Gore Vidal (54 page)

After two months in Guatemala, Gore returned to New York at the end of February 1949, anxious about reviews of
Season
and about his health. “Did I tell you I arrived in NYC,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, “with a nasty case of clap contracted from one of the bels of Panajachel?” On Latouche's recommendation he went to see the omnipresent Dr. Max Jacobson, whom he had first learned about from Anaïs. He was “a friend of the stars. If you went out with Tennessee, suddenly Jacobson would be at the end of the room.” Having chatted with him at numbers of parties, Gore thought him charming. Anyway, he was “the only doctor I knew…. I go over and he's delighted to see me…. There I was, at twenty-three, ready to become an addict of Max Jacobson, and since I had a long life ahead of me,
he'd have a lot of revenue. So he was twinkling. And I said, ‘I've got this problem.' And I whipped out my cock and I said, ‘You know, I've got this clap.' He turned white. ‘For God's sake, go to a doctor. I mean, I mean … go to a urologist.' Not interested at all in what would have been a real illness…. It turned out not to be venereal disease. Something to do with strain, as they call it. But it looked like clap and it seemed like clap.” Pat found his evasion worth teasing. “Your disease is a direct result,” he wrote to him, “of your filthy bed habits, your complete lack of taste etc. Body juices indeed. That was pus you were sliding in on.” Having sex with strangers entailed risks. Within limits, they seemed worth taking, especially when the worst consequence was a venereal disease. Sulphur and the newly emerging antibiotics made the threat bearable, the diseases, if treated, manageable. “The mice and pussycats are as rewarding as ever. True love hides but croons from afar,” though this “afar” in spring 1949 seems to have been Houston, where he went on a book-signing and lecturing tour in early April. The Houston “true love” eventually faded entirely out of memory. At parties, at bars, in New York or wherever he traveled, there was the expectation of erotic excitement, of one-night or even fifteen-minute pickups, none likely to have any emotional content. As he had told John Lehmann, “
I freely admit
to having no romantic notions about trade.”

On the morning of March 16, 1949, seventy-eight-year-old Senator Gore, at home in his ground-floor apartment on Crescent Place and Wisconsin Avenue, while teasing his wife at breakfast, suffered a fatal stroke. The long-articulate life fell into silence. The day before, his assistant, Roy Thompson, had brought him his income-tax forms to sign, his signature the last official act of his life. On the morning of St. Patrick's Day the Senator's ex-son-in-law and his grandson came down together by train from New York. Gene Vidal had known and liked Senator Gore since the early 1920s. To his grandson he had been the most formative positive influence of his early life. Dot “wept quietly, but talked coherently.” Visitors came to pay their respects to the widow, many of them ancient Washingtonians whose hands also had once held the reins of power. The Oklahoma Senate and House delegations paid a call. Always the consummate politician's wife, Dot “greeted each by name. Never got a name wrong. Remembered to repeat
Mr. Gore's good opinion of the visitor.” There was no body to view. When Gene and Gore arrived, the remains were en route to Oklahoma for a ceremonial funeral.

