Briefly, Schools, War, Palimpsest

Briefly, Schools, War

THE PRINCIPAL ANNOYANCE of living at Merrywood was that I had little opportunity to go home to my grandparents’ house in Rock Creek Park. Occasionally, the Gores came to Merrywood—that seems to have been part of the contract between senator-mad Hughdie and Nina—but such occasions usually ended badly, when Nina would quarrel with her mother. One Christmas Day, Nina gave Dot a fur coat, then after Nina had said or done something peculiarly offensive, Dot threw the fur coat at her; and went home.

Meanwhile, every attempt to well-round me failed. I was given a Winchester rifle that I never touched. Paradoxically, I later liked the carbine that the army issued me. I disliked team sports and managed to avoid them almost entirely at St. Albans, to the bemusement of the masters. Then I was sent off to Los Alamos, a “ranch school,” where some seventy allegedly disturbed, allegedly rich boys each had a horse. The school’s founder, A. J. Connell, was a disciple of Theodore Roosevelt’s strenuous life. He was also a pederast who insisted on weekly physical exams for the boys, disturbing, no doubt, even the disturbed, amongst whom, a decade earlier, there had been the disturbed and disturbing William S. Burroughs of the adding machine family.

I enjoyed debating in the Exeter senate. I also enjoyed the mock politics, so like the real world later. I took up public speaking partly because I intended to be a politician and partly because I had a stammer, which I gradually lost.

Fortunately, wherever I was, even Los Alamos, the library was my center. At fourteen, I wanted to know the entire history of the entire world. Although reading was discouraged at Los Alamos in the interest of strenuousness, I not only managed to read nearly all of Shakespeare, but I made a solid dent in a vast series devoted to the history of Europe, country by country, beginning with Guizot’s France. I now understand why my mother, only marginally literate, would find so ravenous an intellectual curiosity distasteful, suspecting, correctly, that it would lead to what every teacher regards as the worst perversion of all, autodidacticism.

At first, teachers used to ask me why I wasn’t a football player like my father. Interestingly enough, Gene himself was fascinated by my “erudition,” as he called it in a letter to me, and had not the slightest interest in my being an athlete. One reason I didn’t like football was the boredom of putting on and taking off all that gear. Even so, at an early school, I made what I thought was an unusually brilliant touchdown against what proved to be, upon closer analysis, my own team. Metaphorically, that said it all. Let coaches bark like dogs, my caravan was moving on, like a juggernaut.

I still recall a baseball game at St. Albans. As I looked at the unfinished tower of the cathedral in the distance, I wondered, close to despair, if I would ever be delivered from this state of perfect boredom. As one means of escape, I had developed a vivid inner life, with a number of fictional narratives going on in my head at any one time. At bad moments, I would simply switch on a story; and be gone. This trick of improvising stories for myself continued until I was out of the army and into the world, where life’s narrative took over. Luckily, I never lost the knack of being able to switch on, pretty much at will, a fictional narrative. This proved to be a lifesaver when, broke in my twenties, I was obliged to write five pseudonymous books in less than two years.

Although I am told that I have an eidetic imagination (I can summon up vivid scenes, recalled or invented, in my head), I have no idea how or why I do this. Now, despite my aversion to Freud, I find a most odd explanation of this by Georges Simenon, author of hundreds of novels and copulator of thousands of women:

From the example of Balzac, I wish to show that a novelist’s work is not an occupation like another—it implies renunciation, it is a vocation, if not a curse, or a disease . . . It is sometimes said that a typical novelist is a man who was deprived of motherly love . . . The fact is that the need to create other people, the compulsion to draw out of oneself a crowd of different characters, could hardly arise in a man who is otherwise happy and harmoniously adjusted to his own little world. Why should he so obstinately attempt to live other people’s lives, if he himself were secure and without revolt?

LACK OF WELL-ROUNDEDNESS did not affect my relations with the other boys at St. Albans, who, mysteriously and easily, accepted my preference for books to their games; in this they were more tolerant of my eccentricity than some of the masters. The head of the Lower School, now in his nineties as I write, still remarks with wonder, “The other boys took it for granted that Gore wasn’t going to play games. And they didn’t mind.” He did not go so far as to say that I was popular, but he realized that I had, somehow, decided not to conform and that I had, somehow, got away with it.

