by Gore Vidal
“You and Tim,” Peter was tentative, “will make a film about Stalin?” Was this the right response to the onion soup code?
“No. No. We wouldn’t dare. I mean, tell the truth. Hollywood is honeycombed with communists.”
“Like L. B. Mayer?”
“Not the studio heads. Except, in a way, they are the worst. They only want to make money. They turn a blind eye on communists like Capra and Myrna Loy because they are box-office. Mother’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt gives them their orders—directly. I’ve heard Mother on the telephone with Eleanor. Thick as thieves.” The waiter asked if Emma was through with her now well-exercised soup. “Yes, thank you. It was delicious. Could I have more ice. And white wine?”
The butter, untouched, was melting on its chaste plate.
“Our plan is to do a Hometown film with what look to be true-blue Americans who turn out to be secret Reds. They take over the schools. At least one classroom, anyway, where they subtly question capitalism.”
“It hardly seems possible!”
Peter was rewarded with an angry glance. “Don’t think your magazine isn’t being thoroughly examined by the Justice Department.”
“For typos?”
“No. For un-American ideas. We’ve been lobbying President Truman and he’s promised to set up a Loyalty Review Board in the next few months. Everyone in government must swear a special oath of allegiance to the country and vow to fight communism in all its forms.”
“That’s what Hitler made the Germans do. It’s not very American, Emma.”
“Well, it’s going to be. Thank heaven. You have to fight fire with fire. Besides, why should a loyal American fear a loyalty oath?”
Peter was amused. “Why should a disloyal one fear an oath?”
“Perjury. Three years in prison.” Emma was prompt.
Peter saw that her powerful emotions had swept her far past mere common sense. Had it swept the President too? If so … “Dewey may well be elected in ’48 as the freedom candidate.”
“This is bipartisan. Everybody’s aboard. We’ve got them all.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“That would be telling.” Emma giggled as she scraped the mayonnaise off her lobster and onto the edge of the plate. “I’ll give you one clue. Senator Bingham’s with us. He may be heading up the whole thing. Look! We have to do it. We’ve no choice. The propaganda is so heavy on the communist side. So weak on ours. That’s how I convinced L.B. that our picture has to be made if we’re to win this war against the Reds.”
“And Myrna Loy?”
“You should take those matters more seriously, Peter. When they break up the great fortunes, that will be the end of you. Go ahead, laugh. You won’t when it happens. The IRS is in the hands of a cell of dedicated Marxists.” Delicately she removed a lobster claw from its shell and placed it neatly on the side of the plate opposite to the mayonnaise. It was then that Peter realized that she was not going to eat anything. As a sign of her specialness, the most expensive items must be brought her; then as a sign of her … of her what? Ascetic character?… everything she’d ordered would be thrown out. Since she was on the verge of plumpness, she obviously nourished herself plentifully when not on view.
The rest of the evening was something of a haze. Peter and the beautiful black singer ended up not in romantic Harlem as he had hoped with Cab Calloway’s hi-de-hi’s and hi-de-ho’s echoing in the streets, but in a comfortable Murray Hill flat where the young singer, daughter of a prosperous orthodontist, lived with a roommate, currently home with her folks in Oklahoma. As always, at the moment of climax, Peter felt that the rest of his life must be spent doing just this with so uniquely perfect a girl, even as he rode wave after wave of ever-diminishing passion until sleep abruptly engulfed him. When morning came, passion spent, he was ready for his usual getaway; even so, he was hurt that she, the soul of easy amiability, was quite as eager as he that he be gone.
“Could I have your number?” he asked, wondering what had happened to that dream of the eternity he had wanted to spend with her. He got the number. Eternity, presumably, could look after itself.
Aeneas was relieved when Peter returned. Rosalind had gone to her office.
“There’s a Tudor ballet at the Ballet Theatre …”
“Except for Nutcracker Suite, I’ve never seen a ballet. I don’t think anyone in Washington has, either—at least not in the city. The National Theatre just does comedies like Three Men on a Horse.”
