At Home on the Hudson in the Cold War
IN THE SPRING OF 1950 I left New Orleans for New York City. I was twenty-four. I had just published The Season of Comfort, written earlier in Guatemala. Although I have never reissued the book, it was as close to an autobiographical novel as I was to write until Washington, D.C. Dot told me that Nina had gone on a bender when she read it. I suggested that the bender was an excuse not to read what she could not have got through anyway. Where Dah, like some ancient vampire, had turned me into an undead voracious reader like himself, Nina and her brother, in rebellion against him, were resolute illiterates.
I was ready to settle down, somewhere near but not in New York City as the Russians were coming and the Bomb would soon fall in the night. The American people were now being systematically terrified by the country’s ownership. Schoolchildren were told how to “save” themselves when the Bombs fell. If in school, they were to hide under their desks. At home, parents were exhorted to build shelters in backyards or basements. The great perpetual American war machine was now humming smoothly, and though it was still officially peacetime (soon we would have a proper war in Korea), Truman had reinstituted the draft, something unknown in the United States except in wartime. Income taxes were as high as 90 percent in order to pay the defense cartel to keep the arsenal of democracy full of weapons so that we could help all the peace-loving little countries everywhere on earth whether they wanted to be helped or not. When we learned, apropos the 1954 Geneva accords, that the people of North and South Vietnam would, in a free election, vote for Ho Chi Minh and godless Communism, Kissinger wailed, “Don’t we have the right to save a people from themselves?”
On the lawn at Edgewater. I still dream of this house, which I owned from 1950 to about 1968. This picture was taken in 1960, shortly after I was nominated by the Democrats for Congress.
Later, when Kennedy was preparing for an all-out war, somewhere, anywhere, he got Life magazine to assure the American people that in an atomic war, “Ninety-seven out of one hundred people can be saved,” if they would only get out those shovels, and take Civil Defense seriously. Jack knew, of course, that this was nonsense, but the White House film critic and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., assured his master that, if nothing else, this was one way “of making foreign policy less abstract or remote.” Arthur thought that the idea of being blown up would strengthen the fiber of the American people; he did fret that an appeal only to those with backyards might be too narrow an electoral base, since most of those who traditionally voted Democratic could not afford houses, much less backyards.
This was the nonsense that first began to be seriously spouted in 1950 by Harry Truman and Dean Acheson and the lords of the defense industry, who did not want to lose their vast revenues from the War Department, now humorously renamed the Defense Department. Did I see through all of this at the time with these sharp eyes that have always been fixed intently upon a future that never works? No. I believed the whole nonsense. I did have informants at the heart of the empire—Gene would be made chairman of a Pentagon committee on secret weapons, mediating between army and newly autonomous air force, while my uncle was an air force general and ex-Senator Gore was not without his contacts with what he had been the first to refer to as that “first-rate, second-rate little man Harry Truman.” But, as far as I can tell now, only a small group at the heart of the National Security State knew just how weak the Soviet economy was and how far behind us they were in modern weaponry.
Meanwhile, charges of Communism at home were beginning to ruin the careers not only of those few who had actually been Communists, but of many others who held unpopular views on politics or sex or race or religion. Truman introduced the loyalty oath for federal employees; this, in turn, made it possible for the likes of Senator Joseph McCarthy—our Titus Oates—to flourish. Who was loyal? Who was disloyal? American or un-American? Fascism was taking off, never to come to earth again, though it is, occasionally, put briefly on hold.
Allen Ginsberg thinks of those years as a liberating time. I don’t. I remember only conformity and fear and silence. The Beats thought that they had made a great gesture by opting out and going on the road to Morocco, not to mention to pot, but they were never in anything to begin with. They were marginal people who would have gone unnoticed had it not been for Allen’s genius as a publicist. But then, once they had finally made it to a degree of television fame, they let themselves be patronized by lumpen-imperialists of the far right like Buckley, Jr.
At that time no writer of my generation was truly political except Norman Mailer, who had nobly spoken out for Henry Wallace, the sole politician in the 1948 election to draw attention to that great con game the National Security State. Wallace was duly demonized as a Communist and flushed from the system.
Two years later I met Mailer at the novelist Vance Bourjaily’s house. Vance and his wife had organized a sort of New York literary salon, which tended to net writer-writers rather than teacher-writers. Fags were shunned (if not well closeted), while the Jewish writers tended to center around Partisan Review. Except for Tennessee and Bowles and Louis Auchincloss, I never really got to know many of my contemporaries. I had the impression, no doubt an unjust one, that most of them were only playing at being writers, each modeling himself on one of the three prototypes of the previous generation—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.
Mailer tells me that I was curious about his age, and that of his parents. He says that I then calculated that I would “win” as I was bound, actuarially, to outlive him. I do think that this ancient saw has a limited truth. Between outliving one’s contemporaries and the ignorance of journalists, there is something—not very much—to be said for living a long time.
Years later, Norman told me, “I thought you were the devil.” I found him interesting if long-winded. I never finished The Naked and the Dead, but I liked the next novel, Barbary Shore. He was trained at Harvard as an engineer, and I have a theory that the mind of an engineer, though well suited for many things, is ill suited for either literature or politics. For the engineer everything must connect; while the natural writer or politician knows, instinctively, that nothing ever really connects except in what we imagine science to be. Literature, like the politics of a Franklin Roosevelt, requires a divergent mind. Engineering (Mailer and Solzhenitsyn) requires a convergent mind. Compare Roosevelt’s inspired patternless arabesques as a politician, artfully dodging this way and that, to the painstaking engineer Jimmy Carter, doggedly trying to make it all add up, and failing.
As of 1950, if I had been thinking seriously of politics instead of the mechanics of election, I would have been as one with Mailer. But I had missed all the wars of ideology that for twenty years had convulsed New York intellectuals. Debates at school and around the family dinner table concerned “real,” not theoretic, politics: Do we go to war or not? That was a poignant question indeed for someone my age and a matter of profound philosophic implications to a populist like Gore.
In any case, I was now interested only in reading and writing and anonymous sex. Although I have had several lifelong friends who were writers, I have never much enjoyed the company of writers. I also did not realize, nor did the others at Vance Bourjaily’s gatherings, that we had arrived on the scene to witness the end of the novel. Today the word novelist still enjoys considerable prestige, so much so that both Mailer and Capote chose to call works of journalism novels. But that was thirty years ago. Today an ambitious writer would be well advised to label any work of his imagination nonfiction, or, perhaps, a memoir.
One day, in the spring of 1950, I was invited to lunch by a very ambitious, very young southern novelist who wanted to shine in those social circles that are, for the most part, closed to very young ambitious southern writers. Like Capote, he wanted to be accepted by what was known then as café society, and like Capote, he had mistaken it for the great, and largely invisible to outsiders, world that Proust had so obsessively retrieved from lost time. In later years, I liked to pretend that Capote had actually picked the right ladder and I would observe, most unctuously, “Truman Capote has tried, with some success, to get into a world that I have tried, with some success, to get out of.” Truman was surprisingly innocent. He mistook the rich who liked publicity for the ruling class, and he made himself far too much at home among them, only to find that he was to them no more than an amusing pet who could be dispensed with, as he was when he published lurid gossip about them. Although of little interest or value in themselves, these self-invented figures are nothing if not tough, and quite as heartless as the real thing, as the dying Swann discovered when he found that his life meant less to his esteemed duchess than her pair of red shoes.
“Can you come to lunch with Alice Astor Bouverie?” The maiden name was trumpeted in my ear. When I paused, not knowing who she was, he said, “Truman will be there.” Plainly, he believed that Truman’s presence, as arbiter, would convince me that the extended ladder was secure. But I had already observed various Astors at Newport, Rhode Island. The Auchinclosses tended to disdain the Astors as flashy even though the Auchinclosses were far newer on the scene and, despite Hughdie’s healthy infusion of Standard Oil money through his mother, nowhere near as rich as John Jacob Astor, who had gone down with the Titanic, leaving three children, Vincent, Alice and, by a later wife, the posthumously born John Jacob IV, whose stepbrothers had been in school with me.
I forget where the lunch was held or who else was there. I now note that Alice was a year older than my mother, while Anaïs was exactly Nina’s age. Since I so little liked Nina, why was I drawn to women her age? More understandably, I was also drawn to women my grandmother’s age, like Eleanor Roosevelt and our mutual neighbor on the Hudson, Alice Dows. In those days, girls one’s own age meant marriage. This made any sort of friendship with them uneasy if not impossible. Later, when I turned dramatist, I got to know actresses, and as we were all in the same business, relations entirely changed. Most of them didn’t want marriage, either. I relaxed, for the first time, and enjoyed myself.
