We should stop going around babbling we’re the greatest democracy on earth, when we’re not even a democracy. We’re a sort of militarized republic.
—Gore Vidal
I. ACTING PRESIDENT
Gore appeared on The Merv Griffin Show—at the time one of the most popular talk shows on television—soon after the election of Ronald Reagan, whom Gore invariably called “our acting president.” It was a deft performance, with the best-selling author in a dark business suit looking presidential himself, a kind of senatorial girth making it difficult to button the jacket. He had begun to weather, and not well, with a ripple of age darkening on his right cheek. His hair had grown gray at the edges, thinning slightly. Griffin teased him about the election, eager to provoke a good line: “Mr. Reagan has received a mandate from the people.” “Well,” said Gore, sniffing as if a bad odor had suddenly emerged, “he has received something. It was certainly better than the Old Actors’ Home.”
Approaching sixty, Gore seemed at ease in public situations, himself a kind of acting literary president. But he wanted badly to return to Rome, and with the unexpected easing of the tax situation in Italy, he and Howard flew home. The old circle of friends greeted them warmly, and they moved back and forth between the Largo Argentina and Ravello often, chauffeured by Mario, a driver from Ravello, whom Howard only had to call and he would appear in a black Mercedes. “Rat always traveled with us,” Howard recalled, referring to their beloved dog, who had become a part of their lives—Gore and Howard frequently had dogs as well as cats, and they were often the subject of good-humored conversation. Now Gore hoped for a long peaceful stretch, when he would return to another of his satirical novels, which were more fun to write than the hefty historical ones (although he enjoyed the research).
The accidental death of Tennessee Williams on February 25, 1983, upset Gore more than he guessed it would, and it broke the calm he was hoping for. Williams died in a suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York from suffocation, when a bottle cap stuck in his throat. He had apparently been trying to ingest a barbiturate when it happened. “The Bird had been drinking and taking drugs, God knows what, for such a long time. It didn’t surprise me when he died, but it was not a good end. We hadn’t been on good terms for a bit. He pitied himself, and that was the worst part of it.” Gore had watched anxiously as Williams began to lose his touch in theaters, and thought his later plays were simply bad. He did not, himself, wish to exit in such a sad way.
With Creation barely finished, he began Duluth, a dark, satirical novel that would appear in 1983. He was also doing research for a novel about Abraham Lincoln, and this put fresh demands on his reading. It was a time to withdraw, to read and write without hectic travel or undue interference. In Rome, he and Howard mainly saw George Armstrong and Luigi Corsini. They also spent time in Ravello with Corsini, who had a teaching post at the university in Salerno, which Gore could see from the balcony of his study in the middle distance. There were dinners with Judith Harris and Mickey Knox, as well as Donald and Luisa Stewart, who had an apartment in Rome on Via Margutta. Michael and Linda Mewshaw were available for meals, too, and Mewshaw put Gore in touch with a number of American visitors as they came through Rome, including the novelist Pat Conroy, whose writing Gore admired. In Ravello, Michael Tyler-Whittle was a frequent companion. “I liked our padre, don Michael,” said Gore. “He combined the best of English traits: real learning, a love of language, and a chaotic sense of everyday life. His life was a shambles, but he didn’t worry. Good cheer got him through anything.”
Gore and Howard continued their periodic excursions to Bangkok, usually in the winter, staying for a week or two at the Oriental Hotel. Gore loved the food and would visit the male brothels, often wandering along the back streets of the sweaty city. In later years he referred to these wanderings ruefully as part of his “relentless pursuit of AIDS,” though he genuinely believed that being a “top” with no interest in being anally penetrated meant he was safe. But he worried about this, and had begun to think hard about what it meant to be gay, though he normally rejected that term. It was during this period that he wrote “Some Jews and the Gays,” a searing essay—one of his finest—that Barbara Epstein didn’t want to publish in The New York Review of Books unless Gore toned it down considerably. But he wouldn’t change a word, sending it to Victor Navasky, his friend and the editor at The Nation, where it appeared on October 14, 1981. The Nation would, indeed, become a repository for some of his best work—pieces that larger publications deemed too hot to handle.
This essay was given a fresh title, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” in Gore’s next book of essays, The Second American Revolution and Other Essays (1976–1982), which came out in 1982. It was a controversial piece that was bound to create discomfort. Yet it’s a sharply drawn, daring essay in which Gore’s cool intelligence and unsparing logic shine out as he attempts to come to terms, yet again, with the complicated matter of sexual identity. “The American passion for categorizing has now managed to create two nonexistent categories—gay and straight,” he writes. “Either you are one or you are the other. But since everyone is a mixture of inclinations, the categories keep breaking down; and when they break down, the irrational takes over.”
Appealing quickly to authority, Gore quotes George Orwell: “It is impossible to mention Jews in print, either favorably or unfavorably, without getting into trouble.” This allows him to mention Jews. “Like it or not, Jews and homosexualists are in the same fragile boat,” he writes. That is, both were subject to prejudice and marginalization. The pretext for his essay was “The Boys on the Beach,” a homophobic article by Midge Decter that appeared in Commentary, which was edited by her husband, Norman Podhoretz (Gore called them “the Pod people”). Gore tosses a bit of gasoline on the fire now—given that Decter was Jewish: “For sheer vim and vigor, ‘The Boys on the Beach’ outdoes its implicit model, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”
Decter’s piece is bizarre. She muses on life on Fire Island, a gay enclave, and comments on how the gays have ruined everything by their freshly discovered militancy, post-Stonewall. She asks: “What indeed has happened to the homosexual community I used to know—they who only a few short years ago were characterized by nothing so much as a sweet, vain, pouting, girlish attention to the youth and beauty of their bodies?” She recalled the “slender, seamless, elegant and utterly chic” clothes that gay men wore in earlier times. There is an undertone: Why can’t they just be normal—or amusingly abnormal, like in the old days? Why get so…political?
