Gore Vidal (137 page)

The issue of honors and prizes was given an ironic twist when
United States: Essays 1952–1992
was awarded the National Book Award for criticism. To Gore, Jason, who had not wanted to publish it, seemed all too self-congratulatory, as if he were totally responsible for its existence and success. But the award forced on Gore additional confirmation that many discriminating readers thought more highly of his essays, somewhat of an afterthought in his career, than his fiction. It was fine to be thought the Montaigne of the twentieth century. Yet to the extent that it deflected attention away from his achievements as a novelist, his reputation as an essayist was not an unmixed blessing. When he decided not to attend the award ceremony, he deputized Harold Evans, representing Random House, to read his brief acceptance speech and accept the award for him. The distance from Rome to New York was not so small that he could not use it as a justification for declining to appear, though certainly he had motives in addition to inconvenience: “
Unaccustomed as I am
to winning prizes in my native land,” he had Evans say to the audience in November 1993, “I have not a set piece of the sort seasoned prize winners are wont to give. Who can forget Faulkner's famed ‘eternal truths and verities,' that famed tautology so unlike my own bleak ‘relative truth.' As you have already, I am sure, picked the wrong novelist and the wrong poet, I am not so vain as to think that you've got it right this time either. Incidentally, I did attend the first National
Book Award forty years ago—that was also my last experience of book-prize-giving. My date was Dylan Thomas, dead sober for a change and terrified of everyone. The winner in fiction was my old friend James Jones, for
From Here to Eternity
. His victory was somewhat marred by Jean Stafford, one of the judges, who moved slowly if unsurely about the room, stopping before each notable to announce in a loud voice, ‘The decision was
not
unanimous.' But Jimmy won, and Dylan and I retired to a tavern in the Village, and the rest was biography. In any case, I am delighted that you have encouraged Random House to continue publishing three-and-a-halfpound books by elderly writers.”

Vermillion, South Dakota. June 1994. He had agreed to receive an honorary degree from the state university where his father had graduated almost three quarters of a century before. Fifty years ago, in his Army uniform, he had flown in from Colorado with his Uncle Pick, to Sioux Falls. “Fifty years later, just like clockwork,” he told reporters, “I returned.” In Madison, South Dakota, he saw again the house in which Gene Vidal was born, the Midwestern center of his father's generation of Vidals. Except for Aunt Margaret, they were now all dead. In his imagination, though, the Vidals and the Gores had recently been given additional life. The autobiographical impulse, pushing irrepressibly to the writerly surface, beginning with
Two Sisters
in 1970 and in the various memoiristic essays, had become insistent. Perhaps he might have declined to write a memoir if Walter Clemons had made effective use of material he had collected and the material Vidal had collected for him, including the bulging files in the archive at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which contained boxes of Gore and Vidal family documents. But Clemons's efforts had moved from frustration to paralysis. By 1990, though he had interviewed dozens and collected additional documents, he had apparently not written a word. “
Of course you're worried
about the progress of the book,” he wrote to Vidal in late 1990, five years since the beginning of the project, “and my ability to finish it. So am I. But I am working night and day to deliver a sizable portion in January.” Little, Brown also began to express concern. “After four years of meeting every famous person I have known,” Gore wrote to Louis Auchincloss, “Walter C has not written one word, nor, I fear, will he. He is diabetic, a progressive disease. My luck in these matters has always been
bad. This was the moment for such a work to halt my slow fade to black but it was not to be.”

