The descent down the hazardous rocky decline from the lawn at Merrywood to the banks of the Potomac he found both exhilarating and frightening. The river ran swiftly, especially in bad weather, white water breaking around small snags and islands. Warned never to swim in it, he was attracted to the river then and later in lifelong dreams that had a touch of nightmare to them, the descent “to the swift mud-brown, swirling river—going faster and faster, ecstatically unable to stop until the dream’s end.” The river was excitement, escape. Standing grandly on the high bluff, Merrywood was dull, problematic, philistine. The morning of his first night there, in mid-October 1935, he found his mother, wrapped in a dark-gray silk dressing gown, sitting on a step of the main staircase below the bedrooms. Probably, as always, she was smoking. This time she was flicking the ashes of dissatisfaction. During her nuptial night she had seen the abyss. Her complacency and self-confidence had been shaken. Sex with Hugh Auchincloss was a disaster. Could she face a lifetime of that? “Would you like us both to leave here and go back to live with your father?” she asked. Stunned, he mumbled that they had just arrived. Nina, according to her son, soon raised with Gene Vidal the possibility of a reconciliation. He politely declined. She later widely reported that he had asked her to return to him, an offer she had declined because young Gene had stated that he preferred the advantages of life at Merrywood. She may have meant that she herself preferred them. Soon she learned to cope with Hugh’s inadequacies as a lover. Eager for satisfaction, she found it in other places. Yusha, Hugh’s son by his first marriage, tactfully remarked that Nina “did some things which hurt my father a great deal, and I was very close to my father and I resented that.” Even young Gene came to sympathize with Hugh. Merrywood’s only practical disadvantage was that it kept him away from what he thought his true home, at Rock Creek Park. Like Aristodemos, he felt in exile from Athens.
At Merrywood, Nina had no need of her mother to take care of Gene. “We were brought up by servants. It was the servants you played games with,” servants such as Marguerite, Yusha’s French governess. “I had a black nurse called Annie, and there were the servants of the house like Maria, my mother’s maid. They kept us company.” It was far from all bad. Maria “was a wonderful Bavarian woman, a great deal of fun. She spoke with a heavy accent…. We used to have seltzer fights in the pantry, the two of us. She seemed a hundred to me. But she was about fifty.” Yusha’s governess, whom Gene adored, also found him grown-up enough to play games with, his sexual initiation, though Gore Vidal declines to say exactly what they did. Jealous, protective, sensing something erotic between Marguerite and Gene, Nina fired her. She also gradually cleaned out the servants inherited from Hugh’s first wife, including the Russian cook whose aromatic dishes Gene had found one of the most attractive aspects of Merrywood when he had first arrived. Also, she immediately began to have much of the house redecorated, her particular obsession a stunningly distinctive black-and-white art-deco recasting of her bathroom and bedroom. With Yusha, Gene battled for space and dominance. As at school, Gene wanted to be in charge. Yusha fought back. He had been there first. Gene was “a bully and invading my territory…. One day I got annoyed at him and punched him in the nose. Since that moment he became more respectful and we got along much better.”
With Nina, Gene began to assert himself. Tall, thin, strong for his age, “he couldn’t really be pushed around physically anymore.” Nina stopped slapping him. But she was still mercilessly critical. Why was she always making sacrifices, she wanted to know, for him and for others, all of whom were ungrateful? Why was he so selfish and inconsiderate? Why didn’t he mix more? Of what use was his reading, especially when he should be doing homework? Her complaints about everyone who did not measure up to her high standard of self-sacrifice were a regular part of life at Merrywood, including her good-humored comment every evening that Hugh’s huge stuffed-marlin trophy above the dining-room fireplace took away her appetite. Why couldn’t they get rid of that? When Liz Whitney gave Gene a toy Scottie, Nina claimed that the dog was a present for her. At Rock Creek Park there had been dogs, particularly a dalmatian given to Gene as a gift, but they could not get comfortable with one another: the dog scratched him badly. Also, any dog had to be kept out of the way of his blind grandfather. He immediately adored the toy Scottie, whom he named Wiggles. Nina, though, insisted that Wiggles was hers. To make the point, she brought him into her room at night. When he whined and scratched at the door, eager to be out, she became angry at the dog and at Gene. Soon she insisted that Wiggles be kept in a small pen behind the house. He was never allowed inside again. To Gene it seemed that Wiggles was being imprisoned, a victim of some of the same forces by which he himself was threatened.
By nature generous, amiable, fair, Hugh was a quiet man. He treated Gene well, especially with expensive presents. The first Christmas at Merrywood had a luxurious plenitude. The magnificent tree everyone helped decorate, the parties, the dinners, the mountain of gifts—all sharply contrasted with the modest Christmases at Rock Creek Park. The Great Depression’s widespread economic misery hardly touched even the consciousness, let alone the actuality, of Merrywood. It was a world in which capital was king, in which Roosevelt was the devil who would destroy their civilization, in which Jews were evil socialists, the Irish ignorant papists fit only to be servants, and blacks essentially unchangeable primitives one step above the jungle. It was a network of powerful people whose wealth and social prestige defined itself partly by its high sense of entitlement. What was most important was to protect wealth and property. Nina gladly shared Hugh’s high-Wasp life, and she brought to it, to her husband’s delight, her own family and connections. Merrywood became a social center, briefly. Though Hugh was “a quiet but sincere anti-Semite,” a few well-known Jews were invited, such as Walter Lippmann. Unmarried couples, like the journalist Arthur Krock and his lady, could come as long as they slept in separate rooms, though they were well known to be lovers. Appearances mattered. Senator Gore and his wife visited. Hugh was eager to have them: the Senator’s anti–Roosevelt, anti-New Deal populist conservatism had much in common with the right-wing politics of Merrywood.
In Nina’s hard-drinking world not to consume punishingly heavy amounts of alcohol would have been unusual. The son of one of Nina’s friends, Patrick Hurley, Hoover’s Secretary of War, remembered her drinking and her beauty. “In my society—northern Virginia, 1930s—a gentleman would consume in a day eight ounces of neat whiskey. You’d have highballs before supper, then drinking with dinner, and then drinks after dinner. These guys weren’t lushes, and the whole society accepted this. To see someone take two or four drinks was not exceptionable, and what was frowned upon was he who took so many drinks that he lost control of himself and got into contentious arguments or fights, or women who got emotional and stormed out of the house … that we would look upon as so-and-so drinks too much.” Even the more temperate Gores drank. The Senator enjoyed his two glasses of whiskey each evening. Mrs. Gore, more often than the Senator liked, drank too much at dinner and slurred her speech. The Senator’s two brothers, successful lawyers, were heavy drinkers. Nina had already mastered the trick of keeping her disposition sweet in public, though she had consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol, then showing the pernicious effects afterward, privately, with her family. Probably her adjustment to her sexually unsatisfying marriage included increasing her drinking. It soon became talked of as excessive. Mostly family and servants, though, were in the line of fire. Years later one of her close friends remarked to Nina’s son, “the thing I never could understand is that we would go to a party together and we would drink along with everybody else. I never saw her drunk at a party. Then I talked to her the next morning and she would say, ‘I’ve got a terrible hangover—call me later.’ … It was then I figured out that she got through the party without behaving disgracefully, then went home and drank a bottle. And started telephoning and denouncing everybody that she had a grudge against, a great trait of alcoholics.”
