From the air, Edgewater was grandly impressive. Its white colonnade in front of the Parthenon-like façade glittered in the August sunshine. The night before, Miles White—the award-winning theatrical costume designer for Oklahoma! and Carousel, who had met Gore in the late 1940s and shared with him a circle of New York artistic friends—had been at a Manhattan party. A heavy drinker, he had awakened too late to take the only morning train that would get him to Edgewater in time for lunch, the start of a weekend in the country house Gore had bought just a month before. Worried that there would be other guests waiting, embarrassed at the thought that he would disappoint his host, Miles flung himself out of bed. At the Thirty-second Street East River airport he hired a small seaplane to fly him up. The plane held steady to the eastward side of the river, past Hyde Park, Poughkeepsie, Rhinebeck, the river houses impressive in their wooded settings. Suddenly Miles recognized the railroad bridge and island landmarks. “That’s it!” he shouted. There was the shape of the land and the distinctive building his host had described. As the pilot taxied toward the dock, Gore came out of the house, down the steps by the colonnade. He quickly walked toward the river. Miles got out. As the seaplane taxied off, gaining speed, ascending, the two friends walked up the slope. The waist-high grass still had not been cut.
Soon after he moved into Edgewater in late July 1950, Gore sat down in the large octagonal room at the north end on the first floor and wrote, “She wore her trauma like a plume.” He had not been able to resist that sentence. Just as he had a new house to live in, he had a new novel to write, though he had not intended to write another just then. But they seemed to go together, as if the move had energized his imagination. He had, finally, a house of his own, one he really wanted, a place that had all the advantages and possibilities for anchoring him to a local habitation and a name. Antigua had been too distant, too limited. Though it spoke to his impulse to establish his own domestic space, it did not fulfill that desire. Edgewater he knew from the beginning would be different, would be successful. It did not matter that the grass demanded cutting, the interior was in disrepair, the building needed painting, the New York Central trains shook the building, the front door was blocked by a foot-high mound of compacted soot that made the kitchen the only usable entranceway on the front side of the house. Confident that in due time all this would be taken care of, he was less certain about where he would get the money. Television was a possibility, and he soon adapted two Somerset Maugham stories. “Some network asked me…. I was quite thrilled to be asked to write two of them.” At first he thought they would be used. “I thought they were quite good. But I didn’t do them in the ordinary TV form, and the people couldn’t understand the plays because they weren’t in standard format. I never made that mistake again. But I got paid something.” Even when they fell through, he still had high hopes. “One of those shows,” he wrote to Lehmann, “(and they do good things: Conrad, Hawthorne, James) a month and I shall be able to live in style up here, composing slowly and elegantly my first major (it must be everything now, everything!) novel.” He soon wrote another short story, “Erlinda and Mr. Coffin,” “rather long, nonhomosexual, faintly ghostly and legendary in tone.” But “there are no places here that publish longer pieces, aside from the quarterlies which I always regard as a last resort since I feel in need of money rather than prestige these days.” Hollywood was a possibility. For the time being, though, his overtures got nowhere, and he was disappointed that Isherwood made no effort to help him. It did matter, however, that the house was not sufficiently winter-livable. Since he had to put $3,000 into repairs that needed to be done right away, he took the money from his depleted savings. “I’ve bought an 1820 Georgian house on the banks of the Hudson,” he happily complained to John Lehmann. “It is very handsome and fine with an octagonal library and vast white columns, six of them, supporting a Parthenesque facade. I shall die of starvation before many moons have passed but the death will be serene I am sure, with a view of the river and my own seven acres of woods and unkempt lawn.” In the meantime he found himself totally absorbed in and entranced by his new novel, for which he had a title, The Judgment of Paris. Perhaps it would bring in some money beyond the usual modest advance, though his expectations were qualified by the worry that his “Meredithean comedy” was “destined … to be read as little as that great man’s works are.” More important, he felt himself on the verge of a major change in writing style and novelistic vision.
At Edgewater he was delighted to have guests and to be a guest, mainly at Alice Astor’s. With her help he soon had furniture, delivered by truck from the warehouse where she kept large numbers of things she had been collecting, particularly because she had a mania for buying furniture and had in mind furnishing a grand London house to which she would someday retire. “A sofa and some beds were delivered, all on loan. Like a set director, she did all the rooms and then from time to time she’d come over and take the furniture away.” One of the beds went upstairs to the third floor, into a bedroom assigned to John Latouche. He was expected so frequently that he was to have his own designated room. Actually, he stayed more often at Alice’s nearby and was a frequent visitor at her suite at the Gladstone Hotel. They had become lovers sometime earlier that year. It seemed clear that Alice, as usual, was the pursuer, Latouche the pursued. That his two best friends were for the time being best friends was a great convenience for Gore, who regularly had dinners and lunches with them at Rhinebeck and had them over to Edgewater, where he finally, sweating heavily, cut the waist-high grass himself. Day visitors from the city came and now, with the extra beds, overnight guests, though the small, inconvenient kitchen and his rudimentary skills as a cook made most meals semi- (or even non-) events. “Life in the mansion is serene,” he told Pat Crocker. “Numerous visitors and a ruinous series of repairs, however, are reducing me to a wreck and I can’t wait until I make some more money, to finish the house up. Vogue is doing a piece on it which should be very chic, so chic that I will then have to pay double for everything from the local cretins.” Vogue never published the piece, and, despite the expense, he was still eager to have visitors. “My dear Carlo,” he wrote to Carl Van Vechten, as he did to numbers of friends, “if you are mobile some day in the week, or over a weekend, come up here and sit between the columns and contemplate the river. The directions are simple: get on the Taconic Parkway and follow it until it ends at Red Hook, then drive through Red Hook toward Barrytown (clearly marked at various intersections). Go to the railroad station, cross the tracks, turn left and there I am, the only house on the river at that point. Do come.”
When there were no visitors, he embraced the solitude that Edgewater provided, the opportunity for long periods of reading and writing, particularly the former. The autodidactic impulse, from childhood on, was strong. This time, though, the reading, connected to the new novel, had a purpose, part of an effort to recast himself as a novelist. He had begun to feel frustratingly disappointed with what he called “the national style,” the flat, spare, unpoetic, naturalistic prose associated at its best with Hemingway, which had come to dominate American literature in the 1930s and 1940s. Within it he had written two bestsellers, but he had a low opinion of the artistic merit of The City and the Pillar, he thought In a Yellow Wood a dismal failure, he still deceived himself into thinking Dark Green, Bright Red a success, and he himself missed the desirable differentness and perhaps new opportunity represented by A Search for the King. What he did see clearly, he told Lehmann, is that “I am not a naturalistic writer…. and it took me some time to discover that I was never going to master that method, that my own gifts, such as they are, are of quite a different sort than I had first suspected. The enormous aesthetic failure of City finally convinced me of this.” Whatever reputation Williwaw had earned him had been “swept away by the scandalous success of a naive and hastily written book which, though eminently true philosophically, was not well done, and, in consequence, I was regarded as a most barbarous sort of young naturalist, a pale Dreiser and a queer one at that. It has been a very humiliating experience for me, these last two years, to endure the reputation of that book and to realize, worst of all, that it is now considered worthy and rather dull, well-meaning…. Read with a friendly eye, dear John, my nervous apologies; I am not frank often and, in letters at least, never coherent for I write them late at night, groggy with fatigue, rage and pleasure.”
A great admirer of Mann, he now also began reading everything by George Meredith—“the Milton of novelists”—Flaubert, Smollett, Scott, and Henry James, the last having been recommended to him rather slyly by his Exeter teacher Leonard Stevens, with whom he still corresponded. On one of his trips to Southampton he bought the complete New York Edition “for $125. I had $300 in the bank. That’s all I had.” He now read James through from beginning to end and added, to his exposure to the seriousness of Jamesian high comedy, a careful reading of the bawdy intellectual comedy of a group of Latin authors, particularly Petronious and Apuleius. They seemed models for some synthesis of his own that would capture in modern terms the tradition in fiction that brought together humor, satire, and high intellectual seriousness about society, culture, and the human condition. He had no doubt about his own narrative skills; he knew how to tell a story. With a gift for language, for the sharply witty phrase, the turn of words that captured an intellectual or a social reality, he realized now that he had been sacrificing this talent on the altar of somber naturalism. As a poet he had expressed linguistic and tonal rhythms gracefully. Why could he not create a more supple, expressive prose that would bring into his fiction the virtues of his talents as a poet? In conversation he had a gift for being both funny and truthful at the same time. Why could he not write fiction that would embody that aspect of himself, completely suppressed in the naturalistic mode, that expressed the seriousness of sharp wit and high comedy? As he began writing The Judgment of Paris, sitting in the quiet beauty of the octagonal room, looking out at the early-autumn Hudson River landscape, he knew he was making a decisive change in his artistic self-definition. “My place is incredibly beautiful,” he wrote to Lehmann; “the leaves are turning and I composing, slowly, The Judgment of Paris.”
On Labor Day, 1950, a month after his occupying Edgewater, a significant piece of the puzzle of Gore’s life began to fall into place. Walking down a corridor in the Everard Baths, wrapped in the usual towels, his eyes met those of a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker, Howard Auster. “I saw Gore coming down the corridor, and he was really something. Good-looking. Somehow our eyes struck. In the corridor. Towels here and a schmatte there. Then we started talking and ended up in bed. And it was just a total disaster.” But in a larger sense it quickly became a great success. “There was an enormous attraction, but it wasn’t physical. But it didn’t matter, you know. It was a kind of relief. I felt like I had met a soul mate…. At the end—and you never exchange names—I couldn’t resist, and I said, as I was putting my clothes back on, ‘Now, listen, tell me who you are?’ And he said he was a student at the University of Virginia. On the chair was a copy of The New Yorker and a book and maybe a copy of another prestigious magazine. I said, ‘Ya know, you’re full of shit!’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘No one who’s a student at the University of Virginia reads The New Yorker magazine.’ I thought he might say, ‘Well, fuck you. Who are you to know?’ Instead he was delighted. He said, ‘You wanna have lunch tomorrow?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I gave him the number of the Lever Brothers mailroom, where I was working, and he called the next day at twelve o’clock precisely. He said, ‘Come on over to the Plaza.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘One o’clock or whatever.’ So I went over. He started the control-freak business right at lunch. An artichoke with hollandaise. The most gentile of vegetables.”
Born into a working-class Jewish family, commuting daily from his parents’ Bronx apartment to his job in Manhattan, Howard Auster was barely a third-generation American. His maternal grandparents had come from the Polish Pale, his paternal from Marienbad, impoverished Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants whose family histories in America embodied the usual pattern of immigration, return, desertion, remarriage, ghettoization, and gentile-phobia in the first generation, slow assimilation in the second and third. His maternal stepgrandfather worked a rented farm in the northeastern Bronx, then gradually sold off pieces of property he had bought or claimed he owned as the urban population expanded northward. The extended-family life at the isolated farm was Howard’s most attractive childhood memory, a brief period of stability. For his mother, Hannah Olswang, born in 1908, the farm provided a refuge from her marital miseries during the first six years of Howard’s life. Eager to be free of her parents’ heavy-handed constraints, without education or vocation, at eighteen she had married Harry Auster, a compulsive gambler who earned his living as a taxi driver. Two years later she bore their only son. Having assimilated Hollywood images of glamour, Hannah, using the name Ann and changing Auster to Austen, worked as a hatcheck and cigarette girl at a nightclub, the first step, she hoped, toward a show-business career. A pretty young woman, she could dance and sing well enough to make the dream but not its realization possible.
