After a certain age, lawsuits take the place of sex.
—Gore Vidal
I. HALF A CENTURY
In late September 1975, Truman Capote was interviewed by Playgirl and observed in passing that Bobby Kennedy had once kicked Gore out of the White House during the Camelot years. Capote and Gore had been rivals for decades, and each bad-mouthed the other at every opportunity. But this latest taunt got under Gore’s skin. “Distortions and lies had to be stopped, if they could be,” he said. At nearly fifty, he imagined he should have relief from the barrage of rumors about him that swirled in the media, and anything about his relations with the Kennedy White House felt especially wounding. He had, to be sure, been pushed away from Camelot, although not literally. From that fateful night at the White House onward, Jackie Kennedy showed no interest in continuing their friendship, and certainly Gore’s 1967 essay, “The Holy Family,” warmed few hearts at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Now Capote’s malicious lie poured kerosene on the flames of Gore’s continuing hurt feelings about his relationship to the Kennedys.
Gore decided to sue Capote for a million dollars, assuming he would at least get back his legal fees. He didn’t really care about the money. Capote had stepped over a line, and he must—so Gore believed—be punished. Gore also assumed that Capote had been told this nasty story by Lee Radziwill, Jackie’s sister, whom Capote considered a friend. (Radziwill later denied relating this tale.) The legal wrangling would continue for several years, with Gore being deposed by a lawyer in New York over a two-day period in 1976.
“I get so monstrously bored with myself,” Gore admitted to Judith Harris as he approached the half-century mark. “Once I pretended to be this famous orchestra conductor. For weeks I went around being him. Later I met him. I didn’t like him.” He seemed at a loss to understand himself, still searching for a true identity, although he would easily have agreed with Pablo Neruda, who wrote of himself: “My selves are many.”
At fifty, Gore had reached an enviable level of fame as well as some measure of critical esteem. If Myron had not succeeded—and it had not—there was certainly more to come. He had another historical novel, 1876, under way and wrote at great speed, often retreating to Ravello for weeks on end without emerging from the house except for an afternoon walk or evening drink in the piazza. In his usual way, he had begun writing that novel while Myron was being typed by George Armstrong. The shape of a trilogy had begun to emerge, if vaguely. “I realized, with Burr, that I liked writing about American figures. The idea of a sequence was still vague, but I liked my character, Charlie Schuyler, and wondered what had happened to him since the death of Burr. Writing this novel was a way to discover it.”
He had an uncanny facility for composition schooled by long practice, and was writing “upwards of two or three thousand words in a single morning.” 1876 came together rapidly, but writing at this pace required discipline, and Rome proved a distraction. So he stayed away from his penthouse at the Largo Argentina and worked through a cold spring on the Amalfi coast, knowing that he had a sharp publicity hook dangling before him: the American Bicentennial in 1976. What could be better than to have a novel about the first centennial in bookstores at the same time? “There wasn’t much temptation to go outside that winter,” he recalled. “I had a box of books on the period sent from a bookseller in L.A. And I liked this period, the final days of Grant’s administration, the clash of Tilden and Hayes, a close election. The Democrats let the Republicans win in exchange for pulling all federal troops out of the South, ending Reconstruction—if, indeed, anything was ever Reconstructed.” The novel followed nicely from Burr, reintroducing Schuyler as a famous historian with an eligible daughter, Emma, who had been briefly married to a minor Napoleonic aristocrat who died and left her penniless. As Charlie rediscovers the American scene, so would Gore’s readers. In the United States of Amnesia (his phrase), Gore supplied its memory, again and again.
He didn’t limit his teaching to novels and essays. On July 27, 1975, 60 Minutes—the most popular television program in the United States—aired a profile of Gore that had, for much of the year, been under way, with segments shot in Rome and on the road as Gore toured in America. Mike Wallace, the interviewer, worked to distance himself (and the audience) from this libertine anti-American expatriate. The program began with shots of Gore in his Roman penthouse surrounded by elegant friends, all drinking wine as cigarette smoke swirls. As the microphone lowered, Gore dissed Norman Mailer, once again comparing him to “a VFW commander from Schenectady.” He noted that Capote “spent most of his life trying to get into the world I’d been trying to get out of.” Asked about Jackie Kennedy, he responded, “She has no interest in anyone but herself.” Wallace chided Gore for his sour take on the fate of the republic, suggesting that perhaps he had not spent enough time among his countrymen to make the grand pronouncements he so relished. Gore’s eyes narrowed in self-defense, but he didn’t give an inch: “Mike, I am so in touch with reality and you are so far off base that I cannot begin to save your soul in the remaining seconds that are left to us.” He explained that “cheap labor and cheap energy” were gone, and the results would be dire. “We’re never going to have that again. We’re going to have to have less gross national product, not more.” He also took exception to the notion that he was an expatriate. This was a term used to denigrate him by his enemies, as he saw it. Gore’s brow furrowed, and he said, “Now, as the times get bad, and I see darkness all around me, and I see disintegrating cities, and I watch these frightened people, I would be very inclined to return because if there is a disaster, then you have a part to play.”
One is struck by Gore’s composure in the face of harsh questions, especially on the subject of sex. Wallace wondered, for instance, why Gore disparaged love, asking him bluntly about the fact that he had lived with a man for decades. Homosexuality was rarely discussed openly in 1975, not on mainstream television during prime time; but Gore—the author of Myra Breckinridge—was the poster child for a libertarian life that both repelled and intrigued his audience. “I don’t like the word love,” he told Wallace. “Romantic love, as Americans conceive it, does not exist.” He added: “I’m devoted to promiscuity.” Of course he liked to startle television viewers, but it took a certain bravura to speak so frankly on 60 Minutes. Gore took chances, letting the chips fall where they may. Risk was in his DNA.
With Gore’s fiftieth birthday (October 3) approaching, Howard wanted an appropriate celebration. “He was the birthday boy,” said Howard, “so I booked a large dining room at the Ritz in London. Fifty people, that’s what I wanted. Fifty for fifty.” Diana Phipps offered to help by figuring out who was in London, and she suggested that invitations be returned to her. The list was necessarily Anglo-centric, and the usual suspects came, including his old publisher John Lehmann, Kenneth Tynan, Ryan O’Neal, Peter Bogdanovich, Clive James, Tom Driberg, Lady Diana Cooper, John Bowen, and Princess Margaret. Claire Bloom was, of course, front and center. Lee Remick happened to be in town, so she got a last-minute invitation. Gore had known Antonia Fraser a little, and wanted her to come; she agreed, bringing her new boyfriend, Harold Pinter, whom Gore found sympathetic as well as amusing. Perhaps the most important guest was Tennessee Williams, who had seen much less of Gore in recent years. “Tennessee was like the cherry on the top of the sundae,” said Howard.
