Gore Vidal (135 page)

That disenchantment was now applied to Vidal's feeling about his publisher, Random House, and his editor and friend, Jason Epstein. For years he had been complaining about the usual ineptitudes and failures that any large publisher inflicts on its books. His happy experience as a Little, Brown author in the 1960s increasingly became his benchmark against which to evaluate his dissatisfaction. Complaint was inevitable. Until the late 1980s, with the exception of the disagreement with Jason about
Creation
, it had been about minor failures of the sort authors always have with publishers. They were of less concern to Random House than its occasional discomfort at having locked itself into very expensive multiple-book contracts at a time when changing market and cultural conditions made it increasingly likely that they would not earn back the advances. As popular as Vidal was as a writer of historical novels, the audience was diminishing. Both he and Random House expected bestsellers.
Empire
, though it was critically praised, did not earn back its advance.
Hollywood
garnered neither critical nor commercial success, partly because its flaws, among its many strengths, were the kind that an increasingly less patient, less literary market for bestsellers found discouraging. Not tightly organized, partly an afterthought of
Empire
, less about Hollywood than about Washington, it was, as Epstein felt when he read the manuscript, less commercial than any of the previous historical novels. In addition, it seemed to him that Vidal's obsession with bisexuality, previously restricted to the “inventions” like
Myra
and
Myron
, was now, in
Hollywood
, becoming central to the historical novels, the result, Epstein thought, of Vidal's inability to resolve the tension between his male and female sides. He feared that conflation would turn future novels in the
series into expanded, historically based versions of the Chinese operas he disliked and whose sales were small. Owen Laster saw the conflict moving toward explosion.

In 1983 Gore had complained bitterly to Laster that Jason and Random House were not behind
Duluth
. A realist, Vidal knew that
Duluth
was not destined for mass-market success, but he felt that Random House was not committed to giving it the support it needed to achieve success within its limits. Whereas the book clubs rushed to embrace the historical novels, they would not take any of the inventions. “Owen would come to me,” Epstein recalled, “and say that Gore is giving me a hard time with this. Random House isn't supporting him, and so on. ‘Well, we're doing the best we can. But the Book-of-the-Month Club doesn't want these things.' It was
Duluth
. And the reviews of the historical novels were not as good as they had been, which I attributed to the intrusion of this
Myra Breckinridge
thing…. Then Gore and I had lunch one day, and Gore was very angry. ‘Why can't you make the Book-of-the-Month Club take my books?' ‘What am I supposed to do? Put a gun to their heads? They make their own decisions.' It was well after
Duluth
. Maybe it was around the time of
Hollywood…
. Up to that point everything was fine, except for the warnings I was getting from Owen that Gore was unhappy.”
Hollywood
, which brought them to the edge but not over, seemed to Laster “a softer book than any of the other historical novels. Perhaps Gore was getting tired of the historical project,” though he had received a large advance to write the final volume in the series,
The Golden Age
. He “was very critical of the way Random House handled
Hollywood
, particularly publicity and promotion, though I don't recall a lack of ads…. My theory—I saw it happen with other big authors—is that Jason thought that Gore's writing was not as good as it used to be, and I sensed that Jason somehow, not meaning to, conveyed this to Gore…. I remember having lunch with Jason and going over the declining sales from the historical novels. There was a lack of the same kind of endorsement of his writing as before that somehow got through to Gore, so the stage was set.” Random House still had a commitment to Vidal. But it was refracted through his editor's decreased enthusiasm about his potential to be as good and as successful a writer of historical novels as before. A certain mutual weariness, even disenchantment, had set in. Elements of it had been there from the beginning. Vidal had tolerated an editor unenthusiastic about novels he valued greatly. It had been from the start a marriage
of demi-convenience, and like an old married couple they had tolerated disaffiliation because each had exercised restraint, neither had desired confrontation, and both had found reasons to assume they would go on together to the end.

When Vidal proposed in early 1990 that Random House publish a volume of his collected essays, to be called
United States
(organized on the trope that the one book united three aspects of his career—the personal, the political, and the literary), he was startled when Epstein resisted. It would be too large and expensive. In this case Epstein's reluctance was partly practical, but perhaps also cranky, a surprising response, since from the beginning Vidal's essays had attracted him “much much more than his fiction. In his own voice there was no need to pretend,” Epstein observed. “He was an American version of Montaigne.” For his editor, Vidal's voice as a novelist has never been fully convincing, even in the historical novels, which seemed to him best the closer they came to being essays. “I always thought about Gore that he was not really a novelist, that he had too much ego to be a writer of fiction because he couldn't subordinate himself to other people the way you have to as a novelist. You've got to become the people you impersonate, you have to have the ability to let yourself go a little bit and become the characters. He didn't seem to do that. It was always him wearing different costumes.” But if Random House were to remain his publisher, it would have to bring out the essays. That Epstein allowed himself to express his reservations was self-defeating. “He sat at lunch at the Plaza,” Gore recalled, “with Howard and Owen Laster and me and said, ‘You can't do it, it's too large, we can't afford to make it, we can't afford to sell it,' and so on.” But unless Random House drastically overpaid, it was certain not to lose money and likely to gain critical honors. “
Obviously, I am not charmed
that the collected essays are regarded as a drug on the market,” Vidal wrote to Laster. He brooded on the possibility of changing publishers, or at least changing editors within Random House. The former was impractical though far from impossible, mainly because Random House had rights to his backlist, which he felt crucial to keep in print in as attractive a way as possible. That issue had begun to loom larger and larger, and increasing amounts of Laster's time, prodded by an anxious author, went into protecting the backlist and keeping it in print. The latter could be done, though the most likely alternative to Epstein, Gary Fisketjon, had moved to Knopf, which now belonged to the same conglomerate as Random House. General
policy militated against authors moving from one house to another within the conglomerate. Also, there was a friendship, which Gore still valued, at risk. During the summer and fall of 1990 he worked at a new short novel, another in the invention mode, which he finished that winter. By the summer of 1991, when Laster, Vidal, and Epstein met in New York to determine what to do about the essays, it was now also part of the discussion. When Laster and Vidal offered to take no advance on the volume of essays, Random House agreed to publish it. Probably Epstein had already rethought his position. Since there was little to no financial risk and since he admired the essays, that issue was disposed of, though at the cost of further deterioration in the relationship by the fact of its having been an issue at all. At that lunch “Gore was tense,” Epstein recalled. “I could see that he was in a strange mood, and I sensed there'd been a long series of discussions with Owen about what they're going to do about this. ‘Let's wait,' I said, ‘till we see the next book … and hope for the best.'”