Alice was slender, dark, pale-skinned; from some angles she was beautiful. Out of boredom, her mother, Ava, had divorced Astor in order to marry the rakish Lord Ribblesdale—nicely sketched by Sargent; they settled in England, where Alice was brought up while her brother Vincent remained at Rhinecliff on the Hudson in a huge McKinley Gothic wooden mansion. Once, when a guest was leaving, he thanked Ava for a splendid weekend and wondered what on earth he could do to repay her hospitality. “On the way out,” she said in her deep Edwardian voice, “drop a match.”
Ribblesdale’s first wife had been a sister of Herbert Asquith, that most civilized of prime ministers, and I used to ask old Ava questions about him and his sharp-tongued wife, the sometime novelist Margot. “I remember,” said Ava, eating a chocolate soufflé as Alice looked humbly on, “when she wrote a novel—she always needed money—and the publisher said that she must put some sex into it. She was mystified, of course. She only cared about politics. Then she was inspired. ‘I did just as he asked,’ she said to me in triumph. ‘I wrote the most marvellous scene of a woman giving birth.’”
By four husbands, Alice had four children. In order to accommodate the latter, she had built herself a gray stone manor house at Ferncliff, the Astor estate high above the Hudson. The house was set far back from the river road, which winds through the wooded estates of Delanos, Vanderbilts, Aldriches, Roosevelts, not to mention Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, built by Ogden Mills. But by 1950 there was not a good deal of mirth in any of the houses. Families had died out or broken up while the postwar economy had eliminated that principal support of any hereditary aristocracy, the servant class.
Alice inherited $5 million from her father; when she died, in 1956, she left exactly $5 million, despite the extravagance of her husbands as well as generous gifts to all sorts of mysterious adventurers aprowl in the psychic world. Alice had once been Queen Tiy in Pharaonic Egypt. She had also come into possession of the queen’s necklace, which looked cursed to anyone like me, who had been brought up on the film The Mummy. I make her sound silly. But she was not. She liked the arts and artists. She liked the night best of all. With a few friends she would talk, play Chinese checkers, speculate on mysteries, and watch the sun rise as gray lawns turned green. She always seemed to me to be somewhat misplaced in America. She disliked her brother Vincent, a drunken slow-witted creature, but, to give him due credit, he had an ingeniously malevolent sense of humor. For one of his houseguests, a lady notorious for her gallantry, he prepared a special edition of a Hearst Sunday newspaper. The details of her love life were on page three, provoking a most satisfying set of hysterics. As owner of the magazine Newsweek, he could indulge his passion for mock newspapers.
Alice had intended to spend her life in England, where she had grown up. Nobly, she stayed in London through the worst of the blitz; then, at war’s end, she came back to the United States, for the sake, I suppose, of her children; ironically, two of them moved to England as soon as they could. At Rhinecliff she lived as if she were still English. Frederick Ashton, the Sitwells, various Churchills came to stay. I used to visit on weekends.
Alice also undertook considerable research to establish, to her own satisfaction if not that of brother Vincent, that the Astors had once been kosher butchers in Waldorf, Germany. She thought this a nice antidote to the snobbism of her grandmother Caroline, “the Mrs. Astor” whose delicious task it was, through her court chamberlain, Ward McAllister, to exclude from society all but the four hundred old-guard New Yorkers whom she could insert into her ballroom. Alice preferred more raffish—not to mention more interesting—company.
Paradoxically, like so many of her class and generation, Alice had legitimate doubts as to her paternity. She was fairly certain that she was not John Jacob Astor’s child, and so the hot kosher blood of the butcher of Waldorf did not run through veins that contained the blue-tinted blood of one Sid Hatch, an elegant figure about New York at the turn of the century.
I never met Mr. Hatch, but a friend described a lunch that Alice gave for him at a restaurant in New York. As usual, Alice arrived late; and her half-dozen guests were already seated. “Too sorry. The wind, too terrible. The trees. The telephone . . .” She had a series of murmured cryptic remarks to serve as excuses for habitual lateness. Meanwhile, as she took her place, she was still screwing on a pair of earrings. Then she noticed an empty place at table. “Where is Sid?” she asked.
“Here is Sid,” said a tall, thin, dark-haired man, hurrying to the table. He looked not only exactly like Alice, but he was even later than she, while, the telling detail, as he took his place, my informer noted, he was hurriedly screwing on his cuff links.
ALICE WAS IN LOVE with the choreographer Frederick Ashton, who was not in love with her but accepted, sometimes with ill grace, her numerous gifts; he often stayed with her at Rhinecliff, where I got to know him. He affected to be in love with me. I said no; but enjoyed his company. He was pouter-breasted, with a permanently crooked finger that was ideal for a wicked witch in pantomime but not so good in other roles. I watched, with him, the first Ashton ballet that I ever saw in New York, Les Patineurs. I thought it very pretty but not Tudor, Robbins, or de Mille.
Freddie was a great mimic—mime, too—and one of his best numbers was that of Ida Rubinstein, a rich woman who commissioned ballets for herself to dance, with decor by the likes of Picasso, music by Stravinsky, and so on. Somehow, the young Freddie ended up with her company. As a prima ballerina, Ida had but a single flaw: She could not, properly speaking, dance.
As “Madame,” Freddie would take the floor in Alice’s drawing room. Slowly, awkwardly, he would get on point. Arms in a spaghettilike adage. Then a stricken look as he realizes he is about to fall off point. Teeters toward sofa. Clutches sofa. Radiant smile as he gets behind the sofa and comes off point with a crash, accepting the cheers of a great audience.
One winter day Alice drove several of us north along the river road to a deserted house called Edgewater, so named as the lawn ended at river’s edge; three acres of locust trees, willows, and copper beech provided a miniature park. The house was Greek Revival; six tall columns fronted a cinnamon-colored stucco facade. The house was built in 1820 for a branch of the Livingston family, to whom a Stuart king had granted close to a third of what would become New York State. At one end of the house an octagonal library had been added, the work of A. J. Davis. In time, Alice’s relatives, the Chanlers, acquired the place. A Chanler lady married John Jay Chapman, easily the most original of American essayists, and he lived at Edgewater while he built a house for himself nearby. “Coldest winter I’ve ever spent,” he said of his brief stay. He also wrote, “The thing that stirs us in any man’s writing is the man himself—a thing quite outside the page, and for which the man is not responsible.”
We approached the house from the unimpressive back, where the original driveway had been replaced by the New York Central railroad, thus making the house unlivable for two generations. By 1950 the trains were cleaner and fewer, though no less noisy. A speculator now owned the more or less abandoned place.
Through tall grass where once a lawn had been, we came around the house and there I first saw the row of columns and the wide view of river with the blue Catskill Mountains beyond. “It’s like the Austrian lakes,” said Alice. She had acquired a romantic lakeside villa during her marriage to Raimond von Hofmannsthal, son of Hugo and himself a man of considerable charm, as well as expensive tastes. When Alice finally noticed that they had spent a million dollars of her money on castles and other toys, she divorced Raimond and married a poor Englishman of modest tastes. Raimond married again, most grandly. He worked for Time magazine in London and gave pleasure to all, including the British army, in which he served during the war. Once, in the barracks, while Raimond was reading in his bunk, the charge of quarters announced, “Attention! Side arms inspection.” Everyone scurried to get pistols in order as the officer proceeded down the center of the barracks, examining side arms. Raimond, as vague as Alice, had heard not “side arms” but “short arms,” which meant an inspection for venereal disease. So, as the officer came abreast of him, Raimond presented his short arm. I last saw him pursuing a girl in the street in front of London’s Connaught Hotel. He stopped when he saw me. He grinned and mopped his sweating face. “I am too old for this sort of thing, of course . . .” We chatted amiably. A few days later I read that he was dead.
Although I was short of money that year, I managed to buy Edgewater for six thousand dollars and a ten-thousand-dollar mortgage, which, had I not discovered television four years later, I would have had a hard time paying off. Alice lent me some of the furniture that she was obsessively acquiring for the return to London that would never take place.
In July 1950, I moved in. I was not yet twenty-five and oblivious of what I had taken on.
I set about putting the place in order. With a borrowed scythe, I painfully restored the lawn. A small island went with the property and on hot summer days I’d swim out to it. In winter I’d walk to it over glacier-thick ice that creaked and groaned as the river’s current broke the shifting ice floes. Summers were too hot; winters too cold. Spring was best. Lilies of the valley grew wild. A huge weeping willow at lawn’s edge. A collapsed boathouse with copper roof. White red-bordered peonies in a row beneath the colonnade. Locust trees with white, densely rose-fragrant blossoms. Idyllic season. John Latouche wrote the lyrics to a song called “Lazy Afternoon” at Edgewater.
