Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  Unlike Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin’s second novel is not overtly autobiographical, yet there is autobiography present. This book about a white bisexual “who could not make up his mind” is dedicated “to Lucien.” Yet the protagonist also contains pieces of Baldwin: his intelligence and self-awareness.

  It’s a miraculously concise novel. The narrator, David (we never learn his last name), spends a long night alone in a rented house in the south of France, getting drunk and remembering the past year. In Paris, while his girlfriend Hella toured Spain, David met and became involved with an Italian bartender named Giovanni. The two men lived together in a small room for several months until Hella returned and David needed to choose between his loves. He chose Hella and handled it badly. Giovanni fell apart, giving himself first to a man he didn’t love, then to a hated boss who humiliated him. Giovanni murdered the boss. He is sentenced to die on the morning after the night we spend with David.

  Giovanni’s Room is as neatly constructed as a great film noir, a tight little machine intended simply to thrill us and break our hearts. But the eloquent prose and complex emotions lift the story past the mechanical. Now and then there’s a slightly clunky phrase, such as Hella telling David, “If I stay here much longer… I’ll forget what it’s like to be a woman,” but we can look past the period cliché to what she and Baldwin mean. There’s also the wonderfully elastic metaphor of the room itself. The shabby ground-floor chamber the two men share can be read as shelter or prison, closet or home. The sex that happens here is never described—the book’s only sex scene is between David and a female friend on the eve of Hella’s return—yet the descriptions of the room with its low ceiling, whited-out windows, its printed wallpaper with faded eighteenth-century lovers, have a haunting, erotic melancholy. Only a handful of pages deal with the room, no more than deal with the river in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, yet room and river are equally resonant.

  This is the classic coming-out novel—made more powerful by the fact that David fails to come out. The plot has not become dated, sad to say, which is why the novel is still powerful for readers fifty years later. The closet is still with us, which is why so many people, gay and straight, could respond to the 2005 movie of Brokeback Mountain. Our poisonous fear of what other people think of us remains strong. Baldwin goes beyond the fear of others and accuses David of being afraid of love itself. The fear of love will become his chief subject in his later fiction.

  Despite the initial praise of Giovanni’s Room, a curious backlash set in over the years from straight readers and critics. They grew to distrust and dislike the book—perhaps because gay readers liked it so much. Baldwin’s friend, Otto Friedrich, in his otherwise perceptive profile of the young novelist in Paris, dismissed it as “an unpleasant attempt to write about white homosexuals”—as if a black gay man could never understand white ones. Baldwin’s own biographer, James Campbell, expresses surprise over the book’s popularity, since it has no sex scenes and is just “a short novel with many flaws.” More recently, Claudia Roth Pierpont in a long essay in the New Yorker claims it is “marred by a portentous tone that at times feels cheaply secondhand—more Bonjour Tristesse than Genet or Gide,” which is high-sounding nonsense. Her larger complaints are that Baldwin wasn’t writing about the new civil rights movement and that his second novel isn’t as strong as Go Tell It on the Mountain. Maybe it’s just me reading as a gay man, but, good as Go Tell It is, it’s not nearly as intimate or as real as Giovanni’s Room. The three portraits of adults in the middle of the first novel are beautifully executed, yet they are people seen from a distance, in long shot. We are not inside their hearts as we are in John’s heart in Go Tell It, or in David’s culpable, conflicted heart.

  The attacks disguised as second thoughts started early. The most famous came from Baldwin’s friend Norman Mailer. The men had met in Paris in 1955 and liked each other. Then in 1959 Mailer published a wild book of previously printed odds and ends, Advertisements for Myself. The title says it all—the book marks the rise of the novelist as celebrity rather than storyteller—and it included a new essay, “Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” where Mailer judges his contemporaries. He trashes them all: William Styron, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, and Saul Bellow. He has a few nice words for Truman Capote (“a ballsy little guy” who is “the most perfect writer of my generation”), but dismisses his stories as saccharine. His words about Baldwin are almost all ugly and wrong: “James Baldwin is too charming a writer to be major… Baldwin seems incapable of saying ‘F——you’ to the reader.” (They still couldn’t print fuck in 1959.) “If he ever climbs the mountain and really tells it all, we will have a testament and not a noble toilet water. Until then he is doomed to be minor.” His one bit of praise is when he calls Giovanni’s Room, “A bad book but mostly a brave one,” but he never says why it’s bad.

