Overdrive (13 page)

At dinner we did our best to brief Ron on the first half of
Nickleby
, and returned to the theater for what was surely the most captivating theatrical experience I've ever had. No one at first thought it could work. Of course it did, and the robust, ingenious kindliness of a sophisticated author was made to flower in a performance so intricate in pacing and choreographical arrangement as to leave one in awe for those reasons alone. Going out, I asked one of the Secret Service agents, who had also been in Stamford that summer, what he thought of it, and his comment was that it would have been easier to spend the four and one-half hours sitting down. There had been no empty seats. We said good night, and plighted our troths to see
David Copperfield
together, if ever the Royal Shakespeare Company does to David what it so wonderfully did to Nicholas.

I have the whole morning clear, which is good, because there is a speech right after lunch at the Waldorf, which has to be thought through, as the occasion doesn't permit a regular lecture. I am to speak for only twenty minutes. I look at the assignment and calculate the time it will take to prepare for it—say a half hour, leaning on familiar material.

I have found that one can work with special concentration when hard up against that kind of a deadline. I have time left to attack the briefcase.

I had a very nice telegram from Walter Meade, the head of Avon Books, which has acquired the paperback rights to my novel
Marco Polo, If You Can
. I had been warned by Sam Vaughan of Doubleday that the market in paperback sales was way down, and that I mustn't be disappointed that the paperback auction fetched for
Marco Polo
less than it had for
Who's On First
. When Avon bought
Who's On First
, I persuaded Walter to purchase the preceding two novels (
Saving the Queen
and
Stained Glass
) from Warner Books, my prejudice being that the same publisher should have all the titles, to expedite multiple sales. Now I thank Walter for his warm telegram, and encourage the idea of a meeting with him, both because of the pleasure of it "and to discuss ways in which we can sell more of the softcover works. It seems to me that they have not done as well as they should have done, given the general [hardcover] reception to them. It may be that my name is unhappily associated with difficult material (long words, that sort of thing). We might consider how to undermine that rumor. In any event, it would be swell to see you.

Every time I bring out a novel, I feel compelled to play my little .45 rpm record which can be compressed into a single sentence: What is the
point
in personally advertising the availability of one of my novels, when all but a very few interviewers will dwell on
political
subjects?—which means that I will end up by alienating the majority of prospective book purchasers? Sam Vaughan smiles when I play my little record, and changes the subject; but it seems to me that my point is very strong. Take, for instance, the Donahue show, in which Phil (he is very good on this matter) will flash the book in front of the audience, but will resist (he is very good at this, too) conversation about the book—"because," he will tell you after the show is over, "after all, they don't know what's in it." One despairs of suggesting that that might be the very
point
in your appearing. But I have written about the general problems of book promotion for
Esquire
(my proposal: A compact among authors—fifty percent of TV and radio interviewing time has to be devoted to the book); but as often happens with my public proposals, no action has been taken.

Someone has sent me an account by Tony Castro, a columnist for the Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
, of an appearance in Los Angeles by Gore Vidal. Columnist Castro began the column by reproducing the well-publicized exchange between Vidal and me in 1968, which in due course resulted in a lawsuit. I decided, some time after writing what I considered a definitive piece on Mr. Vidal for
Esquire
(reproduced in one of my collections), not again (I am searching for a value-free word) ... to write about him. Mr. Castro's column suggests the problem:

[Los Angeles
Herald Examiner
, Nov. 12, 1981, p. A3] Thirteen years later, novelist, playwright and potential U.S. senatorial candidate Gore Vidal has not forgiven William F. Buckley Jr. for his personal attack in the nationally televised emotional outburst whose venom matched the Chicago street violence at the Democratic convention.

Vidal today remains in pain. He hurts so deeply still that the mere mention of Buckley's name rushes the blood to his head and sends him into fits of hemophilic hatred, bleeding freely with vengeful anger and finally causing intellectual blackouts.