I’d learned, very early, how to transmit, in an interesting way, sufficient knowledge and imagination to charm those that I wanted to charm. Also, I was physically well developed for my age and managed to win or neutralize the inevitable fights that stand out like bonfires in the pages of those memoirists who begin life as shy, misunderstood youths. I was never shy, and if I was misunderstood, it was because I was modeling myself on that preteen actor Mickey Rooney, and so played many parts, including my favorite, that of paramount leader. Wherever I was, I always formed a gang, and I was boss. At Friends School, the gang’s headquarters was a collapsed frame building in the center of a large meadow. We had all been warned not to go inside the ruin, a haphazard pile of lumber with many intricate passageways and dead ends—a maze of delight where we would hide out, preparing for wars with other gangs.

AT MERRYWOOD I was cut off pretty much from the Gores and, finally, from Merrywood itself when I was sent as boarder to St. Albans. A good thing, as it turned out, because I finally began to make friends.

Once I was in the dormitory, there was Jimmie, and the first human happiness that I had ever encountered. I do not strike the note of self-pity because, never having experienced happiness before—as opposed to my own odd constitutional cheerfulness—I could hardly have pitied myself for what I’d not experienced. I had always known how to make people laugh and, once free of raging Nina and sad Hughdie, I also laughed a lot; yet, to be fair, in passing, Hughdie was most generous to me; he gave me castles and toy soldiers, and at Merrywood I would deploy them by the hour, inventing stories for them, mostly nonmartial. The life of the imagination became more and more intense as the reality about me became more unendurable. At eleven I started, mysteriously, vomiting in Nina’s presence. Words were suddenly failing me.

Of the masters at St. Albans, Stanley Sofield was my favorite. He was a plump young man with thick brown hair, glasses, a tapir’s nose and small chin. Musical-comedy mad, he wrote and produced shows of his own making at a summer camp. He drank a good deal, which meant that the class that Jimmie and I had with him, early in the morning, often found us face to face with Stanley in a state of terminal hangover. We could always tell if it was one of those days by his gentle grave manner, his slightly pained squint, and the very, very soft voice that he used when he told us to pipe down as we took our seats. Then, like a sleepwalker, he would go through the lesson of the day, often at the blackboard. The tone was always one of gentle expository reason. But we all knew that a storm was now on its way; he was like a benign Nina.

One could never guess what would trigger Stanley: Two boys talking in the back or an unusual display of ignorance could set off the scream. Now, the scream was no ordinary human scream. It was a cry from another species or world. An H. P. Lovecraft ghoul’s eldritch howl or the blast Tarzan’s Tantor the Elephant made. The entire Lower School would fall silent as that scream slowly rose to a crescendo; while the blood of even the best and the brightest turned to ice. Then books would begin to fly with devastating accuracy across the room, each finding, like a proto-smart bomb, an offending boy. We were ecstatic with terror. This was life. Emotion writ large. Catharsis. Then the voice would return to its normal hangover-level; and class would continue.

Stanley had nicknames for boys he liked. I was still called Gene. (At fourteen I lopped off my Christian name and became Gore.) So, for Stanley, I was “Gene-y with the Light Brown Hair,” always sung, while I writhed with embarrassment. Jimmie was also a favorite, though I forget his nickname. If not seated together in class, Jimmie and I would signal each other when a hard-on had arrived unbidden. When the other boys figured out what we were doing, they began signaling, too. At twelve, erections come and go, like T. S. Eliot’s ladies, talking, most appropriately, of Michelangelo.

The highlight of my school days was the summer of 1939. The war was almost upon us, but Stanley and another master were hell-bent on getting to Europe for one last look. They cooked up a plan to take a half dozen of the boys to France “to perfect our French” and go sight-seeing. Nina was immediately sold on the plan. I was getting a bit too old to be shipped off, yet again, to Camp William Lawrence in New Hampshire, “to be with the other boys and become well-rounded” and as far from Merrywood and Newport as possible.

For the next to last time, Jimmie and I made love in the woods above the roaring river. I remember his almost-mature body with the squared bony shoulders and rosy skin against bright green. He was already becoming famous in Washington as a baseball player, and I was busy writing, and thinking of a political career. At thirteen we talked about girls less than we did about each other. This was a sign, though I was hardly adept at signs then. Why should anyone happy ever note a sign?