Much remained, however, for Gore of his grandfather's legacy, including the all-too-ready availability of self-assertion through lineage, a calling card that if left too often at too many doors might indeed not serve him well. At Exeter his frequent reference to his family had impressed some but offended many. It was a temptation difficult for a young man to resist. Later that calling card was to be used more selectively, and indeed transformed into a playing card in a self-conscious literary and political strategy, Senator Gore as both a point of reference through which to make his own political positions more rhetorically effective and Senator Gore (and his Washington world) transformed into fiction and memoir. The imprint was deep, perhaps the best of it the influence of T. P. Gore's love of argument, his attachment to fact and rational analysis, his deep engagement with history and books, his sensitivity to language, particularly to irony, and his satiric humor. “If there were any other race but the damned human race, I'd go join it,” the Senator had said, a disenchantment with human nature as deep as Jonathan Swift's and Mark Twain's. Years later, in Chicago, Saul Bellow asked the visiting Gore Vidal if Bellow could bring his young son with him to the hotel to say hello: “I want him to meet someone
really cynical!”
Gore responded with a gentle but firm corrective:
“Realistic!”
Unlike cynicism, realism had comic potential, perhaps most happily illustrated by one of T. P. Gore's campaign-trail stories about “the hitchhiker [in the 1930s] who was hitching a ride out on the highway in Oklahoma, and a big, long Cadillac with a chauffeur stopped, and the man in the back said, ‘Do you want a ride?' The hitchhiker said, ‘Oh, yes, that would be great.' He said, ‘Well, I'll tell you. It's campaign now, and I'm a Republican. I've got a Republican badge on here, and I don't allow anyone to ride in my car unless they wear a Republican badge. Would you mind?' ‘Oh, no, no.' He got in. They went several miles down the rode, and the hitchhiker said, ‘Oh, stop the car!' ‘Why?' ‘See that peach orchard out there? The peaches are just becoming ripe, and I want to get some.' The man said, ‘Do you own this place?' He says, ‘No, I don't, but I've been a Republican for ten minutes, and I'm just dying to steal something.'”

In early April, Senator Gore's friends and family gathered to take him the last solemn mile. Dot was her usual brave, composed self. Gore was not
there. If Dot had known that he was only four hundred and fifty miles away, in Houston, she might have found his absence even more difficult to understand. At the end of March, having been invited to sign books and lecture, he spent ten days or so on the road, first in New Orleans, then mostly in Houston and Dallas. None of this was especially memorable except for the few days in Houston, which “was a crazy town, fascinating, very Trimalchian. I had quite a good time there,” mostly partying, enjoying his status as a visiting literary celebrity. Sylvia and Ted Brown, former New Yorkers with whom he stayed, hosted a reading, a book-signing, and a well-attended cocktail party at their bookstore, the main intellectual-social center for Houston writers and readers. One of the ballet companies was in town. So too was a beautiful, wealthy Houstonian who was in love with Leon Danielian and hoped he would marry her. Leon was on tour in Canada. Gore happily had her on his arm at numbers of parties, especially the late-night revelry the ballet company enjoyed and at which Gore was welcome. In Oklahoma City, the Senator was being buried. In Houston, Gore partied, to the “chagrin” of his grandmother, to his own as well, he later said. Partly he wanted to avoid seeing his mother: mostly he combined resolute stubbornness with an overwhelming fear of death, the power of which he first felt fully at this time and which for the rest of his life kept him away from almost every funeral he could reasonably have been expected to attend. Confinement in a narrow coffin surrounded by earthy darkness was an imaginative claustrophobe's worst nightmare. “I didn't want to go. My thanatophobia took over. I always was afraid of death and funerals. Going back to my first knowledge that there was such a thing. Why do anything about it?” But his grandmother may have felt equally strongly that his place was with her in Oklahoma City. His fear may have been incapacitating. It also may have had in it some combination of defiance and denial.

