“A MARVELOUS SOUTHERN WHORE NAMED DENHAM FOUTS”
The Europe that Denny found when he had returned in the spring of 1946 was very different from the world he left in June of 1940 when Peter sent him to the United States for the duration.
What had become of his European friends during those horrific years?
Lord Tredegar’s wife had died in 1937. Evan did have a knack for marrying well. In Singapore on March 13, 1939, forty-six-year-old Evan married twenty-four-year-old Princess Olga Sergeievna Dolgorousky from a family of Russian nobility that, before the Revolution, had been close to the Imperial family. The couple divorced four years later; it appeared to have been a rather unhappy marriage that included an incident in which Evan tried to set fire to his wife.1
Through his family’s standing, Evan found himself at the outset of the War just where he didn’t belong: in MI5, Britain’s esteemed counter-intelligence agency. Thinking well outside the box, his first scheme was to have peregrine falcons, like the ones he had trained at Tredegar Park to entertain the guests at his garden parties, attack German carrier pigeons and thereby disrupt the flow of classified information to pre-invasion agents. It was never clear just how the falcons would distinguish enemy pigeons from neutral pigeons or develop a taste for Nazi pigeons more than other avian delicacies flying the skies at the same time. This scheme morphed into a plan to slow the German push into France and Belgium by letting loose a massive flock of pigeons that would mingle with the Nazi carrier pigeons and confuse the Germans as to which pigeons were theirs. The RAF gave it a try with a squadron of planes taking off with cargo holds full of thousands of pigeons. Over the southern coast of England, the pigeons dropped from the planes were instantly killed by the intake of the engines. Evan refined his plan. The next time the pigeons were taken aloft, they were in individual brown paper bags, the bags were let loose over the coast, and by the time the pigeons burst from the bags they at least were free of the planes; but rather than traveling to mingle with their fascist counterparts, they made their way immediately back home to their familiar roosts.
Despite these setbacks, Evan was quite proud of his work as commander of the Falcon Interceptor Unit of MI5, and one day, as he lunched with Lady Baden-Powell, broke all edicts of the counter-intelligence agency by showing her around his office and describing in detail the war efforts in which he was involved. This was a blatant violation of the oath of secrecy he had taken, and Evan at once was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. In due course, he was freed, and, fuming, made his way back to Tredegar Park.
Evan was not about to let the matter pass. He knew just who to contact to plan suitable revenge against those who summarily had imprisoned him: the infamous sixty-eight-year-old Aleister Crowley, a character the British tabloids had dubbed the “Beast of the Apocalypse,” the “King of Depravity,” the “Wickedest Man on Earth.”
Crowley, who fancied himself, with Shakespeare, one of the two greatest poets of the English language, held himself out as a prophet of a new era that would supplant Christianity, an era when men would become gods. The central credo of his ministry was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” a credo that focused on individual freedom while flirting with license and anarchy. A mystic, a spiritual philosopher who fiddled with the concept of reality, Crowley considered magick (as he spelled it to distinguish it from pedestrian tricks of magic) “the science and art of causing change in conformity with will.”2 His rituals and sacraments, in which genital secretions served the same role as the wine and wafer, included the use of hashish, mescaline, heroin, and opium, sexual magick with both male and female partners, and the consumption of the blood of cats.
Crowley was a student of occultism, and his devotion to magick and mysticism paralleled Evan’s, who before the War had been a member of the “Black Hand,” a private occult society in London, and who recently had been constructing, at great cost, an elaborate magick temple on his estate. Surely here was just the person to help perform a little black magick to bring about the revenge against his arresting officer that Evan craved. The two conspirators were kindred spirits. Crowley had been a guest at many of Evan’s notorious weekend parties and had inscribed one of his books, The Book of Thoth, to Evan as follows: “To my old and very dear Friend and Colleague, Adept of Adepts in the Secret Tradition, Eifon Morgan, heir of the Mysteries of the Round Table, entitled to bear Excalibur, Lord of the Secret Marches about Camelot do I, being the pupil and heir of Merlin, entrust this Book, Aleister Crowley.”3
So Evan was well aware of just what havoc Crowley could wreak when on May 18, 1943, he wrote to the Great Beast, inviting him to come stay at Tredegar Park. Crowley arrived on June 17, and was housed in the Oak Room, the grandest in the mansion, a forty-two-foot long bedroom that once had been the main state dining room of Tredegar House, with its massive fireplace and seventeenth century oak paneling carved with busts of the Roman emperors, scrolls of acanthus leaves, and grotesque heads. On Sunday, June 20, 1943, Crowley wrote in his diary: “Saw T’s Magick room—far greater than I thought.”4 That was saying something.
Crowley stayed at Tredegar Park for two weeks to carry out his work. Exactly what sort of black magick the two concocted, what spells cast, what séances conducted, is not known, though the conspirators were suitably smug when, soon after the Great Beast’s visit, they learned that the officer who had had Evan thrown into the Tower of London was beset with a painful illness that brought him satisfyingly close to death.
And what during the War had become of Prince Paul of Greece with whom Denny had sailed the Aegean, and who shared with Denny an identical tattoo over his heart?
Crown Princess Federica, who had wed Prince Paul in January of 1938, dutifully gave birth to their first child, a daughter, in November of that year, and a son two years later. That was to be just about the only happiness the couple shared for the next six years. The Third Reich tried to convince Paul’s brother, King George II of Greece, to abdicate in favor of Prince Paul, who had married a German princess and who, therefore, the Reich assumed, would be more sympathetic to Germany than the King; a promise of protection from Mussolini’s Italy came with this overture. The King and Crown Prince would have nothing of it, and Italy invaded Greece on October 28, 1940, followed by the German army attacking across the Bulgarian border. The Greek government retreated to the island of Crete and then, when Crete was bombed, took refuge in Cairo, where the Crown Prince stayed, and London, where the King set up government in Claridge’s hotel. After three years of exile, the Monarchy with the British army invaded Greece to take it back. The country was freed by November of 1944 and the King and Prince Paul returned to Athens. With the death of King George, Prince Paul would ascend to the throne on April 1, 1947.