After sex, we swam against the swift, deadly current of the forbidden Potomac River, swam among rocks and driftwood to a special large gray-brown glacial rock, where we lay, side by side. We’re going to go on doing this for the rest of our lives, I remember thinking, tempting—no, driving—fate to break us in two. If I had been told that we’d meet only one more time in his short life, I would have . . . done what I have done, no doubt. Happily, neither of us knew the future. I did know that after Europe, Nina intended to ship me off to schools far away while Jimmie would stay on at St. Albans, where I wanted to stay but, alas, the school was far too close to Nina’s more and more scandalous field of operations.

Every now and then, in idle moments, I start to hear snatches of the conversation of those two boys on the rock that afternoon. “. . . could play ball, as a pro . . .”; “. . . can’t be a politician without a state and I don’t come from anywhere, maybe Virginia . . .”; lyrics of some jazz song sung in Jimmie’s light tenor; “gotta learn sax . . .”; “writing a novel, trying to . . .”; “I’m going to, maybe, to VPI, but they don’t have much of a ball team . . .”; “. . . hate her . . .” Who said that? I’m now projecting present feelings upon a cloudless sunny day when Europe was ahead of me and all I cared for beside me.

In later years, whenever I tried out a play at the National Theater in Washington, I’d ask Stanley to come backstage when I gave notes after a performance; then we’d go out on the town and drink. He was thrilled by backstage life, and I was always delighted to be with my one last link to St. Albans, to our European summer, to Jimmie.

“Jimmie.” Stanley smiles. “I went on seeing him all along until he left for the marines.” Stanley was “closeted,” as they say in “gay” circles, but I don’t know to what degree he was suppressed. Once grown, I was always candid with him; but he was not with me, as was proper.

A bar in Fourteenth Street. A jukebox plays. The late fifties. I put the question: “Did Jimmie ever talk about me?”

Stanley, now very stout, looks at me slightly glassy-eyed, more from drink than from sadness at all that was lost. “Oh yes. He knew you and I were in touch from time to time,” a white lie of great kindness. Suddenly, his eyes focus. “Yes, I do remember one day when you were already in the army and he was about to go off to the marines, and the two of us drove by Merrywood and he said he wanted to stop and look around, and so we did. We didn’t go near the house, of course, only to the tennis court where the two of you used to play.” Stanley frowns. “I don’t know . . .” he begins and stops; then: “He seemed sad.”

“Did you know why?”

“I do now, don’t I?”

EUROPE. With Stanley and young Hamilton Fish (now old and just retired from Congress) and a number of other boys, as well as a teacher called Barlow and his wife. We set out in June, aboard the Ile de France, second- or third-class. Pommes frites. Grenadine. Summer school at Jouey-en-Josas. Classes in a manor house with domed drawing room. (In 1949, I saw the half-ruined Château du Mont Cel by moonlight.) French lessons. Walks into Versailles. Baba au rhum.

Paris, July 14, I stand on the steps of the Grand Palais as the French army parades. Nervous bald man in an open car at the center of all this glory. Premier Daladier, the “Bull of Vaucluse,” soon to be a prisoner of the Nazis. In buses, we toured First World War battlefields. Poppies nicely symbolic of blood already shed and of blood to be shed yet again in a year’s time. Maginot Line. Cement bunkers. Impregnable. So impregnable that the Germans sensibly went around the line. Bus to Touraine. Magnificent guide whose large nose was streaked with broken veins. He wore a monocle, and tarried over lunch. At Blois, he acted out the murder of the duc de Guise. Played all the parts, rushing from room to room. Chenonceaux. The salamander of François premier. Diane de Poitiers. In the bus I fell in love with an older woman, Hammy Fish’s sister, Zeva, perhaps sixteen. Never saw her again, though I’ve seen him. He succeeded to his isolationist father’s seat in the congressional district where I’d been a candidate before him.

At Orléans, an old lady squatted down under a tree near the cathedral and relieved herself. I talked to a soldier. He gave me his name, Louis Gilet, and army address. I wrote him twice from school. Sent him a dollar bill. He thanked me warmly. Nothing more.

Rome. August. Heat. I did not careen and moan from monument to monument like Henry James, but I knew that I was home. Forum full of broken marble. I picked up a head and hid it under my coat. Stanley saw me and made me put it back. Blackshirts everywhere. The crowds—like those of France—smelled of garlic. Ten years later no whiff of garlic in either country. Prosperity. Baths of Caracalla. The opera Turandot. We sit outside in a railed-off box, under the hot dark sky. In the next box, Mussolini, wearing a white uniform. At the first interval, he rose and saluted the soprano. Audience cheered. Then he left the box. As he passed me, I smelled heavy cologne. Onstage, he saluted the audience—Fascist arm outstretched. Vanished. Since we were Official Children—Hammy’s father was chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee—Ambassador Phillips received us in the old embassy. Tall glasses of orange juice, and a large plain girl: daughter of Postmaster General Farley. What a good time the ambassador must have had that day! I wrote of Phillips, years later, in Hollywood.

