Best-Kept Boy in the World (16 page)

To Peter’s surprise, Steven calls the next morning
and invites him to a party at Elliott Magren’s apartment. Elliott
Magren is the Denham Fouts character in this short story, and,
appropriately enough, lives on the Rue du Bac, just as Denny did.
Peter is curious about Elliott, who is “already a legend in
Europe,”
⁸¹
and so decides to go to the party.

When Peter arrives at the apartment at ten-thirty
that night, Steven greets him at the door—”The beautiful
Peter!”—and shows him through the four large rooms of the apartment
to the last room, where Elliott, dressed, lays on a big bed
surrounded by pillows. The room is dimly lit by lamps with red
shades, and over the bed hangs a painting of a nude man, “the work
of a famous painter I’d never heard of.”
⁸²
In the room
with Steven and Peter are a dozen other men, middle-aged, in
expensive suits. Steven introduces Peter to Elliott, who shakes his
hand and pulls him next to him on the bed, and asks if he wants to
smoke opium. Peter told him no, he doesn’t use drugs.

Peter doesn’t find this legend to be unusually
handsome, certainly not movie star glamorous as he had expected.
“He is about five foot ten and weighs about a hundred sixty pounds.
He has dark, straight hair that falls over his forehead; his eyes
were black. The two sides of his face don’t match, like Oscar
Wilde’s. Because of drugs, he is unnaturally pale.”
⁸³
That description matches Vidal’s description in his memoirs of his
first meeting with Denny. In fact, Vidal’s depiction of Elliott in
this short story so closely matches Denham Fouts that it seems a
fair assumption that the story follows closely what Denny told the
author about the start of his career.

In “Pages from an Abandoned Journal,” Elliott grew
up in Galveston, Texas and at sixteen was befriended by a German
baron who spotted him on the beach and took him to Berlin. In a
parenthetical remark in the short story, Peter raises the sort of
question that surrounds Denny’s life story: “I always wonder about
details in a story like this: what did his parents say about a
stranger walking off with their son? Was there a scene? Did they
know what was going on?”
⁸⁴
Elliott spends several years
with the baron, then has a fight and begins walking from Berlin to
Munich when a limousine pulls over and an old Egyptian shipping
magnate in the back seat invites Elliott into the car and ends up
taking him on his yacht for a cruise of the Mediterranean. In
Naples, Elliott and a Greek sailor on the yacht steal several
thousand dollars from the old man, jump ship, and make their way to
Capri where they stay at the most expensive hotel. In the short
story, the sailor leaves, Elliott can’t pay his bills and is about
to be led off to jail “when Lord Glenellen, who was just checking
into the hotel, saw him and told the police to let him go, that
he
would pay his bill ...”
⁸⁵

Lord Glenellen takes Elliott to England, just as
Evan Morgan, Lord Tredegar, saved Denny from arrest in Capri and
took him on a world tour and then home to Tredegar House. In the
short story, Elliott, moving in higher aristocratic circles, meets
Prince Basil and lives with him until he becomes King Basil. In
Denny’s life, it was Prince Paul who became King Paul. When war
threatens Europe, Elliott goes to California where he tries to “get
interested in Vedanta and tries to stop taking drugs and lead a
quiet ... if not normal ... life,” just as Denny went to
California, stayed with Christopher Isherwood, studied Vedanta, and
entered college.
⁸⁶
After the War, Elliott returns to
Paris and the Rue du Bac, as did Denny.

As they sit together on the bed, Steven brings
Elliott his opium pipe. Elliott lights up and begins to talk. “I
can’t remember a word he said. I was aware, though, that this was
probably the most brilliant conversation I’d ever heard. It might
have been the setting which was certainly provocative or maybe I’d
inhaled some of the opium which put me in a receptive mood but, no
matter the cause, I sat listening to him, fascinated, not wanting
him to stop.”
⁸⁷
So Gore sat on Denny’s bed, listening,
absorbing.

With his eyes shut (the opium made them sensitive to
the light), Elliott asks Peter about himself. Peter tells him about
growing up in Toledo, Ohio, his work at Columbia for his doctorate,
his plans to marry Helen and teach—in short, his plans for a
normal, all-American life—”but as I talked I couldn’t help but
think how dull my life must sound to Elliott. I cut it short. I
couldn’t compete with him,” and then Peter adds, “and didn’t want
to.”
⁸⁸
Here is a first subtle sign that Peter finds his
new acquaintance of special interest.

