Gore Vidal (56 page)

Immediately on Gore's arrival in Tangier in the last week in June, they made plans for visits to Casablanca and Fez and perhaps a trip into the desert, for which Paul had a mystic feeling and had written powerfully about in
The Sheltering Sky
, a novel Gore soon read and liked considerably. The July weather was magnificent, unending days of cloudless skies. He thought Casablanca at best interesting. The long-discussed Sahara voyage, though, never occurred, and Tangier, all in all, despite the high-partying British and American social life, felt like a disadvantaged backwater. His small rented house in town was a hovel. Scorpions seemed unattractive companions. Tangier's dirt and poverty, its crumbling seediness, its absence of rational organization and intellectual culture seemed considerable liabilities, its exoticism, repellent. Unlike Bowles, Gore felt European. As in his visit to Egypt the previous year, he did not find modern Arabic sensibility or culture interesting, let alone alluring. Why should one isolate oneself in Morocco, he felt, if you could be in Paris or Rome or even New York? The handsome local boys were not sufficient compensation, and he did not enjoy smoking kif, Bowles's favorite drug. Much as he enjoyed Paul's company, he had little desire to stay for any length of time. A cablegram from Capote to Bowles announced Truman's imminent arrival, to Gore's surprise, with his companion, Jack Dunphy. Capote had no idea that Vidal was there. Gore insisted that he and Bowles go down to the dock; in the distance they saw Capote at the prow of the ship, ready for his entrance, looking eagerly toward the shore, Bronzini scarf floating about his neck. From the dock Capote's small body allowed his shoulders and face to be just visible over the ship's railing. As soon as he was in range, Vidal and Bowles began waving their arms wildly. Capote saw the two figures, began waving his scarf. When he recognized Gore standing beside Bowles, “
he did a little
comic-strip routine,” Bowles recalled. “His face fell like a soufflé placed in the ice-compartment, and he disappeared entirely below the level of the railing for several seconds. When he had assumed a standing position again,
he was no longer grinning or waving.” Soon recovering his equilibrium, Capote stayed in Morocco for most of the rest of the summer, finding Jane's company delightful, spending more time with her than with Paul, and enjoying a frenetic whirl of parties and exotic experiences with Cecil Beaton, whom he idolized. Gore left late in the first week in July. Two weeks had been enough. In August, back in New York, he received a letter from Bowles, whose wry report reminded him why he had left Tangier. “Truman gave a mad party … at the cave of Hercules, with a large Arab orchestra, much champagne, and hurricane lamps fainting in the gale. Themistocles passed out on hashish, after drinking several bottles of champagne. Cecil said: ‘How heavenly!' The Arab orchestra, plus porters and pussycats (Vidalese) had cases of Coca Cola. The sand sifted in and Truman found a huge centipide at his feet, nearly dying of horror. Well, actually it was a night of horror; everything went wrong.” Gore was glad he had stayed only two weeks.

On a Florida Beach, Gore and Johnny Kriza enjoyed the late-August sunshine. It had been a glorious ride down from New York in Johnny's big car—which he had named “Floristan”—for a two-week holiday. They stopped at beaches along the eastern coast of Florida, in good-humored high spirits, visiting friends from the ballet world, “
receiving the homage
of the balletomanes in their beachside houses.” When they had sex together, it was, as they both preferred, casually thoughtless. It had no emotive content, no consequences. “I was, during that time, devoted only to health and beauty,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. Fond of one another, they had fun together, in a time and place where all that mattered was the attraction of well-favored bodies, exercised and tanned in the bright sun. Any obvious shadows seemed to come only from palm trees. The moment was so charged with the present that he and Johnny could find it possible, at a stretch, to think the present might go on forever. Actually, Johnny was not used to doing any thinking at all. For Gore, it would have been unusual, perhaps impossible, for there not to be an elegiac shading to the happy sky.