And Peter Watson? During the War, he lived by himself in a modest flat in Palace Gate in London, and volunteered as a clerk for the Red Cross, driving a Red Cross van. Accustomed to traveling the world, he was confined to England, never his favorite country, and after a while began to go stir crazy. He wrote to a friend on January 11, 1943 that “the whole thing [the War] has been going on much too long I feel, and ... it is very depressing for me to have lost all sense of contact with Denham ... After four years the sense of tension is unbearable.”5 Taxes were rising in England during the War years, and the income Peter received from the trusts his father had established was falling. He was still supporting young artists and authors, but his days of Bentleys and Vuitton luggage were in the past. Even worse, some of his investments, and all of his art collection, were in German-occupied France. He had lost contact with Sherban Sidery, the Rumanian caretaker he had left in charge of his apartment, and worried about whether the caretaker had been able to protect the paintings or whether the Nazis had found and confiscated the collection. Peter was fatalistic about the dangers of the day: “There is even a great jagged hole in the Ritz,” he wrote to Cecil Beaton, “but so far this block has escaped. I never go to a shelter—I would rather die in my sleep.”6
As the War dragged on, Peter had become philosophical, too, about his art collection far away in his apartment in Paris. “I had an International Red Cross message from the Rumanian Sidery who has stayed in my flat,” he wrote to Cecil Beaton; “A good thing really I feel to have someone in the flat. The pictures I am afraid have gone—a pity really because I had attempted to get the most interesting work of any painter I ever bought and it was all most deliberately chosen. But I don’t care as it seems to be fatal to one’s character to attach oneself too much to things.”7
Peter was therefore to some extent, mentally prepared for what he found when he and Cyril Connolly at last got back to his apartment in Paris and found the rooms in shambles, the entire art collection gone, and, scattered around the apartment, tell-tale pawn tickets: his caretaker, the man he had left in charge, was responsible for the loss of the paintings, the gold knives and forks, everything of value. All of this Peter could accept. The apartment could be cleaned and renovated for Denny’s homecoming. What Peter did not expect, and could not accept, was how Denny so quickly “lapsed into a sort of pre-war cocktail haute pederast life.”8
A few days after passing out on the bathroom floor where Michael Wishart and Jean Connolly had found him with the heroin needle hanging from his arm, Denny had himself admitted to a clinic. Faithful Peter wired money to cover the expense of his treatment and the around-the-clock nurses who would be necessary for some days after the treatment.
Denny emerged from the clinic with two black eyes, the result of electric shock treatments, and a surly mood. Michael, who at the same time had given up opium on his own and was trying to ease the transition with alcohol and barbiturates, was equally disagreeable.
Peter telephoned and suggested that the two take some time to go to the country to relax and enjoy the fresh air. He paid for their stay at Moret in a hotel that overlooked the River Loing.
It was late autumn, with mists over the river and leaves of gold, and Denny and Michael savored the good food at the hotel and the exhilaration of riding horses through the forests. It seemed as if they had regained their Eden, this time a healthier one. “The weeks I am describing were so intensely happy,” Michael remembered, that I would not for anything have interrupted their pure joy wondering what was to become of our more than friendship on return to Paris. It is the privilege of the young, and of the stupid, to give no thought to the morrow.”9
On one of their excursions, the two went to the Chateau de Fontainebleau, where Michael wanted to paint the ancient carp that had been swimming the garden pools since the days of King Louis XIV. While walking around the chateau, Denny dropped a gold pill box. Its white powder contents spilled on the cobblestones: heroin. Michael realized at once how completely Denny’s addiction had consumed him—”it requires great cunning to conceal a heroin habit from someone with whom one is living intimately.”10 The two returned to Paris to Peter’s flat at 44 Rue du Bac and even before the luggage was unpacked, Denny had taken out his opium pipe from its hiding place behind one of the wall panels, and “smoked furiously” as if to make up for lost time.11
Another year of all this was quite enough. In March of 1947, Peter returned to Paris to remove everything from his flat so that he could terminate the lease. He was concerned about this mission, both because he was never sure if, in the presence of Denny, his determination would falter, and because he would have to tell Denny about his own new affair. Ten days before he was to leave New York to return to England, Peter had been invited to a dinner party. There he met Waldemar Hansen, a twenty-four-year-old aspiring poet who had the clean, crew-cut look of an American college student and who was fascinated by literature and art. Hansen later remembered that evening: “Peter had a wonderfully engaging way about him, a winsome way of smiling, a way of making people feel that he was absolutely on their wavelength. Early in our first evening together it was quite clear that something was transpiring between us. In the course of dinner we had both fallen quite silent, with [the host] doing all the talking, and Peter was simply looking at me mutely, and I was looking back at him. It really was love at first sight. Suffice it to say that Peter stayed the night.”12 Peter asked him to come live with him in London, though Waldemar was reluctant to leave his friends and family. “Then come stay with me at least for the summer,” Watson pressed. “If you do only that, I will give you a summer that you will never forget.”13 Waldemar agreed and would join Peter in London later in April.
It was time for Peter to tell Denny it was over. As he wrote to Waldemar, “I am rather worried about his reactions as I must tell him everything, and he is still more attached to me than to anyone else and is likely to stay so.” Predictably, Denny was devastated, whether because of losing Peter’s love, or losing Peter’s financial support. “Poor Denham,” Watson updated Hansen:
The situation is tragic. He senses that the worst for him has happened as I told him that I really cared about you. I have plenty of guilt about him, although it is not justified. I cannot love people I do not really respect, and I cannot respect the life he leads here. He still loves me, probably more than ever now since I have gone beyond his reach, and I suppose he will until we have been completely separated for a year or so, which must happen I think now.14
Over the course of three weeks, Watson had his furnishings crated and removed from the apartment, so that all that was left were six Venetian shell chairs, and in Denny’s bedroom the massive bed, the Tchleitchev painting, and the red-shaded lamp. Even then, Denny did not believe that Peter would carry through on his threat to terminate his lease. Peter did. Denny refused to leave. The landlord lost no time taking the matter to court to have his troublesome tenant evicted, but month after month the matter remained mired on the court’s docket.
With Denny’s heroin addiction came a consuming paranoia. He paid men to buy drugs for him, which of course led to extortion and the receipt of diluted drugs. In his eyes, everyone was an informant and he was sure the police were trying to trap him. An unexpected knock on the apartment door would cause him almost to faint, and he only answered if he heard the correct code of knocks. He realized that the fact that he was with teenagers as young as Gerard and Michael further increased his exposure to arrest.
Yet even as his troubles grew, so did his reputation, and celebrants continued to come to meet the legend in person. Tony Watson-Gandy, a British Royal Air Force officer during the War, had joined Michael and Gerard as Denny’s latest live-in worshipper, taking up residence in Peter’s apartment. And a stream of visitors arrived at 44 Rue du Bac for a chance to meet the famous Denham Fouts. Among them came twenty-two-year-old Gore Vidal to observe this curiosity in his habitat.
In the preceding decade, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., had transformed himself into Gore Vidal: young literary lion.
