Suddenly his life took an unexpected leap into passion. In late summer 1947 he was recuperating at East Hampton. The hepatitis had gradually disappeared. As his appetite returned, he began to reclaim some of the lost thirty pounds. Morose and unfocused, he was happy to have Anaïs at a distance. Over the last year, in Guatemala and New York, he had complained that his life lacked a grand romance, while at the same time he had strong reservations about the value in general of any kind of “romance” at all. Whether he wanted or felt capable of an affair with anyone was a consideration. “Have you the temperament to secure and hold a lover?” a friend had asked him the previous winter. The answer had been the same as it had been to Anaïs. But he now gave a different response to twenty-two-year-old Harold Lang, the California-born ballet and musical-comedy dancer, famous for his pirouettes on- and offstage. “We met,” Vidal wrote in an unpublished 1947 short story, in “a wood-walled bar in the beach town, the bar where the people in the summer theater gathered.” Lang was performing in Look, Ma, I’m Dancing, one of his many musical-comedy roles, as he alternated between the Ballet Theatre (later renamed the American Ballet Theatre) and Broadway musicals, a lead dancer in the movement that narrowed the gap between classical ballet and American popular-theatrical dance. “Harold was a magnificent dancer,” a balletomane recalled. “He wasn’t a perfect dancer. But he was witty, and vivid, and so intelligent onstage. He didn’t have a beautiful body, but a handsome one.” With a throaty, effective singing voice, Lang reached musical-comedy stardom in Kiss Me, Kate in 1948 and in the long-running 1952 revival of Pal Joey. His first great success had been in Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein’s Fancy Free in 1944, the ballet soon transformed into the musical On the Town. At East Hampton that summer Lang was having sex with the male author and the female lead of Look, Ma. His friend Joe O’Donohue, a high-society habituée of Manhattan nightlife and later a friend of Gore’s, recalled that “Harold and I used to go off on the town. I took him to nightclubs and especially to Harlem. Harold and I had sex together, but it was a casual thing. Harold was very easy about that sort of thing.” Sometimes mooningly romantic, often promiscuously unstable, Lang ranged from carefree to compulsive. Notoriously randy and random, he had affairs, usually brief, with both sexes. As much a sexual athlete as a ballet dancer, to the young Gore Vidal he “was just extraordinary to be with…. It was really the sexual life force. I’ve never seen anything like it and never saw anything like it again…. It was ‘the greatest ass in history,’ as Bernstein said, and Lenny was a true authority.”
After their first flirtation in the bar, Gore went to watch Harold at rehearsal. Dark-haired, a few inches shorter than Gore, with whitish-blue eyes, a trimly muscular body, lithe strong thighs, a boyish face, and roguishly attractive smile, Harold had wonderful elevation as a dancer and riveting stage presence. Gore himself had become a minor balletomane the previous winter and spring. At the Chafee Dance Studio he had enjoyed his own restricted athleticism, therapy for his rheumatoid arthritis. Hanging around Manhattan bars frequented by dance people, he met numbers of young dancers, began to attend performances, particularly of the Ballet Theatre, and met its director of public relations, Sam Lurie. After a few more nights at the same East Hampton bar, they left together and cycled to the dancer’s boardinghouse. Lang invited Gore up to see his room. “It began then.” That first night Lang was the pursuer, Gore emotionally reserved, hesitant. The next day they argued. “I wasn’t capable of an affair, he thought…. I seemed so much like so many other people he knew. I couldn’t answer him. If he couldn’t see how different I was…. Then, as suddenly as before, just when I was about to leave, he said, ‘Let’s go to bed’; that was the way the loving started.” As Gore’s fictional surrogate confessed, “I had never known anything like this and in the dark he whispered to me, don’t louse me up; and then I loved him and, since he was afraid of me, I removed all my armor to show that I was the one vulnerable, that he was safe. I knew that night of something he needed that I couldn’t give, and that gave me anxiety…. But now I was loving for the first time and everything was new.” For the first time he was actually making love with the intent to give as well as get pleasure. It was a new experience. Unfortunately, it was soon less than idyllic. Lang was moody, erratic. After that first week at East Hampton, he put Gore off with the story that he had an ex-lover staying with him, from whom he was in the process of trying to extricate himself. Each day at the beach, Harold mostly absent, Gore diverted himself with Ethel Merman, the Broadway star with the stentorian singing voice “who was quite intrigued with the idea of her voice resounding in a monastery. She has,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, “very likely, the worst figure of any woman in the world but she is amusing and loves to discuss things in terms of male genitalia. We got on quite well and she can’t wait to read the C and P. ‘Don’t read much but love books about homos,’” she said.
Eager for a holiday and a retreat, Harold suggested they take a trip together, preferably out of the country, when Look, Ma, I’m Dancing closed. Soon after Labor Day they flew to Bermuda. All was well again. They lounged together in the sun, enjoying the stillness, listening to the waves, swimming in the reef-protected bay. Lang decorated their attractive four-room cottage, inexpensive in the off-season, with large pink hibiscus flowers. At night they gazed at a star-white sky. On bicycles they enjoyed pedaling up and down hills to the nearby village, where they watched ships coming into the harbor, enjoyed the sunsets, and went to the movies. To help pay for the trip Gore wrote a brief, perfunctory travel article about Bermuda, which he hoped Town & Country would take, though the editor soon responded that it is “a bit dry and stereotyped for us.” Lang, who sometimes drank too much, kept away from the bars for the first week. “We stayed at home and read, played cards, made love, and tried to talk to one another, but he thought I was bored, and I knew he didn’t understand what I said to him.” Great gossips, they talked about the few people they both knew. Beyond that there were vast gaps. Tension developed. Insecure even as an entertainer, Lang felt disappointed in himself and in his insufficiently responsive one-person audience. “One night he decided he was going to drink…. After that, every evening, there was a tug-of-war; should we go into town and go to a bar or not. I never wanted to…. And then one day everything went wrong: he decided he didn’t want any more sex for a while; I didn’t satisfy him. He didn’t want to talk about this; he didn’t want to talk about anything, only to repeat the jokes, the chatter of the theater world…. The nights were more terrible for I slept beside him and could not have him. I knew he hated making someone else happy, and I could understand this since I was the same way but not with him…. Finally, one morning, I took him against his will and he was angry and hurt. We fought and I was ready to fly back…. He asked me to get him an analyst when we got back, he felt that he would go to pieces soon. He’d never believed in analysis but now he’d try anything.”
In New York they lived together for the next month at the Chelsea Hotel. For a moment Gore enjoyed the hope they might go to Europe together in the late winter. Bursting with enthusiasm, he came into Judith Jones’s office at Doubleday. Having left Dutton for what she thought a more literary house, she hoped to lure Gore to their list for his next novel. “Though I shared the office, I was alone in the small room. And he said, ‘I’ve fallen in love.’ I thought it was with a girl. ‘And I’m going to Italy with him.’ I said, ‘Yes?’ It was someone in the ballet. He was just—I mean I’ve never seen him that way. Just dancing in seventh heaven, like a guy in love.” “My life is completely governed these days by my grande affaire,” he wrote to Pat Crocker, “and the grande affaire opens on Broadway [in Kiss Me, Kate] in Jan. I’ve gotten so sick of theatre people that I could shriek and that might be a good excuse to come back to Guatemala.” The history of the affair could be reduced to a few sentences. At East Hampton “I fell madly in love with an unfortunately too famous and too desirable dancer and musical comedy star; we dashed off to Bermuda together for September, came back, went through some mutual scenes of hysteria a la Max and, at the moment, are living uneasily together in the Chelsea Hotel while he rehearses and I work on my fifth book and, believe it or not, take four hours of ballet training a day. What will happen to me if I fall in love with a doctor I don’t know: eight years of medicine I guess.”
Harold went twice a week to a midtown therapist, “Jules Nydes, M.A., Consulting Psychologist.” Always hesitant about psychiatry for himself, Gore had reluctantly gone the previous year to Anaïs’s analyst for a few sessions, an unhappy experience. He worried that analysis would undermine his creativity. Bored with her psychological jargon and her faith in its powers, he had gone mostly to placate her, partly because he recognized his moodiness, felt his depressions, knew indeed that he harbored immense anger against Nina. When the analyst had asked him probing questions, Gore had responded, “Don’t be impertinent!” After a few tense sessions they had parted, the analyst’s final riposte, “You think your shit is better than other people’s shit.” Nina herself, sneeringly hostile when drunk, had off and on urged him to get professional help. Years before, prompted by her friend Sherry Davis, she had had young Gene examined by a psychologist who had concluded that there were no grounds for concern. With the publication of City, Nina was forced to see things in a different light. But whatever her mood of the moment about Gore’s sex life and his male friends, she shared the widespread conviction that homosexuals were sick creatures. If only Gore would shape up, would set his mind to it, he could be perfectly normal. Homosexuality was curable by psychotherapy, so the 1952 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders claimed, and large numbers of young men with doubts about their sexuality sat in analysts’ waiting rooms. A devotee of Freud, Anaïs also believed that Gore needed professional help: homosexuality was arrested development. From his point of view, whatever his problems, they had nothing to do with sexual inclinations and practices. Sometimes with cold logic, other times with angry rhetoric, he signaled how sensitive he was to the subject. He especially resented that what he did not feel as a problem others condemned as either vice or illness. In Harold’s case he urged and arranged therapy not because of Harold’s sexuality but because his irrational behavior threatened their relationship. Desperate, for the moment he was willing to try it himself.
In early October Harold suddenly disappeared from the Chelsea Hotel and, apparently, from New York. He left no message, no note of explanation, no forwarding address. Angry, hurt, Gore tried to find him. Making an appointment with Lang’s therapist, he sat through an awkward session, hoping he could get Nydes to tell him Harold’s whereabouts. Having guessed why Gore was there, Nydes told him nothing. He returned for one more session. Soon, though, he located someone who reported that the dancer had gone to San Francisco to visit his mother. What to do? He decided to write to him there. “My dear Harold—I suppose that you’re with your mother since someone said you’d gone to California. I hope you plan to continue the analysis; I haven’t talked to your analyst since that’s unethical but I gather … that all was going fairly well. As I told you in my letter I’m going to another [therapist] … and I seem to be getting a grip on myself; as you might have guessed I was quite upset over not having heard from you even though I understood why you were scurrying about. Analysis is quite a frightening experience. I think we’ve both reached a similar impasse when our careers don’t give the same satisfaction, the same forgetfulness as they once did; it’s not a pleasant thing to see oneself but it must be faced sometimes. I think this is the right moment for you; I know it is for me. I hope you go on with it.” The letter was never sent. When Harold returned from California, he focused on rehearsals for the January opening of Kiss Me, Kate and resumed a sex life he had hardly repressed during his six weeks or so with Gore. “He was a star on Broadway in Pal Joey, and at least three times he was arrested in men’s rooms on his way to the matinee,” Gore remarked. “They had to hold the curtain while the police let him go, and if the police didn’t let him go, his understudy would go on. Now, that’s madness. And I’m aware of all this, that he’s so compulsive, so crazed. He was wrecking his career. I don’t think I was being entirely self-centered. What I was saying to Harold is that knowing what I know about you, it’s a very good idea that you go through analysis or something, because something terrible is going to happen within three or four years. It did.” Gore’s own halting experiment with analysis abruptly ended. So too had his grand passion, though not quite as abruptly. While hoping that Lang might return to him, he began writing a play that reflected his feelings of loss. “But I find the theme of elusiveness a little too personal and poignant at the moment to write about. I must wait until I’m settled; until I’ve heard from you. My feelings about you are unchanged; from now on it’s up to you to preserve this: if you want it…. I wish you’d write me.”