End of August, war about to begin. We take the last train out of Italy before the border with France is shut. A dash across France and the Channel to London. Bloomsbury. Russell Square. Old boardinghouse. Fascinating primitive bathroom.

September 1, we are in Downing Street to watch the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, leave to go to Westminster to say that war is now at hand. Thin little man. A wing collar, huge Adam’s apple, uncommonly small head. No cheers, no jeers. The crowd simply sighs, in unison, on exhalation. Terrible, mournful sound. Chamberlain tries to smile; winces instead. Is driven off.

At Liverpool, we board the Antonia for New York. In the Irish Sea we see our sister ship, Athenia, torpedoed by a Nazi sub. Longboats carrying passengers to the dull, misty green Irish shore. Consternation aboard our ship. Some wanted to turn back. Captain did not. We zigzagged across the North Atlantic. Canteen ran out of chocolate. No other hardship. I did not know fear because I knew that true history—life and death, too—only existed in books and this wasn’t a book that I’d read—just a gray ship in a dark sea.

“Gene-y with the light brown hair,” sang Mr. Sofield.

“Shut up . . . sir,” said Gene-y.

THE FACT THAT the eight years between my tenth and seventeenth years were spent far from home at boys’ schools was, in one sense, a good thing: I did not have to deal with Nina. But it was a bad thing in that those webs of friendships that start at an early age between boys and boys and then between boys and girls were broken beyond repair. Even while I was a boarder at St. Albans, I was still at home in Washington, D.C.; but from the fall of 1939 to the spring of 1943, I was in New Mexico or New Hampshire for most of the year, and brief returns for holidays only reminded me that I was permanently displaced, and those friends that I had started to grow up with were now strangers. By the summer of 1943 I was in the army; after that I only came back to see the Gores.

After St. Albans and Mrs. Shippen’s dancing class, I made no friends until I was grown. I did like the fact that, after claustrophobic Los Alamos, Exeter was a large place where you could pursue your own interests. It was also reassuringly brutal, just like the real world, or so they rather smugly assured us. But, in retrospect, the real world, at least for me, turned out to be far pleasanter and easier to handle than dour Exeter. The American hysteria about homosexuality was so extreme in those days that friendships between boys were deliberately discouraged, a cruel and counterproductive thing to do in an all-male environment. Duly intimidated, we became coldly competitive, and expert at the art of the cruel put-down. “I came out like a flower and was cut down,” our poet Lew Sibley used to quote as he prepared yet another epitaph for one of us. I fear that I was also good at this sort of thing. The only amicable relations that I had at Exeter were with three teachers, T. Riggs, H. Phillips, and L. Stevens. One could at least talk to them without fear of intellectual ambush.

One of the few boys that I found congenial was Bob Bingham. He was tall and sturdy, with a booming voice. “Flamingo” was a song that he often thundered. We double-dated at the girls’ school, Wellesley, and one night slept out on a golf course. He was the editor of the school literary magazine, The Review. I was on the board. One would think that with so much in common, the relationship would have been easy; instead, it was edgy. So competitive was the atmosphere that he and I were soon in a struggle over which of us was going to be The Writer. He was indolent. I was not. I had begun to write a florid novel; never, happily, finished. But I did turn out dozens of short stories. If Hemingway was correct (he was not) that celibacy increases and improves a writer’s output, I was positively Shakespearean, at least in output. There was also no sex for me at the school, or for much of anyone else. On the rare occasions when sex was a possibility, he who made the first move would be forever in the power of the moved upon, no matter what happened. This made for a certain guarded irritability in all relations. Later, I was told that “the boys,” as we called the athletes, were somewhat freer with each other. One, a lanky baseball pitcher (baseball yet again) swung his leg against mine in English class. I gave him a startled look. He grinned. I suspected a trap and pulled away.

Although there were four other editors at The Review, Bob exercised a power of veto. After I had published one story, he exercised his veto vigorously in my case. He had the head of a huge cherub, with blue eyes that would suddenly fill with tears if he was thwarted or in any way put down. When I denounced him for keeping me out of the magazine and himself altogether too visibly in, tears filled those innocent blue eyes. “How can you say that? I mean . . . well, it’s only your story I’m rejecting, because it’s not as good as you can do.”