“Gore was happy with the dinner,” Howard recalled. “He didn’t like turning fifty. Who does? But he and Tennessee got to talk, and he really liked Pinter. That Princess Margaret came mattered to him a lot.” (So much for Jackie and her sister, Lee: this was real royalty.) Gore felt properly celebrated, although he also realized that a huge amount of time had passed since his twenty-fifth birthday party at Café Nicholson in Manhattan in 1950. Only Howard and Tennessee were left from the original group of friends and family. Gene Vidal had died, and Gore wanted nothing to do with his mother.
As bad luck would have it, Jackie was staying at the Ritz, and she and Gore met in the elevator on the way to the lobby one morning. Gore had heard from friends that she had downplayed their connection, saying unflattering things about him. There was, indeed, a tenuous link, with Jackie now more of an acquaintance than a friend. Her life had changed dramatically since the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, the previous March, and she had pursued a new life as a book editor, mostly in New York. Instead of greeting her as an old friend, Gore turned his back, watching her in the mirror of the elevator. When she stepped out, she said, in a voice recalling that of Marilyn Monroe (as Gore remembered it): “Bye-bye.” It was almost like a dream.
No matter what heights Gore reached in his career, he felt dejected after a brief glimpse from the summit. An invitation to join the National Institute of Arts and Letters came, but he refused this honor, saying “I already belong to the Diners Club.” He had no interest in rubbing shoulders with many of the same writers and critics he had traveled to Italy to avoid.
As the New Year approached, Gore entered discussions with Franco Rossellini (the film producer and a nephew of the director Roberto Rossellini) about adapting his own unproduced television script based on the life of the emperor Caligula. Gore loved the concept, but it was meant as a realistic drama, not an erotic dream sequence à la Fellini—which is what it became. He was offered $250,000, which seemed a good price for scripts at the time. “Bob Guccione agreed to finance this project,” said Gore. “I should have known it would turn out badly, and it did.” But he felt optimistic at first, telling an interviewer in London about the portrayal of Caligula: “We show him as a nice, happy boy. Perfectly normal. Not especially intelligent—though intelligent enough to know that some day he is bound to be murdered—and meanwhile having a good time with all the world to play with. The ideal casting would be Mickey Rooney, thirty years back. Andy Hardy in a toga.” Gore saw Caligula, the third of the twelve Caesars, as an ordinary man corrupted by his power. “Megalomania took over.” As he said to another interviewer: “We are on the dawn of an age of Caligula—think of the Pentagon, the CIA, the current national rulers. They, too, have the absolute power to treat other people as things. And just look at what happened to the Roman Empire.”
Gore insisted that the film be called Gore Vidal’s Caligula, a sign of his own megalomania. He didn’t want to be cut out of the film credits, as with Ben-Hur. As it happened, the director, Tinto Brass (whom Gore now called “Tinto Zinc”), had his own ego issues, and wanted to have his name in the title. By the spring of 1976, it was apparent that Guccione hoped to steer the film in directions that appalled Gore. “It was pure porn,” he said. Even Brass was appalled by what was happening and ultimately disavowed the film. It appeared simply as Caligula in 1980, with Helen Mirren and Peter O’Toole in prominent roles. Typical of the responses was that of Roger Ebert, who called it “sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash.”
Never one to linger over something that didn’t work out, Gore busied himself with another project—a television miniseries based on the life of Abraham Lincoln. He had mentioned this idea to Norman Lear, who called Fred Silverman, a producer at NBC, who loved the idea. Gore quickly began to dig into the life of Lincoln, reading biographies and histories of the Civil War, taking voluminous notes, producing a script that, in the end, never got produced. Silverman left NBC and his replacement had no interest in American history, assuming it would bore American television viewers. Gore filed the teleplay in a drawer, where it sat beside any number of other unproduced works.
As the publication of 1876 approached, all signs were positive. Jason Epstein liked it very much, and believed it would sell. The Book-of-the-Month Club bid preemptively to publish its own edition, guaranteeing a large audience. Random House printed seventy-five thousand copies—a hefty first printing for a novel that wasn’t a spy thriller, mystery, or romance. It was dedicated to Claire Bloom.
II. 1876 AND ALL THAT
“I liked being in the voice of Charlie,” Gore recalled of his lead character. “I knew him well.” In this book, after many decades in Europe Charlie has returned at last to his native land to cover the 1876 election as a journalist and reestablish his professional connections in New York. If he can marry off Emma, his widowed daughter, to a wealthy man, so much the better, as his finances have crumbled in recent years. Unlike Burr and, later, Lincoln, 1876 represents a throwback to the historical novel of an earlier era, when the lives of fictional characters took center stage against “real” history, which played out in the background. Schuyler is a Rip Van Winkle figure, waking up after more than three decades to an even newer New World. He rubs his eyes in disbelief, trying to make sense of what he sees, mostly because he hopes to sell his reports on the election to newspapers for badly needed sums.
Samuel J. Tilden, the governor of New York and a presidential candidate, is only a minor player in the novel, yet Gore endows him with energy, assessing him in fresh ways, allowing him a respect he was surely due, given his refusal to play along with the dishonest system. (In coming novels, Gore would also reassess apparently minor figures, such as Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover, in interesting ways.) Tilden comes off as a man of virtue who, because of his integrity, allows the ruthless Rutherford B. Hayes to win the White House, much to Charlie’s chagrin (as he had hoped to win a diplomatic post in France in exchange for writing the campaign biography). Gore loved the intrigue of such battles, and would adoringly discuss the details of the Tilden-Hayes contest in later years, especially after Bush v. Gore in 2000: another case where a candidate won the popular vote but lost the election. It’s too bad that Charlie so often appears befuddled, and the major politicians in this narrative—Ulysses S. Grant, Tilden, and Hayes—hardly seem as riveting as Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, or even the waddling George Washington.
The business of marrying Emma to a wealthy and interesting man occupies a good deal of the narrative. Gore imagined her as a heroine in the manner of Henry James, though she lacks the moral complexity of Isabel Archer or the fizzy charm of Daisy Miller. Emma’s story nevertheless provides intrigue and establishes bloodlines for characters who had already appeared in Washington, D.C. After much fuss, she weds William Sanford, “a married man without glory or charm, only money,” as Charlie regards him before the mysterious death of Sanford’s wife. He is left with an infant son—Blaise Sanford—who sets in motion a family saga. The Sanford clan will figure prominently in future novels in Gore’s Narratives of Empire.