There was a reconciliation, though it did not last long. “I seem submerged in the dance world,” Gore wrote to Pat Crocker. He had met two more ballet dancers, Leon Danielian and Johnny Kriza, well-known young performers both of whom soon became his friends: Danielian a premiere member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Kriza best known for his title performance in the Ballet Theatre’s production of Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. By the beginning of the new year “the dancer affair” had come “to a painful end and I now have a new lover,” probably Johnny Kriza, “very pleasant, very cozy.” Convenient, companionable sex, it had none of the romantic intensity of his affair with Lang. The City and the Pillar was about to be published, scheduled for January 9. Europe, as always, was much on his mind, though no longer with Harold as his sailing companion. In the late fall Prokosch, from Capri, urged Gore to come to Italy. At first he thought he would go to Guatemala about the middle of February. Since his house in Antigua had been rented, he proposed to Crocker that he stay with him for a month at his house on the lake “on the usual sharing basis: this includes marimba workers etc.” But the idea of Guatemala again soon seemed less and less appealing. By mid-January 1948 he had made up his mind to go to Rome.
Almost one year before, while Gore was still in Antigua, Prokosch, having decided to live permanently in Europe, had written him that “I very much want you to meet John Kelly, who is an old Yale and Cambridge and Istanbul friend of mine…. Write to me … and tell me all the dirt about Guatemala—more sex details, less architectural.” In spring 1947 Gore went to Cismont, near Charlottesville, Virginia, to visit Kelly, whom he had recently met in New York, the first of numbers of visits and the start of a friendship to last until Kelly’s death in 1966. In his mid-thirties, pudgy, dark-haired, an alcoholic who passionately loved the opera and ballet, Kelly had offered numbers of times that spring to help Gore give “romance” a try. Through Kelly, Vidal met Bob Giroux, Kelly’s friend and his editor at Harcourt, Brace, which was about to publish Kelly’s novel, All Soul’s Night. At Cambridge, Kelly, who had been born in New Jersey in 1913, had studied economics with John Maynard Keynes. A well-read, cultured, witty man with a passion for music and for Times Square sex, Kelly, who was “wildly funny,” Gore later recalled, and had “sad, velvety eyes,” alternated his New York activities with his life as a Virginia country squire. “John was a romantic, a male Anaïs Nin,” Gore recalled, “without being as dumb as she was. A romantic Irish tenor who knew everything in the world about music and a rather good writer, very literary. And very good company till he would try to be romantic. He was easily held off.” Kelly was married to Betty Wagner, a wealthy woman from Staten Island, whose family was the source of his money. Their mansion, Cross Meadows, and the land in Cismont came from Betty’s mother, who had moved there. Kelly had met Betty in Virginia and married her at her mother’s home, which later became his. Actually there were no horses or livestock at the Kellys’. They were, though, in the midst of genteel, high-toned horse country and good friends with many of the local squires. Life at Cismont had English country rhythms: horse training and hunting clubs dominated. When Giroux visited, Kelly would insist he go to the club with him. “‘But I don’t hunt!’ It didn’t matter. They’d all go and, like everyone else, drink so much they couldn’t get on a horse anyway.”
Admiring and affectionate, Gore found Kelly companionable. His visits to Cismont were restful, even when Kelly made advances, as he did periodically. Gore would say no, and Kelly would drink more and then usually pass out on the floor, where he would sleep for hours. At Cismont he played Wagner and Verdi incessantly. In New York, in a tuxedo, with Giroux or others, he would appear for almost every performance at the Metropolitan Opera House. That his propositions were bumbling, his soul romantic, his epistolary style engaging, added to his charm. “Having spent, it appears, a lifetime with you, the separation is becoming acute,” he wrote after Gore’s first visit. “Will you come for a week-end?” He was also a master of romantic melancholy. “You make me sad, because I want to be with you and I am not. Such feelings alarm me. I cannot bear to think that I am anywhere other than according to my desire.” Thoroughly in love, he nominated himself, through much of 1947, to satisfy Gore’s often-expressed thought that he needed a lover. His comments on Gore’s complaints were often humorous. “What do you mean by ‘intermittent sex’? Do you mean that you have sexual intercourse at irregular intervals, or that the intercourse itself is subject to interruptions? If you find it impossible to communicate on this subject, send me a picture…. I hear my wife coming up the drive, which means lunch, so I shall close in the midst of deep thoughts about you, dear Gore, and in the hope that I shall hear immediately…. You do not always say ‘no.’ I remember that you sometimes write something that looks like, Yes.” The “yes” was to confidences, not intimacies.
So too with Dan Wickenden and Cornelia Claiborne. Gore had continued his friendships with both when he returned from Guatemala in late summer 1947. At home in Westport, Connecticut, assiduously at work on his latest novel, Wickenden saw Gore only a few times in New York. But they continued the correspondence about themselves as novelists that they had begun when Wickenden had left Guatemala. Genially but aggressively, Wickenden attacked his friendly rival. Mostly Gore defended his work, particularly In a Yellow Wood and The City and the Pillar, both of which Wickenden thought enervated. Wickenden set out at length what he thought were the weaknesses of Vidal’s novels and Vidal’s view of the novel as a literary form, in constant unfavorable contrast to himself and his own vision of the novel as bourgeois upbeat epic on the level of entertainment in which fullness, vigor, raw life were everything. His own novels were stabs in that direction, with the merit of energy rather than art. When he began a chapter, he rarely knew where it would end. Vidal’s novels seemed to him too controlled, too intellectually programmatic, too unlike his own. Rising to the challenge, Vidal defended himself, though not at as great length as Wickenden attacked. His counterattacks, equally self-defensive, did not fully conceal an underlying disquiet, not about his bleak themes but about his flat tightness of tone and language. At work on A Search for the King, he hoped for more resonance. The imminent publication of City was much on his mind. Wickenden did not in the least disapprove of its subject matter. In fact, he admired that aspect of the novel and anticipated that it might be a great success.
By this time Cornelia, whether she had read City in manuscript or not, had fully realized that Gore’s sexual inclinations would keep them, at best, friends and social companions. “I don’t need to write to you of my heart because you are always there, but you never answer,” she told him in fall 1947. Aware of his involvement with Anaïs, she felt baffled about the nature of the attraction and assumed it had to be sexual. But she could not quite see what Gore saw in Anaïs, or so she told him. Actually, by the time she was aware of it as a relationship, it was already mostly over. Gore himself, though, kept Cornelia’s attention. His combination of self-involvement and talent impressed and baffled her. “You have a Christ complex, an Oedipus complex, a Hitler complex, and a complex complex. There really isn’t anything wrong with you at all if you could forget about all these complexes.” But she had become quite certain she was not “capable of making [him] stop being wretched … so there isn’t really much point in trying.” But she believed in his powers, his talents. “You can be a great writer and a great man. It’s so unbelievable that anyone is capable of doing both [literature and politics] that you really should try it…. It would encourage humanity a great deal.” Busy as managing editor of The Hudson Review, Cornelia herself continued to be intensely literary—editing, writing poetry, wondering where her situation and talents would take her.
Still optimistic that the subject of City would not be held against him, in autumn 1947 Gore applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1948. The project was his novel in progress, A Search for the King. The success of Williwaw and In a Yellow Wood might make him an attractive candidate. Whom to ask for recommendations? Since Orville Prescott had reviewed Williwaw favorably in the New York Times, Gore thought it reasonable to ask him. Prescott said yes, though apparently Gore did not read sharply enough between the lines of his assent. “I would be glad to serve as a literary reference to you in your application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, providing that my having read your first book qualifies me. Unfortunately, I did not get around to In a Yellow Wood.… By the way, could it be possible that you are writing too quickly? It seems to me that your rate of output is amazing. But then, everyone has to perform his own job of work in his own way.” Gore soon learned that Capote had also applied. Whatever his own chances, he was happy not to be dependent on any support other than his savings and his writing. He hoped that his royalties would make viable his determination to devote himself fully to writing. By early December 1947, before the recommendations were due, advance copies of City became available. Prescott, who a few months later felt such moral outrage that he declined to review it, may have known enough about it from word-of-mouth or his own reading for it to have influenced his letter of recommendation. Wreden wrote a smashingly laudatory letter. So too did Nathan Rothman, who had praised In a Yellow Wood in The Saturday Review of Literature, and Bob Giroux, who recommended Gore “in the highest terms.” But Prescott damned him with less-than-faint praise. “I do not know enough about Mr. Vidal to feel justified in urging his project upon you. An historical novel about Richard I and Blondel seems to me so conventional and even popular a literary project that it might well take its chances with others of its type. So, I can only say that I know Mr. Vidal to be a gifted young man and to suggest that his need for a scholarship and your own opinion of the merit of his work in progress should be the deciding factor.” It was a killing letter, against the ethical grain of the widely accepted understanding that if one cannot write a good recommendation one should decline to write at all. Gore did not get the fellowship. Neither did Capote. “Shocked, we compared notes. Studied the list of those who had received grants. ‘Will you just look,’ moaned Truman, ‘at those ahh-full pee-pull they keep giving muh-nee to!’” A promising young writer, E. Howard Hunt, to become infamous decades later in the Watergate investigations, received a Guggenheim Fellowship that year.
Once he had decided to sail for Europe in mid-February, Gore’s spirits lightened. New York sparkled a bit more brightly in his restless eye. Johnny Kriza provided pleasure, the usual erotic release. Nina, intermittently, got on his nerves. The previous summer she had dried out at Silver Hill, in Connecticut, an expensive retreat for alcoholics, her mind partly on elaborate schemes for becoming a leading figure in creating support systems for alcoholics, partly on legal procedures to get additional money from Auchincloss. Anaïs pulled strings to arrange lectures at college campuses, the most prominent at Harvard at the beginning of January. Soon she was off to California. Parties were still a staple of Gore’s New York activities. He went to one “for Cecil Beaton and found him dull. Had dinner with Glenway Wescott who is charming.” Eager to meet the much-admired novelist Christopher Isherwood, who he hoped would like The City and the Pillar, he was disappointed to learn he had been out of town when Isherwood had passed through. “He is now touring South America with his love, a boy photographer.” He sent Isherwood, as he sent others, including Thomas Mann, advance copies, with handwritten notes and inscriptions. Worried its reception might not be entirely positive, he tried to get endorsements that could be used as blurbs or in follow-up advertisements to help counter negative reviews.
In January 1948, at the home of the writer Glenway Wescott’s sister, Gore met John Horne Burns, whose successful war novel, The Gallery, he admired a great deal more than he did the thirty-one-year-old Burns himself, “a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great.” He seemed monstrous, envious, bitchy, drunk. With “a receding hairline above a face striking in its asymmetry, one ear flat against the head, the other stuck out,” Burns was “certain that to be a good writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed he named a half dozen celebrated contemporaries, ‘A pleiad,’ he roared delightedly, ‘of pederasts!’ But what about Faulkner, I asked, and Hemingway. He was disdainful. Who said they were any good? And besides, hadn’t I heard how Hemingway once.…” A harbinger of Italian delights, Burns extolled the attractions of Italian boys, whom he called topolini. Gore thereafter referred to them as “mice.” The word itself seemed to bring Italian pleasures closer.