Angry and impatient, he recognized that he himself was partly to blame. He had not bothered to get evaluations and recommendations, so to speak. “The only revelation is my stupidity in bypassing a half-dozen experienced biographers in favor of one who had not written anything longer than a 1500 word personality piece,” he wrote to Bill Phillips, Clemons's editor at Little, Brown. Clemons was notorious in the New York literary world for his writer's block. His literary columns for
Newsweek
often provided anxious deadline jitters and delays for author and editors. Decency, charm, and intelligence, for which Clemons was beloved by many, were insufficient to the challenge. He had wanted to do it. Vidal had said yes. “
Walter maintains that he is
writing the book,” he wrote to Halfpenny in late 1991, “and Little Brown is bearing down on him hard but the fact that after five years he has only got up to
Williwaw
indicates that though he can do research and write beautifully 1500-word cover-stories for
Newsweek
, he has no idea how to master a biography, particularly one so long and varied. I still hope but he dithers.” The dithering continued. Finally, “after 7 years,” Vidal wrote to Janet Caro, who had worked for him in the 1960 campaign, “Walter will present Little, Brown with a m.s.: God knows what it will be like. He's very thorough. Good critic. But, as he says sadly, the book is ‘external' as I have never had a break-down, divorce, autistic child. I've seriously handicapped him but there it is.” Clemons did not fulfill his promise. By late 1992 Vidal had begun to curse himself and feel cursed. “Nine years and we never saw a page. 1985 to 1994. I rang him and I said I'd wish you'd get out of this. He said no on the phone. I said, ‘It's quite clear you've done nothing. You will do nothing.' He said, ‘I don't think we should be having this conversation.' And I said, ‘I wish we weren't having it. We're having it because you have reneged. You won't admit that you've done nothing.' Then he said, ‘I'm committed to handing in three hundred pages in February.' That's after nine years, three hundred pages. ‘I will hand it in then. If they like it, I will go on. If they don't, I'll withdraw.' He gave them nothing because there was nothing, and he was out.” In early 1994, through an intermediary, Jay Parini, Vidal's friend and literary executor, Vidal queried this author: was he interested in becoming Vidal's biographer? I was. Two conditions: that Vidal provide full access to documents and people and that he agree in writing not to attempt to see the manuscript in
any stage of its creation, that his first sight of the book in any form be on its date of publication. He agreed. Before I could approach Clemons about the availability of his files, which ostensibly contained interviews with people who had since died, Clemons, in summer 1994, at the age of sixty-four, suddenly died of a diabetic seizure. His heir refused access to any of his materials, to the puzzlement and anger of both biographer and subject. George Armstrong, also a friend of the executor, who had moved from Rome to New York in 1993, tried unsuccessfully to act as intermediary. Whatever Clemons had collected remained moldering in cartons in a Long Island City cellar.

Having taken the autobiographical route in
Screening History
, Vidal had decided by late 1991 to do his version of what Clemons was failing to do, though he would insist that it was an impressionistic memoir, not an autobiography, the latter a genre that he believed required a more formal structure and more accurate details.
“Screening History
was my trial run. It was interesting to do because I hadn't done anything like that. I hadn't really told a sustained narrative about myself, about crossing the Atlantic, about seeing Mussolini. Then I found that that was interesting to do and I had no other forum. It wasn't stuff I was going to introduce into a fiction. And then I decided, well, I would take it on myself, see what I could do with it.” The chapter in
Screening History
that had focused on a 1937 film version of
The Prince and the Pauper
proved seminal. As he rewatched the film and wrote the chapter, he was suddenly more intensely preoccupied, both imaginatively and intellectually, with his relationship with Jimmie Trimble than he had been at any time since Jimmie's death in 1945. Trimble had been absorbed into his consciousness, an ongoing emotional and literary touchstone who had made his first posthumous appearance in
The City and the Pillar
in 1948, dedicated to him, and had appeared irregularly but frequently thereafter in Vidal's fiction, particularly in
Season of Comfort, Washington, D.C
., and
Two Sisters
, and he was to appear centrally in the 1998 novel,
The Smithsonian Institution
. The memoir, to be called
Palimpsest
(referring to script written over partly erased script so that the earlier, somewhat hidden version still exists), which Vidal worked on from 1992 to 1994, presented a selective anecdotal account of Vidal's life until the age of thirty-nine. Structured as a narrative that moves between the present act of writing and the characters and incidents from the past, the Vidal of the present is as much a part of the narrative as the Vidal of the past. His parents and grandparents
play prominent roles; Gore family history is central to the story. Neither euphemism nor self-analysis had any appeal to him. As Judith Calvino remarked, “I've always thought that Gore is a man without an unconscious and I do believe that. That is what allows him to be so impersonally personal. There are no bad things lurking somewhere in his body or his mind. He was born without it or he got rid of it…. Gore can transmit his warmth in different ways. Sometimes brutal. But he's not without warmth. Nobody else in the world would say what Gore says, ‘Tell [my biographer] everything, whatever comes to your mind.' We all have our dark side that we want to hide. Maybe Gore doesn't have it. That is the most amazing feature of Gore. His absolute originality. He's a man who looks constantly at the truth with such cold eyes that very often he gets at the truth and then he's not afraid of writing about it or being written about…. He's courageous. He was always like that. A man of dangerous attraction.”

