Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (43 page)

Living at the time in low-cost Guatemala, his retreat from the world, Gore finished
The City and the Pillar
. He dedicated it to “J.T.”

Gore never recovered from Jimmie’s death, and wrote about his slain Marine in his memoirs. Jimmie also appears in disguise in other novels written by Gore.

Gore’s memory of Jimmie Trimble was still going strong in 1970 when he wrote a screenplay,
Jim Now
, based on his 1949 novel. Franco Rossellini expressed interest in shooting a low-budget movie adaptation in Rome, but financing was difficult. In Hollywood, Gore shopped the script from studio to studio, getting only negative reactions to its homosexual theme.

“Death, summer, youth—the triad contrives to haunt me every day of my life.”

He often lamented “a few scraps of bone and cartilage scattered among the volcanic rocks of Iwo Jima that Jimmie left behind.”

In 1971, Gore experimented with a hallucinogenic drug. “Jimmie arrived in bed wearing blue pajamas. I could actually feel his body.”

In later years, Gore recalled his youthful romance with Jimmie as “the unfinished business of my life.”

Anaïs Nin, Gore’s mentor, was the first person to whom he showed his first draft of
The City and the Pillar
. She was horrified, mainly at the portrait of herself, whom she recognized in the character of Marie Verlaine, an aging
femme fatale
.

“She is a woman who has seen two wars, who has lines around her eyes, and who cannot find satisfying sexual relationships,” Anaïs said. “You have written an aggressive hostile caricature of me, a brutal parody of a woman. I have been betrayed by someone I trusted. I can never forgive this.”

She also objected to the idea, as expressed in Gore’s novel, that a sophisticated woman, such as Marie Verlaine, might ever have been attracted “to such a colorless clod of a boy as Jim.”

“Perhaps she was right,” Gore later said. “Jim was so unlike those plumed, serpentine Mexican beach boys that she had fancied.”

“You have written a novel without illusion, without feeling, and without poetry,” she charged. “Everything in your eyes is diminished and uglied. To see only ugliness, that is what people do when they do not love. You live without faith, and that will make your world gray and bitter.”

Ironically, Anaïs objected to “the promiscuity of homosexuals.” Gore found that surprising and hypocritical, “but I did not bring up her own powerful sexual appetites.”

Her biographer, Deirdre Bair, put it this way: “Anaïs had a continuing procession of young boys who came and went from Greenwich Village with interchangeable ease, and she cast herself in the role of Colette’s Léa, instructing whichever youth was her
Chéri
of the moment.”

Her relationship with Gore would continue, but her reaction to
The City and the Pillar
marked the beginning of one of the most famous literary feuds of the 20
^th
Century. She would seek her own form of revenge in
Volume Four (1944-1947)
of her diary through an unflattering portrait of him. When she wrote her novel,
Solar Barque
, Gore, in disguised form, would appear as an impotent homosexual.
[
Solar Barque
, originally published in 1958, would re-emerge a year later as
Seduction of the Minotaur
.]

Gore already had two novels on the market,
Williwaw
and
In a Yellow Wood
, and consequently, Dutton delayed the release of his
The City and the Pillar (
written in 1946) until January of 1948 because it didn’t want to glut the market with Vidal novels. Dutton editors were also concerned by the homosexual theme, and some were troubled that the novel might harm Gore’s promising career as a novelist, as indeed, it did.
[Partly because of the negative reviews it received, Gore would wait for another twenty years before he returned to a gay theme in
Myra Breckinridge
, his novel about camp, gender, and the movies.]

“If you hold it much longer, I’ll be scooped,” Gore protested.

[Indeed, during Dutton’s deliberately calibrated delay, two other widely discussed gay-themed novels were published, mitigating to some degree the novelty of Gore’s
City and the Pillar
. They included
The Gallery
, by John Horne Burns, and
End as a Man
, by Calder Willingham.]

The Gallery
, published in 1946, depicted life in Allied-occupied North Africa and Naples in 1944, as seen through the experience of homosexual military personnel. It included a “lurid” account of a gay bar in wartime Naples frequented by soldiers of various nationalities.