How else do you explain why Vidal can preach reason as a solution to America's problems, as he did yesterday in a lecture at Cal State-Los Angeles, and then lose touch with his own rationality in declaring Buckley a "criminal" and "a man who should be in prison."

It was no slip of the tongue. A writer of Vidal's rank doesn't trip over his words. But the only crook that came out of his performance yesterday appears to be Gore Vidal himself.

It is sad, especially when you have admired Vidal and even pulled for him in those tete-a-tetes with Buckley. But it's a bad worm that eats away at Vidal's insides. All you have to do to upset the man is mention the name Bill Buckley and you set him on a near-hypnotic state in which he destroys himself and his own credibility.

For what Gore Vidal proved yesterday was that he can be trusted no more than the "professional politicians" against whom he intellectually and cleverly ranted.

Vidal has a problem of taking as many liberties with the truth as he does with the facts in his historical novels. For certain, William F. Buckley Jr. triggers these fits, but who knows what else can get under the thin Vidal skin so as to rob him of so much reason that he can sink to Richard Nixon's understanding of American law and justice?

It was former President Nixon who, long before Watergate, committed the widely publicized major gaffe, especially for a lawyer, of publicly declaring Charles Manson "guilty," even though at the time Manson had yet to be tried on mass murder charges.

Vidal showed that he could plunge to that depth yesterday when a student asked him whether William F. Buckley Jr. was "a real person."

Vidal answered by telling a packed theater audience that an article in the latest issue of
Time
magazine indicated that the recent Buckley family business problems with the Securities and Exchange Commission are severe enough that "it appears a real prison door may be opening for the Buckleys."

"Whether William F. Buckley Jr. is a real person, I don't know," he said, "but Lewisburg Penitentiary is real."

The students, already in awe of Vidal, took his word as fact. They had no idea he was lying to them, or, in his vernacular, being an intellectual crook because this is not at all what the
Time
article either said or implied.

The third paragraph in the
Time
article even states that "the most illustrious Buckleys were not named in the 43-page (SEC) civil complaint."

Neither William F. Buckley Jr. nor his brother, former Sen. James Buckley, who Vidal also said is possibly prison-bound, were cited in the SEC action, which because it is
civil
—not criminal—would carry no prison penalty at all, even if the famous Buckley brothers had been included.

Later, pressed about the accuracy and ethics of labeling Buckley a "criminal" on the basis of a civil matter, a visibly frustrated Vidal countered:

"You don't have to be convicted by a court to be a criminal."

Somehow, you expected something better from Gore Vidal, something broader-minded, something a little less frightening than the way the crypto Nazis once carried out justice.

Pat Moynihan has written me. The whole thing skirted embarrassment. I was asked by the Millbrook School last spring to be the speaker at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the school's founding. Ordinarily I'd have accepted the invitation, for the obvious reason (my three brothers and I attended Millbrook). But only a week before, Jack Heinz had written excitedly to say that he had confirmed our reservations on the Orient Express, that he had made the requisite hotel reservations in Zurich, and in Istanbul, that he had arranged with friends to take us about Istanbul, that a lunch and a dinner were being given. Whereupon I had called my old friend Alistair Horne in London to ask if it would be convenient if Pat and I stopped by and spent Saturday night with the Hornes in Wiltshire, en route back to New York. By all means, was the answer, and would the Heinzes (whom they had come to know) also spend the night? They'd be
most
welcome. Back to Heinz; they would be delighted; back to Horne, wonderful.

Now to scrub all of that would have been quite unthinkable. But I am too cowardly to say to the incumbent headmaster of the school, knowing that it would get back to the former headmaster of the school, the formidable Edward Pulling, that I cannot accept the invitation because I have to frolic on the Orient Express; so I encourage the vague notion that the future of Turkish participation in NATO ties in closely with my being in Turkey on the weekend in question. . . .

So Moynihan was asked to speak instead, and now writes me, "I was the fourth speaker at Millbrook's 50th and by the time I spoke, the temperature in the tent had dropped to well below 40 degrees. Accordingly, as a 50th anniversary present, much to the students' great relief, I announced that I would not deliver the enclosed speech, but would put it in the
Congressional Record
. Those present, I explained, could get the speech by writing to me.