Ten years before, into Gore’s rather lonely and unhappy adolescence dominated by a hard drinking, caustic, unpredictable mother he detested, who divorced his father when Gore was ten, (and whose periods, he later wryly commented, had been “more excruciating than those of any other woman in medical history”)15, into the gray Gothic world of St. Albans in Washington, D.C., where his mother sent him as a boarding student, a school where bullies would stampede a student into a locker, lock it, and leave, into this world of adolescent uncertainty and fear had walked a schoolboy god “and the first human happiness that I had ever encountered.”16
It was the winter of 1937, mid-term, when twelve-year-old Jimmie Trimble started at St. Albans. Gore checked out Jimmie’s pubic hair in the communal shower—”bright gold curls”—and “as I looked at him, he gave me a big grin and so it began, likeness drawn to likeness, soon to be made whole by desire minus the obligatory pursuit.”17 In class, “Jimmie and I would signal each other when a hard-on had arrived unbidden.”18
Gore’s mother was relieved when on occasion her son brought his new friend home for a weekend visit to “Merrywood,” Gore’s step-father’s Georgian mansion set on forty acres above the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia, with tennis court, squash court, swimming pool, and woods, delighted that at last her bookish son, who spent all his time reading, had any friend. It was at Merrywood, on the white tile floor of a bathroom out of view of the butler, that “there we were, belly to belly, in the act of becoming one,” where “we simply came together.”19
Jimmie would become the golden boy of St. Albans. He was captain of the basketball team, a star of the football team, and a legend of the baseball team, the ace pitcher who strung together a record of no-hitters with his fastballs and curve balls, thrown at such speed that the catcher had to get extra padding for his glove. Jimmie was handsome at twelve, a grown-up, according to Vidal, at fourteen, downright striking at seventeen. There he is in a photograph at seventeen looking remarkably contemporary in a light-colored boat-neck sweater, no shirt underneath. Is he aware how perfectly that sweater set off his chest and broad shoulders? The thrust of his athlete’s neck? The square jaw? The knowing grin, that smile like Gatsby’s “with a quality of eternal reassurance in it,” that smile that, according to another friend, “would just knock the birds out of the trees,”20 those blue eyes that seemed to look at the humorous side of life, that seemed to intimate that he saw right into everyone? The wavy blond hair? “Did you ever tell a man that he was beautiful?”21 a shocked Jimmie asked his mother after a girlfriend had used that word to describe him. He exuded a definite sexual energy, a masculine magnetism that pulled everyone into his world. He was like Phineas of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, with no one immune from his pull. A retired English master from St. Albans who had taught there when Jimmie Trimble was a student recalled that Jimmie “usually, at 17, moved through the Lane Johnston halls briskly, but when he idled along, he had a generous roll of the hips—the flexible hips of the athlete—that promised, like the Anglican definition of faith—‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.’ But I was too much the unsure 27 year-old master to do more than cast my eyes demurely down, probably not too far down, as he passed by.”22 Clearly when Jimmie walked by, there were masters and students, male and female admirers, silently staring.
Late spring, 1939. Before leaving for a school trip to France, Gore remembered, “Jimmie and I made love in the woods above the roaring river. I remember his almost-mature body with the squared bony shoulders and rosy skin against bright green ... After sex, we swam against the swift, deadly current of the forbidden Potomac River, swam among rocks and driftwood to a special large gray-brown glacial rock, where we lay, side by side. We’re going to go on doing this for the rest of our lives, I remember thinking, tempting—no, driving—fate to break us in two ... Every now and then, in idle moments, I start to hear snatches of the conversation of those two boys on the rock that afternoon,” on that “cloudless sunny day when Europe was ahead of me and all I cared for beside me.”23
After the summer, Gore was sent to Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, and the following year to Exeter in New Hampshire, while Jimmie stayed at St. Albans.
The next time, and the last time, Gore saw Jimmie was during the 1942 Christmas season when the two met at the holiday dance of Mrs. Shippen’s Dancing School. “We had last seen each other as fourteen year-old boys. Now we were seventeen year-old men. Would we take up where we had left off in the spring of 1939 on a May day, in the woods above the Potomac River?”24 It was an awkward reunion when they spotted each other in their tuxedos in the ballroom with their dates. Gore had known his date Rosalind for several years, and the two just had announced that they would marry after Gore graduated from Exeter in June, before his enlistment in the Army in July. Gore told Jimmie of his marriage plans. “You’re crazy”, Jimmie said, as the two of them left their dates and walked downstairs to the men’s room. “ ...[O]ur bodies still fitted perfectly together, as we promptly discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly, talking of girls and marriage and coming simultaneously.”25
Jimmie’s pitching prowess had caught the attention of the owner of the Washington Senators who gave him a signing bonus and a four year scholarship to Duke University. Early in 1944, as soon as he turned eighteen and no longer needed the consent of his mother, Jimmie enlisted in the Marine Corps. He and his girlfriend, Christine White, voted the “prettiest blonde” at her school, agreed to marry when Jimmie returned from service. In July of 1944, Trimble joined the Third Marine Division in the South Pacific, and Vidal enlisted in the Army and found himself on a ship in the Aleutians.
After serving for several months on Guam where he was the star pitcher for the Third Marine Division’s baseball team, Trimble volunteered to join a scouting platoon for the landing on Iwo Jima. The stark statistics bespeak the horror of those bloody days. Twenty-two thousand Japanese defended the four mile island. It would take the American forces over a month to control the island at a cost of seven thousand dead and more than twenty thousand wounded, with all but one thousand Japanese soldiers dead.
Eight days after the first landing, Jimmie volunteered to join a reconnaissance team trying to pinpoint the location of rocket sites so that artillery could be called in to take them out. In a midnight attack on his team’s fox hole, a Japanese soldier with a mine strapped to him jumped in and wrapped himself around Jimmie, blowing both of them to death.
That spring, the Marine’s Third Division baseball field on Guam was officially dedicated as Trimble Field, a story reported in all the Washington, D.C., newspapers. There was a memorial service held in the Washington Cathedral where Jimmie lay in state. “I can’t think of how a nineteen year-old Marine private would merit a ‘state’ burial,” Vidal wondered years later, “but on the other hand, he was much loved by Washington sports fans.”26 One of Jimmie’s St. Albans teammates went into shock when he learned of Jimmie’s death, was treated for acute depression, and had to leave college. Christine White, the girl Jimmie had known for three months before he went overseas and who later became a television actress starring in movies and appearing in television series like Bonanza, The Fugitive, and Perry Mason, stayed in touch with Jimmie’s mother for decades. She kept his letters and photographs all those years and showed Gore Vidal a snapshot of herself that had been in Jimmie’s wallet when he was killed. Laying it, curled and rounded, on the table as she and Vidal dined fifty years after the War, she explained that “It still follows the shape of his body.” Vidal could see. “There,” he noted, “on the dining room table in Willard’s Hotel, was the outline of the curve made by Jimmie’s buttock.”27 During the fiftieth reunion of Vidal’s class at St. Albans, one of the members of the class went to visit another who was institutionalized. When he mentioned Jimmie, Ted, (“whom Jimmie had bedded”) “sat up straight, and said, ‘Why, he was just here. He just now left. If you hurry, you can find him in the hall.’”28 Such was Jimmie Trimble’s hold on the imaginations of those who had known him.