As the liquor flowed downstairs, Gene usually stayed in his attic bedroom with his toy soldiers. Over time Hugh added large numbers of them to a collection that eventually reached more than three thousand. To the usual Christmas presents of tennis rackets, baseball gloves, and guns he was indifferent. He mostly wanted books. The toy soldiers, which became a pleasurable, imaginative preoccupation, he would deploy “by the hour” in reenactments of historical and literary battles of the sort he read about in Sir Walter Scott or saw in movies, “inventing stories for them, mostly nonmartial.” In his mind now he could be an author himself, a writer like Scott, a creator of movie scripts like The Crusaders, imaginative extensions of what he read and saw, “an endless series of dramas.” The family dramas he desired to escape. Those of the imagination, endlessly triggered by the toy soldiers, he embraced. There were, occasionally, contiguous public dramas. In December 1936 the family gathered around the radio in Nina’s art deco bedroom to listen to the soon-to-be—Duke of Windsor’s abdication speech. Tears flowed. Soon they were happily listening to the radio account of George VI’s coronation. In the movie theaters, Pathé News provided memorable images of both occasions, grand spectacles of the sort Gene experienced in his attic theater with his own cast of thousands. Later he was to remark that though the Duke of Windsor, whom he knew in the exmonarch’s old age, “was of a stupidity more suitable to the pen of Wodehouse than of Shakespeare, he was to me forever glamorous because he had been artfully screened for me all my life, as had his family.” Leaving the Translux Theater with his father, he was riveted by a display in the lobby of a miniature version of the coronation coach and horses. He desperately wanted it. By necessity and temperament always careful with money, his father “made an insufficient offer to the manager of the theater. Later I acquired the coach through my stepfather.” It was a brilliant addition to his stage sets. Real and imaginative history merged.
The Pathé News of the Week movie camera turns. A blond ten-year-old and his father are standing beside a small, odd-looking airplane at Bolling Field, Washington. The boy wears short pants and a white polo shirt. The man is handsomely dressed, comfortable with the camera, a movie-star face. The boy’s nervousness shows, his full face and turned-up nose, his youthful complexion glowing in the camera’s black-and-white tones. The voice-over announces that the director of aeronautics has high hopes this prototype Hammond flivver will be the airplane of the future that everyone will own. Even a child can fly it. The dialogue begins. “We want to find out whether a ten-year-old youngster can handle it. What do you think?” Eagerly: “Sure, I’ll try it!” His back to the camera, the bare-legged boy climbs, crawls in, takes the pilot’s seat. His father follows. The camera closes on young Gene’s hands demonstrating the controls, his father beside him. Gene Vidal gets out. If he stays, everyone will think he has piloted the plane. It slowly glides down the runway. The camera moves in. The boy is at the wheel. As the plane lifts off the ground, the boy-pilot is visible, behind him the larger silhouette of another figure. The plane makes a turn, disappears from the camera’s eye, reappears, then descends, hitting the ground with a bump, then another, until it comes to a stop. The camera and his father greet the boy as he steps out. More dialogue. “What was it like?” “Easy.” Boy grins for a second at camera, more like an aborted smile. Cut. Camera stops. The next week in the movie houses of the nation audiences watched the Pathé News brief feature in the usual snippet of news-as-entertainment. “Ten Year Old Boy Flies Airplane.” Will Gene Vidal’s dream of everyman in the air come true? If everyone can afford a car, won’t everyone be able to afford a plane? Is a new era in flying about to dawn? The child watches himself on the screen at the Belasco Theatre.
On a warm Saturday afternoon in early May 1936 his father had picked him up at Friends School. As they drove off in Gene’s signature nondescript Plymouth, the streets smelled of melting asphalt, the landscape was bright with the lush greens of late spring. He was hardly surprised when they pulled up at Bolling Field; he had been there many times for flights in Gene’s small Commerce Department Stinson monoplane. On weekend days they would take pleasure trips around the Washington area, over the Maryland and Virginia countryside, regularly exhanging roles, one as navigator, the other pilot. They flew only in good weather, navigating done partly with gasoline-station road maps, mostly by sighting landmarks, following roads and railroad tracks. To the young boy it was now old hat, flying no longer a thrill. But this was to be different, not for them but for the camera. Suddenly he was excited, thrilled. The obsessive movie-watcher now realized he was about to have the chance to be in the movies. Imagining himself another Mickey Rooney, recently circumnavigating the globe as Puck in Max Reinhardt’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he too was about to fly into fame, so he allowed himself to fantasize. “‘Well, you want to be a movie actor,’” Gene said, “‘so here’s your chance. All you have to do is remember to take off into the wind.’” As they parked, his father explained what he wanted him to do: take off, circle once, land, then answer a few questions. When asked what it was like to fly the Hammond flivver, he must stick to the script: “It was just like riding a bicycle.” At the field, the plane waited. So too the camera and movie crew directed by Pathé News’ premier cameraman, who had already filmed Gene Vidal many times. Gene’s assistant hovered solicitously. Soon the camera rolled, father and son speaking their semirehearsed lines. Young Gene could not keep his eyes off the lens.
As they stepped up to the airplane, he felt the excitement of his acting premiere. He was not, though, to have the distinction of flying solo. Though more newsworthy, the news would not have been all favorable. It would have set a record for youngest person ever to fly alone. It would also have broken the law. That had been and would be done by others for the sake of the record. As director of aeronautics Gene Vidal was in no position to allow the law to be broken on camera. To be legal, the boy needed to be accompanied. They decide that Gene’s assistant, who himself could not fly, would crouch in the small back seat, the size of a suitcase, as much out of sight as possible. Young Gene’s father does the on-camera talking, joking deadpan about his age and whether he’s sure he can fly the thing. With Gene beside him in the cockpit, young Gene demonstrates the landing gear. Then he is sitting alone, except for the man partly hidden behind him. Calmly, he starts the engine. He begins to feel anxious, not about the flight but about the camera. Will he perform well enough to be the new Mickey Rooney? He is experiencing the beginning of stage fright. Fastening his seat belt, he taxies downfield, starts the run. Soon the plane rises, the field falls below. Frightened, Gene’s assistant keeps repeating superfluous advice about not flying into the wind. As he takes the plane on its circle above the field, he has no trouble keeping it stable. Then he circles again, which is not in the script, and brings the plane down. It hits the field hard, bounces, bumps, slows to its landing. Everyone is relieved. Young Gene’s mind is now entirely, self-consciously, on the camera. How will he look? Will he be a success? When he steps out, the cameraman asks, for the world’s ears, what it was like to fly the plane. Terrified, young Gene begins to lose his voice. He forgets his lines. “I said, ‘Oh, it wasn’t much’ … and I stammered incoherently.” Gene fills in. He turns to his son and gives him the cue again. “I remember the answer that he wants me to make: it was as easy as riding a bicycle. But, I had argued, it was a lot more complicated than riding a bicycle. Anyway, I am trapped in the wrong script. I say the line. Then I make a face to show my disapproval…. Finally I gave what I thought was a puckish, Rooneyesque grin.” As he watched it in the Belasco Theatre, he “shuddered in horror at that demented leer which had cost me stardom.” He had wanted to be a movie star, not a “newsreel personage.”
The next month, in June 1936, also recorded by newsreels, the sixty-six-year-old Senator Gore crashed politically. After a primary campaign in which he emphasized his populist themes, he was decisively rejected by the Oklahoma Democratic Party. State politics and the temper of the times had turned against him. He seemed old-fashioned, inflexible. Also, having done legitimate legal work for one of the convicted principals in the Harding administration Teapot Dome scandal, in which valuable oil reserves set aside for the Navy had been sold without competitive bidding, his opponents accused him of having been involved in criminality. “This is the last relief check you’ll ever get if Gore is reelected,” they had told the voters. Most important, so did the incumbent President, who despised the retrograde, anti—New Deal, harshly outspoken Senator, who had deeply offended him by telling him to his face that he would be stealing money from the people if he took the country off the gold standard. Like those on the far right, Senator Gore was “convinced that FDR … was our republic’s Caesar while his wife … was a revolutionary.” Two retainers, one from the American Petroleum Institute, the other from the Chase National Bank, provided most of his income thereafter, about the same amount as his Senate salary had been. “He didn’t take any money that wasn’t rightfully his. And he did think up the oil-depletion allowance, which he thought was good for the state. And never got a penny,” other than the income he earned, out of office, “as my grandmother bitterly would say, since all the senators and congressmen from Oklahoma were on the take and they all died rich…. Oil fields do get depleted,” his grandson later remarked. “But so does the brain. I said I’d like a depletion allowance for writers, for our brains.” The former Senator soon became active and successful as a pro bono lawyer for the land claims of Oklahoma Indian tribes. His pioneer ancestors would have been amused at the irony. For his grandson, who worshipped him, there was much to admire, nothing to criticize. In the attic at Rock Creek Park, young Gene put together a scrapbook of campaign newspaper clippings, partly an act of homage to his grandfather, mostly an expression of anger at those who had rejected him.