Hollywood, another exotic landscape, had been on his mind during much of 1947, and still had importance to him even as he prepared for his departure for Europe. Numbers of talented writers, including Isherwood, had found sustenance writing screenplays for the movies. It had occurred to Gore early on that he might supplement his novel-writing income or even if necessary earn his living in Los Angeles. The occasion when he had overheard two scriptwriters working beside the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel stuck in his memory. That his mother was good friends with Doris and Jules Stein could be a help. Before leaving for New Orleans in late summer 1946, he had sent some of the good reviews of Williwaw to Felix Ferry, Nina’s Beverly Hills friend, an agent with Famous Artists Corporation, whom he had met the previous spring. Perhaps a studio might be interested in optioning Williwaw and/or contracting with its author to write scripts. A year later, from Antigua, he had assured the desperate Anaïs that “if I get a Hollywood job then there will be a great deal of money. Think about this for I am serious.” He hoped something could be arranged through a contact at Columbia Studios. Toward the end of 1947 Ferry encouraged the neophyte to provide a story idea that Ferry might try to sell. “A short to the point story with a not too extensive background is one of the most welcome commodities in Hollywood today. Have you any in mind which might do? If so, please put it on four or five pages which would be quite enough to sell the idea, especially when it is as beautifully written as your works are. Then there would be a chance to see you with it and have you come out here to enjoy a little of this season’s sunshine.”
The beginning of the new year in New York had its own brightness. Finally, on January 9, 1948, Dutton published The City and the Pillar. All at Dutton held their breath, having moved into what seemed perilous, uncharted waters by publishing a book that made an argument for the legitimization of sex between men. The Macraes were uncomfortable. Advance orders of 5,000 copies, though, were good enough for Wreden to hope it might be a bestseller. Word-of-mouth provided news of the novel’s controversial subject. Vidal’s reputation, as the author of Williwaw and as a well-publicized “enfant terrible,” helped stimulate bookstore interest. He had already pocketed his largest advance against royalties, $2,000, the final $1,000 on the day of publication, replenishing his bank account with enough to pay for much of his European trip. The well-known English publisher and editor John Lehmann, whom Gore was soon to meet, had contracted with Dutton for British rights. A number of foreign-language editions seemed likely. Wreden, though, still worried that his prize author would be damaged by the book’s enemies. Fortunately, readers, despite mixed reviews and occasional sharp attacks, found the subject absorbing. Amanda Ellis, who had befriended Gore in Colorado Springs, came by for a visit, enthusiastic about her former protégé’s success. From Lima, Peru, Christopher Isherwood responded to Vidal’s letter with enthusiastic encouragement and permission to use his praise in advertisements, though he disapproved of City’s ending: it would encourage the widespread prejudice that homosexual relationships always ended miserably, a self-defensive comment echoed by a large number of homosexuals happy to see their sexuality taken seriously in fiction but distressed that society’s impression that homosexuals all come to a bad end would be reinforced by Jim’s murdering Bob Ford. Isherwood, it seemed to Vidal, preferred propaganda to artistic integrity. It was, though, the start of a friendship. “Thank you for what you say about my writing,” Isherwood wrote to him. “That makes me very happy…. It’s nice to be a stimulus—and especially to another writer…. And do please write. I love getting letters, and most of my friends seem to regard me as temporarily dead.”
From his Pacific Palisades exile Thomas Mann thanked the young writer for his gift copy “with your personal inscription. Your novel, which has afforded me a noble entertainment, is a valuable addition to my English library. The interesting book has my most sincere wishes for the success it deserves.” In his private diary Mann remarked on how much it had stirred the banked fires of his own past, how powerfully and personally he identified with the novel’s subject. From California, Anaïs, to whom Gore had written announcing his bestsellerdom and offering her money, wrote back with congratulatory kindness, especially since she did not like the book and believed it contained a mean caricature of her. “Already I’d heard that you were the best seller! I’m happy because money can be magical when well used—I think it was sweet offering me some—I like your saying it even if I won’t take advantage of it…. Cheri, I feel as exactly close to you as you to me and of the most durable quality…. You have won all your battles, you know—You have more power to love richly than any young man I know—you have physical beauty and charm and a heart and a gifted nature—I should know, who know you deeper—So be happy…. Our only enemy is doubt, lack of confidence—Have faith, have faith.” From Rome, Prokosch, who passed his copy around among eager friends, urged Gore not to worry “in the least about the sex angle—it is obviously treated very cleanly and manfully.” Come to Europe, he urged, delighted to learn at the end of the month that Gore was almost on his way.
First, though, the newspaper reviews, crucial to the book’s sales, had to be absorbed, confronted, evaluated. It was not an easy and hardly a pleasant experience. Gore had worried about what the reaction might be, what effect it might have on his future. He had thought he had realistically assessed the risks, the parameters of response and their impact. Somewhat naïvely he had assumed that whatever the range of response, its effect would be brief, limited, and manageable. He had hoped for fame and fortune. Now all he could be sure of for the moment was notoriety. As the reviews came in, the Dutton publicity department created its usual excerpts for trade distribution and advertisements. The controversy was a publicist’s delight. “Some rave about it,” a Dutton advertisement heralded in bold print, quoting one word from the laudatory review in The Atlantic Monthly: “Brilliant”; “Some are shocked,” quoting one word from the hostile review in the Chicago Tribune, “Disgusting—but it became a best seller.” By mid-January City was “a bestseller in New York at the rate of 1,500 a week and should show on the bestseller lists in three weeks, thank God.” Before publication Dutton had increased the first printing from 5,000 to 10,000 copies and the advertising budget, for a book that sold for $3.50, to $5,000, approximately the equivalent of $50,000 today. “The fan mail,” Gore wrote to Pat Crocker, whose copy was avidly passed from hand to hand in their Guatemala circle, “has been amazing, but no enclosed pictures so far.” On February 8 it was number fourteen on a national list of sixteen; by February 22 it had risen to number seven (Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, he noted, was number eleven on the same list). “The book sells merrily; it’s now the #14 bestseller in the country. #2 in New York; #3 in Los Angeles; #1 in San Francisco…. Tell Wickenden,” who had returned to Guatemala, “that The Atlantic Monthly gave me a wonderful review. The rest have been quite awful.”
To celebrate the ratings Wreden hosted at his Park Avenue apartment a dinner party for a number of his bestselling authors, including Cleveland Amory, whose The Proper Bostonians was on the nonfiction bestseller list. Kit and Gene walked over with Gore from the Vidals’ apartment on Fifth Avenue. Gene queried Wreden about how the book business worked. “You know, it astonishes me in a country the size of the United States how few copies you can sell of anything,” Gene remarked. “Of anything! I could make a celluloid napkin clip and sell more copies of it in the country tomorrow than you can sell of a book, and you have more means of publicity with a book than I would have with my celluloid napkin clip. But I would know how to sell it.” Gore was lively, amusingly conversational. Mostly, though, the talk was about success, not about how small even bestseller sales were, and not about reviews.
The bad ones, though, were difficult to shake off. He did his best, writing to Pat Crocker that they were “flatteringly violent,” essentially of two kinds, both more unrelentingly hostile than he had anticipated: the homophobic Middle American outrage—epitomized by review headlines such as “A Sordid Picture of the Male Species,” “Tragedy of Perversion,” and “Abnormal Doom”—and the attacks on the novel’s artistry, most of which had an ummistakable moral underpinning, but a few of which, notably Leslie Fiedler’s in The Hudson Review, found City’s failures to be entirely aesthetic. With great praise for the novel’s honest embrace of “drabness” and for its effective dramatization of “seedy torment,” Fiedler gave it the respect of serious literary criticism: “the book cannot even hold rigidly to the impersonality it proposes, the scarcely more than animal awareness of its athletic protagonist; there are, on the one hand, long artificial speeches diagnosing homosexuality and proposing Utopias for its free play, and there is, on the other hand, the suggested symbolism of the novel’s name—an illegitimate device, proposing to supply with the five words of a title a dimension of symbolism that the book otherwise ignores.” In brief, Fiedler argued, the novel’s admirable sincerity had expressed itself in a flat naturalism that fell short of effective dramatic and symbolic representation. The problem was in the young writer’s artistry, not his subject. It was a conclusion to which the author himself would give serious even if self-defensive attention. Gore, though, insisted on blaming Cornelia, as managing editor of The Hudson Review, for Fiedler’s harsh review, an expression of his increasing anger at what he had begun to feel, after the publication of City, was a homophobic cabal to wound him by attacks or eliminate him by silence.
Some of the hostile reviews combined moral outrage with aesthetic criticism, the most damaging of these by C. V. Terry in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, so brief that it signaled contempt, so clever that it allowed its moral disapproval to be carried simply by indirection, misrepresentation, and code words: “Presented as the case history of a standard homosexual, his novel adds little that is new to a groaning shelf. Mr. Vidal’s approach is coldly clinical … this time he has produced a novel as sterile as its protagonists.” Like character like author, every reader was meant to assume. When Gore wrote a sharp letter of protest to the New York Times, the Review declined to print it. The daily New York Times expressed its disapproval by silence. No review at all. The Times management had a commitment to their version of “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” An admirer with close contacts at the newspaper’s executive level reported that the decision had been made by the owner himself, Julius Ochs Adler, who had decided that the Times would accept ads for The City and the Pillar but not review it. Good reviews were few and far between, mostly notably in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, The Saturday Review, and Atlantic Monthly, which called it “a brilliant exposé of subterranean life among New York and Hollywood expatriates from normal sex … an attempt to clarify the inner neuroses of our time, of which the increase in homosexuality and divorce are symptoms.” Like other thoughtful readers, the Saturday Review commentator called attention to the culturally revealing coincidence that Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking statistical study, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, had been published within a month of City. If Kinsey’s statistics were correct, Vidal’s dramatization spoke to a sexual activity so much more widely practiced than had heretofore been believed that the society would be better served by open, enlightened discussion than by medieval repression. The New York Times, self-consciously and self-righteously inconsistent, decided it would review but not accept ads for Kinsey’s scientific study.
Gore soon came to value the Kinsey connection. In spring 1949 he was to talk at length to the avid scientist in the mezzanine of the Astor Hotel. Clipboard in hand, the tired-looking “gray-faced man” with a crew cut, wearing a polka-dot bow tie, was interviewing homosexual artists for a book on the relationship between sexuality and creativity. He was eager to talk to Vidal, to whom he had written, complimenting him on City, which he had read carefully, expressing his hope that “we will have a chance to meet someday.” Kinsey “told me that I was not ‘homosexual’—doubtless because I never sucked cock or got fucked. Even so, I was setting world records for encounters with anonymous youths…. I tried to tell Kinsey about Jimmie. But I had not yet read Plato; I had no theory. Kinsey gave me a copy of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, with an inscription complimenting me on my ‘work in the field.’” Gore gave Kinsey an autographed copy of The Season of Comfort. In the long interview at the Astor, he may indeed have told him much about the novel’s heroine. Nina knew all she wanted to know about City and The Season of Comfort from what others told her. Gene said almost nothing to his son about City, other than that it was “interesting,” his nonconfrontational way of saying he had nothing happy to say about his son’s sexuality. His wife, Kit, assumed that he was deeply disappointed, among other reasons because he had hoped that Gore would marry and make his own father a grandfather. “Yes, you had to assume that the author of The City and the Pillar was either homosexual or very observant,” Kit remarked. “Gene wasn’t enthusiastic.” He feared that the book would damage Gore’s career. In Washington his grandparents passed over City and its reviews in silence.
As he sailed out of New York harbor in mid-February 1948, bound for Naples, the twenty-two-year-old author leaned against the railing, salt spray rising from waves breaking against the Neue Helena. He happily posed for a photograph. With a black tie against his white shirt, plaid-patterned sport jacket, a look of anticipation and certitude in his eyes, he felt every bit the well-brought-up young American artistic entrepreneur off again to see the world. The City and the Pillar had risen to number five on the Times bestseller list. His intention was to go to Rome. Naples was an accidental destination. At last he was on his way again, this time to the place to which he had frequently dreamed of returning, the Europe of his childhood reading, of his fascination with ancient history, of the happiest experience of his school days, his summer 1939 visit to France and Italy. Had Europe been available in 1946, he never would have gone to Guatemala at all; now he was back on course. He had with him in his cabin the manuscript of his novel-in-progress, A Search for the King, which he would work on during the two-week voyage, and a diary he had started to keep at the beginning of the year to record his ascension to bestsellerdom and his triumphal progress, including this grand European tour. Probably he had Byron in mind. The entries for the first six weeks of the year, so Vidal recalls, had less to do with triumph than with anguish, a linguistic grinding of his teeth in response to City’s stormy reviews. The diary for 1948 is the one document that Vidal declined to make available to his biographer.