As the novel opens, Charlie describes New York in attractive prose: “Ships, barges, ferry boats, four-masted schooners were shoved like child’s toys against a confused jumble of buildings quite unfamiliar to me, a mingling of red brick and brownstone, of painted wood and dull granite, of church towers that I had never seen before and old bulbous-domed creations of—cement?” Gore was at his best when evoking a scene like this, with the imagery at his fingertips as he wrote—a product of close reading and firsthand experience. Gore recalled: “I liked to walk around in New York and try to imagine what would be there in earlier decades, even centuries. The flesh of the city had added fat, but the bones remained. I knew that Charlie would have been shocked to see how, in the years he was gone, the city had spread. The civilized parts now reached up to the fairly new Central Park, which had only been completed a few years before Charlie returned.”
Despite the centennial, this was a dark time in American history, not unlike the mid-seventies when Gore wrote 1876. Trust in the federal government had eroded, with scandals breaking upon scandals. The Grant administration churned in a stink of nepotism, bribery, and cronyism, and the country awaited a shift of government as the hundred-year mark approached. The so-called Gilded Age had begun, a period when the wealthy paid no income tax whatsoever, and unseemly fortunes were made in heavy industry and railroads, shipping and manufacturing. Newly minted plutocrats lived in expansive mansions with small armies of servants, often dining at expensive restaurants such as Delmonico’s, where (as Charlie says) “the lobster salad is a specialty of the house and it is as good as any dish I’ve ever had at Paris (paprika somehow makes the difference). Canvasback duck followed, enclosed in a savory aspic.”
Perhaps stimulated by his “gastronomic tours” of France with Epstein, Gore’s interest in food permeates 1876. His fascination with the tiny details of everyday life brings the era into focus, as when Charlie and his daughter take a train to Washington: “I was not prepared for the amount of commerce that goes on. First, one is tempted by a doughnut salesman. Then a small boy appears with a large pile of magazines and cheap novels as well as bags of peanuts. Without a word, the boy shoved a ladies’ magazine onto Emma’s lap and a novel about the Wild West onto mine.” Likewise, he describes the interior of the railway car, “with curtains of green plush, stuffed chairs that turn this way and that, gas lamps in good cut glass, mahogany wood fittings, and, all-pervading, the smell of burning fuel mixed with that of fried oysters.”
The American world of 1876, especially in the high-altitude political and social circles that fascinated Gore, makes a rich stew, full of gossip and corruption. Gore draws memorable portraits of real and imagined characters. Tilden himself comes to life, if sporadically; one even gets a glimpse of President Hayes in his glory, “an impressive-looking, rather stout man with a naturally fierce expression.” In chapter ten, Mark Twain struts across the novel’s somewhat overcrowded stage, drinking heavily and dropping aphorisms. Charlie reflects on Twain afterward: “Had he the character to be unpopular, he might have been greater than Swift, another Voltaire, a new Rabelais.” If the plot of 1876 fails to cohere, there is nonetheless a good deal of entertainment in its pages, as one gets a strong whiff of the American republic at its centenary mark.
The novel arrived as the nation began to celebrate its bicentennial, another of Gore’s deftly timed strokes. It flew its flag on most best-seller lists, and on March 1, Gore appeared on the cover of Time, as his grandfather and father had done before him. Reviewers largely bowed in appreciation, although some found the writing less vivid than in Burr, the plot without much focus or narrative tension. In a review in The Times Literary Supplement, Peter Conrad noted that 1876 and Gore’s other historical novels were “the result of a precarious, dazzling partnership between Gore the researcher and Vidal the frivolous meddler with history.”
III. MEMORIES, DREAMS, SELF-REFLECTIONS
Michael Mewshaw is an American writer whom Gore teasingly referred to in conversation as Youngblood Hawke, the title character in a 1962 novel by Herman Wouk about a young novelist from Kentucky who achieves literary success but works himself to death in pursuit of a fortune. Soft-spoken and warm, Mewshaw lived in Rome throughout the mid-seventies, eighties, and nineties with his wife, Linda, and their sons. He and Linda saw a good deal of Gore and Howard in those decades, often joining them for dinner in local restaurants, occasionally visiting in Ravello. “Ravello was really Gore’s workplace,” says Mewshaw, “and it was never as glamorous as it seemed, despite the large-scale architecture and the great views of the coast. It was run-down, a place for research and writing. He didn’t really have a social life on the coast, not unless there were visitors.”
Mewshaw was with Gore one evening in 1975 when Pier Paolo Pasolini, the poet and innovative filmmaker, was murdered by a young man he had picked up on a beach outside of Rome. Gore knew and liked Pasolini. “He was a fellow degenerate,” said Gore. “He cruised for trade in the same places. I knew that world.” In fact, Gore knew the seventeen-year-old boy who had killed Pasolini and who had claimed that he acted in self-defense, that the fifty-three-year-old Pasolini had threatened to sodomize him with a stick. This murder both terrified and depressed Gore. “I think it was a shock to him,” says Mewshaw.
The following summer, another “fellow degenerate,” Tom Driberg, died in London, though not in such a dire fashion. Driberg was a longtime member of Parliament, a leader of the Labour Party insurgency after the war. He had been elevated to a peerage only a year before his death. He often spent time with Gore and Howard in Italy, especially in Ravello, which became a favorite writing retreat. Gore called him “a kind of stout Dracula,” but he invariably opened his doors to Driberg. The sudden death of his good friend further depressed Gore, who had turned unusually introspective at fifty.
It was a time for memories, some nostalgic. And Gore eagerly accepted from Barbara Epstein the offer to review the memoirs of Williams. This served as the occasion for “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and an Earlier Self,” a recollection of his friendship with Williams, “the Bird.” It is, as James Wolcott nicely observed, “a masterpiece of tender malice.” “At that first meeting I thought Tennessee every bit as ancient as Gide and Santayana,” Gore writes. “After all, I was twenty-two. He was thirty-seven; but claimed to be thirty-three on the sensible grounds that the four years he had spent working for a shoe company did not count. Now he was the most celebrated American playwright. A Streetcar Named Desire was still running in New York when we met that evening in a flat overlooking Rome: in those days a quiet city where hardly anyone was superfluous unless it was us, the first group of American writers and artists to arrive in Europe after the war.”
Sumptuous images related to their early friendship give way to a warm (if cautious) reading of the memoirs themselves, noting errors and mistaken impressions, but mostly veering into recollections. This “review” is an autobiographical sideshow, as much about Gore as about Williams. “I think that the marked difference between my attitude toward sex and that of Tennessee made each of us somewhat startling to the other,” Gore writes. “I never had the slightest guilt or anxiety about what I always took to be a normal human appetite. He was—and is—guilt-ridden, and although he tells us that he believes in no afterlife, he is still too much the puritan not to believe in sin.” Unlike most others on this planet, Gore failed to connect sex and love. This was certainly a personality deformation, amplifying the usual loneliness that is part of being human.