Decter attacks Susan Sontag’s well-known essay on camp, arguing (inaccurately) in a footnote that Sontag fails to realize that “camp is of the essence of homosexual style, invented by homosexuals, and serving the purpose of domination by ridicule.” Gore fires back: “Decter seems unaware that all despised minorities are quick to make rather good jokes about themselves before the hostile majority does.” Without pause, he dismantles her shallow Freudian take on homosexuality, as when she writes: “The desire to escape from the sexual reminder of birth and death, with its threat of paternity—that is, the displacement of oneself by others—was the main underlying desire that sent those Fire Island homosexuals into the arms of other men.” Gore says with arch irony: “But Freud has spoken. Fags are fags because they adored their mothers and hated their poor, hard-working daddies.” He wonders about the fact that Decter’s twaddle, her “unproven, unprovable thesis” could still be found within the pages of a supposedly respectable magazine.
Gore continues in full attack mode, striking at the neocon critic Joseph Epstein (no relation to Jason), who in Harper’s a few years earlier had written: “If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” Needless to say, Gore could hear in such a remark the undertones of fascists who, in the twenties and thirties, wished the same for Jews. He finds it inconceivable that Jews could speak against “fags,” as Gore calls them, and suggests that this new kind of Jewish intellectual, those identified with the ruling classes, were like “so many Max Naumanns,” referring to a German self-hating Jew who was out to save his neck by identifying with the oppressor and joining the Nazis. In a conclusion that lowers the temperature of the discourse by several degrees, Gore calls for “a ceasefire” in the war between Jews and homosexuals, “and a common front against the common enemy, whose kindly voice is that of Ronald Reagan and whose less than kindly mind is elsewhere in the boardrooms of the Republic.”
This essay was a spectacular performance by Gore, who summoned every ounce of wit and good sense. It’s rude, of course: He can barely conceal his scorn for Decter. And some would find his isolation of a class of neoliberal Jews as anti-Semitic in itself. Yet Gore did not, at least in this piece, sound an anti-Semitic note, though he was hardly beyond such a thing in conversation. (When he was drunk, he could seem terribly racist and anti-Semitic. It was the least attractive side of Gore, although neither of these prejudices ran deep, and he could be just as fierce in attacking racists and anti-Semites when sober.) In this essay, he makes sense—unless, of course, you take exception to hyperbolic characterization of Reagan and those in power in American boardrooms as the “common enemy.”
Sitting in Rome or Ravello, he assembled a consistent and detailed worldview, putting the random witty remarks he had offered on ephemeral talk shows into permanent form, creating art from cultural politics. The essay as genre became an ideal vehicle for his waspish voice. Wit leavened the work, whether he wrote about a literary icon (Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Christopher Isherwood, L. Frank Baum) or deconstructed an American political figure, as in “Theodore Roosevelt: An American Sissy.” In “The Second American Revolution,” the title essay of the collection, he calls for what in his view has been long overdue: a fresh look at the U.S. Constitution, suggesting that the American republic had long ago given way to an empire run by oligarchs, and “the oligarchs are a good deal more dangerous to the polity than the people at large.” He calls for reining in the imperial presidency and getting rid of the executive order, which allows the president to bypass Congress and, therefore, the wishes of the people. As for the House of Representatives, he argues for a parliamentary system where “whoever can control a majority will be the actual chief of government, governing through a cabinet chosen from the House…Since the parliamentary system works reasonably well in the other industrially developed democracies, there is no reason why it should not work for us.” As for the Supreme Court, he suggests—a shocking idea!—that it should be “entirely subservient to the law of the land.” He envisions a reformed Senate that would vaguely resemble the lifetime lords of Britain, “a home for wise men” who would look at the laws made by the House and consider whether or not they are constitutional as well as rational.
Gore was willing to take things back to basics, and to regard the U.S. Constitution not as the stone tablets of Moses but as a living document in need of regular visitation and revision (as Thomas Jefferson, in fact, had argued, suggesting that each generation should take a hard look at the document and make appropriate changes). As Gore observed, the original document drafted in Philadelphia would soon—in 1987—reach its second century. “I had seen how much trouble it caused,” Gore later said, “and my proposals were fairly modest.”
The reviews were mostly respectful, and no reviewer—however hostile to Gore’s political views—could doubt that this collection of essays “was written by a man of taste and seriousness,” as The New York Times suggested. A number of reviewers pointed out, fairly enough, that Gore liked to harp on old themes. In one of the few sweeping notes of dismissal, Julian Symons in The Times Literary Supplement called Gore “a lightweight” who was nevertheless “a sparky little fellow prepared to shadow-box twice his own size in the ring.” More typically, Thomas Mallon in the National Review (William F. Buckley’s magazine, of all places) wrote: “No one else [in America]…can combine better sentences into more elegantly sustained demolition derbies.” (This review endeared Mallon to Gore, and they became friends. Indeed, when Mallon became the literary editor of GQ, he would commission pieces by Gore.)
By the early eighties, Gore had become a landmark on the cultural scene—on television, in print, on public stages, where he held forth before assorted audiences with grave authority and mercurial wit. In his own measure and style, he combined the role of public intellectual with that of writer and public scold, and it remains a testament to his work ethic. “He just wouldn’t stop,” said Howard. “I wanted him to slow down, take it easy. He was getting old. But Gore did what Gore did. He had things to say. He is a genius.”
II. RUNNING IN PLACE
Now Gore was famous around the world, and the demands on his time began to weigh on him. It proved difficult to write for extended periods without interruption, and he could not resist traveling to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, or London to give talks or television interviews when reasonable offers came. He was by nature a social animal, and when friends called—on the phone and in person—he never turned them away. London played a huge part in his life, and he relished encounters with Princess Margaret, as in July 1983 when he went to a lunch at Kensington Palace: “We drove to the Royal Lodge at Windsor,” he wrote to Judith Halfpenny, an enthusiastic fan from Canada with whom he corresponded, “in a sort of station wagon with a Scotland Yard man next to the driver, making it impossible to see anything except through the side windows. ‘One sees a great many backs, traveling,’ said herself. The Queen Mother had just vacated the RL, which is pretty much her house and gone to Sandringham and the household wanted to shut it up because no one was there but, ever forceful, she said, ‘I know there are three stewards, and the maid.’ ‘But no cook, your royal highness!’ We lunched beneath a great oak tree in the lawn. We dined on the terrace in front of the one great room of the lodge, built by the Regent whose mad peevish little face not yet as porcine as it would become stares down at one from above the fire place.”
