The Desire and the Successful Pursuit ofthe Whole
RECENTLY, I LECTURED AT HARVARD on how we are shaped by the movies we see while growing up. In preparation for the lectures, I watched The Prince and the Pauper for the first time since 1937. Like most of the movies that impress themselves on a child, the story is simple, but the subtexts are disturbingly complex if one is the right age to be affected by them. The prince and the pauper were played by Bobby and Billy Mauch, identical twins who were the same age as I—twelve. So there was I, in surrogate, on the screen not once but twice, not only prince but pauper, and the two of them—of us?—were so alike as to be interchangeable as well.
I do not know if a desire to be a twin is a common one or if such a longing might run in families, psychically as well as genetically. My grandmother Gore lost her twin at birth, and it required no uncanny knowledge of the human heart for the family to figure out that when she took over the task of being not only wife but eyes to a blind husband, she had found in him her long-lost twin. On the other hand, I was quite pleased to be an only child. Later, I acquired various step- and half brothers and sisters, but I never really knew any of them, since I was gone for good at seventeen—into the army and to all those other worlds elsewhere.
When I watched The Prince and the Pauper the first time, I wanted to be not one but two. Lonely children often have imaginary playmates, but I was never lonely—I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.
Jimmie Trimble as he looked the last time I saw him, when we were seventeen, in 1942. What I was not, he was, and the other way around.
A childhood desire to be a twin does not seem to me to be narcissistic in the vulgar Freudian sense. After all, one is oneself; and the other, other. It is the sort of likeness that makes for wholeness, and is it not that search for likeness, that desire and pursuit of the whole—as Plato has Aristophanes remark—that is the basis of all love? As no one has ever actually found perfect wholeness in another human being, no matter of what sex, the twin is the closest that one can ever come toward human wholeness with another; and—dare one invoke biology and the origin of our species?—back of us mammals doomed to die once we have procreated, there is always our sexless ancestor the amoeba, which never dies as it does not reproduce sexually but merely—serenely?—breaks in two and identically replicates.
Anyway, I thought Billy and Bobby Mauch were cute as a pair of bug’s ears, and I wished I were either one of them—one of them, mind you. I certainly did not want to be two of me, as one seemed more than enough to go around even in so exaggerated a family. Yet doubleness has always fascinated me, as mirrors do, as filmed images do. I have read that a recurring theme in my work is doubleness or duplicity. If this is the case, I see now where it might have—unconsciously, at least—begun.
In any case, it was after I saw the film that I saw my other half in Jimmie Trimble. It was thought best by Nina that I board during the week at St. Albans, an all-boys’ school near Washington’s cathedral. I was allowed to come “home” on weekends. At midterm, Jimmie became a boarder. We were friends immediately. I was one week older than he. We were the same height and weight. He had pale blue eyes; mine were pale brown. He had the hunter-athlete’s farsightedness; I had the writer-reader’s myopic vision. I was blond, with straight hair. He was blond, with curly hair. His sweat smelled of honey, like that of Alexander the Great. At seventeen, when he graduated from St. Albans (I was doing the same at Exeter), he was offered contracts to play professional baseball with both the New York Giants and the Washington Senators; each club would have sent him to college and kept him out of the war. Loyal to his native city, he chose the Senators.
I had lunch with Jimmie’s mother in Washington not long ago, our first meeting in fifty-five years. At ninety, Ruth Trimble Sewell is like a woman of fifty; she is alert, straight-backed, with blue eyes like Jimmie’s, only just beginning to fade. Over lunch, we brought him back to life, briefly, each for his own purpose. She had been disturbed by the revelation in a magazine that the “IT” to whom I had dedicated The City and the Pillar (about one boy’s love for another) was Jimmie Trimble; and the journalist made it as clear as he could, with no corroboration from me, that we had been schoolboy lovers. Of Jimmie’s death at nineteen, on Iwo Jima, the journalist quoted me as saying, “He was the unfinished business of my life.” A response as cryptic as it was accurate.
“Kind friends”—Mrs. Sewell emphasized the adjective in her Washington-Kentucky accent—“wrote me from all over to say how upset I must be. Perhaps I overreacted.” She had given Jimmie’s letters to a master at St. Albans, who was aware of my interest in . . . what? bringing him to life again? in order to . . . again, what? Discover who he was? As if I hadn’t once known him as well as I knew myself. But since we had been separated by geography the last years of his short life, I suppose that I wanted—now—to fill in the details. “I shall but love thee better after death,” as Mrs. Browning so stonily put it.
“Yes, perhaps I overreacted.” She ordered a single vodka martini. She had been born in Washington, a belle of the town, one year older than my mother, whom she remembered. “So good-looking,” she said tactfully.