As for Gore Vidal, from that day he last saw him “and left Jimmie to time and chance,”29 his world never again was the same. He would think of him the rest of his life. Hanging on the wall beside his bed was a life-size reproduction of a portrait of Jimmie as a teenager. Now and then, Jimmie would appear to him in visions, as “completely present, as he had been in the bedroom of Merrywood”: Jimmie “opened his blue eyes and smiled and yawned and put his hand alongside my neck.”30 And “for years, whenever I was in a numinous place like Delphi or Delos, I would address the night: Jimmie, are you anywhere? And almost always the wind would rise.”31 Late in his life, Vidal bought a small plot in Rock Creek Park Cemetery in Washington, D.C., just a few yards from where Jimmie Trimble lay in the shade of a copper beech. “Was there ever so furious and restless a ghost?” Gore Vidal asks in his memoirs, “or is it that we, the survivors, are so traumatized to this day by his abrupt absence from our lives that we are still trying to summon his ghost?”32
Looking back from the vantage point of his seventh decade, Vidal realized that when he knew Jimmie Trimble, he was whole “for what proved to be the last time ...I not only never again encountered the other half, but by the time I was twenty-five, I had given up all pursuit, settling for a thousand brief anonymous adhesions ... Quite enough, I think if the real thing has happened.”33
“I am neither a believer in an afterlife nor a mystic,” Vidal wrote further in his memoirs, “and unlike Santayana, I cannot begin to imagine what it must be like. Yet I still want Jimmie to be, somewhere, if only on this page.”34 And indeed he was. Jimmie appears time and again, in one guise or another, in many of Vidal’s novels, The Season of Comfort, Washington, D.C., Two Sisters, The City and the Pillar, The Judgment of Paris, The Smithsonian Institution, and throughout his memoir Palimpsest.
Vidal’s emergence as a prominent author had been all but instantaneous. He graduated from Exeter in June of 1943, entered the Enlisted Reserve Corps of the Army the next month, became the first mate of an army supply ship in the Aleutians, and on his night watches began drafting in pencil in an accounts book his first novel. He completed his book nine months later. Williwaw—an Eskimo term for the violent storms that bore down on the Bering Sea—was based on his own military experience in the Aleutians, published in 1946 by Dutton, and hailed as one of the first war novels, and by a nineteen year old author, no less. Vidal immediately assumed a place among those perceived as the next generation of American literary lions.
“With the finishing of this book, my life as a writer began.”35 Books tumbled out of him. The next year, he published In a Yellow Wood, a coming-of-age novel in which the main character had to choose between a predictable life and an unconventional lifestyle, perhaps reflecting the tensions Vidal was feeling between the pull of a political life—following in the path of his grandfather Senator Thomas Gore—or a more bohemian, literary life. (“I ... was brought up by a politician grandfather in Washington, D.C. and I wanted very much to be a politician, too. Unfortunately, nature had designed me to be a writer. I had no choice in the matter.”)36 Whatever its origins, it was a minor book Vidal later in his life would call his “worst novel.”37
His next more than made up for this lackluster performance. Published less than a year later, on January 10, 1948, The City and the Pillar was dedicated “For the memory of J.T.”, and was, as Vidal described it, a novel in which he described what might have happened had he and Jimmie met again after the War. Vidal knew he was moving into uncharted, dangerous territory with this book. “I knew that my description of the love affair between two normal all-American boys of the sort that I had spent three years with in the wartime army would challenge every superstition about sex in my native land.”38 After he read the new novel, Orville Prescott, the influential book reviewer for the New York Times, told Vidal’s editor that he would never again read, much less review, a book by Vidal. The Times refused to advertise it, as did all major newspapers and magazines. “In freedom’s land,” Vidal wrote years later in describing the shock caused by his new novel, “what ought not to be is not and must be blacked out.”39 But within two weeks of publication, The City and the Pillar was riding the New York Times best seller list along with Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and a triumphant twenty-two-year-old Vidal was off to Rome.
There, at a dinner party in February, he met and befriended the famed thirty-seven-year-old playwright, Tennessee Williams, whose A Streetcar Named Desire was then a national sensation and a year later would win a Pulitzer Prize. The two traveled around Italy in an old Jeep that Tennessee had bought, and Gore remembered never laughing so much with anyone in his life.
From Rome, the two friends in April drove to Paris where “there were Bellow and Mailer and Capote and Baldwin and Bowles, while Tennessee and I shared a floor of the small Hotel de L’Universite”.40
This amazing assemblage of young authors eager to experience Europe after the War was soon augmented by the arrival of Christopher Isherwood, who, with Bill Caskey, landed at Le Havre on April 22. They immediately made their way to Paris, past the many reminders of the War—”small military graveyards, smashed houses, provisional half-rebuilt bridges over which the train moved cautiously”—straight to the Rue du Bac to Peter Watson’s flat to see Denny.41
It was a Saturday evening, April 24, 1948. Christopher recorded his thoughts in his diary:
It is a huge shabby place with traces of the splendor of his pre-1939 period, in which he leads a nocturnal Proustian life with the tattered curtains always drawn. He lies most of the day in bed, with Trotsky and the pipe at his side, reading and dozing, often eating nothing but a plate of cooked cereal. When he can’t afford opium, he drinks a kind of tea made of the dross, which gives him stomach cramps. He is as pale as a corpse, but quite unchanged, slim as ever, and a sort of waxen beauty. He did not seem at all vague or stupefied, as [Bill] Harris had told us and he welcomed us both warmly. He is liable to be thrown out of the apartment before long, and doesn’t know where he’ll go.42
Denny introduced Isherwood and Caskey to some young French friends who were there that evening. Writing in another diary entry thirty years later, Isherwood described the scene: “They began what sounded like a parody of Frenchified intellectual conversation. One of them made a sneering reference to those dupes who believe in a life after death. What I can still hear as I write this [three decades later] is the withering tone in which Denny silenced him, exclaiming, ‘You little fool!’ Denny’s scorn was quite uncannily impressive. It was as if he knew.”43
The next day, Isherwood and Caskey were sitting in the Café les Deux Magots when Gore Vidal walked by, recognized Isherwood, and stopped to introduce himself. Earlier in the year, Vidal had sent him an advance copy of The City and the Pillar seeking an endorsement, and the famed author had praised it. When he sat down to talk, Gore asked Christopher advice on how to manage his writing career, and the two struck up a friendship that would last for years, each appreciating the other’s sense of humor. (Both later admitted that in this first encounter, each felt the other was flirting, but neither made the first move, then or ever.)
The next evening and the next, Isherwood, Caskey, and Vidal dined together. It was that second evening that this group joined up with John Lehmann, Isherwood’s publisher; through Isherwood’s introduction, Vidal had engaged Lehmann as his English publisher. As Vidal described him, he had “a tiger’s grin, liked to call people Ducky” and “sexually, it was his pleasure to beat working-class boys; otherwise, he lived a life of perfect domestic virtue ...”44
After dinner, the friends took Vidal to 44 Rue du Bac to visit Denny, into that room with the great bed and the “magnificent Tchelitchev painting hanging over it.”45
Vidal noted that “Denham’s legendary beauty was not visible to me.”46 This may have been because Denny was the anti-Jimmie. If Jimmie was the all-American boy next door, then Denny was a walking orgasm. Gore saw Denny as “very pale, with dark lank Indian hair and blank dark eyes, usually half shut: ... He was slender and boyish, with a markedly asymmetrical face.”47
Gore sat on the side of Denny’s bed with John Lehmann, with Trotsky sprawled on the other side. Denny went through his ritualistic ceremony of preparing his opium pipe, “inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly blue medicinal-smelling smoke.”48 Trotsky greedily inhaled the smoke.
“Here,” he said to Gore, handing him the long opium pipe.