Epstein hated it.
Live from Golgotha, The Gospel According to Gore Vidal
, narrated by Saint Timothy, is Vidal's culminating deconstruction of Christianity, a parodic explosion of the Gospels and Jesus into satiric and science-fiction fragments. It is also a buddy story in which the older “boy,” Saint Paul, and the younger, Timothy, for a while travel together the first-century Christian religious circuit. Paul, who likes boys and Timothy especially, initiates Timothy into hilarious, exciting, and sometimes dangerous adventures as “Saint” (a.k.a. Saul/Paul) attempts to convert the heathen. Jesus' followers (or adapters) are split into two groups, those who believe that the message of the Jewish Jesus is for Jews and those who believe (as does Saint) “that Jesus had come as the messiah for everyone,” that Jesus is a big, international, multicultural business not to be limited to Jews. The struggle between the warring groups is fought partly over the battleground of Timothy's attractive body, whose crucial part must be altered in order for the uncircumcised, non-Jewish Timothy to be initiated. “In the beginning was the nightmare, and the knife was with Saint Paul, and the circumcision was a Jewish notion and definitely not mine.” Poor Timothy! “Little did I realize when I became a Christian and met Saint and his friends that my body—specifically my whang—was to be a battleground between two warring factions within the infant church.” A marketing genius, Saint eventually wins. There is another battle in progress, so Timothy discovers, when, after Saint's death in Rome, Timothy begins to have strange extra-first-century
A.D. visitations, which include a Sony television set, network executives from the twentieth century viciously competing to televise the crucifixion live, and a master computer hack who turns out to be the man who the world thinks was, but actually was
not
, crucified and who has time-traveled forward to the late twentieth century so that he can, electronically, reach back to the first to eliminate Christianity itself by erasing all records of its existence. In the end Lucky Timothy watches the crucifixion on TV. It is not “live” but taped. The special effects are extraordinarily beautiful. The editor wins an Emmy.

Not only did Epstein not like
Live from Golgotha
, he thought it “contemptible.” The condemnation was fueled by a surprising moral outrage at Vidal's treatment of Paul's sexuality and by a literalist's sense of the necessity to be factually accurate. Epstein was, as he read it, “trying very hard to like it, and there were a few funny moments in the beginning. I actually laughed once or twice. I said that to Gore, that I'm enjoying this. I read the rest of it. I had just published a book by Elaine Pagels with a lot about St. Paul in it, which had led me to read other books on early Christianity. So I knew a certain amount about Paul and what was going on with current scholarship and so on. It was shocking. Gore didn't bother to look anything up. Paul is a revolutionary. When Paul says don't marry, he says it because if you do you'll be committed to Rome, not to us. It wasn't about sex. It was about revolution. I tried to explain that to Gore, and he was very high-and-mighty about that…. Then I wrote a letter, suggesting that he make some changes…. I didn't think the novel was funny. I thought it was forced and confusing, which I said in a polite way. I knew that that would lead to trouble. I knew that the fuse was getting short there.” Vidal wondered if there had been all along some latent homophobia in Epstein that at least partly explained his dislike of
Myron, Duluth
, and
Live from Gologotha
. It also seemed to him possible that Epstein's hostile response to the last of these reflected visceral disapproval of Vidal's attack on right-wing Zionism that had begun with “The Empire Lovers Strike Back.” Furious at what seemed to him Epstein's assumption of superior knowledge, as if the issue were whether or not Vidal's version of Saint Paul was an “accurate” one, or at least the one that Epstein thought accurate, Vidal's short fuse—which had burned low during ten years of what he thought his editor's condescension, distaste for his fiction, and pernicious neglect—detonated into an immediate explosion. In a controlled, furious letter, in response to Epstein's, he rejected
both the criticism and the person from whom it had come. To Epstein, Vidal seemed to be playing, now and for much of his life, the role of Shakespeare's Coriolanus. “‘I banish thee.' He banished us and doesn't know about us anymore. He doesn't know what's going on. It's leftover socialism. It doesn't work. It has nothing to do with what's going on in this country now. And this endless sneering about America. I don't think it helps much to do that. This is an interesting country, for better or worse. You might as well figure out what's going on here and take it seriously.”