Rather jealous of Burns, Gore sought him out and reported, “He was a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great. He was also certain that to be a great writer, it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed, he named a half-dozen celebrated contemporaries. ‘A Pleiad,’ he roared delightedly, ‘of pederasts.’”

“But what about Faulkner?” Gore asked. “And Hemingway?”

Burns was disdainful of Gore’s question. “Who said they were
any
good?” he asked.

Calder Willingham, born in Atlanta, burst onto the scene with his novel,
End as a Man (1947)
, a withering indictment of the macho culture of military academies. The story also focused on sex and suggested homosexuality, which led to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to file obscenity charges against its publisher, Vanguard Press.

Pressing on, Willingham turned the book into a play at New York’s Actors Studio, where it was an off-Broadway success, featuring a very young James Dean and introducing actor George Peppard, who would later star as the dashing romantic hero in Truman Capote’s
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Both Truman and Tennessee saw the play together and met both Dean and Peppard. They were particularly fascinated by Dean.

Willingham would also go on to achieve success as a screenwriter, credited for screenplays of
The Graduate
(1967), which co-starred both Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft.

Condemned before its release,
The City and the Pillar
is today an American classic.

It was the first book by an accepted American author to define his protagonist as strong, athletic, relatively well-adjusted, and masculine, and the first to portray overt homosexuality as a natural behavior. Harmless, even “vanilla,” by today’s standards,
The City and the Pillar
tells the story of handsome Jim Willard, a coming-of-age drama of a tennis player who discovers his homosexuality. He falls for his best friend, Bob Ford. Eventually, Bob gets married. The end of their relationship unfolds in the bed of Bob’s hotel room. In the novel’s original version, an infuriated Jim, spurred on and antagonized by Bob, murders him. In Gore’s revised version, released in 1965, he rapes him instead.

Tennessee told Gore, “You spoiled it with that revised ending. You didn’t know what a good book you had.”

Christopher Isherwood, traveling at the time in South America, was also put off by the ending. He thought the novel suggested that homosexuality brings tragedy, defeat, and death. “Many men live together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work, just as heterosexuals do,” Isherwood claimed.

“The gay revolution began as a literary revolution,” wrote Christopher Bram in his book,
Eminent Outlaws, The Gay Writers Who Changed America
. “Vidal was the godfather of gay literature, in spite of himself—a fairy godfather. He would cringe at this description. He continued to insist that there is no such thing as a homosexual person, only homosexual acts.”

The City and the Pillar
drew almost a completely negative response.
The New York Times Book Review
dismissed it as “disgusting” and “gauche.”

Orville Prescott of
The New York Times
said he was so horrified by Gore’s book that he would neither review nor ever read another novel by him. Gore accused anti-gay critics of blocking his career.

The New Yorker
found the novel “unadorned tabloid writing, the kind of dreary information that accumulates on a metropolitan police blotter.”

Despite their condemnations,
The City and the Pillar
rose quickly to the bestseller list, eventually selling 30,000 copies in hardcover.

The release of
The City and the Pillar
had been immediately preceded by the January, 1948, publication of
The Kinsey Report
a major scientific study revealing that male homosexuality was more frequently practiced than most Americans had ever realized. Adding to that month’s abundance of gay-favorable (or gay-indulgent) reading material, the publication of The Kinsey Report was followed a week later by the release of Truman Capote’s
Other Voices, Other Rooms
.

Gore met and was interviewed by Alfred C. Kinsey, author of
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. “
After many serious talks, 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, nicely matching busy Jack Kennedy’s girl-a-day routine.”

Based on countless testimonies associated with Gore’s sexual conquests, his statement about his sexual practices to Kinsey appear to be completely untrue.

“I traveled with Gore,” Tennessee later said, when he read the statement. “Gore performed fellatio and allowed himself to be sodomized. Yet he was suggesting that he was exclusively a passive partner in fellatio and an active partner in sodomy. That was merely his fantasy, hardly the truth.”