That evening, Rosalind stayed home with a feverish child while Peter and Aeneas watched an extraordinary actress who was billed as a ballerina perform Antony Tudor’s Pillar of Fire. Peter had never seen anything like it and, apparently, neither had the rest of the world until the war’s end and classical ballet, with “psychological” variations, had conquered New York. For Peter, the result was revelatory.
Later, in the bleak Russian Tea Room in Fifty-seventh Street, Peter ate pressed caviar and drank hot tea from a glass; while Aeneas poked at beef Stroganoff, Peter quizzed Aeneas about ballet—what it had been, what it was becoming.
“The fact is that the war froze every one of the arts. Particularly the performing arts. The best young men were gone. Now they’re back. But instead of the androgynous types that used to go in for ballet we’ve got what look to be American high school athletes up on stage, and they make their British and French counterparts seem much too fragile by comparison.”
Peter was looking through a stack of Ballet Theatre playbills. There were photographs of a ballet about three young sailors on leave in wartime Manhattan. Fancy Free was the title. Not a swan in sight. The music was by the young Leonard Bernstein, who was talked of—if not listened to—even in Washington.
“Bernstein?” Peter looked at Aeneas, suddenly become his guide to Parnassus.
“Late twenties. Does everything. Composes symphonies. That musical comedy On the Town. Conducts …”
“And young. Everyone’s as young as we are,” Peter marveled. “Is that the sign of a new cycle? Or arrested development, arrested by war?”
“I have no idea. Probably both.”
Peter was thoughtful. “Young. American. The American idea. Something new. But only for us? Or is the same thing happening in Europe?”
Aeneas shook his head. “They’re too busy trying to survive this winter. Certainly, we’re inventing the new ballet. We’re far ahead of the French and the British, who don’t know it yet. Our poets …”
“Lowell. Yes. I know. Prose? Painting?”
Aeneas shrugged. “I don’t read novels. Don’t look at pictures. Peggy Guggenheim’s in charge of modern art. At least here in Manhattan. She will know.”
Peter was beginning to feel a—what? Want or desire? Like the first stage of sex that he’d experienced the night before? Except he knew that this sensation was not about to fade away, stage by diminishing stage, because there would never be a climax to what would be for him—or any interested contemporary—an endless process of engulfment by a newborn civilization in a traditionally artless land. An American ballet! The concept had not existed before the war. Now if all the other arts were suddenly to be airborne …
“Could it be that …” he started; then stopped.
Aeneas said, “It’s bad manners to begin a rhetorical question and then not finish it. Could it be that—what?”
“I don’t know. That is, I don’t know what it could be.”
“Start by telling me what it is.” Aeneas had shifted into ontological gear.
“That ballet where the dancer I like so much … the one who acts.”
“Nora Kaye.”
“Gives birth onstage …”
“Undertow by Antony Tudor. Giving birth to the very large Hugh Laing.”
“Well, that’s the ‘it.’ ” Something very large is being born now.”
“In ballet?”
“In the United States. Given half a chance, of course. Depression’s over. War’s over. Europe’s our dependen
cy. Japan’s our colony. Russia’s freezing and starving this winter while we have Undertow.”
“A renaissance? Here?” Aeneas was skeptical.
“I’ll settle for naissance. We’ve never had a high culture or anything close …”
“New England Indian summer?”
“What was new? What was English? What was Indian? That was also far too chilly a season for summer. A handful of eccentrics in Boston with old Walt Whitman down in New Jersey singing the body general electric.” Peter was now in full imaginative flight. “Think of all the energy we put into these two wars. Into breaking the atom. And now the education—or what passes for education—of the veterans, a whole class, millions of them, freed from the virtues of the family farm and the assembly line, are going to go to Harvard …”
“Surely Detroit is the true home of our genius and Cambridge, Mass, our school for dunces.”