In his entry of May 25, 1948, Peter is at the beach
at Deauville with Hilda, a high school friend from Toledo who he
met in Paris and with whom he has begun an affair, although “having
sex with her is about the dullest pastime I can think
of.”
⁸⁹
Elliott appears, walking down the beach in
crimson swim trunks and sunglasses, and Peter notices “with
surprise how smooth and youthful his body was, like a
boy.”
⁹⁰
Is Elliott there by chance, or by design? That
night they had first met in Elliott’s bedroom, Elliott had asked
Peter “if I’d see him some evening alone, and I said I would like
to but ...and this was completely spur of the moment ...I said I
was going to Deauville the next day, with a girl.”
⁹¹
Is
Peter afraid of being alone with Elliott? Does he want to confirm
to Elliott, and to himself, that he is straight? Has Elliott
followed Peter there?

Two days later, Peter and Hilda see Elliott again at
the hotel where they are staying, though now in tow was a
fourteen-year-old boy Elliott introduces to them. The next morning,
after Hilda leaves for Paris, Peter knocks on Elliott’s door, as
Elliott has asked him to do, to meet him and go with him to the
beach. In the room, Elliott and the fourteen year old are sitting
on the floor, naked, working on assembling a Meccano erector set,
the blueprints and parts spread about them. “The boy who was the
color of a terra-cotta pot gave me a wicked grin.”
⁹²
From this description, it seems that Vidal had met Gerard at
Denny’s apartment, or at least had heard all about him—the teenager
Denny had met on a beach in Brittany, taken by his resemblance to
himself. That “wicked grin” mirrors Michael Wishart’s description
of Gerard’s “wide, violet, conqueror’s eyes.” Vidal had realized
right away when he met Denny that Denny “was at his best with
pubescent boys.”
⁹³

Elliott and the teenager put on swim trunks and,
together, the three walk to the beach where the teenager goes off
on his own. “I asked Elliott if this sort of thing wasn’t very
dangerous and he said yes it probably was but life was short and he
was afraid of nothing, except drugs. He told me then that he had
had an electrical shock treatment at a clinic shortly before I’d
first met him. Now, at last, he was off opium and he hoped it was a
permanent cure ... Then when I asked him if he always went in for
young boys he said yes and made a joke about how, having lost all
memory of his own childhood, he would have to live out a new one
with some boy.”
⁹⁴

A pivotal point in the short story, and perhaps in
Vidal’s life, is revealed in the entry from the abandoned journal
for May 29, 1948. It is evening; Andre, the fourteen-year-old boy,
has gone home to his family. Peter and Elliott are having dinner
together on the hotel’s terrace overlooking the sea. (In an oral
history, Vidal spoke of dining with Denny a number of times after
their first meeting in Denny’s bedroom.) The two characters in the
story begin to reveal more about themselves to each other:

Eating fresh sole from the Channel, I told Elliott
all about Jimmie, told him things I myself had nearly forgotten,
had wanted to forget. I told him how it had started at twelve and
gone on, without plan or thought or even acknowledgement until, at
seventeen, I went to the Army and he to the Marines and a quick
death. After the Army, I met Helen and forgot him completely; his
death, like Elliott’s shock treatment, took with it all memory, a
thousand summer days abandoned on a coral island.
⁹⁵

Here again, in a style reminiscent of Hemingway’s
reliance on what is left out of a story, what is not told, to give
it emotional depth, is the Jimmie Trimble story. Gore already had
told Tennessee Williams all about Jimmie, and Christopher
Isherwood’s diaries from these days reveal that Vidal had told him
of his love for Jimmie.
⁹⁶
That he would share this story
with Denny when they were together hints at the intimacies of their
conversation.

Finishing his story, Peter wonders why he had told
Elliott, feeling as if he had said too much: why was he telling his
new acquaintance that which revealed the innermost secrets he had
not accepted himself? Elliott contemplated silently what he had
heard, then spoke to Peter “about life and duty to oneself and how
the moment is all one has and how it is dishonorable to cheat
oneself of that.” Peter thinks about this “strange disjointed
speech.” As he writes in his journal: “I’m not sure that he said
anything very useful or very original but sitting there in the
dark, listening, his words had a peculiar urgency for me and I
felt, in a way, that I was listening to an oracle . .
.”
⁹⁷

Could this be the turning point when Peter/Gore came
to grips with their own identity, their own sexuality, who they
were? Could Denny have had this sort of impact on Gore’s life?