Since stories were often sent us for submission, I wrote a comic piece to which I signed the name of a boy none of us knew. I presented it to the editors. “I got this yesterday. I think it’s pretty funny.” Bob read the story aloud and laughed the loudest. The story was unanimously accepted.

It was a lovely victory. Bob never forgave me for what he called my “duplicity.” In later life, when The New York Times refused, for more than a decade, to review me in its daily paper (and always badly in the Sunday supplement), I recalled Exeter and published three novels as Edgar Box; each was extravagantly praised by the Times. Plainly, Exeter, though a bad place for the kinder emotions, proved to be a good training ground for every kind of warfare.

When Bob became editor of The Reporter, he got me to be, briefly, drama critic. Then he vanished into The New Yorker magazine as an editor, and a very good one I am told. He did write one novel after the war; it was not published. He once told an interviewer that he would rather be a good editor than a bad novelist. This was meant to be the ultimate put-down. But I thought that it was not quite up to our old savage standards. Like several of our contemporaries who had seen heavy combat in the infantry, Bingham came back from the war with—how to describe it? A broken ego? For him, some sense of self was lost for good in France.

I think it was Bingham who had the happy notion to break into the files of the English Department and find out what the various teachers had said about us as we moved from the class of one to that of another. A master complained that I seldom did the required reading but would often be found reading irrelevant books on history or novels not on the syllabus, like Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Another wrote that as a writer and a speaker I was “a soapbox orator.” This was at the height of the struggle between the America Firsters, of which I was one of the student leaders, and the interventionists, which included most of the Anglophile faculty. Of the teachers, only Tom Riggs was on my side. A radical young man, he had, while at Princeton, organized the Veterans of Future Wars. This caused a national stir, particularly when he demanded that we be given our bonuses now, before the war and possible death. Riggs and I used to think of ways of discomfiting the interventionists, headed by a boy called Gunnar, whom I dubbed “Give ’em a Gun Gunnar.”

One prescient English teacher wrote that I might well be a “credit to the school if we can stand him for another two years.” Another teacher, after a class with me, told his colleagues, “I wish that I were a bull.” When asked why, he said, “So that I could gore Vidal.” Well, I see their point; but I don’t think that they ever saw mine. As most of them were dim dispensers of conventional wisdom, I felt, who knows why, an obligation to find out what they really meant, particularly when they got onto politics, and then to contradict them, an unpopular trait that I shared with Mary McCarthy, who once told me, “I was always the one in class to hold up my hand to say no to the teacher. I couldn’t stop myself.”

Unsuccessful as a child, I was proving to be a perfect failure at pretending to be a conventional adolescent in a New England boys’ school. Then, three years after graduation, I published my first novel. I am told that there was rage and despair in the English Department. Only the best teacher that I had, Leonard Stevens, was pleased by what I had done, but in his gentle way, he suggested I try to transcend the national manner—gray literal realistic prose—and read more Henry James. I did; and I did.

In the class behind me was John Knowles, whom I don’t remember, but he remembers me, because, I suppose, I was conspicuous at the debating societies as well as in the wars on behalf of America First. We have been friends many years now, and I admire the novel that he based on our school days, A Separate Peace. I am the character Brinker, Jack tells me—and soon the world, since he is currently writing a book on the novel and its background. I don’t see the slightest resemblance. True, Brinker is the class politician, but in the story he acts as a sort of snooping district attorney, trying to find out whether or not one boy caused another boy to fall from a tree. I’ve told Jack that since I had almost no interest in any of my classmates, I would be the last person to mix myself in the business of others. My time was spent writing and reading and counting the days to my deliverance not only from the school—and later the army—but from the control of others. Nevertheless, A Separate Peace remains an eerily precise reconstruction of how things were in that long-ago world before the Second War.

IN MY SIXTEENTH SUMMER I went to work in Gene’s factory in Camden, New Jersey. In the interest of finding a cheap fuselage for his “flivver” aircraft (metal was too expensive), he had developed something called Vidal Weldwood, a laminated plywood that proved to be useful for making, among other things, wingtips for fighter planes, which the Vidal company manufactured.

The war was well under way in the summer of 1942. I lived in a boardinghouse and worked as unskilled labor. I ate my first cheeseburger, a new invention, I think. I also bought a package of Camel cigarettes and tried to learn to smoke, but after a few attempts I gave up. Factory work was as dull as I’d suspected. The only person at home on the floor was a mad Englishman who, in response to the rubber shortage, was busy inventing a molded plywood automobile tire. With each awful failure, his confidence grew.

