Gore Vidal

by Fred Kaplan

  From Naples he went the next day to Rome. As the train entered the city from the south, he saw once again the landmarks he had kept vividly in memory since 1939. The sharp winter light made their uniqueness even more distinctively pristine. No sooner had he put his bags down at the Swiss-run Eden Hotel, near the Via Veneto, than he was off to feel Rome beneath his feet. He immediately walked across the city to the Colosseum. The nighttime quiet seemed preternatural, so unlike the rush of traffic he had experienced before the war. “Very, very dark. No lights. No cars in the streets. A very strange time,” he later recalled. “A wartime feeling still.” But it was recognizably Rome, even in the darkness. The Colosseum cast its silhouette against the night sky. In the circular amphitheater the silence felt ancient. The Forum seemed much the same as it had in 1939, still accessible, without barriers or guards. Back at the hotel he found food scarce, the meat at dinner likely to be something strange and stringy, probably goat. There were vegetables and oranges, as the season permitted, but imports were few, manufactured goods hardly available, luxuries nonexistent. The black market flourished for those with foreign currency, especially dollars. With fuel oil unavailable at any price, people were cold even in the mild Roman winter. The sun, when it shone, was a cherished blessing. From Paris another American writer, Tennessee Williams, who was soon also to come to Rome, wrote, “I am writing this lying up in bed because it is too cold to get up or out…. I have been moving from hotel to hotel trying to find one that is heated.”

  Early in March, as Gore awakened to his first morning in Rome, there were signs of spring. “First impressions: Acid-yellow forsythia in the Janiculum. Purple wisteria in the Forum. Chunks of goat on a plate in a trattoria.” Suddenly he was high with the whirl of visual pleasures, revisiting with happy eyes the monuments, the remains of pagan and Christian civilizations, combining the pleasure of new experience with an overlay of vivid memory. Just as years later he encountered in his visual memory, as he walked in Rome, a presence as real as any other of the passersby: the Gore Vidal of this visit now; so too he now encountered his thirteen-year-old self, the schoolboy rapturously reeling from one long-anticipated site to another. “In Rome whenever I turn down the street which goes past the Hotel Eden,” he wrote years later, “where I lived when I first came to Europe after the war, I can sometimes see myself coming up the street, a ghost not knowing he’s being watched by me, by a stranger old enough to be his father, and yet the instant we pass one another and I see the same face I look at every day—but as it was then, unlined, pale, intense—time overlaps for an instant and I am he. I know what he is thinking, where he is going.” Rome began to become inseparable from a personal palimpsest, as if he were writing himself onto the city and the city onto him, his experience over the years taking as its visual and verbal model the overlayered archaeological levels of Roman history. At a table in his cold hotel room he worked in longhand on The Search for the King. The first line he wrote, once settled, was particularly expressive of his strong sense that he had as an ultimate goal some personal version of the power of the Eternal City: “Toward some further mystery time moved, and the days, the moments of light and dark passed, and he moved, like time, toward a mystery he could not name, a place beyond illusion, larger than the moment, enlarged by death.” For him the movement toward mystery, “beyond illusion,” interfaced with consciousness in the passion he felt for the past, in the energy he felt in his writing.

  Aware that there were other American writers and artists in Rome, all part of the Grand Tour of 1948, he balanced his quiet hours of work on Search with an active Roman street and café life. Eager to meet everyone, he expected that everyone in the American community would know his name, particularly the artists and intellectuals. Also, those with a special interest in the subject of City would almost certainly know of its existence, if only for its association with scandal, one of the advantages of having published a controversial bestseller. Public discussion of the subject was still mostly muzzled. As to the act itself, that was another matter, especially in impoverished Rome, where he was delighted to discover that John Horne Burns’s “topolini” were indeed widely available. Burns responded to Gore’s letter of confirmation, “I’m happy to know that you’re picking up mice in Italy. Italian mice are most agreeable.” Used to the restrictions and conventions of cruising in New York, newly arrived Americans found postwar Rome and Paris refreshing. “Honey, you would love Rome! Not Paris, but Rome,” Tennessee Williams, who had arrived from Paris while Gore was at sea on the Neue Helena, wrote to a friend. “I have not been to bed with Michelangelo’s David but with any number of his more delicate creations, in fact the abundance and accessibility is downright embarrassing. You can’t walk a block without being accosted by someone you would spend a whole evening trying vainly to make in the New York bars. Of course it usually cost you a thousand lire but that is only two bucks (less if you patronize the black market) and there is never any unpleasantness about it even though one does not know a word they are saying.” Fritz Prokosch greeted Gore with a touch of coolness, happy to have his company though unable fully to contain his annoyance at City’s success. With Prokosch he immediately toured the usual spots, from the Pincio, a favorite pickup place for sexual partners, to Doney’s, a popular café on the Via Veneto, an informal head-quarters for coffee, drinks, and conversation. Mornings he walked the few streets from his hotel to Doney’s to have breakfast with Prokosch. At a nearby table Orson Welles usually sat alone, reading. Around the corner from his hotel, on the Via Aurora just below the Borghese Gardens, the newly famous thirty-six-year-old Tennessee Williams had a few weeks before rented a sunlit apartment he was in the process of decorating. One of its ornaments was a young Italian. Romantically self-indulgent and at the same time serially promiscuous, he had immediately found one to his liking.