Taking on the plays of Williams, Gore speaks candidly, with useful insights: “Tennessee is the sort of writer who does not develop; he simply continues. By the time he was an adolescent he had his themes. Constantly he plays and replays the same small but brilliant set of cards.” He adds: “I am not aware that any new information (or feeling?) has got through to him in the twenty-eight years since our Roman spring,” he says, no doubt playing off The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, a 1950 novel in which an American actress approaching fifty encounters a young gigolo, with predictable unhappiness all around. “In consequence,” writes Gore, “we have drifted apart.” This is breathtaking in its sweeping judgment and self-referential bent. Can there be any connection between the quality of Williams’s work and the nature of his friendship with Gore? Williams had certainly not been attentive enough to his younger friend’s feelings, and Gore felt this acutely. The mere fact that Williams continued to admire Capote didn’t warm Gore’s heart. In any case, these hurt feelings course boldly through this essay, and yet an indelible image of the dramatist emerges.
Gore’s views of the Bird remained ambivalent to the end, a mixture of admiration and ill-concealed jealousy, especially as it became clear that Williams had logged a few plays in the permanent canon of classic American theater—a feat that eluded Gore. “He [Williams] is bitter but not a liar, a rare trait for an American writer,” Gore wrote in 1976 to Bill Gray, his professorial friend, with notable candor. “I’ve done quite enough by the Bird—of Paradise, as he must now be known, pecking away at the golden grapes of eternal fame (if he went the other way, he will find not heat but an eternal panel of [Robert] Brustein, [John] Simon, Moses and Freud, shitting, like Dante, on his doomed feathers).” With some regret, he noted: “I can’t say that the Bird and I had much connection during the last twenty years. Friendship with him was always a one way street; and I lived rapidly. Also, he was not the same person I first knew—to the extent I knew him at all!”
It annoyed Gore that Williams read so little and dwelled compulsively on the same few themes, refusing to “develop.” Williams had, in fact, been on a downhill slide as a playwright for many years, with few late successes, and this made Gore’s pronouncements sound accurate, if oddly biased in ways the reader might not quite understand. Of course Williams was badly addicted to alcohol and prescription drugs, which Gore did his best to ignore, being himself addicted to alcohol—not unlike his mother in this regard.
Gore’s relationship with his mother had been limited for some time, reaching a fairly civil, if painful, standoff between them, but the situation took a dramatic turn for the worse in 1976, after Gore appeared on the cover of Time. Nina sent a letter to the editor, claiming that she was owed more credit for his success than her son ever allowed. She had helped him to get a soft berth in the war, had introduced him to important Hollywood people, and so forth. It was a sad, bitter letter, full of half-truths, accusations, and self-promotion. The editors chose to print it, with a nasty title above it: “A Mother’s Love.” “This was the last straw,” said Howard. “Gore wanted nothing ever to do with her again—ever.”
His connections to Hollywood had diminished since the move to Italy, although Gore flew into Los Angeles regularly to appear on talk shows or discuss film projects, most of which came to nothing. “I had a gift for getting involved with the wrong people,” Gore said, and—often sounding petulant like his mother—felt that his work never had been fully realized on the screen, not even when he wrote the script himself. On March 29, 1976, he appeared as a presenter at the Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay. “Those of us who write books are seldom happy with what the moviemakers do to our creations,” he said, making a joke about the hideous version of Myra Breckinridge, which had quickly acquired almost iconic status as one of the worst Hollywood films ever produced.
Gore knew and liked Norman Lear, the producer of All in the Family—among other television hits—and in the late summer of 1976 he proposed that he might put in several brief appearances as himself on Lear’s popular Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Gore adored the show, a subversive parody of American soap operas, full of heartfelt banalities, shallow values, and manufactured crises. The series acquired a kind of cult following, with Louise Lasser in the lead role as a dewy-eyed, neurotic dummy. Everything was tongue in cheek, and celebrities often walked onto the show as themselves. Gore shot seven brief scenes in a few weeks, playing himself and pretending on screen that he wished that Mary Hartman would co-author a book with him. “I had a little fun,” said Gore, “and a great acting career was born.”
He had, in fact, already appeared as himself on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, where he dealt with Lily Tomlin as a telephone operator trying to pronounce his name. In October of the same year, he appeared on Dinah!, a CBS talk show hosted by Dinah Shore, a popular singer, sandwiched on this particular program between the country singer Loretta Lynn and the Culinary Olympics Chefs. As ever, he never missed any opportunity to be on television, and this compulsion meant that whenever a book of his appeared he could bank on name recognition. When Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, David Susskind, or anyone associated with the BBC called, he leaped to his feet, put on the mask of Celebrity Author, and stepped out smiling and waving to the audience. To make sure he looked thin enough for these appearances, he retreated regularly to La Costa, a “fat farm” (his words) in San Diego, where for weeks at a time he would drink no alcohol, eat very little food, and exercise.
IV. APOCALYPSE NOT QUITE YET
As he traveled, Gore wrote every morning wherever he landed: in a rented house in Beverly Hills, in hotel suites in New York, London, and elsewhere, in Rome or Ravello. Now he began to work on Kalki, a fierce novel about world apocalypse. Begun early in 1976, the manuscript was finished by mid-summer. It had not taken long to write, which Gore often took as a good sign. Epstein responded favorably to Gore’s draft, but he disliked the first-person narrator, who seemed cold and detached. Like Myra/Myron, this character was a transsexual male, and Epstein (wisely) urged him to make Teddy Ottinger into a woman. “So I set to work, rewriting. It didn’t take long. And I think the changes actually made it a better book,” said Gore. In later years he would, in fact, be far less generous about Epstein’s talents as an editor of fiction, often harping on the subject and blaming Epstein for his failure to appreciate his satirical novels in particular.
While Gore chipped away at the revisions of Kalki, Epstein ushered Matters of Fact and of Fiction (Essays 1973–1976) into print in April 1977. It represents Gore at his peak in the genre, containing half a dozen of his finest essays. In only a few years, Gore had accumulated a quantity of first-rate work. In “The Top Ten Best Sellers,” a piece of inspired hilarity, he celebrates (tongue in cheek) the virtues of popular fiction. The Wise Hack at the writers’ table in Hollywood doesn’t denigrate popular writing, and knows that “the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked.” Gore takes up some admirable writing as well. There are strong essays, for instance, on Louis Auchincloss, Vladimir Nabokov, and Italo Calvino. He begins the Calvino meditation in his usual way, recalling his own arrival in Rome after the war: “Acid-yellow forsythia on the Janiculum. Purple wisteria in the Forum. Chunks of goat on a plate in a trattoria.” As ever, Gore remains the consummate autobiographer and knowing observer.