Palimpsest
is a nonintrospective memoir without a center of consciousness. Observation dominates, the eye looking outward, not inward. Emotion comes from mood, description, and intellectual analysis rather than from psychological self-investigation. Freud is not resisted but rejected, despite a narrative in which the author's mother is the primary villain: the portrait of Nina, mostly accurate, is written in unforgiving acid. “
Bringing back my dreadful
mother is no joy,” he told Halfpenny. “So I am treating her comically. In fact, all the Auchincloss crew appear in my pages not as their actual dull rather invidious selves but as Wodehousean near-originals.” The central character, though, was elusive. “I, too, explore the past nowadays only to find I never met me,” he wrote to Ned Rorem. He later told his biographer, “I don't like talking about myself. And certainly not about private matters. So I don't know how you're going to do this because there isn't anything there. The fact that I was indeed infatuated for a brief period with somebody like Harold Lang, what can be made of that? There are no letters. There is no particular relationship. Just events. I did the best I could with it in
Palimpsest…
. Mine was a philistine family and his [Henry James's] all, more or less, dedicated to high art in one fashion or another. So if you do him, you're getting a record of intellectual life in his time. With mine, you get a political record. And an aviation one. I suppose there's enough material there. That material's got to do. There isn't anything except the books, of course, to talk about.”

But there was also Jimmie Trimble. Trimble's impact on Vidal implicitly dominates the narrative: in the chapter called “The Desire and the Successful Pursuit of the Whole”; in various places throughout the narrative of Vidal's youth and Trimble's death; and in the final chapter “Section: E Lot 293½, Subdivisions 2 and 4”—the burial plots between the Clover Adams memorial and Jimmie Trimble's grave, where Gore and Howard will be buried. It is a story about love, lost love, and lovelessness, about completion and incompletion, about an only son who discovers in a boyhood friend the perfect representation of complementary otherness, of dialectical twinness. Whatever the relationship had meant to each of them while Jimmie was alive, afterward, for Gore, it took on symbolic as well as personal meaning. And Trimble's death at Iwo Jima had further transformed him, for Vidal, into a representation of America's waste of young lives, to which the Vietnam War had made him even more sensitive. “I have always hated that Rooseveltian war, and now I realize why and at so visceral—and obvious—a level. Those Marine landings were a mindless slaughter of our own.” Something precious to him had been slaughtered, though he had no illusions that if Jimmie had lived, their adult relationship would have been anything other than ordinary. “Death is the mother of invention,” Wallace Stevens had written, and while Vidal invented nothing about what happened between Jimmie and himself while Jimmie lived, his death had provided him with a lifelong focus for desire and for literary art. As he wrote
Palimpsest
, he began to see the pattern of his own life and of Jimmie's role in it. “It just fell into place…. It was the key to everything—you only see the pattern afterwards.” After all, it was a memoir, he himself was the underlying subject, and it was a voyage of self-discovery as much as of self-creation. “
The section on J.T.
is written at last,” he was soon to tell John Claiborne Davis, a new friend, “and I've solved my mysteries.” Gore's own sexuality had moved in ways he doubted Jimmie's would have, if Jimmie had lived. But his days at St. Albans and his relationship with Jimmie seemed in retrospect to have been golden and sufficient unto themselves.