by Fred Kaplan
At night, in the dormitory and study hall, there was homework, there were smells and noises and games, some very personal, others companionable, all the world-shaking dramas of companionship, ambition, rivalry, affection, health, illness, high spirits, love—the varied activities of a few dozen disparate boys between the ages of ten and fourteen who when the dormitory master, sometimes benign, other times a hated figure, shut off the lights, fell into the sleep of dreams and sometimes nightmares. In the dark one boy sometimes went into another’s bed, for comfort, for sexual games. Others, awake, could hear the distinctive noises. Wet dreams, which Gene began to have, were whispered about. In the shower the boys visually measured one another, made note of who had pubic hair and who not: whoever boarded in the Lower School dorm was part of the community’s self-scrutiny. One of Gene’s school friends, who confided in him, worried about masturbating. He was trying desperately not to. Succumbing to temptation, he thought, was going to destroy his life. It was, Gene told him, his impression “that it probably did no harm at all…. He then said that ‘everywhere you look there’s something that sets me off.’ ‘Well, like what?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the funny papers.’ I said, ‘I don’t see anything sexy about them.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I do.’” At home, with his mother’s casual nudity, with parents who had affairs, with his own erotic responses and erections, Gene was becoming aware of sexual feeling, though he still had a long way to go in getting right the facts about how babies were made. But he was unselfconscious about most of his personalized responses, which seemed to him perfectly ordinary, natural, acceptable. Unlike some of his friends, he had no religious scruples or anxieties to bring to bear.
At some level, Gene was determined not to be a good student and willing to take the consequences. Flashes of eidetic memory kept his mind alive with images that he gradually sought to embody in language, in the poetry he was writing, in prose essays, and especially in the made-up stories he had started putting down on paper years before. Also, his grandfather’s carefully crafted combination of independence and political shrewdness seeped into his attitude, his consciousness. He wanted to be shrewd, powerful, successful, President of the United States or at least a senator like his grandfather. He also wanted to be a great writer. But he did not necessarily want good grades or see any connection between them and his aspirations. He certainly did not want to spend his time studying things that did not interest him rather than reading what did. And he did not want to work to please people. The cost in self-respect and self-reliance would be too great. Also, he knew from experience with his mother that the more one tries to please some people, the more cruelty they inflict. His grades, in fact, did get significantly better in his second year at St. Albans than the low B average he had achieved the first, good enough for him to tie for fifth in a class of nineteen. In his third year he slipped back, probably for reasons as irrelevant to effort as the reasons he had risen before. In a pre-grade-inflation world, a middle B might have satisfied the school and his mother if it had been the result of disciplined application rather than natural intelligence. His mother accused him of sloth. The school mostly let him alone.
At St. Albans, church and state flourished in miniature. It was a microcosmic simulacrum of the world immediately outside. Many students were children of the government, sons of ambassadors, congressmen, civil servants, bureaucrats, military families. In the Lower School dormitory, power was important. Gene had no intention of allowing himself to be anyplace but at the top of the hierarchy of his boys’ world. As at Friends, he took great interest in being in charge, at least to the extent of fighting back if attacked and organizing a group to assert himself and his values. When the boy he most palled around with, Dick McConnell, tried to turn on him in fall 1938, his response was aggressive. “In the dormitories they had these lockers which were about eight feet high, two feet wide, and two feet deep, with locks on them, where you hung your clothes. And it was McConnell’s trick to get together two or three other boys and stampede somebody and lock them in one. I feared this more than anything in the world. I was a claustrophobe, and I avoided it by overthrowing McConnell, a preemptory strike so that it wouldn’t happen to me. So I would not be shut up. In fact, I’d be running the show.” Playing on McConnell’s reputation as a bully, he got sixteen boys to sign a “Declaration of Independence” that he drew up. It had four articles. “I. We declare ourselves free of the tyrannical rule of Richard McConnell and Ashe-Mead Fuller. II. Every month we will vote for our president. The president will be the symbol of unity. He can not command anyone to do anything that he does not want to do. III. Unless everyone in the Dormitory agrees, there can be no organization in which R. McConnell is involved. IV. We all agree to this.” After his own signature appears the word “President.”