The Senator’s bitter summer of 1936 was Gene’s first in his new Auchincloss world. To his surprise, he was once more sent off to William Lawrence Camp, though for August only. The rest of the summer was spent at Newport with his mother and stepfather, whose aged mother ruled over Hammersmith Farm, one of the grand nouveau-riche mansions built by the post—Civil War Newport robber barons, the gilded-age vulgarians whom Henry James so much despised when he visited the Newport of his youth. At Hammersmith Farm “the old lady still presided over two liveried footmen as well as a conservatory that produced out-of-season grapes, more beautiful than a Vermeer painting, and about as tasteless.” While Hughdie patiently waited for her to die, they stayed at a nearby house, at Hazard’s Bay, with its own pond, the beach and sea in front. The next three summers Gene spent part of his time at Newport, building sand castles at Bailey’s Beach, where he won a first-prize silver cup for a larger-than-life bust of Lincoln, and sailing, swimming, seeing movies, reading a great deal. Next door were Jim Tuck, from the Bancroft playground days, and his sister, whose mother had married Snowden Fahnstock, who owned the “cottage” next to Hammersmith Farm. They played “the usual kid games.” Yusha was often around, though they still did not get along. Each Sunday they had lunch with old Mrs. Auchincloss. The first summer Nina was pregnant with the first of two children born during her marriage to Hughdie. One summer they took Gene to Watch Hill, Rhode Island. At Newport, he remembers, he was “a royal pain in the ass,” boastful of his fame as a “newsreel personage,” filled with a sense of his intellectual superiority and of his talents as a sculptor and painter (he always took his watercolor set with him), “the repository of a myriad of mediocre talents.” Quick-witted, he was now himself sometimes sharp-tongued, ironic, even sarcastic. Preoccupied with Lincoln, he wrote in his notebook, under the preparatory drawings that he made for his sand sculpture, “Now he belongs to the ages.” One hot summer afternoon, reclining on the lawn, watching the sailboats, he half overheard his stepfather talking about a family portrait of a lady named Theodosia, who had been Aaron Burr’s daughter. Hugh was distantly related on his mother’s side to the nation’s third Vice President, who had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel. Thomas Jefferson’s name came up. Just as the mention of Lincoln always brought to mind the memorial in Washington, Jefferson meant to young Gene, partly, the memorial now in the process of being created. During that summer of 1936 he also tried, unsuccessfully, to read a biography of George Washington. It seemed to him unbearably dull. He never finished it. But the whispers of American history that blew around him on the summer breeze were already part of his consciousness. He would remember Burr.
The boring biography of “The Father of Our Country” had been assigned as preparatory reading for his entry, in September 1936, to a new school. When Gene and Nina decided in spring 1934 to send him to William Lawrence Camp, they had politely turned down Reverend Henderson’s request that he attend Henderson’s camp. They had responded, though, with interest to his eagerness to have Little Gene at St. Albans. Henderson had tried again in April 1935, urging them to “drop out here and look us over.” Since they had been discussing sending him to a boarding school, “as soon as he returns from camp,” Gene responded, “we will drop over some afternoon and visit with you as to enrolling him in your school.” Both parents favored the change. Gene liked the low cost of tuition and board. Since St. Albans was both a day and a boarding school, Nina could deposit him there whenever it suited her. Life at Merrywood would be more comfortable with him around only on weekends. She would be happy to be rid of the daily presence of her book-obsessed, sharp-tongued son, who increasingly fought back, who more and more seemed an inhibiting depressant on her freedom to do as she pleased. Situated on the high rise from which the unfinished National Cathedral looked toward Washington, within an easy half-hour run from Merrywood, the school would be far enough for separation, close enough for supervision.
Originally the National Cathedral School for Boys, St. Albans, opened in 1909, had its conception in a bequest from President James Buchanan’s niece to the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation of the District of Columbia. As the unfinished cathedral conducted what it considered God’s business, the school presided over the mostly secular education of what was still, by 1936, only about a hundred boys divided between the lower and upper schools, grades five through twelve. The main school buildings were vaguely neo-Gothic, in imitation of the cathedral. Chapel was compulsory. Reverend Henderson, senior master of the Upper School, taught Sacred Studies and mathematics. In the Lower School the assistant headmaster, Alfred True, soft-spoken, responsive, thoughtful, was a secular angel of attentiveness who greeted his boys each morning in the entranceway. Headmaster Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas presided, an ex-marine who combined decisiveness, authority, and benevolence in the amounts that produced the successful headmaster of that era. He was both master and cheerleader. Lucas and True, working together with a dedicated, well-qualified faculty, gradually overcame the main problems: to make the Lower School attractive enough so that it would be a happy place for young boys and to make the Upper School sufficiently prominent and respected so that enough elite Washington families would send their high-school-age sons there rather than to the traditional New England academies. Lucas stressed discipline, athletics, and college-entrance preparation; True emphasized community, sensitivity, individual attention. To his faculty he was the best administrator they had ever seen, someone “who let people down very gently.” Most of the students, like young Gene, who were in awe of Mr. Lucas, loved Mr. True. And Gene did not at all mind being a boarder, though he could not have known that True had strongly recommended that no Lower School boys board. They were too young, he believed, to be separated from their families. For Gene that was the attraction. Life at Merrywood was hardly domestic bliss. He was eager to get away.
In late August 1936 a counselor from William Lawrence Camp, on his way south, brought Gene home to Merrywood, empty except for the servants. The Auchinclosses were still on holiday. In mid-September, with twenty-one other boys divided into two sections, Gene began Form A, the equivalent of sixth grade. Initially he was a day student, though soon Nina arranged to have him stay at the dormitory for short spells and then to board entirely, which had been her original intention. As usual, his grades were mediocre, ranging from the usual high in spelling, for which he had a natural feel, to the low in penmanship, a lifelong nearly indecipherable scribble. For his entire three years at St. Albans his English grades remained poor. The system demanded memorization, with little to no emphasis on intellectual content. With a sonorous voice, he loved reading poetry aloud. When, as often required, he did so in class, his nuanced, actorly readings attracted attention and praise. But he refused to memorize poems. Demerits followed. Student essays were mainly parsed for formal grammatical correctness; beyond that, there was little analysis. Grades in English depended on memorization of grammatical categories, with examples. More than indifferent, he was hostile to rote learning. St. Albans gave him the gift of an inability to learn the language of grammar. Neither the system nor the student would adapt. On the athletic field he expressed his usual indifference, though he did his best with tennis, which he liked, and soon fencing. He now wore glasses, as little as possible to avoid both the stigma and the disfigurement. Subtle depth perception seemed the problem, an astigmatism that glasses did not completely correct. As the ball came close, it went slightly out of focus. Fortunately, none of his classmates ragged him about his incessant reading, his disinterest in athletics. It was a benign environment of what he remembered as very decent young people, among them George Goodrich, Barrett Prettyman, and Hamilton Fish. Two of the boys, Jim Birney and Dick McConnell, became friends, Birney a soft-spoken, outgoing, rather innocent son of a well-known Episcopalian abolitionist family, McConnell a more aggressive boy who was both rival and friend. “The only boys I ever really liked were at St. Albans,” he recalled. “I can’t say I was wild about any of them, but I mean I liked them as people.”