As a critic, he liked to hug the shore when he wrote about authors, circling the islands of their texts, chatting gaily as he sailed with a broad reach. He moves through Calvino’s books, for instance, with admiration for what he sees, noting that “Calvino has now developed two ways of writing. One is literally fabulous. The other makes use of a dry, rather didactic style in which the detail is as precisely observed as if the author were writing a manual for the construction of a solar heating unit. Yet the premises of the ‘dry’ stories are often quite as fantastic as those of the fairy tales.” He suggests that Calvino, relatively unknown in English at the time, has “advanced far beyond his American and English contemporaries, weaving fantastic webs of prose to which all things adhere.” Not surprisingly, Calvino would influence Gore’s own writing as he would try to write in “literally fabulous” ways on occasion.
In other essays, such as “French Letter: Theories of the New Novel” and “The Hacks of Academe,” he takes apart academic critics, slicing the meat from their bones, boiling the leftover carcasses to make a delicious soup that will never go down well over lunches at the faculty club. He wonders why the academics contributing to a particular anthology of essays on the novel even bothered to get out of bed. Wickedly, he ventures a possible answer: “Because the ambitious teacher can only rise in the academic bureaucracy by writing at complicated length about writing that has already been much written about.” He levels his gun sights at one critic in particular: Leslie Fiedler, who had not looked favorably upon him in his influential study, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960). Fiedler is described as a “redskin most at home in white clown makeup.” Now Gore blasts away: “From a secure heterosexual base, he [Fiedler] has turned a bright amused eye on the classic American goyim and finds them not only homoerotic to a man (or person as they say nowadays) but given to guilty pleasures with injuns like Queequeg, with niggers like Jim.”
A lively essay on West Point becomes a recollection of his father and the dark ethos of the academy, with its parochial loyalties and hardened traditions. As he often did in talks and interviews, Gore attacks the outsize budget of the Department of Defense. “Today the first order of business in the United States is the dismantling of the military machine,” he writes. “Obviously, we must continue to make it disagreeable for anyone who might decide to attack us (this could be done by not provoking other nations but that is too much to ask). Nevertheless the military budget must be cut by two thirds; and the service academies phased out.” A sweeping “State of the Union” concludes this volume, rehearsing many of the arguments (even phrases) used on the lecture circuit. He riffed, as ever, on the swollen military budget, the prejudices of the public, the idiocy of various political leaders, and foolish efforts by the state to regulate sexuality. “Therefore let us remove from the statute books all laws that have to do with private morals—what are called victimless crimes. If a man or woman wants to be a prostitute that is his or her affair. It is no business of the state what we do with our bodies sexually. Obviously laws will remain on the books for the prevention of rape and the abuse of children.” Gore calls, in effect, for a revolution of American ways and means.
He shines in these essays, which display his formidable gift of assimilating information and setting forth arguments combined with a cool and lustrous style: the syntax neatly balanced, the intelligence palpable on every page. Yet voices of criticism still arose, as in Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s review in The New York Times, where he subjects Gore to a kind of lazy Freudianism: “So we are left to speculate over the psychological implications here, and to conclude that Mr. Vidal’s animus toward everything from West Point to the American Establishment—not to speak of academicians, who are, after all, instructors—boils down to an unresolved hostility toward his father, further evidence of which, some would argue, is Mr. Vidal’s cheerfully admitted homosexuality.” This review only added to Gore’s long-standing hatred of The New York Times.
Never one to let an unjust accusation go unanswered, Gore responded with a letter, but the paper refused to publish it. The New York Review of Books, however, happily displayed it. “There is no evidence of an ‘unresolved hostility’ toward my father in the pages under review or elsewhere in my work. Quite the contrary. I quote from Two Sisters: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir: ‘My father was the only man I ever entirely liked….’ Nowhere in my writing have I ‘admitted’ (‘cheerfully’ or dolefully) to homosexuality, or to heterosexuality. Even the dullest of mental therapists no longer accepts the proposition that cold-father-plus-clinging-mother-equals-fag-offspring.” Howard recalled: “He was in a rage about that, and a lot of anger came into everything he said.” His obsessions converged, indeed, in Kalki, where he could blow up the whole world in his mind’s eye.
The novel imagines a misanthrope’s dream scenario: The world ends with a bang, and only a chosen few remain. The narrator is quite appealing in Gore’s makeover of Teddy as a female: frank, clear-eyed, strong. She seems like a refraction of Amelia Earhart, the iron-willed aviatrix whom Gore knew well as a boy. Teddy is also famous as the author of Beyond Motherhood—a best-selling piece of nonfiction about population control. As the novel begins, she lags in her alimony payments, forcing her to take on a journalism gig. Her assignment is to investigate the ex–army officer James J. Kelly, who resides in Katmandu, where he imagines he is Kalki, the last incarnation of Vishnu, the Hindu god. Gore describes the Nepalese capital and its environs: “The outskirts of Katmandu are like the outskirts of any city in the world. That is to say, ugly, raw, disorganized; cement-block metastasized. But the countryside was green and rolling, and on a good day (which this particular one was not) you could see the Himalayas, sparkling like masses of quartz and crystal.” He had visited Katmandu some years before, and his astonishing memory for details served him well as he offers a guided tour of the city, recalling that “the Nepalese houses have small latticed windows, peaked roofs of yellow tile supported by carved beams that overhang the narrow streets.”
As it happens, Kalki has read Teddy’s book, and he asks her bluntly: “What is there beyond motherhood?” “Freedom,” she answers, adding: “You can be both a woman and a man.” As a character, Kalki is fetching as well as far-fetched, a true megalomaniac. “I am the avatar,” he says without a trace of embarrassment, noting that before him came Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. “Now I have come.”
Teddy is overwhelmed by Kalki’s vitality. He radiates charm, and his soft Southern baritone appeals to her (as it would have to Gore). He claims to be searching for the five Perfect Masters and hopes that Teddy might be among them. She understands perfectly well that Kalki is auditioning her for a part, though she doesn’t (at first) know he wants to destroy the world in order to start over, with himself and his wife, Lakshmi, as Adam and Eve, and with the Perfect Masters as teachers and companions. In due course, she learns the details of his diabolical plan for a nuclear holocaust, but she dismisses the notion as fanciful: “At the most, I thought that there would be some sort of television spectacular. Then a number of explanations about a special reprieve for mankind. Or perhaps, cleverest of all, the announcement that the end had already taken place and that we were now all of us, miraculously, purified and living at the start of a new Golden Age.”
Gore’s revulsion for the world as he found it, with its hungry billions, its turbid rivers and oceans, its littered metropolitan streets, permeates this bleak, haunted, many-sided novel, which has been underestimated (or mostly ignored) by critics. Most reviewers regarded the book as an unhappy mixture of jeremiad and satire, calculated to amuse and chide. Angela Carter, herself a gifted novelist, took the book apart in The Guardian: “Vidal’s apocalypse is as cozily flabby as yesterday’s salad, the plotting looks like kittens got at the knitting wool and a bouquet of invincible boredom rises from the ill-conceived pages.” But she missed the intensity of imagination that Gore displays in Kalki, which combines the sexual playfulness of Myra Breckinridge with the visionary social critique of Messiah. The essayist in Gore meets the novelist here: a mixture that unsettled many readers, though R. Z. Sheppard, at Time, understood its value, calling it “an apocalyptic extravaganza.”
