which he had read carefully, expressing his hope that “we will have a chance to meet someday.” Kinsey “told me that I was not ‘homosexual'—doubtless because I never sucked cock or got fucked. Even so, I was setting world records for encounters with anonymous youths…. I tried to tell Kinsey about Jimmie. But I had not yet read Plato; I had no theory. Kinsey gave me a copy of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, with an inscription complimenting me on my ‘work in the field.'” Gore gave Kinsey an autographed copy of
The Season of Comfort
. In the long interview at the Astor, he may indeed have told him much about the novel's heroine. Nina knew all she wanted to know about
City
and
The Season of Comfort
from what others told her. Gene said almost nothing to his son about
City
, other than that it was “interesting,” his nonconfrontational way of saying he had nothing happy to say about his son's sexuality. His wife, Kit, assumed that he was deeply disappointed, among other reasons because he had hoped that Gore would marry and make his own father a grandfather. “Yes, you had to assume that the author of
The City and the Pillar
was either homosexual or very observant,” Kit remarked. “Gene wasn't enthusiastic.” He feared that the book would damage Gore's career. In Washington his grandparents passed over
City
and its reviews in silence.

As he sailed out of New York harbor in mid-February 1948, bound for Naples, the twenty-two-year-old author leaned against the railing, salt spray rising from waves breaking against the
Neue Helena
. He happily posed for a photograph. With a black tie against his white shirt, plaid-patterned sport jacket, a look of anticipation and certitude in his eyes, he felt every bit the well-brought-up young American artistic entrepreneur off again to see the world.
The City and the Pillar
had risen to number five on the
Times
bestseller list. His intention was to go to Rome. Naples was an accidental destination. At last he was on his way again, this time to the place to which he had frequently dreamed of returning, the Europe of his childhood reading, of his fascination with ancient history, of the happiest experience of his school days, his summer 1939 visit to France and Italy. Had Europe been
available in 1946, he never would have gone to Guatemala at all; now he was back on course. He had with him in his cabin the manuscript of his novel-in-progress,
A Search for the King
, which he would work on during the two-week voyage, and a diary he had started to keep at the beginning of the year to record his ascension to bestsellerdom and his triumphal progress, including this grand European tour. Probably he had Byron in mind. The entries for the first six weeks of the year, so Vidal recalls, had less to do with triumph than with anguish, a linguistic grinding of his teeth in response to
City's
stormy reviews. The diary for 1948 is the one document that Vidal declined to make available to his biographer.

After a placid two-week-long winter crossing the port of Naples came into sight on the first of March. Wind and sea spray brought him for the first time to southern Italy. From a distance, sunlight and steel-gray sky made monochromatically bright the high outcropping of Capri to the south, Ischia to the north. The curve of the Bay of Naples seemed graciously cupped. Vesuvius's flat volcanic peak, slouching dramatically in the background, highlighted the city's low silhouette, its pre-highrise skyline. As the ship came into the harbor, the still-unreconstructed devastation of the port provided the prelude to a mostly bombed-out city, people living and working in partial ruins. “The whole waterfront had been smashed up, bombarded.” Impoverished Italy had barely begun reconstruction. At the Excelsior Hotel, where he stayed for the night, extensive repairs were under way, the bath-room half paved with marble, the rest raw cement. With a group of fellow passengers from the
Neue Helena
, he went to a live sex exhibition, a specialty performance at the local whorehouse for hard-currency tourists.

From Naples he went the next day to Rome. As the train entered the city from the south, he saw once again the landmarks he had kept vividly in memory since 1939. The sharp winter light made their uniqueness even more distinctively pristine. No sooner had he put his bags down at the Swiss-run Eden Hotel, near the Via Veneto, than he was off to feel Rome beneath his feet. He immediately walked across the city to the Colosseum. The nighttime quiet seemed preternatural, so unlike the rush of traffic he had experienced before the war. “Very, very dark. No lights. No cars in the streets. A very strange time,” he later recalled. “A wartime feeling still.” But it was recognizably Rome, even in the darkness. The Colosseum cast its silhouette against the night sky. In the circular amphitheater the silence felt ancient. The Forum seemed much the same as it had in 1939, still accessible,
without barriers or guards. Back at the hotel he found food scarce, the meat at dinner likely to be something strange and stringy, probably goat. There were vegetables and oranges, as the season permitted, but imports were few, manufactured goods hardly available, luxuries nonexistent. The black market flourished for those with foreign currency, especially dollars. With fuel oil unavailable at any price, people were cold even in the mild Roman winter. The sun, when it shone, was a cherished blessing. From Paris another American writer, Tennessee Williams, who was soon also to come to Rome, wrote, “
I am writing this
lying up in bed because it is too cold to get up or out…. I have been moving from hotel to hotel trying to find one that is heated.”