Gene was not unhappy at St. Albans. Merrywood stood at most thirty minutes distant, unequivocal demonstration of his mother’s desire for separateness. But Gene had begun to see the advantages of separation: it suited mother and son. One day, Nina, tired of complaining to Gene about his grades, came to see Mr. True. Gene’s “grades must improve ‘because,’ she said, ‘he is living in the lap of luxury now, but he’s never going to inherit anything! And he doesn’t understand the value of money.’” “Well, if you could just get him to do his homework,” True said. “She confessed defeat: ‘He locks himself in his room,’ she said sadly, ‘and writes.’” Gene declined to explain or reform. Frustrated, Nina kept demanding proof he was not slothful, a spendthrift, a disgrace to her social status and ambition, an improvidential ward of the family whom they would have to support forever. Sensibly, True realized that Gene cared little about grades, though even at that low level of motivation he performed adequately. Best to let him alone, since he spent most of his time reading, a constructive alternative to what boys were expected to do and, mostly, did. True understood boys; Nina did not. Quick to pursue her view of dysfunction, she became suspicious of Gene’s imaginative games, one of which was role-playing and performance. She hated his constant reading. That he already knew a great deal of history and literature seemed to her irksome. What good could it possibly be? If pernicious, she was nevertheless sincere, eager to fix what she perceived as wrong, though her eagerness rarely produced sustained attention to the problem. When she decided his teeth needed straightening, she had her dentist install braces. “I had absolutely straight teeth, except for one incisor which was slightly off. So I had to have braces put on my teeth by a lousy dentist” because the children of everyone she knew had them. Then she forgot about them. “They stayed on much too long. They were never looked after again, and five years later my teeth were rotting away under these things.” Eventually he was to lose all his upper molars.
When given, probably for his tenth birthday, a theatrical makeup kit designed to allow a child to dress up as historical and literary characters, he delighted in combining his fascination with history and role-playing, his second chance to be Mickey Rooney. The kit contained the basic materials and instructions for a wide group of characters, from Cardinal Richelieu to Mephistopheles to the prince of The Prince and the Pauper. The latter he had seen enacted in a recent film in which twins had played the lead roles. The notion of an alternative self, of being himself a twin, fascinated him. With the help of a white towel, which he had become adept at twisting into a turban, he used the makeup kit to play an Egyptian pharaoh, based on his favorite move, The Mummy. A black wig, a gift from Liz Whitney, enabled him to play Cleopatra, though mostly he impersonated male figures. Popular Hollywood movies were dressing up the world, especially its glamorous past, its famous historical figures and events. Downtown, at the Keith, the Palace, the Belasco, the Translux, the Metropolitan, and the Capitol; at the Blue Hen in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, where he was taken sometimes for brief summer visits; in the movie house in Newport—each with its own particular aroma and atmosphere—he saw every new movie, accompanied, at the main Washington theaters, by an elaborate stage show. At the Capitol Theater “there were the Living Statues. Well-known historic tableaux were enacted by actors and actresses in white leotards.” Gene’s reading and moviegoing were part of a vast costume drama that he personalized. At first Nina took all this as another example of his self-involvement, like reading. At Newport a family friend, Sherwood Davis, set off alarm bells when he told Nina that Gene’s love of theatricality was a danger sign that might indicate homosexual tendencies. “So Sherry Davis says he likes putting on makeup, he likes dressing up—watch out: that’s what fags do. Sherry Davis was himself a fag and a bisexual. And she took that to heart, my mother…. I seem to remember that I was sent to a doctor. I don’t know if it was a psychiatrist or a psychologist, probably the latter, who asked me sex questions and so on. I gave perfectly polite answers. And that was the end of it. She then loses interest. Never again does the subject come up.”
As the leaves changed colors in autumn 1936, young Gene and his father, while Gene Vidal was still director of aeronautics, traveled northward by railroad through the Hudson River Valley to West Point, the military city high on the Palisades where Vidal had had many of his greatest triumphs. In 1925, when he left, he had been an assistant football coach, the track and field coach, and the instructor of aeronautics. He returned as a man of Washington and of the world, bringing along his eleven-year-old son, who had just started at a new school. Gene also brought with him one of his closest friends, Amelia Earhart, whose fame had risen to a dimension beyond Gene’s athletic or professional achievement. She had become a national icon. Together the three of them sat in the stadium watching Army play Navy. As much as Gene was a familiar figure to the cadet corps, Earhart would have created the stir, her willowy figure, her blond-white eyebrows, her elegant clothes, the mystique of her courage, her fame for being famous. On their way back to New York, as Earhart’s fans peered into the train compartment to get a look at their idol, she told the fascinated young Gene about her plans to fly around the world from east to west, to circumnavigate the earth, like Puck circling the globe. In her own way an actress of sorts, Amelia glittered in his eyes. Playing the grown-up, he asked what part of the flight she most worried about. Africa, she responded. She did not want to be forced down in the jungle. What about the Pacific? he asked. “Oh, there are always islands,” she said. As they approached Grand Central Station, he asked if she would give him a souvenir. “Shortly before she left on the flight around the world, she sent me the blue-and-white checked leather belt that she often wore. She gave my father her old watch.”
They had also given one another much of their company, both personal and professional, during the last six years. Gene rarely made an important decision without consulting her. Together, with Paul Collins, they had become in 1936 the founding organizers and major stockholders of an airline in New England, at first in conjunction with the Boston-Maine Railroad, later to be reorganized as Northeast Airlines. City-hopping together in a small plane, at least once with young Gene along, they laid out the routes along the railroad tracks. If it seemed an odd thing for a government official to be doing, apparently no one thought it remarkable. She regularly confided in him, and especially about her aeronautical plans. He was to be one of her closest consultants in her preparation for her ill-fated round-the-world flight the next year. Her marriage to George Palmer Putnam remained the open one she had insisted on from the beginning. Whether she had other lovers, male or female, she certainly had Gene Vidal in her heart. With young Gene she was playful, warm, glamorous, another one of his father’s women whom he would have preferred to the mother he had. It was a daydream he allowed himself. Amelia Earhart and Liz Whitney were the prototypes of the older women with whom as an adult he was to have strong friendships, mother and grandmother figures not necessarily themselves very motherly but reminders of the mother he would have wanted or of the much-loved Nina Kay Gore. An occasional visitor at the Earhart-Putnam home in Rye, young Gene loved Amelia’s company, her house, her aura, the maps spread out on the living-room floor, the jungle-animal-decorated wallpaper in the guest room. Walking with her on the boardwalk at Atlantic City, he noticed how many people stared at his famous companion. Another time, when he had been ill in Washington and she had visited him, he sculpted her head out of clay, a creation they both admired. Her beautiful voice, like his grandmother’s, stayed in his memory. And now that he was writing a great deal of poetry, she read his and he hers, sometimes out loud to one another. As poets they were both expressive, though Earhart more personal, and equally untalented. For young Gene there was a glow to the relationship.
Apparently Nina did not feel especially threatened by Gene’s friendship with Amelia, at least not to an extent that prevented her having lunch with Earhart at a Washington hotel the year before the divorce. Gene had hovered nervously in the background, afraid there might be a scene, especially if Nina had too many drinks. Perhaps Amelia’s boyish looks disarmed or even attracted her. Shrewd and intuitive, she may have sized up the relationship as unthreatening. The Whitneys were then the targets anyway. But by autumn 1936 Nina had been married to Hugh Auchincloss for a full year. Since she had lost Jock, she was no longer in a mood to be happy if Gene married Liz. Whatever her many dissatisfactions, money was not among them, except insofar as she occasionally worried about her son’s economic future, especially since he did not excel in school or mix with people. He was happy to mix at Langollen, Liz Whitney’s horse farm in Upperville, Virginia, fifty miles from Washington, where Gene took him for visits and where Liz taught him to ride. With his father and his father’s friends he felt comfortable. The glamorous ones, like Liz and Amelia, were very attractive. From a bachelor apartment at the Wardman Park, where he played tennis with Henry Wallace, Gene Vidal had moved to another apartment, on Connecticut Avenue. His son visited regularly. Liz was often there during 1936–37. Liz and Gene traveled together, at least once to Los Angeles, where Liz presented herself as a candidate in the international competition for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, the movie based on the bestselling novel of the Civil War. Its male star was soon to appear in a film called Test Pilot, on whose set Nina was to meet Clark Gable and have an affair with him and also with her third-husband-to-be, an Air Force officer who served as technical consultant. Unfortunately for Liz, her estranged husband, the primary financial backer of Gone With the Wind, made it clear to the producer she was not even to be considered for the role. While Liz tried Hollywood, Gene busily attended the National Air Show in Inglewood. What is now the Los Angeles Airport was still a cornfield. They drove together cross-country, back to Washington, with a detour to visit Gene’s brother Pick, now a young Air Force pilot, at Barkesdale Field, in Shreveport, Louisiana. Pick and his wife, Sally, insisted Liz sleep in the guest bedroom and Gene in the den. “We were very old-fashioned,” Sally explained. A month later Liz was still not divorced. The endless legal-financial wrangling went on and on.