Howard’s father, born in 1905, left fatherless at the age of about five and working for his living by the time he was twelve, embraced his working-class ethos and his gambler’s compulsion. His own father, who had immigrated from Austria, had started a small business in New York. When he went to Europe for a visit, he never returned, leaving his wife and five children to fend for themselves. As if his first family never existed, he remarried. Without education or vocational skills, his deserted wife sent her children to work as soon as possible. A rigidly Orthodox Jew, she pronounced anathema on whoever did not follow the rules, including her eldest daughter, who later became the mainstay of the fragmented family, the only aunt Howard remembered with any fondness. His grandmother “didn’t know what Judaism meant. She just followed the forms. She also never learned English.” Uninterested in religion except insofar as not wanting to offend the neighbors, Ann and Harry Auster struggled financially, fought bitterly, separated, reconciled, loved one another after their fashion, and set themselves up in the shadowland between working-class and lower-middle-class venues, mostly in the Pelham Parkway area of the Bronx. For Harry, life was mostly sporadic work, heavy gambling, the daily sports pages, and the poolroom. For Ann the hair tint of the day, the newspaper gossip columns, her work at nightclubs on the lowest rung of showbiz life were all major preoccupations. Though money was always short, each summer they went to the Jewish Catskills for a holiday, the high point of their year. At Public School 105, Howard, without much assistance from his parents, performed adequately. “I don’t think my father ever read a book in his life. He did, though, help me in my early years in school. I remember I was having trouble learning the alphabet. He took pieces of cardboard and wrote out the letters and taught them to me by rote. That was it. I suppose the main part of it was my fault: He wanted me to be interested in baseball and sports, which he never played. He liked pool and he liked gambling, and I felt that I disappointed him.”
At about five or six Howard “discovered masturbation. But not with my hand. It was rubbing against something. I didn’t know what it was. And I was doing it on my bed one day in this terrible one-room apartment we lived in then on Stratford Avenue, and they came in. I didn’t stop. I was happily humping away. Well, my father didn’t do anything. My mother hit me. I don’t know what consequences this later had on my life. Of course, it made sex all the more interesting.” Initially Ann Auster seemed glamorous to her young son. “My mother getting dressed up and beating up every eyelash to go out at night. She was a bit of a flapper.” And at first his father had appeared strong, exciting, someone to look up to. Soon, however, both parents seemed dull, hostile, rejecting. Like his mother, perhaps in imitation of her, he discovered early on that he had a good voice and loved singing popular and Broadway-musical songs. But “my mother was totally discouraging, except that I do remember, which shows you the extent of their religiosity, that when it came time for my bar mitzvah—‘Well, what’ya wanta do? I’ll give you singing lessons or a bar mitzvah!’ That’s how deeply religious they were. I would have loved singing lessons. But I said, to please her—I’ll have a bar mitzvah. I’ll go to six weeks of Hebrew school.’ Of course she loved giving the party. They showed off. I was aware that I liked singing, and I wasn’t as diffident then. Earlier there was this kid’s hour on radio. I got her to take me for an audition. I was so sure I would pass it. And I guess I didn’t at all. And coming home on the train I remember that my mother would not talk to me. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t pass the audition. I remember being nervous beyond belief.” For some years thereafter “that rejection inhibited me from singing. It was like a little secret of mine. The fear of criticism, and of course when my sexual thing came along, this was another way of just exposing myself.” As he went from grade school to Christopher Columbus High School, he felt that his parents disapproved of him, that their world was small and boring. At about ten he had discovered that he liked sex, especially with boys and men, the secretive, transgressive element a great thrill, partly connected in his mind to his mother’s having hit him when she found him masturbating. “I did it once, I think, with the super’s son—that was enjoyment. I did get blown in the park, I must have been eleven, by a twenty- or twenty-one-year-old guy. But I really did the seducing…. I was really very aggressive about it as a child. Far more then than I would ever dream of being now. And that kind of sex was so exciting. I continued that in high school.”
More than anything, he wanted to get away from his parents, to get away from the dullness of his working-class and lower-middle-class Jewish Bronx world. Always told that money was short and that his parents were making sacrifices for him, he was eager to be independent. Like his father, he started working at twelve, mostly after school, weekends, and summers, as a soda jerk in local candy stores. “One of my reasons for working was so that I could get away from my parents and my neighborhood and I could meet people to have sex with. And then it became a total addiction that I adored.” College was his passage out of that world. He applied to and was admitted in 1946 to New York University at Washington Square. With his own savings and earnings, he could just barely pay the tuition. To his parents, college was a foreign world. They did not want him to know more than they did, to rise above them. When, later, he confided to his father his worry that he might not be able to continue at school, his father responded, “‘Good! You can drive a taxi! You can get a job as a trucker!’” Instead he worked long hours at the soda fountain in a Walgreen’s drugstore near the Paramount movie theater, a job he liked. The customers were interesting, amusing, varied, the neon-lit show-business Times Square atmosphere attractively glamorous. He loved the glitter, and it paid almost all his school bills. Living at home, he had no rent. His parents put pressure on him to live with them (not that he could have afforded to live anywhere else), partly because they benefited from his baby-sitting for his only sibling, a sister twelve years his junior, also because they considered it shameful for a son to live outside the house until he married or moved away. Perhaps because he felt guilty living in the home of people he increasingly disliked, he succumbed one summer to his parents’ wish that he work as a waiter in their beloved Catskills near the resort they stayed at. When business turned bad, the owner fired almost all the waiters. Without any summer earnings, he had to withdraw from college. Soon he had his Walgreen’s job back. Resuming college the next semester, he was back at his old Manhattan haunts—the Village, Times Square, the Everard Baths as soon as he turned eighteen, the Upper West Side. “Anonymous sex, in parks. That sort of thing…. Being on display at the Paramount Theater and at Walgreen’s, I was picked up so many times, and then on Seventy-second Street and Broadway. Just young male flesh. My first really serious encounter was with a woman who must have been a prostitute; she must have been about eighteen or twenty at the most. She really came on strong. She invited me to a place—it wasn’t an apartment. I had never had that kind of experience before in my life. I was willing to try it. But I was so terrified. I couldn’t get a hard-on. First of all, she was older. I was seventeen. She might have been twenty-one or -two. I didn’t find her that attractive. So that was a disaster. What I immediately did to reassure myself was to go to Seventy-second Street and get picked up and get blown by a guy.”
Cute, with red-brown hair and freckles, about medium height with a trim, nicely proportioned build, refreshingly straightforward and innocently unsophisticated, Howard was both street-smart and charmingly young. When they met at the Everard Baths on Labor Day, 1950, Howard, who had graduated from NYU in June, appealed to Gore not because of any particular sexual chemistry between them but because he was refreshingly different, youthful, and roughly charming. That he was a relatively uneducated boy from the Bronx was in his favor. Intellectuals and well-educated Wasps were the proverbial dime a dozen in the world in which Gore had been brought up. Howard’s Jewishness, to the extent that Gore thought about it at all, was transgressive in a minor key, something that might have appealed to his self-assertiveness, his rejection of the prejudices of the Auchincloss and Gore worlds. So too Howard’s working-class background. Gore had had considerable sexual experience with boys from the working-class world. But now here was one for whom he had an immediate strong feeling of protectiveness, companionability, seniority, whom he could jokingly refer to as his “child.” Both were eager for friendship, for family on their own terms. Both recognized some potential for creating a relationship that might substitute for what they had been denied or had rejected. If they were, from that first encounter, an odd couple, they were an odd couple that made sense. That distinctive familial chemistry was there from the beginning. Howard was immediately in awe, entranced. They were soon having dinner together every night. When Howard could not afford to pay his half of the expensive restaurant bills and asked if they couldn’t go to cheaper places, Gore responded, “‘Why should I suffer because you don’t have any money? I’ll pay for the dinner, and you give me what you can.’ I couldn’t argue with that.”
A week or two after Labor Day, Gore said, “‘Come up to the country this weekend.’” Not “‘would you like to or’—Just: ‘Come to the country this weekend!’ ‘Well, I’m busy, I don’t know if I can make it.’ ‘Well, if you can’t make it, then good-bye!’ I didn’t know if that meant forever. And besides, I really did want to go up. I had nothing else to do. So I said, ‘Okay.’ So I came up for that weekend. There was no sex, no sexual tension. There might have been jealousy early on. He told me—don’t expect sex. I would have gone on doing it. I didn’t care. I would have gone on willingly. But it wasn’t sexual, physical love. I kind of moved—not moved in—I was never sure, that’s why I never took it very seriously. If it ended, it ended. Which took a lot of the tension out of it. I suppose I ended up being a permanent playmate, Greek chorus, and Jewish mother. Who could ask for anything more? I got the company of Gore. Beyond anything I really ever dreamed of…. I know people are puzzled by how it works between me and Gore. I’ve been plagued by that all my life. What do you say? ‘Hi, I’m Howard Austen, I’m associated with Gore Vidal, but we don’t sleep together?’ You assume when two men are living together that…. It was a corner that they put me into that I just had to accept. Even today. There’s no defense. If it were true, I would not be ashamed of it. People have done a lot worse than Gore Vidal, even though he’s fat. The truth is the truth.”
To celebrate Gore’s twenty-fifth birthday and the publication of Dark Green, Bright Red, Nina decided to make a grand birthday party for her son. Though most of their lives they had fought bitterly, at the moment they were in a quiet passage in their ongoing pattern of separation and temporary reconciliation. Nina’s $3,000 loan toward the purchase of Edgewater had given her a proprietary interest in the house. At the Volney, where she took an apartment for her extended New York City visits, she played cards with her alcoholic neighbor, Dorothy Parker. Boiling pot after pot of coffee, Nina tried to stay on the wagon. Regularly she fell off. Most of the time she dressed glamorously, elegantly. In public she was usually vivacious, a dominating presence. In September she came up to Edgewater for her first visit, delighted to have lunch with Alice Astor, whom she soon began to refer to as “my friend Alice Astor.” In fact, Joe O’Donohue recalled, “she would refer to ‘our friend’ and even ‘my friend’ Alice Astor, which would make Gore furious.” When she noticed Howard, she thought him cute and inconsequential and began various small efforts of noblesse oblige, including trying to teach him proper Wasp table manners. “The first time I met Gore’s mother was at the party at the Café Nicholson in October 1950. She seemed wonderful to me. I loved glamorous people, party girls. She was a star. Even Gore would agree on that. I don’t know whether she accepted me reluctantly or whether she was convinced that I was going to be a permanent part of Gore’s life. She had her own gay world. She knew how these affairs began and ended with the speed of light.”
