OCTOBER 3, 1994. I am at La Costa, a “spa” north of San Diego, where I often come to lose weight and dry out.
This morning I got up at five-thirty and checked my blood pressure: 129/82. As this is normal for me, I shall take no beta-blockers. Blood sugar is slightly high. I must cut back on fresh orange juice. A few years ago I was told that I was a “senile” diabetic; I have controlled this condition by diet, not pills.
Senile? Yes. I am sixty-nine today, an age that I never expected to reach when I was young. At noon on the East Coast, the time of my birth, I shall enter what in Italy is called, accurately, my seventieth year. I can’t say that my cup is exactly overflowing.
Before breakfast, I read Lucretius On the Nature of Things. I’ve been quoting passages from him for years, but until now, I’ve never read him straight through. I’m now at the end of part two, where he anticipates Darwin by two thousand years. “For it is not true as I think, that the race of mortal creatures [man] were let down from on high by some golden chain . . .” So much for the antique notion of Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth to create human beings or the peculiarly silly story of Adam and Eve believed by so many of my countrymen. Lucretius is aware—how, I wonder?—that we evolved. I’ve often quoted his law that nothing can come from nothing, but wonder about his corollary that nothing can go to nothing since, if the it is transitive—the going, that is—then it must be something and so, by definition, not nothing.
Lucretius had also worked out that we live on a globe and that there are a myriad of other globes in the heavens and that many of them will support “mortal races.” Lucretius is also a proto-ecologist, fretting about overpopulation. Nature “of her own accord first made for mortals the bright corn and the luxuriant vineyards of herself; she gave forth sweet fruits and luxuriant pasturage,” but now “we exhaust our oxen and the strength of our farmers, we wear out the plowshare, and then are scarce fed by our fields”; man seems congenitally unaware that “all things gradually decay, and go to the reef of destruction, outworn by the ancient lapse of years.” Thus he anticipates the second law of thermodynamics, not to mention giddy entropy.
While I’ve been here, I’ve also been reading through this memoir, adding, subtracting, writing over half-erased texts—“palimpsesting”—all the while looking for clues not so much to me, the subject, if indeed I am the subject, as to what those first thirty-nine years were all about as we grew more and more ingenious in finding new ways of killing off the human race and its support system, the small planet that each of us so briefly visits. No, I haven’t found any pattern at all to life itself, but then there is probably none other than birth and growth, decay and death, something we all know from the start. As for who I was then as opposed to now . . .
IN MY THIRTY-NINTH YEAR, where I shall now leave myself in this narrative, a dinner was given for me in Washington. Alice Longworth sat beside me. The gray, flinty eyes are not unlike first cousin Eleanor’s. “I loved Justinian,” she said. She always got the title wrong, but I think that she may have read the book, no commonplace thing in what Henry James called “the city of conversation.”
“You know, you were so wise to get out of this town and do what you’ve done and not stayed on like the rest of us—like Joe over there.” Her cousin Joe Alsop is booming across table about “the balance of power.” “You’ve made an interesting life for yourself out there in the world while we just stay on and on here, as fixtures.”
But that is doomed to change. I have just bought two small plots for Howard and me in Rock Creek Cemetery; we will be midway between Jimmie Trimble and Henry Adams—midway between heart and mind, to put it grandly.
Paul Newman just rang. He and Joanne want to come to hear me speak at the National Press Club in Washington. He proposes we have dinner with the Clintons, four days before the midterm elections. Since no one else is talking to them, we will.
So here I am at the end—of this book, that is. I am again a novelist, and I have spent close to thirty years beneath the shield of Apollo, for whom I changed my life when I moved to Rome. Occasionally, I slipped out from under the shield to write theater, movies, television. Unlike grandfather and father, I was not physically shattered in my late forties and so I have been able, if not to complete, to get on with my work in a way that they could not. I was also to become more intensely political than I was in my conventional youth. Will I write about all this? I don’t know. A right-wing radio windbag called Rush Limbaugh, after the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, declared, “The age of Lenin and Gore Vidal is over.” I am inclined to dust off my six-shooters: Billy the Kid will ride again—unless he meant Lennon, not Lenin.
I do feel surprisingly serene when I contemplate Subdivisions 2 and 4 of Lot 293½ in Section E. I note that Alice Longworth is nearby, my fellow fixture, while the half of me that never lived to grow up is only a few yards away.
Finally, I seem to have written, for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I feared but a love story, as circular in shape as desire (and its pursuit), ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.
Meanwhile . . .