From the window seat of his St. Albans dormitory cubicle he could see the Washington Monument in the distance. The biography of “The Father of Our Country” which he had never finished epitomized the boredom of historical studies (and most of his classes). Now, deeply absorbed, he was reading Gone With the Wind. Through the Gores, he thought of himself as Southern, living in what was, prior to World War II, essentially a Southern city whose only industry was government. Southerners like his grandfather dominated the Congress, which despite Roosevelt’s power still insisted it was the premier branch. Issues of honor, justice, seniority, home rule, and graft preoccupied the political rulers, whether they were of the Ashley Wilkes or the Snopes kind. Having been brought up in the home of a practical politician, Gene knew that the romanticism of Ashley Wilkes was nonsense. His grandmother’s dismissal of gambling, whoring Southern boys getting their comeuppance was another antidote to idealization. Still, while he had no doubt that Gone With the Wind distorted history and human nature, he found the book deeply absorbing, a dramatization of the sort that made history come alive. The novel and film brought together his own growing interest in the American past and numbers of vivid self-reflexive moments, one of which was his self-awareness as he sat in that window embrasure, gazing out into the Washington distance, often looking down at the pages that were alive in his hands. It produced in his mind an unforgettable image of himself, there and then, becoming himself. Such visual images increasingly filled the storehouse of his mind, always there, readily available, instantly alive.
Life in the antiseptic Lower School dormitory was best lived imaginatively, “a long room with a linoleum floor, freshly waxed and lined on both sides with doorless cubicles,” small, bare spaces with bed, chair, desk. Each day began with services in the Little Sanctuary, presided over by the headmaster, who had a sermon or homily for the school. An imposing figure, he was authority itself, speaking familiarly about honor, duty, country, about God, morality, and “character.” He also had a sense of humor and a sharp eye for the personalities of his teachers and pupils. An avid athletic partisan, “The Chief” cheered as loud as the loudest at school football games. Though some parents found it unseemly, the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas knew what he stood for and was not to be repressed. Among other things, he stood for winning football games and building character. He presided, for the boarders, over breakfast and dinner, each of the resident masters at the head of a table, where the food was competent, the atmosphere mostly pleasant. For the sixth- and seventh-grade boys, the homeroom teacher dominated the long teaching day. For Gene, Herve Gordon (“Papa”) Chasseaud’s much-loved “boudoir,” the school library under the stairs in the Activities Building, was a primal location. Chasseaud himself had gathered most of the growing collection. A bibliophilic French teacher with attractively eccentric habits, he had a literary aura. In the Lower Form office, the school secretary and mother-confessor to many, Virginia Martin, sold cookies and milk during recess. One day a student ran in, exclaiming, “Miss Martin, there’s a fire in the boys’ room!” “First,” she replied, “put on your tie.”
The one master he did love was Stanley Sofield, his seventh-grade homeroom teacher, an eccentrically brilliant pedagogue whose personal charisma made him a powerful presence in the daily lives of his students and a St. Albans legend. The only teacher Gene later came back to see and had a friendship with, Sofield had “magic with boys,” partly based on an intuitive understanding of and a genuine affection for the species. “He had that magic quality of treating them as equals,” Alfred True recollected. “They felt he was the man in charge, but he never condescended to them. No boy was ever a mystery to him.” A Columbia University graduate, in his thirties when Gene was at St. Albans, Sofield was physically unprepossessing, a rather gawky pixie, “a plump young man with thick brown hair, glasses, a tapir’s nose and small chin.” Unmarried, his sexual interests unclear, he was strongly attached to a sister in New Jersey whom he helped economically and spoke with on the telephone every evening. Rumored among the masters to be homosexual, Sofield never made that a part of his St. Albans life. The boys knew him only as a brilliant teacher and a memorable character. With a sharp wit and a loud, demanding voice, he made the classroom his theater. The students he good-humoredly addressed as “gentlemen.” Totally unathletic himself, he apparently enjoyed coaching baseball and cheering boisterously at school games. Flamboyant, “he knew how to control the boys and teach them also,” to make the class interesting by investing it with personality and ideas. Passionate about the musical theater, each year Sofield directed the school Christmas musical, which he composed, frequently banging away at the piano. Afraid of performing in public, Gene would have nothing to do with the musicals, though Sofield, who had nicknames for most of the boys, would regularly sing to him, “Gene-y with the light brown hair.” It made him writhe with embarrassment. Actually he was still blond, as his classmate John Hanes recalled, with straight hair darkening to brown, “good-looking although not pretty. Just a good-looking boy. Tall for his age.” With another St. Albans master, Sofield directed a summer camp in the Adirondacks, where musicals were featured. He hoped Gene would attend. A regular if not heavy drinker who loved martinis, some mornings Sofield, bleary-eyed, would with a soft voice, a “gentle, grave manner, and a slightly pained squint,” alert the students to his mood, which often produced histrionic demands for silence. Other times books or erasers would fly, unerringly, across the room toward offendingly loud or silly or unresponsive boys. Sofield’s famous scream echoed throughout the Lower Form, part of its special character. His storms were unpredictable, though everyone expected them, and most enjoyed them. Usually he taught in a tone of “gentle expository reason.” To Gene he seemed like “a benign Nina”—the vitality, the histrionics, even the drinking, but without the destructive irresponsibility, the self-glorification, the cruelty. With everyone else Gene was reserved, mostly unresponsive. But he responded to Sofield’s magic, part pedagogic calculation, part spontaneous expressiveness, a feel for boys and for schoolroom life that made him predictably unpredictable in the classroom.
At night, in the dormitory and study hall, there was homework, there were smells and noises and games, some very personal, others companionable, all the world-shaking dramas of companionship, ambition, rivalry, affection, health, illness, high spirits, love—the varied activities of a few dozen disparate boys between the ages of ten and fourteen who when the dormitory master, sometimes benign, other times a hated figure, shut off the lights, fell into the sleep of dreams and sometimes nightmares. In the dark one boy sometimes went into another’s bed, for comfort, for sexual games. Others, awake, could hear the distinctive noises. Wet dreams, which Gene began to have, were whispered about. In the shower the boys visually measured one another, made note of who had pubic hair and who not: whoever boarded in the Lower School dorm was part of the community’s self-scrutiny. One of Gene’s school friends, who confided in him, worried about masturbating. He was trying desperately not to. Succumbing to temptation, he thought, was going to destroy his life. It was, Gene told him, his impression “that it probably did no harm at all…. He then said that ‘everywhere you look there’s something that sets me off.’ ‘Well, like what?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the funny papers.’ I said, ‘I don’t see anything sexy about them.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I do.’” At home, with his mother’s casual nudity, with parents who had affairs, with his own erotic responses and erections, Gene was becoming aware of sexual feeling, though he still had a long way to go in getting right the facts about how babies were made. But he was unselfconscious about most of his personalized responses, which seemed to him perfectly ordinary, natural, acceptable. Unlike some of his friends, he had no religious scruples or anxieties to bring to bear.
