Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  When the handsome young man sitting next to her asked if she were French, she answered seductively in her small-girl, breathy voice, immediately drawn to his attractiveness. He had overheard her speak to her friend, the experimental moviemaker, Maya Deren, who sat a few chairs away. Deren, Nin later wrote in her diary, had said to her, “You look dramatic.” She had responded, “I feel like Mary Stuart, who will soon be beheaded.” Then Vidal had leaned over and asked his question. Vidal remembers that “I said to her, ‘You look like Mary Stuart.’ She said—soft voice, French accent, ‘Does that mean you will cut my head off?’” Whether or not he introduced himself as “a descendant of Troubadour Vidal,” Nin would have liked it if he had, though so one-toned herself she would not have been able to know whether he was being humorous or ironic. To her he was immediately a romanticized figure, a young man she desired. “He is luminous and manly,” she wrote in her diary. “He is not nebulous, but clear and bright…. He talks. He is active, alert, poised. He is tall, slender, cool eyes and sensual mouth.” Apparently, during the brief intermission, he told her much about himself, his mother, his family, his work. A seductively engrossing listener, Anaïs encouraged him to tell all. He told her more than the guarded young man usually told anyone, let alone a stranger. Anaïs, who specialized in seduction by mutually expressive instant rapport, emphasized that they had both been deserted as young children. That should be a bond between them. They were not and could never be strangers. They agreed to continue talking at her apartment.

  Chapter Seven

  Two Eagles

  1946-1947

  As he ascended the stairs that evening in November 1945 to Nin’s Greenwich Village apartment, Gore felt the attraction of her erotic glamour. She appeared bewitchingly female, a European woman of allure and accomplishment. They talked for hours, or Gore mostly talked, continuing from where they had left off that afternoon. Hugh stayed away, as he did by arrangement on such occasions. The small apartment had only a single room, with “an alcove in which she had a stove where she cooked. It had a glass sort of ceiling,” Gore remembered. “She had painted all of the glass with designs … like a skylight…. There were a couple of mattresses up on top of each other which were used as a sofa until she went to bed.” As much preyed-upon as preying, as much dovelike as vulturine, Anaïs wanted nothing more than a perfect love, a total passion. Now forty-three years old, she still thought such perfection possible. When depressed, she confided her despair to her diary. When one love failed her, she searched for the next. When she could not find a publisher for her diary, she kept writing, plotting, trying to compel the world to agree to be her audience. Looking into her various mirrors, she worried about her looks. Masterful at disguising her age, she sustained the illusion, as best she could, that her beauty would last forever, an avatar of her sex, a pure representation of some mysterious female essence. To Gore there seemed something eternal about her.

  By the beginning of winter they were intimate friends. “Since our last meeting have been seeing much of Anaïs Nin,” he told Friar. They were not lovers, though, except by companionship and rhetoric. Anaïs hoped to change that. His resistance puzzled her. In the interim he had other uses, particularly to help her get her diarylike fiction published. As an editor whose first novel Dutton had scheduled for spring publication, Gore had influence there. But resistance to Anaïs was strong. Neither Wreden nor the Macraes liked her work. Wreden thought it puffy, inflated, insufficiently concrete. The Macraes thought it unreadable, probably immoral. By looks and reputation Anaïs seemed someone they should not be publishing. That they would make little to no money doing it was a certainty. Gore, though, pushed her aggressively. “I think that Dutton will publish her,” he wrote to Friar, “but I am confident that they’ll do her as she is. The point that I’ve put across, and to which they are most amenable, is that she is a prestige and not a commercial author and therefore she must stand as she is. To my mind she is one of the most exciting authors now at work.” Wreden finally agreed to publish Ladders to Fire, entirely out of support for Gore. The Macraes went along. Ecstatic finally to have a trade publisher, she was by midwinter passionately in love with her benefactor. His own fascination with her was certainly a sort of love as well, though whereas she had no ambivalence about consummating the relationship, he had deep hesitations. Whatever he felt sexually about her, he did not feel it compellingly. Initially she found his evasion of a sexual commitment baffling. Confident of her attractiveness, she assumed that his resistance could be overcome. At first she thought it the result of inexperience. Then shyness. Then fear. As she learned more about him, she applied her psychoanalytical wiles. Having herself been analyzed, she felt qualified to analyze others. She believed she could save him from the supermasculine hard shell with which he had self-protectively surrounded his “true” inner self. When she read Williwaw, she found it a representation in style and attitude of all she hated in modern American writing, from Hemingway to James T. Farrell, a tough-as-nails “this is the way the world is” realism. “He has great assurance in the world, talks easily, is a public figure, shines. He can do clever take-offs, imitate public figures. He walks in easily, he is no dream-laden adolescent. His eyes are hazel, clear, open, mocking.” The fault was in his infancy and childhood, his mother’s dominating embrace of social power and material values, his deforming early exposure to corrupt adults at a time of great vulnerability. It had robbed him of his childhood, had deprived him of the normal stages of emotional growth. In Anaïs’s analysis he had been traumatized at an early age. And it was there he was still stuck, a victim of his childhood attempt to defend himself. His ambivalence about his family expressed the war within him between his mother’s values and his poetic inner self. Convinced he had one, she believed she was the person to help him discover and assert it. In her eyes his hidden life, if allowed to flower, would bloom with a warmth of romantic expression that would make his the masculine equivalent of hers. She desired the diarist within him to bloom. She wanted him as lover to be her perfect other self. The villain in the melodrama was Nina.