The first novel that I wrote in the house was The Judgment of Paris. When a writer moves into the house that he most wants or needs, the result is often a sudden release of new energy. Henry James’s move to Lamb House produced The Wings of the Dove, Somerset Maugham’s move to Villa Mauresque resulted in his only satisfactory novel, Cakes and Ale. In my case, there was a burst of energy and imagination of a sort not accessible to me before. Overnight—the result of the octagonal library?—I jettisoned what I called “the national manner,” the gray, slow realism of most American writing, not to mention the strict absence of wit and color, and I made a sort of bildungsroman about a young man loose in Europe after the war, preparing to make his own judgment of Paris. Would he give the golden apple, his life, to wisdom, power, or love? Mysteriously, Burroughs misread my high comedy for an attempt at “tragedy,” but then no one else was writing like that in those days, and what would a literal American reader make of a text full of classical allusions? At Edgewater, when I first read Petronius and Apuleius, an electrical current was switched on. Simultaneously, late at night, I read straight through Meredith and Peacock; and felt at home in their company. I even read most of Scott’s novels, and longed to write my own Count Robert of Paris. Meanwhile, my contemporaries—the ambitious literary ones—were trying to find sustenance in the likes of thin Hawthorne or wafer-thin Hemingway, then in high fashion.
I have just read a bad review of The City and the Pillar in The Harvard Advocate, spring of 1948. The writer duly notes that I am about the same age as the editors of the paper but that I have obviously done myself in by not having gone to college. In a sense, for a conventional writer, the reviewer was right. It is probably a good thing that the dwindling company of twentieth-century readers and the hugely expanding company of writers share the same syllabus. Although the voluntary reader will have read many books that schoolteachers will never have heard of, he may not know all of their required reading. Required reading! I have noticed over the years that those who go on to become teachers or critics—or even novelists or poets of a hyphenate kind—tend, as time passes, to dislike, even resent, all literature. But then the secret worm in their brazen apple is careerism, which kills off the amateur or the dilettante, the very best sort of reader, if not writer.
During my first four years at Edgewater, I could not stop reading. I got through James (the New York edition, for which I paid $125, all that I had in the bank). I read through Smollett, too. Then—secondhand books were cheap in those days—I discovered George Saintsbury, unaware that he was out of fashion. Saintsbury led me into French literature. He also led me to the essay; and, best of all, to Montaigne. Although I had written occasional book reviews in the papers of the day, I never wrote a proper essay until 1954, when I read a new translation of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars. Suddenly, I had so many new thoughts on the subject of sex and power that I was obliged to write an essay on the subject, not for publication but just to clear my own mind. Eventually, it was published (though a dozen papers turned it down as much too radical), and that is how I became an essayist. I wrote first for myself; then for those few readers who might be interested in the resulting essai, French word for “attempt.”
Meanwhile, I was going broke. Labor Day, 1950, I met Howard Austen. He worked for an advertising agency in New York; on weekends he came up to Edgewater. Alice and her group liked him; that is, the new group that I had helped her assemble, based on John Latouche, whose wit delighted her almost as much as their shared passion for the night.
John Latouche was one of “the little friends” that I had got to know when I was first in New York. Others were the set designer Oliver Smith, his cousin Paul Bowles, the composer Virgil Thomson, and a half-dozen other originals or near originals. Touche had written “Ballad for Americans” in his youth, a becoming patriotic ballad, much loved by A. J. Connell of the Los Alamos Ranch School. He also wrote lyrics for Ballet Ballads and Cabin in the Sky. He was a wit of the hard-drinking Irish school; he was always broke; he pretended to be a Communist, and was much blacklisted in the fifties. Alice was enchanted with him.
In the city, the two of them would go from one smoky club to another, all through many a night. Whenever Touche appeared, musicians would play his song “Takin’ a Chance on Love.” For a time, Alice fell in love with him, and he was charmed by her. She helped him out financially, and he helped her through one splendid night after another. In one very dark club, as she sat in a booth, long white fingers entangled in the enamel necklace of Queen Tiy, Latouche returned from the lavatory and presented her with the chain to the toilet. She often wore this chain, usually wound around a ruby-and-emerald necklace. I don’t think she ever dared offend her earlier self, Queen Tiy, with so flippant an ornament.
AT THE HEIGHT of my literary blackout—late forties, early fifties—I used regularly to lunch with Victor Weybright, the inventor of New American Library, whose paperback series, Signet and Mentor, sold millions of copies at fifty cents apiece. Victor was a jolly bon vivant from Maryland whose accent shifted from Eastern Shore to West London as occasion required. He had distributed Penguin books in the United States. Then, in 1945, he set up shop for himself as the first “quality paperback” book publisher in the United States. Before Victor, paperbacks were mostly mystery stories.
“Then, one day, while I was home, reading Faulkner, I thought to myself, if this book were to be marketed like Dashiell Hammett or Thorne Smith, we might be able to sell quite a few copies, considering all Faulkner’s sex and violence—the fine writing, of course, doesn’t help—but in the end, presentation is all. A sensual cover can do wonders even for a good book.”
We are at lunch at the Brussels Restaurant. Victor has started on his second martini. I settle back in my chair: I always enjoy this story. “So I rang up Bennett Cerf, Faulkner’s hardcover publisher, and I said I’d like the paperback rights to, oh, maybe a half-dozen Faulkners.” A low Maryland chuckle as Victor started in on his first oyster. “Bennett was confounded. ‘We’ve never been able to sell more than two or three thousand of any of his novels and you want to put him in the mass market! You’re crazy. Anyway, he’s out of print.’ I told Bennett that, as a good southerner, I not only read but collected Faulkner, so we would set type from my personal copies. Well, that was the beginning. Faulkner was—is—one of our biggest best-sellers.” This was also the beginning of paperback editions of literary writers. As of that lunch in the early fifties, all of my contemporaries were in paperback except me. Victor was only mildly apologetic. He blamed my absence from the list on his partner, Kurt Enoch, who not only hated The City and the Pillar but feared that it might be banned. Several years later, when I had several plays on Broadway, Victor published all my novels, and The City and the Pillar was the first to sell a million copies, a large number in those days.
But, in the end, the blackout affected even my relations with Victor. I had decided that what was needed was a good eclectic nonacademic literary paper, like the recently expired English paper Horizon. More or less simultaneously, Victor had decided that he’d like to publish some sort of periodic anthology in which he could try out writers whose later novels he might want to publish, or attract writers that he very much wanted but who were not available to him. We joined forces. I would edit the first collection with the understanding that, if it was successful, I would continue to edit. I borrowed John Lehmann’s New Writing for the title, inserted the word World before Writing to show that we would be as broadly based as possible. The first issue was mostly my doing. Friends like Tennessee, Isherwood, Louis Auchincloss, and Philip Johnson rallied around.
Victor gave a triumphant vernissage for the first issue. He spoke gracefully of his passion for the best in literature as exemplified by those not only present in the room but by those published in the first issue of New World Writing. (I was one of them, under a cautious pseudonym.) During this, Victor stood beneath a portrait of himself as master of some Maryland hunt, occasioning the odd snigger. At one point, as he paused for breath, the gobbling voice of Auden was heard: “How much are you going to pay us?”
Victor serenely evaded this coarse question and proceeded to thank those who had helped with the first issue. He mentioned one of the editors who had been assigned to the project; she had done little or nothing, but she was an amiable woman and she was useful with the printers. Then, gracefully, as always, he did not mention me.
At the Brussels, another lunch: “Gore, I simply couldn’t allow any writer—particularly a controversial one—to appear to be in charge of what I’ve announced as new writing from all around the world.” Victor died confident that he had thought of the title of what was to prove to be a successful series of collections. Admittedly, in a prefatory note, several people were thanked for their help and I was one. “So, you were mentioned, of course. You seem to have forgotten that over the years.” Then Victor did me a curious favor. “I’m quite aware that whatever you publish these days will be ignored or attacked. But I have a hunch that if you were to write something—well, popular, under another name, we could sell it.” Victor puffed comfortably on his cigar. “You know, I’ve had great success with this Mickey Spillane—fantastic success . . .”
“For God’s sake, Victor, I can’t even read him much less write like him.”
“Of course not. What I was thinking . . . you will recall S. S. Van Dine?” I did; he was a popular mystery writer of the twenties and thirties. “Elegant stuff, you know. Of its sort. Well, we have Spillane, the lowbrow mystery writer. What we need now is an elegant one, to balance Spillane.” Later, at a party, Victor introduced me to an English couple who made movies; their name was Box. “How’s that for a name?” I asked. I was already writing a mystery called Death in the Fifth Position (it took me eight days to write, seven chapters of ten thousand words each, and on the eighth day I pulled it all together). “Excellent. Easily remembered. Now, what about a first name?”
“Edgar,” I said.
Victor’s rosy face was beatific. “For Edgar Wallace. Good.”