The Hollywood connection meant even more to him than his associations with British royalty. And keeping these fires going required meetings, parties, phone calls, and letters. Visitors came and went, usually staying for a day or two, including Norman Lear, Claire Bloom, Walter Matthau, Lee Remick, Susan Sarandon, and, as ever, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Movie agents Sue Mengers and Boaty Boatwright remained close friends, and they stopped by whenever they came to Italy.
Any number of English or American writers sought and received invitations to dinner. Among them was William Styron, who came to Ravello in 1981, though he disliked Gore and had trouble disguising his contempt. “Styron had a thing against fags,” said Gore, “and thought we were all rich because we didn’t have to support armies of children and grandchildren. He, of course, married an heiress. I never read his novels.” American visitors wanted to meet Gore, and he was happy enough to see most of them. He was himself often a guest at the residence of Maxwell Rabb, the U.S. ambassador. Rabb, despite being a Reagan appointee, found Gore delightful and lured him to his house on Sunday afternoons to watch the latest Hollywood films, which weren’t easily available in Rome, not in English. “They dubbed American actors into Italian,” Anthony Quinn recalled. “I always came out sounding like Bugs Bunny.” Rabb liked to meet Hollywood stars. He once pulled out of a major international conference in Naples in order to meet Woodward at one of Gore’s parties. (Only once, when Nancy Reagan came to Rome, was Rabb compelled—by the White House—to scratch Gore’s name from the guest list.)
Piqued by the popularity of Reagan, Gore began to take seriously the idea of running in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in California in 1982. “That was all Max Palevsky,” Gore recalled, referring to the wealthy liberal entrepreneur who had become a good friend. Palevsky disliked Jerry Brown, the two-term governor and Democratic favorite for a Senate seat, and had been pushing Gore to run for a while, offering to act as campaign treasurer and helping to raise money. Paul Ziffren, an influential lawyer who rose to prominence as a backroom operator in Democratic politics in the fifties, encouraged Gore as well, offering to help raise money and introduce Gore to the right people. As word about this potential primary bid leaked out, the Los Angeles Times printed a small story that fueled interest in his candidacy, and Gore found he enjoyed being in the political limelight again.
By the winter of 1982, he had firmly decided to run, so he moved from Italy back to Los Angeles, where he would base himself during this adventure. His house in the Hollywood Hills doubled as campaign headquarters, and he accepted speaking engagements throughout the state in January and February. On March 9, 1982, he filed for the nomination, and from that moment on it was a whirl, with too much to do. He lived “on rubber chicken now, and plastic carrots,” he said. Though a few friends put up money, he decided it was best to rely mainly on his own funds, as it would give him the kind of flexibility he preferred. It was, however, expensive to print posters and to manufacture lapel buttons, brochures, bumper stickers, and the usual paraphernalia of American elections.
As a cultural icon and iconoclast, he attracted large crowds at places such as Berkeley and UCLA, but the press never quite caught up to him, as three years later he told one interviewer: “Thousands of people came to hear me, but the press insisted on saying that I was very unpopular. On TV they showed two sleepy students and the voice-over of the announcer said, ‘Of course, Vidal couldn’t attract a crowd.’ What they don’t want you to know, they don’t tell you. Take, for example, the corruption in the aerospace industry in California. It’s astounding. Poor Jerry Brown, for all his liberal credentials couldn’t quite explain why he liked the B-1 bomber, which is totally impractical militarily but totally necessary for him to endorse for his campaign coffers.”
Palevsky asked Gore to hire a publicist to help with daily appointments and setting up interviews, and he took on Robert Chandler, a young man who thought of himself then (as now) as a conservative. “The prospect of having Gore Vidal as a client couldn’t have been more delicious,” Chandler says. “Not just for the irony, but because I’d always gotten a kick out of Vidal as a public personality.” He entertained some skepticism about Gore’s sincerity in running, but soon discovered Gore meant what he said. “Vidal was, as I’d hoped, a kick, although quite serious and earnest about the race. And not the least haughty or intimidating or acerbic, but helpful, constructive, and conscientious. And though we were nominally running against Jerry Brown, he wanted really to be running against Ronald Reagan. Or, more precisely, he wanted not a partisan run against Reagan or the Republicans. Way beyond that, Gore Vidal was running against the way America was turning out.”
One can watch Gore run—the documentary filmmaker Gary Conklin followed him with a camera crew as he appeared at dinners, town hall events, and small gatherings. (Gore Vidal: The Man Who Said No appeared in 1984). He catches the candidate in candid scenes with bystanders or, less spontaneously, as he gives his stump speech. Gore seems fully engaged, running with all his might. He kept hammering away at several key ideas, such as when he argued that taxing corporations was preferable to loading the weight of running an empire on the backs of the poor. He proposed cutting the Pentagon budget by a quarter—not so terribly radical, as he said: a matter of closing a few anachronistic bases and suspending the production of irrelevant weapons systems. He shifted from venue to venue, traveling light, with no entourage except for Howard and one or two friends—plus the camera crew. For three months, he ran as hard as he could, with a focus on college campuses and liberal-minded areas around Los Angeles and San Francisco. “I could see little point in visiting Orange County, but I went there anyway,” he said. As expenses ballooned, a few Hollywood friends put extra cash into the kitty. “I think he was quite worried,” said Gavin Lambert, an expat English novelist, screenwriter, and close Hollywood friend. “We sat by his pool on Outpost Drive one night drinking Scotch. He looked very tired, and I wondered aloud if the whole thing was worth the effort. Gore rounded on me, furious. He had no choice, he said. Jerry Brown was beginning to move toward his positions, and this was a good thing.”