  Soon Anaïs had reconsidered why he would not go to bed with her. Actually her wiles, her charms, her attractions had been partly successful. She had no doubt he was in love with her. To that extent she had succeeded. Though he could not fully satisfy her need for more emotional intimacy, he talked to her more openly than to anyone else. “I do not want to be involved, ever,” he told her. “I live detached from my present life. At home our relationships are casual…. I like casual relationships. When you are involved, you get hurt.” But he was involved. With gesture, with facial expression, with an intuitive feel for one another, they interacted as if they were lovers. Among their friends it was assumed they were. To Kit, Anaïs, whom Gore brought to the Fifth Avenue apartment and to whom Gene took a liking, was Gore’s “girlfriend.” At Dutton everyone, from Wreden to the secretaries whose hearts fluttered each time he appeared at the office, assumed they slept together. In Gore and Anaïs’s Greenwich Village world it was simply a given that they were madly fucking. When Judith Jones, a young Dutton publicist and friend of Gore’s, saw the mattress in Anaïs’s apartment, she could not help visualizing Gore, whom she found attractive, and Anaïs “tossing together.” Intensely preoccupied with one another, spending a great deal of time together in December 1945 and from January to May 1946, they tried to find some way to work through the obstacles. Finally, under the pressure of her constant effort to bring him to bed, he decided to tell her about his sexual preferences. He wanted to propose that she make an accommodation, that she accept he would continue to have sex with young men while having an intimate relationship with her.

  The news did not shock her. She herself had had sex over the years with numbers of women. She had been obsessed with Henry Miller’s wife and perhaps, once or twice, in love with other women. In fact, she cared less about his orgasms with transient men than about his failure to give enough of himself emotionally to her. The depth of
his involvement, greater than with anyone else heretofore, was not enough. She wanted his soul, for his sake, she believed, more than for her own. And now, she felt, she had another key to his personality, another insight into his deep childhood traumas. Again the villain was Nina. His moodiness, his occasional coldness, the hardness of his prose, what she saw as “his desperate need to assert himself,” his self-protective embrace of rational analysis, his seeming rejection of romantic love had another explanatory component—his preference for homoerotic sex. And she believed she knew the source of that. He would not go to bed with her because of his mother. Because of her he hated all women. There was always, she generalized, “some traumatic event which caused fear of woman,” even hatred. “It is totality the homosexual fears. He separates love and sexuality.” She had, in her last assertion, a point he later recognized and recommended as a sensible policy. But in 1945 he was struggling with the distinction, partly because he desired to escape what he considered society’s limiting sexual classifications, mostly because he was genuinely enamored. He feared labeling that might be used against him. “Queens” and “fairies” dominated society’s vocabulary about men who had sex with men. He had no desire to complicate his life with public announcements about private matters. With his penchant for compartmentalization and separation, very few people knew, as Anaïs soon did, about his hours at the Everard Baths or his nights in Times Square hotels or his cruising at the Astor Bar. Those who more or less knew were mainly a small group of homosexual and bisexual men he was beginning to meet in the ballet and theater world but whom, early in 1946, he had just begun to associate with. It would take Cornelia Claiborne a year or two to wonder why Gore was not interested in her in quite the same way as other men. So too Judith Jones, who assumed that Gore was a potential lover “because of the relationship with Anaïs and because he was very flirty—he liked women, you can tell that he was responsive…. We went to a French restaurant one night together … and I was dying to have Gore at least take my hand, to do something physical. That’s when I began to suspect that he really wasn’t …”