In the final pages of Kalki, Teddy sits on a log under a weeping willow in Washington, D.C., watching as monkeys released from the zoo cavort, a reversion to origins. “Small things give great pleasure now,” she says. “Let me list today’s delights. Apple-scented air. Bright red birds on the wing. Silver fish that briefly arc above the surface of a river which glitters in the sun like a silver fish’s scales.” This is superb writing. Gore seems wholly in command of his material, delighting in its black humor, his words an elegy to a world that has passed but might reemerge. As usual, however, a mix of loose ends and caricature undermined the project, a result of Gore’s usual hasty composition. Epstein could not, it seems, rein him in.
In July, Harris came down from Rome for a visit of two weeks at La Rondinaia, where she found her friend eager to assert himself, full of anger, trying to regain control. In her diary, she writes: “Gore said, ‘I’m a local icon, and am pointed out to tourists just like the thousand-year-old castle. Everybody comes to say hello to the Maestro. I talk to the Monsignore in the piazza.’ Proud old priest-baiter. He says that he and Howard are still known to the locals, after all these years here, as ‘the two English sculptors.’ Later I wrote him a thank you note that I addressed, Dear Icon. But he’s not an icon—he’s in his own eyes only a partial success. Unable personally to exert power he must at least write about power. ‘Everybody in America is writing about victims,’ he said to me. ‘Well, I’ve no interest in victims. I’m interested in those who exercise power.’ ” Harris noted that Howard mostly concerned himself with the garden, obsessed by the variety of its flowers. Gore tried to put into practice what he had come to Ravello to achieve: “creative boredom.” Harris, while looking from Gore’s balcony at the glorious stretch of coast, asked him what on earth he could want apart from this view. Tellingly, he said, “I want to make 200 million people change their minds.” In this sincere and immodest ambition Gore resembled Mailer, his frequent antagonist and fellow provocateur.
In late October 1977, Gore and Howard spent a few days in New York en route to California from Rome. They checked in to a suite at the Plaza, and there was no shortage of invitations to lunches or dinner parties. The city had been home for many years. “Howard adored New York,” said Gore. “I never did. It had all of the filth and confusion of Calcutta without the cultural amenities.” They attended a party for Princess Margaret one night, moving afterward to an expansive apartment owned by Lally Weymouth, a journalist and the daughter of Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. Guests crammed together, at a party ostensibly in honor of George Weidenfeld, the British publisher. “You could hardly breathe,” Howard recalled, “everyone standing shoulder to shoulder.” It was a gleaming party, with Jackie Onassis, John Kenneth Galbraith, Gay Talese, William Styron, and Jerry Brown—Gore’s future rival for a Senate seat in California—among the guests.
Mailer was talking with Jackie in the kitchen as Gore entered the living room, and the image struck him: “Mailer leaning into her face, listening too hard,” Gore recalled. What happened next varies according to the teller, but Howard’s version accords with others: “Norman came into the big room from the kitchen loaded for bear. He saw Gore surrounded by friends, everyone talking and laughing. Gore was in a good mood as Mailer moved right up to him, got in his face, and everybody around them fell pretty silent. It looked like trouble. Norman told Gore that he looked like an old Jew, and Gore shook his head. He didn’t want to get into anything with Norman. Then Mailer threw his drink in Gore’s face, right in his eyes, then hit him in the mouth with a punch, a kind of glancing uppercut. Gore was stunned, and he stepped back. He wiped a dribble of blood from his mouth with a handkerchief. Then Gore said, ‘Norman, once again words have failed you.’ ”
Mailer was wild that night, drunk, and came at Gore again. Howard and Morton Janklow, the literary agent, rushed to separate them. Now Mailer stumbled into Max Palevsky, the computer wiz and venture capitalist, who spilled his champagne on Weymouth’s dress. Jackie watched from the kitchen doorway. “She was mortified,” said Howard. Unable to restrain himself, Howard threatened to punch Mailer, who laughed harshly and told Howard that his fourteen-year-old son could take him out with a single punch. Gathering his wits, Mailer said to Weymouth, “Either Gore goes or I do.” She properly refused to toss either guest from the party, so Mailer wisely left.
The confrontation at Weymouth’s apartment became not only mythic in Gore’s circle but emblematic of an age when literary lions roared at each other, even struck blows. Certainly the next day, on The Dick Cavett Show, Gore commented ruefully on Mailer’s aggressiveness, causing Mailer to threaten a lawsuit. This was dropped in exchange for another appearance by Mailer on Cavett’s show, a kind of “equal time” deal. “It was all very tedious,” said Gore, referring to this encounter with Mailer as “the night of the small fists.”
For his part, Mailer had a version he would write to his friend and future biographer, J. Michael Lennon: “I butted him, threw the gin and tonic in his face, and bounced the glass off his head. It was just enough to prime you or me for a half hour war but Vidal must have thought it was the second battle of Stalingrad for he never made a move when I invited him downstairs. 24 hours later he was telling everybody he had pushed me across the room. Mike, I’m beginning to think I’m innocent. I simply don’t understand whole-hearted liars who gain strength by the distance they put between themselves and the truth.” This seems wonderfully rich, as Gore himself deplored “liars.”
V. HOLLYWOOD REDUX
Meanwhile, life in Italy in the late seventies had acquired fresh difficulties. Violent demonstrations and kidnappings (the former prime minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped in March 1978 and murdered by the Red Brigade, a militant leftist group) added to the usual political turmoil. On the right were paramilitary groups such as the Ordine Nuovo and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, and their militant homophobia terrified Gore, who thought he might become a high-profile target. Making matters worse, the Italian government—now in a dark financial hole—decided to tax American residents as if they were citizens. “Nobody in Italy paid taxes,” Howard said, “not like they were asked to pay. They all knew how to cheat the government, but it wasn’t so easy for us, as foreigners.”
Gore and Howard had rented a house in Los Angeles the previous winter, testing the waters, and Gore briefly contemplated a permanent move. Still preferring real estate over less tangible investments, like stocks and bonds, he bought a house on Outpost Drive in the Hollywood Hills, taking possession on March 24, 1977. It was a large Mediterranean-style mansion on an impossibly steep road, only a few minutes’ drive from Sunset Boulevard. It featured high ceilings and a grand wooden staircase, a massive sunken living room with an impressive fireplace and French doors that opened onto a patio, and a lovely pool. Not unlike La Rondinaia, the house itself seemed to hang in the air, a garden as much as a house, with a stucco façade and red-tiled roof reminiscent of Italy.