In New York, dragging eleven-year-old Tommy around with her, Nina arranged to have Gore’s birthday party at Café Nicholson on Monday night, October 2, when the restaurant would otherwise be closed. Food from the party would come from a caterer Nina would obtain. Gore, through Johnny, would supply the room and the lovely back garden. He also, of course, would supply most of the guests, from a list of his famous friends whom Nina was eager to meet and have a high time with. For Nina it was somewhat down-class. But it gave her the chance to be managerial, to show the world her interest in and her closeness to her son, to rub shoulders with what to her was a glamorous though less refined world than her own. As usual, she intended to be splendid. Among other things, she had had a large cake made with bright green-and-red lettering in the shape of the book she had not read. Soon after the party began, she swept in, dressed in glittering silver lamé, “a fabulous figure,” Nicholson remembered, “a very handsome woman,” glamorously, superciliously, and probably happily out of place. Since Anaïs was there with Hugh Guiler, they must have met, the only encounter between them, though in the noisy excitement of the party they probably at most eyed one another in passing. Anaïs would have been more interested, though disdainfully, in Nina than Nina in her. Gene Vidal was there, with Kit. When Gene sat next to Anaïs, she startled him with her frank conversational references to Gore having been her lover. Gore introduced his mother, as he did his father, to Tennessee Williams, John Latouche, and Carl Van Vechten. Oliver Smith, the prominent New York set designer, was there, Nick Wreden and Louise Nicholl from Dutton, Harvey Breit from the Times, Alice Astor, Connie Darby, Sarah Moore, the actress Ella Raines—related to Gore and Nina through her marriage to one of Bob Olds’s sons—and about seventy-five of Gore’s old and new New York friends, including editors from Vogue and Mademoiselle. When Miles White entered, he noticed a shy-looking young man standing alone near the entranceway. Shy himself, he kept Howard company. So too, a little later, did Johnny Nicholson, who was frightened of Nina. Toward the end of the party Gore “made a gracious little speech about what an occasion it was etc., etc., ‘particularly when I can,’ I said as I cut the cake, ‘eat my own words.’”
Through the fall of 1950 the domestic rhythms of Edgewater took shape. Before driving to the Rhinecliff station to welcome his new friend to Edgewater for his first visit, Gore had put a pork roast in the oven. When they returned, “the roast was dried out and terrible. And that was it—the whole dinner. Well, perhaps he had some vegetables or something.” Gore seemed to think that he had prepared an excellent meal. “So I said, ‘Maybe I’ll try the cooking.’ I was hungry.” Howard cooked thereafter, making pleasurable use of “fresh ripe Dutchess County tomatoes in July and August from the roadside stands. And the corn,” which Gore always remembered as the best he had ever eaten. At least one weekened meal, usually Saturday night, was at Alice’s, where her Russian chef kept guests happy. On Sunday they often ate at a nearby lobster restaurant. The driving was done by Gore. In the Aleutians he had occasionally driven a jeep over the roadless tundra. He knew how to start and stop. That, though, was the extent of his driving skill. Howard did not drive at all. For local driving (Gore initially took the bus or train into Manhattan) he needed a car. “I went into Rhinebeck and bought a Model A Ford, a couple of hundred dollars,” Gore recalled. “In those days nobody asked you for a driver’s license. I lived there. I said, ‘Will you tell me how this thing starts?’ And they started it and showed me the throttle. I remember that. ‘This is in case it doesn’t start. You do that.’ ‘Where’s the brake?’ I knew about the brake. ‘How do you stop it, etc.?’ ‘The pedal.’ I got into the car,” without a license, “and I drove it from Rhinebeck to Edgewater.” Howard, who stayed from Friday through Sunday, found that social life revolved around guests, at Edgewater and at Alice’s. Gore went regularly into Manhattan once or twice a week, often staying overnight, enjoying New York literary society, particularly, for example, Edith Sitwell who was over for a lecture tour in November and the New York opening of Williams’s The Rose Tattoo in early February 1951. Gore paid all the bills, though often he worried about where the money for major expenses would come from. During the week Howard still lived with his parents. Then, late in the year, an ex-cab-driver friend of his father, who had gone to college, showed up with his fifth wife. Howard’s mother had told him about her son’s glamorous new friends. “He was the only person in that milieu to whom those names would mean anything.” Soon Ann Auster was laying down the law. Howard would have “to give up all these friends because Sam … had done some research and found out my new friends were homosexual. I took a bag—I don’t know why we even had a bag—and packed my clothes. I didn’t say a word. ‘You’re moving out?’ That’s when she called me a degenerate.” In late autumn he moved into the Manhattan YMCA, then early the next year into a shared, subleased, $75-a-month furnished apartment on the top floor of an abandoned synagogue on East Seventy-second Street.
For Christmas, Gore and Howard took the train down to Washington, where Howard had never been, to visit Nina and Dot. Gore’s temporary truce with Nina now provided a painful example of its fragility and Howard his first experience with Nina drunk. They arrived in good Christmas cheer at her large four-story row house, 3226 N Street, one floor of which she occupied, the others of which she rented, except for a guest apartment Dot sometimes stayed in. Probably she was there now, though not Gore’s thirteen-year-old half-sister Nini, who, with a temper of her own and after a fight with her mother, had gone to live with her father. She preferred an Auchincloss Christmas. Eleven-year-old Tommy, home from boarding school for the holiday, showed Howard the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan and Mars books that had once been Gore’s and that Tommy had saved when they had left the Woodland Avenue house. Few of Gore’s other childhood books remained, and all his papers had been discarded. Fascinated by the Tarzan books, Howard sat with Tommy, leafing through one of them. Tommy then went to bed, early. He was suddenly shocked into awakeness by Nina. “God, it was an awful thing. She came in, and she was naked, and she hit me a couple of times,” Tommy recalled. He had never seen his mother that way before. “She woke me up. I must have said something that set her off into a drunken rage. Something like kids do. She may have spent too much money on me, and I wasn’t appreciative enough or something. Then she got sick and vomited on me. Gore was there, but he was in another apartment.” The next day Gore explained to Tommy “that ‘your mother’s not well.’ I guess she felt badly about it. Afterwards she never remembered what she had done. I didn’t go near her for two years after that…. I was in boarding school anyway.” Frightened, he also moved to his father’s. Janet Auchincloss’s rages were slightly less intolerable, and at least she was not his mother. When he left, Nina got rid of “all the toys and all the clothes and all the books” Tommy had, including those of Gore’s that Tommy had salvaged. For Gore the scene was familiar, one of many he had experienced, some of them when he was as vulnerable as Tommy. Nina’s friend Joe Ryle remembered what for him was the sadness of Nina’s self-destructive behavior, particularly how, when Nini and Tommy were coming home from school for holidays, Nina would be “so marvelous and be on the wagon for two or three weeks before they came home, totally. Not a drink. The minute those children would arrive, she’d go falling-down drunk. She just couldn’t cope with—I don’t know what it was she couldn’t cope with. It was just so sad.” Sometimes she could stay on the wagon for months. AA helped. At times in the mid-1950s “she was quite self-analytical, but she was also always excusing herself,” Gore recalled, “and trying to find excuses for what she knew was incredibly bad behavior, even as drunks go. She blamed her bad behavior on having been neglected as a child and so on and so forth. But she knew that didn’t play with me, because I knew too much about her parents, so she then said that she had agonizing menstrual periods. ‘I had the longest menopause in history. It went on for years. It was agony. All the night sweats and nerves.’ I said, ‘I guess a lot of it was DTs too.’”
Though he felt sorry for Tommy, the Christmas nightmare did not ruffle Gore’s good spirits. Except for his concern about money, things were going well, and he had hopes that either television or pulp fiction would provide him with additional funds. There was the possibility of reprints of his novels, a backlist that he hoped the new paperback industry would make available. Victor Weybright, who had originated New American Library with Signet and Mentor paperbacks, was successfully pushing mass-market fiction. Gore had just met Weybright, a stolid, dark-haired man, elegantly dressed in hand-tailored British suits, his ever-present pipe accenting his jowls. “Weybright looked like Evelyn Waugh,” Jason Epstein recalled, “and tried to act like him, to look elegant. He was a very good businessman.” From an agricultural family long settled in rural Maryland. Weybright had gone from the Wharton School to editing an important Washington social-science research magazine to four enjoyable wartime years in London as the American liaison with British scientific and cultural organizations. Before leaving England he had made an arrangement with Alan Lane, the pioneering creator of Penguin Books, to buy out Penguin’s fledgling American operation. Weybright hoped to do for paperbacks in America what Lane was doing in Britain. There was some possibility that Weybright would arrange with Dutton a new paperback edition of The City and the Pillar. Also, he had in mind a paperback anthology of quality literature, to be published a few times a year. By spring 1951 both projects were in the air. Weybright, who had been having great success publishing mass-market originals of Mickey Spillane’s subliterary detective fiction, may have suggested to Gore he might earn much-needed money by writing an upscale version of Spillane, sophisticated murder-mystery thrillers to appeal to the high end of the paperback market. Vidal remembers that the suggestion came from Weybright, partly compensation for his resistance to publishing Gore’s out-of-print novels with the excuse that literary novels did not sell in paperback, though he boasted he had been the first to sell Faulkner widely when he put a steamy cover on his edition of Sanctuary. More likely he feared the taint of a novel and a novelist associated with homosexuality. The chronology and the record suggest that in the spring of 1951 Gore himself thought of what were soon to become the pseudonymous Edgar Box mystery novels. As a reader of Agathie Christie and S. S. Van Dine, he felt he knew the genre. That summer at Edgewater, experimenting for the first time with a Dictaphone, he dictated in about a week Death in the Fifth Position, the first in the Edgar Box trio.
At ease in the octagonal study, the house still somewhat haggard and underfurnished, he had worked through the winter and spring completing Judgment and trying to get various moneymaking projects off the ground. Through Harvey Breit he had done a review in February for the New York Times Book Review, another for The Saturday Review. It soon seemed evident that he would make very little from Judgment. In late June 1951 he had finished the novel. At best, he anticipated, it would sell his usual 10,000 copies. In October 1950 he had arranged to be paid by Dutton $450 a month from November 1, 1950, to October 1, 1951, mostly advances against royalties for Judgment and for the next novel he had in mind, tentatively titled The King James Book. That money would stop soon. At the same time as he finished Judgment, Gene Vidal, consulting with his son, leased a small factory in Poughkeepsie with a contract to make a thousand plastic bread trays a week for the General Baking Company. He previously owned a similar factory in New Rochelle, which had recently burned. Probably the plastics were dangerously flammable. Gore, from nearby Barrytown, was to be director of personnel. Perhaps there would be profits for both father and son. “He was actually running his father’s factory,” Tommy Auchincloss recalled, “or at least that was the impression he gave me. His father would come down and visit. Gore was basically the one who was going over there and checking things.” A disastrous fire two years later was also to close the Poughkeepsie factory, with little or no benefit to either. But beginning in the summer of 1951, it was something that Gore kept one eye on. Gene, who regularly inspected the factory, stopped at Edgewater for brief visits.