In the middle of the summer, Gene suffered a coronary thrombosis and was not expected to live long. I saw him in St. Luke’s Hospital, New York, eyes a glazed yellow-gray from drugs, the hair on his chest gone as gray as mine is now. Haltingly, he told me to work hard. Neither of us had the right script for this scene. As it was, thanks to his years as an athlete, he had developed powerful ancillary veins to the heart and recovered. But in those days heart-attack survivors were kept immobile for at least a year after the attack, thus truly ruining their health. He was never the same again.

Gene was not interested in business once the initial invention or organization had been completed. Even before the heart attack he had begun to drift away from his companies, to the consternation of his partners, the Pew family of Philadelphia, owners of Sunoil.

Three years later, when I was in the army, Gene wrote me to say that he was playing tennis again. “I am so healthy I don’t know what to do with myself now that I am removed from the Vidal companies’ activities. My withdrawal resulted in very bad feeling on the part of my associates, the Pews, who now accuse me of not acting in the best interests of the stockholders, etc. Never again will I have associates in business.” He does admit, “I was rather a phony president, seldom about and dodging all regular official work.”

Later, he would do some experimenting with molded fiberglass; he even put a small factory near my house on the Hudson that I was supposed to manage during the days when I was broke. Luckily, it burned down; unluckily, it was not insured.

Gene was never to be the Henry Ford of aviation, because no one could be. The skies were, even then, too crowded, but he did remark, in a letter toward the end of the war, “I do find that I am also a fair-haired boy now [and] that all aviation people agree that the private plane program I tried to swing ten years ago should not have been stopped up.” It should be noted that one of the prototypes that he helped develop, with government money, became the helicopter.

Once upon a time, the highest American distinction that could befall fifty-two men and women in a given year was to have one’s face on the cover of Time magazine. Even Auden was thrilled when he heard that he was the subject of a cover story, and deeply hurt when it was canceled because the managing editor, nodding beneath his flat rock, had been told that Auden was a fag and no fag could ever be so honored. This changed in time, but too late for Auden.

A lobbyist to her fingertips, Nina believed implicitly in publicity, particularly cover stories. She also believed that had it not been for her lifelong selfless service to undeserving husbands, lovers, and children, she herself could have been a very great celebrity indeed, though in what field it was never clear. Once, she had some cards printed, announcing that she was an interior decorator. Certainly, she had talent in that field, but between drink and sloth she never set, as it were, a sofa right. Even so fame, rightfully, should have been hers. The day my father brought Time magazine home, she threw the magazine in his face, which was also the one on the cover. Since their relations were relatively good at the time, this was indeed a loud cry from a jealous and competitive heart.

In 1976, some eighteen years after I had got her out of my life for good, I was on the cover of Time. A few months before, she had written me, begging for money, and I had sent her seven or eight thousand dollars. Money duly banked, she wrote Time the infamous attack on me.

I have a copy of the letter in front of me. Nina notes, apropos Exeter, that they would not take me in after the summer school because I had been caught cheating. “However,” she wrote, “with tears and pleading I got them to let him continue.” There were no tears or pleading. She never set foot in Exeter, even when I graduated. But there is some truth to the “cheating.”

Each class sat at a round table with pull-out leaves. During a written test, the master would wander about the room or look out the window while we answered the test questions that had been put to us. One lad, a heavy breather, often looked over my shoulder to see my answers. Finally, hot breath on my neck one time too many, I broke. “Here,” I muttered, and shoved the paper toward him. At that moment, the master turned around. We were both put on probation. I was not able to explain to the principal my exasperation without getting the heavy breather into even deeper trouble. But, more to the point, I knew that even if I had been able to explain the nature of my gesture—ironic, not collusive—the irony would never have registered in so literal a place.

Since English was my best subject, it was decided that, at worst, I was an accomplice. I was duly warned and allowed to come back in the fall. But honesty now requires me to say that I cheated in almost every mathematics examination; otherwise, I could not have graduated, a matter of some urgency with the war on and a high school education necessary to get into the army’s training program. My breach of Exeter’s honor system never gave me the slightest pause. After all, it was their honor system, not mine, a means of getting us to sneak on one another. None of us had been consulted in the matter, nor had we sworn an oath. We were simply told and that was that, and I have never thought much of rules arbitrarily imposed on me by others for their convenience. For me, in those days, honor was Billy the Kid: Kill my friend and I will kill you. Now honor is to try to tell the truth.

