Gore Vidal (59 page)

Having discovered that the well-known young novelist was in town, Moore, who wanted him for his radio broadcasts, had telephoned. Gore came over to the small patio apartment on Ursulines Avenue in the slave quarter. They all took to one another right away. “He was just mad about her,” Gore recalled. “She was a lean brown woman, rather sort of athletic, with a sexy look in her eye, not beautiful but handsome and well made … and a bit passive.” Gore often came to their place for dinner and drinks, or
they went to restaurants. “He kept dropping in. We'd just look up, and there was Gore. We never made any appointments. He was just there. He was very welcome, anytime.” Moore, late in March, had Gore on his radio program,
Looking at Books
, to discuss the state of the novel, a version of his talk on novelists of the 1940s. Both young, attractive, articulate—one with a crisp British accent, the other a deep-toned American voice—they dazzled the local audience and enjoyed being written up handsomely in the two local newspapers. New Orleans seemed marvelous to both of them, pristine, unspoiled. “We used to see the cat girl and hear the old musicians play ‘When the Saints Go Marching In' in the Quarter. Those were grand old days,” Moore recalled. “You never had to bother then about being mugged or anything like that, or at least we never bothered, and we never were. It was a great life.” For Gore also, who planned to stay in New Orleans until the warm weather in April. Afterward, he told Lehmann, “
I may do a short
Hollywood stint this spring for cash; plans are uncertain, at the moment, depending on Houston … among other things.”

The short stories were going well. When he sent “Three Stratagems” to James Laughlin, Laughlin liked it and accepted it for fall publication in New Directions'
New World Writing
#
12
, an annual anthology. “It's one of the few serious short stories I've ever written,” he told Laughlin, “and I'd not like to see it die somewhere among the lingerie of
Mademoiselle
or on the front shelves of the Lady of the Gotham Book Mart.” Sales of
Search
seemed likely to be about 10,000, less than he had wanted but about what his novels since
City
had averaged. He had in mind two new ideas, one a novel about the Roman emperor Julian, still quite vague in conception, the other about a charismatic, apocalyptic religious figure in modern America, perhaps a new messiah whose views would turn Christianity on its head. The latter would be, he partly joked, his masterwork, “the monster which I've been sniffing around for five years, the story of the second coming. Pray for me…. Soon I shall begin work on
The First and the Last;
it may very well be the last novel for, if I do it right, I shall have nothing else to say for many years to come. Not, as Mr Maugham has remarked, that
that
is any reason to stop.” With Lehmann there had been something of a rapprochement, with a touch of personal affection, as if now it were an old friendship that transcended serious annoyances, though Lehmann, soon to be out of business anyway, still declined to publish anything since or before
City
except
Dark Green, Bright Red
. Vidal himself was beginning to develop some perspective about his novels, including
City
, whose message he considered on target but whose aesthetic success he thought modest. “You know,” he wrote to Lehmann, “
I've had to learn
how to write since
Williwaw
and it's not been easy. Most people seem to be born knowing their way through literature, the young lions at least, like Truman. I have had to fuss and groan no end, these last four years especially, and, at last, a natural manner seems to have been shaped, both literate and true. But then who can tell? … I am as usual in one of my melancholic reveries in which I feel like going off to a war. How awful to be Byron without Greece!”