  Four months earlier the spectacular Broadway success of A Streetcar Named Desire, in the first of its over-three-year run, had made Williams an American celebrity. Short, well built, with a tendency to be stocky and puffy, with a small dark mustache, brownish complexion, and an intelligent, laughing glitter in his light-blue eyes, Williams was tasting the first fruits of fame and freedom. He had enough money now to live as he pleased. With a wickedly delicious sense of humor, his broad Missouri drawl deepened by his long residences in New Orleans, he loved being funny, outrageous, spontaneous. An eager drinker, he had a great thirst for parties and fun, for sociability and titillating emotional drama, especially the histrionics of his own life. With a talent for moodiness, capriciousness, and unexpected emotional tropes, he enjoyed big scenes both on- and offstage. Hypochondriacal, he told everyone in Rome he had been hospitalized in Paris for fatal pancreatic cancer. It actually had been for tapeworm. During the next few months he and Gore played the European stage together.

  The two met on a shining early-March day, introduced at a party for visiting Americans in a baroque apartment at the nearby American Academy, high on the Janiculum. The view from the sun-filled windows held the palpable tone of the quiet city. Prokosch was there. The host was the American composer Samuel Barber, who, Gore noticed, spoke Italian fluently, unlike the other newly arrived Americans, who at best spoke adequate French. Williams looked unmistakably, unforgettably, familiar. “I had actually seen but not met him the previous year,” Gore remembered. “He was following me up Fifth Avenue while I, in turn, was stalking yet another quarry. I recognized him. He wore a blue bow tie with white polka dots. In no mood for literary encounters, I gave him a scowl and he abandoned the chase just north of Rockefeller Center.” Since they both liked young men, they were not meant to be sexual partners. As the introductions were made, the conversation immediately turned to New York City, though not directly to that first encounter. “‘I particularly like New York,’” Williams said, “‘on hot summer nights when all the … uh, superfluous people are off the streets.’” Then “the foggy blue eyes blinked, and a nervous chuckle filled the moment’s silence.” The differe
nces of personality were already clearly established in the difference in artistic self-definition—the emotional dramatist and the intellectual novelist; the romantic, theatrical hysteric and the witty, coolly observant man of ideas. Yet there was an immediate affinity, a sense of mutual responsiveness. To Gore, the playwright, fifteen years older, looked ancient, clearly a member of the next-older generation. “Williams is not at all what you might expect the most successful playwright since Shakespeare—well, O’Neill—would be like. He has a funny laugh, heh-heh-heh, and a habit of biting his knuckles to make them crack,” he later wrote. To Tennessee, Gore was handsome, sexy, funny, talented, ambitious. Each responded to the other’s gift for language, to the satiric voice, the elaborate put-on, the practical joke, the self-defensive, sometimes aggressive vulnerability. Despite differences, they immediately liked one another. They soon knew each other’s quips and cues; they could read one another’s body language and facial expressions; they knew when the barbed wit was about to strike or the clownish joke about to be performed. “Tennessee,” Gore later recollected, “was the greatest company on earth. We laughed. He had a wild sense of humor, grotesque, much like mine, and we just spent a lot of time parodying the world, mocking and burlesquing everything and everybody. He wasn’t a terribly good mimic … but he could do numbers. He could do a dying heroine for you. Or he could do an addle-headed piece of trade for you. He could do these characters, much the way he wrote them.”