The others who didn't write would be reported to 'The Boss' [Mr. Pulling], Warm regards."

Moynihan had begun his address, "As many of us learned in the Sunday New York
Times Magazine
, William F. Buckley, Jr., graduated from Millbrook School, in Dutchess County, in the Class of 1943. That is the year I graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. Although these places were apart in a number of senses, I was struck, on reading Mr. Buckley's sensitive and insightful [an awkward word for someone of such literary taste to use] memoir, by the similarity of our experiences." After reading Patrick's speech, I wrote a column about it. Now I send it along, in case he had missed it. I had remarked Senator Moynihan's observation that the Reagan administration had brought "a time of meanness in American life when the very idea of education commences to be assaulted." "He did not make it clear who exactly in the Reagan administration is assaulting 'the very idea of education' [I wrote]. Whoever is doing this is showing that he is just mean enough to guard his anonymity." I analyzed a few other assertions of Moynihan's, and closed: "Ah well. Sen. Moynihan is lots of fun, and will be wise again soon after his reelection."

But, in addition to sending him the column, I thank him for his courtesy in placing my own memories of Millbrook School, published in the New York
Times
the week before its celebration, in the
Congressional Record
.

The article, from which I now borrow as relevant, was a highly subjective reminiscence, primarily about the school, but substantially about my own childhood-at-school. . . .

My father did not go in for participatory democracy in the matter of children's schooling, and we did not know at exactly what moment in the thirties he resolved that his children should, having up until then mostly been tutored at home, be shipped out, gradually, to orthodox boarding schools, because one never questioned him on that, or any other grave matter. He had bought, and gradually expanded, a large house in northwestern Connecticut, in the town of Sharon, after being exiled from Mexico (he backed a revolution that sought to restore religious freedom—the churches in Mexico had been shut down for several years). His work in the oil business kept us in Europe during the late twenties and early thirties; but eventually we would settle in Sharon. My oldest brother John was fourteen, suffering from creeping unmanageability and an exuberant gregariousness which absolutely required that he be detached from the informal tutor system to which the younger of us were subjected, and go off to school. But go off where?

Just north of Sharon, five miles up, lay the Hotchkiss School, a venerable institution even then, with its ivied brick walls and private golf course. But there presided over Hotchkiss School a formidable gentleman named Van Santvoord, whose views on all subjects were highly pronounced, as were my father's. It would not have been easy, I dare say, for any stranger in the room to decide, on that spring day in 1934, who was interviewing whom. Nor is it exactly known why my father came away with a negative impression of Mr. Van Santvoord, a man of immense skills and cultivation. Probably it had to do with Mr. Van Sant-voord's amazed reaction at learning from the father of four boys that the father wished to maintain residual control over his sons' schedules, for instance in the matter of where they would weekend, at school or at home, and that he assumed that Hotchkiss would be agreeable to such an arrangement. To have suggested such a thing to Mr. Van Santvoord would not have been different from my father's suggesting that he would take the liberty, now and then, of changing the school's architecture, as required.

In any event, the next we heard was that my father had traveled ten miles west, to interview the headmaster of another boys' school. Millbrook School was then all of three years old, and had thirty boys enrolled in it. My father's exchange with Mr. Edward Pulling was evidently satisfactory to both parties, because it gradually transpired within the household that in the fall my brother John would go to Millbrook. And, over the ensuing six years, my brother Jim, then I, then my younger brother Reid. Moreover, my father had worked out arrangements with Mr. Pulling as follows: The boys would be his until noon on Saturday, after which they would return home for one and a half days. This proved a singular, though not unique privilege. Probably now that Millbrook is fifty years old such latitudinarianism does not exist. But my father liked very much about Mr. Pulling that anything existed that Mr. Pulling elected to have exist. Including Millbrook School.