Back in New York at the beginning of April 1950, he became preoccupied with writing an essay, provoked mostly by his reading of Plato and his discussions with the Moores but also by a piece called “New Innocents Abroad” by William Barrett in the
Partisan Review
. Vidal had no disagreement with Barrett's slighting reference to the “scandalous” conduct of American queens in Europe, but Barrett's general homophobic miscomprehension of the variety and prevalence of homosexual behavior among American men appalled and angered him. “It is
their
attitude and
their
influence on society which is of importance, not that of the poor parodied queens who are to the homosexual world what the musical comedy minstrels are to the Negros, the
yentas
to the Jews.” The statistics from the Kinsey Report needed to be taken into account; practices in other cultures, especially in ancient Greece, needed to become part of the descriptive and definitional discussion. He undoubtedly had in his memory Anaïs's and Nina's semi-Freudian simplifications about arrested development and the desirability of psychoanalytic treatment. He had no doubt that his love for Jimmie, whose lost presence and image stayed sharply in mind, had been honorable and natural. And was there anything significantly different between consensual commercial sex with men and the widespread commercial sex between men and women? “
I am designing
,” he wrote to Lehmann at the middle of April, “a set of Dialogues” as well as an essay “on homosexuality, from a Platonistic and affirmative point of view, suggesting that perhaps Jewish-Christian morality is at fault and not the human race.” They would be grounded in, among other things, the intensive reading he had been doing. “I have been studying hard these last four months all of Plato, all of Vergil (translated since I have forgotten my Latin). Boethius (
Consolations
)
and so on. It has been revelatory and I am still somewhat stunned by it all; to me, in school, the classics consisted of those dreary battles of Caesar recorded in War Office prose.”

For the first time he set out his argument that for many men homosexual acts are normal (natural) expressions of their sexuality, just as are heterosexual acts, and that cultural and social conditions usually determine whether men have sex exclusively with men, with women, or with both. Men who had sex with men did not need to be cured. They were not ill. Queens were another matter. “As a matter of fact, the queen world frightens and depresses me and in its hysteria I see all the horror of the world brought into focus and, when I am particularly tired and despairing, I find myself almost prepared to accept the doctrine of original sin, no longer a Pelagian heretic or a classicist but, like my Italian ancestors, a good Roman Catholic.” But “pederasty among the non-neurotics is by no means a negative act. It is not the result of a delayed emotional development nor is it a substitute for heterosexual relationships; a man is a pederast not out of hatred or a fear of women but out of a natural love for men which is traditional, affirmative and, in the best sense, respectable.” Plato was a more authoritative witness than Barrett. So too was Kinsey. The argument, alas, was put into print only metaphorically, typed rather than published, and though he had had in mind submitting it to
Partisan Review
, he thought better of it. Probably he remembered the hostile reaction
The City and the Pillar
had provoked. Perhaps best to wait for another day in which to engage publicly with that issue again. The essay went into his collection of unfinished and/or unpublished manuscripts, a trunkful of which he had arranged with Pat Crocker to send back from Antigua, partly because he expected soon to have ample storage room of his own, mostly because he urged Pat to intensify his search for a buyer for the Antigua house. He needed a sale as soon as possible. “I am now
in the throes
of buying a place up the Hudson and so must sell, if possible, my Antigua seat.” New York City seemed unattractive even in the spring. “This city depresses me more and more,” he told Laughlin, “and every year there seem to be fewer and fewer people I want to see. The fault is no doubt with me since I have never much subscribed to the egalitarian dogmas: I am one of God's little misanthropists.”

By May the prospects for buying Edgewater were bright. By June he could “hardly think of anything else,” he told Carl Van Vechten. “My usual hobbyhorses [are] unridden and gathering dust.” With the moral support of
Alice, with whom he spent some May and June weekends in Rhinebeck, he moved closer to a purchase. The owner was delighted to have a buyer. The buyer did not think to haggle about the price, since it was so low anyway and no one seemed to think bargaining part of the ambience of the transaction. He visited his mother and grandmother in Washington. They seemed eager that he have Edgewater, which they both thought would be a fine place at which to visit him, perhaps even for substantial portions of the summer, which made them even more willing than they might otherwise have been to lend him $3,000 each. With that $6,000, he applied to the Rhinebeck Savings Bank for a mortgage of $10,000, at the going interest rate of 3 percent, for a semiannual mortgage payment of $300 for the life of the loan. The bank agreed to lend him the money. A little more than two months before his twenty-fifth birthday, the legal papers were signed. Edgewater was his.

