“Gene Collins”

THE YEAR 1948 was the year that I became, overnight, as Michael Foot put it in an English review, like Byron, “famous.” The City and the Pillar came out in January. As a best-seller that year it was somewhat ahead of Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, somewhat behind Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Only Mailer and I have survived that year’s best-seller list, headed by George Orwell’s 1984. In those days works of literature were often popular, something no longer possible. But then, for someone young today, 1948 is as remote as the year 1903 was for us—the year that Henry James published The Ambassadors and Jack London, The Call of the Wild.

Although my book had generally very bad reviews—sterile was a favorite adjective, code word for faggot—the book was being read not only by the crushed and closeted inhabitants of Sodom but by a great many other people as well, including Dr. Kinsey, as I have noted. In the same season he and I made, jointly, a nice assault on the Leviticus Committee Report, and the United States was never to be the same again, on that subject at least.

I have often been asked what family and friends thought of The City and the Pillar. The Gores did not finish the book; and the Senator never mentioned it to me. But our relations were unchanged. After he died in 1949, my grandmother used to come and stay in my house on the Hudson; we would also go to Key West together in the winter. The most she ever said was, “You mustn’t stir up more snakes than you can kill.” When I asked her if this was an old South Carolina saying, she said, “No, I think I just made it up.”

My father, Gene Vidal (1895–1969), when he was a football and track star at the University of South Dakota. The local congressman was so excited by his playing that he appointed him to West Point. Had he not been a great athlete he might never have got out of South Dakota, and so I would not have existed—in present guise.

Nina was thrilled by my subsequent failures—five books unreviewed by the daily New York Times, Time, and Newsweek. “You see,” she would confide to anyone who would listen, “he isn’t really a novelist, he’s only a journalist, with just the one book in him, and now of course he’s finished.” Heaven knows who gave her this line, but she reveled in it. Then everything changed rapidly when I became a “hit” playwright on Broadway. Carlos Fuentes tells me that once he came to her house in Cuernavaca and, not finding her in the sitting room, he went to the next room, which proved to be her bedroom. She was lying on the bed, paperback editions of my books all around her—this was years after I had sent her away for good. Odd.

My father—I now realize—was being deliberately cryptic when he’d say, “I think it’s a very interesting book.” Thus closing the subject. Actually, it must have been of more interest to him than I ever suspected. At the time I had heard of—but never read—Robert McAlmon. He was from my father’s hometown of Madison, South Dakota. Like most of the bright and restless young of the heartland villages, he got out. He was a writer. He settled in Europe and was friend and editor to Pound and Hemingway. I have an impression that, at some point, he wrote me a letter that I never answered.

I cannot remember when or how I first heard that McAlmon had been romantically involved with Gene. I know that I always kept forgetting to ask Gene about him—because McAlmon had the reputation of being Capote-like in his inventions?

Although McAlmon was neither a good writer nor “a good person,” he was a good editor; he also wrote an interesting autobiography called Being Geniuses Together, which Kay Boyle later reissued, adding her life story to McAlmon’s text. No, I never talked to Kay Boyle about him, either.

Finally, I read McAlmon’s novel Village: As It Happened Through a Fifteen Year Period. There, on the first page, is my father at fifteen, consulting a Ouija board in order to discover whether he will be appointed to West Point or to Annapolis or to neither. The narrator is McAlmon, aged fourteen; he is in love with Gene, whom he calls Eugene Collins. At first I took this to be a reference to war pilot Paul Collins, my father’s airline partner in the twenties and thirties; but the dates didn’t work out. Then, in the spring of 1994 at the University of South Dakota, I saw a fraternity photograph of Gene sitting near the strikingly handsome head of the fraternity, a youth named Collins.

What is McAlmon up to?

The book covers fifteen years in the life of a village, based on Madison. Gene grows up. Goes to West Point. Becomes an all-American football player. Marries Nina. McAlmon himself comes and goes, recording the rather sad life of a village where the bright boys and girls all move away, as he himself does, too.

If I had had the sense to get to know McAlmon, I might have learned a great deal about Gene, not to mention Hemingway, whom McAlmon had fingered as a fellow fag, to Hemingway’s fury. Whatever McAlmon may have said about others later in life, right or wrong, he is plainly working from the facts in Village. My aunt, Margaret, who is about to be born at the beginning of the book, testifies to the accuracy of his description of life in that box of a house in South Dakota where winters were arctic and summers hot, and Peter Reynalds (McAlmon) would visit Gene Collins, and they’d discuss the facts of life and Gene, after some stammering, says,

“Well, you know what happens to fellows our age—I wonder if it’s happened to you yet.”