  Mailer was straight, of course (he spent his career striving to out-butch Hemingway), but he was fascinated by homosexuality. He discussed it endlessly and fearlessly. He actually treated gay people fairly in a short essay, “The Homosexual Villain,” apologizing for his evil gay characters and calling for equality. But he backtracked when he printed the piece in Advertisements, mocking the gay editor at ONE magazine who commissioned it and calling it the “squarest” thing he ever wrote. His allusions to Baldwin’s sexuality in “Evaluations” are all indirect: in addition to “noble toilet water,” there’s repeated mention of perfume, first for Baldwin’s prose, then “the perfumed dome of his ego.”

  Baldwin had attacked other writers himself, fairly and otherwise, and he did not act hurt and indignant. He resisted the urge to send Mailer a telegram that said simply “F——you,” but remained friendly. He waited two years to respond. Published in Esquire in 1961, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” is a cool, tough, sly piece of work, a history of their friendship that shows more understanding of Mailer than Mailer ever showed him. Baldwin alternates praise with merciless put-downs, pointing out that this tough guy is a nice middle-class boy who went to Harvard. He says the black jazz musicians whom Mailer worshiped never took Mailer seriously: “They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.” He nakedly reveals much of himself, talking about his own fears and career insecurity when he describes the dangers of the writing life. The essay closes on a warm, friendly, damning note. Baldwin has learned Mailer is running for mayor of New York City, which he thinks is a terrible idea. He believes Mailer is a great writer who has it in him to write a great novel. A writer’s duty is to write and not get lost in politics or public life. “His work, after all, is all that will be left when the newspapers are yellowed, all the gossip columnists silenced, and all the cocktail parties over, and when Norman and you and I are dead. I know that this point of view is not terribly fashionable these days, but I think we do have a responsibility, not only to ourselves and our own time, but to those who are coming after us. (I refuse to believe that no one is coming after us.)”

  It was a remarkably prescient warning, not only about the future of Mailer but the future of American literature as it moved from a world of print into a world of celebrity and television. A writer’s public image could become more important than his books or writing. And as with his remarks about Richard Wright, James Baldwin was talking not just to Mailer, he was talking to himself.

  5. Going Hollywood

  Gore Vidal came to Los Angeles to work for MGM in July 1955. Like many other novelists, he was in Hollywood chiefly for the money, but Vidal and the movies were made for each other.

  He needed money badly. He had bought Edgewater, his villa on the Hudson, for only $16,000 in 1950, but it was a white elephant that required endless repairs and renovation. The rundown 1820 structure sat between the river and the New York Central railroad tracks—it shook every half hour or so when a train thundered by. The Greek revival facade with white columns suggested a bigger, fancier place than it actually was. Vidal and his
partner Howard Austen camped out in half-furnished rooms during their first years there. Austen had an advertising job in the city, which he hated, but he came up every weekend to cook and entertain. Vidal tried to increase their income by writing genre fiction under various pseudonymns, including a series of clever murder mysteries set in the ballet world, yet they didn’t pay enough, either. He complained nobody read novels anymore, not even trashy ones. But then he discovered television.

  Many of the early TV studios were in New York City and they devoured material. A half-hour script earned from $500 to $1,200; an hour script earned as much as $2,500, roughly what Vidal made from his last novel, Judgment of Paris, which had taken two years to write. He began with an episode of Janet Dean, Registered Nurse, written for an actress friend, Ella Raines. This led to an original melodrama, Dark Possession, done for CBS’s Studio One, about a murderess with a split personality: her good half squeals on her evil half. Adaptations of William Faulkner, Henry James, and John P. Marquand followed. Soon so much TV work was coming in that Austen was able to quit his job and act as Vidal’s secretary and manager. The two men moved back and forth between Edgewater and an apartment in New York.

