Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  Soon after the New Year he hitched a ride eastward with Pick, who piloted a B-24, with Gore in the gunner’s turret, to frigid Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from which they drove the short distance to Madison. For the first time he saw his father’s boyhood home. “It was a wonderful trip and we met just about everyone in Madison. Stayed with Amy,” Gene’s youngest sister, “and saw the house you were born in and all the landmarks…. I liked Madison a lot…. It’s one of the few places where they pronounce Vidal right.” Many of the Madisonians he met were hoping Gene would build a Vidal Weldwood factory there. From Sioux Falls they flew to the East Coast. At first Gore felt certain he would be going to Officer Candidate School in March. Then what had seemed probable in late 1943, now, in early 1944, appeared “a bit far off, though I think it will swing through in time.” His myopia was one impediment: he needed glasses for accurate vision. As OCS seemed less likely, he raised the possibility of West Point. But “if your eyes aren’t good they won’t even give you an exam. I looked into … every avenue possible to become an officer.” When he learned that the Army had closed the ASTP program and sent all its enlisted men to the front lines, he realized what a close escape he had had. If he were going into a battle theater, he wanted to go as an officer. Another scheme came to his and Pick’s minds. If he could get a “direct commission,” he could skip Officer Candidate School entirely. His eyesight would not be an issue. If one of his father’s high-ranking friends in the Pacific would request him through the War Department, then General MacArthur could instantly make him an officer in the field. “After I get commissioned out there Pick (when he’s a Gen.) can ask for me as his aide and I’d come gaily back…. I’d get a nice trip thru the south seas; see Australia and be an officer.” That scheme never got off the ground. For the time being he had to settle for promotion to corporal clerk-typist stationed at Peterson Field.

  With a five-day pass he flew from wintry Colorado to sun-happy Los Angeles. Nina, at her Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow with Nini, Tommy, and a maid, greeted him warmly. He was eager to meet Nina’s famous Hollywood friends. Actually, since Nina never went to movies, she usually did not recognize the luminaries. But at the fashionable hotel and parties, many hosted by her friend Doris Stein, who had also just had her fortieth birthday, Nina met them simply as attractive people, most of whom were impressed by her East Coast upper-class social standing and her partying good spirits. Still a social backwater, Hollywood found the daughter of Senator Gore, the ex-wife of Hugh Auchincloss, and the widow of General Bob Olds an attractive asset. She seemed high-class Eastern nobility. One evening Gore noticed Nina, drunk, spending a long time in her bedroom with a handsome hotel employee who had carried her in from a chauffeured car after a late party. At the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, Clark Gable, on leave from the Army, put Tommy on his back and gave him a swimming lesson. When Tommy urinated, Gable threw him off. Both heavy drinkers, Gable and Nina “would be drinking through the golden hours of the day.” One evening Nina took Gore, in uniform, to a crowded party. “All of the Hollywood people were in a terrible state of shame that they weren’t in the war. I remember Sinatra coming over to me—he couldn’t have been nicer—feeling terribly guilty. He was getting an awful lot of bad publicity because he’d stayed out of the war…. I was the only soldier there.” When Gore was introduced to Leslie Charteris, who wrote the “Saint” stories, it occurred to him that since someone had to be lucratively paid to write movie scripts, he should keep that in mind for the future. He met Doris and Jules Stein, both soon to become friends and supporters. To his father he wrote, “met everybody in Hollywood from Jack Warner to D. Lamour who isn’t so much.”

  Life at Peterson Field continued with tedious repetition, most of it benign, some of it, like his visits to Colorado Springs, enjoyable. Like many, he waited. March, April, May, June. Pick himself, who had at last received his general’s stars, longed for his orders to go overseas. Suddenly, in July, uncle and nephew had good news. Pick took a fighter squadron to Italy, Sally and the children soon to leave the Broadmoor for her family’s Texas home. Gore, promoted to sergeant, was assigned to the Second Air Force Rescue Boat Squadron, a unit for which he had volunteered. Shortly he was on his way to Louisiana for training missions on Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans, though stationed in Baton Rouge. It was not Officer Candidate School, but at least he was on the move. So too were the Second Air Force pilots. While flying training maneuvers over the lake, they sometimes found themselves ditching planes or parachuting into the water. Rescue Squadron “crash boats” completed the training rescues, which were both real rescues for the downed pilots and real saves for the crash-boat crews. Everyone assumed that soon they would be doing this under fire or at least in a war zone. Vidal was occasionally out on the water, a deckhand whose job required him to do everything, from participating in the rescue to maintaining the boat. His qualification for seaworthiness consisted simply of his attesting to having had small-craft experience as a recreational sailor at Newport. Perhaps he exaggerated the frequency of his sailing activities. Probably nobody cared. It was, unfortunately, not a sufficiently challenging change from the uneventful routines at Peterson Field. Since there was little crash-boat work, he was also assigned to the newspaper staff, where he did the same kind of in–house reporting/editing he had done in Colorado, “writing most of the newspaper,” whose main substance was the usual Army tedium. The slack rescue-boat training allowed frequent visits to New Orleans. Dinners at Antoine’s, seafood in streetside cafés, lively bars where he could nurse a beer through the evening—New Orleans fascinated, beguiled, enchanted him. In Baton Rouge, with the encouragement of one of the crash-boat captains, he took an examination for warrant officer, to serve as first mate on an Army transport ship. In effect, the Army ran a huge navy, the transport wing of which mainly moved supplies. One could become an Army warrant officer without going to Officer Candidate School. Since warrant officers were in short supply, all he need do was pass an examination in the principles and practices of navigation. Strongly motivated, he memorized the navigation textbook without understanding much of it, let alone knowing its practical application.