Ruth told me of Jimmie’s first report home after a weekend in the great house in Virginia where I was prince, he pauper. Of course, we were interchangeable, as I was not really prince but only living for a time as princes do. Upon my mother’s divorce from Hughdie, when I was sixteen, I, too, became pauper.
I had a very nice dog, Jimmie had reported, a toy Scottie named Wiggles. But my mother would not let the dog in the house, so while I was away during the week at boarding school, a thirty-minute drive from Merrywood, Wiggles was exiled to a fenced-in area beside the garage, itself set over a squash court, where Hughdie never played but Jimmie and I used to roller-skate, ruining the wood floor.
The dog was one of a thousand sore points between Nina and me. My father had brought me the puppy, a present from Liz Whitney, whose numerous dogs roamed her eighteenth-century Virginia house, Llangollen. Litters were constantly being produced beneath Chippendale consoles and allowed to grow up on the spot. I often wished that Liz were my mother.
Nina promptly took the dog and said that Liz had given it to her. This was followed by a flaming row of the sort that punctuated her life with me and, indeed, with anyone that she knew well. In later, more reflective years, she blamed her behavior on an agonizing menopause. But as of 1935 she was all set to have two more children—ladled into her by silver spoon?—so she was also obliged to note, for those who might be counting, that her periods had also been more excruciating than those of any other woman in medical history.
At the beginning, Wiggles had slept in Nina’s Art Deco bedroom. A fashionable word in those days was neurasthenic, which could mean practically anything. In Nina’s case, it meant fearful hangovers combined with a morphine habit. Once or twice a week one Dr. Huffman, wearing a Prince Albert, would arrive to administer a shot; then, if the company was not too grand, he would be asked for lunch. “I am upper-middle-class,” the drunken Auden kept repeating at our last meeting, “my father was a doctor.” To which I finally replied, “Well, he would never have made the grade in my day, in my city.” But with or without the humble Dr. Huffman’s drugs, the sound of the dog’s claws at night on the bedroom floor gave Nina the jitters and so Wiggles was banished from the house.
On those weekends that I was allowed to come home—usually when Mr. and Mrs. Auchincloss were on safari in Hobe Sound or places even more dangerous and farther to the south—Jimmie and I would join Wiggles in the enclosure and tell her how sorry we were about her exile. Jimmie’s mother had been much struck by details of life in the great house: “‘They also have silk sheets,’ Jimmie said to me, ‘and the butler asks you at night what you want for breakfast.’” Mrs. Sewell was beginning to remember a lot. So was—am—I.
I tried to recall, as I looked into what proved to be Jimmie’s eyes across the table from me, what it was that we had talked about when alone together. He was an athlete; I played nothing except erratic tennis. I read everything that I could; he read as little as possible. But I am intrigued by a letter he wrote his mother from Guam, in the South Pacific. Would she send him Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? This set off a tremor. He and I had certainly lived out the Calamus idyll. Now someone—a lover?—had suggested that he read Whitman. Is this to be a mystery story? Who was he, after all? Will I ever know now?
I remember him mostly in flashes. I’d go with him to hear Benny Goodman at the Capitol Theater. He loved jazz, swing; played saxophone. I liked “classical” music; played nothing. What we had entirely in common, aside from each other, was the fact that each was already what he would be when grown-up. He was professional athlete; I was writer. That was that. Neither was uncertain about what to do in the future because each was already doing it. This completeness set us off from our contemporaries. As a result, neither was much of a success as a schoolboy. Little of what we were offered in class was of the slightest use to either him or to me. I wanted to know far more history and literature than any school would ever have taught, while all he needed was a playing field to dominate. So, haphazardly, I educated myself, all the while resentful of the dullness and irrelevance of the classroom. Since learning then was mostly by rote, I developed a block against memorizing so great that now, when I occasionally act in films, dialogue must be glued to the backs of chairs or written on cards held out of camera range. Today, schools—for the rich, that is, there is nothing much for the rest—know better how to teach; their only problem is what to teach.
The differences between Jimmie and me were sometimes polar. I detested my mother; he adored his. I said as much to Mrs. Sewell. She smiled. “I remember when he was first brought to me, at the hospital. I had so much wanted a brunette, and there he was, all blond already. I must admit I was a little disappointed, to have two blonds, Jimmie and his sister.” The smile vanished. “Tell me, did he ever talk to you about his father?”
I said that I couldn’t remember. I had always assumed that his father was dead. I did know that there was a stepfather whom he disliked. She frowned. “Well, he and I were not married long. Then I married Mr. Sewell, and we lived happily ever after until last year, when he died. So you see,” she said with no dramatic emphasis, “I am bereft.”