Peter answered quickly: “I guess so; I thought Chemo had talked to you. I told him about the scare I had one night after I got to bed, and I thought something had burst in me. He said he’d been afraid when that happened to him, and went to see Dr. Douglas who only laughed and said: ‘That’s all right Chemo, my boy. You just take a girl and you’ll be all right,’ and Chemo thought he had to or he’d be sick. But you don’t have to at all because your dreams take care of you.”

Peter wondered to himself if he really liked Gene as a friend as he liked Lloyd Scott. The unspoken understanding that had existed between him and Lloyd was not here with Gene. He almost resented his affection for Gene; he wondered if he’d have liked him at all if many other boys of his own age were about. It was simply that all of the other boys in their classes at high school were such dumb-heads. Gene had an attraction for him, however, that Lloyd had never had. He wondered, was that simply now, and because both of them were adolescent? But if that was so, why did it exist more between him and Gene than between him and other boys in that period? He saw that Gene felt about him as he did about Gene; attracted, and antagonistic too. That was rivalry, and jealousy, because the two of them led their class easily.

This is right out of The City and the Pillar, including the clumsy gray all-American prose. Gene never mentioned McAlmon to me. Had he forgotten him, as Bob had pretty much forgotten Jim?

The years pass and the passion cools on McAlmon’s side:

Gene Collins, after two years at the State University, was appointed to West Point, and his first year there made a great name for himself as a football player. By this time any friendship that had existed between him and Peter Reynalds had evaporated. Six years had passed. Peter . . . found that they were completely antipathetic to each other. Gene’s attitude about money, a tightfisted one, was the first symptom; and his intentness on making a good marriage was a second.

This is, plainly, a bit of a projection. It was McAlmon who was obliged to marry the wealthy English lesbian novelist Bryher, in order to survive. In any case, Nina had no money.

Later, in a memoir, McAlmon writes of Eugene Vidal, the director of Air Commerce, whom he had once known, and remarks that boys like Gene and himself were a lot more articulate than Hemingway was currently rendering them in his mannered stories of dumb-ox Midwest lads.

After Aunt Margaret, at my suggestion, read Village, she said, “Well, it’s pretty clear he liked Gene too much,” exactly the same words that Jimmie’s mother used about Jimmie’s stepfather. Recently, when I visited Madison, I asked about McAlmon. A few people had heard of Village, but every time a copy arrived at the library, the librarian locked it up.

Although I was once held in the arms of my grandparents Vidal in a Chicago hotel room, I have no memory of them. But at Madison I did go to the cemetery to see their graves, two small yellow lichen-covered stone markers: F. L. Vidal and Margaret Vidal. They died less than a year apart: in 1934. My uncle—the youngest child—said that for days on end they would not speak to each other. Then, after their sundown supper, they would go to bed and make love; hence, his “scandalous” birth when she was in her forties.

McAlmon:

Mrs. Collins, Gene’s mother, came into the room to say goodnight. She was retiring early, exhausted, as she might well be, carrying her great flabby person about all day.

“I’m not one to brag,” she said, “or to want my children to be snobs, but I just tell them about their forebears so they will know they can hold their heads up anywhere they go. Of course the debt will never be paid, but if the French government ever would pay back all it owes to our family from away back since the Revolution, we’d be one of the wealthiest families in the world. I don’t remember very clearly, but some ancestors of ours lent some king or other all kinds of money years and years back. We aren’t one of those families which can’t trace back more than a generation; though I’m very democratic myself, and not one to boast.”

Fifteen-year-old Gene looked sheepish, and mumbled: “Peter doesn’t give a darn about all that rot, mother,” but Mrs. Collins pattered on for a few minutes. Her mind and her conversation never stayed fixed on any one point for long, so that before finally saying goodnight, she was rambling on about the marriage that her father, the gay, rakish old Mr. Dubois, had made. “He wrote me the woman was wealthy but I’ve heard nothing from him since, and from other reports that are drifting back, I’m thinking both he and that Atlantic City widow played a joke on each other, each pretending to have money they don’t have.”