He would have liked also to defy the critics, many of whom did not find
Season
convincing. Some could not understand why a book focusing on a mother-son relationship was stubbornly antipsychological, especially the abrupt ending. Others found the novel excessively psychological. Amid substantial praise there was a backwash of reservation from those who felt its stylistic modernisms forced and awkward, its psychological insights routine, its energy level low. His Houston friends may not have celebrated his visit any the less fulsomely because the headline editor for the
Houston Post
had called it, in bold print, “An Error for Gore Vidal, A Mother, A Son and
a Debacle.” The reviewer had concluded that “the entire book is so fuzzy, so uncertain as to be unworthy of a review of this length.” Vidal himself, the
Houston Post
insisted, as did many of the negative reviews, “is important as one of the nation's most promising writers.” Undoubtedly “a writer of genius,” claimed the dyspeptic
New York Post
reviewer, who found himself “disliking intensely every character in Gore Vidal's novels.” There was also widespread praise for
Season
, laudatory reviews in the
Herald Tribune
and
Saturday Review
, among others. Even among the harsh critics, including those who urged him to return to the realism of
Williwaw
, a general consensus existed that a major novelist had emerged with the promise of a substantial oeuvre. Eager savants tried to predict and influence its direction. On one side was the alliance of John Aldridge, soon to publish his influential
After the Lost Generation
, and the Orville Prescotts of the newspaper reviewing world. On the other, those who placed primary emphasis on the novel as an aesthetic entity, to be judged not by moral content but on artistic merit. Aldridge believed that the worthiness of a novel importantly resided in its value structure, the degree to which it represented some culturally desirable and sanctioned moral stance. Prescott insisted that the values had to be those of his conservative middle-class constituency. With Aldridge, Gore did a tentative dance for a while, beginning with the critics's favorable comments in
Harper's
, which had occasioned the beginning of their relationship. Gore had some residual hope that despite his emphasis on values—often a code word for ideological litmus tests, including homophobia—Aldridge would be an ally, someone with whom he could have constructive dialogue about his work and the novel as a literary form. From Paris the previous year he had been both friendly and frank when he had written to Aldridge, “
I'd like to talk
to you about writing. I seem to have no very firm convictions only a kind of luminous tenuous attitude.” Over the next three years they were to see one another occasionally in New England and New York, to correspond at some length about their different views of art and, inevitably, to end as enemies.

After
The City and the Pillar
, though Gore had a supporter at the
New York Times
—the poet and editor Harvey Breit, who soon managed to get the
Times
to publish his feature profile of the young novelist—he began to hate the
Times
in general. Prescott refused to review anything of Vidal's. Even Breit's effort fell short of satisfaction. When the interview-article came out early in February 1950, Vidal felt that each of his “
bejeweled epigrams
was ruined by Mr Breit's poor memory; each time he very nearly got the point, he came close enough to make me look a trifle more foolish than usual.
I
think the whole interview makes me look marvelously clever, brilliant and pretentious.” Like most writers, he needed the
New York Times
's support, the visibility and sales its favorable reviews generated. Like many, he came to hate its conservatism, its hostility, and, worst of all, its neglect. Not to be reviewed, or not to be reviewed prominently enough, was a form of erasure. Somewhat battered but still standing, he had enough vulnerability to be hurt, enough resoluteness not only to keep going but to recast the moment into an overview of the longer perspective. “Thus do I,” despite the onslaught, “most ancient and revered of young authors, speak, dedicated as I am to longevity and performance and hopelessly jaundiced,” he wrote to his lukewarm British publisher. He feared that having exposed himself with
The City and the Pillar
to a homophobic culture, he would be forever anathema to the champions of Middle American normalcy. He would be living for a long time, as he had not fully enough anticipated, though he had been warned, with the backlash against his third novel. He tried to keep his sense of humor. “The critics still regard me,” he wrote to Pat Croker, “as a variety of poison oak and the girls are waiting for me to lead them like a Priapic Piper into the new Sodom, with milk and honey blest.” He could neither mollify the critics nor satisfy the girls. At least Dutton and Nick Wreden stood strongly behind him, though sales of
Season
were modest compared to those of
City
and
Williwaw. A Search for the King
was scheduled for January 1950 publication. Except for minor revisions, he had finished
Dark Green, Bright Red
. Before leaving for Guatemala the previous December, he had met with Wreden at The Players to complain about Dutton's sales efforts and the long delay between his completion of a novel and its publication. Wreden had been sympathetic, conciliatory, constructive. But Dutton, in essence, had done and was doing its best. Though Gore had flirted with switching from Dutton to Doubleday, he was realistic enough to realize that the change probably would do him little to no good. There seemed no pressing enough reason to fly from one evil to another. He did his best to publicize himself, something for which he had a natural talent, refined by his publicity-conscious political family and childhood. Since he had been proclaimed by numerous commentators as an important literary voice of the new generation and since “New Writers” was a topic that caught people's attention, he worked up a lecture, a version of which a
Dallas newspaper published in coordination with his visit, on “The Young Writer in America.” It was his first literary essay as a professional writer.