  Shocked, he learned that he had passed. Confused in its endless paperwork as to whether Gore E. Vidal was a corporal or a sergeant, the Army resolved the problem in late October. Effective November 8 he was discharged formally from military service as a sergeant in the Army of the United States and appointed, under the category “maritime technical specialist,” a United States Army temporary “Warrant Officer, Junior Grade,” serial number W2139622. Soon he was on his “way west on a train with the windows down, sleeping on the floor … headed for Seattle. First we stopped at Marysville near Sacramento.” Nina came up from Beverly Hills to see her son before he was to ship out for a combat zone. After “two or three nights at Marysville … we were again on the train, with the curtains down, and ended up in Fort Lewis, Washington, from where we embarked for the Aleutian Islands.” He was going to, of all places, Alaska. The orders read, “Permanent station outside the continental limits of the United States, arctic climate.” The night before departure, in the Snakepit Bar of the Olympic Hotel in downtown Seattle, he picked up a merchant marine. Despite his wedding ring, the older man of about twenty-five seemed delighted to be propositioned by a handsome young warrant officer. “Smoky, raw—wood paneled dive, powerful smell of beer, cheap Ivory soap, fog-damp woolens … bodies that smelled.” They could not get a bedroom in the crowded hotel. In a samples room where salesmen showed their wares he got more than he had bargained for. On a cot at the far end of the room, with no plan of procedure, he paused. “Suddenly, he was on my back. I tried to push him off. He used an expert half nelson in order to shove partway in. I bucked like a horse from the pain, and threw us both off the bed. We rolled across the floor, slugging at each other. Then, exhausted, we separated. He cursed; dressed; left. That was my first and last experience of being nearly fucked.”

  Three days after Christmas, h
aving sailed up through the inland channel route on the troop—crowded United States Army Transport Chirikof, he was in Anchorage, “in sunny Alaska,” he wrote to his father. As the soldiers had marched onto the boat in Seattle, an Army band had played Judy Garland’s “Trolley Song” from Meet Me in St. Louis. The trip was long, dull, uncomfortable, the scenery beautiful, the weather delightful. In Anchorage, “a frontier town, pretty much like a horse-opera town with saloons,” the days were short and dark, the landscape white. To his surprise it seemed less cold than New York in the winter, not even “as cold as Exeter.” On New Year’s Eve, unused to handling liquor, he got drunk and was officially reprimanded. There was little to do at Fort Richardson but wait out the weeks before orders came for relocation to the Aleutians. He thought he would have six months of Army tedium in which to finish writing a new novel on which he had made the first tentative beginnings in the last week; then perhaps one of his father’s West Point friends would still be able to arrange a direct commission in the field.

  Two weeks later, still in Anchorage, he had reason to believe he would soon be on his way, “either (a) in command of a power-barge (crew of 15) or (b) first mate aboard an FS [Freight Transport] boat—crew of 30—I’m looking forward to this great new experience with mingled feelings…. I think 6 months of this will be very stimulating.” Many soldiers in Anchorage, he noticed, seemed to enjoy life there. “In fact many of them wouldn’t go back if they could—and they certainly wouldn’t go to a more active theatre—this army gets more and more depressing; everybody just coasting along.” But being a warrant officer gave him “deep satisfaction.” At Fort Richardson he had the job of putting soldiers through drill at the port; his mind, though, was mostly on his publication prospects, particularly whether or not his agent had been able to place his poems. “Am getting to work on a piece of prose about this part of the world—sent a story to Esquire which they felt because of its military nature they’d rather not print now but might after the war—it was really a flattering letter which they don’t usually do—still I’d like to sell something.” Nina flew in from Los Angeles for a quick visit, and “we had a pleasant time.” Late in January orders came at last. Shipped to Chernowski Bay, Umnak Island, almost at the far end of the one–thousand–mile–long Aleutian Island chain, a thousand miles west of Anchorage, he was now the first mate on a freight-supply ship, with a crew of thirty, making the run between Chernowski Bay and Dutch Harbor, a hundred miles to the east. He stepped off the boat for the first time onto Umnak Island, “which is remote, desolate, sad … in the midst of a roaring blizzard,” so an observer remembered. “He caught my attention at once by his self-possession…. What I remember is that he was very young, and that he kept looking about, taking everything in, while the other soldiers, mostly older, were grumbling and cursing and pulling their fur parkas about their faces. I watched him as he stamped his boots in the snow and turned his head this way and that.” In port the crew slept on the boat, the bay as calm as a lake. Soon the weather was surprisingly warm, almost springlike, the volcanic landscape eerily barren, without any vegetation at all. The two towns were rugged, provincial, dominated by the Army, still tiny even with their swollen populations, mostly basic facilities and tawdry recreation for the soldiers: bars, prostitutes, the usual meager Army library, supply depots, occasional movies, bored men.