  In a newly purchased Army-surplus jeep, with a canvas roof neither could figure out how to put up, they were soon off on a trip down to Naples, where Gore had first disembarked, then south along the Amalfi coast to Positano and Amalfi. It had taken Williams an entire afternoon, he told “Dear Blood and Gore,” to do the “transfer of jeep-ownership red tape.” In Rome in 1948 it was easiest to communicate leaving a note with a concierge. “We’re definitely going to Amalfi Sunday morning,” Tennessee assured him. In the meantime, at dawn, Williams, drunk, drove the jeep, which had a defective muffler, up and down the Via Veneto and then to St. Peter’s, where he raced through the wind-blown fountains to cool his head. He loved the roaring engine, the sense of freedom. An amazingly bad driver with terrible eyesight, almost blind in one eye, he seemed indifferent or oblivious to how easily he could have been killed or killed others. Apparently the roar from the muffler and the absence of other vehicles prevented mayhem. Positano and Amalfi, set in the steep hills above the sea, remained vivid in their memories, each to return later to what seemed one of the unspoiled natural paradises. The coast from Naples to Sicily combined visual splendor, medieval life, and rich classical associations. But “our drive down was through nothing but ruined cities that had been bombarded either by our fleet or by retreating Germans. Everything was a mess.” In Amalfi they stayed at the Luna Hotel on the coast highway. There were no other guests. As in Rome, they could live and dine handsomely on an extraordinarily favorable exchange rate in an impoverished Italy. A thousand feet above them, obscured by the high cliffs, was the town of Ravello, which they did not visit, where La Rondinaia, a villa that decades later Vidal was to buy, served as a convalescent home for injured British officers.

  As they toured, each time they got out of the jeep, even for brief stops, they had to remove all their possessions. There was no way to protect anything from theft. Even when they stopped for lunch, everything had to come out, including Gore’s manuscript of A Search for the King, which he had taken with him and which he worked on in hotels. He put it inside his shirt for safekeeping. “I wasn’t going to leave it in the car and have it stolen. Stolen and then tossed away. Every time I got out of the jeep, I made sure I had the manuscript with me. We didn’t know how to put up the canvas top of the jeep. Anybody could have got in.” Williams, who was working on Summer and Smoke, probably had that manuscript with him. They had a photo taken of the two of them, Gore leaning against the hood, one foot on the bumper, Tennessee sitting on the hood, his arm around Gore, which they had made into a postcard. Gore proudly sent it to friends and family. “That happy picture of you and your friend nesting lazily on that Jeep was too much for me,” Judith Jones responded. “I’ve decided to take your suggestion—I shall be sailing on the Vulcania on the 18th of May.” To Anaïs he wrote lovingly, “Write me in care of American Embassy Rome. I think of you cherie; you are still closer to me than anyone else. I want so much to see you. I think about you constantly; glad you’re happy with RP.” In response to a letter from Nina that had reached him at American Express in Rome, he wrote on the back of the postcard, “Tennessee Williams (Streetcar Named Desire) and me—we’re touring Italy in his jeep. Lousy weather, dangerous politics, working well…. Life is luxurious and cheap.” “I have never laughed more with anyone,” he remembered.

  Life was great fun, both on the road and in Rome, though there were the usual anxieties and complaints, most focusing on the reception of City. It had made him an uneasy celebrity and a ready target, even among friends. When Williams and Prokosch were sitting in Doney’s, Vidal came by, so Bill Fricks remembered. Vidal stopped and asked Prokosch if he had gotten the copy of City he had recently dropped off at Prokosch’s hotel. A few polite remarks were exchanged, and Vidal left. Then Prokosch said to Williams and Fricks that Vidal was “a terrible writer, the book is bad, and we’ll never hear from Vidal again—he’ll probably never write anything more and nothing worth reading.” Years later, when Fricks conveyed the story to Vidal, Gore responded, “I always knew that Fritz hated the sale of my books.” Rarely an enthusiastic reader of anything, Williams “got through The City and the Pillar. He disliked the ending. He said, ‘I don’t think you realize, Gore, what a good book you’ve written.’ He thought I’d just put on a hokey ending for commercial reasons.” Williams mistakenly assumed that Jim Willard’s father was modeled on Gore’s and “said of the family scenes, ‘Our fathers were very much alike.’” Toward the end of March, celebrating his thirty-seventh birthday (he claimed it was his thirty-fourth), Williams threw a large party at his Via Aurora apartment. In the crowded rooms everyone spoke English and some French, except for occasional Italians, mostly attractive young men, including Williams’s latest passion. The wealthy British-born art connoisseur Harold Acton, a longtime Italian resident, had come down from his Florentine villa, La Pietra, to inspect the invasion of American artists. He seemed to float “like some large pale fish through the crowded room; from time to time he would make a sudden lunge at this or that promising piece of bait.” Acton later criticized the young Americans for being more interested in sex than in Italian culture. Condescendingly haughty to seemingly provincial Americans who hardly knew a word of Italian, Acton politely deplored “our barbarous presence in his Europe.”