  Vidal had a new idea for an original teleplay, a satirical comedy about an alien who tries to trick the Earth into destroying itself with a nuclear war. CBS turned down Visit to a Small Planet as too grim, but it was picked up by NBC’s Philco-Goodyear Playhouse. Broadcast in May 1955, it was a huge success. MGM signed him at $2,000 a week to adapt a teleplay by another TV writer, A Catered Affair by Paddy Chayevsky. Vidal had no more movie experience than Chayevsky, but MGM didn’t care. He moved into the Chateau Marmont, across Sunset Boulevard from the giant rotating statue of a painted cowgirl that would later appear on the cover of Myra Breckinridge. Austen remained in New York, taking care of Edgewater, but occasionally flying out to the Coast.

  Vidal enjoyed California. The weather was soft and golden, friends from New York were often in town—including Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman—and hustlers were plentiful. Arthur Laurents later claimed Vidal was delighted to learn the young men on Santa Monica Boulevard charged only ten dollars before six o’clock, which was when Vidal preferred sex anyway. (Vidal jokes in his memoirs that he was unexciting in bed—he didn’t even kiss—and thought it only fair he pay for sex. In another self-deprecating moment, he said a woman once told him he made love like Picasso. “Oh, I’m a genius, too?” he asked. “Yes, and a very bad lover. Just in and out and back to work.”)

  At the MGM commissary, he ate lunch with a pack of jaded screenwriters whom he later celebrated in his essays about the movie industry. More important, his office was next door to the office of a fellow novelist, Christopher Isherwood.

  Vidal already knew and respected the older man. Isherwood was fifty-one in 1955, a short, ruggedly handsome, blue-eyed Englishman with the build of a bantam boxer and a surprisingly thin, reedy voice. He had been in Hollywood since 1939.

  One afternoon while they walked around the MGM lot, he confided in Vidal: “ ‘Don’t,’ he said with great intensity,… ‘become a hack like me.’ ” Vidal thought he was only playacting. He didn’t know that the author of The Berlin Stories really did feel like a failure. Despite his craft and talent and decades of accomplishment, Isherwood had not yet fully expressed himself as a writer. His breakthrough was still several years away.

  Christopher Isherwood spent much of his life as an exile. He was, among other things, a citizen of love without a country.

  He began as the son of English landed gentry, with a career army officer father who died in the First World War. He did not get along with his mother or their class. He wasn’t happy until he left England and visited Berlin for the first time when he was twenty-five, invited there by his school friend and occasional bedmate, W. H. Auden. Berlin was a revelation. He found working-class Germans far sexier than he’d ever found any Englishman. He lived in Berlin off and on over the next four years, pursuing young men until he found his first real love in sixteen-year-old Heinz Neddermeyer. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Isherwood left Germany and took Neddermeyer with him. The pair wandered Europe in a traveling limbo of rented rooms and temporary visas.

  Meanwhile he was writing—he was always writing. He published two lean, elegant novels in his twenties and collaborated with Auden on several plays. He now began a long, sprawling novel about his time in Berlin with the working title of The Lost. When the manuscript proved too unwieldy, he mined it first for a shortish novel, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, then for a linked set of stories and vignettes, Goodbye to Berlin. Both were told by a first-person narrator too busy describing the world around him to tell us much about himself. “I am a camera,” the narrator famously declares. In the novel he is called Bradshaw, an Isherwood family name. In the stories even that pretense is dropped and he becomes just “Christopher,” “Chris,” and “Herr Issywoo.”