Peter, unable to sit still, went over to the window and looked out at the plain cement wall of the next building. “This is classic,” he said. “Literally. Think of Rome when Augustus made peace in all the world that he and Rome had conquered.”
“Romans still celebrate his birthday, two millennia later. August fifteenth. But,” Aeneas was dour, “his peace didn’t last all that long …”
“It lasted four hundred years. That was when all the arts flourished. When something new was born …”
“Like Hugh Laing in Undertow?”
“Except he is born onstage at the Ballet Theatre and not in a manger. If it wasn’t too late, I’d change American Idea to something like American Civilization.”
Aeneas laughed. “A thin paper but there will be those who love it.”
Peter was in no way deflated. “We start from scratch. Take me to Peggy Guggenheim’s.”
Peter was pleased that many of the assembled artists and patrons in Guggenheim’s low-ceilinged flat—more like a small house than a Manhattan apartment—had heard of his paper if not of him. The hostess was dressed as a peasant girl in a frilly skirt, wooden beads, close-cut gray hair; she had a large rosy nose not unlike that of the congenial W. C. Fields. She squinted at Aeneas. “Oh, it’s you. So this is Peter Sanford!” Peter shook her hand. “The Sanfords are very rich so you can buy all sorts of things in the gallery. There’s Léger.” Peter turned to look at what even he could tell was not a painting by Léger.
“No, Peter, not the picture. The painter.” She introduced him to Léger, a tall burly Frenchman in workman’s clothes. Then she vanished. Since he had nothing to talk to Léger about, Peter wandered about the room. The editor of View introduced himself. He had three names. He identified various poets and painters. “Peggy scoops them all up.” Peter was now more than ever at sea.
Aeneas was sardonically aware that Peter’s first plunge into postwar American civilization was not quite what he had expected. The two of them drank cheap red wine at the edge of a group surrounding their hostess’s husband, Laurence Vail—or ex-husband—with Peggy such formalities were seldom spelled out. Vail was demonstrating how to put a model ship inside an opalescent bottle.
“Everybody’s foreign,” Peter muttered to Aeneas.
“Not everybody. There’s James Agee. He writes about movies for Time. He thinks a lot of junk movies are high art …”
“That’s part of the changeover.” Peter was beginning to recover his enthusiasm. “The line between high art and popular …”
“… has been fading away for some time now. But this isn’t really New York. It’s a displaced Paris. Soon everyone here will be going home.”
“Peter!” A blond girl with slightly hyperthyroid gray eyes greeted him.
“Cornelia.” They had known each other from the years that they had served together at Mrs. Shippen’s dancing school, where the young of Washington were sent at puberty and then, year after year, were expected to ascend life’s social ladder together until marriage within the dancing class and the prompt replication of themselves in order to repeat the process until, presumably, the Day of Judgment, when prizes would be awarded to the best waltzer, best Lambeth Walker, most enthusiastic interpreter of the Big Apple.
Cornelia Claiborne had taken up with several young academics who believed that the country urgently needed yet another academic quarterly review. Somewhat jealously, he quizzed her; was relieved to discover that the review they were planning would be mostly literary with a classical bias. Nothing new need apply. Then she introduced him to a lean young man with a blond crewcut like Clay’s, not a recommendation in Peter’s current mood. But then Peter realized that they knew each other from Washington. Gene Vidal was several years younger than Peter. Each had been at St. Alban’s; each had attended Mrs. Shippen’s; then war had taken Vidal to the Pacific and Peter to the far more perilous corridors of the Pentagon. Now, to Peter’s bemusement, Vidal had dropped his Christian name and as Gore Vidal had published a first novel; a second novel was on the way. Although Peter would have preferred death to reading a book by a Washington contemporary even younger than himself, he had not realized that the book he had read about—some kind of war novel—was by the boy that he had known prewar.
“My mother insists that Gore writes just like Shakespeare,” said Cornelia, causing the young—twenty? twenty-one?—author to blush.