In New York through late summer and autumn 1949, staying sometimes at his father's apartment, mostly in hotels, he proofread galleys of
A Search for the King
and finished the revisions of
Dark Green, Bright Red
for
which Lehmann had pushed. “I agree, of course,” Gore wrote to him, “with what you have to say that one should not create characters that are lifeless and dull merely because the originals might appear that way; on the other hand I think creation of character in a novel is very much a business of chance; either the magic happens or it doesn't. I'm not sure that a ‘real character' can be created by some correct or logical process, Aristotelian or not. Peter can't be remade as a character, certainly, but I think what you mean is not that personality should change or grow but that it should be revealed; in that case, I can do something about him. I'm not sure what just yet.” He had not given up hope that Lehmann would publish other of his novels. In early November he sent him the revised
Dark Green, Bright Red
. “
A great deal
of work has gone into it and I am pretty well pleased now. I've made some cuts and a few additions; most of your objections have been taken care of and Peter is less shadowy, I think.” He soon sent him one of the first printed copies of
Search
, which Lehmann chose not to publish, though why he selected the less successful
Dark Green, Bright Red
is unclear, especially since the subject of
Search
made it a likely read for an English audience.
Williwaw
had made Vidal well known.
The City and the Pillar
had made him famous. He himself shared the general lack of enthusiuasm about
In a Yellow Wood. Dark Green, Bright Red
had mostly its narrative drive to recommend it. That the artistically interesting
The Season of Comfort
was vastly underrated resulted from the inevitable focus on its psychological mother-son drama. In addition, for a writer so young to have written so much so quickly made many uncomfortable, some resentful. Haste was sometimes evident. Often it made no difference. Partly he was driven by the desire for prominence, and by a seemingly inexhaustible energy, but he also needed to support himself. “Contrary to legend, I had no money. Since I lived on publishers' advances, it was fairly urgent that I keep on publishing every year. But of course I
wanted
to publish every year. I felt no strain, though looking back over the books,” he remarked decades later, “I can detect a strain in the writing of them. Much of the thinness of those early novels is simply the pressure that I was under. Anyway, I've gone back and rewritten several of them. They are still less than marvelous but better than they were.”

Even with publishing six novels in five years, he had still earned only modest sums. Though he did well with
City
, none of the others sold enough
to make the bestseller list, let alone provide him with much more than the average $2,000 advances he got for the last three. The nearly 30,000-copy total sale of
City
netted him approximately $9,000 over a three-year period. The trust fund that Nina had gotten Auchincloss to provide and which she had relinquished when he became twenty-one provided a small sum, varying in relation to the securities markets, usually around a thousand dollars a year. To the extent that he stayed at his father's apartment, he had a partial rent subsidy, though he preferred to stay there as little as possible. Most of the money he had saved in the Army and from the railroad bonds set aside for college costs had been absorbed by his living expenses. He was economical, but he was not thrifty. Bohemian self-sacrifice and ascetic sparseness did not appeal to him. Though he had no need for luxuries, for first-class travel or deluxe hotels, he still needed money to cover his ordinary expenses. With the exception of a smash bestseller of the sort that stayed at the top for a long time, a novel was not a paying proposition. Publishers had not yet developed the tendency to give highly thought-of “literary” novelists huge advances. Even successful novelists had to scramble for money: some scrambled into university jobs, others into writing for the popular culture. As Gore looked around him in mid-1949 for additional ways to earn money, he took notice of television, a new phenomenon. “
All my literary friends
,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, whom he urged to find a buyer for his Antigua house, “from Jean Stafford to Truman Capote are writing or trying to write television.” He himself began to make inquiries. Perhaps television, perhaps the movies. “They feel about me, generally, that there is nothing I cannot do (this is said by irritable admirers) or that there is nothing I
will
not do (more the majority opinion, I think) … the truth is I don't want to go to work in an office. On such soft negatives are airy empires built.” One of the things he
would
do, he decided, is write a pulp novel. An idea had come to him in mid-March while on the train to attend the bereaved Mrs. Gore. Before leaving for Europe in May, he had put into Dutton's hands a commercial fiction of about 55,000 words, dicated into a Dictaphone machine in about a week, called
A Star's Progress
, to be published under a pseudonym, the surname taken from the much-frequented Everard Baths. The conspiracy appealed even to the staid Dutton proprietors, who early in July drew up a contract, with an advance of $1,000, for the pseudonymous Katherine Everard. “Very intrigued with new novel, but why assume another name?” Anaïs wrote to him from California. “Why not add to
your
legend? …
I'm flattered that you haven't proposed to anyone but me—I'm happy too…. I wish I had known of your trip to Spain.”