Old Mr. Dubois was my grandmother’s father, Luther Lazarus Rewalt, a Pennsylvanian Dutchman from Morristown. He was known as Foxy Grandpa, after a natty cartoon character of the day. He had served, he said, as a doctor in a Pennsylvania regiment in the Civil War. I looked up his army record. Apparently, he was a civilian doctor employed by a Washington hospital to look after the wounded. He was fired for drinking and playing cards with enlisted men while on duty. In his last years, he did very well with something called Rewalt’s Elixir, a patent medicine containing sugar and gin by which many a Midwest temperance lady swore. Always on the lookout for a rich widow, he thought that he had found one in California. They met. Unfortunately, she was on the lookout for a rich widower. Each fooled the other only briefly. That winter he came back to Madison. After a night in a tavern, he passed out in a snowdrift. The temperature was below zero. The next morning, what everyone took to be the frozen body of Dr. Rewalt rose briskly from a snowdrift, brushed the ice from his overcoat, and said, “You see? The virtues of my elixir.” The alcohol in his veins had kept him from freezing solid.

McAlmon’s Gene is hard and calculating. I never saw that side to him, and perhaps McAlmon’s view is colored by the Jim-Bob syndrome that results from rejection.

The University of South Dakota yearbook hails Gene as their greatest athlete but notes that he “lacks aggressiveness.” A Senate committee came to the same conclusion about his administration of the Bureau of Air Commerce. I suspect that what he “lacked” was the single-minded ambition that most people are accustomed to. He was restless, curious, inventive. In general, people bored him, and since he had no wish to exert power over them, he was not “aggressive”—or much of anything else—in his relations with them. When a journalist once remarked to him on my “courage,” his response was to the point: “What’s courageous if you don’t care what people think of you?”

One detail that establishes the authenticity of McAlmon’s report on “Gene Collins” is the mother’s long ramble about the loan to some long-dead “French” king. One of the first things that I ever knew about the family was the loan which, if ever repaid, would make us all incredibly rich.

My great-great-grandfather, Jost Josef de Traxler, of Stans, Switzerland, had been a member of the Swiss guard of Louis XVI at Versailles. During the revolution, he survived the general slaughter of the guard and escaped to Madrid, where he was employed by Louis’ cousin Charles IV, king of Spain. This was 1803. When Napoleon invaded in 1808, Traxler and his son-in-law Ludwig von Hartmann of Lucerne raised a regiment with their own money to fight for the Spanish king against Napoleon, who wanted to include Spain as well as Portugal in what Napoleon tidily referred to as his “continental system.” Charles IV, to whom my great-great- and great-grandfather had sworn loyalty, abdicated in his son Ferdinand’s favor, only to be replaced by Napoleon’s brother Joseph. Meanwhile, the Spanish people resisted Napoleon, and our family’s regiment played a considerable part in the resistance. Once Napoleon was gone and the royal family restored, the cortes, or parliament, of Spain was presented with the family’s bill for services rendered and the government acknowledged the legitimacy of the claim as well as the sad emptiness of the treasury. Finally, in the 1930s, just before the republic fell, the debt to the family was honored and my father received his share of the many millions that the family in Madison, South Dakota, had dreamed would enrich them—some three hundred dollars, I seem to remember.

I saw a photograph of my great-grandmother’s grave in Wisconsin. She was born Carolina de Traxler, and her place of birth is given as “Carthage.” It took me some time to realize that Carthage was the Wisconsin translation of Cartagena in Spain, where she had been born. Professional Swiss soldiers seldom lived in Switzerland: Her father, Jost Joseph, had been born in Naples, where his father had been commander of the guard of the king of the two Sicilys. By my grandmother’s time all this was a glamorous blur, involving royal rich birth for us all.

Robert McAlmon: It is curious—to say the least—to encounter one’s father as a boy of fifteen as seen through the eyes of a boy of fourteen who is in love with him. I was as intrigued by the possibilities of all this as I was by Jimmie’s sudden interest in Walt Whitman.

I replay in my head Gene’s comment that he had found The City and the Pillar “very interesting.” Had I, without knowing it, told his story? With Gene as Bob Ford, who forgets about a youthful idyll, and Robert McAlmon as Jim Willard, a writer who is still writing about what may or may not have happened in their common boyhood. If nothing else, the very ordinariness of the story makes it a good deal more universal than I realized when I wrote it at the age of twenty—I turned twenty-one as I wrote the ending in Guatemala City. Certainly, McAlmon must have been intrigued that the son of “Eugene Collins” had written a variation on Village without ever having heard of the book or its author.