That same summer Gore had long-term visitors, though they did not distract him from work. Dot, who came to see the house, did not stay long. Nina, who had Tommy for the summer, initially intended to stay much of July and August, the 1950 Christmas fiasco long out of her mind. She would help decorate Edgewater. The octagonal room, like much of the house, needed painting. As always, to pass time during the evenings, they played gin rummy. “Nina wouldn’t take my beating her at gin rummy terribly well, and she never paid me what she owed me. Oh, we played just for pennies. And even that was more than she would pay.” Soon Nina was happily aflutter at an invitation to be a celebrity bridge-playing guest on the maiden voyage of the transatlantic liner the United States. Why could she not leave twelve-year-old Tommy with Gore at Edgewater and she herself sail off on this glamorous adventure? Amiably, Gore agreed. While he worked on Death in the Fifth Position and answered, as Tommy noticed, stacks of letters, Howard entertained Gore’s half-brother. In addition to the press of work, Gore felt he was “not very good with children. I can manage babies. They’re like cats. But much older children, I don’t know what to do with them. Tommy was the wrong age. If he were an adolescent, I’d have been able to talk to him.” Gore would talk to him, Tommy recalled, about his work, his friends—one of them a famous ballet dancer who could jump four feet in the air. He would not play with him, though. The highlight of Tommy’s summer was when Howard, his ubiquitous Lucky Strike cigarette in his mouth, took him to Coney Island. “We went to a burlesque show,” Tommy recalled. “I probably talked Howard into it. I had a prurient interest in that kind of thing, and I never had any sense that he didn’t.” After a few weeks Gore and Dot arranged for Tommy to spend the rest of the summer in Newport with the Auchinclosses. When, after a month, Nina returned, clearly something had gone wrong on her trip, perhaps some aborted romance or imagined insult. She did not seem, though, “in such bad spirits. But she was raging at Hughdie for having taken the son that she had left there, and then she decided to kill herself. She took a lot of pills, and my grandmother knew she wasn’t up and heard this terrible snoring from her room where she had passed out.” The local doctor saved her.
At Alice’s grand hostelry and at Ferncliff, Vincent’s larger estate nearby, Gore had the advantage of both friendship and entertainment on a high scale. Alice, who split her time between the Gladstone Hotel and Rhinebeck, was delighted to have her artistic-intellectual young friend nearby, especially during the fall and winter weekends when most of her Dutchess County society was away. Though Gore, who disliked Edgewater’s winter cold, soon began regular Key West visits for at least one winter month, he stayed during part of the off-season. Oblivious to seasons or class distinctions, Alice had little interest in warm-weather winters. Howard was regularly, kindly welcomed at Rhinebeck. Alice “looked like a Byzantine princess. Very dark, with brooding eyes, Byzantine-Etruscan. She never wore much makeup, but of course she didn’t have to. I see her constantly playing with her earring. Not with great speed, but as if her hands were always busy with worry beads. She smoked constantly.” Her young teenage daughters, Emily and Romana, were around. So too her eldest, Ivan, who detested Gore, probably suspecting, as he did of many of his mother’s friends, that he was getting money from her and perhaps had designs on Ivan’s inheritance. He was right to the extent that Alice invested $2,500 in June 1950 in a Latouche-Vidal “literary idea” called “The Devil May Care,” one of a number of ideas and outlines they created together, the most substantial a screenplay called Love Is a Horse Named Gladys. Actually, Latouche got the entire $2,500. It was a device to funnel money to him. Always broke, he lived from hand to mouth, sometimes desperately morose, often charmingly inventive. One day when Gore was visiting him at his lower—Park Avenue apartment, some men came to seize his furniture for indebtedness. “They asked him if he were John Latouche. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m Louis Latouche, his brother!’ In a short while he had charmed the men not only into believing this but into going away without the furniture.” Except for the loan of some sofas and beds, most of it returned by the mid-1950s, Gore himself took nothing from Alice.
A fountain of humorous anecdotes and witty comebacks, Latouche often lived up to his reputation of being the best talker around. Gore, who had begun to hear some of Latouche’s favorite stories too many times, especially about his adventures in Africa, set him up amusingly one night at Edgewater. With his eye on his watch, making sure to get the timing right, Gore interrupted the flow of conversation, suddenly saying to Latouche in an amiably insistent voice, “Why don’t you tell everyone your African story?” Latouche launched into it. Just as he came to the climax, the New York Central Railroad roared by, shaking the house, drowning him out. Like Latouche, Alice loved the night, whether partying in New York or staying up until the small hours of the morning, playing cards and Chinese checkers, chatting, gossiping, telling stories, always sleeping late. When guests came for lunch, she quickly dressed, dashed out of her bedroom, went out the back door into her car, and had the chauffeur drive her around to the front, as if she had just arrived from a morning out.
Soon after moving into Edgewater, Gore was delighted to discover he had some interesting neighbors in addition to Alice. In Barrytown and nearby Red Hook lived a number of accomplished people, one of whom, Alan Porter, he became friendly with. Another, Joe O’Donohue, whom he already knew from the New York ballet world, became a good friend. A small, humorous man who always laughed at his own jokes, Porter, the first curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (despite being totally color-blind), came up regularly from New York. His friend Greta Garbo sometimes came to stay with him at the old Lutheran church he had converted into a residence. There he headed what he and his friends, particularly Paul Kent, Billy Baldwin, and Jack Frear, called “the sewing circle” and what the locals called the “Boys from Barrytown.” Jack Frear and Jimmy Whitfield “had a house called Dovecote, and they were known as the Doves of Dovecote. And Whitfield was a cousin of Calder Willingham. I saw him occasionally,” Gore recalled. “The only ones I saw were Alan Porter, who lived next to Don Wilson and Paul Kent.” Old-fashioned, with an odd rustic accent, Porter was an amusing eccentric. “If someone had gone to bed with someone,” O’Donohue recalled, “Alan described it in one sort of little Revolutionary-time dialect, ‘He put the boots to him.’ He was a very strange little guy. A perfectly nice man, who laughed all the time.” Another, more eccentric neighbor was the son of the essayist John Jay Chapman, the heavy-drinking Chanler Chapman who ran a highly personalized local newspaper. For whatever his reasons, including perhaps that John Jay Chapman had once lived in Edgewater, Chapman felt free to come over and make himself at home anytime, which Gore resented and soon put a stop to. O’Donohue, however, was always welcome. A handsome, slim man, elegantly dressed and fastidiously outrageous in manner and conversation, he had lost the inherited fortune that had allowed him to live a cultured, high-society Manhattan life during the 1930s and ’40s, a friend of Carl Van Vechten, Cole Porter, and Clifton Webb, a premier member of café society from Harlem to Park Avenue. “Very handsome in an elegant, aristocratic way,” Sam Lurie recalled. “A snobbish type, I suppose you’d say today. Tall, thin. Very good-looking then. Great charm. Well mannered.” A society columnist named Maury Paul, who wrote under the name Cholly Knickerbocker in the Hearst papers, called him “The last of the Perhapsburgs.” Having recently bought, with the help of Alice, who found it for him, a small house in Red Hook, he stayed much of the winter.
Many of Alice’s literary guests were treated to the luxuries of her brother Vincent’s estate. Tennessee Williams enjoyed swimming in the indoor pool, wearing a bathing cap, as Romana noticed with some astonishment, and the Sitwells, particularly Edith, came. Alice would bring them over to Ferncliff for the hospitality of Vincent and his wife, the former Minnie Cushing, one of whose sisters had married Jock Whitney—in Nina’s mind still the man who had “got away”—after his divorce from Liz. The aristocratic Sitwells, for whom the Gladstone was not posh enough, stayed free at the St. Regis Hotel, which Vincent owned. “We’re in some little hotel. Osbert, what’s the name of it again?” Edith would say. “Oh, the St. Regis. Yes. Perfectly nice.” Gore, who had met Edith and Osbert in New York in autumn 1949, found the Sitwells’ eccentricities—their odd, elongated, skeletal frames and especially Edith’s witty flamboyance—compelling. When after a lunch together Gore, Paul Bowles, and the very tall Osbert, whom Bowles had been eager to meet, walked on Fifth Avenue toward the St. Regis, the two younger men found that Osbert, who had lost some control of his limbs because of Parkinson’s disease, began to take longer and longer strides. They could barely keep up. “I raced beside him, trying to hold him back—and down to earth like a balloon—while Paul, who is short and slight, had now left the pavement and was flying through the air, clinging to Osbert’s arm for support.” At the height of her reputation as a poet, over six feet tall, wittily wicked, Edith in her sheer entertaining bizarreness appealed to Gore’s sense of humor as well as to his sense of history, as if some medieval Plantagenet had come alive again. When he complained to her about a foolish British review of The City and the Pillar in the Times Literary Supplement, she said, “But they do books on Icelandic runes very well.” In preparation for her sitting next to the conversationless Vincent at her first lunch at Ferncliff, Edith took counsel with her fellow guests. “‘What am I going to talk to Vincent Astor about? I’ve heard he’s very difficult.’ They said. ‘Look, what he really loves is facts.’ ‘Ah!’ She was put next to Uncle Vincent at lunch,” Romana remembered, “on his right. People were wondering how this was going to go. Uncle Vincent was amazed when she turned to him and said, ‘So glad to meet you. Tell me something—you’re probably the only person who can tell me—how many girders does the Eiffel Tower have?’ She kept my uncle talking about the Eiffel Tower for the whole of lunch.”
Close to Edgewater, though worlds away from Ferncliff, Bard College provided entertainment of a different sort and, during the first half of the 1950s, a few local friends, particularly the poet Ted Weiss. A small, arty, serious school, with a special emphasis on literature and the humanities, Bard, years before cast off from Columbia University without an endowment, frequently teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, its faculty underpaid and overworked in a demanding tutorial system. Students got much individual attention. Faculty rarely had time for anything else. Still, in the 1940s and ’50s, when academic jobs were especially scarce and widely underpaid, Bard attracted distinguished people who came as visitors or stayed for a few years, writers like Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. Three years after moving into Edgewater, Gore had not met the peripatetic Bellow, to Ted Weiss’s surprise, and “since I plan to shut the house in a week or so we are not apt to meet: there is a rumor he may not be long up here, that the open road, more grand appointments await him. I have not read his book [The Adventures of Augie March] but it sounds most energetic and respectable.” A young poet of distinction and an enthusiastic teacher of literature, Weiss and his wife Renée, a violinist, had been publishing their influential small magazine, Quarterly Review of Literature, since 1943. They regularly organized poetry readings and conferences at the attractive riverside campus that over the next decade brought to Bard most of the best-known poets of the period. Unenthusiastic about academia, having narrowly escaped Harvard, Gore was enthusiastic about the Weisses and accepted some invitations to readings at the nearby campus, one to hear Jean Garrigue, whom he had met through Anaïs years before in New York and to whom he had introduced the Weisses, another to hear Wallace Stevens. Gore recalled, “Here was this fat solemn businessman in a three-piece suit, a typical insurance salesman from Hartford. ‘Well, it’s a remarkable time in the arts,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be talking about modern poetry today. I think that’s the subject I was given, and I don’t know what to say in a period that has something no other period has even had, a Museum of Modern Art.’ Well, I fell apart. Nobody else could see the joke. I thought it hysterically funny. I read him then. I used to read a lot of poetry…. I went into the war with Auden’s anthology, which I carried all through the war, two or three volumes…. I got through the war with him.” On another occasion at Bard there were “three British poets,” Gore reported to Lehmann, “very dreary … D. Gascoygne (’nearer my God to thee’), Graham (hearty, solid, regular feller) and a Miss Raine (‘I loathe Jane Austen’) … for a literary jamboree … being strange to these shores they were unaware that anyone took poetry seriously enough to want to discuss it in PUBLIC, so one had the feeling that their most central modesty was hopelessly violated by the tough young New Yorkers who put to them long technical questions. The session broke up with one sharp youth remarking from the floor that, among other things, the supernatural was an abstraction … to which Mr D. G. gulped with pain and said in a strident choked voice, ‘The Supernatural is Not an Abstraction!’ ending the symposium.” Some of the Bard poets came for parties at Edgewater, especially the much-liked Weisses. One afternoon, at the time of the publication of Judgment, as they were chatting about things literary, Gore, defiantly and defensively, told Ted, “Well, my best novel is at least as good as the worst of Henry James.”