After a placid two-week-long winter crossing the port of Naples came into sight on the first of March. Wind and sea spray brought him for the first time to southern Italy. From a distance, sunlight and steel-gray sky made monochromatically bright the high outcropping of Capri to the south, Ischia to the north. The curve of the Bay of Naples seemed graciously cupped. Vesuvius’s flat volcanic peak, slouching dramatically in the background, highlighted the city’s low silhouette, its pre-highrise skyline. As the ship came into the harbor, the still-unreconstructed devastation of the port provided the prelude to a mostly bombed-out city, people living and working in partial ruins. “The whole waterfront had been smashed up, bombarded.” Impoverished Italy had barely begun reconstruction. At the Excelsior Hotel, where he stayed for the night, extensive repairs were under way, the bath-room half paved with marble, the rest raw cement. With a group of fellow passengers from the Neue Helena, he went to a live sex exhibition, a specialty performance at the local whorehouse for hard-currency tourists.
From Naples he went the next day to Rome. As the train entered the city from the south, he saw once again the landmarks he had kept vividly in memory since 1939. The sharp winter light made their uniqueness even more distinctively pristine. No sooner had he put his bags down at the Swiss-run Eden Hotel, near the Via Veneto, than he was off to feel Rome beneath his feet. He immediately walked across the city to the Colosseum. The nighttime quiet seemed preternatural, so unlike the rush of traffic he had experienced before the war. “Very, very dark. No lights. No cars in the streets. A very strange time,” he later recalled. “A wartime feeling still.” But it was recognizably Rome, even in the darkness. The Colosseum cast its silhouette against the night sky. In the circular amphitheater the silence felt ancient. The Forum seemed much the same as it had in 1939, still accessible, without barriers or guards. Back at the hotel he found food scarce, the meat at dinner likely to be something strange and stringy, probably goat. There were vegetables and oranges, as the season permitted, but imports were few, manufactured goods hardly available, luxuries nonexistent. The black market flourished for those with foreign currency, especially dollars. With fuel oil unavailable at any price, people were cold even in the mild Roman winter. The sun, when it shone, was a cherished blessing. From Paris another American writer, Tennessee Williams, who was soon also to come to Rome, wrote, “I am writing this lying up in bed because it is too cold to get up or out…. I have been moving from hotel to hotel trying to find one that is heated.”
Early in March, as Gore awakened to his first morning in Rome, there were signs of spring. “First impressions: Acid-yellow forsythia in the Janiculum. Purple wisteria in the Forum. Chunks of goat on a plate in a trattoria.” Suddenly he was high with the whirl of visual pleasures, revisiting with happy eyes the monuments, the remains of pagan and Christian civilizations, combining the pleasure of new experience with an overlay of vivid memory. Just as years later he encountered in his visual memory, as he walked in Rome, a presence as real as any other of the passersby: the Gore Vidal of this visit now; so too he now encountered his thirteen-year-old self, the schoolboy rapturously reeling from one long-anticipated site to another. “In Rome whenever I turn down the street which goes past the Hotel Eden,” he wrote years later, “where I lived when I first came to Europe after the war, I can sometimes see myself coming up the street, a ghost not knowing he’s being watched by me, by a stranger old enough to be his father, and yet the instant we pass one another and I see the same face I look at every day—but as it was then, unlined, pale, intense—time overlaps for an instant and I am he. I know what he is thinking, where he is going.” Rome began to become inseparable from a personal palimpsest, as if he were writing himself onto the city and the city onto him, his experience over the years taking as its visual and verbal model the overlayered archaeological levels of Roman history. At a table in his cold hotel room he worked in longhand on The Search for the King. The first line he wrote, once settled, was particularly expressive of his strong sense that he had as an ultimate goal some personal version of the power of the Eternal City: “Toward some further mystery time moved, and the days, the moments of light and dark passed, and he moved, like time, toward a mystery he could not name, a place beyond illusion, larger than the moment, enlarged by death.” For him the movement toward mystery, “beyond illusion,” interfaced with consciousness in the passion he felt for the past, in the energy he felt in his writing.
Aware that there were other American writers and artists in Rome, all part of the Grand Tour of 1948, he balanced his quiet hours of work on Search with an active Roman street and café life. Eager to meet everyone, he expected that everyone in the American community would know his name, particularly the artists and intellectuals. Also, those with a special interest in the subject of City would almost certainly know of its existence, if only for its association with scandal, one of the advantages of having published a controversial bestseller. Public discussion of the subject was still mostly muzzled. As to the act itself, that was another matter, especially in impoverished Rome, where he was delighted to discover that John Horne Burns’s “topolini” were indeed widely available. Burns responded to Gore’s letter of confirmation, “I’m happy to know that you’re picking up mice in Italy. Italian mice are most agreeable.” Used to the restrictions and conventions of cruising in New York, newly arrived Americans found postwar Rome and Paris refreshing. “Honey, you would love Rome! Not Paris, but Rome,” Tennessee Williams, who had arrived from Paris while Gore was at sea on the Neue Helena, wrote to a friend. “I have not been to bed with Michelangelo’s David but with any number of his more delicate creations, in fact the abundance and accessibility is downright embarrassing. You can’t walk a block without being accosted by someone you would spend a whole evening trying vainly to make in the New York bars. Of course it usually cost you a thousand lire but that is only two bucks (less if you patronize the black market) and there is never any unpleasantness about it even though one does not know a word they are saying.” Fritz Prokosch greeted Gore with a touch of coolness, happy to have his company though unable fully to contain his annoyance at City’s success. With Prokosch he immediately toured the usual spots, from the Pincio, a favorite pickup place for sexual partners, to Doney’s, a popular café on the Via Veneto, an informal head-quarters for coffee, drinks, and conversation. Mornings he walked the few streets from his hotel to Doney’s to have breakfast with Prokosch. At a nearby table Orson Welles usually sat alone, reading. Around the corner from his hotel, on the Via Aurora just below the Borghese Gardens, the newly famous thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams had a few weeks before rented a sunlit apartment he was in the process of decorating. One of its ornaments was a young Italian. Romantically self-indulgent and at the same time serially promiscuous, he had immediately found one to his liking.
Four months earlier the spectacular Broadway success of A Streetcar Named Desire, in the first of its over-three-year run, had made Williams an American celebrity. Short, well built, with a tendency to be stocky and puffy, with a small dark mustache, brownish complexion, and an intelligent, laughing glitter in his light-blue eyes, Williams was tasting the first fruits of fame and freedom. He had enough money now to live as he pleased. With a wickedly delicious sense of humor, his broad Missouri drawl deepened by his long residences in New Orleans, he loved being funny, outrageous, spontaneous. An eager drinker, he had a great thirst for parties and fun, for sociability and titillating emotional drama, especially the histrionics of his own life. With a talent for moodiness, capriciousness, and unexpected emotional tropes, he enjoyed big scenes both on- and offstage. Hypochondriacal, he told everyone in Rome he had been hospitalized in Paris for fatal pancreatic cancer. It actually had been for tapeworm. During the next few months he and Gore played the European stage together.
The two met on a shining early-March day, introduced at a party for visiting Americans in a baroque apartment at the nearby American Academy, high on the Janiculum. The view from the sun-filled windows held the palpable tone of the quiet city. Prokosch was there. The host was the American composer Samuel Barber, who, Gore noticed, spoke Italian fluently, unlike the other newly arrived Americans, who at best spoke adequate French. Williams looked unmistakably, unforgettably, familiar. “I had actually seen but not met him the previous year,” Gore remembered. “He was following me up Fifth Avenue while I, in turn, was stalking yet another quarry. I recognized him. He wore a blue bow tie with white polka dots. In no mood for literary encounters, I gave him a scowl and he abandoned the chase just north of Rockefeller Center.” Since they both liked young men, they were not meant to be sexual partners. As the introductions were made, the conversation immediately turned to New York City, though not directly to that first encounter. “‘I particularly like New York,’” Williams said, “‘on hot summer nights when all the … uh, superfluous people are off the streets.’” Then “the foggy blue eyes blinked, and a nervous chuckle filled the moment’s silence.” The differences of personality were already clearly established in the difference in artistic self-definition—the emotional dramatist and the intellectual novelist; the romantic, theatrical hysteric and the witty, coolly observant man of ideas. Yet there was an immediate affinity, a sense of mutual responsiveness. To Gore, the playwright, fifteen years older, looked ancient, clearly a member of the next-older generation. “Williams is not at all what you might expect the most successful playwright since Shakespeare—well, O’Neill—would be like. He has a funny laugh, heh-heh-heh, and a habit of biting his knuckles to make them crack,” he later wrote. To Tennessee, Gore was handsome, sexy, funny, talented, ambitious. Each responded to the other’s gift for language, to the satiric voice, the elaborate put-on, the practical joke, the self-defensive, sometimes aggressive vulnerability. Despite differences, they immediately liked one another. They soon knew each other’s quips and cues; they could read one another’s body language and facial expressions; they knew when the barbed wit was about to strike or the clownish joke about to be performed. “Tennessee,” Gore later recollected, “was the greatest company on earth. We laughed. He had a wild sense of humor, grotesque, much like mine, and we just spent a lot of time parodying the world, mocking and burlesquing everything and everybody. He wasn’t a terribly good mimic … but he could do numbers. He could do a dying heroine for you. Or he could do an addle-headed piece of trade for you. He could do these characters, much the way he wrote them.”
In a newly purchased Army-surplus jeep, with a canvas roof neither could figure out how to put up, they were soon off on a trip down to Naples, where Gore had first disembarked, then south along the Amalfi coast to Positano and Amalfi. It had taken Williams an entire afternoon, he told “Dear Blood and Gore,” to do the “transfer of jeep-ownership red tape.” In Rome in 1948 it was easiest to communicate leaving a note with a concierge. “We’re definitely going to Amalfi Sunday morning,” Tennessee assured him. In the meantime, at dawn, Williams, drunk, drove the jeep, which had a defective muffler, up and down the Via Veneto and then to St. Peter’s, where he raced through the wind-blown fountains to cool his head. He loved the roaring engine, the sense of freedom. An amazingly bad driver with terrible eyesight, almost blind in one eye, he seemed indifferent or oblivious to how easily he could have been killed or killed others. Apparently the roar from the muffler and the absence of other vehicles prevented mayhem. Positano and Amalfi, set in the steep hills above the sea, remained vivid in their memories, each to return later to what seemed one of the unspoiled natural paradises. The coast from Naples to Sicily combined visual splendor, medieval life, and rich classical associations. But “our drive down was through nothing but ruined cities that had been bombarded either by our fleet or by retreating Germans. Everything was a mess.” In Amalfi they stayed at the Luna Hotel on the coast highway. There were no other guests. As in Rome, they could live and dine handsomely on an extraordinarily favorable exchange rate in an impoverished Italy. A thousand feet above them, obscured by the high cliffs, was the town of Ravello, which they did not visit, where La Rondinaia, a villa that decades later Vidal was to buy, served as a convalescent home for injured British officers.