Peter nodded gravely. “With our new civilization we’ll certainly need a Shakespeare sooner or later. Why not you?”
Vidal shook his head sadly. “I could never manage those rhyming couplets at the end of scenes.”
“I could do those for you,” said Cornelia. She turned to Peter. “Gore almost married Rosalind Rust.”
“It was her mother that nearly married me.” Peter now remembered hearing about Vidal from friends in common. After three years in the Army he had refused to go on to college. Instead, he had left Washington for New York, published his first novel, and taken a job with a publisher. Plainly a reckless optimist.
Aeneas had joined them. Peter made introductions. Then he said, “We’ve just decided that the United States is going to have a civilization at last. We’ve been auditioning Shakespeares.”
“Do we really want a civilization? Isn’t it sort of nice, the mess we’ve got?” Was Vidal mocking them? He seemed too young and bland to have that sort of humor. “I mean, we’ve done awfully well as the hayseeds of the Western world. Why spoil it? Certainly we don’t want to be like these jokers.” Vidal indicated Peggy’s version of Comus’s rout. “And do nothing but speak French all day long and in our sleep, too. No, we’ve got to stay dumb. We owe it to our forefathers. To Plymouth Rock. That great rock we landed on. That really thick rock. Dense, too. Our foundation and our emblem. In the sign of that clueless rock, we’re bound to conquer the world.”
Aeneas was not amused but Peter was. “You should go in for satire. For us. In The American Idea.”
Vidal laughed. “I mostly do storms at sea. The ones Conrad didn’t bother with.”
There was a round of applause for Laurence Vail, who had finally raised the sails of a miniature ship inside a bottle. “That’s my sort of ship,” said the young war novelist.
“I intend for us to create—we’ll include you and Cornelia if you want to come along for the ride—America’s Golden Age.” Peter was overwhelmed not only by his own megalomania but by the new world empire’s untapped resources.
He was promptly deflated by Vidal. “How can you have a golden age after Roosevelt took us off the gold standard?”
“Uranium,” said Aeneas, “will do just as well.”
TWELVE
1
The new offices of The American Idea were located in a nineteenth-century red-brick building to the east of the Capitol. The neighborhood was middle-class Negro and a ten-minute walk from the Capitol. Peter had made a flat for himself on the third floor, and so, at last, he had a home of his own on his own.
The new arts pages had magically increased circulation in New York City and Boston and not harmed it too much in the Distric
t of Columbia, where the arts were regarded at best with indifference, at worst with active dislike or, as Representative Smith of Virginia said, when yet another doomed bill came before Congress requesting some sort of minimal funding for the arts, “I have always regarded poker as a peculiarly American art form, and so I must respectfully propose that this magnificent card game be federally subsidized along with your symphony orchestras and picture paintings, thus acknowledging the native creativity of the true American.”
Peter had written an editorial expressing wonder how it was possible that the world’s political capital should have only one theater, no opera house, no symphony hall, and no museum of art had it not been for the Mellon family, who had built for the city an imperial marble building of Augustan splendor to house their great collection. Since this palace was begun pre–world empire, it was, Peter wrote, somewhat recklessly, a premonition of what was sure to come. Thus far, of course, only a mock subsidy for poker had been proposed by the Capitoline geese.
In February, after they had got back from the conquest of New York—conquest in the sense that they, not New York, had been conquered—Aeneas had begun to cultivate a smooth young Missouri lawyer called Clark Clifford who was now very close to the Missouri president. Clifford had come to the White House as a naval aide. Then he had become the President’s legal counsel, the same job that Sam Rosenman had performed for Roosevelt. It was Clifford who had written the speech that Truman had delivered to Congress during the great railroad strike in which the President, by some sort of executive decree, drafted all the railroad workers into the Army; then he ordered them, as soldiers, back to work. Fortunately, for what was left of the republic, the strike was settled while Truman was addressing Congress; later the Senate rejected the dictatorship that he had so temptingly put on offer.