I had been in her apartment earlier that morning. Over the mantel was a painting of Jimmie made in 1937. He is holding a model sailboat. Though he smiled a lot in life, in almost all his pictures he looks grave, eyes usually turned from painter or camera lens. I have a life-size reproduction of the painting on the wall beside my bed. Jimmie is looking to his right, to the west, to the approaching end, I morbidly think. Jimmie used to be excused from class so that he could go sit for his portrait. He was also excused, from time to time, for surgical enlargement of his urethra. I never knew what this condition was called medically, and I was not about to mention it to Mrs. Sewell. Jimmie said that it was a remarkably painful, slow business.
Mrs. Sewell described his first serious girlfriend, “She was absolutely beautiful, but she wasn’t really. . . . Well, once I asked her to help with the punch bowl, to fill cups, you know? and she refused. She was . . .” But the word common did not pass her lips because, “I always tried to love anyone he loved. Then he met Chris White that last year and wanted to marry her.”
“You mean Chris White the actress?”
She was surprised. “You know who she is? Yes, she was an actress on television, a long time ago.” In the fifties, Chris White was a successful television actress who almost invariably got the parts that my friend Joanne Woodward wanted. When Joanne received the Academy Award, I wired her, “Where is Chris White tonight?” So here was Chris White yet again: Jimmie’s final love except, perhaps, for whoever it was who got him to read Whitman.
“When they sent me Jimmie’s footlocker, I burned all the letters to him from girls—hers too.” But Chris, a Washington girl, continued to see Mrs. Sewell after the war. Then, some years ago, she dropped from view.
Mrs. Sewell laughed. “I remember Jimmie asked me, once, ‘Did you ever tell a man that he was beautiful?’” Jimmie had been shocked at such a word applied to himself by a girl. But then, in those days before Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando, males were taught to think of themselves as coarse and brutish Calibans, on a lower level of evolution than the fragile Ariels of the other sex.
Jimmie overflowed with animal energy, not to mention magnetism for both sexes. Even so, at twelve or thirteen, I was delighted to be able to report to him that I had had sex—if that is quite the phrase—with a girl before Jimmie did. He was riveted; wanted details. The event had taken place in the game room at Merrywood, an airless chamber in the cellar where game was hung and aged—game never shot by Hughdie, but often sent him by friends. I was showing a girl that I’d known for some time this scary room—scary because on the inside of the heavy metal door there was a rusty round knob that one had to push in order to open the door; if it failed to work, you would suffocate, unheard by anyone, since the room was soundproofed. On the floor, the girl and I fumbled about, and I was almost as interested in what I was going to tell Jimmie about the great mystery that I had at last—barely—penetrated as I was in the earthshaking event itself.
Rousseau thought that Montaigne should have told us more about his sex life. I think Montaigne told quite enough. But then I have never had much interest in the sexual lives of real people. I suspect that I was the only boy of that era to have read Frank Harris, skipping the sex parts in order to get to the political and literary anecdotes. I do like pornography, but only when it is clearly fiction.
Mrs. Sewell picked at her elaborate lobster dish. The dining room at Willards, as we used to call the hotel, was half full. The hotel is not very like the original Willards, where Lincoln stayed; it was entirely rebuilt at the beginning of the century and, lately, rather well redone. I am at home with the result. Across Pennsylvania Avenue from the hotel is the Commerce Department, and from the windows of my room I can look into what had been my father’s second-floor office when he was director of air commerce—a corner office at the west end of the building, with windows shaded by a row of pillars set in a ledge, already darkened, even then, by the excrement of those multitudinous pigeons who were—and are—almost as numerous as civil servants in our now imperial capital city. Together, from the ledge, we watched Roosevelt’s second inaugural parade, in which Gene took no part, since he was resigning his post.
“Before my children were born, I took a course in nutrition. I always made the bread, and just about everything else, from scratch.”
“Did they like it?”
“I never gave them any choice.” She was serene. I wondered if her diet explained Jimmie’s odorless sweat. Anaïs Nin also prided herself on having no odor, as I have just read in her latest posthumously published journal, Incest. I remember otherwise. Yet too little is made of the importance of human odor when it comes to sexual attraction. But then—is it the smell of a particular person whom we already like that attracts us? Or does a liking for a certain smell draw us, bee to flower’s pistil, to its owner?