At St. Albans, in the winter of 1937, Gene fell in love, both in the unselfconscious schoolboy sense of natural physical attraction to another and in the emotional (and long-lasting) preoccupation with an alter ego, a twin who would be the playmate of his soul, a completion of the incomplete, the perfect fit that makes two comrades into one friendship. It was a love that had no need for loving words. Romantic jargon was out of the question for these two very masculine young men. Neither of the boys would have known how to talk that way or seen a reason for it. For both it was prelapsarian, a combination of adolescent sex and friendship, an unspoken enactment of what came naturally and gave pleasure. The boy, Jimmie Trimble, was a young Washingtonian, almost precisely his age. Also tall, with a lanky build and blond curly hair, one of St. Albans’s premier athletes, Jimmie excelled at every sport, especially baseball. The only books he read voluntarily were about sports, to his mother’s tolerant despair. From a cultured home, he loved music, especially jazz and musicals, and played the saxophone. Probably he participated in Sofield’s Christmas musicals. Like most of the boys, he worshipped his Form I teacher. Easygoing, amiable, he was blessed with social intelligence and with a love of the athletic games his talents could transform into popularity, success, even fame. At ease with almost everyone, he made friends readily, attractive to and admired by both sexes, a kind of normal, intelligent, uninteresting student athlete, in his own and in his friends’ eyes a future all-American and professional star.
A boy of the Washington suburbs, Jimmie attended first the Rosemary Street School, then Leland Junior High in Chevy Chase. His mother, worried about poor instruction, soon enrolled him in St. Albans. Already a locally famous student athlete, he had been tutored by his father and his uncle, both enthusiastic baseball players and fans. Before St. Albans he had been taken under the wing of a well-known local coach who had taught him to become a sophisticated schoolboy pitcher. Ruth Trimble, who had divorced Jimmie’s father and then remarried, was now in the process of separating from her second husband, Jimmie’s stepfather, who may have taken liberties with the boy and who certainly had alienated Ruth. His stepfather was “creating trouble at home,” she later said. With a well-to-do maternal grandmother footing the bill, Jimmie enrolled at St. Albans in September 1937. In fall 1937 Jimmie, like Gene, was in Stanley Sofield’s homeroom class. The next year, in November 1938, eager to have him away from the tensions of her dissolving marriage, Ruth put him into the Lower School dormitory, if only for the one term. Gene and he were already friends, the result of an overture from Jimmie, who had come up to him and remarked on how much Gene seemed to read. The friendship intensified. In the dormitorywide shower ritual of inspection for new boys, Jimmie clearly was identified as belonging to Gene’s elite group, boys with pubic hair. Naturally, identity and identification for the adolescents was partly sexual. When Gene, fumbling on the game-room floor at Merrywood, had a sexual experience with a female, he had his mind throughout mostly on telling Jimmie all about it. Jimmie had not yet been initiated. Jimmie was important. The girl on the floor was not. What he told Jimmie, other than that it was confusing and anatomically problematic, is unclear. The simple mechanics for uninitiated adolescent boys were u
sually formidable. But the fact that he had had such sex was an achievement to boast of. Twelve-year-old boys talked to one another about the heterosexual sex they had or might have. The other sex they just did, mostly without discussion, as Jimmie and Gene did one day on the white-tiled bathroom floor at Merrywood. Quietly, to avoid being heard by the butler, they rubbed their stomachs and genitals against one another into what Gene remembered as an explosion of perfectly blissful orgasm. Neither felt they had broken a sacred taboo. Neither, apparently, felt any guilt, though they both tacitly understood that this was a private affair. It was something they would talk about neither to others nor even, for that matter, between themselves.