The galleys were ready in September, publication scheduled for February 1950, one month after
A Search for the King
. No one other than the author and a few people at Dutton were to know that
both
had been written by him. Critics had already found his productivity suspect. If he associated his name with
A Star's Progress
, his credentials as a serious literary writer would be weakened. His critics would complain that not only did he write too much too quickly but that he also had written a steamy potboiler. The Orville Prescotts of the world would feel vindicated, probably maliciously vindictive. Dutton's production manager, who sent Katherine Everard the galley proofs at a Ridgewood, New Jersey, address, had no idea that “Dear Miss Everard” was anyone other than she appeared to be. Enjoying the conspiracy, John Macrae, soon after publication, happily told Gore, “
I have to sneak
around and write to you about Miss Kitty's book. Here is the review in the
Times
. Not too bad. When you mention her in your letters just use the work K. I mean the letter K. I keep worrying for fear someone will find out.” No one did. The complacent
Times
reviewer, who thought the book okay of its kind, was readily taken in. The governing board of The Pen and Brush, a Manhattan club of female “professional writers and artists,” wanted, “in recognition of [her] work,” to have Miss Everard “as a regular member.”

Despite Vidal's efforts to write down,
A Star's Progress
is a classy piece of pulp fiction. The author's hand is evident throughout. Set mainly in Monterrey, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, it is a partly original, partly formulaic female bildungsroman in which a beautiful, graceful, gifted Mexican-born dancer, perhaps modeled on Rita Hayworth, eager to escape her family's poverty, rises, with the help of numbers of men, to Hollywood stardom, though not to happiness. Despite her talent, she is a victim of forces she can at best accommodate to, at worst be damaged by. Her talent and willpower can take her only so far, though they do take her to fame and notoriety. At the age of thirteen she dances in a raunchy New Orleans nightclub. One year later she becomes the mistress of a wealthy man more than four times her age, who takes her to Los Angeles. With the help of powerful Hollywood supporters, she soon becomes a film star. When she falls in love with her handsome bisexual co-star, she is stunned to learn he prefers his own sex to hers, that he is in love with a man. Escaping her
misery, she has a sensationalized affair with a European prince. In the end she returns to New Orleans, where she carefully, deliberately, kills herself. Like that of
The City and the Pillar
, the narrative is framed by an opening and closing set in a bar in the novel's present. The narrative pace is artfully varied, mostly brisk and focused. Drawing on his 1945 stay in Hollywood and his frequent visits to New Orleans, Vidal sharply evokes the two cities with a casual but concrete indirectness that makes them more than scenery and less than performers. When Graziella Serrano (as the movie star Grace Carter) goes to Nevada for a divorce, she stays at a dude ranch very much like the one Nina stayed at in 1935. Grace's bisexual lover, Eric, a name that Vidal was to use again in
Two Sisters
, “sooner or later … always managed to prove that every man in the world was like himself” sexually, a Vidalian position of some later prominence. “The name Duluth,” where her mother was born, “had always intrigued” Grace, as it did her creator, who was to use it as the title for one of his most compelling fictions. As in
Williwaw
, elegant directness of style is everything. The prose is spare, precise, sometimes luminous in its exactness, interesting in its rhythms, sophisticated in its elaborations. Throughout, alas, convention and public morality press hard on the narrative. Grace Carter cannot escape the punishing hand that demands she pay for her transgressions with death, though her bisexual co-star remains happily unscathed. But for Grace punishment is inescapable, such did the genre, the publisher, and the public demand. A strong character, she is not strong enough; she is a weak link between, looking backward, Moll Flanders and, looking forward, Myra Breckinridge.