“For Edgar Allan Poe,” I said grimly. If I was going to whore, I might just as well follow in a master’s footsteps. For several years I lived on the proceeds of the three novels I wrote as Edgar Box. The New York Times lavished praise on Box; then, years later, when I published all three in a single volume, confessing to their authorship, the Times retracted its three good reviews to give me a bad one.
I last saw Victor in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He looked ill and haggard. But he was as cheerful as ever. I introduced him to a famous film producer. I knew that Victor had been forced out of New American Library by his partner and he was now at something of a loose end. I praised Victor to the producer as the man who had made William Faulkner a best-seller. As the producer had not heard of Faulkner, I don’t think he was greatly impressed; then the producer moved on.
“You know, Gore,” Victor was suddenly confiding, “it’s true what you said. I did make him a best-seller and all that. As I made you one, too, and a lot of others, but the damnedest thing is something that we didn’t discover for the longest time, and I’ve always kept it a secret.” He lowered his voice. “The contents of a paperback book mean absolutely nothing. It is the cover that sells the book. I first got suspicious when Absalom, Absalom outsold Sanctuary. How can this be? Absalom is almost unreadable. So I changed the covers. Put a sexy one on Sanctuary and a distinguished one on Absalom. Sanctuary took off. It really was all in the presentation. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t discuss this with too many publishers.”
As I write this forty years later, a handsome new—tenth?—edition of Death in the Fifth Position has arrived from France. It is in hard cover and, perversely, the dust jacket could as easily be used for a new edition of La Princesse de Clèves. I can hear Victor murmur, “How publishing has changed.”
ALICE BROUGHT the Sitwells into my life. On their first visit to the United States, the literary world turned out for them, a tribute, I suppose, to that great white elephant Publicity, which they rode so triumphantly throughout their lives. When the famous 1949 picture of them in the Gotham Book Mart was taken by Life magazine, almost all our major poets, from Auden to Marianne Moore, were on hand as spear carriers, while Tennessee and I, part-time or would-be poets, were added to the picture, from which James Merrill, the best poet in the shop, was excluded, along with William Saroyan and James T. Farrell. I cannot think of a photograph more often reproduced as almost everyone present in the picture is the subject of multitudinous ongoing biographies.
When Truman saw the picture at Tennessee’s flat on Fifty-eighth Street, he was furious. “Of course,” he said, inventing rapidly, “Life’s devoting a whole issue to a day in my life.” Tennessee and I were quick to say that an entire issue was, if anything, too small to record even a half day in a life of such busy importance. But Truman was now beginning to lose control. “Edith, Osbert! Intimate friends! I can’t think why . . .” He turned on me. “You’re not a poet.” I said neither was he, but at least I was still publishing verse, such as it was. He compared our novels, to my—yes, yes!—detriment.
“At least I have a style!” he concluded.
“Of course you do.” I was soothing. “You stole it from Carson McCullers, along with a bit of Eudora Welty and of . . .”
“Better than stealing from the Daily News.” During this highly satisfying exchange, the Bird was flapping nervously about the room. “I have never heard such conversation!” The Bird’s eyes rolled to heaven. “Please! You are making your mother ill.”
Edith and Osbert stayed with Alice in the country. They were not royalty in exile so much as true monarchs who had come from over the seas to claim their rightful kingdom. Osbert was publishing volume after volume of rococo memoirs, while Edith’s Canticle of the Rose was on the coffee table of everyone in the world who knew—and knows no longer—what was fashionable in poetry or prose. Today they would have not a book but a videocassette of the latest Peter Greenaway movie.
Paul Bowles wanted to meet the Sitwells (“a lifelong dream,” John Lehmann would have written) and so Osbert, Paul, and I had lunch at the Madison Hotel. Osbert was rosy-cheeked, with small sharp eyes alongside an important nose. He mumbled, due to Parkinson’s disease, which had also affected his walking. Even so, lunch was a success. Paul was always good with difficult cases—not that Osbert was anything but charming, as befitted a newly crowned king. There was no problem of any kind until we were in the street on our way back to the St. Regis Hotel, where Alice had arranged for the Sitwells to stay, gratis, as the hotel belonged to her brother Vincent.
On Fifth Avenue, Osbert’s shuffling gait began, uncontrollably, to quicken; faster and faster he went, taking longer and longer steps. As he was a tall, long-legged man, this was very fast indeed. I motioned to Paul to take one arm while I took the other in order to act as anchors. But Osbert was now too far gone to be slowed down. I raced beside him, trying to hold him back—and down to earth like a balloon—while Paul, who is short and slight, had now left the pavement and was flying through the air, clinging to Osbert’s arm for support. We hurtled toward the hotel, where we let go of Osbert, who cannoned into the chasseur’s arms.
“Too kind,” Osbert mumbled, falling into the lobby.
But it was Edith that I most enjoyed, and whenever I was in London, I’d go and lunch with her at the Sesame Club in Grosvenor Street.
Among the colonials, Edith was capable of saying such astonishing things as, “Ah, Lady Macbeth! An ancestress of mine,” while Osbert merely looked shyly Plantagenet. But in London, surrounded by military-looking ladies at her club for gentlewomen, Edith was a cozy figure despite her six-foot frame, flowing robes, huge rings on long alabaster fingers, pendant slabs of jade hung from ears, while golden snakes entwined to form a crown in thin tea-colored hair.
I would arrive to find Edith already enthroned in the lounge as the military ladies, one by one, marched up to pay her tribute: To each she gave a winning girlish smile while whispering to me, “This one we call the field marshal.” A bobbed-haired figure, in sensible shoes, with swagger stick—if there was not a swagger stick there should have been one—bowed low over Edith’s hand. “Dame Edith,” the gruff voice saluted her.
Edith responded with gay girlish giggles. Then the field marshal went off to war, and Edith said, “Now, I know that you Americans always want a drink of something before lunch—something light for me, of course. Now, what was that lovely drink that Osbert and I became so fond of in New York? Something amusing and—I think—Italian . . .”
A waitress appeared with a small goldfish bowl: “Here’s your martini, Dame Edith.”
Edith’s last years were alcoholic but not too oppressive until she began to fall and break those Gothic bones. But in the fifties she was still a splendid companion. “We shall have a red lunch. I have no money, you know. It all goes for lunch here.” She would not let me pay. The red lunch was always lobster and strawberries and a bottle apiece of red burgundy.
Toward the end of one splendid lunch we discussed the Lady Chatterley case. Lawrence’s novel was being prosecuted for obscenity and most of literary London was in court, defending the novel and condemning censorship. “We never forgave Lawrence, of course. He based a character in that book on poor Osbert, and we had been so kind to him.”
“Actually,” I said, the wine working its way into my brain, “Lawrence did not write Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It was entirely Truman Capote’s work. You can tell from the style, and, of course, the dates,” I added, in a burst of creative scholarship, “conform.”
“Really!” Edith mulled this over. Then, slowly, she nodded. “Yes. How stupid of me not to have seen it all along. There are so many clues, aren’t there?”
“Far more than Finnegans Wake.”
“Far, far more, but now this means that we must strike quickly before the case is decided.” She summoned a waitress. “Paper, pen, quickly.” Tiny red-rimmed eyes gazed into mine. “These girls think that I am about to write a poem. Little do they suspect.”
Pen and paper were placed in front of her. “Shall I write directly to the judge?”
“No.” I was firm. “Write the editor of The Times.”
“Whole hog, then?” Edith began to talk as she wrote, “Dear sir, I am a little girl of seventy-four and I have it, on the best authority, that the actual author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover . . .” I remember her best like that, in a pool of light in a corner of the Sesame Club dining room.
My last glimpse of the third Sitwell, Sacheverell, and wife, Georgina, was at the Roman flat of the James Dunnes in Palazzo Caetani. Recently, an English book-chat writer sneered at the Sitwells in general and Georgie in particular. He adopted a curious—because so unlikely—stance of superiority to his subjects and then, when he had told us that these glittering figures had not been as Good and True and Aristocratic as the reviewer, he savaged them, getting the facts all wrong, for which he was no doubt modestly paid.
Georgie had a deep cigarette-whiskey voice; she also had a sense of humor. Sachie had just finished telling us the recent horrors of trying to pay a Roman hotel bill with a personal check instead of a credit card, which he did not possess.
“I could hear him all through the lobby of the Hilton.” Georgie shuddered. “Sachie’s voice got louder and louder. He had no cash, the lobby learned. He had no credit card, and never would, he confided to the mezzanine. The management was sorry but . . . At that moment I knew what was coming next and I raced toward the door. But not fast enough. I heard it, tolling like some great bell, that terrible phrase, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ I nearly swooned.”