Gore protested that he couldn’t even inhale cigarette smoke, but, good guest that he was, gave it a try, had a “coughing fit” and was “deathly ill.”49 Other than politely offering his visitors a chance to smoke, Denny never pressed anyone to keep trying. As Isherwood remembered the evening, “he let us all take puffs at the pipe, scolding us for our awkwardness and saying we should never make real smokers. It tasted like incense and had no apparent effect whatsoever.”50 As the others watched, Denny continued his ritual, his eyes half shut, then closed, and then, after a while, began to speak, his lulling voice now a run-on jumble of a monologue of people and places and thoughts:
“Cyril was just here. His first trip to Paris since the war. Peter and I took him to a restaurant down the street where he ordered a huge lunch—he’s very fat and greedy, you know—and he ate it all up very fast and then he ordered a second lunch and ate that, too. Then he fainted. The waiters carried him back here and put him over there on the floor. I want to meet Truman Capote. I have his picture here.”51
The Life magazine with the famous photograph of the young Capote rested under one of Denny’s opium pipes. Gore told Denny he was sure they would get along.
Denny continued: “I’ve just had a telegram from Prince Paul—only he’s King Paul now. We lived together—well, traveled a lot together before the war, but then he had to get married to Frederika and so we stopped seeing each other because I was living in Santa Monica by then anyway and working in that bookshop and seeing Chris and Gerald . . .”52
Fascinated by what he was hearing, Gore was skeptical. Were all the names, all these stories, a result of the opium haze? As he soon learned, Denham never had to fabricate or embellish.
It was a few days later, on April 29, when the group met Denny for cocktails at the Ritz. Isherwood described Denny as looking like “Dorian Gray emerging from the tomb—death-pale and very slim in his dark elegant suit, with black hat and umbrella. He looks like the Necropolitan ambassador.”53 After he sat down, Denny asked Bill Caskey to take some money and get a package of opium from a “connection” who was waiting outside the restaurant. Isherwood thought this request outrageous and refused to let Caskey go, afraid the police could be watching the pusher and that Caskey would be arrested. He felt that Denny’s suggestion “was an entirely characteristic act of aggression.”54 (After Christopher left Paris at the end of April, Denny sent him a letter: “I hope you and Billy will go on being as happy as you seem to be.” Isherwood noted that “Denny obviously didn’t hope it.”)55
Isherwood found that Denny seemed to be quite himself, not in the least “depressed or debauched or down-at-hell.” But his stomach cramps may have been acting up that evening for he merely picked at the caviar and watched the others eat “with an air of controlled distaste, as though our addiction to solid food were a far more squalid vice than his. Now and then, his manner became a trifle vague, but his wit was as sharp as ever.”56
(This dinner found its way into “Paul,” Isherwood’s chapter about Denny in Down There on a Visit. In “Paul,” Christopher, the narrator, goes to visit Paul in Paris at his apartment on the Rue du Bac. Propped up in bed, “he was corpse-white, and his face looked as though it had the firmness of hard wax and was semitransparent. There was an air about him of being somehow preserved and, at the same time, purified: his skin seemed to be absolutely without blemish. Indeed, he was marvelously, uncannily beautiful. He wore a heavy skiing sweater over pajamas. Gigi lay on the bed at his feet.”57 Paul told Christopher that he used opium and said, “I hear you’ve been working in the movies a lot lately, so perhaps you can give me some money?” Paul proposed that they go for dinner at The Ritz. “The Paul who appeared that evening had a sinister, sepulchral elegance; Dorian Gray arisen from the tomb. He wore a perfectly tailored black suit with a black hat and a neatly rolled umbrella. Gigi was at his heels.” He ate only caviar. Again, he asked Christopher for money to buy opium, and Christopher gave him thirty thousand francs.)58
Gore had read in that day’s paper that King Paul of Greece had pneumonia, and as the evening wore down, he mentioned this to Denny.
“I must send him a telegram,” Denny said, and together, Gore and Denny located on St. Germain a Western Union office still open and Denny sent the telegram.
The day after the telegram was sent, Denny showed Gore the reply telegram he received from King Paul:
“Darling Denham, so wonderful to hear from you. Why haven’t I heard from you before? Much exaggerated about my illness ... Love, Paul.”59
Gore realized at that moment that all of Denny’s stories were true.
By then, Vidal was visiting Denny regularly. (Isherwood wrote in his memoirs that “Denny treats Gore with the slightly sarcastic tolerance of an elder uncle.”60) “At sundown,” Vidal recalled, “like Dracula, Denham would appear in the streets leading his dog down St.-Germain-des-Prés.”61 Here, certainly, was a character in search of an author, and Vidal, consciously or not, filed in his memory-bank his encounters with Denny. It was not long, just two years, before Denny appeared in his fiction.
It was in the summer of 1950 when Vidal was twenty-four. He had just bought “Edgewater,” a Greek revival mansion on the Hudson River in Dutchess County, New York, ninety miles from New York City, a home that has often been regarded as one of the most beautiful in the United States. It was built in 1820 for a member of the Livingston family, a Palladian villa with a monumental classical portico of six massive two-story Doric columns on the river side, and a lawn that rolled one-hundred-fifty feet down to ancient weeping willows which lined the water’s edge. The home had its drawbacks. The mansion had been deserted for years and needed every imaginable repair, its lawns had grown waist high, and worst of all, the New York Central’s railroad tracks ran twenty-five yards behind the house, with trains rumbling by each hour. But the River was a mile wide there and the sound of the wind waves drifted through the open French doors, and the views of the Catskill Mountains, purple in the distance, were magical. With a ten thousand dollar mortgage and six thousand dollars borrowed from family members, it was his, and Gore moved in in July of 1950.
The book he wrote in the soaring twenty-six foot high octagonal library at Edgewater was The Judgment of Paris, a book he always regarded as one of his favorites and sometimes called his best book, “the novel in which I found my own voice.”62 This picaresque novel centers on the wanderings of Philip Warren, a twenty-eight-year-old American, a graduate of Harvard Law School, who travels around Italy, France, and Egypt after the Second World War, just as Vidal visited Rome, Paris, and Cairo in 1948 and 1949. One of the characters Philip encounters in Paris is Jim. Vidal later confirmed that this Jim was the same Jim Willard from The City and the Pillar, who was based on Jimmie Trimble, only now Jimmie had morphed into Denny. “High romantics who fall from the heights make very good drug addicts. I suppose, unconsciously, I was grafting onto him ...some characteristics of a marvelous southern whore named Denham Fouts.”63
How close to the mark was Vidal’s portrayal of Denny as Jim in The Judgment of Paris? Who better to assess his accuracy than Denny’s friend, Michael Wishart, who characterized as “brilliant” Vidal’s vignette of Denham, with Denny appearing in the novel “very much in character.”64 As Vidal sat on the side of Denny’s bed, as he dined with him, the young author was exploring the thoughts of so strange a character, gathering material, and the essence of their conversations found their way into this novel.