Brown assumed he would defeat whatever candidate the Republicans put up, especially if the mayor of San Diego, Pete Wilson, won the primary. In fact, he never considered Gore a serious rival, but one sees a look of annoyance crossing his face as Gore teases him at one political banquet filmed by Conklin. “I think Gore actually might have done better, even won,” said Lambert, “but he wasn’t used to the pace of a modern campaign. It had been some years since he ran, in upstate New York. This wasn’t a book tour, and he wasn’t getting any younger.” Not surprisingly, exhaustion set in, and at times one can almost see Gore yawning in Conklin’s film. He came in far behind Brown, with 15 percent to Brown’s 45 percent. Quite sensibly, Brown appropriated many of Gore’s ideas, emphasizing in his campaign the need to cut military budgets and focus on those in society who were most in need of government assistance.
Gore knew, at least on a subconscious level, that he wouldn’t win the nomination. “I spoke with Vidal during his Senate primary campaign,” says William Bradley, a political reporter, “and he acknowledged the obvious, that he had no realistic sense that he might win, but that he did hope to provoke debate with Brown about the nature of democracy in America, something for which Vidal had a notably jaundiced view.” Lambert found the whole effort on Gore’s part “Quixotic,” but tilting at windmills was in character for Gore.
Another view comes from Conklin: “I do think he wanted very much to win, but unfortunately he didn’t spend his own money on good political ads, which seems to be the only way you can be elected to office in this country. Yet the audiences were large and responsive.” Conklin noticed that Gore’s political ambitions, though largely extinguished by this primary run, would sometimes flare briefly: “From one telephone call I received from Ravello after the campaign, I believe that Gore dreamed when he had drunk a bit more than usual that he might still run for president.” The fantasy would never quite die, though Gore knew perfectly well it was a fantasy.
He returned to Italy, eager to get back to writing: his only true refuge. The run for Senate had forced him to put his writing aside, and he saw how much he really hated that. Owen Laster came for a visit, having in hand a proposal from Jason Epstein for another political novel. Lincoln was the obvious subject, and Gore had planned on writing this book in any case. Soon Gore signed a deal with Random House and, in a gesture of peace with Epstein, offered to pay back all unearned money from a previous contract—an unheard-of suggestion, which Epstein dismissed. He knew, of course, that a novel by Gore on Lincoln that focused squarely on the tumultuous years of his presidency would sell in large numbers.
Gore dug into his bottom drawer for the teleplay about Lincoln he had written, without luck, for Norman Lear in 1979. It would not be easy for him to transform this sketchy material—more a treatment than a finished script—into a full-length novel about the sixteenth president, but he accepted the challenge. For his part, Epstein, who had been unhappy about Duluth from the outset, relaxed. He would soon have a big political novel from Gore, and this would make up for any losses that Random House might still have on its books. Epstein would even hold his nose and publish Duluth.
III. DULUTH: LOVE IT OR LOATHE IT
Epstein’s bright assistant, Gary Fisketjon, took over editorial duties on the novel. “I was of course thrilled,” says Fisketjon, who would later become the editor of many celebrated novelists, including Richard Ford, Jay McInerney, and Cormac McCarthy. “Gore was a challenge—a very difficult man at times to edit, as he didn’t like anyone to change anything he wrote, but I was game. We seemed to get along well.” So Epstein stood back and watched. In May 1983, the novel appeared, less than robustly supported by its publisher, or so Gore claimed. It failed to attract many readers and received tepid reviews, at best. Peter Conrad, a sympathetic commentator on almost anything by Gore, wrote in The Observer that Gore “laughingly debauches the novel with an anthology of skits, mimicking Regency romance, soap opera and science fiction.” More typically, Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post Book World that Gore “relishes retailing a brand of witless, slapstick humor that would cause a sophomore to blush.”
Reviewers missed the anarchic energy of Duluth, which has many virtues, though its lack of narrative coherence makes them less visible. The novel is ruthless, silly, and shrewd at the same time, a riff on the American language itself and how it shapes American realities. Making fun of soaps and popular novels, it centers largely on Rosemary Klein Kantor, a past winner of the Wurlitzer Prize, who works doggedly “at the console of her word-processor, which is connected with a memory bank containing ten thousand popular novels.” But it’s also the portrait of a city, one with no purchase on space or time. Gore writes: “If, as it has been so often said, every society gets the Duluth that it deserves, the United States of America in the last but one decade of the twentieth century has come up with a knockout.”
At times, the novel veers toward a kind of poetry, reminiscent of John Ashbery, who has made a career out of reformulating, riffing on, luxuriating in the detritus of American speech as it passes into or around thought. Consider a couple of representative paragraphs from Duluth:
August is the month of Duluth’s Coming Home parties, of which the most important, socially, is the lovely reception that is being held at The Eucalyptus Club for the Bellamy Craig IIs.
All things considered, both Bellamy and Chloris enjoyed the kidnapping, while their marriage, though by no means altogether shut, is a lot less open than it used to be as a result of the happiness each experienced during a week in Rome—preceded by a single uncomfortable night in Bonn—where they were able to attend the showing of Valentino’s new line of evening wear.
The language mocks the rituals of middle-class life in nondescript cities, as when Gore sends up “Duluth’s Coming Home parties.” That “lovely reception” (with a clichéd adjective so typical of the way experience gets homogenized by language) happens at a club with a perfect name for it, one that mocks all such clubs, as in city streets called Happy Valley Road or Sunny Avenue. Heterosexual marriages, as ever, come under a barrage of linguistic meddling, with a play on “open marriages,” a maneuver that literalizes the metaphor and makes it seem ridiculous. This builds to the ultimate happiness for this couple, who were “able to attend the showing of Valentino’s new line of evening wear.” As ever, Gore sends up the mania for brand names, deconstructs the reliance on certain linguistic turns that provide (for some) a kind of comfort, a sense of reality.