Gore and Howard moved in that spring, bringing Phipps from London to be their decorator. She imagined the place “like some sort of tent in the Arabian desert,” with draping fabrics, Howard said. Gore felt mildly uncomfortable in these new surroundings at first, but gradually he came to like the decor. He spent much of the day in a silk dressing gown, writing at a vast desk in the study off his bedroom on the second floor, while at local cafés and bars Howard met with friends, including Carole Mallory (a writer, actress, and onetime lover of Mailer’s) and Lester Persky, the producer of the movie Hair, who continued a friendship with Gore for many years. “Howard liked movie people,” Gore said, although he himself often felt ill at ease in Los Angeles and soon longed for Italy. “Hollywood Hills was an option we liked to have, but I didn’t want to live there, not forever.”
As he often did, in December Gore retreated to La Costa, the “fat farm” near San Diego. Tynan stopped by one day and marveled that Gore would spend “$1000 a week to lose thirty pounds.” He noted that “the place has four restaurants, all with lengthy menus and wine lists for visitors. In five weeks there Gore has forged ahead with a new novel working nine–ten hours a day, and his talk at lunch, on Perrier, is quite as vivacious as mine, on two vodka martinis and white wine.” Gore explained to Tynan that, much as he loved Italy, the tax laws there made him feel squeezed in ways that he found uncomfortable despite having plenty of money.
Relief came when Italy loosened its grip on the earnings of foreign residents, and Gore felt safe to return after roughly six months in California. He eagerly resumed his life in Rome and Ravello. “We were a little desperate not to lose Gore, either to Ravello or Los Angeles,” said Armstrong, who had come to depend on Gore. “He was like a brother,” he said. “Perhaps a difficult brother, but one loved him anyway.” One gets a glimpse of Gore’s demeanor at this time from an entry in Thomas Powers’s diary. The scene was a dinner at Armstrong’s apartment:
It was cool on George’s terrace, four stories up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. [My wife] Candace was pretty in her yellow dress. Gore talked, imitated, made sexual allusions, mimicked accents, occasionally asked a question, and in general worked hard to be a good, entertaining guest. He’d been just the same way back in 1965 and 1966, gracious, friendly, but perhaps not quite so hungry. I mean that literally. He ate all the hors d’oeuvres, all the bread at dinner, finished his drinks at machine-gun rate, poured himself wine faster than Johnston [Armstrong’s Indian boyfriend] could keep the carafe filled.
Gore worked hard in the mornings, frequently hungover but determined to write Creation, a novel set in the fifth century BCE. “Such a key period, the fifth century,” he said. “West and East converged.” It had occurred to him that Zoroaster, Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Confucius, and the Buddha—just to skim the cream off the barrel—were alive in the same century, and he imagined a novel that would somehow link them. But his knowledge of these figures remained patchy, so he found himself once again deep in research. This novel would, in fact, complete a $1.2 million contract for two novels that Gore had signed with Epstein, Kalki being the first. “I saw the novel in my head clearly, and I knew that—if I just did the research—it would write itself.”
The death of Gore’s mother in April 1978 seemed like a turning point of sorts. She had been undergoing treatment for cancer at the Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York, looked after by her son Tommy (another of Gore’s Auchincloss half brothers). Gore had by now banished Nina from his life. He would go further, in letters, and say he “detested her” and that his feelings were not “thwarted incestuous love but hatred of evil.” The very idea of an Oedipus complex made him wish to run from the room screaming. “I agree with Nabokov,” Gore said. “Freud was a Viennese quack.”
A final development in the old lawsuit with Capote came at nearly the same moment. The story Capote had told about Gore being tossed onto the streets in front of the White House by Bobby Kennedy was untrue, at least in a literal sense, and many friends, including Arthur Schlesinger, George Plimpton, and Galbraith, stood behind Gore’s version of events in depositions. For her part, Radziwill told an interviewer flatly that she had never said anything about this episode to Capote, thoroughly squashing his hopes for success. People recapped the feud, quoting Capote: “I’m very sad about Gore—very sad that he has to breathe every day.” They quoted Gore in response: “Truman has made lying an art form—a minor art form.” Radziwill is once again quoted, in all her royal eloquence: “They are just two fags.”
The publishers at Playgirl knew that Gore had a watertight case, and they printed a retraction of Capote’s statement. More or less satisfied, Gore told his lawyers to drop the case and send Capote a bill for his legal fees, totaling $50,000. By now deeply soaked in alcohol and addled by drugs, with few savings, Capote could hardly afford this and paid nothing to Gore. After another three years of mild wrangling, the affair subsided. When Capote died, in the summer of 1984, Gore remarked to Epstein: “It was a wise career move.” There was the added insult that Capote had died in the Los Angeles home of Johnny Carson’s ex-wife, Joanne. Gore wrote to her: “I shall have to die in your house now, just to even things out.”
VI. GRACE AND HOPE
The ultimate value of his work as a novelist now began to worry Gore. Was he a serious writer of fiction or, as some critics said, a mere entertainer? In a review of Doris Lessing’s sci-fi novel Shikasta, he began to think aloud about the possibilities for fiction. “Currently, there are two kinds of serious-novel,” he wrote. “The first deals with the Human Condition (often confused, in Manhattan, with marriage), while the second is a word-structure that deals only with itself.” He disliked the makers of word-structures, who wrote (as he later said) novels that “could not be read, only taught.” He wanted, in digging into the ancient world, to go beyond what seemed to him like the contemporary options for a serious writer. He hoped that Creation would be viewed as a serious book, a work of art as well as of historical evocation. He needed, and hoped to create, a kind of masterpiece.
While not quite that, Creation is nevertheless an impressive book, summoning the Persian world of its narrator, the blind old Cyrus, a grandson of Zoroaster (who seems a good deal like Senator Thomas P. Gore in a toga). In recent decades, scholars have questioned the received wisdom of decades ago, when historians placed Zoroaster in the sixth century BC. But that isn’t important, as this is fiction anyway. Imagine that Zoroaster lived then, and that he grandfathered old Cyrus who, in the span of a long public life, met Master Li and the Buddha in India, sat with Confucius in China, and encountered Anaxagoras and Socrates in Greece, while missing Plato by mere decades. If the scenario tests credulity, remember that Gore himself had personally met a dizzying range of figures from Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, and André Gide to Jack Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Hillary Clinton. In a sense, he imagined history as he lived it.
The elderly Cyrus dictates his memoirs to a younger man (his handsome great-nephew)—a typical Vidalian mode of narration. The voice shades into irony from the start: “I am blind, but I am not deaf.” Because no recent visual impressions have caught his mind’s eye, he sees the past with uncanny clarity and, at seventy-five, recalls his long diplomatic career in detail. It’s heady stuff: “My grandfather in his seventy-fifth year used to talk for hours without ever linking one subject to another. He was absolutely incoherent. But then, he was Zoroaster, the prophet of Truth; and just as the One God that he served is obliged to entertain, simultaneously, every aspect of all creation, so did His prophet Zoroaster. The result was inspiring if you could ever make sense of what he was saying.”