  The library and the movies kept him sufficiently entertained. To his pleasant surprise many of Frederic Prokosch’s novels were there, most of which he read for the first time. Having so much enjoyed The Seven Who Fled on the train to Rome in 1939, he wanted to read them all. Most of the movies he viewed for the second or third time, one a night in a big wooden shed. Later he remarked that of the eleven million men in the service, “maybe one million saw any action. The other ten million of us sat and saw movies. That’s all we did on the Army posts. So I saw every movie made in the ’40s.” At one of the educational lectures “we soldiers were briefed on the difference between a life-size cardboard cut-out of a nude Chinese youth and one of a Japanese youth. The briefing officer noted such differences as the bandy-legs of the ‘Jap,’ so unlike the straight, smooth limbs of the ‘Chinaman.’ But the principal difference, he said, pointing his pointer, ‘Is that the Japs have a lot more pubic hair than the Chinks.’ Needless to say, mine was the only voice raised at the briefing. How, I asked, does one persuade a possible enemy to reveal the difference?” In fact, while in the Army he was never to see any yellow-skinned person at all. At sea, life on FS–135 was routinized, under the command of an able captain, “a fine fellow, 25 yrs old, [who] has spent several years in these waters. I’m in for a very interesting time, I can see. Can’t say much more about my job or anything else for that matter, but the food is good and I have a cabin to myself.” He intended to begin writing again soon. “I think perhaps I’ll be a seaman for the rest of my life,” he joked to his father. “You know, the salt water runs through my veins—ah the sea! I can just hear the tide coming in. It seems as if it’s only a few feet away from me. As a matter of fact it is only a few feet away.”

  Not only was it close but often high. The rough winter waters were a challenge, sometimes a threat. Fortunately, the experienced captain did not need to rely on his poorly trained, inexperienced first mate. “It was so foggy that no one ever discovered that I couldn’t set a course. We relied on point to point navigation.” In early February the weather changed, the wind stronger, the seas higher. The barometer quickly fell precipitously. Suddenly a huge storm, known locally as a “williwaw,” an Eskimo word, roared down from the Bering Sea with gale-force wind and blinding snow. The rough sea imperiled any ship caught in the open. Luckily, FS-135 was in port when the storm hit. From within the protected bay Gore had the luxury of being able to say that “it has been extremely unpleasant.” The williwaw passed but stayed strongly in his mind, both the distinctive peculiarity of the word and as a possible setting for the dramatic action of the novel he had begun at Fort Richardson. The Deserter had been mostly deserted. A short novel set at sea, in which men deal with some basic force of nature and elemental emotional conflict, with a distant nod to Conrad and a closer debt to Stephen Crane, would be the best challenge. Soon he was making the first halting efforts at writing a new novel. It went slowly, almost begrudgingly, as if the elements themselves did not want him to write about the elements. But he was resolute. By late February, “in the hours waiting to go on watch,” he had written about ten thousand words and soon found himself doing about a thousand a day. Within a month he had completed the first chapter and the two first parts of the second. “When the weather is good here it is perfect. I am at present both thinking and writing—also reading a great deal.”

  News of the Russian entry into the war against the Japanese marked by a battle in the Bering Sea reminded him that he was both in and also missing the war. It seemed unlikely that any fighting would ever come his way. “In fact—now that the weather’s clear—this is a good place to spend the war, though it’s hard not to feel a little guilty. Still something might happen here—it’s hard to tell.” On shipboard, as if to compensate for inaction, “an epidemic of Hearts” broke out, “which is murderous. The 2nd mate no longer speaks to me, and everyone is quite disagreeable. It certainly is one hell of a game,” he told his father. So too was the Army in general. Still, he decided again to put “in for OCS fairly soon. I think it would be a good idea to hold a regular reserve commission in anticipation of the next war.” On the one hand he was happy not to have to fight. On the other, life in the Aleutians was beginning to become tiresomely dull, and he resented not having full officer status. He made one last try. His rating as first mate was excellent, his probationary period completed. “I continue to discharge my duties as 1st mate in absolute silence. It’s amazing how good they think you are when you make no sound.” Captain John Weiler, First Lieutenant William Kasper, and Lieutenant Colonel Clarence Johnson did the paperwork, checking off pages of rating scores, testifying to thei
r belief that he would be an excellent officer. It still seemed possible. “When I went in as a private,” he later commented, “I felt, Jesus, I’ve already done this once at camp. Now I’ve got to do it again. And I still have recurring nightmares that I am my age today and I am who I am and I am back in the Army. I’ve been called back in as a warrant officer and I haven’t got my complete uniform and nobody believes that I’m actually a warrant officer. So they think I’m a private. And I say no. And they say, ‘Where’s your rank? Where’s your serial number?’ I don’t have them. It’s like the old dream of being back at school when you’re fully grown up. I have that with the military.”