At some level, Gene was determined not to be a good student and willing to take the consequences. Flashes of eidetic memory kept his mind alive with images that he gradually sought to embody in language, in the poetry he was writing, in prose essays, and especially in the made-up stories he had started putting down on paper years before. Also, his grandfather’s carefully crafted combination of independence and political shrewdness seeped into his attitude, his consciousness. He wanted to be shrewd, powerful, successful, President of the United States or at least a senator like his grandfather. He also wanted to be a great writer. But he did not necessarily want good grades or see any connection between them and his aspirations. He certainly did not want to spend his time studying things that did not interest him rather than reading what did. And he did not want to work to please people. The cost in self-respect and self-reliance would be too great. Also, he knew from experience with his mother that the more one tries to please some people, the more cruelty they inflict. His grades, in fact, did get significantly better in his second year at St. Albans than the low B average he had achieved the first, good enough for him to tie for fifth in a class of nineteen. In his third year he slipped back, probably for reasons as irrelevant to effort as the reasons he had risen before. In a pre-grade-inflation world, a middle B might have satisfied the school and his mother if it had been the result of disciplined application rather than natural intelligence. His mother accused him of sloth. The school mostly let him alone.
At St. Albans, church and state flourished in miniature. It was a microcosmic simulacrum of the world immediately outside. Many students were children of the government, sons of ambassadors, congressmen, civil servants, bureaucrats, military families. In the Lower School dormitory, power was important. Gene had no intention of allowing himself to be anyplace but at the top of the hierarchy of his boys’ world. As at Friends, he took great interest in being in charge, at least to the extent of fighting back if attacked and organizing a group to assert himself and his values. When the boy he most palled around with, Dick McConnell, tried to turn on him in fall 1938, his response was aggressive. “In the dormitories they had these lockers which were about eight feet high, two feet wide, and two feet deep, with locks on them, where you hung your clothes. And it was McConnell’s trick to get together two or three other boys and stampede somebody and lock them in one. I feared this more than anything in the world. I was a claustrophobe, and I avoided it by overthrowing McConnell, a preemptory strike so that it wouldn’t happen to me. So I would not be shut up. In fact, I’d be running the show.” Playing on McConnell’s reputation as a bully, he got sixteen boys to sign a “Declaration of Independence” that he drew up. It had four articles. “I. We declare ourselves free of the tyrannical rule of Richard McConnell and Ashe-Mead Fuller. II. Every month we will vote for our president. The president will be the symbol of unity. He can not command anyone to do anything that he does not want to do. III. Unless everyone in the Dormitory agrees, there can be no organization in which R. McConnell is involved. IV. We all agree to this.” After his own signature appears the word “President.”
At St. Albans, in the winter of 1937, Gene fell in love, both in the unselfconscious schoolboy sense of natural physical attraction to another and in the emotional (and long-lasting) preoccupation with an alter ego, a twin who would be the playmate of his soul, a completion of the incomplete, the perfect fit that makes two comrades into one friendship. It was a love that had no need for loving words. Romantic jargon was out of the question for these two very masculine young men. Neither of the boys would have known how to talk that way or seen a reason for it. For both it was prelapsarian, a combination of adolescent sex and friendship, an unspoken enactment of what came naturally and gave pleasure. The boy, Jimmie Trimble, was a young Washingtonian, almost precisely his age. Also tall, with a lanky build and blond curly hair, one of St. Albans’s premier athletes, Jimmie excelled at every sport, especially baseball. The only books he read voluntarily were about sports, to his mother’s tolerant despair. From a cultured home, he loved music, especially jazz and musicals, and played the saxophone. Probably he participated in Sofield’s Christmas musicals. Like most of the boys, he worshipped his Form I teacher. Easygoing, amiable, he was blessed with social intelligence and with a love of the athletic games his talents could transform into popularity, success, even fame. At ease with almost everyone, he made friends readily, attractive to and admired by both sexes, a kind of normal, intelligent, uninteresting student athlete, in his own and in his friends’ eyes a future all-American and professional star.
A boy of the Washington suburbs, Jimmie attended first the Rosemary Street School, then Leland Junior High in Chevy Chase. His mother, worried about poor instruction, soon enrolled him in St. Albans. Already a locally famous student athlete, he had been tutored by his father and his uncle, both enthusiastic baseball players and fans. Before St. Albans he had been taken under the wing of a well-known local coach who had taught him to become a sophisticated schoolboy pitcher. Ruth Trimble, who had divorced Jimmie’s father and then remarried, was now in the process of separating from her second husband, Jimmie’s stepfather, who may have taken liberties with the boy and who certainly had alienated Ruth. His stepfather was “creating trouble at home,” she later said. With a well-to-do maternal grandmother footing the bill, Jimmie enrolled at St. Albans in September 1937. In fall 1937 Jimmie, like Gene, was in Stanley Sofield’s homeroom class. The next year, in November 1938, eager to have him away from the tensions of her dissolving marriage, Ruth put him into the Lower School dormitory, if only for the one term. Gene and he were already friends, the result of an overture from Jimmie, who had come up to him and remarked on how much Gene seemed to read. The friendship intensified. In the dormitorywide shower ritual of inspection for new boys, Jimmie clearly was identified as belonging to Gene’s elite group, boys with pubic hair. Naturally, identity and identification for the adolescents was partly sexual. When Gene, fumbling on the game-room floor at Merrywood, had a sexual experience with a female, he had his mind throughout mostly on telling Jimmie all about it. Jimmie had not yet been initiated. Jimmie was important. The girl on the floor was not. What he told Jimmie, other than that it was confusing and anatomically problematic, is unclear. The simple mechanics for uninitiated adolescent boys were usually formidable. But the fact that he had had such sex was an achievement to boast of. Twelve-year-old boys talked to one another about the heterosexual sex they had or might have. The other sex they just did, mostly without discussion, as Jimmie and Gene did one day on the white-tiled bathroom floor at Merrywood. Quietly, to avoid being heard by the butler, they rubbed their stomachs and genitals against one another into what Gene remembered as an explosion of perfectly blissful orgasm. Neither felt they had broken a sacred taboo. Neither, apparently, felt any guilt, though they both tacitly understood that this was a private affair. It was something they would talk about neither to others nor even, for that matter, between themselves.
Eager to have her son invite home schoolboy guests, Nina welcomed Jimmie, a sign to her that her solitary son was mixing, that he actually had friends. From the house they went often to the swimming pool, the poolroom, the squash court, the farm, the woods. One day they roller-skated on the squash court, ruining the expensive wooden floor. In the enclosure next to the garage they played with the dogs. Jimmie could not believe that Gene could not take Wiggles into the house. Most of all there was the river, where in the warm weather they swam, unafraid of the rapids and unconcerned about snakes. They sunbathed on the warm rocks. On one bright afternoon in 1938 they made love “in the woods above the roaring river,” then swam against the dangerous current to a large glacial rock, where they lay next to one another. They had lots to talk about, mainly themselves, though not what they had done sexually and not often about girls either, but mostly about all the rest of their schoolboy world and their adolescent interests. Gene wanted either to be a writer or a politician, like his grandfather, with whom he had had many discussions about how to begin his political career, especially where he might reside so that he could have standing as a resident in order to run for office. Jimmie wanted to be a professional baseball player, and if not, or after, he would be a saxophone player or a teacher. But the present was pleasurably vivid. There seemed no reason not to think, or at least to daydream, that it would go on forever.
As the Île de France left New York harbor in June 1939, thirteen-year-old Gene was at last fulfilling his dream of sailing eastward to Europe, especially to Italy, where his mind and imagination had already been long resident. The ship’s port of destination was Le Havre. It was to be the Île de France’s last voyage as a passenger ship. From the new Washington, with its vast neo-Roman buildings, the imperial city that Roosevelt had been creating, Gene happily began his voyage to the old Rome, the imperial city of ancient history. The books he had read, from Plutarch’s Lives to Stories from Livy, the movies he had seen, from Roman Scandals to The Last Days of Pompeii, provided images and expectations. Before Rome, there would be France and England, both of which had been relentlessly filmed and both of which stood on the brink of another great military adventure. Like most Americans, young Gene opposed the United States fighting in a European war. Like his grandfather, he did not want one drop of American blood shed on foreign soil. In Washington everyone knew that war was coming but not precisely when. More than anything Gene wanted to see Paris, London, Rome before it became too late. As he stood on the deck, the Île de France sailing down the Hudson, through the harbor and into the open sea, he felt for the first time that the world lay all before him. He would now have a chance to see in actuality what he had read about and seen on the screen, to provide himself with images of himself as an actor in the film of his mind about the great events of the world. He would remember this first visit to Europe as the “pleasantest” time in all his school days.