IT IS THE DAY BEFORE EASTER. Daffodil, forsythia; spring flowers are bright yellow as autumn ones are dark red. Cold wind. The Mediterranean has gone from a deep uncharacteristic blue to slate-gray. Wisteria in bloom on the loggia, as it used to bloom on the colonnade at Edgewater. Purple and white. I inspect the rosebushes. All survived the winter. As homage to Edith Wharton, I put in several General Jacqueminot rosebushes. She must have had some special liking for the general himself, whoever he was, because his roses are candy-red, odorless, and grow in fussy clusters. Yet when she is in a good mood in a chapter, she tacks those roses, like a special charm, to her page.
I am still recovering from three months of the Hollywood Hills. Earthquakes, fire, mud slides, race riots to one side, life is comfortable there. Though the cast, for me, is smaller than ever. Isherwood is gone, but Don Bachardy carries on in their house, which now has an ominous split down the middle. Christopher’s diaries are taking forever to edit. “They are just like him,” said Don. “His voice, just the way he sounded, written all in a hurry, the way he talked, not labored over like the writing.”
The movie magnates are now all younger than I. Curiously, I have known many of them since they were very young men indeed. As always, paranoia reigns in movieland. To make a film is to make a choice which, should it be the wrong one, means the loss of a career. One evening I introduced the editor of The New Yorker to several hundred of the essential players, as stars and magnates of the largest magnitude are currently known. I quoted myself: “To be truly commercial is to do well that which should not be done at all.” Silence like the tomb engulfed these words. But the commercialites have their own weird integrity, and their productions are often rather better than those of solemn auteurs, as “serious” directors are inappropriately known in these parts.
I was offered three films to write and one part to act. Since my price had been lowered for screenwriting (I had forgotten that I had done nothing for the American screen in years), I said no to what was on offer and no, as an actor, to the director of My Own Private Idaho, a movie that I liked. Unfortunately, the part that he had in mind for me is bound to be edited out. I am beginning to think like an actor. I wonder if I will seem like one when With Honors opens at the end of this month. Odd to be trying something new at my age. I feel like an imposter when I see the old man from my mirror up there on the screen.
I LOOK BACK OVER what I’ve been writing about the fifties. Alice Bouverie, and John Latouche; both died, a month apart, in 1956. In each case, murder was hinted at. Latouche died of a heart attack in a Vermont cabin with a boyfriend. Pains in the night. Always the autodidact, he immediately got out a medical encyclopedia and diagnosed himself. The friend wanted to go to the nearest house with a telephone and ring for a doctor, but Latouche thought the spell was passing. He was also enthralled by the medical description of what he was going through. The friend went to sleep. When he woke up the next morning, Latouche was still seated on the bed, encyclopedia open on his lap, dead. A small amount of blood on the floor gave rise to his mother’s accusation of foul play. I am sure there was none. Everyone was most impressed that the page he was reading was exactly the right one for someone suffering from an arterial embolism nourished by too much brandy and too many cigarettes. He was not yet forty.
The last telephone call that Touche had made to me was a week earlier, to discuss Alice’s sudden death in her New York house; she had fainted in the bathroom, and was found dead in the morning. What grim mornings! “We must hold a memorial service for her. That’s the least we can do.” But with him gone, too, the least proved to be too much for the survivors. For the first time, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure. I was given pills guaranteed to produce suicidal depression. I stopped the pills; and normal pressure resumed.
Why have I jumped to the end of their lives? I suppose those years up on the Hudson were too filled with incident for me to concentrate on them or, perhaps, much of anyone, including myself. I envy Bowles’s diaries, or whatever he used when he wrote his memoir Without Stopping (called by Burroughs Without Telling). He is full of incident, if not always accurate. He describes how he joined the Communist party with Jane: “Touche was already in but for some reason would not admit it.” The reason was that he had tried to join the party but the Communists would not take him: He was too unserious for them.
I have just been reading parts of Without Stopping and note that Paul never tells us who anyone is, and he fires a great many names at us. Does he think that the reader will know who Libby Holman is? Does he care, and does it matter if there is sufficient anecdote? It is an odd performance both in the telling and in the selection of what is told. He defends his method by saying the text is “covered.” But how to lift the cover? Shall I explain Libby? No. She’s not a part of this story.
I am also feeling slightly out of time; the telephone rings only for business. Howard misses the company of Los Angeles or New York. I don’t. Yet I read less than I did in youth; and watch too many movies and documentaries. Last night we saw a series on the Depression in which I am a talking head, recalling the Bonus Army’s march on Washington and how I was well and truly traumatized by the fragility of our social arrangements, today more fragile than ever as the poor grow desperate, the rich arrogant, while the ubiquitous television set keeps showing consumers without cash how well the few live, not a wise thing to do.
After the crash of 1929, our ruling class vanished from the public scene—no more tiaras at the opening of the opera. Celebrities now fill in for them, and the shadowy Mellons will be chuckling softly as Capote’s jet-setters, filling in for the last time, are driven off in tumbrils, especially constructed for the revolution by the Ford Foundation.
I HAVE RECURRING DREAMS about Edgewater, and sometimes I wonder if I should have given it up. The dream always starts in the same way. I have just bought the house back from the man I sold it to. Before I cross the railroad tracks to the house, I stop to say hello to Mr. Navins. He is postmaster and storekeeper in a one-room cabin opposite the small Barrytown railroad station house. Mr. Navins has never left home except for one daring trip to New York City in his youth. When he walked out into Forty-second Street, he was so horrified by what he saw that he went back into Grand Central Station and took the next train home to Barrytown. Though long dead, he is very much alive in my dream. “Always thought you’d come back,” he says.
Edgewater is in almost as great disrepair as it was when I first moved in. Worse, as I look out the window of my bedroom on the second floor, I see that the river has eaten away most of the lawn. In fact, the water is alarmingly close to the house, while some sort of factory has been built on my nearby island.
Then, as I wander through the house, I come to a door that I’d never noticed before. I open it. Yes, a long vista of splendid rooms, with painted ceilings, like a Roman palace. The same dream.
A LITERARY BIOGRAPHER said recently that the one period in American literature in which he would have liked most to live was the fifties at Barrytown and its surrounding countryside, which includes Bard College. Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison shared a house nearby. Mary McCarthy taught for a time at Bard, where she assembled that nosegay of deadly nightshade, the novel The Groves of Academe, later to be countered by Randall Jarrell’s equally witty Pictures from an Institution, in which Mary is satirized satirizing Bard. The political journalist Richard Rovere also lived nearby, in Rhinebeck. Best of all, for me, there was F. W. Dupee, with his wife and two children, in a handsome old house called Wildercliff.
Perhaps the only time that an American university could be said to be a legitimate center of culture was Columbia in the years just after the Second War. Richard Chase, F. W. Dupee, Lionel Trilling, Andrew Chiappes, Mark Van Doren, Jacques Barzun, and even Gilbert Highet made the place interesting not only for undergraduates like Kerouac and Ginsberg but for those who wished to participate in what Barzun, too neatly perhaps, called “the long conversation,” as good a definition of civilization (intellectual division) as one is apt to get. I suppose that Harvard at the time of William James, Peirce, and Santayana might have been as interesting.
So it was, quite by accident—the accident being my friendship with Alice—that I found myself at the geographic center of as lively a group as our culture had to offer.
My own position was anomalous. I was associated with the likes of Tennessee, Capote, and Bowles—that is, everything those steeped in the political and cultural wars of the thirties and forties deplored. Most of them wrote for Partisan Review, where William Barrett used to fret about the rising tide of fagdom that threatened to engulf heterosexuality, that bright but unexpectedly brittle perfect mean. When Barrett moaned that “all they can think about and write about is sex!” Philip Rahv responded, in his thick Russian-cabdriver-from-the-Bronx accent, “You mean just like us?” He and I were to become good friends. But at the time I was even further suspect, because I associated with the Hudson River valley families; then, in 1954, I took the plunge into live television—where I wrote some thirty plays and saved myself financially but, in the process, between the blackout on the one hand (due to the rising tide, and so on) and a conspicuous commercial success on the other, I became doubly devilish in the eyes of those who taught as well as wrote.
As I recall, Fred Dupee came into my life the year that Alice died. He was the most charming of men, with a wit that generally slipped unnoticed past most of the Hudsonites, including the teacher-writers. He was of middle height, with Kerouac-blue eyes, thick gray hair, parted in the middle, and the most elegant manners of anyone who had made the quantum leap from Joliet, Illinois (home of the penitentiary), to the Yale of Rudy Vallee to the Communist party to the heights of Columbia. At one point, Fred had gone to Mexico with the scatterbrained director-to-be Nicholas Ray. As a teacher, he was handicapped by no wife and no children and, most significantly, no Ph.D. Eventually, he married a student, whose charm, though hardly equal to his, was reinforced by a truly passionate and radical political nature that sometimes made him nervous. Despite Fred’s time as a Communist, he was apolitical; yet, ironically, the last piece that he was to write before he gave up writing for good was a description of the 1968 riots at Columbia. Fred no longer took seriously the politics of the day; he also had little interest in the politics of old days—that is, history. He was fascinated by aesthetics. He could discourse on the correct attire for the Yale undergraduate of 1930 just as easily as he could on a close reading of Milton, whose bust brooded over the Wildercliff drawing room. Fred at work on a text was a joy to anyone who thinks criticism can be a high literary art and not simply a mechanistic process for the production of theory.