  Isherwood had hit upon an ingenious solution to the gay writer’s problem of how to write about his life when so much of that life is despised or illegal: he did it indirectly, by writing about other people’s lives. He lived for love, but he could not yet write about his kind of love. He never lied, never invented heterosexual love stories to hide the truth. He simply left sexual matters blank. We can go back now and fill in those blanks with his gay experience and the stories make perfect sense. The most famous story in Goodbye, “Sally Bowles,” is the tale of a friendship between a gay man and a straight Englishwoman, a tough little cocotte who occasionally sings at the Lady Windemere Club. Christopher’s lack of romantic or sexual interest in her is presented without explanation or apology, yet it could not read more clearly to a gay reader.

  Mr. Norris was published in 1935; Goodbye to Berlin didn’t appear until 1939. (The two were published together as The Berlin Stories in 1945.) The novel is good, but the book of linked stories is extraordinary. The prose has a hard, dry, quick poetry; the snapshots of people and places are unforgettable. Fraulein Schroeder’s rented rooms on Nollendorfstrasse place the book in the rich tradition of boarding-house novels, looking back to Père Goriot by Balzac and forward to Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin. We also see other sides of Berlin: the cramped rooms of the working-class Nowak family; the spooky, unearthly mansion of the wealthy Jewish Landauers. Expanded further with diary chapters, the book gives us a very full picture of German life during the rise of Hitler.

  Goodbye to Berlin appeared in pieces before the war and was broken up into new pieces afterward: a play, a bad movie, a musical, and a great movie. However, it deserves to be read and appreciated by itself, without the distractions of Mr. Norris or Liza Minnelli.

  Isherwood and Neddermeyer continued to shift from country to country. When British officials refused to let the German refugee enter England on his second visit, Isherwood stood by helplessly while his lover was sent back to the Continent. They were apart when Neddermeyer was arrested in Paris in 1937 without his identity papers. He was deported to Germany, charged with draft-dodging, and sentenced to six months of prison and two years in the army.

  Isherwood was shattered. He did what he could to help his lover from England, but it wasn’t much. He eventually resumed life without him. Nevertheless, he seemed to suffer a crisis of faith over the next few years. It’s hard to know how else to explain his restless, busy discontent. Isherwood no longer knew what he wanted or what he believed in—not his antifascist politics, not even his writing.

  He visited China with Auden to collaborate on a book about the war there. Crossing the United States on their way home, he fell in love with the new continent—and with “Vernon,” a savvy seventeen-year-old he met in New York. He thought he might find meaning in America. By early 1939, he was living in Hollywood with Vernon and studying pacifism and Eastern religion. He was a pacifist now, fearing and hating violence, not only the violence of fascism and possible war in Europe, but the violence he sensed in himself. He began to meditate. He studied yoga, but only briefly—he later
found the breathing routines excellent for dealing with hangovers. Soon he met Swami Prabhavananda, a humorous, chain-smoking priest from Bengal who practiced Vedanta, one of six orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy. Vedanta promises inner peace through the contemplation of the oneness of existence and the rejection of the false self. This appealed to Isherwood, even though the false self includes the body and renouncing the body meant renouncing sex. After he and Vernon amicably separated (Vernon, who studied Vedanta, too, was always more friend than lover), he tried celibacy, with mixed results. He funded his spiritual quests by doing screenwriting work for another refugee, Bertold Viertel. Hollywood was full of German Jewish artists, and Isherwood was often reminded of Berlin.

  So there he was: the worldly spiritualist, the angry pacifist, the ascetic sybarite. Isherwood was full of contradictions yet somehow managed to sustain his fundamental sanity and decency. The tensions of his contradictions seemed to hold him together.

  Then Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939 and war was declared. People still debate Isherwood’s decision to stay in the United States, but at the time nobody expected him to return to England. He wrote to the British consulate and offered himself for noncombatant work; they said it wasn’t necessary. Nevertheless, he and Auden were attacked in the British press as deserters. He explored his reaction in his diary (he was an inveterate diary keeper; it was like a meditation exercise in prose):