From the air, Edgewater was grandly impressive. Its white colonnade in front of the Parthenon-like façade glittered in the August sunshine. The night before, Miles White—the award-winning theatrical costume designer for
Oklahoma!
and
Carousel
, who had met Gore in the late 1940s and shared with him a circle of New York artistic friends—had been at a Manhattan party. A heavy drinker, he had awakened too late to take the only morning train that would get him to Edgewater in time for lunch, the start of a weekend in the country house Gore had bought just a month before. Worried that there would be other guests waiting, embarrassed at the thought that he would disappoint his host, Miles flung himself out of bed. At the Thirty-second Street East River airport he hired a small seaplane to fly him up. The plane held steady to the eastward side of the river, past Hyde Park, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck, the river houses impressive in their wooded settings. Suddenly Miles recognized the railroad bridge and island landmarks. “That's it!” he shouted. There was the shape of the land and the distinctive building his host had described. As the pilot taxied toward the dock, Gore came out of the house, down the steps by the colonnade. He quickly walked
toward the river. Miles got out. As the seaplane taxied off, gaining speed, ascending, the two friends walked up the slope. The waist-high grass still had not been cut.

Soon after he moved into Edgewater in late July 1950, Gore sat down in the large octagonal room at the north end on the first floor and wrote, “She wore her trauma like a plume.” He had not been able to resist that sentence. Just as he had a new house to live in, he had a new novel to write, though he had not intended to write another just then. But they seemed to go together, as if the move had energized his imagination. He had, finally, a house of his own, one he really wanted, a place that had all the advantages and possibilities for anchoring him to a local habitation and a name. Antigua had been too distant, too limited. Though it spoke to his impulse to establish his own domestic space, it did not fulfill that desire. Edgewater he knew from the beginning would be different, would be successful. It did not matter that the grass demanded cutting, the interior was in disrepair, the building needed painting, the New York Central trains shook the building, the front door was blocked by a foot-high mound of compacted soot that made the kitchen the only usable entranceway on the front side of the house. Confident that in due time all this would be taken care of, he was less certain about where he would get the money. Television was a possibility, and he soon adapted two Somerset Maugham stories. “Some network asked me…. I was quite thrilled to be asked to write two of them.” At first he thought they would be used. “I thought they were quite good. But I didn't do them in the ordinary TV form, and the people couldn't understand the plays because they weren't in standard format. I never made that mistake again. But I got paid something.” Even when they fell through, he still had high hopes. “
One of those shows
,” he wrote to Lehmann, “(and they do good things: Conrad, Hawthorne, James) a month and I shall be able to live in style up here, composing slowly and elegantly my first major (it must be everything now, everything!) novel.” He soon wrote another short story, “Erlinda and Mr. Coffin,” “rather long, nonhomosexual, faintly ghostly and legendary in tone.” But “there are no places here that publish longer pieces, aside from the quarterlies which I always regard as a last resort since I feel in need of money rather than prestige these days.” Hollywood was a possibility. For the time being, though, his overtures got nowhere, and he was disappointed that Isherwood made no effort to help him. It did matter, however, that the house was not sufficiently winter-livable. Since he had to
put $3,000 into repairs that needed to be done right away, he took the money from his depleted savings. “I've bought an 1820 Georgian house on the banks of the Hudson,” he happily complained to John Lehmann. “It is very handsome and fine with an octagonal library and vast white columns, six of them, supporting a Parthenesque facade. I shall die of starvation before many moons have passed but the death will be serene I am sure, with a view of the river and my own seven acres of woods and unkempt lawn.” In the meantime he found himself totally absorbed in and entranced by his new novel, for which he had a title,
The Judgment of Paris
. Perhaps it would bring in some money beyond the usual modest advance, though his expectations were qualified by the worry that his “
Meredithean comedy
” was “destined … to be read as little as that great man's works are.” More important, he felt himself on the verge of a major change in writing style and novelistic vision.