As they toured, each time they got out of the jeep, even for brief stops, they had to remove all their possessions. There was no way to protect anything from theft. Even when they stopped for lunch, everything had to come out, including Gore’s manuscript of A Search for the King, which he had taken with him and which he worked on in hotels. He put it inside his shirt for safekeeping. “I wasn’t going to leave it in the car and have it stolen. Stolen and then tossed away. Every time I got out of the jeep, I made sure I had the manuscript with me. We didn’t know how to put up the canvas top of the jeep. Anybody could have got in.” Williams, who was working on Summer and Smoke, probably had that manuscript with him. They had a photo taken of the two of them, Gore leaning against the hood, one foot on the bumper, Tennessee sitting on the hood, his arm around Gore, which they had made into a postcard. Gore proudly sent it to friends and family. “That happy picture of you and your friend nesting lazily on that Jeep was too much for me,” Judith Jones responded. “I’ve decided to take your suggestion—I shall be sailing on the Vulcania on the 18th of May.” To Anaïs he wrote lovingly, “Write me in care of American Embassy Rome. I think of you cherie; you are still closer to me than anyone else. I want so much to see you. I think about you constantly; glad you’re happy with RP.” In response to a letter from Nina that had reached him at American Express in Rome, he wrote on the back of the postcard, “Tennessee Williams (Streetcar Named Desire) and me—we’re touring Italy in his jeep. Lousy weather, dangerous politics, working well…. Life is luxurious and cheap.” “I have never laughed more with anyone,” he remembered.
Life was great fun, both on the road and in Rome, though there were the usual anxieties and complaints, most focusing on the reception of City. It had made him an uneasy celebrity and a ready target, even among friends. When Williams and Prokosch were sitting in Doney’s, Vidal came by, so Bill Fricks remembered. Vidal stopped and asked Prokosch if he had gotten the copy of City he had recently dropped off at Prokosch’s hotel. A few polite remarks were exchanged, and Vidal left. Then Prokosch said to Williams and Fricks that Vidal was “a terrible writer, the book is bad, and we’ll never hear from Vidal again—he’ll probably never write anything more and nothing worth reading.” Years later, when Fricks conveyed the story to Vidal, Gore responded, “I always knew that Fritz hated the sale of my books.” Rarely an enthusiastic reader of anything, Williams “got through The City and the Pillar. He disliked the ending. He said, ‘I don’t think you realize, Gore, what a good book you’ve written.’ He thought I’d just put on a hokey ending for commercial reasons.” Williams mistakenly assumed that Jim Willard’s father was modeled on Gore’s and “said of the family scenes, ‘Our fathers were very much alike.’” Toward the end of March, celebrating his thirty-seventh birthday (he claimed it was his thirty-fourth), Williams threw a large party at his Via Aurora apartment. In the crowded rooms everyone spoke English and some French, except for occasional Italians, mostly attractive young men, including Williams’s latest passion. The wealthy British-born art connoisseur Harold Acton, a longtime Italian resident, had come down from his Florentine villa, La Pietra, to inspect the invasion of American artists. He seemed to float “like some large pale fish through the crowded room; from time to time he would make a sudden lunge at this or that promising piece of bait.” Acton later criticized the young Americans for being more interested in sex than in Italian culture. Condescendingly haughty to seemingly provincial Americans who hardly knew a word of Italian, Acton politely deplored “our barbarous presence in his Europe.”
A greater barbarity threatened. The strength of the national Communist parties among the working classes in Europe was epitomized by the possibility that the party would actually win the Italian election in April. In America, the Communist threat in Europe seemed almost to bring the red tide to American shores. The Bolshevik scare dominated American headlines, the Marshall Plan and McCarthyism opposite sides of the same exaggerated anxiety. Americans in Italy “were told the communists were going to win and that there’d be a bloodbath,” Gore later wrote. The Gores, in Washington, now very conservative, were eager for their grandson’s views. “This country is all wrought up about Europe, Asia, and the whole world. There is a great deal of war talk in the air,” the Senator wrote to him, urging him to “remain in Italy until after the election … unless you think that it is too dangerous?!?!?” From New York, Gene Vidal, who gave him the bitter news that City, sinking fast, was number ten in the Herald Tribune and last in the New York Times Book Review bestseller rankings, also had the dreaded Communists in mind. “You must be wading in Communists according to the most recent war scare via our DC Administration. The elections in Italy are supposed to be something.” When Gore mentioned he might leave because of the threat of postelection violence, Tennessee was baffled. The Russians “are not a predatory people,” he announced. “‘I don’t know why there is all this fuss about international communism.’ I disagreed. ‘They’ve always been imperialists, just like us.’ ‘That’s not true. Just name one country Russia has tried to take over? I mean recently.’ ‘Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,’ I began … ‘And what,’ asked Tennessee, ‘are they?’”
In late March, as another manifestation of his desire to meet the famous, gently teased by Prokosch, who gave him “the impression that this sort of busyness was somehow vulgar,” Gore visited George Santayana. The eighty-five-year-old Spanish-born American writer, philosopher, and Harvard professor put the likely Communist takeover into larger perspective. A hard-headed, rational Catholic whose religious faith did not require that he believe in miracles, Santayana had retired to spend his last years at the Convent of the Blue Nuns on the Celian Hill, having discreetly left the Bristol Hotel soon after the Germans occupied Rome. When Gore expressed his residual “America First” horror at the possibility that Italy might go Communist, “Santayana looked positively gleeful. ‘Oh, let them! Let them try it! They’ve tried everything else, so why not communism? After all, who knows what new loyalties will emerge as they become part of a—wolf pack.’” What seemed his cynicism revolted the American innocent who had been brought up in an environment in which the only political leader worse than Roosevelt was Lenin, a difference of degree, not kind. Santayana seemed to Vidal to look exactly like his grandmother, except bald. “He wore a dressing gown; Lord Byron collar open at the withered neck; faded mauve waistcoat. He was genial; made a virtue of his deafness. ‘I will talk. You will listen,’” he always made clear to his American visitors among whom were Edmund Wilson, who seemed to Santayana very self-important, and the poet Robert Lowell, his “new friend” who would have a difficult life as a Catholic in Boston. “The black eyes shone with a lovely malice.” On Gore’s first visit one of the Irish nuns, “a small figure, glided toward” him, asked him his business, and brought him to Santayana, who after a few questions was interested or bored enough to invite him back to his cell. It had an iron bed with a screen around it. There were few books other than his own. He was reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, which he separated from its binding, tearing away each page so that he could hold one at a time. Another day Gore brought with him Barber, Prokosch, and Williams, the playwright a reluctant visitor. Williams stared “at the old man with great interest.” Neither had any idea who the other was. Afterward Williams remarked, “‘Did you notice how he said ‘in the days when I had secretaries, young men?’” Santayana probably had no idea what The City and the Pillar was about. Gore, though he had read The Last Puritan as an adolescent, had not understood or sensed its homoerotic element. Another time they talked about Henry James, whom Santayana had known. “He gave a sort of imitation of Henry’s periphrastic style; then sighed. ‘Oh, the James brothers!’ He sounded as if he were invoking the outlaws.” Reminiscing about his youth, Santayana told him, Vidal later wrote, that there had been “an opening at Harvard in philosophy and not in architecture, which is what he really wanted to do. Since he was very well read and a thoughtful man and a poet, with secondary but real gifts, he said, ‘Oh, well,’ and became a philosopher. To the horror of William James,” with whom he never got along. Serious, innocent, fatuous, the young Gore Vidal, thinking of his own ambition, complained, “In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly.” The response was immediate. “‘It would be insufferable if they did not.’” At the third, final visit, in the beginning of April, as Gore rose to go, Santayana said, “‘I shall give you a book,’” and took a copy of his autobiographical The Middle Span from the bookcase. “‘What is your name?’” he asked. “‘I shall write for you. I rarely do this.’ … ‘For Gore Vidal, George Santayana, April 1, 1948.’ ‘It is your April Fool’s present.’”
Taking seriously the threat of postelection chaos, Gore had decided to leave Italy, even if only temporarily. Perhaps he would return after the election or go to Paris or London instead. Election-scare warnings from the American embassy seemed good enough reason to do what he had it in mind to do all along: visit Egypt. Greece was out of the question because of the violent political situation there. In his youthful imagination Egypt glowed with the excitement of Hollywood movies like The Mummy, with the alluring power of its imperial political and cultural role in the history of the ancient world, from Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra to Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. Since he wanted to see everything, why not the magnificent pyramids, the mysterious temples? Cairo was a short plane ride from Rome. With the manuscript of A Search for the King, he flew into Egypt on April 2, thrilled at the contrast between late-Victorian Cairo and the ancient ruins that surrounded it, a Middle Eastern version of Rome. Still ruled by a remnant of the Ottoman Empire, Egypt unstably combined Turkish and European colonialism, Arab nationalism, tribal customs, and excruciating poverty.
From his room at the moderately priced El Mint Hotel, near one of the great pyramids, he had a Westerner’s-eye-view of modern Egyptian misery and ancient Egyptian glory. At a club one evening he saw the white-suited, obese King Farouk, the monarch of nightclubs, with the usual European blonde on his arm. “Like a Mafia don, with dark glasses, he was surrounded by plainclothesmen, also in dark glasses.” At the old Shepheard’s Hotel, the historic gathering place for Anglo-Americans, Gore observed with interest the colorful eccentricities of a late-colonial world, partly English, mostly French. Cairo was “like a French provincial village in those days,” he later remarked. Taken up by Mehmed Abib, “a strange little man who was chasing me around … the grandson of the last Ottoman Emperor or Sultan who was married to the sister of Zog of Albania,” he got a fascinating glimpse of Ottoman-Albanian high society, which included “two beautiful Romanov princesses … in exile. A rather exotic foreign enclave with much intrigue.” Abib wooed him “sadly and hopelessly beside the pool at Mena House. He looked like a sensitive dentist. He was the only person I ever met who sighed the way that characters are supposed to sigh in novels.” The pudgy, ineffectual Abib was easy to keep at arm’s distance. After a week in Egypt, Gore wrote to Williams that he feared disease more than he felt tempted by Egyptian opportunities. Perhaps he had Flaubert’s example in mind. “I am glad you did not have carnal associations in Cairo,” Tennessee wrote back, “not only because it would have interfered with the glorious work but because I kept thinking, if Gore is not careful he will catch one of those things from the dirty Egyptians.”
In Cairo he spent part of each day writing, working at his hotel or in one of the public rooms at Shepheard’s. Finishing A Search for the King on April 8, he quickly wrote a play, a variant on The City and the Pillar and The Season of Comfort, with a bitchy Nina-like mother and a homosexual son, whose father had been homosexual, torn between his relationship with his mother and his love for another young man, named Jimmy. It seemed to him a “powerful play,” though later he was happy to forget most of what it was about. Oddly enough, he wrote to Nina about it, though probably without giving her any details. She knew little to nothing about The Season of Comfort, which was not to be published until the next January. Anticipating a Streetcar Named Desire–like Broadway success, Nina was “thrilled over the play. Air mail me with whom it is,” she wrote to him, “for I am going to N.Y. and want to read it, unless you can send me a copy. I can hardly wait!” She imagined herself its producer or at least an instrumental money-raiser among her theater and society contacts. “I think I am sure of money for it,” she wrote to him. If another one of her financial negotiations with Auchincloss worked out, she hoped “to catch a boat in May.” Fortunately, he did not send her the play. “Bright eyes!” Tennessee wrote him from Rome. “This is glorious news about the play,” though he cautioned that “glorious plays are not usually written in such a short time.” Usually there were innumerable tedious revisions. “Still, by all means send it to me. When a thing goes that quickly it is a good sign, for it means that the impulse was vital and the vision was clear.” The good news was that Helen Hayes was going to star in London in The Glass Menagerie, Williams’s first play, which had initially fizzled on Broadway. The jeep was still his maniacal pleasure. Always warmly attracted to Gore more than either of them found practical, “I close now with an affectionate and mildly libidinous kiss on your soft under lip which I never kissed.”