His outward gaze was mostly turned toward New York, his inward focused on intense reading. Still, the Weisses were fun and nice, and Gore’s larger New York City literary life, soon to be extended to television and then the movies, seemed exotic to them. When Ted asked him to satisfy one of his students’ curiosity about Tennessee Williams, Gore graciously responded,
As for Tennessee, you may pass on to the young man the information that he reads a great deal of verse, almost no prose of any kind, that the greatest single literary influence on him was Hart Crane (he set out to be a poet, not a playwright) and a later but less influential mentor has been Rilke, in translation. He admires Sartre’s plays, despite a fierce snub we both received from that busy little Caesar (I don’t share Tenn’s admiration) one afternoon in Paris. Among contemporaries T.W. personally likes Carson McCullers, Windham and myself … putting up with those works of ours he cannot bring himself to read with good humor and right feeling. He does not like novels though he will read short stories with some pleasure. He has had little personal contact with other theatre writers. He once wrote O’Neill a fan letter after The Iceman Cometh, getting a long response, shakily written. I read it but can’t remember what it said. So much for my talents as a recollector of the great.
Down the road from Edgewater, near the entrance to the Bard campus, Gore and Howard found a better use for Bard than its academic resources. At Adolph’s, a small tavern and student hangout, Howard met some of the more adventuresome members of a faculty and student body that had its fair share of men interested in men. Some he occasionally brought back to Edgewater.
Though he never spoke at Bard, Gore had begun to supplement his income and cultivate his audience by lecturing. “My life has been desperately busy these last few months,” he told Lehmann. “Every other week I go out to lecture to Ladies’ clubs: the Midwest, New England, the South, all over. I do it all in a sort of daze, for the money. I have also had my father move one of his small factories within two miles of my house, to provide me with a sinecure, which it will do very nicely as soon as the troubles stop but after six months they still persist.” Late in 1951, on his way to Philadelphia to lecture, as he drove through Manhattan under the elevated subway tracks, he banged his car into a steel post. Miraculously the car was intact and no one else hurt. His ribs, though, were badly bruised. He simply drove on. Fortunately, if the police had been involved (apparently they were not), at least he now had a driver’s license. A fast driver who frequently exceeded the speed limit, he had recently been stopped for speeding on his way to Joe O’Donohue’s in Red Hook. “The state trooper called me over and said. ‘You’re speeding. I have to give you a ticket. Where is your license?’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ He thought I was either joking or I didn’t have it with me. He chose to interpret it that I didn’t have it with me. I had the registration. ‘Okay,” he said, ‘the magistrate is over there. You go and pay your fine for speeding.’ So I went to the justice of the peace with this thing and I said I’ve been speeding. And he said, ‘Well, where’s your driver’s license?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t have one.’ He said, ‘You mean you don’t have it with you.’ ‘No, I never got one.’ ‘You never got one!’ and he became extremely interested in the case…. ‘Well, why didn’t you get a driver’s license?’ ‘It just never occurred to me.’” With aching ribs, he drove on to Philadelphia and gave his lecture. Isherwood, who had just been at Edgewater for a visit, was there with John Van Druten to attend an out-of-town performance of Van Druten’s adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera. To Gore, who joined Isherwood at the theater, it seemed more Van Druten than Isherwood. Still aching, he drove back to Edgewater, where the doctor diagnosed and taped up four broken ribs. “I am in physical discomfort most of the time with these ribs but,” he told Lehmann stoically, “that sort of thing is not eternal.”
At Williams College, where he went to lecture in mid-May 1951, the bookstore manager, Raymond Washburn, a Vidal enthusiast, eagerly greeted him. He had been to Edgewater for a visit, where Gore had introduced him to his grandmother, whom he found “characteristically fascinating.” They had all gone over to Alice’s for lunch. Latouche’s “conversational ability” impressed Washburn. “I’m not sure,” he wrote to Gore, “I could survive a long siege of it, for either my mental capacities would shrivel away (what few there are) being blanched in the reflective glory of his verbal acumen, or the constant assaults upon my ears would soon leave me deaf and dumb.” From Barrytown, Gore took the train to Williamstown, where Washburn and others had arranged a meeting with students eager to talk to him about the ongoing public discussions he had been conducting with John Aldridge on the future of the novel. That evening he gave a talk on literary reputations, mostly to faculty, one of whom, Richard Poirier, who had just come to Williams and was the same age as Gore, persistently took him to task for his undervaluation of Faulkner. Faulkner had been the subject of Poirier’s recent Ph.D. dissertation. He “didn’t really care much for Faulkner,” Gore later remarked. “I had been brought up by a family from that area. He was so startling and exotic to Northerners but was too down-home for my taste.” In the argument that developed, Gore challenged Poirier to name one writer not sanctioned by academia that he liked. Had he read Meredith? Poirier had not. “Your view on every writer is exactly that of every English teacher.” Poirier kept pushing. “How do you explain the lack of acceptance and popularity of Faulkner in this country? He has greater fame in France.’ Gore wouldn’t have any of this,” Poirier later said. “‘But Faulkner has been accepted here,’ he said. ‘He’s a revered figure.’ Then, as he went on, I began to see that what he was really saying is that Faulkner’s reputation was quite adequate to the attainment. And this was the beginning of my friendship with him and my deep reverence for his sweetness…. He was immaculate-looking, stately-looking, princely. He looked like a young prince. He had a wonderful voice and inflection, and above all he was always very, very gracious and charming, as I’ve always thought him to be.” In New York, in fall 1951, when they ran into one another at one of Poirier’s hangouts, the popular Blue Parrot, they joked pleasantly together, the start of a friendship.
Inviting her to visit in late-summer 1951, Gore wrote to Anaïs, who was spending much of her time in California, that Edgewater is “a perfect summer house, airy and full of green light.” It was a happy refuge, especially from discussions about values, a perfect place for work. Though there was still a distance to go, the house was shaping up. Basic repainting had been done, repairs made, sufficient furniture was in place. Howard, with Alice’s help and Nina’s suggestions, began to redecorate. “My mother, her twelve-year-old son, a colored cook and her twelve year old daughter are all in the house for the summer,” he told Anaïs, “and I rather like the activity: I feel quite patriarchal. Not easy to work but soon, when the library floor is painted and the new shelves are put up, I will lock myself away and begin my Messiah novel.” But money was very tight. The $1,000 advance for Death in the Fifth Position helped. So too did Dutton’s willingness to advance money on a monthly basis. The small amounts from the Auchincloss trust took care of the very low mortgage payments, but austerity was still necessary. Howard paid his own bills in New York. Eager to get out of the mailroom at Lever Brothers, when he was turned down for every job he applied for in advertising, on Gore’s recommendation he changed his name on his résumé from the identifiably Jewish Auster to Austen. Whether that change made the difference or not, he got the next two jobs for which he applied, first as a sales and display assistant at Helena Rubenstein, then as an advertising-agency account assistant at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. Whenever there were joint activities, Gore paid, as he did for everything at Edgewater. He had a strong sense of possession, a country squire comfortable in a house that increasingly reflected his vision of himself.
At Columbia University one evening in February 1952 Gore joined Malcolm Cowley, the literary and cultural critic born in 1898, who had analyzed the post–World War I generation in Exile’s Return, and the much younger John Aldridge for a forum discussion of the state of the novel. The relationship with Aldridge had grown more complicated than simply critic-pseudo-novelist and novelist-occasional-critic jockeying for position and prominence. Initially Vidal had thought Aldridge might do something important for him and other writers of his generation. If Aldridge was to be the preeminent critic of his time, the new Edmund Wilson, then his imprimatur would be valuable. By 1952 Vidal was beginning to see that Aldridge would not rise to Wilson’s level. He later began to think of him as another version of Orville Prescott; it was becoming clear that Aldridge might become an enemy, certainly not a supporter. After their correspondence in 1948, they had met in New York in fall 1949, having lunch and spending part of an afternoon wandering around the midtown bookstores, at each of which Gore looked for his own books. “Maybe he thought it would be impressive,” Aldridge later remarked, “if the stores had his books. I think he wanted my support, and for a long time I think he thought he had it. I reviewed about three of his books in the Times, always somewhat mixed. But he seemed to think that that was just fine.” Aldridge’s review of The Judgment of Paris was not unfriendly, but it was condescending and had in it distant homophobic touches. As always, his main thrust was “values,” the absence of moral values in contemporary fiction, equating a novel’s value quotient with its literary merit. Latent in Aldridge’s emphasis was the likelihood that writers who were homosexual, such as Williams, Isherwood, and Vidal, would fall damnably short as artists simply on that basis. At Columbia each of the participants had given a brief talk about the novel and then squared off in an amiably contentious performance, Gore much the best public performer of the three. “On the strength of that,” Aldridge recalled, “we were invited to Princeton to do the same thing again. Cowley said we were ‘the happiness boys.’ We were anything but spreading happiness; we were talking about the contemporary novel.”
That spring, at Princeton, the critic R. P. Blackmur, who had arranged the rematch, introduced them for another semistaged literary slugfest. They were joined by the young novelist William Styron, who had recently published Lie Down in Darkness and whom Gore rather liked. As the well-attended discussion turned hot, Gore said to Styron, “‘Do you notice that there’s basically no interest in you and me and only in the two critics?’ A college audience took them seriously and Styron and me as people of no consequence. Producers of raw material, which they in turn shaped. Values, Values, Values. Then Aldridge said that there weren’t many values anymore in a modern society like the United States because there was no class system, except there were pockets like the Army where there was hierarchy and a class system and you could write about class. And Cowley got up and said, ‘Values, Values, Values.’ He had kind of a funny lisp on V so it sounded like a W. ‘There are plenty of values. Everywhere you look there’s a value of some kind.’ And I got up and said, ‘Mr. Aldrich was born in Sauk City, Iowa, or some such place, and was a brief time in the East and then he came back and taught in some Middle Western place. Since he’s never knowingly encountered the class system, he doesn’t think it exists.’ I said, ‘Anyway, I’m glad he’s here at Princeton, where there are so many members of a class higher than he, and all eager to condescend to him.’” Afterward they went to the Nassau Tavern. Blackmur, with whom Gore would have liked to have talked about Henry James, had left immediately after introducing the speakers. He was stuck again with Cowley and Aldridge, among others. The principals kept hammering at the putative gap between values and literary merit. “I had to leave early,” Aldridge recalled. “But he and I were going at it strongly. I was talking about my old theme of values. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘you need values to get out of bed in the morning.’”