THE TRUTH IS my war was not much. With a hundred other Washington boys of seventeen, I marched into Union Station and onto an ancient train that let us off in or near Lexington, Virginia, where the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) was. The school’s cadets continued about their business while we occupied similar but unequal barracks. We were to be trained as engineers—and, of course, soldiers. I was hopeless, as always, at mathematics. But I liked Major Willard, the physics teacher, who told me (July 1943) that the atom had been broken and that somewhere out west we were creating what would be the most powerful bomb in history. So much for the top-secretness of the Manhattan Project.

“Out west,” I later learned, along with the rest of the world, was the Los Alamos Ranch School, taken over by the government a year or two after I left. The main house of the original school is now a museum showing how the place looked before the government built its city on the mesa. I am told that there are, in a glass case, the chaps that I left so happily behind, my name pinned to them like a relic.

I wrote a good deal of dark verse at VMI. I also enjoyed the company of a VMI English teacher who was surprisingly literary, but then he was a relative of Ellen Glasgow, an excellent Richmond novelist now forgotten. Since the three-month term was about to end, I realized that the army was getting ready to abandon our training program. I signaled my uncle, the commanding officer of a fighter wing at Peterson Field, Colorado Springs, and so I leaped, as it were, away from the door to the slaughterhouse through which my classmates were now obliged to pass. I already knew too much politics to be willing to die in “Roosevelt’s war.” Nina, of course, claimed credit for my transfer. “I got Gore,” she confided to Time magazine, “into the Air Force.” But, of course, she did not.

My time Stateside is a blur. At Peterson Field we lived in Quonset huts heated in winter with black iron coal-burning stoves. We alternated as CQs (charge of quarters) to stoke the coals all night long in below-zero weather. I recall a handsome red-haired southern boy who could neither read nor write. When I was CQ, he’d often stay in the hut rather than go into Colorado Springs, and I’d tell him stories, like a child. I even tried Shakespeare on him. Romeo and Juliet. He loved the plot, but then he came from feuding country and, for him, the Hatfields and the McCoys were no different from the Montagues and Capulets. The verse, what I could recall, moved him, and he would idly play with what he called his “fuck-pole,” but in no provocative way. As Dr. Kinsey would discover, there was a great deal of same-sex going on. In the States, it was dangerous on post. But in nearby Colorado Springs there were many men eager to know us, and once, after I was blown by an old man of, perhaps, thirty—my absolute cut-off age—he offered me ten dollars, which I took. As a result I, alone in the family, did not condemn Jackie’s marriage to Onassis, since I, too, had once been a small player in the commodities’ exchange market.

From Peterson Field to Lake Pontchartrain as a deckhand on an army crash boat. I knew more about boats than anything else of use to the air corps, other than being a clerk-non-typist. We were stationed at the so-called Irish Canal; our job was to pick up wet flyboys—pilots in training who had ended up in the large lake. In time, I passed an examination for first mate by memorizing most of a navigation book. My eyes were too bad to get into Officers’ Candidate School. So I became a warrant officer (junior grade) and transferred to the Transportation Corps at Fort Lewis, Seattle, Washington.

The night before we went overseas, I was in the Snakepit Bar of the Olympia Hotel in Seattle. Smoky, raw-wood-paneled dive, powerful smell of beer, cheap Ivory soap, fog-damp wool uniforms, and bodies that smelled and looked as different from today’s bodies as science-fiction earthlings differ from deodorized androids. We were a lean, sinewy, sweaty race, energized by sex and fear of death, the ultimate aphrodisiac. Bodies were different then. No one was fat, unlike most Americans today. These were Depression boys. I recently watched some old “pornographic” films of the period. I had forgotten what the so-called workingman’s body was like—thick-thighed, flat-chested, with muscular arms, not as comely as an aerobics-styled body of today, but solider, uncalculated, earthlike.

Certain that I was going to be killed wherever it was that the ships would take us the next day, I thought that I should at least experiment with a potential Jimmie. For the first time, I picked up someone. A merchant mariner. He was delighted. I noted that he wore a wedding ring, but then half the hunters in the bar were fleshing out Dr. Kinsey’s as-yet-uncharted graph from 1 to 6 (those exclusively heterosexual were 1; homosexual, 6; 2 through 5 were swingers between 1 and 6). In the Snakepit Bar the golden mean prevailed, as I suspect it does throughout the race.