Eager to have her son invite home schoolboy guests, Nina welcomed Jimmie, a sign to her that her solitary son was mixing, that he actually had friends. From the house they went often to the swimming pool, the poolroom, the squash court, the farm, the woods. One day they roller-skated on the squash court, ruining the expensive wooden floor. In the enclosure next to the garage they played with the dogs. Jimmie could not believe that Gene could not take Wiggles into the house. Most of all there was the river, where in the warm weather they swam, unafraid of the rapids and unconcerned about snakes. They sunbathed on the warm rocks. On one bright afternoon in 1938 they made love “in the woods above the roaring river,” then swam against the dangerous current to a large glacial rock, where they lay next to one another. They had lots to talk about, mainly themselves, though not what they had done sexually and not often about girls either, but mostly about all the rest of their schoolboy world and their adolescent interests. Gene wanted either to be a writer or a politician, like his grandfather, with whom he had had many discussions about how to begin his political career, especially where he might reside so that he could have standing as a resident in order to run for office. Jimmie wanted to be a professional baseball player, and if not, or after, he would be a saxophone player or a teacher. But the present was pleasurably vivid. There seemed no reason not to think, or at least to daydream, that it would go on forever.
As the Île de France left New York harbor in June 1939, thirteen-year-old Gene was at last fulfilling his dream of sailing eastward to Europe, especially to Italy, where his mind and imagination had already been long resident. The ship’s port of destination was Le Havre. It was to be the Île de France’s last voyage as a passenger ship. From the new Washington, with its vast neo-Roman buildings, the imperial city that Roosevelt had been creating, Gene happily began his voyage to the old Rome, the imperial city of ancient history. The books he had read, from Plutarch’s Lives to Stories from Livy, the movies he had seen, from Roman Scandals to The Last Days of Pompeii, provided images and expectations. Before Rome, there would be France and England, both of which had been relentlessly filmed and both of which stood on the brink of another great military adventure. Like most Americans, young Gene opposed the United States fighting in a European war. Like his grandfather, he did not want one drop of American blood shed on foreign soil. In Washington everyone knew that war was coming but not precisely when. More than anything Gene wanted to see Paris, London, Rome before it became too late. As he stood on the deck, the Île de France sailing down the Hudson, through the harbor and into the open sea, he felt for the first time that the world lay all before him. He would now have a chance to see in actuality what he had read about and seen on the screen, to provide himself with images of himself as an actor in the film of his mind about the great events of the world. He would remember this first visit to Europe as the “pleasantest” time in all his school days.
In February 1939 at Merrywood, Reverend Lucas had baptized Gene into the Episcopalian flock. Sponsored by Nina and Hugh, he now also had his mother’s family name as his own, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal. It was a baptism of form, not faith, with social rather than religious significance. Herself without concern for substance, always eager to observe the forms, Nina thought it a good idea. But the social event that Nina and Hugh most crowed about came in early June. All Washington was thrilled. “Their Brittanic Majesties,” King George VI and Queen Mary, had come to America on a state visit to rally support for their country. American goodwill (and ships) would be necessary for Britain’s survival. Mr. and Mrs. Hugh D. Auchincloss were the happy recipients of an invitation “to a Garden Party at the Embassy on Thursday, the 8th June 1939,” the most sought-after invitation in town. In explaining the guest list, the British ambassador remarked, “‘It’s rather like the kingdom of heaven. Some are chosen and some are not.’” As the royal family made their way along Massachusetts Avenue to the White House, Gene and Jimmie, in the hot June weather, watched the procession from in front of Hugh Auchincloss’s town house, a yellow Italianate mansion. With State Department clearance, Auchincloss was about to sell it to the Japanese government, which wanted to make it the embassy of their puppet regime in occupied Mongolia. The State Department approved the sale but not the embassy. Later that same day, standing in a large crowd in front of the Treasury Building, Gene cheered the King and the President as they drove by in an open car, “the red-faced President Roosevelt” towering “over the small, brown-faced King of England beside him. Sweating crowds were waving American and British flags.” It was as near as he got to the royal personage, but he was now eagerly about to get closer to the place from which he had come. On June 13 his first passport was issued. Still growing, he was five foot eight, with blond hair, brown eyes, a chickenpox scar between his eyebrows one of his “distinguishing marks.”