In summer 1952 Gore went up to Putney, Vermont, to participate in the Windham College Writers Conference, which Aldridge directed, where he met and rather liked Aldridge’s new wife. The novelist Vance Bourjaily, whose The End of My Life had established him as one of the writers who, along with Vidal and Norman Mailer, Aldridge had written about in After the Lost Generation and whom Gore had recently gotten to know in New York, was there. “I went to Vermont to lecture under Aldridge’s auspices,” he wrote to Anaïs, “a cold brilliant lecture which was completely hated, to my surprise since I made a number of what, I thought, were illuminating remarks on the literary art … but then of course illumination is the last state of being tolerable to our countrymen, especially writers and would-be writers, my audience.” When, that same summer, John Bowen—a young English writer who had just graduated from Oxford and had favorably reviewed The City and the Pillar under the title “Kiss Me, Hotlips, I’m Asbestos”—came up for a weekend visit on his way to take up a graduate fellowship at Ohio State University, Gore and he swam out to the small island in the river. “There was a middle-aged Swede … there at the same time,” Bowen recalled. “I only remember an open fire. The middle-aged Swede I think had the vague idea that I’d been invited to go to bed with him, but I was prudish then, perhaps even more so than now. And so I disappointed him.” He and Gore liked one another immediately, and when they began to correspond, Bowen regularly addressed him, though they were about the same age, as “uncle” and Gore addressed Bowen as “nephew.” He “was standing to me in an avuncular relationship because I knew nothing about the United States. So it became a joke between us that he was acting as my uncle, standing in loco parentis, being my American uncle.” With Bowen the relationship was clearly noncompetitive. With some of his American contemporaries, many of whom Gore was seeing at literary gatherings in New York, the story was more complicated.
Encouraged by Vidal and the challenge of bringing new writers to the attention of the large audience for paperbacks, Victor Weybright in late 1951 decided to see if he could get a paperback literary serial, New World Writing, off the ground. Edited out of the Signet-Mentor offices, it would appear four times a year in book form with original material by a mix of new names and the best-known writers of the day. At the same time Ian Ballantine’s Pocket Books decided to sponsor, with John Aldridge and Vance Bourjaily as editors, a similar paperback anthology, discovery. Suddenly both were competing for material. Authors were being pursued for contributions. Publisher-sponsored parties at which liquor and conversation flowed brought potential contributors together. New World Writing had the advantage of Weybright’s experience and Gore’s contacts, which he immediately put to the service of the new venture, excited by its prospects, by its potential impact on the literary scene, and by the satisfactions of his own central role. Weybright, who now had the first of Gore’s Edgar Box novels in hand, consulted frequently with him about the new project, usually at lunch in Manhattan. Gore thought of himself as the unofficial editor, though it had been agreed that there would be no formal editor. Arabel Porter, Weybright’s assistant, an intelligent, hardworking cross between a secretary and an editor in charge of reprints at Mentor, would be the coordinator. Soon busy writing letters to friends and acquaintances, Gore helped obtain contributions for the first volume, with additional material for volumes to follow, from Isherwood, Williams, Auden, Kimon Friar, and Carson McCullers, among others, then poems by Ted Weiss and Louise Nicholl, even a story by Bob Bingham, who was in New York working as an editor for The Reporter. “Material is being collected now,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. “Chris (who is most enthusiastic) will let some of the fabled diary be done. Tennessee’s Lawrence play will be done in toto. There’s an essay on Carson by Oliver Evans, an essay on architecture by Philip Johnson … and stories by Gore Vidal et al.” “Erlinda and Mr. Coffin” appeared in the first issue, “The Ladies in the Library” later. discovery had the attraction of Vance and Tina Bourjaily, who at their Greenwich Village apartment hosted ebullient parties, the venue for a great deal of heavy-drinking literary sociability. It also had the disadvantage of the two editors’ not seeing eye to eye on much. At one of the Bourjailys’ parties Gore met a young lawyer, Louis Auchincloss, a talented short-story writer just about to publish Sybil, his second novel, to whom Gore was related by his mother’s marriage to Hugh. Gore pulled him in as a contributor.
Eager to help Weybright assemble the best writing of the period, Vidal knocked himself out in a venture that seemed worth the effort. “I am going out of my mind,” he had written to Lehmann late in 1951, “New World Writing, lecturing, manufacturing, as well as battling with the last proofs of Judgment.” But it was not a complaint. “The great project of the moment has to do with Signet,” he explained. “Due to MY exertions for the past year, Victor Weybright (whom you met in London recently) is going to put out four collections a year of New World Writing, an American child, in spirit, of New Writing and Horizon.… I shall be, if it succeeds (first issue in April), a permanent sort of reader…. You are of course vital to the undertaking so do be receptive. I think well of it…. There has never been anything like this in America since the great days of the Atlantic Monthly in the last century: a national showcase for the best writers.” To Arabel Porter he wrote regularly, recommending writers, evaluating material, making suggestions, “an editor without portfolio,” as he put it to Aldridge, from whom he diplomatically solicited a contribution. As the April 1952 publication of the first issue became imminent, he concluded that “New World Writing is triumphant, in advance at least.” Though they had agreed there would be no single editor, he felt he had edited the volume and that that should be acknowledged somehow. He also believed that Weybright had explicitly agreed that if the first issue were successful, Gore would formally be appointed editor of future issues. When the first issue came to hand, he was shocked to see Porter prominently proclaimed editor. At the back, in small print, he was thanked, with two others, for helping make the volume possible. It felt like a betrayal. At a party Weybright hosted, attended by most of the contributors, the publisher made a gracious speech thanking them. “Auden stood around sullenly and occasionally muttered, ‘How much are we going to be paid?’” Weybright cheerfully ignored Auden. Angry, Gore reproached Weybright. But, the publisher explained, Porter had to be the editor. “But I did edit it,” Vidal remonstrated. “I asked him afterward, ‘Why have you left me out?’ ‘Well, Gore,’ he said, ‘I can’t make this any single writer’s anthology.’ ‘You mean you can’t make it mine,’ I said. And he stammered around and then said, ‘Well, you are thanked in the first issue.’ … I knew that I’d been fucked yet again.” Still, he hung in with Weybright, whom he otherwise liked. Soon Weybright agreed to publish under the Signet label a number of Vidal’s novels, including The Judgment of Paris, and eventually City. Gore continued during the next two years to do his best for New World Writing. The idea still seemed to him a good one.
From Edgewater he made frequent trips into Manhattan. Having skipped Key West that winter, he was happy to see, in May 1952, the countryside around the river come alive. “I have been busy,” he wrote to Aldridge, “weeding gardens, composing the journal, studying the daffodils (the first one opened yesterday … awfully odd-looking, too, a kind of hybrid), communing with Weybright on the November issue of N.W.W. and preparing, God help me, a reading at a theater in the Village called The Circle in the Square, booked right after a Welsh road-show named Dylan Thomas.” The combination of country life and city adventures agreed with him. When he came to town, he struck friends and acquaintances as beamingly healthy and attractively young. To Tina Bourjaily, a pretty, amiable woman with striking blue eyes, whose parties he often attended, he seemed “much healthier than anybody else…. There was a great deal of body abuse going on. We didn’t exercise, we drank a lot, we sat around and smoked. He always came in like a fresh breath from the country. Apparently he did a lot of work around Edgewater. He appeared youthful to me. Very youthful and very handsome.” Unlike the discovery and New World Writing crowd, he hardly drank and did not smoke. The Bourjailys had been evicted from their first Manhattan apartment when the young novelist James Jones, who had published From Here to Eternity in 1951, drunk, threw up in the stairwell. Downtown, in their Greenwich Village flat and at other literary parties, floating from apartment to apartment, literary friends had long nights of drinking and conversation that Gore sometimes joined for the company. “What people wanted to do when they got together was to have a drink,” Tina recalled. “We gave parties for almost any reason. A party could be three or four people who just happened to be there. Or calling up others. You could have a few drinks and then flow into the subway and up to somebody’s apartment.” William Styron, Norman Mailer, Herbert Gold—who had just begun his writing career with Birth of a Hero—and even Ralph Ellison were part of the discovery group, the emphasis tilted toward what Gore thought a somewhat too heavy-handed naturalism. Aldridge came in frequently from Vermont, tall, blond, always combing his hair, an eager lady’s man hoping for conquests, including Anaïs Nin, and Tina Bourjaily remembered that he “never went anywhere without a toothbrush and brushed his teeth furiously as if it were his conscience.” Calder Willingham, from Georgia, often visited, his hair red, his neck almost red, with a thin face and curved nose, a clever, amiable man with a great deal of talent as novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Late in the year Gore co-hosted a party at the Bourjailys’ apartment, competing with them to see who could produce the most famous literary names. Gore’s trump card was Tennessee Williams. “Katherine Anne Porter said she didn’t like to go out, even though he invited her. She was another important guest. We were trying to one-up one another,” Tina recalled. “Tennessee Williams and Calder Willingham…. Our apartment was this long flat, a long, long hallway, and then you had the option of going this way laterally to the kitchen or bathroom or bedroom and then two doors came into the living room and dining room. Williams somehow got into the bedroom. There was Tennessee Williams standing alone. I took him out and said to this assembled group full of themselves, ‘This is Tennessee Williams!’ Dead silence. First the poor man got lost in the bedroom, then he came into a room that went absolutely dead when I made the announcement. He was that big a celebrity.”
The Bourjailys themselves Gore became quite fond of, especially Tina, an easy-tempered Midwesterner via California from a strong-willed Scandinavian farming family. She seemed to all of them a beneficent presence. She “looked like a very pretty Zelda Fitzgerald,” Gore recalled. “Tina was slender, vivacious, quick, very droll. Vance was quite slow, and she was very quick. So she was the one.” Vance, who struggled during these years to write his own fiction and who began to look to television to earn a living, functioned effectively as one of the editors of discovery. Gore found him pleasant, amiable. Olive-skinned, Syrian-looking in background, Vance was the son of journalists: his mother had been a popular novelist and then owned a small rural newspaper. He and Tina had married in 1946, in their early twenties, gone to Bowdoin College, then in 1950 moved to New York, where Vance, who had published a first novel based on his war experiences, was to take his turn at the literary wheel of fame and fortune. Tina was to support them, which she did with a job at Woman’s Day magazine. By late 1952 Gore and the Bourjailys were good friends.