This witty narrator leads us through an array of religious visions, including that of the Jain prophet, Lord Mahavira—an intriguing figure who, like the Buddha, abandoned a life of luxury (as a prince) to become an ascetic, seeking spiritual awakening while rejecting the material world. After his enlightenment, Mahavira traveled for decades in India, spreading his ideas and attracting converts. Time, he explains to Cyrus, is an illusion one must overcome. Cyrus is a nonbeliever to the core, although he does seem to believe in the Wise Lord, a kind of mystical God above all gods. “Personally,” he says, “I am all for nirvana—a word hard to translate. Nirvana is something like the blowing out of a flame, but there are other aspects to the word that are not only impossible to translate but difficult for a nonbeliever like myself to understand.” When he meets the aged Buddha, he listens keenly to the voice, which he describes as “mild.” The Buddha tells him a little of what he has learned during his years of contemplation and religious practice: “I know how perception begins and ends. How consciousness starts, only to stop. Since I know these things, I have been able to free myself from all attachment. The self is gone, given up, relinquished.”
It’s difficult for a novelist to put forward a flesh-and-blood Buddha or Mahavira. Such figures are, perhaps, best left to mythos, the realm of legend. Yet Gore valiantly puts words into the mouths of spiritual masters, often inventing the kinds of things they might well have said. Cyrus (like Gore, perhaps) admires the Buddha’s wish to remove himself from the world of illusion; but he cannot understand the desire to renounce individual responsibility. “The absence of purpose,” Cyrus declares, “makes the Buddha’s truths too strange for me to accept.” In due course, Cyrus comes to realize that “there is never a true account of anything.” A monotheist like his grandfather at the outset, his experience of many religious visions at last undermines his certainty.
The middle section of this long (and quite literally meandering) novel has Cyrus back in Persia, where he spends his time with the powerful prince Xerxes, a son of Darius, the king. The bulk of this material comes from Herodotus, the Greek historian, although Gore chooses to tell the story from the Persian viewpoint. After succeeding his father as king, Xerxes ships his friend off to Cathay, hoping to open a trade route. There are episodes of considerable excitement, although Gore keeps the narrative at a level of fantasy that owes much to Calvino in places. At one point, Cyrus meets Master Li, who teaches Taoist restraint, saying things like “Wise is chaos.” And this might well be the motto of this long novel.
Confucius is more to Gore’s liking than any of the other spiritual masters in Creation, and Cyrus responds warmly to his teachings. “You know, when I was fifteen I set my heart upon learning. At thirty, I had my feet planted firmly in the ground. At forty, I no longer suffered from…perplexities. At fifty, I knew what were the biddings of heaven. At sixty, I submitted to them. Now I am in my seventieth year,” recalls Confucius. “I can follow the dictates of my own heart because what I desire no longer oversteps the boundaries of what is right.” What Gore has Cyrus say of Confucius is, perhaps, what one might say of Gore himself: “He made himself an expert on the past so that he might be useful in the present.” As Gore later recalled: “I think I felt closest to the figure of Confucius in Creation. He was a this-worldly person.”
When he returns from Cathay to Persia, Cyrus discovers that Xerxes has been drawn into another unproductive war with Greece. Yet after a while, things settle down and, according to Cyrus, a period of relative calm arrived. “The next dozen years were the happiest of my life,” he tells his scribe. “There were no wars of any consequence, and the life of the court was more than ever delightful.” The peace ends when Xerxes is murdered; but the drama seems weakly dramatized, and the novel ends abruptly with a period in Athens, where Cyrus converses with Pericles, the great general and statesman, among other notables. We learn that Sophocles has become a thorn in the general’s side. “Sophocles has been able to hold office and seduce youthful citizens,” says Cyrus, who with his Persian background disapproves of the Greek penchant for homosexual and pedophilic relations. Of course Pericles has no same-sex tendencies: “Never touch one of your own soldiers,” he supposedly told his officers. Cyrus notes with approval: “Pericles has never shown the slightest interest in boys.”
Apart from such slight nods by Cyrus in the direction of vaguely lost erotic opportunities, Creation is a sexless novel—very odd from the author of Myra Breckinridge. For the most part, the grand figures in this panorama of the ancient world speak in orotund voices, coming off like cardboard cutouts. Cyrus is especially orotund, which is perhaps appropriate for the testimony of a blind old man who recalls so many decades. Yet Gore’s tour of the ancient world is comprehensive, with no great tombstone left unturned. The knowledge on display in these pages is dazzling if also dizzying.
Gore put the unwieldy manuscript into the lap of his new agent, Owen Laster, who came to Ravello to get better acquainted with his illustrious client. “Owen wasn’t sure it was going to work,” said Gore. “He told me it might need severe editing. I’m afraid I was not easy with that suggestion.” Indeed, he terrified Laster, who backed off immediately. They took a taxi into Amalfi, where Gore insisted on celebrating the novel with a large meal at Da Zaccaria, a small restaurant overhanging the bay. It was always Gore’s favorite place to dine, with its dime-size clams in fresh linguine, with langoustine cooked on a wood fire. He could easily drink a carafe of the zingy white wine by himself, preferring a table on the terrace, where you could hear waves crash on the black rocks below and see the winking lights of Amalfi. Zaccaria himself, a wiry black-eyed young man, treated Gore like a king, and would bow before him, uttering in a gravel voice: “Maestro. Quello che vuoi.” (Master, whatever you want.)
Back in New York, Epstein proved less easy to placate. “It was going to be a hard sell,” he said. “I wanted another book on American history, not this.” He and Gore jousted for several months, with Gore contemplating a return to Little, Brown, where he had never felt any ripples of dissent. Epstein had hoped for a more “realistic” novel of history, but Gore had been reading Calvino, and he liked the idea of a novel of ideas that backed away from realism. “Creation,” Gore said, “was a dream of sorts. I was Cyrus. I wandered in the corridors of history, at night, in my blindness. But I was all ears.” Of course Epstein didn’t want to lose Gore, so he urged him to revise the novel to foreground the realistic elements, such as they were. He also got him to cut large portions (which Gore defiantly added back in a 2002 edition that he called Creation: The Restored Edition). In the end, Gore would always feel that Random House failed to get behind the novel, which found an appreciative audience nonetheless. Published in 1981, it rose quickly up the lists of best sellers, defying gravity. Even the reviews were surprisingly positive. In The New Republic, for instance, Stefan Kanfer wrote: “Vidal writes with extraordinary concentration and little of the predictable reversals that mar much of his work.” Further, he called it “a novel of grace and hope.”