It is a usual condition of the American writer to have no one to talk to about literature, assuming that the subject has ever attracted his own interest. I asked Bellow, years later, why he still went on teaching in Chicago. “Because,” he said, “I don’t have anyone to talk to. I only know people here, which is fine, except every now and then I get the urge to talk about books and so I call my class together.”
Until I was seventeen, I had my grandfather to talk to. But we were limited to American politics, history, and melodious verse. “I like the sound of poetry. I don’t much care for the meaning.” He was without affectation. Luckily, he got me onto Poe, who, as Allen Ginsberg and I were to agree, is the primal fount of American literature, as the French discovered long before we did. Later, at Exeter, there was one teacher, Leonard Stevens, who was knowing and enthusiastic; he himself had been a favored student of F. O. Matthiessen’s at Harvard. Need of money for a large family obliged him to leave Harvard for a prep school that gave him a large house. At first, he didn’t know what to do with us, a special class of seniors with literary longings. Then he said, half to himself, “I think they should read Plato’s Republic.” No one had ever used that as an English Department text. He also got us onto Milton’s prose; and laid the foundation for my last great experience as a reader when, at forty-five, I finally read, over a period of a month, Paradise Lost, sounding every word.
My most intensive period as a reader coincided with meeting Fred, himself self-taught in the sense that he had never truly joined the English Department trade union, which tended, doggedly, to narrow, if not to deepen, the mind through specialization. I never heard him lecture, but I am told he filled the hall. He could range easily from Shakespeare to James, for whom he had a deep affinity, somewhat exacerbated by the presence nearby—but, for him, so far away—of the River Road families who figure in James as well as in Wharton. Fred did get to know the ancient Margaret Aldrich, who had known the Master. She lived at Rokeby, a crumbling old house just south of Edgewater. Fred’s obsession with these characters was more than balanced by Saul Bellow’s loathing for them, particularly of Saul’s landlord, Chanler Chapman, son of John Jay Chapman. Chanler was a large booming creature with an eerie and entirely unjustified self-assurance. He had once married a James. He published his own dotty newspaper, and flirted with libel. He was a hereditary Democrat.
Chanler was very much lord of the manor to the writer-teachers who surrounded him. With Saul, he was very lordly indeed as Saul lived in one of the tenant cottages on the Chapman estate. The rows between thick-skinned master and mutinous serf gave us all joy; later, they gave those able to read equal joy when Saul turned Chanler into his finest invention, Henderson the Rain King. Saul also made wine from berries.
I could never tell Saul’s wives apart. He seemed always to be married to—or accompanied by—a new variation on some, for him, Platonic-model woman, with a tendency to nag: “Of course you forgot to pick up the yogurt after I especially asked you to . . .”
One day Saul showed me his family’s passport, signed by the Russian foreign minister Adelberg, whose son, I noted, was staying with Alice Bouverie a few miles away. Saul wrote close to life in a way that ought to have limited his work, but somehow, he could transcend a great deal of forgotten yogurt—yet never forgot that the yogurt is essential to a story, one of those “human fringes” as Edith Wharton remarked to James, that “we necessarily trail after us through life,” and which she had found sadly missing in The Golden Bowl. Stricken, James maintained that they were there, or so he thought, when he was writing. They are certainly all present in Saul’s Herzog, which we read with astonishment at how fully he seized reality—nothing of significance is made up—and made it art, not the easiest task, particularly for someone writing in the American realistic manner. The original of Valentine, the adulterer, was Saul’s most devoted admirer, Eckermann to Saul’s Goethe. He was some sort of writer-teacher, long since forgotten. I can still remember the afternoon when the president of Bard introduced him to me because, “you are both writers,” and Valentine said, in his thick impenetrable English—he was German, I think—“At least I write English.” As it proved, he was optimistic. But in Herzog he has a permanent life on the page.
By and large, except for, perhaps, an inordinate concern with reputation, the conversation of an American writer is no different from that of a realtor—money and the storms of domestic life. What little reading most writers do tends to be of a competitive nature. Who has written what, and why it has failed or, worse, succeeded. A contemporary book is seldom praised by contemporaries, while books older than The Great Gatsby are simply a blur. The writer-teacher, of course, must know the syllabus, which he often comes to hate, as who would not, reading, year after year in class, one’s old notes on Middlemarch? Thirty years ago, the shattering of the canon was supposed to free the teacher-writer so that he might explore the terra incognita outside the sacred maze where once resided that devouring Minotaur tenure. Now Harold Bloom tries to . . . But this is not the place for literary theory or bookish musings. Memoir. The people and places that I remember.
Memory: Dupee and his wife bring Lionel and Diana Trilling to Edgewater. Lionel is pale, with dark-rimmed eyes like a shy nocturnal raccoon; Diana is proud, opinionated. Bellow and a few others are at the end of what we call the Green Room (painted dark green, that is—a nontheatrical term), on the south side of the house. I am polite, as a host must be. Lionel seems truly pleased that I admire his political novel The Middle of the Journey. On the other hand, anyone who could write a book about E. M. Forster and not be aware of his intense, almost religious, faggotry is not much in the way of a critic.
Diana’s book chat for The Nation has plainly gone to her head, as one discovered in her recent memoir. Apparently, people, the right people, took her very seriously indeed, she tells us, and she very much enjoyed, she confesses . . . well, fame: Publishers took her to lunch. Later, she would distinguish herself with an inadvertently hilarious piece called “One Night at Columbia” when, after a fine introduction by Fred, Allen Ginsberg gave a reading, obliging Diana to meditate on the difference between the Beat barbarians and those high-culture figures who had really made it, like Lionel and herself. For many years, whenever I would ring Fred, I’d say, in a thundering bass voice, “Fred! This is Diana. Diana Trilling.” And Fred would respond in his most gravely courteous manner, “Why, Diana, how good of you to call. I was just reading again your review of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. It holds up so well. No, really. I mean it. It is like Matthew Arnold.”
The Trillings follow me into the Green Room. Merrily, Saul greets Lionel. “Still peddling the same old horseshit, Lionel?” In due course, Saul broke with New York and retreated to Chicago. Although Chicago is a better city to live in, I’ve never understood his disaffection for the New York literary scene, whose prince he was. The Jewish literary establishment wanted a great writer. They picked him; and he left town. But then he has always had universalist tendencies.
Another couple in another year are in the Green Room. Norman and Midge Podhoretz. Norman is a chatterbox who never listens. Midge does listen, sternly. “Look at that rug, Midge!” Norman turned over one edge of the rug and gave its weave a professional stare. “Persian . . .” I almost sold it to him on the spot.
I was writing Julian then, so this must have been in the early sixties. Midge had a scholarly bent, totally undone by the family’s occupation as polemicists for Israel. I told her that Julian was an odd sort of Zionist; he had wanted to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem in order to disprove Christian prophecy. But then, in one of his letters, the emperor describes a disappointing meeting in Jerusalem with the rabbis. Why the disappointment? Midge was brisk: “Because they weren’t serious.” Since she was not a fourth-century scholar, I thought that she had just made a quick guess. But if she had, it was a lucky one. Research proved her as right as one can be in these matters.
Poddy was always trying to get me to write for Commentary (in those days a liberal literary paper, financed by the American Israel lobby). Years later, I criticized him and the lobby, and he denounced me as an anti-Semite who had been totally undone by the triumph of Israeli arms in 1967. As always, in his zeal, he got everything wrong. Since 1948, I had been a somewhat offhand Zionist; but in 1982, when Israel criminally invaded Lebanon, I publicly attacked Israel and its American lobby. In any case, before these interesting exchanges, I finally wrote a piece for Commentary called “Literary Gangsters.” I named four book reviewers. Poddy wanted me to add all those critics who had given him bad reviews for his autobiography Making It, a wonderfully silly book. I declined. Since my piece appeared in Commentary in 1970, three years after the famous victory in the desert, this meant that I had been as guileful as a serpent in keeping my anti-Semitism to myself while consorting almost entirely with Jews, penetrating, one by one, their innermost secrets in order to betray their arcane blintzes.
During what was called Vidalgate, one of my Jewish defenders said, “How could he be an anti-Semite when he wrote two pictures for Sam Spiegel?”
“Two pictures? For Spiegel?” was the shocked response. “Then of course he is.”
I had just put on a play at the nearby Hyde Park Playhouse. It was set in the Civil War. Poddy was mystified. “Why, the Civil War is as remote and irrelevant to me as the War of the Roses.” I was later to elaborate on this.