In February 1939 at Merrywood, Reverend Lucas had baptized Gene into the Episcopalian flock. Sponsored by Nina and Hugh, he now also had his mother’s family name as his own, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. It was a baptism of form, not faith, with social rather than religious significance. Herself without concern for substance, always eager to observe the forms, Nina thought it a good idea. But the social event that Nina and Hugh most crowed about came in early June. All Washington was thrilled. “Their Brittanic Majesties,” King George VI and Queen Mary, had come to America on a state visit to rally support for their country. American goodwill (and ships) would be necessary for Britain’s survival. Mr. and Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss were the happy recipients of an invitation “to a Garden Party at the Embassy on Thursday, the 8th June 1939,” the most sought-after invitation in town. In explaining the guest list, the British ambassador remarked, “‘It’s rather like the kingdom of heaven. Some are chosen and some are not.’” As the royal family made their way along Massachusetts Avenue to the White House, Gene and Jimmie, in the hot June weather, watched the procession from in front of Hugh Auchincloss’s town house, a yellow Italianate mansion. With State Department clearance, Auchincloss was about to sell it to the Japanese government, which wanted to make it the embassy of their puppet regime in occupied Mongolia. The State Department approved the sale but not the embassy. Later that same day, standing in a large crowd in front of the Treasury Building, Gene cheered the King and the President as they drove by in an open car, “the red-faced President Roosevelt” towering “over the small, brown-faced King of England beside him. Sweating crowds were waving American and British flags.” It was as near as he got to the royal personage, but he was now eagerly about to get closer to the place from which he had come. On June 13 his first passport was issued. Still growing, he was five foot eight, with blond hair, brown eyes, a chickenpox scar between his eyebrows one of his “distinguishing marks.”
Nina had already disappointed his transatlantic hopes at least twice. She “would announce trips to Europe and then cancel them. So my hopes would be high and then they would be dashed. In 1938 the Gripsholm, a Swedish boat, had scheduled a tour of Scandinavia. We were all set to go on that. But her exciting life always intervened so that was canceled.” Then, in spring 1939, two St. Albans schoolmasters, Stanley Sofield and his friend and camp partner, Thomas Jefferson Barlow, eager themselves to see Europe again before borders closed and only military ships sailed, organized a student trip. The ostensible aim was to study French, the larger plan to see as much of Europe as possible. Even at modest cost to the students, it would allow them (and Barlow’s wife) to travel free, perhaps even to profit. Sofield invited “Gene-y with the light brown hair.” Nina said yes, perhaps among other reasons because she had decided against his wishes to remove him from St. Albans School. Dissatisfied with his mediocre grades, constantly arguing with him, unhappy with his bookish tendencies, she thought it best to move him again, this time far away. Why not allow him this European trip? It would provide a break and a distraction, a way of compensating for the impending dislocation, of making a point of her generosity and reasonableness. It would also clear the field for her infidelities. She preferred not to have Gene around to take notice of them. In her eyes, he was spying on her. Hughdie was less of a problem. “As her character was stronger than his,” Gore Vidal later remarked, “she got away with almost anything and could have to the end,” which was not far off. The war, though, was imminent. Since his father would pay the small cost, as the divorce agreement required, everything was easily settled. Sofield and Barlow were delighted to have him, along with about sixteen other boys, most but not all from St. Albans, who would at first spend four weeks “perfecting their French,” as the phrase of the day had it, at Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles, a short distance from Paris. From Jouy they would take frequent field trips and then, done with France and French lessons, they would go to Italy. Though Gene may have been brooding about the consequences of his impending exile from Washington in the fall, he put it mostly out of mind. Bad as it was, he would still see Jimmie, who was to continue at St. Albans, during school holidays. That the coming war might change all that never occurred to him. Whatever his remonstrances, and they were vigorous, he had no thought of a serious rebellion. What good would it do anyway? Only time would provide him with independence. Efficiently and enthusiastically, he focused on the grand European adventure.
Life at the École de Jouy-en-Josas, a few buildings and a small campus vacant of its usual people, was both familiar and exotic. Each morning there were classes in history and French, the afternoons free or booked for excursions. Dormitory routine, as familiar as at home except for there being only one unreliable toilet for everyone, had four boys to a room in a manor house with a domed ceiling. Classes, taught in French, were also held there in the smaller of two buildings, the larger occupied by female counterparts from a New England school. One of his roommates was Hammy Fish from St. Albans. In their private room Tom Barlow and his wife, Lee, had a busman’s honeymoon, having married the previous year. On a schoolmaster’s salary any trips, let alone European honeymoons, were hard to come by. The study-abroad trip had been Barlow’s conception. Tall, ramrod straight, a dignified Kentuckyan with “an aquiline Greek nose and dark eyes,” Barlow was amiable but disciplined. Sofield was short, round, bespectacled, more indulgent. They made a good team. Oliver Hodge, a bilingual French teacher from Chattanooga, a close friend of theirs, provided language expertise. Each boy had a bicycle for local transportation, particularly regular visits to Versailles, though Gene often also walked the short distance to the pastry shops and the local sights. With a sharp sweet tooth, he found the pastry as memorable as anything else in the royal city. Moist baba au rhum melted in his mouth, disappeared almost immediately. “Very thin, tall, a good-looking boy,” he could afford to indulge.
They went frequently to Paris by train. Recognized for his self-reliance, Gene was allowed to go off on his own, which he did enthusiastically. On Bastille Day he stood on the steps of the Grand Palais, watching French military might parade by, awed by its glory, thrilled to recognize in the flesh the French Foreign Legion he had already seen and loved in a movie called Under Two Flags. All Paris seemed like a movie anyway, until he “saw an open car containing a bald man in a business suit. I could spot a politician anywhere in any country. This one was the prime minister of France,” Daladier, an unprepossessing figure who soon had the honor of turning France over to the Germans. The American visitor had a sense that this was a man who made deals, that the next year’s Bastille Day parade would have a very different cast of characters. In his Paris wanderings he went to the Palais Royal, buying quite cheaply, as a favor for Nina, two eighteenth-century silver snuffboxes to add to her collection. To Gene, with European history in mind, they were reminders of the French Revolution, of the guillotine, of aristocratic privilege and political change. To Nina they were just snuffboxes.
Longer excursions by crowded bus filled with more young Americans, girls from the other school group at Jouy, took them in all directions, south to Orléans, to Touraine, to Blois, to Chartres, out to the Rhine to see the famous Maginot Line, filled with French troops that would stop any invasion from the west; north and east to Arras Cathedral and the battlefield cemeteries of the First World War. Poppies were in bloom. At Chartres they had the shock of seeing an elderly Frenchwoman, squatting, raise her skirts and relieve herself. It was as memorable as the cathedral. On the bus to the Rhine Gene sat next to Zeva Fish, Hammy’s sister, with whom he instantly fell in love. “I thought she was wonderful. I was reading her my poetry, and she thought it was wonderful. She was an older woman, about sixteen or seventeen.” The oldest woman on the bus was twenty-nine-year-old Lee Barlow, whom he thought very pretty. She also wrote poetry. On the bus they had at least two long chats on versification, about which she thought Gene needed to know more if he were going to be a real poet. A college-educated formalist, she decided she needed to teach him the language of prosody and metrics.
By late July war signals alerted Sofield and Barlow to the likelihood that they might not be able to have the entire summer in Europe. Accelerating their schedule, at the end of the month they went by train to Italy. They anticipated Rome eagerly, the part of the trip to which Gene most looked forward actually about to happen. Almost as if he feared Rome’s splendor would be too much for him, he protected himself as the train went southward by keeping his eyes as much on the fascinating book he was reading as on the vista outside. It was an exotic adventure novel by Frederic Prokosch, The Seven Who Fled, about a journey across an imaginary Asian landscape. In Rome for the next two weeks Gene’s eyes blazed, partly with the splendor of the ancient city, partly with the landscape of the novel, as if he were in two places at once, an increasingly characteristic trope of doubleness. Rome itself dazzled him. A passionate pilgrim, like Henry James, he feverishly exalted in the Roman monuments, the Roman streets, his mind filled with the literature he had read, the history he knew, his first taste of a city he was to visit many times. Eventually it would become one of his homes; now it was a dream realized, a young man’s fascination with the material presence of what before had been only words, thoughts, imagined vistas.