  Anaïs now thought it her mission to save him. “What I see in the homosexual is different from what others see. I never see perversion, but rather a childlike quality, a pause in childhood or adolescence when one hesitates to enter the adult world. The relationship based on identification, on twinship, or the ‘doubles,’ on narcissism, is a choice more facile … than that between men and women. It is almost incestuous, like a family kinship…. Whenever I came close to a homosexual, what I found was childishness … and always some traumatic event which caused fear of woman, hence the hatred of her.” Unaware of Jimmie Trimble and of Gore’s fascination with twinship, Anaïs complicated her self-serving etiology with occasional insight. It was as if she sensed Jimmie Trimble in the background. In the foreground, though, was Nina, exactly the same age as Anaïs. Anaïs began to pressure him to give it up, to grow up, to get it up with her. Apparently she induced him to try, probably on the mattress at her Greenwich Village apartment. It was not satisfying to either. She resented that her mission of total conversion had hardly been advanced. He resented being pressured. But the experience did not drive them apart. The bond, through the spring of 1945, remained strong. They were like two eagles who had embraced in flight. Their talons were dug deeply into one another. They could not fly on together this way. But they could not find a way to let go.

  Early in January 1946 he told Carrington Tutwiler, “I have been busy writing, going to the theatre, having odd pains in my stomach, falling in love, and being a soldier on alternate Wednesdays.” Anaïs took satisfaction in noting that whereas Williwaw had been dedicated to Nina, a play he wrote in a twenty-four-hour period just before Christmas, called Time of Darkness, he had dedicated to her. “It’s based on the legend of the werewolf brought up to date and made a symbol of the shadow and the surface sides of the man etc etc. I’ve been threatening for such a long time to write a play that it’s a relief to get one done. I’ll send you a carbon if it gets to that stage.” Fortunately, it did not. The play went into his drawer of unfinished or unsatisfactory manuscripts. The concern with the theme of division, of the clash and choice between alternative selves, that had been central to the play he now moved into the novel he had been working on since late autumn. “I am very happy with parts of it. I have an occasional hot flash when I think that I am forgetting how to write but a little flattery, well a lot of flattery, does me no end of good and I attack my typewriter like Tarquin doing whatever it was he did….” But midway through, the emphasis changed from The Myriad Faces to In a Yellow Wood, a title taken from Robert Frost’s poem about diverging choices, the new emphasis the result of his awareness that his affair with Anaïs represented a choice between her bohemian antisocial underworld and the social-political empowerment represented by his father and grandfather. She asked him to walk with her down dark romantic paths, and literally envisioned him as a Romantic poet. “Coming down the road thoughtfully the other day,” she wrote to him that summer, “you looked like Keats.”