The Podhoretzes, in due course, started a curious racket called the Committee for the Free World. One by one, they accused the country’s major writers of being “anti-American.” (Code for insufficient enthusiasm for those military budgets whose beneficiary was—what else?—Israel.) Saul Bellow let them have it:
“They gave all these editorial opinions about books, and my name was on their masthead. It looked as though I had a part in their opinions. So I wrote to Midge Decter and told her I was through with it . . . If I want to make enemies, I’ll do it on my own. I mean, who are they to drag me into abuse of other people—Gore Vidal, for instance?”
Third couple in the room. Norman and Adele Mailer. Norman had stabbed Adele; been sent to Bellevue Hospital; now he was out. I asked them both up to Edgewater. This caused some stir among the writer-teachers. At last, a Moral Problem. Should they meet someone who had done such a thing? Controversy raged over many a glass of gin—we were heavy drinkers in the Valley. As it turned out, most came to the house to greet the Mailers. Adele was surprisingly cool; Norman much subdued. Bellevue had been an alarming experience.
“I was really in danger of being put away as insane, because the doctors there were all Jewish, and I’m a Jewish writer, and Jews just don’t do this sort of thing unless they are really crazy.” But he was let out.
For some reason Mailer and I drove back together to the city on that, or another, occasion. We were talking about Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, and I said that I did not appreciate Jack’s invasion of our common privacy. Norman wanted to know what had really happened. I told him. Norman almost drove us off the Taconic Parkway. Later, he worked up a mystical case that I had deliberately removed the steel from Jack’s sphincter and that is why he took to drink and self-destruction. When Norman arranged a confrontation between us on a television program (I’d criticized his stand against women’s liberation, as it was then known), he tried to tell, as proof of my evil, the Kerouac story, but as I was more experienced at television than he, I spoke through him within the same decibel range, thus erasing what each was saying.
Another couple: Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Dows, a contemporary and neighbor of Franklin Roosevelt, who had once, it is said, fancied her. But Alice married the dim Mr. Dows; she was also, for years, the queenly mistress of Nicholas Longworth, Speaker of the House and husband to president Theodore’s daughter Alice, who was complaisant as she was having an affair with Senator Borah, who fathered her daughter. Both Alices attended Nick’s funeral. “We went in a private train, like two widows,” said Alice Dows, with quiet satisfaction at a quartet—she, like Nick, was musical—that performed every bit as well in death as in life.
“Franklin always loved this house.” Eleanor went out on the porch. “It was usually empty, you know. And he’d drive up from Hyde Park and sit on the porch and look at the river.”
Alice stood with me in the doorway as Eleanor crossed the porch to the lawn. “Such a pity,” said Alice of her eighty-year-old rival, “the way Eleanor has let her figure go.”
It was well known that Eleanor was careful to serve the most inedible meals on the river and, later, in the White House.
“Franklin came to me, every chance he could get, to be fed properly.”
To the mystification of the Valley, Alice Dows and I were a sort of romantic couple until her death; I suppose it was assumed that I was some sort of gerontophile. When she died, she left me the red Chippendale secretary in which she kept her letters from Nick Longworth and the Irish writer Shane Leslie. She was buried with my letters. Plainly, I lack all compass when it comes to the geography of love.
WALKING INTO THE PAST, I see Gore as he was back then, some thirty years ago, relaxing in the autumn sunlight on the lawn of Edgewater, his stately Hudson Valley house built in the Greek revival style. In an ecstasy of unconditional love, he is slobbering over his two spaniels, Billy and Blanche, and receiving their licking-wet kisses in return while he prattles away to them in some arcane version of baby talk. He is handsome, yes, I had long ago conceded this point; there was no denying his crisp good looks and his dimpled smile.
From Elaine Dundy’s memoir of those years. We had met in London. She had just written a splendid comic novel, The Dud Avocado; and she was still involved in a not-so-splendid, not-so-comic marriage to the London theater critic Kenneth Tynan.
Gore, who made an amusing, if provocative, if provoking guest, came into his own as a host. It is one thing to throw good parties as Ken and I did and have your guests (figuratively) swinging from the chandeliers for three or four hours. But it is quite another to have them (literally) underfoot for a weekend and keep them as Gore did, in a fairly blissed-out state of satori.
In memory those weekends I spent at Edgewater in ’58, ’59 and ’60 are luminous. Just the sight of Gore standing at the Rhinebeck station as I got off the train on Friday evening had the effect of instantly cleansing my palate—like some tart lemon sorbet—of the toxic fury I had ingested all week at the movable feast it was my lot to share with Ken, now drama critic of the New Yorker.
Then would follow evening enlivened by the company of Gore’s neighbors, Fred and Andy Dupee, and Richard Rovere, and an assortment of the more interesting professors currently teaching at the nearby college, Bard. Then the guests would depart and leave the world to darkness and to Gore, his companion, Howard Austen, a red-haired and freckle-faced young man, the dogs, and me.
I was, I suppose, in those days, the designated laugher, a role I enjoyed playing to the hilt. As the hours and the drinks progressed, certain sign posts would regularly appear: Howard, who aspired to be a pop star, would try out a few songs on us. Gore would balance a half-full glass on his head which was never referred to and which, miraculously, never spilled. While I, enveloped in this ambiance of warmth and ease and gaiety and, feeling at once both liberated and cozy, would start taking off my clothes. And once, and once only, Gore and I went to bed together. Next day everything was back to normal. Let us say we chose to bathe in the pure, refreshing streams of friendship rather than shoot the perilous rapids of physical love. Which is not to say I wasn’t in love with Gore because I was. I saw nothing odd about this. If platonic love is not based on passionate feelings how can it sublimate itself and ascend the heights?
Obviously, I was seriously observing the first law of friendship: no sex (unless betrayed by alcohol) if you want to keep the friend.
AFTER MESSIAH FAILED IN 1954, I went into television. Grimly, I vowed that in five years I would make enough money to keep me for the rest of my life. As it turned out, five years became ten. I went from television to MGM as a screenwriter. From there to Broadway, where I had two successful plays in a row. I think it was Samuel Johnson who said that there is nothing so pleasurable for a man as to have produced a play that delights the town. I had also gone into local politics.
For close to a decade I was on the move, fulfilling my plan and enjoying myself enormously. From time to time I had the impression that the teacher-writers in my neighborhood were often ill disposed toward me. As Diana Trilling was to demonstrate in “One Night at Columbia,” deportment is more important than talent in academe. Some things are simply not done. Success on Broadway was one of those things, and Mary McCarthy, in a fit of savage envy, the dark side to that otherwise bright intelligent nature, gave the game away when she wrote an attack on Tennessee in Partisan Review and called it, unconscious of what she was revealing about herself, “A Streetcar Named Success.”
Although Fred had his invidious side, he was also genuinely fascinated by theater and actors. He came to a rehearsal of The Best Man. “So ghostly,” he said afterward, “to see those famous faces from old movies like Lee Tracy and Melvyn Douglas, alive, and small, so very small on the stage.”
Fred was also aware that I was frustrated by not being able to write prose. It might be useful to note here that dramatic writing is not prose writing and those who confuse the two will end up writing, yet again, Guy Domville. After Fred read my piece on the Twelve Caesars, he thought that I had the right tone for a good discursive critic, and he encouraged me to write more pieces. I did—for The Reporter, a liberal paper of the day, as well as for The Nation, tiptoeing in Diana’s giant footsteps; then for Esquire, on politics. This was not exactly novel writing, which I missed, but it was prose and kept me thinking. By and large, I commented on whatever I was reading, and I was still reading almost as hungrily as I had in youth. It was definitely Samuel Johnson who said that he had read so much in youth that, at eighteen, he had, he feared, known just about as much as he now did in old age. There is something in this, with the proviso that with age one will know the same thing in a different way.
I have never known a good writer to hate the act of writing as much as Fred did. There was no workroom in his house. He compensated by talking, brilliantly. But when The New York Review of Books was started by Jason and Barbara Epstein, the former a student of Fred’s at Columbia, he was forced, groaning and sighing, to write. After his envoi, the Columbia riots of 1968, he stopped altogether; and moved with his wife to California.
Like the rest of us, Fred drank too much; and when, at a certain point in the evening, he would turn ugly, his long upper lip would rise and fall over bared teeth, rather like Humphrey Bogart in films.
One day he was awakened, fully clothed, in a potato field, by an interested farmer. Fred quickly got to his feet. Made some remark about what a pleasant potato field the farmer had created. Yes, he had been most comfortable during the night, thank you very much, and, gossiping brightly, he allowed the farmer to drive him home. Later, a doctor felt his liver and said that enough was now enough. Fred stopped drinking for good and died at a reasonably ripe age.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1955, Nina and Dot came to Edgewater for the summer. Nina brought Tommy, her son by Hughdie, and Dot brought the ever-loyal servant Theresa. Although Dot and Theresa settled in easily, Nina was restless. “Our friend Alice Astor,” as Nina would call her acquaintance in a late deposition, showed no sign of interest in the household when I was absent in New York, writing for television. Nina took solace in the bottle, while the boy, Tommy, kept her company, as he was to do, nobly, for the rest of her life. But that summer Nina wanted fun.