Of course a political rivalry occupies the city of Duluth. Captain Eddie Thurow, head of the Duluth Police Department, wants badly to be mayor; he’s running against the incumbent, Mayor Herridge, who had the misfortune to be named Mayor by his parents, thus confusing his achievement. Herridge thinks that he must win over the teeming barrios of Duluth, which exist in slums “just off ethnic Kennedy Avenue.” In a related turn, Captain Eddie has a lieutenant, Darlene Ecks, who has been strip-searching illegal aliens and stepping on their corns—which they produce in abundance because their shoes are too tight. (Political correctness annoyed Gore, who never lost a chance to debunk it.)
Duluth is a mad, campy novel that relocates the city of the future in the present, even as it draws on a disenchanting past. It’s a place of corrupt politics, fierce local prejudices, race hatred, and an insatiable love of kitsch. The narrative builds to the usual Vidalian climax, with alien insects planning to destroy the world even as Rosemary Klein Kantor, the prizewinning author, presses the Erase button on her machine, dissolving at a keystroke the neighborhood of Garfield Heights (named for a presidential nonentity), where the elite of the city live in luxury, a part of Duluth known for “its mansions and houses, its bitter homes and gardens.” In an instant, there is “now nothing at all where the Heights once were.” Soon all is lost, though it’s no loss in Gore’s wan view, as he gives a final withering glance at the American scene from an enormous height.
Needless to say, it upset Gore that critics failed to realize his intentions or accomplishment in Duluth, though a small band of admirers would emerge, including Italo Calvino, who wrote about it as a brave experiment in narrative method. “To be sure, Vidal’s explicit intention is to parody the current university vogue for ‘Narratology,’ ” says Calvino, “but his mythology seems to me to be no less rigorous and his execution no less perfect. For that reason, I consider Vidal to be a master of that new form which is taking shape in world literature and which we may call the hyper-novel or the novel elevated to the square or to the cube.” Perhaps having one appreciative reader at this level was enough.
IV. HONORARY CITIZEN
Calvino’s remarks were delivered at a celebration of Gore in Ravello, where he was made an honorary citizen on September 24, 1983. Howard knew how much this distinction meant to Gore, and organized a party after the ceremony at La Rondinaia. In her diaries, Harris recalls the occasion in some detail:
Gore received honorary citizenship from the town of Ravello in a touching ceremony: the coming out party organized by Howard. The evening before, a Friday, we sat out in the piazza at a table: Gore, Howard, the Italian writer Alberto Arbasino, AP’s chief Dennis Redmont and his wife Manuela, Italo Calvino and his wife Esther, Luigi Barzini, the journalist, Peter Nichols (the English playwright) and his actress wife and their very young son, all at tables with beer and wine before us. Calvino said he’s loved the book Duluth, its synthesis of America, “the density of its comic effects.” Said Calvino: “Gore is an ubiquitous enfant terrible who doesn’t respect anyone or anything except for the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. He has been away from the U.S. and in Italy for long periods, but it’s as if he never left. He is a harsh and happy critic and polemicist such as only a fully mature nation could produce, unlike our fragile Italy.
Luigi Barzini said, “What makes Gore a good writer? Not because his books are all best sellers (though they are); not because they are performed upon the stage of the United States of America; but because he found the emotive streak inside of the Americans, the anguish of modern life.” For Gore “Ravello is an oasis, here there is ancient life all around, not just for the viewing of it; man has left his mark here everywhere the eye rests.”
By now, Gore and Howard felt entirely at home on the Amalfi coast, and could be found most nights of the week before dinner at the San Domingo, a bar in the piazza where you could sit at tables overlooking the cathedral. They had a sizable number of reliable local friends, including Tyler-Whittle, who recalled: “Howard liked everyone in the village. Everybody knew him, and he paid for their beer and wine. Gore enjoyed watching Howard enjoying them. Gore’s Italian wasn’t terribly good, but Howard knew the local dialect, and used always to light up when he’d see one of his friends, Andrea or Pepe or Giovanni. Sometimes the boys came back to the pool for a swim in the evenings. It was all good fun, nothing sexual. Gore would sip Scotch and look on with amusement.”
Gore occasionally looked for “trade” on the streets of Rome, but this had become less urgent in later years—alcoholism played a role in this—and his life in Ravello rarely included sex. “I was largely celibate there,” Gore said, “as it was where I did my research, kept long hours at my desk.” He wrote for three or four hours in the morning and, in the afternoon, corresponded with countless friends and strangers, some of whom he found interesting, such as Jonathan Ned Katz, who published the Gay/Lesbian Almanac in 1983, which Gore found entertaining. As he would with admiring fans, he wrote to Katz about the almanac’s insights concerning himself and novelist James Baldwin, whom Gore had known a little: “I thought the Baldwin ’49 piece brilliant; I never knew it existed, which explains Jimmy’s nervousness with me at the time—‘his panic’ is an excellent description of a state of mind which my characters in The City and the Pillar, perhaps, shared—though the author not. But I was a realist back then—if you succeed in driving a stake through those false nouns ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual,’ statues will be built in your honor—or perhaps just a large stake to burn you at.” (In private, less than magnanimously, Gore often referred to Baldwin as “Martin Luther Queen,” claiming that he had heard Jack Kennedy make the same joke at the White House.)
A couple of intense months in 1983 were devoted to Gore’s magisterial essay on William Dean Howells for The New York Review of Books. The occasion was a new Library of America volume of the Gilded Age novelist, critic, and editor, which reprinted a decade’s worth of Howells’s longer fiction. Thinking about this neglected author—the model of the traditional man of letters—Gore thought about himself, and his survey of Howells’s career reads like autobiographical stock-taking. Howells, alone among such peers as Mark Twain and Henry James (who were close friends), took a principled stand on the Chicago Haymarket Riot of 1886, which saw seven men convicted of capital murder even though nothing could really connect them to the crime except hearsay. Gore reflects:
Of the Republic’s major literary and intellectual figures (the division was not so clearly drawn then between town, as it were, and gown), only one took a public stand. At forty-nine, William Dean Howells was the author of that year’s charming “realistic” novel, Indian Summer; he was also easily the busiest and smoothest of America’s men of letters. Years before, he had come out of Ohio to conquer the world of literature; and had succeeded. He had been the first outlander to be editor of the Atlantic Monthly. In the year of the Haymarket Square riot, he had shifted the literary capital of the country from Boston to New York when he took over Harper’s Monthly, for which he wrote a column called “The Editor’s Study”; and a thousand other things as well.