  By mid-January he could at last take off his Army uniform. Before Christmas he had visited his grandparents at their Washington apartment, where he and the Senator had talked about his political future. The New Mexico option seemed a possibility, at least to Senator Gore, who outlined a plan that would have his grandson become a presidential elector there in 1948. It would position him to run for Congress. Just out of uniform, billed as the young Army veteran with a famous political name, supported by the Senator’s friends, he could start his political career. When he returned to New York, that political road must have seemed less concrete, less alluring, than it had in his grandfather’s living room. As The Myriad Faces was transformed into In a Yellow Wood, to be dedicated to Anaïs and two-thirds finished by late February, it changed into an expression of his awareness that he had another choice to make between a different set of divergent roads. One led to a political, the other to a literary career. Sometimes both seemed possible. But in sober moments the unlikelihood of combining public-political self-creation, an image acceptable to the electorate, and writing honestly at a high literary level seemed formidable. For months he had appeared each Thursday at Dutton; his residence still remained Mitchell Field. His visits to Nin’s apartment were mostly on Sundays, before returning to Long Island. On January 7 the official memo, “Separation of Surplus Officers,” stated that “Gore E. Vidal … has declared his desire to be relieved from active duty with the Armed Forces.” He celebrated his release in mid-February by dining at the Charles Restaurant with Anaïs. “My terminal leave terminated itself in mad mad revelry on the 15 Feb,” he wrote to Tutwiler, “and Vidal was led by the hand into the wicked maelstrom of modern publishing so faithfully but ineptly described by Bunny Wilson.” Nin wrote in her diary that “he was in civilian clothes, looking more slender, more youthful, and more vulnerable.” The subject of Nina soon came up. “He told me his mother said to him: ‘No one will ever love you as I do.’ He had wanted his mother to die.” Anaïs certainly did. Despite her absence, Nina was very much a presence. When Gore took off his uniform, he had no civilian clothes to wear. Nina, when she had moved to California, had gotten rid of all his things, “which was really very bothersome. I was stuck with nothing but Army clothes, which I wore for about a year. She didn’t think I was coming back, I suppose, or if I did I’d be totally changed. I got a sort of blue tweed suit, a hideous-looking thing, but I thought it looked fine. I had one suit. I wore it most of the time.”

  No one, least of all he, minded the monotony of his wardrobe. He did, though, mind the tedium of his daily office stint. At first it had seemed bearable. Soon his reworking of Myriad Faces began to reflect, in the main character’s resistance to his stockbrokerage office routine, Gore’s increasing dissatisfaction with traveling each morning (often by taxi) from his father’s apartment, where he slept and wrote in the back bedroom, to Fourth Avenue and Gramercy Park, where he spent the day readin
g manuscripts, writing reports, and participating in editorial meetings. Later in the day he returned uptown, sometimes via Anaïs’s apartment or the Everard Baths, the Astor Hotel Bar, the Times Square hotels. “Being an editor is dull but not tiring and I have other relaxations,” he told Tutwiler. The better part of life, he soon realized, was not spent at the office, though office life was not initially unbearable or unpleasant, especially his conversations with Wreden and Tebbel. The Dutton staff welcomed him. His attractions were appreciated, a handsome, congenial, often funny young Army veteran with a crew cut who brought to the staid publishing house new blood. With Eliot and John Macrae his relations were congenial. Both of them eccentrics in their different ways, he mostly avoided them, except that John had the habit of waylaying office-hall wanderers for long, nonintelligible sessions in his office, where he would say avuncular things such as “Publishing is like a river.” When in the spring Gore tried to persuade Eliot Macrae to publish an early version of James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain titled Cry Holy, Eliot defined himself by responding, “No, I’m from Virginia!” Baldwin, whom Gore had met at a party at Anaïs’s, “was a vivid creature … full of energy, with a personality that oscillated between Martin Luther King, Jr.’s … and Bette Davis’s.” He had to return to the author “the neatly typed manuscript in two torn cardboard boxes.”

  With Wreden’s approval Vidal soon was coming into the office less regularly, mostly to pick up mail and manuscripts and for meetings. He still received $35 a week. At his father’s apartment his housing was free. Having saved much of his Army pay, he projected that with decent sales of Williwaw he might have as much as $10,000 by late in the year. Also his father had purchased $20,000 worth of railroad bonds to cover the costs of the college education he increasingly determined not to have, despite Bingham’s blandishments from Harvard. If redeemed that year, the bonds would be worth about $14,000. If he could persuade his father to turn that money over to him, he could easily afford not to continue at Dutton. Except for the confusion about Anaïs, the world lay all before him. “Everything is contingent on the war. The war saved my life. The war kills Jimmie and saves me. It gets me out of the family. It gets me on my own. I come out of it with $10,000, which was a lot of money in those days, and a published book. I certainly couldn’t have done that if I’d gone from St. Albans to Harvard.” Within months of his arrival at Dutton he was plotting his escape from there too. Most of all he wanted to go to Europe, to see Rome again, to renew the excitement of his 1939 visit, which stayed in his mind as the most pleasurable experience of his life.