Mrs. Sewell was a strong character. When the war turned bad for us, Jimmie had wanted to enlist in the marines. He was seventeen, an age when one needed parental consent. I got mine readily, but Ruth had refused to give hers and so he had stayed at Duke University on a scholarship paid for by the Washington Senators. But then, when he came of age at eighteen, he enlisted. The last letters that he wrote to her are more those of husband to wife than son to mother. I had also not realized how much of an artist an athlete is until I read, again and again, about “my arm,” the pitcher’s arm which he guarded with the same single-mindedness that a dancer does his legs. Toward the end, he knows that he is not going to survive and he tells her what to do about insurance and his effects, and Chris. He is plainly in a rage at being killed before he could have his life.
“I think I’d like to make a little book about Jimmie, photographs, letters, what people remember . . .”
Mrs. Sewell was on her guard, as well she should be after that magazine article. I told her of a similar book about Hobe Baker, a Princeton athlete much admired by Scott Fitzgerald’s generation. “Of course,” she said, “I wouldn’t want anything said about his father and his problems.” Jimmie’s father had left Washington under a series of clouds. He was thought to be dead until he did indeed die, years later, in California. I said that I had no interest in the father; after all, the subject never came up between Jimmie and me. But then he was a boy who could keep secrets, as I was about to learn.
I assured her that the book would be largely based on his letters to her. Copies of several of them had been shown me by the master at St. Albans, who, that morning, before my lunch with Mrs. Sewell, had also given me a tour of the school. The gray Gothic-style stone of the original buildings still harmonizes agreeably with the now-finished cathedral on its hill, separated from the school by a green herb garden and tall trees. The Lower School dormitory of my day, with its flimsy partitions and linoleum floor, has been replaced by a row of small cell-like rooms. So all of our ghosts are gone. I did push open the swinging door to the shower room to find that our communal spartan shower was now modestly compartmentalized.
Boarders in the Lower School were divided between the aristocrats, who had pubic hair, and the plebes, who did not. I was part of the aristocracy. When Jimmie arrived, at midterm, he was much discussed. Did he or didn’t he have pubic hair? He went for a shower, and I joined him: aristocratic, with bright gold curls. As I looked at him, he gave me a big grin and so it began, likeness drawn to likeness, soon to be made whole by desire minus the obligatory pursuit.
When I came to read the Symposium, I was amazed at how precisely Plato had anticipated two boys twenty-three hundred years later. The classical scholar M. I. Finley once told me that it was not he but one of his students who first noticed that Plato never speaks in his own voice at that famous dinner party; rather, he gives to others viewpoints that he may or may not have shared. So it is Aristophanes—not Plato—who explains to his dinner companions the nature of sexual desire.
To begin with, there were three sexes, each shaped like a globe—male, female, hermaphrodite. The three globes behaved offensively to the king of the gods, who chose to discipline them by slicing each in half. “Just as you or I might chop up sour apples for pickling,” remarks Aristophanes, “or slice an egg with a hair.” Apollo was then called in to tidy up the six creatures that had once been three. “Now when the work of bisection was complete it left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each other’s necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one.”
This explains, according to Aristophanes, how the male half of the hermaphrodite is attracted to his female half, while the half of the woman sphere is drawn to woman and man to man. “And so when this boy-lover—or any lover, for that matter—is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant . . . although they may be hard put to say what they really want with one another, and indeed the purely sexual pleasure of their friendship could hardly account for the huge delight they take in one another’s company. The fact is that both their souls are longing for something else—a something to which they can neither of them put a name. . . . And so all this to-do is a relic of that original state of ours, when we were whole . . .”
Parenthetically, I have just been reading Kenneth Dover’s wonderfully self-confident memoirs. The author of Greek Homosexuality asks, “Why did Plato make Aristophanes the mouthpiece of the ‘other half’ doctrine? My own answer was (and is) that Plato recognizes it as a vulgar, uneducated idea, and therefore appropriate to a writer of comedies which are undeniably vulgar and populist.” Dover then celebrates “those of us who are happily married . . .” One is pleased, of course, for the Dovers; even so, there are other equally successful unions. But I am hardly disinterested as I, too, have written vulgar and populist comedies.
I cannot think just how or why my coming together with Jimmie happened to take place on the white tile floor of the bathroom at Merrywood. I suppose that the butler was on the prowl at the time. But there we were, belly to belly, in the act of becoming one. As it turned out, Jimmie had been involved with another boy, while I, despite wet dreams, had never even masturbated. As it was, mutual masturbation was impossible with Jimmie—too painful for me because his large callused hands gripped a cock like a baseball bat. So we simply came together, reconstituting the original male that Zeus had split in two. Yet “sexual pleasure could hardly account for the huge delight we took in one another’s company.” There was no guilt, no sense of taboo. But then we were in Arcadia, not diabolic Eden.
Suddenly, Mrs. Sewell turned to me. “I want to ask you a question,” she said: our roles reversed. “What did Jimmie tell you about his stepfather?”