  A greater barbarity threatened. The strength of the national Communist parties among the working classes in Europe was epitomized by the possibility that the party would actually win the Italian election in April. In America, the Communist threat in Europe seemed almost to bring the red tide to American shores. The Bolshevik scare dominated American headlines, the Marshall Plan and McCarthyism opposite sides of the same exaggerated anxiety. Americans in Italy “were told the communists were going to win and that there’d be a bloodbath,” Gore later wrote. The Gores, in Washington, now very conservative, were eager for their grandson’s views. “This country is all wrought up about Europe, Asia, and the whole world. There is a great deal of war talk in the air,” the Senator wrote to him, urging him to “remain in Italy until after the election … unless you think that it is too dangerous?!?!?” From New York, Gene Vidal, who gave him the bitter news that City, sinking fast, was number ten in the Herald Tribune and last in the New York Times Book Review bestseller rankings, also had the dreaded Communists in mind. “You must be wading in Communists according to the most recent war scare via our DC Administration. The elections in Italy are supposed to be something.” When Gore mentioned he might leave because of the threat of postelection violence, Tennessee was baffled. The Russians
“are not a predatory people,” he announced. “‘I don’t know why there is all this fuss about international communism.’ I disagreed. ‘They’ve always been imperialists, just like us.’ ‘That’s not true. Just name one country Russia has tried to take over? I mean recently.’ ‘Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,’ I began … ‘And what,’ asked Tennessee, ‘are they?’”

  In late March, as another manifestation of his desire to meet the famous, gently teased by Prokosch, who gave him “the impression that this sort of busyness was somehow vulgar,” Gore visited George Santayana. The eighty-five-year-old Spanish-born American writer, philosopher, and Harvard professor put the likely Communist takeover into larger perspective. A hard-headed, rational Catholic whose religious faith did not require that he believe in miracles, Santayana had retired to spend his last years at the Convent of the Blue Nuns on the Celian Hill, having discreetly left the Bristol Hotel soon after the Germans occupied Rome. When Gore expressed his residual “America First” horror at the possibility that Italy might go Communist, “Santayana looked positively gleeful. ‘Oh, let them! Let them try it! They’ve tried everything else, so why not communism? After all, who knows what new loyalties will emerge as they become part of a—wolf pack.’” What seemed his cynicism revolted the American innocent who had been brought up in an environment in which the only political leader worse than Roosevelt was Lenin, a difference of degree, not kind. Santayana seemed to Vidal to look exactly like his grandmother, except bald. “He wore a dressing gown; Lord Byron collar open at the withered neck; faded mauve waistcoat. He was genial; made a virtue of his deafness. ‘I will talk. You will listen,’” he always made clear to his American visitors among whom were Edmund Wilson, who seemed to Santayana very self-important, and the poet Robert Lowell, his “new friend” who would have a difficult life as a Catholic in Boston. “The black eyes shone with a lovely malice.” On Gore’s first visit one of the Irish nuns, “a small figure, glided toward” him, asked him his business, and brought him to Santayana, who after a few questions was interested or bored enough to invite him back to his cell. It had an iron bed with a screen around it. There were few books other than his own. He was reading Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History, which he separated from its binding, tearing away each page so that he could hold one at a time. Another day Gore brought with him Barber, Prokosch, and Williams, the playwright a reluctant visitor. Williams stared “at the old man with great interest.” Neither had any idea who the other was. Afterward Williams remarked, “‘Did you notice how he said ‘in the days when I had secretaries, young men?’” Santayana probably had no idea what The City and the Pillar was about. Gore, though he had read The Last Puritan as an adolescent, had not understood or sensed its homoerotic element. Another time they talked about Henry James, whom Santayana had known. “He gave a sort of imitation of Henry’s periphrastic style; then sighed. ‘Oh, the James brothers!’ He sounded as if he were invoking the outlaws.” Reminiscing about his youth, Santayana told him, Vidal later wrote, that there had been “an opening at Harvard in philosophy and not in architecture, which is what he really wanted to do. Since he was very well read and a thoughtful man and a poet, with secondary but real gifts, he said, ‘Oh, well,’ and became a philosopher. To the horror of William James,” with whom he never got along. Serious, innocent, fatuous, the young Gore Vidal, thinking of his own ambition, complained, “In America literary reputations come and go so swiftly.” The response was immediate. “‘It would be insufferable if they did not.’” At the third, final visit, in the beginning of April, as Gore rose to go, Santayana said, “‘I shall give you a book,’” and took a copy of his autobiographical The Middle Span from the bookcase. “‘What is your name?’” he asked. “‘I shall write for you. I rarely do this.’ … ‘For Gore Vidal, George Santayana, April 1, 1948.’ ‘It is your April Fool’s present.’”