Street life in Cairo was exotic, hot, dirty, the April sky relentlessly bright. At first the nights were cold. Then the heat intensified and, without air-conditioning, even the nights were warm. Gore tramped through Cairo, “a ferocious sight-seer,” fascinated by the mixture of old and new, of Arab and European. “I did nothing but sight-see, and then I moved on,” along the Nile to the ancient sites of Karnak and Luxor and the Valley of the Kings, where he was “overwhelmed by a sense of the past, and the knowledge that there is no mystery at all about our estate despite the beautiful progression of the Book of the Dead…. We come and we go and the time between is all that we have.” He was to write later in a pseudonymous fiction that “as the train moved through the outskirts of Cairo,” it was “a strange spectacle by moonlight: thousands of mud hovels, each with the yellow flickering light of a lantern in the window. Dark shapes moved quickly in the shadows; other shapes huddled around tiny fires in front of the huts. The modern city was now only a blur of electric lights in the distance, hidden by this sweep of slums, which were as old as the Bible, unchanged since the days of the Pharaohs.” In his mind, at Luxor, he heard a first-person fictional voice resonating with the possibility of a novel, at least partly set in Egypt, about last things, our end in our beginning, the first stirring of Messiah. He kept in mind for future use the image of the ancient desert landscape. Cairo and environs, especially the atmosphere of seedy intrigue, decadence, and poverty, seemed both exotic and familiar enough to become part of his reservoir of usable experiences. Still, despite its attractions, two to three weeks of Egypt were enough. The heat had become constantly oppressive. It was difficult to sleep, even in otherwise comfortable hotels.
Back in Cairo he had enough energy to book a flight to Paris, where after a brief stint at the Pont Royal Hotel in whose downstairs bar Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir frequently sat, he soon set himself up at the Hôtel de l’Université, a small boardinghouse-hotel on the Left Bank, run by a good cook. Tennessee, up from Rome, joined him there. “There were a bunch of English and Americans … and then the academics or academics-to-be and then Tennessee and me.” They shared the second floor. Gore usually wrote in the back. The more social and alcoholic Tennessee drank with visitors in the front. There were “two rooms and a bath for him on the street side and one room and a bath for me in the back, with the stairwell between.” One of the raffish hotel’s attractions, Williams remarked, was that “‘it suited Gore and me perfectly as there was no objection to young callers.’” Busy traffic pounded the stairs. “The Bird and I did like the same type, and we would pass boys back and forth. Once, after an unsuccessful evening’s prowl of Saint-Germain, we returned to the hotel, and the Bird said, ‘Well, that just leaves us,’ to which he says I said, ‘Don’t be macabre.’” Apparently, though, Gore had little difficulty making up for his Egyptian abstemiousness. In a short while he had all the usual one-incident pickups, most of them French trade, and at least one affair in which the affections if not the heart were touched. Still open to or at least occasionally brooding about the possibility of romance, he attracted some who invested romantic feeling in him.
Almost as quiet as Rome, in spring 1948 the streets of Paris were uncrowded, the city experiencing the predawn of its postwar awakening. For visiting Americans the favorable exchange rate, French eagerness to be in the cultural-tourism business again, the enthusiasm of once more renewing the historical Franco-American handshake—all this gave Paris a roseate early-morning glow. Suddenly transatlantic ships were coming into Le Havre, planes landing at Orly, ferries crossing the Channel. American artists and writers, having been excluded by a brutally long war, wanted to be in Paris again.
Having finished a draft of The Search for the King, Gore began to rework the manuscript. When he gave the play he had written in Cairo to Tennessee to read, the latter “pronounced it the worst play he’d read in some time, and I solemnly abandoned playwriting for good, after first pointing out to him that a literary form which depended on the combined excellence of others for its execution could hardly be worth the attention of a serious writer, adding with deliberate cruelty that I did not envy him being stagestruck and his life taken up with such frivolous people as actors and directors.” It was not a renunciation Vidal was able to sustain. What sustained him most in Paris was the pleasure of simply being there at a golden time. The chestnut trees were in bloom, the food wonderful. Elegantly shabby, Paris looked lovely. “We lived as if it would be forever summer.”
His long-hoped-for meeting with Christopher Isherwood happened accidentally, in late April, at the Deux Magots café, where Isherwood and Bill Caskey, an American ex-merchant marine and professional photographer, were sitting. As Gore walked by, he recognized from photographs the well-known forty-four-year-old Isherwood, just one year younger than Nina, author of successful novels and the celebrated Goodbye to Berlin. The British-Hollywood expatriate had already entered literary mythology as the third in the Auden-Spender triumverate. Well read in a way that none of Vidal’s American writer friends were, Isherwood, with his humor, his delight in word games, parodies, spoofs, and class-conscious ironies, delighted Gore. “‘I am American literature,’” Gore announced one day. “‘I feared as much,’” Isherwood said. “Although the voice was controlled, I saw the mounting terror in his eyes as we deconstructed American literature not only past but yet to come, making, as we did, spacious room for ourselves among the ruins.” At that first meeting Vidal seemed to Isherwood “a big husky boy with fair wavy hair and a funny, rather attractive face—sometimes he reminds me of a teddy bear, sometimes of a duck.” His talk about sex seemed youthful, cute, silly, with phrases like “peeing machines,” “mice,” and “we looked at each other and our tails started to wag,” and his disbelief in romantic love and certainty (if it existed) about its tragic, doomed nature, left Isherwood skeptical. He himself, who had no difficulty reconceptualizing marital romance into a homosexual variant whose model combined romantic devotion and domestic harmony, lived with the rough, irritable Caskey, who thought Gore the typical product of an American prep school. Gore thought Caskey suffered from a case of “terminal jealousy.” What Isherwood respected immediately, though, was Gore’s courage. “I do think he has that—though it is mingled, as in many much greater heroes, with a desire for self-advertisement,” he wrote in his diary. With youthful self-enthusiasm and bestseller narcissism, Gore asked for advice on “‘how to manage my career.’”
They had dinner together the next two nights. Eager to talk about other writers and about Isherwood’s Hollywood life, Gore learned that Isherwood and Gore’s English publisher, John Lehmann, were great friends. The next afternoon they went out to Versailles, where Gore had last been in summer 1939. Isherwood found it disappointing, too “big and barracklike.” “I don’t know when I’ve met anyone I liked so much in such a short time,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. When Isherwood left for England, he took with him a copy of Gore’s play, the idea of which, he soon responded, was “very interesting and even potentially great.” But “the basic weakness seems to me to be in the character of the mother…. She simply isn’t interesting; too bitchy. She should be a genuinely tragic figure…. I even think there should be a big scene between her and Jimmy…. I don’t mean that you should be more shocking, more outspoken, but I want you to be more human.” Isherwood read it as a play-in-progress. So too, and much more so, was the relationship. “I am so glad,” he wrote from London, “we met in Paris, and I hope we’ll see more of each other from now on. I don’t feel like I’ve really talked to you yet.” They both looked forward to Vidal coming to London in June.
In Gore’s conversations with Isherwood, Truman Capote’s name had come up. Vidal was irresistibly drawn to the slightly sore subject of his competitor, among other reasons because Capote was about to arrive in Paris. Somewhat disingenuously, Vidal had written to Lehmann in London, “If you see Truman Capote before he comes over here give him my number. I look forward to seeing him.” It could only have been on the principle that it is best to have your enemy in sight and in front of you, though they were not in any manifest way enemies yet. They were slightly friendly catty rivals, each of whom, traveling in some of the same literary circles, accepted the necessity of occasionally running into one another. When Capote, who was having lunch at the Deux Magots with his friend Johnny Nicholson—who later that year opened Café Nicholson in New York—introduced him to Gore, Nicholson immediately saw that “they weren’t friends.” Gore was “very handsome, very distinguished-looking, very proper. No way was he bohemian-looking.” But “Truman had written his book. So we had two rivals. That I knew. They were two personalities,” though “at that time they were very proper with one another.” They were also each looking over his shoulder at the other’s progress. Eager to combine histrionic charm with sharp intelligence, Capote treated every situation as a stage performance whose message was the assertion of his desirability and brilliance. Like Vidal, he believed in advertising himself. Unlike Vidal, he had a mystical faith in his ability to make reality conform to his desires. A performance personality, he frequently improvised, sometimes recklessly, often cleverly, softly blurring the boundary between convincing others and convincing himself. If he could do one, he could do the other. Soon after arriving in Paris, Capote was in high form, entrancing Vidal and Williams “with mischievous fantasies about the great.” He flashed a brilliant amethyst ring. “‘From André Gide,’ he sighed.” Soon after Truman and Gore met Camus at a publisher’s party, Truman began telling everyone that Camus had fallen madly in love with him. “Apparently the very sight of him was enough to cause lifelong heterosexual men to tumble out of unsuspected closets,” Vidal later wrote. “The instant lie was Truman’s art form, small but, paradoxically, authentic. One could watch the process. A famous name would be mentioned. The round pale fetus face would suddenly register a sort of tic, as if a switch had been thrown. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, I know her intimately!’”
His lies infuriated Vidal, who, though he thought he had amiable relations with Capote, soon discovered that his rival was bad-mouthing him everywhere and at every opportunity. “All the writers are here,” Gore wrote to a new correspondent, the critic John Aldridge, “and the atmosphere is heavy with competitiveness. Someone might one day remark in print that American writers are the most highly competitive and mutually antagonistic in the world.” Though some found Capote charmingly entertaining, Vidal was not alone in thinking him offensive. The novelist Calder Willingham, with whom Gore had become casually friendly in 1947—48 in New York, found Capote as untenable as did Vidal. He is “insincere, extremely mannered … snobbish,” Willingham wrote to Vidal. Though attractive, clever, and “an excellent talker,” he “tries too hard to be charming … busy all the time at the job of getting ahead…. Also, he uses his homosexuality in this; he uses it as comedy, and plays the role of the effeminate buffoon, thus making people laugh at him. It gets attention.” One of the dangers to Vidal was his own potential overreaction. Sometimes quick to anger, his counterattacks occasionally strained other people’s credulity: Capote could not be as bad as all that. To some, such as Sandy Campbell, Tennessee Williams’s friend, Gore seemed “obsessed with Truman and his success.” He “talked about Truman continually, putting him down, insisting that Truman had never met Gide, Cocteau, etc.” But, later, “I realized from Truman’s demeanor, his sudden quietness, his failure to make any claim of friendship or acquaintance [with Gide when they ran into him in Taormina in 1950], that they had never met before. What I had taken to be one of Vidal’s jealous libels was true.” As to Capote’s claim of an affair with Gide, Gore himself shortly had a chance to put it to the test.
John Lehmann came from London to Paris, among other reasons to discuss with his newest American acquisition his hope that he would revise the ending of The City and the Pillar for the British edition. Like Isherwood, he thought the violent ending both off-putting and bad publicity for homosexuals. Early in the year Lehmann had received happily the news “that you and Tennessee are moving in our direction across the globe.” Vidal, though he resented Lehmann’s pressure on him to alter the ending, was pliable or ambivalent enough so that from early on he committed himself to make changes. “I don’t think I need tell you that your book will be a bit of a problem child in London,” Lehmann told him at the beginning of May, “and there are one or two points I am anxious to take up with you in connection with this.” When Gore seemed almost to volunteer changes, Lehmann was pleased. “I’m very much interested to hear that you are thinking of revising the end of The City and the Pillar. I would welcome this, and feel sure that we could easily come to an agreement about when the next text should be ready.” In London, Gore was a subject of friendly gossip. “Christopher came to stay here,” Lehmann wrote to him, and “we talked a lot about you.” From the first, though, Vidal did not trust John Lehmann. “After Isherwood went to America [in 1941],” Lehmann “regularly said that Isherwood had never written anything good since,” Vidal recalled. “Lehmann was a great gossip, and he had implacable malice. He just wasn’t likable. He had some charm and some wit. He was a very handsome man. Extremely…. But there was something off-putting about him. I didn’t like him dictating to me what to do with my book,” though by mid-May Vidal had explicitly expressed himself as “not very happy with [City] as it stands” and preparing “to rewrite [its] ending.” To some extent his accommodation was strategic and deferential. “Would it be possible, if the City is a success, to bring out the first two books? I know nothing of English publishing conditions: perhaps this would not be practical.” Having had Dutton send Lehmann galleys of The Season of Comfort, Gore was eager to have Lehmann commit himself to publish all his novels in England. Lehmann was clear in his own mind that he would make a commitment only to City.