“He said he didn’t get on with him, and that was why he moved into the dormitory.” Jimmie had not said much more than that. “I suppose they disliked each other.”
“No, my husband didn’t dislike Jimmie. I’m afraid he liked him altogether too much.”
I could not believe what she was telling me. “He was German. A fine decorator, a great horseman. Master of the Warrenton Hunt. A popular man, but he wanted to adopt Jimmie, and change his name, which I couldn’t allow—I mean, the Trimbles would have been horrified. Jimmie was James Trimble the third.” Then she looked very grim. “One day I found a letter written to my husband from a man who was . . . like him, in green ink,” she added, the smoking gun, as it were, “and that was the end for me. We were divorced. Funny, I’ve only told two other people this story, the real story.”
So Jimmie had become a boarder in order to escape from his stepfather. I am still startled by all the implications. Had anything happened between them? If so, what? As I replay the ancient tapes of memory, I begin to see the story from quite a new angle. I had always thought that I had been the seducer, as I was to prove to be for the rest of my life, and so it had never occurred to me that it might have been the other way around. Like me, Jimmie would have found repellent the idea of a sexual act with a grown man. But with another boy, an equal other half, it is the most natural business there is. Yet if he had made the first move . . .
If it were possible, I would like to reedit all the tapes, but they are now so fragile with age that they would probably turn to dust, as Jimmie has, in a box at Rock Creek Cemetery near the statue of the mysterious veiled youth that Henry Adams commissioned Saint-Gaudens to make as a memorial to his wife, Clover, and to—who knows what else?
Now there is a second startling mystery, along with the first one that I found in his letters to his mother.
I move to safer ground. “Did Jimmie go to Mrs. Shippen’s?”
Ruth laughed. “Well, I used to aim him there, but I can’t say if he ever arrived. He thought the girls were a bit on the plain side.” The upper-class youth of small-town Washington were sent to one of two dancing classes, Mrs. Shippen’s or Miss Hawkes’s. Boys and girls were taught not only to dance but to deport themselves in such a way that in due course they would either marry someone from the dancing class or someone very like someone from the dancing class, and settle down to a decorous life.
The last time I saw Jimmie was at one of these dances, held at the Sulgrave Club during the Christmas holiday of 1942, a year after the Japanese had attacked us at Pearl Harbor. I had not seen Jimmie since the fall of 1939, when I had been shipped off to the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico, where one lived the vigorous life, much of it on horseback; the next year I moved on to Exeter. Nina wanted to keep me as far away from her field of operations as possible, and for once, we were in accord. The deterioration of her marriage with Hughdie was disagreeable for everyone.
Since Gene had remarried by then and moved to New York, I saw him only in the summers and so, as always, it was the Gores in Rock Creek Park who represented home during my exile, a life at whose emotional center was not my family but Jimmie; yet we never wrote each other. Of course, boys don’t write boys, more or less on manly principle; even so, since I thought so much about him, I am surprised that I was so unenterprising. We had last seen each other as fourteen-year-old boys. Now we were seventeen-year-old men. Would we take up where we had left off in the spring of 1939, on a May day, in the woods above the Potomac River?
We met awkwardly in the ballroom. We wore “tuxedos”; girls wore long dresses. An orchestra played such novelties as “The Lambeth Walk” and “The Big Apple.” Also slow fox-trots. “Night and Day.” I could only turn right.
NOW I ERASE a bit of Jimmie as Rosalind appears, demanding, if not equal, fair time. I had brought Rosalind to the dance. She was tall and dark and exuberant. We had known each other all our lives. We had been “a couple” for several years. We were used to each other in a low-key, comfortable way. Then the war came and everything changed. The desultory boy-girl relationship of our old life suddenly became urgent: The boy might soon be killed. We experienced what so many did in our time and place. We decided to get married between my graduation from Exeter in June and my enlistment in the army in July (a special army program for high school graduates was the army’s siren song). Our announcement galvanized my usually casual family. My grandfather, Senator Gore (“I never give advice”), was suddenly Polonius; he also changed his usual line from “Never have children, only grandchildren” to “Be not fruitful, do not multiply.” Certainly, his son and daughter had always been annoying to him and of little consequence to anyone else, while I, who read to him gladly, had been a treasure. But treasure no longer, since I seemed to be following both son and daughter into premature marriage, to be followed by certain failure in life’s great adventure. Nina was concerned about the alcoholism in Rosalind’s family.