Some years later, Gore reflected on his time with Howells: “I lived in Howells for weeks, reading him through a damp winter in Ravello, sitting by the fire in my study, wrapped in a blanket. Pussy cat wondered what had happened to his master, why he didn’t move. That piece was probably the best one I did.” Criticism is often covert autobiography; almost certainly, Gore looked into the mirror of Howells and found himself. “Howells, a master of irony, would no doubt have found ironic in the extreme his subsequent reputation as a synonym for middlebrow pusillanimity,” he wrote in the essay. “After all, it was he who was the spiritual father of Dreiser (whom he did nothing for, curiously enough) and of Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic and Frank Norris, for whom he did a very great deal.”
The piece has a strangely prophetic aura, as when Gore writes: “Howells lived far too long.” It was something Gore feared: becoming a rumor in his own time. And he wondered to what degree one could outwit the forces that invariably conspire to push away a writer, especially one as prolific, diverse, controversial, and successful as Gore had been. In the act of creating his imperial self, he sent out emissaries to far-flung posts, distant colonies of readers in at least thirty-five languages. A mortal fear of erasure dogged him to the end: “One feels the Great Eraser always at work,” he wrote to Elaine Dundy—a line repeated endlessly in letters and conversations over the years. As he sat at his desk in Ravello, beneath a dozen framed magazine covers of himself, he wondered how and where to get the continuing reflection he required in order to sustain a sense of reality. He could only see himself in print, in photos, on television. The mirror in his bathroom didn’t suffice, especially as the light grew dimmer by the decade.
“My thoughts turned to Lincoln in the mild wake of Duluth,” he said, “a president at the height of his power as the war drew to a close.” As he wrote Lincoln, he had in mind what he said at the end of his Howells essay. “The fact that a novelist like Howells—or even Bellow—is probably no longer accessible” weighed on him. It was a fate he must somehow avoid, if possible. “How could I make a man like Abraham Lincoln accessible, real?” he wondered. “In a way I think I worried him into being.”
V. LAND OF LINCOLN
The year spent writing Lincoln was calmer than usual, and intentionally so. Gore traveled less, spoke in public a bit less often, avoided camera crews whenever he could. He needed to sift through a trove of material, taking notes, drafting scenes. He read the writings of John Hay, Lincoln’s devoted young secretary, who later became the secretary of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt (presidents who would figure prominently in Empire, the next novel in the Narratives of Empire series). He also swept through all the major biographies of Lincoln, including an early biography-cum-memoir by Lincoln’s former law partner from Illinois, William H. Herndon. With some dismay he read what he referred to as “the sweet, insufferable” life of Lincoln by the poet Carl Sandburg. Lincoln’s private correspondence and public writings, and the memoirs of men associated with Lincoln, both friends and enemies, helped Gore to fill in the details of Lincoln’s life, especially during the period of his presidency.
Among the great men of American politics and history, only Aaron Burr and Lincoln attracted Gore’s complete admiration, although he looked at Old Abe without rose-tinted glasses, aware that every generation needs its own Lincoln, one that speaks to its current needs. Gore’s Lincoln is a man who understands politics in a visceral way, willing and able to manipulate those around him to achieve ends he regards as worthy. As Gore saw it, Lincoln wished to maintain the Union above all else. As he struggled to achieve this end, he became a tragic hero who sacrificed everything, including himself, for a greater cause.
Gore centers Lincoln during the Civil War years, when the president’s character—like a photograph—developed in the harsh solution of repeated bloodbaths. Historians and biographers had extensively studied and chronicled the man and his political life, going back to Josiah Gilbert Holland’s 1866 biography. From Holland and Herndon to Sandburg and beyond, the life of the greatest American president had been fully excavated and described. Most recently, there had been a range of books by historians such as David Herbert Donald, Peyton McCrary, and Stephen B. Oates. Novelists had also written about Lincoln before Gore, as in (the American, not the English) Winston Churchill’s forgotten The Crisis, a best seller in 1901; or Thomas Dixon’s infamous pro-slavery novel, The Clansman (where Lincoln wants all African Americans expelled); or Love Is Eternal, a piece of schlock by Irving Stone about Abe and his beloved Mary. Gore, however, steps closer to history than his predecessors, creating political history in fiction that advances the genre of biographical fiction itself by placing a major figure at the center of the narrative in a way that allows us to regard Lincoln in all his alienated grandeur, the man whom Walt Whitman in his elegy called “the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.”
With Gore’s natural grasp of political banter and his love of cabinet-level machinations, he fleshed out the cast around Lincoln, a swirl of politicos, generals, journalists, conspirators, corrupt bankers, and social climbers. Among the major figures in this crowd are John Hay, of course, and William Seward, Lincoln’s monomaniacal secretary of state and chief rival for the Republican nomination in 1860—a rival whose ambition ultimately gives way to a recognition that Lincoln is the greater man. One also meets Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln’s self-important head of the Treasury Department, who also thirsts for Lincoln’s job. Chase had been a devout abolitionist well before Lincoln, who was a latecomer to the cause. Chase seems mildly foolish in Gore’s portrayal, as he collects the autographs of famous people, in one scene hunting down Whitman in an attempt to wrest a letter by Ralph Waldo Emerson from the vagabond poet. (He succeeds.) Another nicely drawn character in Gore’s novel is Kate Chase, Salmon’s daughter—a society hostess who holds the capital in her thrall. Young Hay calls her “the most attractive girl in the town.” Indeed, she was a type Gore recognized and admired from his youth, and his affection for her shows.