In The Judgment of Paris, Philip Warren when in Paris meets Jim, with his “low Southern voice” and “slow engaging smile,” and, dressed “like a conservative schoolboy in dark grey trousers and a sports coat,” just as Denny dressed. Vidal gives this character “golden hair and dark blue eyes,” essentially fusing Jimmie Trimble’s physical characteristics onto Denny. Jim invites Philip to join him the next evening at an outdoor café. They meet, and in a coming storm, Jim takes Philip to his apartment where the bedroom is very much like Denny’s with “a large carved bed of dark wood with four posters” in the center of the room and on the mantle “unframed drawings of Tchelichew and Picasso,” and outside the window, the same courtyard where Michael Wishart heard the rain on the gravel when he awoke with Denny.
Gathering through their conversation the nature of Jim’s profession, Philip, curious, begins inquiring about his lifestyle, whether he likes the men he is with.
“I don’t like any of them.”
“They like you.”
“Yes ... funny, isn’t it? I’ve often wondered why.”65
Men with extraordinary looks often cannot recognize or understand the power of their own attraction, and this was the case with Denny. He knew he was beautiful, but as Jim says in the story, anyone could “get a better-looking piece of flesh with a bigger thing for a dollar in any street in this town.”66 Jim’s aura of attraction is clearly something more, which mystifies him and fascinates Phillip, what accounts for that instantaneous flash of magic that inexorably draws others to him so that they look at him with thirsty eyes and became fixated on him.
Philip asks Jim about payment for his services. Jim explains that it’s not just the money. “I get everything,” he said, waving his hand around to encompass the apartment and all that was in it, including the drawings. “One old guy settled a hundred a month on me for life ...Get property ...that’s the thing. So many kids, when they start in, just go around chiseling drinks until they get fat and nobody wants them anymore. But I get cash if I can ... or jewelry or pictures. I’ve learned a lot about painting these last few years. I once spotted a phony Degas some old guy tried to get me to take.”67
Philip clearly is intrigued.
“You make the deal in advance?” he asked.
“I’m not that crude. I get things without asking. That’s what I mean when I say I don’t know what it is that they see. I’ve often thought that if I knew what it was, I’d really be able to cash in.”68
Philip—here perhaps Vidal himself—gives his theory of the power of Jim’s/Denny’s appeal: “I suspect,” said Philip, “that the fact you don’t know may be your charm. Self-consciousness often produced great art but I doubt if many find it a loveable trait, in others. The secret to wide popularity is a kind of mysterious negativity ... something that can’t be imitated. Not that I mean you’re actually negative, or mysterious (though you may, for all I know, be both), but you give that appearance.”69
As they talk and drink more Pernod, Jim asks Philip if he likes boys. When Philip answers no, and, upon the next question—”not even once, in school?”—responds no, Jim then inquires “would you like to?” to which Philip responds no, that he’s too old to change his habits, and upon further pressing—”you wouldn’t like to try?”—declines again the invitation.
They discuss their theories of what men and women are looking for in relationships, and Jim concludes by saying “Damned if I know. I haven’t got any theory. All I know is that it’s one thing to love somebody and another thing to have sex with somebody you don’t know or don’t care about, the way I do all the time.”70 Jim continues: “I suppose I’ve been mauled as much as anybody can be but in spite of all that I think it’s possible to care about one person and to forget the acrobatics and think just of him and not the two bodies. But I suppose I’m romantic because I’m just a whore and know how little sex has to do with loving.”71
The rain has stopped and the two go across the street for dinner.
“They got wonderful snails across the street,” Jim said.
“I don’t like snails.”
“Have you ever tried any?”
“No.”
“Well, how do you know?” They both laughed.72
After dinner, Jim takes Philip back to his apartment, “just for a moment ... I have to practice my vice.”73
From a cabinet Jim takes “a yard-long wooden pipe, brightly decorated with Moorish designs,” and a thin metal spoon in which he places a single dark pellet and heats it over a Bunsen burner, then pours the heated residue into the pipe, inhaling “so deeply and so long that his face grew red and his eyes stared. Then, slowly, he exhaled a cloud of smoke. Oh, that’s good stuff,” he said happily, smiling at Philip. That’s better than anything I know.’”74 He inhales and holds several more times, then hands the pipe to Philip . Like Vidal with Denny, Philip explains to Jim that he doesn’t smoke and doesn’t know how to inhale.
“Well, it won’t work if you can’t inhale,” agreed Jim. “Anyway you ate the snails. That’s enough for one night.”
“How do you feel?” asked Philip, curiously.
“Like I’m dreaming ... a little like a dream of flying.”
“Better than love?”
“Wouldn’t you rather fly than make love?”
“Any day.”
“This way I feel like I’m doing both.”
“Shall I go?”
“Oh, no ...not yet. Stay with me until I’m way gone. It won’t be long.”
Jim lays down on the massive bed, patting the edge of the bed for Philip. Like Gore sitting on Denny’s bed, Philip sits on Jim’s bed as he talks. “But then when he was sure that the other was no longer conscious of him, he got quickly to his feet and, blowing out the paper lantern, he left the apartment.”75
Jim appears one more time in The Judgment of Paris, in a haunting scene written in Joycean stream of consciousness style to recreate Jim’s thoughts on an opium trip. Like Denny, Jim has been in a sanitarium and received shock treatments to try to cure him of his addiction, and has been warned by his doctors that his addiction will prove fatal. In this scene, he returns to his apartment after a party, takes out his opium pipe, which is hidden away, finds his last pellet of opium, prepares it, and smokes it. Vidal takes the reader into Jim’s dream-like state, learned no doubt through questioning Denny, of drifting, “to the nightmare world of the ceiling across which he must journey, occasionally floating, sometimes running, other times struggling to move even a hand, a finger, as the dreary shadows held him tight above the room, embraced his body with a loving greed, draining it of will and memory ...”76 Two friends come to visit Jim while he is high and, walking into his apartment and seeing him on the bed, are not sure if he is unconscious or dead. Feeling a pulse, they pull a blanket over him, turn off his Bunsen burner and leave, as he drifts in his haze: “Where was he going? he wondered lazily, as layer after layer of darkness opened to receive him.”77 It is not clear if this is Jim’s final trip, but the certainty of death hangs over this scene.
Denny’s role in The Judgment of Paris is of a minor, secondary character, one of the unusual specimens the narrator meets in his youthful wanderings. It is in one of Vidal’s early short stories that a character based on Denham Fouts plays a more pivotal role.
In his memoirs published in 1995, Vidal reveals that he never kept a diary or journal, no record of his days other than “thirteen green pages of notes from 1961 and a diary kept for a month or two in 1948.”78 The notes from 1961 concerned his encounters with President John F. Kennedy in his first year in office, a time when Vidal, who had unsuccessfully run for Congress the year before, still harbored political ambitions; in short, encounters he realized at the time were of special interest and importance. Why would he keep a diary for several months in 1948, the only other time in a very active life during which he kept contemporaneous notes of daily events? Their significance deepens because these were the only pages he would not give to his biographer and are, in fact, the only pages among all of his papers given to the University of Wisconsin, and then transferred to Harvard, to be sealed until “after my death or the Second Coming, whichever comes first.”79 Certainly this year, 1948, was, in Vidal’s estimation, an “annus mirabilis” as he called it—a bestseller to his credit, his emergence as a personality, meeting such famed authors as Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Bowles, E.M. Forester, Truman Capote—so it would be natural for him to be recording his experiences and thoughts in a journal. But these are not the sorts of jottings to be kept secret.