Even my amiably offhand father came down to Washington to ask a significant question: “How much do you think you’ll need to live on?” I said about five hundred dollars a month. Gene wondered where this would come from; an army private makes considerably less. I already knew that there would be nothing from my family, ever. It was a close contest who was meaner, T. P. Gore or Gene Vidal, two self-made men who had no intention of contributing one penny to the making of any other man, beyond the grim obligation to pay for a son’s Education.
Education was the key to everything, as my uneducated mother knew when she approached Mr. True, head of the Lower School at St. Albans. My grades must improve “because,” she said, “he is living in the lap of luxury now, but he’s never going to inherit anything! And he doesn’t understand the value of money [a favorite refrain].” Mr. True said that my grades would probably improve if I could be persuaded to do more homework. She confessed defeat: “He locks himself in his room,” she said sadly, “and writes.”
As it turned out, I did not go to college after the war, while my income during my first year of civilian life was about five hundred dollars a month. I could very easily have married and, conforming to every last one of the rules of the game, followed my grandfather into the Senate. Happily, life was to be more interesting than that. Unhappily, Rosalind, whom I did not marry, became an alcoholic—not on my account. Happily, in later life, Rosalind pulled herself together to become a commercial artist in London, where she had an affair with Churchill’s attorney-general, John Foster, a large bearlike man of marvelous wit. I last saw the two of them in 1970 at the airport in Katmandu, where, on the tarmac, John gave a superb imitation of the judge in the Margaret Argyle divorce case. This featured a compromising Polaroid of the duchess sucking the cock of a man whose head is not visible in the Polaroid and whose pubic hair was not straight like the duke’s (the valet’s solemn testimony) but curly like—like an adulterer’s.
“You are a jeweler, sir, by trade,” said the judge. “I pray you, sir, note the ring on the hand that is holding the penis. Disregard the penis. Disregard the hand. Disregard the headless man. Concentrate your attention, sir, solely upon the ring. Is that your handiwork?”
BUT ALL THIS was far in the future that evening when I told Jimmie that I was going to marry Rosalind after I graduated from Exeter. “You’re crazy,” he said.
We went downstairs to the men’s room with its tall marble urinals and large cubicles. I wondered what, if anything, he felt. After all, men are not boys. Fortunately, our bodies still fitted perfectly together, as we promptly discovered inside one of the cubicles, standing up, belly to belly, talking of girls and marriage and coming simultaneously.
Thus, we were whole for what proved to be the last time for the two of us—and for me, if not for him, for good. I not only never again encountered the other half, but by the time I was twenty-five, I had given up all pursuit, settling for a thousand brief anonymous adhesions, as Walt Whitman would put it, where wholeness seems, for an instant, to be achieved. Quite enough, I think, if the real thing has happened. At least, in Platonic terms, I had completed myself once. Jack Kennedy—a half of the hermaphrodite rather than the male—by his own admission never came close. I am lucky. He was not.
Why did Jimmie ask his mother to send him Whitman? Why am I jealous of a ghost—two ghosts? Did he find a lover in the marines, someone of a literary nature, who wanted him to read . . . I “knew too well the sick, sick dread lest the one he lov’d might secretly be indifferent to him . . .” So Whitman now resounds in these late, late reveries.
Two vivid images of Jimmie. One came back to me while I was smoking ganja in Katmandu, not an easy thing for a nonsmoker to do. But as I gasped my way into a sort of trance, Jimmie materialized beside me on the bed. He wore blue pajamas. He was asleep. He was completely present, as he had been in the bedroom at Merrywood. I tickled his foot. The callused sole was like sandpaper. It was a shock to touch him again. The simulacrum opened its blue eyes and smiled and yawned and put his hand alongside my neck; he was, for an instant, real in a hotel room in Katmandu. But only for an instant. Then he rejoined Achilles and all the other shadowy dead in war.
My second memory: I am lying on top of him, after sex, eyes shut; then I open them and see his eyes staring up into mine. The expression is like that of his sad-looking photographs rather than of the actual smiling boy whom I recall, or think that I do. In his last photographs, the marine private of nineteen looks to be a powerfully built man of thirty, in a rage because he knows that what’s next is nothing.
After our final encounter at the Sulgrave, I knew that we would go on together until our business had finished itself in a natural way. I certainly never wanted to grow old with him. I just wanted to grow up with him. Each would marry in time; find wholeness elsewhere, if lucky. And so we went back to the dance upstairs, he as happy as I at being, if only briefly, rejoined.
In the light of all this it is puzzling to me now that I did not write him after he finally joined the marines in 1944, the worst year of the war. Of course, I was already in the army, and concerned with my own fate. So I left Jimmie to time and chance, as I left everything else. But then I hadn’t much choice, while, a year later, he had none at all. I was stoic since, forever after, I was to be the surviving half of what had once been whole.