The inevitable row took place at the end of the first week. We were on the portico, overlooking gray Hudson, blue Catskills. She began a tirade that ended with a glass of something cold and liquid in my face. At that moment, kindly fate—mine not hers—arrived in the form of an invitation for her to go on the maiden voyage of the United States, the last of the great transatlantic liners. She had been invited because she—what else?—knew someone; also, she was a good bridge player. Nina packed Tommy off to his father in Newport. Then she stopped drinking, pulled herself together, and set sail for that blinking blue light at pier’s end that proved to be her Byzantium. Much relieved, Dot and I settled in to a happy cycle of canasta and reminiscing and Theresa’s cooking.
Tennessee came to call, and he and Dot recalled his cousin, whom he had not known but she had—John Sharp Williams, a colorful Mississippi senator.
“How I remember the problems Mrs. Williams had with him,” said Dot, with a mischievous smile, black eyes very bright, dewlaps aquiver at the memory. “He was often . . . not himself at home . . .” Euphemism for drunk. “One day I came to the house to pick them up to go to the Congressional Club and she was ready but he wasn’t and she said, ‘I must go and help the Senator to get ready.’ Well, she was gone quite a time. Then I heard this hollering in the yard and I looked out the window and there was Senator Williams on the ground, with Mrs. Williams sitting on top of him, pulling the braces of his trousers over his shoulders. My, how he roared! But once he was dressed, he was his usual courtly self.” The Bird looked very pleased: We were deep in his country.
Nina returned at the end of summer. It was plain that something had gone wrong—Byzantium no country for her? She made abusive calls to Newport: Send Tommy back immediately! But Hughdie made it clear that by dumping him in midsummer she had forfeited her custody unless a court found otherwise. She started to drink again. Dot and Theresa looked after her, and I fled to New York City and another play for television. When I came back, Dot said, “She tried to kill herself.”
Through the arched windows of the Green Room I watched the river gliding slowly past the house. That morning Dot had heard harsh breathing from Nina’s room; when she went in and failed to wake her, she called the doctor. Nina’s stomach was pumped in time: sleeping pills and alcohol. Now she was asleep and Theresa was looking after her.
“Things must have gone wrong on the ship,” I said.
“Things always go wrong.” Dot was bleak.
“She’s already lost custody of Nini for good. Now she’s lost Tommy.”
“Just as well . . . for them.” Dot was unsentimental about the failures of kin, particularly if she regarded their misfortunes as the inevitable consequence of not going to college or marrying too soon or taking to the bottle. Alcoholism was not yet known as an inherited disease—in Nina’s case, from Dot’s Kays and McLaughlins as well as from the Gores.
We sat in wing chairs on either side of the fireplace. On the wall above Dot’s head, a painted plate showed Louise of Prussia and Napoleon meeting at Tilsit. Finally, like someone in a dream, I asked, “Why did you send for the doctor when you did?”
“You have to, you know.”
I said nothing. In effect, that was the end of my relations with Nina until the very end, which was to occur a few years later in London when I, far, far too late, told her that I would never see her again and, true to my word, did not.
It is difficult for me to understand why I would ever care to see someone who was, at best, trouble and, at worst, a highly resourceful enemy. Guilt? But I seem to have been born without guilt of any kind, in which I resembled her and, from what I know, the rest of our clan. Duty, yes; guilt, no.
It would be easy for me to claim compassion for this virago with, admittedly, considerable charm when impressing strangers with her lobbyist know-how. But I suspect that my reasons were more base. For Lao Tse the creation of envy in others is a very great crime. By his precept, in my adult dealings with Nina, I was truly criminal. After all, I had risen far higher in the world than she or our other connections, excepting always Jackie, a master criminal in Lao Tse’s sense, and I was not about to let Nina forget my victory over her, which she, of course, turned promptly to her advantage. After T. P. Gore, Gene Vidal, H. D. Auchincloss, and General Olds were forgotten, she had only my card to play as she moved above the fringes of the world from a house in Cuernavaca to the flats of fag-hags in Mexico City and, finally, sadly, to army hospitals and thieving nurses. Along the way she collected the author of a book called Auntie Mame; here, at last, was the son that she had always wanted. “I am Auntie Mame,” she would tell everyone, even though she had met its author long after publication.
My half brother, Tommy, has just sent me a photograph of Nina toward the end. Rage and confusion in eyes that look to be obsidian-black. Dr. Freud, so often wrong in his analyses of types—and almost always wrong when it came to classical labels—might have had some fun with a Medea type, who killed her children as a revenge upon their father. The ever-inventive Freud might also have been sufficiently inspired to invent a Medea son, who escaped and went on to torment the would-be murderess by simply surviving his fate—the Kid from Colchis. I did torture her with heartless kindness; and today I feel nothing other than curiosity that I should have remained on the case for as long as I did in actual time and now in surprised retrospect.
My researcher has found Christine White and—a definite nonsequitur—Marlon Brando is, according to the newspaper, seventy years old today. At least celluloid has preserved that iconic presence.
A YEAR HAS PASSED since I wrote the above. I am at La Costa, a spa north of San Diego, losing weight and undergoing a medical checkup. I have been told that I have a basal-cell carcinoma on the tip of my nose. In two days I am to be operated on; a plastic surgeon will be standing by in case the cancer turns out to be larger than expected. Meanwhile, Marlon has now published his memoirs while, simultaneously, someone else has published a thousand-page biography of him. Last night Marlon was interviewed on television for ninety minutes. He is barefoot, showing off tiny delicate feet to go with his tiny delicate hands. The rest of him is enormous, although the face has been neatly lifted and there are angles, especially when he flashes his ten-year-old bad boy’s grin, from which he looks like his original self. We have known each other slightly for almost half a century. He now talks a sort of New Age psychobabble, but when he relaxes, one is charmed by his sly defensive amiability. Suddenly, he talks about fear—“You know of death, or maybe—like—uh, getting cancer of the nose.”
He looks into the camera at me. This is alarming.
I’m reading the biography of Marlon—more interesting than his showbiz-gossip memoirs. The biographer has talked to a thousand people I once knew in the theater and movies and he does bring back, for me at least, that wonderful lost world of Stella Adler and Harold Clurman and Gadg Kazan and, of course, the Glorious Bird. Much is made, as always nowadays, of Marlon’s “bisexuality.” But anyone with a great deal of sexual energy and animal charm is going to try everything. In youth he touched base with a different girl a day, so much so that he had two abortionists on retainer to deal with the results of his activity—safe sex was not for any of us in those days. Next, I read “rumors linked him with,” among others, “Leonard Bernstein and Gore Vidal.” I must ring Lenny, I thought; then remembered that there is no longer a Lenny left to talk to. Anyway, in gossip-land, such names are par for the course, as garnish.
I read that later, in the sixties, when Marlon was in London, making a disastrous film with Chaplin, he went—rather drunk—to a party at the Tynans’ “to celebrate the Labour party electoral victory earlier in the day. Other guests included such literary and film heavyweights as Gore Vidal, Richard Harris, and Michelangelo Antonioni . . . Marlon loudly dared his drama-critic host to accompany him into the bathroom for a full-on-the-mouth kiss ‘as proof of their friendship.’ Rumors later circulated that Brando and Vidal had a brief affair.” I sometimes think that there is a secret committee (headed by Poddy and Midge?) that decides who is to be linked with whom: “What about Marlon and Tennessee? No? Too obvious? Well, Marlon and Gore. They’re the same age and . . .”
I do recall that night in London vividly. I scratched my forehead as Marlon and I chatted. “Why are you scratching your forehead like that?” This was an old trick to put you on the defensive. I was quick to reply: “Would you rather I scratched your forehead?”
The evening made such an impression on Antonioni that he made a film of it, Blow-Up.
Last night, Marlon ended his television appearance by kissing the interviewer, Larry King, full on the mouth—like Kerouac, he’s a great come-on-er, get it?
I should note here that over the years, I have read and heard about the love affair between me and Paul Newman. Unlike Marlon Brando, whom I hardly know, Paul has been a friend for close to half a century, proof, in my psychology, that nothing could ever have happened.
Paul did tell me that when he was a young sailor, on a troopship in the Pacific, “I went up on deck with a copy of Nietzsche to improve my mind.” While he was improving his mind, a kindly chaplain engaged him in a conversation, then made a pass. Paul shook his head. “Now that really put me off.”
“Off Christianity or homosexuality?”
“Neither. Nietzsche.”