In the short story’s journal entry three days later,
June 1, 1948, we learn that Elliott has been arrested. Young Andre
has stolen his camera; Andre’s parents find the camera and ask
where he got it; under threats from them, Andre tells his parents
that Elliott has tried to seduce him. A gendarme comes to Peter
while he was sitting on the hotel’s terrace and tells him that
Elliott Magren has asked him to visit him in jail, and then
questions him about what he knows about Mr. Magren, looking at him
suspiciously. “It was only too apparent what his opinion of
me
was: another
pederast americain
. My voice shook
and my throat dried up as I told him I hardly knew Elliott ... I’d
only just met him ... I knew nothing about his private
life.”
⁹⁸
In his journal entry for this day, Peter
records the events as if from a distance. “All I wanted was to get
away from Deauville, from Elliott, from the crime ... and it
was
a crime, I’m sure of that.”
⁹⁹
Frightened,
Peter immediately packs his bags and that day returns to Paris.
“I’m not proud of my cowardice but I didn’t want to be drawn into
something I hardly understood.”
¹⁰⁰
Several days later,
he records in his diary that Steven told him how Elliott had
contacted a friend who was a lawyer, the charges were dropped,
perhaps through a payment, and Elliott is staying in Deauville for
another week “doubtless to be near Andre.”
¹⁰¹

The journal’s next entry is dated December 26, 1953:
almost six years have elapsed. Peter is now in New York City,
hung-over from a Christmas party where an English playwright he met
had “made the biggest play for me,” though, Peter notes, he wasn’t
at all attractive.
¹⁰²
Peter is now an antiques dealer;
he has sold to Steven a Queen Anne desk for his new apartment where
Peter went with Steven after the party. There, Steven questions
Peter about Bob and his break-up with Bob. At first it seems as if
this concerns the break-up of a business arrangement, but the
context makes it clear that it is also the break-up of a personal
relationship. “Well, I’m out of it and any day now I’ll meet
somebody ...though it’s funny how seldom you see anyone who’s
really attractive. There was a nice young Swede at Steven’s but I
never did get his name and anyway he is being kept by that ribbon
clerk from the Madison Avenue Store.”
¹⁰³
Clearly, Peter
in the intervening years has come out.

The next day, the narrator goes to a tea at the home
of Mrs. Blaine-Smith, an important patron to whom he has sold a
Hepplewhite sofa and a lot of other antiques. Another guest at the
tea party is an Italian count “who was terribly nice though
unattractive”
¹⁰⁴
; the two exchange stories about their
times in Europe after World War II. “Then, as always, the name
Elliott Magren was mentioned. He’s practically a codeword ... if
you know Elliott, well, you’re on the inside and of course the
Count (as I’d expected all along) knew Elliott and we exchanged
bits of information about him, skirting carefully drugs and small
boys.” The two talk about Elliott’s apartment “and that marvelous
Tchelichew [note how Peter now knows the artist’s name] that hangs
over his bed” when another of the guests, an Englishman, tells them
that Elliott Magren has died the week before. The Count is visibly
upset, and Peter wonders if he had been one of Elliott’s
lovers.

And then a stunner: Peter writes in his journal: “I
couldn’t help recalling then that terrible time at Deauville when
Elliott was arrested and I had to put up bail for him and hire a
lawyer, all in French!”
¹⁰⁵
“I”? This Peter had not been
able to admit, even in his journal, as those events unfolded almost
six years before: that it was he who thought enough of Elliott, who
was close enough to Elliott, to come to his rescue.

The news of Elliott’s death brings back to Peter
memories of those months in 1948: “what an important summer that
was, the chrysalis burst at last. . .”
¹⁰⁶

In itself, “Pages from an Abandoned Journal” would
not be a memorable short story, certainly not one that would have
found its way into an anthology of the best short stories of the
decade, or even one that would be remembered long after it is read.
Nevertheless, its an intriguing story that may be read on a number
of levels. It is a subtly unfolding, finely wrought coming-of-age
story of Peter’s awakening to his sexuality, his identity, with
Elliott perhaps as a catalyst who opened his eyes—the oracle—to the
importance of being true to oneself, of the importance of the
moment. This story adheres so closely to the details of Denny’s
life that it perhaps is not a reckless leap to conclude that it is
a close transcription of the secret pages from Vidal’s journal
locked away with his papers at Harvard. In all of his voluminous
and often introspective writings, Vidal never analyzes his
transformation from the man at the Christmas party at Mrs.
Shippen’s Dancing School that December in 1942, telling Jimmie
Trimble of his plans to marry Rosalind while “coming
simultaneously” with Jimmie in the basement men’s room stall, to
the man who lived with Howard Austen from 1952 until his partner’s
death in 2003. Did Vidal’s encounters with Denham Fouts hold the
key to his own awakening, the time when his own “chrysalis burst”?
Certainly the year 1948, the year he repeatedly called that “annus
mirabilis,” a time when “those of us who had missed our youth tried
to catch up,”
¹⁰⁷
had a special meaning in his life. If
so, this quiet short story may someday be viewed as a key to Gore
Vidal’s life story, and as a nonfiction chronicle of Denham
Fouts.