I realize that according to the School of Vienna (the Riding School), I should have become a lifelong pederast. But that did not happen. Naturally, like most men, I am attracted to adolescent males—this is, by the way, one of the best kept secrets of the male lodge, revealed in a study called The Boys of Boise, where most of the male establishment of that heartland Idaho city (each a mature married man) were revealed to be lovers of the high school football team. But I did not go prowling for fourteen-year-old athletes. After all, if the ideal is the other self, then that self would have had to age along with me, and attraction would have become affection, and lust would have then been diverted to . . . chance encounters or the other sex.
Montaigne is sharp about the Greek arrangement of young warrior and pubescent squire, the latter not enjoying—or supposed to enjoy—what the lustful other does with him. Although this relationship might produce excellent soldiers, it was not and could not be, in Montaigne’s eyes, true love because man and boy were not equals and the relationship was grounded solely upon the passion of the older and more experienced male for the beauty of the younger. Only in equality can there be love, as Montaigne had uniquely experienced with his friend La Boétie’s mind and character if not body. Montaigne thought that if a woman could ever be a man’s equal in mind and education, then that relationship might be best of all, but since Montaigne is mildly misogynistic, he gives no examples.
JIMMIE TRIMBLE had applied for the navy V-12 program, where high school graduates of seventeen and eighteen were trained to be naval officers in Stateside universities. As of June 1943, I was in the army’s equivalent, the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute, to be trained as an engineer, for which I had no aptitude. After three months, I flunked out, more or less deliberately, thus saving my life because, with the army’s usual brutish haste and ill faith, the program was suddenly dissolved and my inadequately trained classmates were shipped off to Europe as front-line infantrymen. Many were killed in the last German counteroffensive, the so-called Battle of the Bulge. But by then I was first mate of an army freight-supply ship in the Aleutians, more in danger of being killed by my own inadequacies as a navigator in the world’s worst sea than from enemy fire. At least, unlike Jack Kennedy, I didn’t get run over by a Japanese destroyer, the trick of the week, I always thought, though the latest biography makes more sense than usual of the harebrained fleet of PT boats to which the ailing Jack had been assigned, a thousand miles to the south of me.
Jimmie, according to a survivor from his unit, failed his physical for V-12, which seems impossible for a professional athlete. Yet, I now learn, he was indeed sickly, prey to a chronic form of pneumonia. But he had no problem in getting accepted, as cannon fodder, by the marines in January of 1944; his basic training was at Camp Lejeune; then, in August 1944, he became a member of a scout and observer group of the Third Marine Division in the South Pacific. He saw action until the end of October, when Guam was secured.
From October to February he seems to have had a quiet time on Guam. For one month he was again a baseball player, helping the division team win the local championship. On February 4, he played his last game for the division. He reports to his mother that he has sprained his ankle; meanwhile, “everything is once again wonderful with Chris and me.” He remarks that his mother is a “worse procrastinator than I ever was”—she has not sent him a long-promised picture of herself, so “how about sending one while there is still a tomorrow?” He recalls the Sunday picnics that they used to have in the Virginia mountains. “I’ll never forgive myself for refusing to follow your advice to stay in college. After the war we won’t receive any credit for having been out here . . . Mom, please don’t get the blues over what I am going to say, but some insurance should be taken just in case. Mom, you know if anything happens to me you are to have all I possess but I would like to ask one favor. You know the gold ring with the diamonds set halfway around? Well, Mom, if (it won’t) anything does happen, would you give it to Chris for me? Kind of a memorial the other way around.” Finally, “Well, Mom, I’ll write again in a couple of days . . . All my love to the swellest Mom in all the world. Your devoted son, Jimmie.”
This letter could have been written in the Civil War. The tone is also that of Andy Hardy in an MGM movie, but there were once real boys like that, before the great sullenness spread over the land.
February 25, 1945, Jimmie arrived at Iwo Jima in what turned out to be one of the bloodiest engagements of the war. Twenty thousand Japanese were killed; 6,821 American troops were killed, mostly teenage marines. Jimmie was in the 4th Platoon, a member of what was called the Reconnaissance Company. A survivor of the platoon recalls, “I was with the first observation team that went up there; we stayed three days, then they relieved us; I saw him [Jimmie] when they relieved us, and that was the last time. They relocated their position forward; lost contact with them. In the early morning hours.”