Louis Auchincloss came to the revels; soon the two semi-cousins were companionable both in New York and at Edgewater. Tall, dark-haired, craggy-featured but handsome, always well dressed, with a high-pitched voice whose accent was a mixture of Groton and Upper Manhattan, Auchincloss had decided to combine a legal with a literary career. The upper-class legal and social world was his subject. Gore soon began to use him as his lawyer. If you could not trust Cousin Louis, whom could you trust? Like Vidal, Auchincloss was a great admirer of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Gore immediately thought he was a good writer, an excellent human being. They both enjoyed occasionally gossiping about their shared world. Always ready to argue that every male was potentially homosexual, Gore would teasingly call Louis “Louise.” Their main subjects together were literature, history, and their own careers. Auchincloss was the conduit in the Bourjaily world to the Upper East Side, to occasional dinners and parties that he hosted and introductions that he made. For Auchincloss the Bourjailys were the conduit to Manhattan life below Fourteenth Street, to the less refined but dynamically talented circle of mostly Greenwich Village people, one of whom was Norman Mailer, a swaggering, heavy-drinking young man from a Brooklyn-Jewish background. Handsomely rugged, short, somewhat thickly stolid, pugnaciously physical, with electrically bright blue eyes, Mailer had just published his second novel, the much-reviled, highly political Barbary Shore. He had hoped to duplicate the bestselling success of The Naked and the Dead, which he had published in 1948. Mailer, who seemed both by personality and conviction even more radical than he actually was, had the impression that Vidal was an elitist conservative. “In those days,” Mailer recalled, “before he became a liberal, Vidal was an archconservative, virtually a loyalist. He was well known for that.” Aggressively masculine, Mailer had no sympathy for homosexuals, and The City and the Pillar, as well as Vidal’s obvious attitudes in the public part of his private world, had made his interests well known to his friends and to New York literary society. Mailer flourished in a world in which conquests were everything, women and booze the drugs of choice. For those who were married, “everybody was switching partners,” Tina Bourjaily recalled. “That was the name of the game.” Actually, both Mailer and Vidal were sexual marauders, with only certain minor differences in taste to distinguish them. When they first met, in 1952, at a party at the lower—Fourth Avenue apartment of the actress Milly Brower, they were aware they had much in common, especially an extraordinarily high energy level, an ambitious competitiveness as writers, and the will to dominate circumstances and people. Both were fascinated by power, including their own. “He was a very good-looking young man,” Mailer recalled. “He came over and said, ‘Well, at last we meet!’ He had the same voice then that he has today…. He said, ‘Well, now, Mailer’—mind you, we’re the same age—‘How long did your grandparents live?’ ‘Well, they both died when they were sixty-nine.’ ‘Aha, I’ve got you then. My grandparents lived to a very ripe age. You know what that means?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t.’ ‘I’m going to outlive you. And because I’m going to outlive you I’m going to have the final say on both our careers.’ It was the same Gore even then.”
Eager to get away from the cold Edgewater winter, Gore went to Key West in early January 1953 for almost three months, as he was to do for a shorter period in 1954, stopping in Washington to pick up his grandmother, who drove down with him. In South Carolina they stopped to visit some of Dot’s cousins. When she told him, “You mustn’t stir up more snakes than you can kill,” he asked her “if this was an old South Carolina saying. She said, ‘No, I think I just made it up.’” In Key West the sunny warmth pleased both of them. Since Dot did not care for Gore’s favorite, the Southernmost, they stayed at a place more attractive to her, almost as close to the beach, dining at the Tradewinds. “I am in the throes of losing weight on the beach at Key West,” he wrote to Arabel Porter, “small lumps of lard upon the sand to extend the image wilfully.” The topic and the theme were beginning to become a recurrent one, the natural tendency of his body to thicken around the middle, much as his grandfather Gore’s had, now regularly asserting itself against his thin frame. Only severe dieting helped. “I hope in a few weeks to be a slim golden youth again or at least a faintly decrepit facsimile. Let me know what goes on in New York.” He was at work on a new novel, to be called Messiah, and was planning the second of his Edgar Box mysteries. The tentative title was Kill Him in the Shell, to be set in East Hampton. He was also preparing an essay on the contemporary novel for New World Writing, a longer, more subtle version of the lecture he had honed over the years, to appear under the pseudonym Libra. He had no difficulty writing in his motel in the morning, enjoying the beach and good company for the rest of the day. Tennessee, recently returned from Rome, frequently met them at South Beach. “We made our way through sailors on the sand to a terraced restaurant where the Bird sat back in a chair, put his bare feet up on a railing, looked out at the bright blue sea, and, as he drank his first and only martini of the midday, said, with a great smile, ‘I like my life.’” While the early-retiring Dot slept, Gore, with Tennessee, Frankie, and other friends, enjoyed lively nights at the Key West bars.
Generally there was no emotional price to pay for his sexual adventures. One of his Key West encounters, though, which took place in 1953 or 1954, was costly. Some months after leaving Florida, he was told by a woman he had known in Key West that he was the father of the child she was bearing. She asked him to pay for an abortion. The claim was credible enough for him to accept the likelihood that it was so. Worried, he confided in Tina Bourjaily. The woman, he told her, was a waitress whom “he’d had an affair with…. ‘We humped for two weeks … and Gore’s going to be a daddy.’ … It was a worry. He wasn’t being boastful at all. I thought he was anxious about what was going to happen. It wasn’t something that should happen. This was a real problem. Here he was having a heterosexual relationship, and it went bad.” In New York, anxious and distressed by what might happen, he asked Louis Auchincloss’s advice. “I was feeling a bit of strain and a bit lost about how you go about these things. I didn’t know what the repercussions were going to be.” Louis advised that he send an untraceable money order for the $780 for which he had been asked. He did. A local Key West doctor apparently performed the abortion, at least so Gore was told. With brutal animus, some Key West enemy made sure later that year that he heard a nasty ad hominem story. “It’s about the sickest story that I’ve ever heard. A faggot doctor-abortionist had a Christmas tree, and on it was a fetus and he said that’s Gore Vidal’s child.” There is no certainty there was any child at all. He may have been the victim of an extortion scheme. Or of a cruel practical joke or a combination of both. Whatever the reality, it was a painful experience that reinforced some long-standing attitudes. He had no doubt that he did not want to be a father. He had seen too much of bad parenting in his own life to take the risk of repeating what he had experienced with a child of his own. Also, the domestic arrangements required by the effort to be a responsible parent were inconsistent with the flexibility to travel for work and pleasure as he desired. He preferred to be mentor rather than parent, and when he sometimes referred to Howard as his child, it was in that sense—someone to whom he was teaching the manners and mores of the sophisticated world. The issue of metaphoric parenthood, however, became a concern and gradually a preoccupation, partly related to his role as a novelist-creator, later to be a central theme in Two Sisters and Burr.
Through the Bourjailys, Gore met Francis Markoe, an elderly Yale-educated Francophile with a passion for Racine, amateur theatricals based on sixteenth-century masques, and young men. Markoe had an attractive house and guest cottage with a Chinese garden at Water Mill, near Southampton. He was “really a great old-fashioned queen,” Gore recalled, “very exuberant, an old-school Edwardian sort of style; he would go on about the king’s guardsmen.” The Bourjailys were Markoe’s guests for much of the summer. Gore, who had had lunch there in summer 1952, had invited Markoe to Edgewater, which he visited the next summer, driving up from Water Mill in his chauffeured car with his own guests, the Bourjailys and their infant daughter. Howard was there and some of Gore’s ballet friends. The Bourjailys recalled that Gore was very kind to their little girl. Vance remembered Markoe “being very excited to learn that I knew Gore and very eager to meet him…. Mr. Markoe … by being on the state parole board—he’d gotten all the prisoners when they came out of prison—and he liked them—he would pick somebody that he’d met from this group and offer him a job as a chauffeur or a houseboy. He got men that way. He had some money growing up that he’d run out of; then he married a wealthy older woman.”
One afternoon at Edgewater in 1953, Markoe and the Bourjailys were visiting for the weekend. As they played croquet on the lawn sloping down to the river, Gore knocked Tina Bourjaily’s ball into a berry bush. “For a long time there was a thorn in my finger that never came out. He had forced my ball into the bush, and I had gone in after it…. He had no sympathy whatsoever for my ripped finger. I did get my ball back in play.” The visitors noticed that Edgewater was underfurnished. “It was elegant, except that you were waddling around in an unfurnished palazzo.” While they slept in the guest room in “a four-poster bed that belonged to Mrs. Astor,” the Bourjailys had the characteristic Edgewater experience of being shocked awake by the noise from the New York Central. At night Vance and Gore swam out to the island in the river. Tina and Frank Markoe sat on the lawn, talking. “We thought it would be fun to light little balls of newspaper for them to see, and we lit them all along the columns so that it was dazzling flame. It was very theatrical. We hoped that they could see it from the water. You couldn’t burn the place down. We were sitting there, and Mr. Markoe said to me, ‘There’s only one commandment I’ve never broken: I’ve always honored my mother and father.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, all those others!’” In a lighter key, Gore was working on his new Edgar Box mystery, with the revised title of Death Likes It Hot. Soon after Markoe’s Edgewater visit, Gore drove down to Water Mill for a weekend. The gardens were lovely, the house charming, the entrance hall decorated with a mural depicting naked men. Markoe put on two plays on the lawn, in both of which he performed, one a Racine drama, the other something Vance had written based on an idea as old as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that was again popular: visitors to earth from outer space. Gore complimented Markoe for his “startlingly excellent performance in Racine: I think it as good as the Comedie.” In Vance’s play “Mr. Markoe was a visitor from outer space wanting to blend into this strange little planet he’d landed in. He thought the appropriate dress for the part was a baseball umpire’s; that was his costume. I can’t remember what occurs in the play.” The Bourjailys were delighted to see Gore again. Conservative communities, Southampton and East Hampton were still almost exclusively a combination of summer enclaves for wealthy old East Coast families and quiet year-round working-class villages. The first early wave of artistic people had just begun to flow in. The Bourjailys had been pleased to have Adele and Norman Mailer’s company for some weeks at Markoe’s earlier in the summer, though much of Markoe’s high-social community had been scandalized. It seemed clear to Tina that Markoe “lusted after Gore like crazy, but I don’t think he ever got him. He was almost seventy at the time…. One day, when Gore was there, I went over to the house by mistake. Mr. Markoe was walking around in a short smock. He climbed up on a ladder, to get some china, I think. He didn’t have anything on under this short smock, so I said, ‘Excuse me!’ He was all visible. It was part of the show for Gore…. I think Gore was more amused than anything. It was kind of sweet and pathetic.”
There was little sweetness to Vidal’s encounter in 1953 with Jack Kerouac. At the San Remo, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, on a stiflingly hot night late that August, Kerouac hailed him, somewhat high, probably a combination of alcohol and sexual anxiety, and introduced him to William Burroughs, who was eager to meet and talk to Vidal. Gore had met Kerouac some years before at the Metropolitan Opera House, at a ballet performance starring Leon Danielian. Gore had gone with Nina and John Kelly, who was still in love with Danielian. In the club circle they met Kelly’s good friend, the publisher Robert Giroux, whose guest was a handsome, dark-haired young writer, three years older than Gore. According to Gore, Kelly had had sex with Kerouac, who half concealed behind a frenetically macho manner a nervous, uneasy attraction to men as well as to women. Gore thought him handsome, sexy. Often volubly confused and energetically self-hating, Kerouac had since that first meeting established close friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, and the older William Burroughs. Though he had just written On the Road, he was still mostly unknown, the Beats not to coalesce into prominence as a movement until 1956 and the book not published until 1957. A fiercely competitive writer, Kerouac had read The Judgment of Paris with resentment, even contempt, an expression of the confused envy, oscillating between hero-worship and hostility, that he felt for Vidal’s celebrity. He and Burroughs liked nothing about Judgment except its “satirical queer scenes” and the book-jacket photograph of its attractive author. With his own self-defining barbaric yawp, Kerouac detested the fascination with stylistic elegance and classical balances Vidal had begun to reveal in Judgment. Such novels seemed to Kerouac “sophomoric imitations of Henry James,” an archenemy whom he felt needed to be erased as an influence on American literature. Novels like The Ambassadors he felt utterly worthless.