In the Forum, with pieces of broken marble everywhere, he had his own Jamesian vastation, an epiphanic moment in which his eyes superimposed on the glittering debris the living reality of what had been, as if it were all alive again, as if the informed imagination could make visually real what had been dead for centuries. Walking through the Forum excavation, not yet sequestered from visitors, he picked up a small Roman head. He quickly hid it under his jacket. Ever alert, Sofield made him put it back. From the Roman to the American Senate seemed to him an obvious continuity. He could see his grandfather there. He imagined himself, the supreme orator, in both Roman and American chambers. From the Forum to the Colosseum to the Pantheon, from one shining structure to another, he traversed ancient Rome. The simple storybook accounts of the Roman imperium from his Victorian edition of Stories from Livy provided adequate narratives for his imagination to people Rome visible with Rome past. Great marble statues of emperors and orators seemed almost to accompany him as he walked to them, by them, around them. With his schoolboy Latin he could read the obvious inscriptions. Standing on the rostrum where Mark Antony had spoken of the dead Julius Caesar, he felt the thrill of identification. He haunted the Forum and the Palatine. The Holy City’s Christian churches and priestly presences he hardly noticed. Classical Rome possessed him.
So too did the dramatic history transpiring in the modern city. It was as if he were living in a newsreel. Everywhere there were Blackshirts. The garlic-smelling August air breathed war. Triumphant Italian nationalism, still drunk on Ethiopian victories, paraded in the streets, flexed its muscles and guns. Pathé News and The March of Time had given Hitler’s and Mussolini’s faces worldwide currency. So too had their politics and armies. If Americans were frightened, they were also fascinated, especially those who lived with and studied political power. In May, as if in preparation for his European trip, Gene had written for his St. Albans English class an essay called “A Comparison Between a Dynastic Ruler and a Totalitarian Ruler,” a strikingly objective analysis of the Emperor Franz Joseph and of Adolf Hitler. He had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a biography of Franz Joseph, and four encyclopedia articles, an ambitious undertaking for a usually indifferent schoolboy. He had also seen the film Mayerling. The subject fascinated him. For the first time his teachers took notice of substance as well as grammar, partly because the timely subject was compelling. Though brief, the essay is divided into three chapters, accompanied by his own competent pencil drawing of Hitler, with enough factual detail to be textured and creditable. The analysis is surprisingly sophisticated, the prose economically effective, occasionally graceful. A report rather than a condemnation, it leaves history to judge whether Hitler is “a madman or a genius.”
As the train that had taken them from France to Italy made its first Italian stop, “fascist guards gave the fascist salute just as they had done in all those newsreels where Hitler and Mussolini were perpetual Gog and Magog to our days.” One night at the Baths of Caracalla, part of a large audience to see an outdoor performance of Turandot, they suddenly saw in a railed-off box next to theirs Mussolini himself. Resplendent in a white uniform, he seemed almost part of the performance, as if Italian history and Italian opera were indistinguishable. To Gene he looked “almost as worried as Daladier…. At the first interval he rose and saluted the soprano. Audience cheered. Then he left the box…. As he passed within a yard of me, I got a powerful whiff of cologne, which struck me as degenerate. A moment later Mussolini was on the stage, taking a bow with the diva. The crowd shouted ‘Duce’ … he saluted the audience—Fascist arm outstretched. Then he was gone.” Despite the cologne, the young boy thought Mussolini splendid, as spectacle, as politician. “That jaw, that splendid emptiness. After all, I had been brought up with politicians. He was an exotic variation on something quite familiar to me.” The next year Mussolini was to be the dark but white-uniformed inspiration for his first “really ambitious novel,” never to be completed, “about a dictator in Rome, filled with intrigue and passion and Machiavellian combinazione.”
Summer 1939 was closing around them, the days shorter, European politics dangerous. As they were well-connected Washington children, the American ambassador received them at the embassy, particularly since Ham Fish’s father was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Even in distant, domestic-minded Washington, foreign affairs were now on everybody’s mind. Whether or not Sofield and Barlow read Italian newspapers or tuned in to other immediately available currents, they had reason to be nervous. Rumors of imminent war came from authoritative sources. If war were to be declared, the border between Italy and France would be closed. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, whose husband had close relations with the State Department, got a message to them, probably through the embassy, urging them “to get out of there quick,” so Lee Barlow remembers. Perhaps Nina was the source of the urgent request that they leave Europe as soon as possible. “She fixed it up through our embassy somehow,” her son remembers. “She would have gone straight to the State Department, to Sumner Welles or someone. All these people were coming to Merrywood. Probably one of them came to Merrywood, the undersecretary of something or even Cordell Hull, and said there’s trouble coming. Try to get them out.” Late in August they made one of the last trains out of Italy. The border closed behind them.
From Saint-Malo they crossed the Channel. In London they found a gloomy, disappointed Britain preparing for war. From an ancient Bloomsbury bed and breakfast on Russell Square, with a “fascinating primitive bathroom,” all soon to be turned into rubble, Gene quickly saw as much of London as he could. He had little time. The city was mostly shut down. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, he stood in front of 10 Downing Street watching Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister whom he had often dressed up as and imitated, leave en route to Parliament to tell his nation that war was inevitable. “Thin little man. A wing collar, huge Adam’s apple, uncommonly small head. No cheers, no jeers. The crowd simply sighs, in unison, on exhalation. Terrible, mournful sound. Chamberlain tries to smile; winces instead. Is driven off.” Sofield and the Barlows rushed to the American embassy to get tickets for Lee and the boys to depart immediately. The two men, who needed to arrange for the bicycles and other luggage to be sent separately, would take a later ship. At Liverpool on September 3, the day Britain and France declared war, the boys were on a British vessel, the Antonia, sailing out into the Irish Sea. Wartime exigencies applied on the crowded boat. Nazi submarines prowled the North Atlantic. Soon they witnessed the almost incomprehensible: the Antonia’s sister ship, the Athenia, had been torpedoed on the final day of its eastward voyage from New York to Liverpool. “Longboats carrying passengers to the dull, misty green Irish shore. Consternation about our ship.” They saw the Athenia turn up and then slip beneath the water. The sky and the smooth sea were gray. Some passengers on the Antonia urged that they turn back. The captain decided to go on. Soon they were sailing a zigzagging evasive pattern that added days to the voyage. Since the protocols and strategies for crossing the Atlantic in wartime had not yet been worked out, no one knew what to expect. But there were no further sightings or incidents.
Life settled down to the usual shipboard routine except that, to Gene’s annoyance, the canteen ran out of chocolate, a major disappointment. To him it seemed mostly an adventure, not true history since he was not reading about it in a book, where real history exists. After a few days the adventure seemed ordinary, even boring, certainly not as scary as the countless scary movies he had seen. At night they sailed without lights. He and Lee Barlow walked the deck in the darkness. She tried, again, to teach him versification. When she insisted on absolute metrical regularity, he cited a Keats sonnet as evidence that great poets sometimes write irregular lines. And why did he need to know the name of a metrical pattern in order to write poetry in that pattern? They were at a standstill. As they kept walking the deck in the darkness, the Antonia zigzagged westward. Soon the passengers discovered they were heading for Montreal, not New York. The eight-day trip took two weeks. From Montreal they took the train to Washington, where one of the first things Nina required was that Gene get his hair washed and cut at the Mayflower Hotel. As he looked down into the washbasin at the dirty water, his dark hair turning blond again, he realized, happily, that he had not washed his hair in three months. It had been a blissfully successful first European visit. His only problem was that he had been booked, involuntarily, for a further westward voyage. It was to, of all places, Los Alamos, New Mexico.