There were eight men in Jimmie’s squadron as of the night of February 28. They were arranged, as far as I can tell from a news story, two to a foxhole “on a slope overlooking our infantry front line and the enemy’s concrete placements beyond. As dawn broke at 4:45, March 1, 1945, all hell broke loose upon them. A Jap raiding party had infiltrated the front lines and attacked their post.” Six of the eight were killed: “one . . . was dead in his foxhole. He had been bayoneted in his sleep. Another had been killed by a grenade, and a third by rifle fire. One burned poncho was found in the foxhole shared by the two missing men. . . . Sixty-three Jap bodies sprawled in the observation post’s little battleground.”
Jimmie was the scout who had been killed by a grenade. Another marine who was there bears witness: “We were all real proud of Jim Trimble, and everybody else was. He was a joy to be around. He had a good personality. He was always joking. I know he wanted to go back and go to school and play professional baseball. He was just a joy to be around. I remember that he went into the ship’s store—because it was cold up in Iwo. Everybody thinks of it as the Pacific, but it was their winter up there, and it was only 700 miles from Tokyo. Jim went in and bought a black Navy watch sweater. He was the only guy that kept warm, before this happened. But then, you know, I’ll never forget the way the grenade hit him in the back, and that sweater was just all wrapped up inside of him.
“You know, in circumstances like that, you’re probably closer to those guys than you are your own brothers. Of course, for me now, we’re talking about 50 years. You kind of forget. Like I said, the wars all kind of blend into each other.
“He was tall, blond curly hair. But I’ll tell you, he was heavy, carrying back. I though I’d die. At that age, you know, I was 18, and I weighed about 145. He had to weigh 160. He felt like 2,000 pounds by the time I got back to the foxhole.”
When the commanding general heard of Jimmie’s death, he was, according to a witness, “moist-eyed” for one boy lost in all that carnage. The Third Division named its baseball field on Guam Trimble Field. That was that. End of Jimmie. Since then, “the wars all kind of blend into each other.”
In the summer of 1945, I left Birmingham General Hospital, at Van Nuys, California, on leave to see my father in New York. I had acquired rheumatoid arthritis as a result of a modest freezing (hypothermia) in the Bering Sea; one knee was partly locked and the fingers of my left hand were like thumbs—yes, everything is a bit worse now. When I went before the hospital board, I was told that I could get a disability pension for life, but that would mean two years more of service. If I chose to forgo the pension, I would be let out in less than a year. The European war was over; the Japanese war nearly so. I let the pension go.
En route to New York, I stopped off in Jackson, Michigan, to see my father’s sister. We were standing in a sunny garden when we were joined by a boy I had been at school with—which school? Even then Nina’s educational enthusiasms had begun to blur: Potomac, Sidwell Friends, Landon, St. Albans, Los Alamos, Exeter. But since the boy spoke of Washington, it must have been one of the local schools—“You know,” he said, “Jimmie Trimble’s dead.” By this time, I had pretty much distanced myself from these stark announcements. I think my first reaction must have been somewhat like that when I heard Jack Kennedy had been shot. I was in a Rome movie house, watching David and Lisa. News spread during the interval. I didn’t believe it. There had been a mistake. That’s not the right plot. But, of course, finally, that was all that Jack was ever to be—a great media monster, now wreathed in garlands of paranoia of a most unpleasant sort. Jimmie was no media monster, but he was already vivid in his own right and, thus, no candidate for death. It took me some months to absorb the fact—or nonfact—of his being not-being.
To this day, in another world and almost another century, I have wondered what might have become of our so swiftly completed maleness. Is it only for a season that wholeness endures? On this matter Plato is silent. Experience suggests that desire of any kind is brief. In due course, I wrote a novel in which I described what might have happened had we met again years later. The conclusion was too harsh for many readers, but that is the way American society is and I was a realistic writer until, one day, I realized that there is no common reality beyond desire, the pursuit, and, in at least one case, the achievement of the whole. It would be greedy—not to say impractical—to expect a repetition of a lucky accident. I was very much aware of my once perfect luck, and left it at that.
“DID YOU SEND JIMMIE the copy of Leaves of Grass he asked for?”
Mrs. Sewell was vague. “If he asked me to, of course I did.”
Will I ever know who got him to read Whitman on the island of Guam? No, I am not jealous, only sad I was never to be with him again. Actually, I hope that he did find someone. He was always lucky, except for his death—and maybe there was luck in that, too. Long life, finally, is nightmarish repetition while “Death is beautiful from you.” Did he read that in Calamus? Did he read Whitman on “the brotherhood of lovers”? On “How together through life, through dangers, odium, unchanging, long and long, Through youth and through middle and old age, how unfaltering, how affectionate and faithful they were, Then I am pensive—I hastily walk away fill’d with bitterest envy.” As who would not?
I have now lived a half century with a man, but sex has played no part in the relationship and so where there is no desire or pursuit, there is no wholeness. But there are satisfying lesser states, fragments.