Nina had already disappointed his transatlantic hopes at least twice. She “would announce trips to Europe and then cancel them. So my hopes would be high and then they would be dashed. In 1938 the Gripsholm, a Swedish boat, had scheduled a tour of Scandinavia. We were all set to go on that. But her exciting life always intervened so that was canceled.” Then, in spring 1939, two St. Albans schoolmasters, Stanley Sofield and his friend and camp partner, Thomas Jefferson Barlow, eager themselves to see Europe again before borders closed and only military ships sailed, organized a student trip. The ostensible aim was to study French, the larger plan to see as much of Europe as possible. Even at modest cost to the students, it would allow them (and Barlow’s wife) to travel free, perhaps even to profit. Sofield invited “Gene-y with the light brown hair.” Nina said yes, perhaps among other reasons because she had decided against his wishes to remove him from St. Albans School. Dissatisfied with his mediocre grades, constantly arguing with him, unhappy with his bookish tendencies, she thought it best to move him again, this time far away. Why not allow him this European trip? It would provide a break and a distraction, a way of compensating for the impending dislocation, of making a point of her generosity and reasonableness. It would also clear the field for her infidelities. She preferred not to have Gene around to take notice of them. In her eyes, he was spying on her. Hughdie was less of a problem. “As her character was stronger than his,” Gore Vidal later remarked, “she got away with almost anything and could have to the end,” which was not far off. The war, though, was imminent. Since his father would pay the small cost, as the divorce agreement required, everything was easily settled. Sofield and Barlow were delighted to have him, along with about sixteen other boys, most but not all from St. Albans, who would at first spend four weeks “perfecting their French,” as the phrase of the day had it, at Jouy-en-Josas, near Versailles, a short distance from Paris. From Jouy they would take frequent field trips and then, done with France and French lessons, they would go to Italy. Though Gene may have been brooding about the consequences of his impending exile from Washington in the fall, he put it mostly out of mind. Bad as it was, he would still see Jimmie, who was to continue at St. Albans, during school holidays. That the coming war might change all that never occurred to him. Whatever his remonstrances, and they were vigorous, he had no thought of a serious rebellion. What good would it do anyway? Only time would provide him with independence. Efficiently and enthusiastically, he focused on the grand European adventure.
Life at the École de Jouy-en-Josas, a few buildings and a small campus vacant of its usual people, was both familiar and exotic. Each morning there were classes in history and French, the afternoons free or booked for excursions. Dormitory routine, as familiar as at home except for there being only one unreliable toilet for everyone, had four boys to a room in a manor house with a domed ceiling. Classes, taught in French, were also held there in the smaller of two buildings, the larger occupied by female counterparts from a New England school. One of his roommates was Hammy Fish from St. Albans. In their private room Tom Barlow and his wife, Lee, had a busman’s honeymoon, having married the previous year. On a schoolmaster’s salary any trips, let alone European honeymoons, were hard to come by. The study-abroad trip had been Barlow’s conception. Tall, ramrod straight, a dignified Kentuckyan with “an aquiline Greek nose and dark eyes,” Barlow was amiable but disciplined. Sofield was short, round, bespectacled, more indulgent. They made a good team. Oliver Hodge, a bilingual French teacher from Chattanooga, a close friend of theirs, provided language expertise. Each boy had a bicycle for local transportation, particularly regular visits to Versailles, though Gene often also walked the short distance to the pastry shops and the local sights. With a sharp sweet tooth, he found the pastry as memorable as anything else in the royal city. Moist baba au rhum melted in his mouth, disappeared almost immediately. “Very thin, tall, a good-looking boy,” he could afford to indulge.