A tall, handsome, pale-complexioned, peremptory man with receding blond hair and icy blue eyes, the forty-one-year-old Lehmann came from two Victorian publishing and literary families, one of Scottish, the other of German-Jewish origin. His grandparents had been intimates of Dickens, Browning, and Wilkie Collins, among other great figures of nineteenth-century British literary culture. His sisters were the actress Beatrix Lehmann and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. At Eton and Cambridge, Lehmann had expanded his inheritance into more current circles, including Bloomsbury. He had begun working in 1931 for Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press, which published his poetry, and become a partner in 1938. His greatest success came as editor of the groundbreaking semiannual journal New Writing and Penguin New Writing, and, later, of London Magazine. Well known in the tight-knit British literary world for his interest in homosexual books, he ran his small publishing house from a vantage point of great prestige but from a weak financial-business position. With the end of the war he had begun to give great emphasis to taking on up-and-coming American authors, including Vidal. He had already made up his mind “to capture as many of the new postwar generation of American writers as possible.” Having just returned from a successful book-buying trip to New York, he happily embraced Isherwood, who had been staying at Lehmann’s house at Egerton Crescent in Kensington, and was reunited with his companion Alex Racine, a distinguished Polish-born ballet dancer. Late in May he took the boat-train to Paris, where among other things he signed Tennessee Williams to a publication contract and took Vidal to meet André Gide, who just the year before had won the Nobel Prize. Disappointed that Gide had not read The City and the Pillar, a copy of which he had received from a friend, Gore took pleasure in meeting the acerbic writer. At seventy-nine, Gide was still alert enough to express his formidable personality and mind in the cleverness of his language and the keenness of his satiric eye. Gide’s defense of Communism and his championing of homosexuality had made him controversial, a writer who was both widely hated and deeply admired. He was cher maître to those who admired his courage, a Bolshevik fag to those who detested his politics. To the young American, Gide had fought and had suffered from the French version of the same enemies who so viciously attacked City. As they rang the doorbell in the rue Vaneau, Lehmann noticed Vidal’s excitement. Gide was the first prominent writer he was to meet who combined a literary career and an intense interest in politics and the first who dared, defying convention, publicly to defend same-sex relationships as natural.
In the sunny apartment, in his book-lined two-level library, Gide, “short-legged, deep-chested, with a large egglike bald head on which was perched a vie de bohème velvet beret,” wearing “a dark green velvet jacket” and large eyeglasses, greeted them. He appeared to have big peasant hands. When Vidal congratulated him on the Nobel Prize, Gide, beaming, responded, “‘Premier le Kinsey Report, après ça le Prix Nobel.’” The open championing of homosexuality was no longer summarily disqualifying, a message Gore was happy to hear. Though limited by his Exeter schoolboy French and Gide’s preference not to speak English (apparently Lehmann did not attempt to act as intermediary), they talked briefly about Oscar Wilde and Henry James, whose popularity among Anglo-Saxons puzzled Gide. He had met the other cher maître at a dinner on New Year’s Eve 1912. Gide, an admirer of Conrad, wrote English well enough for him to have translated Conrad into French. Suddenly the telephone rang. Rather slyly, Gide held the phone so that his visitors could hear the voice, whispering “Henri de Montherlant,” a writer Vidal especially admired. Open on Gide’s desk was a “pornographic novel by an Anglican priest recently retired to the English countryside. The pages were beautifully hand-printed, and there were a number of drawings of boys being debauched. With a grin Gide said he had received the manuscript sometime ago but had not yet decided how to answer its priestly author.” When Vidal asked him, “How did you find Truman Capote?” Gide responded, “Who?” Finally he understood whom Gore was asking about. “‘No,’ he said, ‘I haven’t met him, but several people have sent me this.’ From his desk he held up the photograph of Truman from Life. He grinned. ‘Is he in Paris?’” Before Gore left, Gide asked if he would like a book as a gift. Corydon, Gore replied, Gide’s best-known explicit defense of homosexuality. Surprised at the request, “I never give that book,” he said, perhaps meaning it was never asked for. He inscribed a copy “avec sympathie.” As they walked down, he said, in English, “Mind the step!”
American accents dominated the linguistic cacophony of Paris. A half century earlier Henry James had called it “the bark of Chicago in the streets of Venice.” Everywhere Americans heard American voices, especially in restaurants, bars, museums. Sometimes one ran into overly familiar voices, unhappily. A red-faced, drunken American, who had had enough, shouted out in a restaurant as Capote was telling stories at a table in the back, “For Christ’s sake! Wherever I go I hear that American faggoty pansy voice! Can’t I ever get away from you guys?” On his way to New York from Morocco, the composer and writer Paul Bowles, fifteen years older than Gore, came by to see Tennessee. Bowles, who had just finished his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, had agreed to write incidental music for Summer and Smoke, scheduled to premiere in New York in the fall. Vidal and Bowles had met in passing in New York the previous year. Elegantly dressed as always, the thin, blond, rather delicate Bowles and his new friend took a walk “down an empty street off Saint-Germain. Suddenly, a radio is turned on behind a shuttered window and the street is filled with the music of Bizet. Paul complains that composers now think of him as a writer and writers as a composer and that, as a result, he is nowhere.” Bowles had just met Saul Bellow, whose Dangling Man Gore admired. James Baldwin was soon to be in Paris, as was Norman Mailer, whose recently published The Naked and the Dead Vidal thought “a clever, talented, admirably executed fake,” part jealousy, part accurate analysis. Soon Irwin Shaw was to produce “another one of those monsters called ‘great war novels.’ They’re all so phony, so dull that I wonder that anyone takes them seriously; I suppose,” Gore wrote to Lehmann, “it’s all a part of our manifest destiny, artificial plumes on the eagle’s wings.” The newly arrived Judy Jones ran into her New York friend on a Paris street. “He had a very young man with him,” whom he said he had picked up the night before, “a little disreputable-looking. He could have been a sailor. Gore came and sat with us in the cafe and kept him sort of at another table. I remember his making the kinds of remarks he makes today about young men being just for sex and there’s no love involved. Here was sort of this scruffy-looking character at the next table.”
At a large, shabby, heavily curtained apartment in the rue du Bac, Vidal was introduced by John Lehmann to Denham Fouts, a semilegendary, cadaverous opium addict from Jacksonville, Florida, who had spent much of his life as the consort of numbers of wealthy older men. His own preference was for young boys. From his glory days with British lords and King Paul of Greece, he had fallen on hard times. During much of the war he had lived with Isherwood in Los Angeles, the basis for the character Paul in Down There on a Visit. Irregularly supported by his longtime friend and companion, Peter Watson, the wealthy backer of Horizon who had recently set him up in his Paris apartment with an impressive Tchelitchew painting hanging over his bed and a large fluffy white dog, Fouts stayed in bed during the day, took brief walks at night, his “nocturnal Proustian life,” as Isherwood called it, and smoked as much opium as he could afford. On his table was the Life magazine photograph of the ubiquitous Capote. Bright light hurt his eyes; he blinked a great deal. Solemnly he passed the pipe around to Gore, who with Lehmann sat on the edge of the bed. “It made me deathly ill, and I never tried it again,” Vidal recalled. Fouts was to appear as the central character in his short story “Pages from an Abandoned Journal.” Later that year he died in Rome.
There were, for Vidal and other American writers, French voices, but they were often voices with a purpose, particularly because American money and American art were a formidable presence in war-impoverished France. When the flamboyant surrealist novelist, moviemaker, and dramatist Jean Cocteau wanted to obtain the French rights for A Streetcar Named Desire for Jean Marais, he invited Tennessee Williams to a splendid lunch. Tennessee, who brought Gore along to translate, was so ignorant of French that he could not tell how limited Gore’s was. “Marais looked beautiful but sleepy. Cocteau was characteristically brilliant. He spoke no English but since he could manage an occasional ‘the’ sound as well as the final ‘g,’ he often gave the impression that he was speaking English. Tennessee had no clear idea who Cocteau was, while Cocteau knew nothing about Tennessee except that he had written a popular American play with a splendid part in it for his lover…. No one made any sense at all except Marais who broke his long silence to ask, apropos the character Stanley Kowalski, ‘Will I have to use a Polish accent?’” However, if there were no practical incentives, the French, especially the literary establishment, preferred to keep their distance. American voices were barely tolerable. When Tennessee threw a large party at the Hôtel de l’Université, hordes of French actors came, hoping to get a part in Cocteau’s version of Streetcar. Through a French intermediary or, so he claimed, by telegram, Williams had invited the one person he most wanted to meet, the novelist and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who with his companion Simone de Beauvoir and his rival Albert Camus dominated early post–World War II French culture. When Sartre did not appear at Williams’s party, “one of the guests went to fetch him.” He “refused to come. Very French. Williams was highly pissed off.” He surmised, probably correctly, that Sartre “regarded me as too bourgeois or American or God knows what.” In general, Vidal later commented, “the French gods kept their distance from all of us.”
With hot weather in Paris, sharing colds and stomach problems with everyone he knew, Gore was relieved to visit London in mid-June. For the time being he was not writing anyway. Nina, traveling with friends, had shown up in Paris for a couple of days. In London he stayed with Racine (“a very ladylike man and a marvelous Blue Beard and a much admired dancer”) and the less likable Lehmann at 31 Egerton Crescent, near Harrods. Low on cash, he was happy to save. What he had in the bank in New York was not readily available, and he preferred to live off new income, if possible. Nothing more was forthcoming in royalties from Dutton until October. Lehmann, though, had a small amount of sterling for him, part of his advance for the British edition of City, handled through his recently obtained British agent, Curtis Brown, which acted as Dutton’s representative in England. With prices low, a little sterling went a long way. The young man the agency assigned to handle his account, Graham Watson, twelve years older than Gore, found him a challenge and a pleasure to work with, though there was little work at the moment. He also thought him “enormously handsome.” Lehmann’s office, “a small operation” at 8 Henrietta Street, was on the ground floor of the Curtis Brown building. To Watson, “Lehmann was a charmer. I liked him very much. He had very sort of blue eyes, very, very blue eyes. Somehow one felt, ‘Watch it!’ He was Okay. Very much, of course, in literary London at the time.” As soon as Gore arrived, Lehmann was quick to take possession of the ration book he had been given at the border. Food was scarce. “To an American eye, English life was of a terrible rationed drabness.” In exchange he got “a mess of fish with one egg clotted over it at breakfast. I ate the rationed egg and left the fish.” Watson first met Gore at the Hyde Park Corner apartment of the aristocratic Edward Montague, who had gone to prison for eighteen months for an affair with a young boy, which became a “notorious court case…. I think it was Montague who asked me to meet Gore, and there was this bit of rough trade there…. I don’t know whether it was Gore’s rough trade or Montague’s rough trade.” It was part of normal activity for both of them. About those who had homosexual affairs or romances, the same ongoing curiosity and gossip occurred as about heterosexual relationships. And Gore, who sometimes could gossip as avidly as Lehmann, immediately found himself the youthful student in a long-established, stratified, but unified London literary society. Enmities were long-standing. Friendships durable. School ties binding. Privileged families and aristocratic names had special social prerogatives. The ruling powers exacted their tributes. A quick learner, Gore was soon getting the hang of it.