Gore never enters the thoughts of Lincoln directly but circles around him, as when the president and Seward discuss a politician from Pennsylvania who had recently joined the Republicans as a fierce abolitionist and “the sworn enemy of all moderates beginning with the President.” Being a canny fellow, Seward has an idea about how to deal with this man. “Good,” says Lincoln. “But don’t tell it to me. I’m not made for secrets.” Gore writes (from Seward’s point of view): “Actually, he had never known a man so secretive as Lincoln when it came to keeping to himself the direction that he planned to take in some great enterprise. On the other hand, Lincoln tended to be quite free with the secrets of others.”
The novel begins as Lincoln slips into Washington unnoticed under heavy guard on the cold morning of February 23, 1861. Assassination anxiety is already in the air. As it must, the novel ends shortly after his assassination in Ford’s Theatre by John Wilkes Booth: The scene is swiftly, brilliantly conjured as “from a distance of five feet, Booth fired a single shot into the back of the President’s head.” The emotional conclusion of the novel, however, occurs earlier, as the Confederacy crumbles and Lincoln enters the Southern White House of Jefferson Davis in Richmond. An elderly black man shows Lincoln into the office that once belonged to Davis. “That was Mr. Davis’s chair,” he says. An emotionally overwhelmed Lincoln sits in the chair. Gore writes: “Suddenly, Lincoln looked about the room, as if aware for the first time of the magnitude of what had happened. ‘It is so much like a dream,’ he said at last, ‘but then I dream so much these days that it is hard for me to tell sometimes what is real and what is not.’ ”
As he runs his hand across the smooth tabletop before him, he declares that the war will soon end: “And the Union be so restored that no one will ever be able to see the slightest scar from all this great trouble, that will pass now the way a dream does when you wake at last, from a long night’s sleep.” Gore chose to relay this great story in the third person, giving it an old-fashioned, almost Tolstoyan, aura. “I liked the natural authority of the third person, the knowing eye, a feeling of measured distance,” Gore recalled. “I was measuring that distance, line by line.”
Apart from Lincoln himself, Hay—the wide-eyed young man who understands the luck of his vantage—often takes center stage and becomes one of the keenest observers of the president. The narrative muscles seem to grow stronger whenever he comes onstage, as when the war begins with volleys of cannon fire across the river that have already awakened Mary Todd, seeming to her like “the sound of doors slamming.” But Hay knows the significance of what he hears, unlike the often confused First Lady. “At the first sound of artillery, Hay tumbled out of bed…After all, this was history.”
Lincoln commands Gore’s respect; but Gore punctures the myth repeatedly, giving us a plainspoken and practical man of politics (not so terribly dissimilar from the Great Emancipator of legend) but one who will do whatever he needs to do, never losing sight of his larger purpose, to maintain the Union. Controversially Gore suggests that Lincoln had picked up a venereal infection in his youth and transmitted it, unawares, to his wife and, perhaps through her, to his sons. Gore tracks the gradually darkening mind of Mary Todd throughout Lincoln, her illness accounting for her famous headaches and tantrums. The tensions in the marriage contribute to the president’s evident melancholy, although he rises to heights of good humor in the company of friends and associates.
As Harold Bloom argued in The New York Review of Books, Lincoln is a visionary achievement, the keystone in the arch of Gore’s novels about the American past. Bloom writes: “Vidal’s imagination of American politics, then and now, is so powerful as to compel awe.” In The New Republic a few years later (in a review of Empire), Andrew Delbanco says: “The writing in Lincoln reaches for sublimity, as in the moving account of the president’s visit to the Confederate wounded, or the telling of Willie’s death and Mary Todd’s encroaching madness. There are passages that make one weep. This novel will, I suspect, maintain a permanent place in American letters. There has been no better prose in the last 50 years than that with which Vidal narrates the streaming of the panicked people down Pennsylvania Avenue to the ‘soft thud of cannons’ from the debacle of the first Bull Run.”
A few passages in Lincoln rise to a level rarely seen in Gore’s writing, before or after; yet for long stretches the novel feels ponderous, with perhaps more detail about the politics of the Civil War in the capital than any reader needs or wants. Another drawback is that only Lincoln has any real depth in a populous crowd of figures, with the possible exception of Hay. Those in the president’s entourage have a kind of Dickensian flatness, identified largely by a handful of metonymic traits, such as Seward’s imperial obsessions or Chase’s physiognomy: “a large man with a small nose.” We hear perhaps once too often about Chase’s bad eyesight—a blindness as much symbolic as literal.
Yet it could not have been easy to write about a major historical figure who lived during complex times. Gore’s habit of rapid composition made it especially difficult for him to avoid errors, and he turned for help, as often before, to others, among them David Herbert Donald, a kindly and brilliant Harvard historian, who was generous with his time. He also got assistance from Heidi Landecker, who had been a fact-checker at The Atlantic Monthly in the early eighties. The magazine planned to run an excerpt from the novel, and asked Landecker to check for errors and inconsistencies. “I found so many mistakes,” she said, “serious ones, like Civil War battles Vidal said were won by the Union that were in fact won by the Confederacy.” Gore appreciated her gifts, and asked her to fact-check the entire manuscript, saving himself a good deal of embarrassment later.
Academic historians attacked him anyway, as Gore expected, ferreting out small errors wherever they could. The controversy over the presentation of Lincoln himself would unfold slowly, as unfriendly experts and history buffs in due course read and dismissed the novel. Richard N. Current, a Lincoln biographer, and C. Vann Woodward, a well-known historian at Yale, found the book full of mistakes that, however small, undermined the whole project. Roy P. Basler, the editor of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, suggested that “more than half of the book could never have happened as told by Vidal.” In a letter to The New York Review of Books, Gore outlined the charges against him by these “scholar-squirrels,” as he called them. It was an awkward piece of self-justification that nonetheless contains jewels of wisdom, as when he explains that he tends, in these historical fictions, “more to history than to the invented.” He adds, by way of explanation: “I am still obliged to dramatize my story through someone’s consciousness. But when it comes to a great mysterious figure like Lincoln, I do not enter his mind. I only show him as those around him saw him at specific times. This rules out hindsight, which is all that a historian, by definition, has; and which people in real life, or in its imitation the novel, can never have.”