We tried to get a room in the hotel; all were taken except for a “samples room.” We took that. The room was a corridor with a long table where salesmen could line up samples of whatever it was that they were selling. At the far end, in an alcove, there was a bed. I was nineteen, just under six feet, weighing in at one hundred and fifty pounds. He was twenty-five and weighed about one hundred seventy pounds; he was shorter than I, but we seemed a fair fit. Once in bed I realized that I had no plan; this proved to be an error. Suddenly, he was on my back. I tried to push him off. He used an expert half nelson in order to shove partway in. I bucked like a horse from the pain, and threw us both off the bed. We rolled across the floor, slugging at each other. Then, exhausted, we separated. He cursed; dressed; left. That was my first and last experience of being nearly fucked.

By ship we sailed up Prince Rupert’s Channel to Anchorage, Alaska. I got drunk for the first time New Year’s Eve 1944–45. I was reprimanded. Then out to the islands, the Chain, as the Aleutians were known.

Palimpsest from Williwaw, my first novel.

The main street of Dutch Harbor curved parallel with the beach for half a mile. Most of the houses were on this street. Bars and restaurants and one theater, all wooden, also lined the street. The buildings had been painted white originally; they were many weathered shades of gray, now. On a small hill, behind two bars and a former brothel was the old Russian Orthodox church, with two onion-shaped cupolas painted green while the rest of the church was an almost new-white.

On several lanes, running inland from the main street, were the homes of the two hundred odd pre-war residents. Most of the houses had been vacated and the windows were boarded up and the privies leaned crazily in the back yards. Seven trees, which had been imported, were withered now, and their limbs had been made grotesque by the constant wind.

A mile inland from the shore and the village was the army camp. It had been erected early in the war and its many barracks and offices duplicated the military life of the distant United States.

Soldiers from the post and sailors from the Navy ships in the harbor wandered about the crooked lanes and along the main street. They were looking for liquor and women. There was much of one and little of the other in Dutch Harbor. Prices were high for both.

I took over as first mate of freight-supply ship 35, operating between Chernowski Bay on the island of Unimak (according to the atlas—we called it Umnak) to Dutch Harbor. We made a weekly trip carrying cargo and seasick soldiers. The Aleutians were barren volcanic islands, home to huge ravens and small foxes, with beaches strewn with moonstones and jasper.

From Williwaw:

Major Barkison contemplated the sea and was pleased by it. Today the water was smooth and only occasionally disturbed by gusts of wind. The Major stood alone on the forward deck. A few miles to his left was the vanishing entrance to Dutch Harbor; before him was the Bering Sea.

The water of the Bering Sea was a deep blue-black [and] the Major . . . watched carefully the ship-made waves: black when with the sea mass, then varying shades of clear blue as they swept up into the large waves, exploding at last in sudden whiteness. When he had the time, Major Barkison appreciated beauty. He had three days now in which to be appreciative.

Several sea lions wallowed fearlessly near the ship. Their black coats glistened in the pale morning light. For a moment they dove and splashed near the ship, and then, quickly, they went away. . . .

Major Barkison had a sure method of foretelling weather, or anything else for that matter. He would, for instance, select a certain patch of sky and then count slowly to three; if, during that time, no sea gull crossed the patch of sky, the thing he wanted would come true. This method could be applied to everything and the Major had great faith in it.

He looked at a section of sky above a distant volcano. Slowly he counted. At the count of two a gull flew across his patch of sky. The Major frowned. He had a way, however, of dealing with this sort of thing. He would use the best two counts out of three. Quickly he counted. No gull appeared. The trip would not be bad. In his mind, though, he wondered if it might not be cheating to take the best two out of three. One had to play fair. Not that he was superstitious, of course.

As it proved, the Major was in for a williwaw, a sudden wind out of the mountains that my fictional ship—like my actual one, the F.S. 35—barely survived. I suffered—not then but later—a drenching in below-zero weather. Hypothermia.

A few days later, while docking at Dutch Harbor, I tried to leap from bow to dock, and my knee locked. Something had gone wrong. The hospital at Fort Richardson, Anchorage, X-rayed me: rheumatoid arthritis or rheumatic fever.

Since we could select a hospital near home for recovery, I picked Van Nuys, California, to be near, not Nina, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, but the movies. I would hitchhike into Hollywood and hang around the studios, an endless fascination.