Literary London assembled at Egerton Crescent, partly to meet Vidal and Williams, mostly to see one another. Williams, in London to attend The Glass Menagerie rehearsals, was co-guest of honor at a party Lehmann threw for his two American authors. Isherwood, who had come down from his family home in Cheshire, greeted Gore affectionately. They had exchanged a number of letters since Isherwood had left Paris, particularly about Gore’s play. “Why not come over,” Isherwood had urged. “London is well worth seeing, if Truman and Caskey haven’t wrecked it by then!” Isherwood himself had not seen London since his departure with Auden for America in 1939, an expatriation that had seemed wartime desertion to some of his countrymen. Graham Greene, V. S. Pritchett, and William Plomer came to Lehmann’s party. “V. S. Pritchett was amiable,” Gore recalled. “The novel. Yes. Yes! The novel. ‘Ought to have a lot of sex in it,’ I proclaimed. ‘Oh, quite. Yes, yes a lot,’” Pritchett responded. The author of Brighton Rock seemed as “gray-green as his name.” E. M. Forster’s arrival caused a stir. He was less than warm to Isherwood, who had recently sent Forster at his King’s College, Cambridge, residence a copy of his latest novel. From across the room “Christopher asked, ‘Morgan, did you get the copy of Prater Violet I sent you?’ … Forster went on chatting to William Plomer and seemed not to have heard. Christopher swallowed more gin. ‘Morgan!’ … ‘Yes, Christopher.’ Morgan’s twinkle never ceased. ‘I got it.’ Then he turned back and continued his conversation with Plomer, leaving Christopher garroted in plain view.” It was an explicit lesson in literature as blood sport. “Forster had developed … an unremitting censoriousness. He was always in court, seated on the high bench, passing judgments, a black cloth on his head. Christopher was hanged not so much for Prater Violet but for having left England before the war.” Later that night Isherwood, drunk, beat up Caskey. The next morning he told Caskey that Gore had done it.
Forster, who had read Streetcar, was “very excited at meeting Tennessee,” Gore later wrote in his memoir, “which I considered unfair since I had read and admired all his books while Tennessee, I fear, thought he was in the presence of the [creator] of Captain Horatio Hornblower…. Forster, looking like an old river rat, zeroed in on Tennessee and said how much he admired. Streetcar. Tennessee gave him a beady look. Forster invited us to King’s for lunch. Tennessee rolled his eyes and looked at me. ‘Yes, I said quickly.’” It turned out a sour disappointment. Gore, who admired Forster’s novels, already disliked Forster. His malicious humiliation of Isherwood the night before had been off-putting. Still, eager to know a writer he admired, to have a sense of personal relationship that suited his own hope for achievement and importance, he accepted the invitation for a reluctant Williams and for himself, aware that Forster’s interest was in Williams. The next morning he dragged the always-late Tennessee to the railroad station. They had missed the first train. Relieved, Williams refused to wait. “‘But we have to go,’ I said…. ‘Your fan is a very old man, sitting on a stone lion and waiting for you, not me, to come to lunch.’ … Tennessee was not moved by the poignant tableau. ‘I can’t,’ he said, gulping and clutching his heart…. ‘Besides,’ said Tennessee primly, wandering off in the wrong direction for the exit, ‘I cannot abide old men with urine stains on the trousers.’” Faced with unattractive alternatives, Vidal went by himself. “Forster’s look of disappointment was disheartening.” After a bad boiled lunch they went to Forster’s rooms, where he showed the young novelist a copy of the manuscript of his unpublished homoerotic novel, Maurice, which, he said, he had declined to publish while his mother was alive. When, as Forster took him dutifully around Cambridge, Gore used the Americanism “pretty” in a positive sense, he had the distinct impression that to the censorious Forster he had doomed himself forever to nonexistence.
Literary royalty and glamour, however, did half bow, mostly silently, in Gore’s direction: remnants of the Bloomsbury world such as Harold Nicholson, whom he ran into numbers of times, and Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, with whom he later became friendly, the ghosts of Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Lehmann had known them all. A member of the Auden generation, he introduced Gore to Stephen Spender, whose friend, the poet C. Day-Lewis, was the object of Rosamond Lehmann’s passion. The new monarchs of British literary society, the exotic Sitwells, were constantly evoked in party conversations, their angular aristocratic presences notable even though Gore did not meet them until later in the year. Such were their powers, particularly Edith’s, that they could make strong literary men quake.
At another London party he was invited by the wealthy Sir Henry Channon, enthusiastic about the author of The City and the Pillar, to a country weekend late in June at Kelveden, near Plymouth. An American by birth, “Chips” Channon, who had married an heir to the Guinness fortune, had written a successful book on Ludwig of Bavaria and kept an elaborate diary he hoped would one day make him the Saint-Simon of modern Britain. He found Gore’s Nordic-looking crew cut and blond good looks a turn-on. A member of the prewar Cliveden set, Channon had been pro-German. It apparently was not held against him now. Charming, immensely sociable, he gave entertaining, well-attended parties and moved in the highest social circles. “Everyone mocked Chips, but he more than sang for his supper; in fact, he himself provided the supper in his great silver and crystal dining room copied from one of Ludwig’s castles.” Somewhat self-defensively, Gore managed to have Tennessee invited, both of them driven down in the car Channon sent for them. At Kelveden, Gore’s first experience of a British country weekend, they were introduced to Channon’s companion, Peter Coates, though Channon spent much of the time talking about his passion for the playwright Terence Rattigan. “Sexually, he [Channon] preferred men to women and royalty to either,” Vidal later observed. At lunch the talk was of royalty and writers. When Tennessee wanted to know what the royals talked about, their host responded, “Each other.” Channon said that he had gotten many long letters from Proust, none of which he had kept. “How was I to know he was a genius?” In the afternoon Gore and another guest, Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinlech, prompted by Channon and Coates, who teasingly encouraged a winter-spring romance, strolled together through the gardens. Later Gore did his best to entertain with dinnertime stories of Cocteau and the French literary world. Bored, Tennessee retreated to his room and insisted on their leaving before lunch the next day. As Channon escorted them to the car taking his guests back to London, he rushed to greet a newly arrived guest and then returned to say good-bye to Gore and Tennessee. “That is the queen of Spain,” he said.
Inadvertently Gore became indirectly connected to real royalty through a new friend, Judy Montagu, an intimate friend of Princess Margaret, who eventually was to become his friend as well. In the kitchen of Auburon Herbert’s flat, near Victoria Station, on a sun-bright afternoon, he met the daughter of Edwin Montagu, who had been in Prime Minister Asquith’s cabinet, and Lady Venetia Stanley, from a distinguished aristocratic family. Asquith himself had been in love with Venetia, though Judy’s actual father was probably the Earl of Dudley. Three years older than Gore, she was a tall, plain, handsome woman, with a long equine face and large, square figure, mouse-brown hair, blue eyes. She was a different kind of beauty, with great personal presence. “Very glamorous. She made the weather. A great wit.” Gore and she immediately liked one another. Judy asked Auburon about his sister, who had, they all thought, the misfortune to be married to the difficult Evelyn Waugh. Interested herself in some sort of matrimonial alliance, since her career clearly had to do with existence rather than achievement, Judy told Gore she was going to marry the American journalist Joseph Alsop, whom she had met during his London visits and whom Gore knew from his parents’ Washington world. Alsop had sometimes watched Gore and Jimmie Trimble play tennis at Merrywood. Somewhat impulsively, Gore told her that Alsop’s only romantic attachment, as far as he knew, was to a handsome ex-sailor from Brooklyn named Frankie Merlo. Gore’s precipitate words probably made little to no difference to a marriage proposal unlikely to have been realized anyway. Joe Alsop was to become one of Gore’s Washington friends and, years later, Judy and Gore were to have a friendship in Rome, prefigured by this meeting in summer 1948.
Through Tennessee he met the actor John Gielgud, ineptly directing The Glass Menagerie, and Helen Hayes, the “first lady of the American theater,” starring as Amanda Wingfield in the British production, still in rehearsals. In late July it was to have its opening in Brighton and then London. The rehearsals were going badly. Everyone sensed that they were about to have a failure on their hands, partly because neither Gielgud nor the British theater public had much feel for the American particularities of the play or for Williams’s romantic/gothic sensibility. In addition, Williams had no enthusiasm for Helen Hayes, though Gore rather liked her. With grim imperial omniscience, the actress told the playwright, the director, and the cast that the play would be a failure. She was right. The only pleasure the British theatrical world provided Williams was his meeting with an almost twenty-seven-year-old Russian-born British actress of minor talent and small roles, Maria Britneva. They had probably first met at a party given by Binkie Beaumont, a well-known London theatrical agent. Within days the three were great friends—Tennessee, Maria, and Gore walking the Strand together, eating toffee candy that pulled out one of Gore’s false teeth, laughing, joking, finding themselves immediate comrades in carefree silliness. Petite, slim-waisted, dark-haired, flaming-eyed, with full but sharp lips and a slightly irregular nose, Maria was simultaneously peremptory and responsive. A quick, passionate talker, she was voraciously expansive, enough to have people whom she valued disappear in her embrace. Maria found Tennessee magnetic, sexy, needy. She soon cast herself in the role of devoted sister-caretaker, though she would have liked lover, certainly wife, if Tennessee had been so inclined. Gore liked her free spirits, her ambition, her rashness, her sense of humor. He hoped to see her in London whenever he returned, or, even better, in New York. Williams fled to Paris in mid-July and purposely did not attend the London opening.
Having had enough of London, Gore himself returned in early July to the Hôtel de l’Université for what he decided would be his last month in Europe. Paris seemed the better place to spend the final weeks. On July afternoons he prowled “the streets, empty of traffic in those days.” Having heard from Jean Cocteau of a male brothel that Proust had frequented, he located the Hôtel Saumon, near the Place de l’Humanité, allegedly “lugubriously furnished with Mother Proust’s furniture.” He went numbers of times, partly for the boys, mostly to question the ancient proprietor, an Algerian. “‘Oh, he [Proust] would just look. That’s all. There were holes—you know, in the walls.’” Through a crack in a door, customers could view and select from the half dozen or so working-class boys who lounged in the sitting room. One day, crossing the Pont Neuf, Gore recognized one of the boys he liked, walking with a baby carriage and a pretty, pregnant wife. The two men smiled at one another and walked on. For the French young man, a student, it was simply a way to earn money. The next year a new, more moralistic government closed the Paris brothels.
From Paris, Gore complained to Lehmann that Lehmann had cast him in an unfavorable light by widely quoting his having said about someone that “‘I used him.’ … I don’t think it was wise of you to repeat that since, for one thing, you completely misunderstood what I meant…. American is not English even though it has a familiar ring; then, too, I freely admit to having no romantic notions about trade. But I don’t think you meant it maliciously since I like you and feel, naively perhaps, that people I like won’t make bitchy remarks.” Lehmann blamed mischief-makers. “Now I think you must surely realize by now that I’m fond of you, and believe in you.” It was not to prove a creditable claim.
Restless, eager to be home, Gore canceled his boat ticket and bought plane passage. He had had enough of living out of a suitcase, even of traveling, though he had proposed to the London editors of Vogue an article for them on Ischia and Capri, which the New York editors had declined to commission. Now he wanted to work on revising A Search for the King, and he had some short stories in mind. The best place to do that would be at home, wherever that was or might be—New York, Washington, East Hampton. He had every reason to feel that his European trip had been successful, the first of many reaffirmations of the vision of himself he had cherished since he had first learned to read and which his 1939 voyage had made a vivid part of his consciousness. At the beginning of August he flew westward. “A note to tell you,” he soon wrote to Lehmann, “I am back amongst my people ready to lead them to the new Sodom, out of this pillarmarked wilderness.”