Clues to this mystery may well be found in a short story Vidal wrote in 1956 in that octagonal library at Edgewater with its views of the gardens and the Hudson and the Catskills. “Pages From an Abandoned Journal” (certainly the title of the story is intriguing: pages from a diary begun in 1948 and put aside after two months) was published in a collection of his short stories written between 1948 and 1956, titled A Thirsty Evil.
The story opens with the narrator’s journal entry for April 30, 1948. (It would be interesting if Vidal’s diary fragment from 1948 started on that exact date, which was, in fact, five days after Vidal met Christopher Isherwood, and three days after he first met Denham Fouts.) Peter, an American from Toledo, Ohio (representative, perhaps, of the norm, of middle America) in Paris working on his doctorate on Nero and the Civil Wars, has been at a bar the night before where he “told everyone off” and apparently rebuffed the advances of Steven, another patron at the bar. “I said I wasn’t interested, that I didn’t mind what other people did, etc., just as long as they left me alone, that I was getting married in the fall when I got back to the states (WRITE HELEN) and that I don’t go in for any of that, never did and never will. I also told him in no uncertain terms that it’s very embarrassing for a grown man to be treated like some idiot girl surrounded by a bunch of seedy, middle-aged Don Juans trying to get their hooks into her ...him.”80
To Peter’s surprise, Steven calls the next morning and invites him to a party at Elliott Magren’s apartment. Elliott Magren is the Denham Fouts character in this short story, and, appropriately enough, lives on the Rue du Bac, just as Denny did. Peter is curious about Elliott, who is “already a legend in Europe,”81 and so decides to go to the party.
When Peter arrives at the apartment at ten-thirty that night, Steven greets him at the door—”The beautiful Peter!”—and shows him through the four large rooms of the apartment to the last room, where Elliott, dressed, lays on a big bed surrounded by pillows. The room is dimly lit by lamps with red shades, and over the bed hangs a painting of a nude man, “the work of a famous painter I’d never heard of.”82 In the room with Steven and Peter are a dozen other men, middle-aged, in expensive suits. Steven introduces Peter to Elliott, who shakes his hand and pulls him next to him on the bed, and asks if he wants to smoke opium. Peter told him no, he doesn’t use drugs.
Peter doesn’t find this legend to be unusually handsome, certainly not movie star glamorous as he had expected. “He is about five foot ten and weighs about a hundred sixty pounds. He has dark, straight hair that falls over his forehead; his eyes were black. The two sides of his face don’t match, like Oscar Wilde’s. Because of drugs, he is unnaturally pale.”83 That description matches Vidal’s description in his memoirs of his first meeting with Denny. In fact, Vidal’s depiction of Elliott in this short story so closely matches Denham Fouts that it seems a fair assumption that the story follows closely what Denny told the author about the start of his career.
In “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” Elliott grew up in Galveston, Texas and at sixteen was befriended by a German baron who spotted him on the beach and took him to Berlin. In a parenthetical remark in the short story, Peter raises the sort of question that surrounds Denny’s life story: “I always wonder about details in a story like this: what did his parents say about a stranger walking off with their son? Was there a scene? Did they know what was going on?”84 Elliott spends several years with the baron, then has a fight and begins walking from Berlin to Munich when a limousine pulls over and an old Egyptian shipping magnate in the back seat invites Elliott into the car and ends up taking him on his yacht for a cruise of the Mediterranean. In Naples, Elliott and a Greek sailor on the yacht steal several thousand dollars from the old man, jump ship, and make their way to Capri where they stay at the most expensive hotel. In the short story, the sailor leaves, Elliott can’t pay his bills and is about to be led off to jail “when Lord Glenellen, who was just checking into the hotel, saw him and told the police to let him go, that he would pay his bill ...”85
Lord Glenellen takes Elliott to England, just as Evan Morgan, Lord Tredegar, saved Denny from arrest in Capri and took him on a world tour and then home to Tredegar House. In the short story, Elliott, moving in higher aristocratic circles, meets Prince Basil and lives with him until he becomes King Basil. In Denny’s life, it was Prince Paul who became King Paul. When war threatens Europe, Elliott goes to California where he tries to “get interested in Vedanta and tries to stop taking drugs and lead a quiet ... if not normal ... life,” just as Denny went to California, stayed with Christopher Isherwood, studied Vedanta, and entered college.86 After the War, Elliott returns to Paris and the Rue du Bac, as did Denny.
As they sit together on the bed, Steven brings Elliott his opium pipe. Elliott lights up and begins to talk. “I can’t remember a word he said. I was aware, though, that this was probably the most brilliant conversation I’d ever heard. It might have been the setting which was certainly provocative or maybe I’d inhaled some of the opium which put me in a receptive mood but, no matter the cause, I sat listening to him, fascinated, not wanting him to stop.”87 So Gore sat on Denny’s bed, listening, absorbing.
With his eyes shut (the opium made them sensitive to the light), Elliott asks Peter about himself. Peter tells him about growing up in Toledo, Ohio, his work at Columbia for his doctorate, his plans to marry Helen and teach—in short, his plans for a normal, all-American life—”but as I talked I couldn’t help but think how dull my life must sound to Elliott. I cut it short. I couldn’t compete with him,” and then Peter adds, “and didn’t want to.”88 Here is a first subtle sign that Peter finds his new acquaintance of special interest.
In his entry of May 25, 1948, Peter is at the beach at Deauville with Hilda, a high school friend from Toledo who he met in Paris and with whom he has begun an affair, although “having sex with her is about the dullest pastime I can think of.”89 Elliott appears, walking down the beach in crimson swim trunks and sunglasses, and Peter notices “with surprise how smooth and youthful his body was, like a boy.”90 Is Elliott there by chance, or by design? That night they had first met in Elliott’s bedroom, Elliott had asked Peter “if I’d see him some evening alone, and I said I would like to but ...and this was completely spur of the moment ...I said I was going to Deauville the next day, with a girl.”91 Is Peter afraid of being alone with Elliott? Does he want to confirm to Elliott, and to himself, that he is straight? Has Elliott followed Peter there?