But the full range of their differences was not part of the encounter that evening at the San Remo, where Kerouac had “recognized him from the night I’d met him at the Met ballet when in New York in a tux I’d cut out with tuxed editor to see glitter nightworld New York of letters and wit.” Gore had no idea of the ambivalence or depth of Kerouac’s feelings toward him; his own antipathy to the Beats and his fear of the significance of their success were in the future. When they left the San Remo together to go barhopping, Burroughs soon became uncomfortable with, if not embarrassed by, Kerouac’s behavior. Fawning and assertive, sincere and mocking, the drunk Kerouac kissed Gore’s hand and said flattering things, which he later dramatized in his censored, parodic account of the evening in The Subterraneans. At that time neither Burroughs nor Vidal was aware they had both been students at Los Alamos Experimental Ranch School, that they had in common, among other things, A. J. Connell. Despite his manic years, his drug habit, his rebelliousness, his autobiographical first novel, Junkie, which had just been published, Burroughs dressed and acted publicly in a way that his St. Louis-Burroughs Adding Machine family would have found perfectly respectable. When Kerouac swung from a few lampposts, Burroughs said good night to both of them. Kerouac proposed to Vidal that they get “a room around here.” They went to the familiar Chelsea Hotel on Twenty-third Street, signing their names in the register. Gore told the clerk that “this register would become famous.” In Vidal’s account they first showered together, then went to bed. A red neon light flickered with a rosy glow through the shadeless window. Kerouac blew him. Then they rubbed bellies for a while. Then Vidal flipped him over and attacked him from behind. Years later he still remembered that he “stared at me for a moment … forehead half covered with sweaty dark curls—then he sighed as his head dropped back on the pillow…. The rosy neon from the window gave the room a mildly infernal glow.” In the gray morning, with hangovers, without much conversation, they prepared to leave. Kerouac, who had no money, needed subway fare. Vidal gave him a bill and said, “Now you owe me a dollar.” In Vidal’s account Kerouac was impotent. He slept on the bathroom floor, not in the bed. In his own account in The Subterraneans Kerouac left out the sexual details entirely so as not to offend his mother, Allen Ginsberg, whom Gore liked, later told Vidal. Apparently Kerouac boasted to friends later that day, “I blew Gore Vidal!”
How to make an adequate living in a depressed book market still perplexed Gore. He was neither Mickey Spillane nor Erskine Caldwell. Serious novelists were not doing well in general. One day on Fifth Avenue he ran into William Faulkner, to whom he had previously been introduced. Uncharacteristically chatty, Faulkner advised against Hollywood, his own gold-plated but still-sustaining egg. Faulkner’s novels had earned next to nothing in hardcover. Only now were Weybright’s paperback reprints, with their sensationalized covers, bringing in any money. For Gore there were the Edgewater bills. The cost of a car. Ordinary living expenses. To Howard, who had moved out of his shared Seventy-second Street apartment to a modest Lexington Avenue walk-up between Fifty-seventh and Fifty-eighth streets, Gore now paid $20 a week as his secretary/assistant, soon raised to $40. When Gore was in Manhattan, he often stayed with Howard rather than at a hotel or his father’s apartment. Strenuous efforts to write pulp fiction for money were not sufficiently successful. In November 1949 he had accepted a fee of $2,500 to revise a badly written adventure novel set in Turkey, with the understanding that his name would not be associated with the published book. The revision may have destroyed its pulp-fiction credibility. No publisher would take it. In June 1953 he had published Thieves Fall Out under the name Cameron Kay—a Kay cousin’s Christian name and his grandmother’s maiden surname—a Gold Medal mass-market original for which he earned a little over $3,000. At a retail price of twenty-five cents a copy, not even the sale of about 300,000 copies could produce much income for the author. Not quite as revealing as A Star’s Progress, it nevertheless had many effective Vidalian touches, the setting drawn from his Egyptian experiences in 1948, a combination of hard-boiled suspense, a strong love story, and a political/social drama that pits the individual against a corrupt society. “You sneak!” the Gold Medal editor wrote to him. “Why didn’t you tell me you were that world-famous crescendo-making writer, Gore Vidal, instead of pussyfooting around with a cardboard alias?” In November 1953 he had signed a contract with Avon Publications for a mass-market novel called The Pursuit of Vice, for which he received a $1,000 advance. Later, when it was clear that he no longer had an interest in writing it, he reluctantly returned the money. The short stories published in New World Writing earned only a few hundred dollars. In January 1954 he delivered the second Box manuscript, in June the third, Death Before Bed-time. The money was already spent, partly in the twelve $450 monthly payments from the December 1952 agreement with Dutton, then in an emergency $1,500 advance in August 1953, and another $1,750 advance in December. Future earnings would probably at best pay off the advances. There was no more to be gotten from Dutton for the time being. When with sickening apprehension he saw realized his fear that Judgment and now Messiah, dedicated to Tennessee Williams, the first inklings of which had come to him in Egypt and which he published in early 1954, would at best earn back a little more than their advances, he pushed harder to engage with the only other two sources of writing income, television and movies.
Actually, he had been trying the movies since 1946. Nothing had worked out, neither an adaptation of one of his novels for the screen nor a studio contract for his writing services. He had not given up. Through Tennessee he had gotten access to the best-known theatrical and movie agent of the time, Audrey Wood, who handled Tennessee’s plays. That had started in 1948 when Henry Volkening, a New York literary agent who represented him for a short time, sent Wood The Different Journey, the play Gore had written in Egypt and, with Tennessee’s help, revised in Paris. Volkening accurately anticipated Wood’s response. They both thought the play awkward, amateurish, and censorable. Because of its homosexual theme, Volkening felt certain a producer would at least have to ”worry about the New York police.” Wood thought he needed “a good technician to work” with him. “Ideally you need that ugly word a ‘dramatist collaborator.’” At the beginning of 1950 Gore had tried Wood again, though this time with an offer of his own writerly services. “I think,” she had responded, “that rightly agented you could become a successful Hollywood writer and that this might well balance your budget in times of a depressed book market generally.” It was a boulevard he had been trying to walk up since 1946, through Felix Ferry and other Hollywood studio people at Famous Artists, at Columbia Pictures, and in 1952 at Paramount. The Goldwyn office responded encouragingly to Wood’s overtures. “Mrs. Goldwyn thought you were ‘a very erudite young man’” and a possibility for the future. Nothing came of it. In November 1950 he had contracted with his semi-relative, the actress Ella Raines, to write a screen treatment, “a ski story,” which would have a starring role for her. It fizzled out. When Latouche and Vidal teamed up to write screenplays, Wood had wished them a “happy honeymoon.” In July 1950, in response to three ideas for screen treatments they had devised, she had admitted “I’m very fond of each of you but having read the three ideas for screen-originals you recently submitted to me, I don’t think either of you are taking the picture business too seriously these days…. Each of these three ideas seems very trivial, seems very forced, seems very phony to me…. Do either of you two ever go to see a motion picture?” The next year they got no place with their screenplay, Love Is a Horse Named Gladys. They had also tried to write a Broadway musical together. “I am trying to buy a house and write a musical comedy with La Touche, all at once,” he had written in June 1950 to Robert Halsband, a young eighteenth-century scholar and book reviewer for The Saturday Review. Wood kept trying, without success, to sell screen rights to his novels, particularly Death in the Fifth Position. Her sources told her that “it is very difficult to sell a mystery melodrama, a light comedy, or an average triangle drama, primarily because the TV channels are so full of this kind of thing…. I don’t think I am going to be able to help you on this” or anything else, she confessed. Wood’s assistant in charge of radio and television tried, at Gore’s request, to get him some television jobs. Nothing happened. “As you know,” she told him, “the competition is very keen these days.” Since he and the Liebling-Wood Agency were not getting anyplace, they parted company.
Whatever he had tried, no one particularly wanted his services. At best he had been able to scrape up a few television-writing assignments in 1951 and 1952. His Maugham adaptations had been an unsuccessful first effort. A quick learner, he had realized he needed to master the basic techniques of writing for television if he were going to have any chance of success. He hoped he could learn by practice and get paid at the same time. Luckily, in 1953 Ella Raines was starring in Janet Dean, Registered Nurse, “an eternal series. Mrs. Eric Ambler was in charge of this program,” Gore recalled. “She’s English and had been the right hand of Alfred Hitchcock. It was Ella who said, Why don’t you do one of these? So I worked with Joan,” who was “the producer of my first TV play, ‘The Jinx Nurse.’” The work was almost anonymous, but he could present it as a credential on his oral résumé, proof that he knew how to do this kind of thing successfully. Since he needed an agent who could influence network producers to hire him, he had gone to the top, to Jules Stein, the head of MCA and the husband of his mother’s best friend. Stein had been warmly avuncular over the years and, aware of his novels, thought him very talented. Ready to help, he sent Gore to John Forman and Tom Moser, two television agents at MCA in New York. For whatever their reasons, they declined to take him on. Stein “didn’t think when he sent me to them that they wouldn’t handle me, since he was the head of the firm. But that’s the way big hierarchies work. If your connection’s too high up, it’s useless. You can only deal with somebody who’s closer to where the work is. They thought he was so imperial and far away that he wouldn’t know or notice.”
Unwilling to give up, he went, late in 1953, to the head of drama in the television department at the William Morris Agency, MCA’s prime competitor. Harold Franklin, a balding, graying, handsome man in his late forties, bespectacled and dressed immaculately, immediately decided that he might be able to help and that he probably liked this young, attractive, articulate novelist. True, Vidal’s only experience was the unproduced Maugham adaptations and ‘The Jinx Nurse’ show. But Franklin, a shrewd and thoughtful man, an avid reader with a conservative, almost scholarly air, had both presence and intelligence. “He was vibrant,” a younger colleague recalled. “When he walked into a room, you knew he was there. He was not an insecure agent who had to be on all the time. He seemed to have strength.” Talent, Franklin thought, was more important than experience, especially in a young industry. He said to Gore, “‘just think of something, a one-paragraph idea.’ I thought of Dark Possession.” Franklin sent him to see Florence Britton, the story editor for CBS’s Studio One, sponsored by Westinghouse, one of the premier weekly one-hour television drama anthologies. At lunch together, eager for scripts, she commissioned him to write it. The fee would be $750. A few days later he had it done. “The year is 1904,” Dark Possession began, a story of schizophrenia or dual personality in which a woman, split into two people one of whom has murdered her husband, writes incriminating notes against herself. When, at the climax, her doctor tells her she has written the notes herself and that she is the murderer, she kills herself. Soon slotted into the insatiable weekly production schedule, revisions and rehearsals occurred quickly and mercilessly. Like all Studio One dramas, the script had to be exactly sixty minutes minus two commercial breaks. On February 15, 1954, Dark Possession, “written especially for Studio One by Gore Vidal,” starring Geraldine Fitzgerald, with Barbara O’Neill and Leslie Nielsen, produced by Felix Jackson and directed by Franklin Schaffner, had its premiere. The broadcast went coast to coast. Suddenly twenty-eight-year-old Gore Vidal had a much larger audience than he had cumulatively for all the novels he had published.