To Gore, Abraham Lincoln was a mountain that could only be glimpsed from different sides, and part of him would always remain invisible to the naked eye. In his portrait, he looked—as he usually did—for foibles, and took an important cue from Herndon, an early biographer who set afloat the syphilis rumor. Gore couldn’t resist the dramatic potential of such a story line. He also understood the long tradition of anti-Lincoln sentiment, which had grown virulent during the president’s lifetime, coming from abolitionists in his own party and from antiwar Democrats or pro-slavery Southerners. Lincoln was neither the hero of Whitman’s great elegy nor Sandburg’s sentimental portrait; he was hardly the face on Mount Rushmore, nor was he the rabid warmonger who assumed dictatorial powers, as many at the time (even the critic Edmund Wilson) believed. Nevertheless, the assassination made sainthood immediately accessible, and there can be no doubt of his greatness in so many respects.
Gore put forward a very human Lincoln, a man not quite in control of his own destiny, though driven by the usual ambitions of political leaders, especially those capable of winning the White House. His portrait of Lincoln, however flawed, will remain a major take on this iconic figure, and this novel added mightily to Gore’s unfolding chronicle of the American republic, which—in the post-Jackson era—becomes a tale of expanding imperial interests, the picture of a nation driving westward, expanding beyond its borders in Mexico, the Philippines, and beyond.
VI. AH, VENICE!
The popular success of Lincoln pleased Gore, who watched as it rose to the top of most national best-seller lists. He could sit back, draw a long breath, and resume his life in Italy. It was time for a quiet, smaller project, and one caught his imagination: a chance to write and present a film about Venice. The invitation to do this made-for-TV documentary had come from Mischa Scorer, a British director and producer. It would feature both Vidal and Venice, a two-part series sponsored by ITV in Britain in collaboration with the Italian network RAI-TV. PBS in the United States was another possible sponsor, although they refused to commit at first. Armstrong urged him to go forward. “I loved Venice,” he said, “and I volunteered to write the coffee-table book for him, Vidal in Venice. It was a little money for me, and I knew we’d have a good time.”
Gore had never spent much time in Venice. He had attended a ball there with Clare Boothe Luce in the sixties, and fondly remembered dancing at the Ca’ Rezzonico, arriving at the palazzo’s steps by gondola, with torches burning. The rooms in the palace were full of mirrors, and the candles flickered. Gore thought about Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Henry James, and other writers who had passed through those rooms over the years. With Lincoln in the rearview mirror, he needed a holiday, and what better holiday than a working holiday?
The first part of the series focused on the history of Venice, its rise in the fifth century from a nasty backwater to the center of an empire. “How was it even possible,” Gore wondered on camera, “that a piece of real estate roughly the size of Central Park could extend its reach so far?” The second part concerned its art and architecture, those features that still make Venice one of the glories of the world. Gore said, “I loved the color and movement in a Tintoretto, the stately balance of a Veronese. But the palaces, the apartments all seemed beyond magical, a dream. The architecture of Palladio was a gift to the world, who kept doing what he did. It’s where Jefferson got the idea for Monticello.”
He also suspected that he had familial connections to Venice, although this wasn’t the attraction. “Ah, Venice,” he sighs on camera. “I couldn’t quite understand it.” As one watches him climb a grand stairway of the Doge’s Palace, it seems clear that this setting appealed to his grander self. He lost no chance to link the Venetian and American imperial dreams. “In an odd way, the founders of the American republic were fascinated by the Venetian republic,” he says. What links these two empires? “Just human greed.” As per usual, he leaps at the opportunity to chide Reagan and his hatred of “the evil empire,” which in the president’s mind was the Soviet Union. For the Venetians, the “evil empire” was Turkey, the enemy as framed by Venetian imperial politics. Gore imagines a Venetian public-relations push to demonize Turkey and establish “strategic defense systems to protect the free world.” One suspects that his ironies were lost on many television viewers.
But no matter. This was mainly a holiday in Venice with a camera crew and Armstrong. Gore loved performing in the role of Gore Vidal, and the documentary was called Vidal in Venice. On these terms he couldn’t lose, as Venice never failed to do its part as backdrop, with splendid churches and palaces, dark canals, a sumptuously realized history. In his introduction to the coffee-table book (which Armstrong wrote, working from notes by Gore), he says: “There is nothing quite like writing and appearing in a two-hour television documentary on Venice to stumble on a truth: as, talking and talking, I slowly sank into a mud flat near Torcello, I realized that not only did I have nothing to say but there is nothing to say.” That is, Venice is always itself, beyond criticism, probably beyond comprehension.
After Venice, Gore resumed the life he had made for himself in Rome over two decades. Anthony Quinn (who had married an Italian woman) often met Gore at parties, in restaurants, or at the apartment of Mickey Knox, a mutual friend. Quinn recalled: “I don’t know what it was, but he looked so Roman. It was the nose, the profile, the way he stood. He looked like somebody who had once been the emperor. When he went out in public, he was a performer. ‘You’re the actor,’ he would say to me, when we’d meet over dinner. ‘No,’ I’d say. ‘I think you’re the actor, but you’ve only got one part, Gore Vidal. But it’s a good part, and you get to write the script yourself.’ ”
Knox was also Mailer’s friend, and he and Gore often talked about the feud that had lasted so long. Knox had done his best to soften them toward each other, and on November 20, 1984, Mailer wrote to invite Gore to participate in a PEN fund-raising event. “Our feud, whatever its roots for each of us,” he wrote, “has become a luxury. It’s possible in years to come that we’ll both have to be manning the same sinking boat at the same time. Apart from that, I’d still like to make up. An element in me, absolutely immune to weather and tides, runs independently fond of you.”
Gore said, “I never actually disliked Norman, not really. So now the feud—for what it was worth—was officially over. This was fine with me, as long as I didn’t have to read another of his books.”