Two days later, Peter and Hilda see Elliott again at the hotel where they are staying, though now in tow was a fourteen-year-old boy Elliott introduces to them. The next morning, after Hilda leaves for Paris, Peter knocks on Elliott’s door, as Elliott has asked him to do, to meet him and go with him to the beach. In the room, Elliott and the fourteen year old are sitting on the floor, naked, working on assembling a Meccano erector set, the blueprints and parts spread about them. “The boy who was the color of a terra-cotta pot gave me a wicked grin.”92 From this description, it seems that Vidal had met Gerard at Denny’s apartment, or at least had heard all about him—the teenager Denny had met on a beach in Brittany, taken by his resemblance to himself. That “wicked grin” mirrors Michael Wishart’s description of Gerard’s “wide, violet, conqueror’s eyes.” Vidal had realized right away when he met Denny that Denny “was at his best with pubescent boys.”93
Elliott and the teenager put on swim trunks and, together, the three walk to the beach where the teenager goes off on his own. “I asked Elliott if this sort of thing wasn’t very dangerous and he said yes it probably was but life was short and he was afraid of nothing, except drugs. He told me then that he had had an electrical shock treatment at a clinic shortly before I’d first met him. Now, at last, he was off opium and he hoped it was a permanent cure ... Then when I asked him if he always went in for young boys he said yes and made a joke about how, having lost all memory of his own childhood, he would have to live out a new one with some boy.”94
A pivotal point in the short story, and perhaps in Vidal’s life, is revealed in the entry from the abandoned journal for May 29, 1948. It is evening; Andre, the fourteen-year-old boy, has gone home to his family. Peter and Elliott are having dinner together on the hotel’s terrace overlooking the sea. (In an oral history, Vidal spoke of dining with Denny a number of times after their first meeting in Denny’s bedroom.) The two characters in the story begin to reveal more about themselves to each other:
Eating fresh sole from the Channel, I told Elliott all about Jimmie, told him things I myself had nearly forgotten, had wanted to forget. I told him how it had started at twelve and gone on, without plan or thought or even acknowledgement until, at seventeen, I went to the Army and he to the Marines and a quick death. After the Army, I met Helen and forgot him completely; his death, like Elliott’s shock treatment, took with it all memory, a thousand summer days abandoned on a coral island.95
Here again, in a style reminiscent of Hemingway’s reliance on what is left out of a story, what is not told, to give it emotional depth, is the Jimmie Trimble story. Gore already had told Tennessee Williams all about Jimmie, and Christopher Isherwood’s diaries from these days reveal that Vidal had told him of his love for Jimmie.96 That he would share this story with Denny when they were together hints at the intimacies of their conversation.
Finishing his story, Peter wonders why he had told Elliott, feeling as if he had said too much: why was he telling his new acquaintance that which revealed the innermost secrets he had not accepted himself? Elliott contemplated silently what he had heard, then spoke to Peter “about life and duty to oneself and how the moment is all one has and how it is dishonorable to cheat oneself of that.” Peter thinks about this “strange disjointed speech.” As he writes in his journal: “I’m not sure that he said anything very useful or very original but sitting there in the dark, listening, his words had a peculiar urgency for me and I felt, in a way, that I was listening to an oracle . . .”97
Could this be the turning point when Peter/Gore came to grips with their own identity, their own sexuality, who they were? Could Denny have had this sort of impact on Gore’s life?
In the short story’s journal entry three days later, June 1, 1948, we learn that Elliott has been arrested. Young Andre has stolen his camera; Andre’s parents find the camera and ask where he got it; under threats from them, Andre tells his parents that Elliott has tried to seduce him. A gendarme comes to Peter while he was sitting on the hotel’s terrace and tells him that Elliott Magren has asked him to visit him in jail, and then questions him about what he knows about Mr. Magren, looking at him suspiciously. “It was only too apparent what his opinion of me was: another pederast americain. My voice shook and my throat dried up as I told him I hardly knew Elliott ... I’d only just met him ... I knew nothing about his private life.”98 In his journal entry for this day, Peter records the events as if from a distance. “All I wanted was to get away from Deauville, from Elliott, from the crime ... and it was a crime, I’m sure of that.”99 Frightened, Peter immediately packs his bags and that day returns to Paris. “I’m not proud of my cowardice but I didn’t want to be drawn into something I hardly understood.”100 Several days later, he records in his diary that Steven told him how Elliott had contacted a friend who was a lawyer, the charges were dropped, perhaps through a payment, and Elliott is staying in Deauville for another week “doubtless to be near Andre.”101
The journal’s next entry is dated December 26, 1953: almost six years have elapsed. Peter is now in New York City, hung-over from a Christmas party where an English playwright he met had “made the biggest play for me,” though, Peter notes, he wasn’t at all attractive.102 Peter is now an antiques dealer; he has sold to Steven a Queen Anne desk for his new apartment where Peter went with Steven after the party. There, Steven questions Peter about Bob and his break-up with Bob. At first it seems as if this concerns the break-up of a business arrangement, but the context makes it clear that it is also the break-up of a personal relationship. “Well, I’m out of it and any day now I’ll meet somebody ...though it’s funny how seldom you see anyone who’s really attractive. There was a nice young Swede at Steven’s but I never did get his name and anyway he is being kept by that ribbon clerk from the Madison Avenue Store.”103 Clearly, Peter in the intervening years has come out.
The next day, the narrator goes to a tea at the home of Mrs. Blaine-Smith, an important patron to whom he has sold a Hepplewhite sofa and a lot of other antiques. Another guest at the tea party is an Italian count “who was terribly nice though unattractive”104; the two exchange stories about their times in Europe after World War II. “Then, as always, the name Elliott Magren was mentioned. He’s practically a codeword ... if you know Elliott, well, you’re on the inside and of course the Count (as I’d expected all along) knew Elliott and we exchanged bits of information about him, skirting carefully drugs and small boys.” The two talk about Elliott’s apartment “and that marvelous Tchelichew [note how Peter now knows the artist’s name] that hangs over his bed” when another of the guests, an Englishman, tells them that Elliott Magren has died the week before. The Count is visibly upset, and Peter wonders if he had been one of Elliott’s lovers.
And then a stunner: Peter writes in his journal: “I couldn’t help recalling then that terrible time at Deauville when Elliott was arrested and I had to put up bail for him and hire a lawyer, all in French!”105 “I”? This Peter had not been able to admit, even in his journal, as those events unfolded almost six years before: that it was he who thought enough of Elliott, who was close enough to Elliott, to come to his rescue.
The news of Elliott’s death brings back to Peter memories of those months in 1948: “what an important summer that was, the chrysalis burst at last. . .”106
In itself, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal” would not be a memorable short story, certainly not one that would have found its way into an anthology of the best short stories of the decade, or even one that would be remembered long after it is read. Nevertheless, its an intriguing story that may be read on a number of levels. It is a subtly unfolding, finely wrought coming-of-age story of Peter’s awakening to his sexuality, his identity, with Elliott perhaps as a catalyst who opened his eyes—the oracle—to the importance of being true to oneself, of the importance of the moment. This story adheres so closely to the details of Denny’s life that it perhaps is not a reckless leap to conclude that it is a close transcription of the secret pages from Vidal’s journal locked away with his papers at Harvard. In all of his voluminous and often introspective writings, Vidal never analyzes his transformation from the man at the Christmas party at Mrs. Shippen’s Dancing School that December in 1942, telling Jimmie Trimble of his plans to marry Rosalind while “coming simultaneously” with Jimmie in the basement men’s room stall, to the man who lived with Howard Austen from 1952 until his partner’s death in 2003. Did Vidal’s encounters with Denham Fouts hold the key to his own awakening, the time when his own “chrysalis burst”? Certainly the year 1948, the year he repeatedly called that “annus mirabilis,” a time when “those of us who had missed our youth tried to catch up,”107 had a special meaning in his life. If so, this quiet short story may someday be viewed as a key to Gore Vidal’s life story, and as a nonfiction chronicle of Denham Fouts.