Gore Vidal

To

RHODA,
and to the memory of
JEROME BADANCES

Prelude

Chapter One Origins, 1776-1925

Chapter Two A Washington Childhood, 1925-1939

Chapter Three First Flight, 1935-1939

Chapter Four Brave New World, 1939-1941

Chapter Five Proudly Unfurled, 1941-1943

Chapter Six A Border Lord, 1943-1946

Chapter Seven Two Eagles, 1946-1947

Chapter Eight The Golden Age, 1947-1948

Chapter Nine Byron Without Greece, 1948-1950

Chapter Ten A Room of His Own, 1950-1955

Chapter Eleven Intolerable Absences, 1955-1957

Chapter Twelve Open and Shut, 1957-1960

Chapter Thirteen Something to Say, 1960-1963

Chapter Fourteen Delphi, 1963-1966

Chapter Fifteen Trapped in a Nightmare, 1965-1968

Chapter Sixteen From Chicago to Ravello, 1969-1972

Chapter Seventeen The View from La Rondinaia, 1972-1978

Chapter Eighteen The Same Sinking Boat, 1978-1986

Chapter Nineteen Scenes from Later Life, 1987-1996

Endnotes

Plate Section

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Author

Also by Fred Kaplan

Rock creek park cemetery, washington, D.C., November 1994. I prefer my subjects dead, I had told him. He responded that he perfectly understood but declined to do anything special to accommodate my preference. Now we are experiencing a different aspect of the subject. A few hundred yards away, the sculpture of a veiled, androgynous figure famously signifies the grave site of Henry Adams and his wife. The land slopes aslant the grassy November stubble to the comparatively obscure burial marker of a Marine killed at Iwo Jima fifty years ago. My subject and I are standing amid the dead. We are both very much alive. The object of the visit to Rock Creek Park Cemetery is to certify visually that the site he has requested for his burial is in fact what he had triangulated in his mind, what he had negotiated from afar with the Rock Creek Park Cemetery business office, and to sign the covenants and authorizations. He wants the site roughly equidistant from the famous Adams and the obscure Jimmie Trimble.

One can always be buried, someplace. But to be buried at a particular place for particular reasons takes planning and sometimes luck. The director of the cemetery, partial lord of all he surveys, thinks the site an excellent
one. He is both businesslike and officious. Probably it gives him pleasure to anticipate a celebrity burial, the newspaper stories perhaps not far beyond the year 2000 that will identify the cemetery in which the famous writer has just been buried. The cemetery director is a relatively young man, certainly not a day over fifty. If the obituaries have any wit, they will remark that Gore Vidal at last owns property in Washington, D.C. “How do Mr. Vidal and Mr. Austen envision the monument?” Howard Austen has been Gore Vidal's companion for almost fifty years. There is some matter-of-fact discussion. My opinion is solicited. Since, if I survive my subject, I will someday describe in print the glint of medium-dark marble, the angle at which the two flat stones have been placed, the simplicity of the inscriptions, why not add to the day's solemn amusement the irony of the biographer being consulted about the burial circumstances? It is one of the rewards for having forgone my preference that my subject be dead.

We chat a little at the grave-site-to-be. With my shoe I prod up some soil and scuff it forward an inch or two across the fields of the republic. It is a bright, mild day that transcends funereal locations. Gore (mostly) and Howard seem satisfied. In the end they will both be here. That is, what remains of them. They have been almost everywhere on this planet, and they have had a few favorite places. The last decades have been spent mostly on a Roman Street and in a Ravello villa. But, about America, Vidal has written,
“Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”
For the satirist there is no difference between loving and loathing. They are the same pleasure, the same pain. To be buried in Rock Creek Park Cemetery is to be buried as close to home as possible, a final statement about the pleasure and the pain of our American home. Before leaving the cemetery we stop at a small stone Gothic building, the business office. Here the
real
business is done. Gore signs various documents. Howard signs. I also sign. The biographer as observer, participant, witness.

Gore Vidal's last name is his father's family name, his first his mother's. Born October 3, 1925, at West Point, New York, he was named, and thirteen years later baptized by the canon of Washington's Episcopalian National Cathedral Church, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr. His father, who had a poor memory for such things, could not remember for certain whether his own name was Eugene Louis or Eugene Luther. He mistakenly put Louis rather than Luther on
his son's birth certificate
. His exasperated son remarked, years later, that since his father was then an instructor at West Point, “He might have asked the head of his department what his name was. ‘You know, I've forgotten my name. Could you tell me?'” At his baptism the Luther was restored. He also added, as another middle name, his mother's maiden name. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, the young boy's highest model of worldly achievement, was a United States senator. Then, at the age of sixteen, Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, Jr., decided that a partial act of self-naming would anoint him with the best of both traditions. He wanted a sharp, distinctive name, appropriate for an aspiring author or national political leader. “I wasn't going to write as Gene since
there was already one. I didn't want to use the Jr.” He dropped his first two names and the Jr. Thenceforth he was, so to speak, just Gore Vidal.

The Gore family saga is aggressively American, mostly Southern and Southwestern. When, in the early seventeenth century, the first Gores arrived in America from their Protestant Anglo-Irish origins, one brother went to New England, the other to Maryland, apparently never to meet again. The brothers probably came from Ireland, where the English Gores (of whom there were many) had been awarded land for service to the crown. They settled in Donegal, resolutely Anglo-Irish and anti-Catholic. Where they originally came from in England is unclear; so too is the nature of their service to the crown, though it probably had something to do with putting down the Irish. In Maryland, James Gore flourished, the patronymic father of seemingly innumerable farmers, ministers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, soldiers, politicians—three hundred years of ambitious, stubbornly assertive individualists. English and Irish origins faded into family legend and historical mist. They later associated themselves with the category Scots-Irish, which proved useful to those who wanted to make clear that though they were from Ireland, they were not Catholics. From generation to generation American Gores were to have names like James, Thomas, Manning, Austen, Albert, Notley, Elias, Ellis, Ezekiel.

The immigrant James and his immediate descendents leased and owned substantial tracts of land in what is now part of central Washington and in the Georgetown-Rock Creek Park area. They fought in the French and Indian and then in the Revolutionary War, by the time of the latter apparently staunchly anti-British. They were fruitful and multiplied. As each died, land had to be divided or sold or both. Each needed a property, a stake, an opportunity. Fortunately, there was always land to the west. Toward the end of the French and Indian War, one of the immigrant James's grandsons, Thomas, was granted or bought land in South Carolina. Selling extensive property in Maryland, part of the large family moved, before the Revolution began, southward and westward, to Chester County, near Spartanburg, in northwestern South Carolina. Thomas Tindal Gore, perhaps Thomas Gore's nephew, the son of his brother Manning, was born in South Carolina in the celebratory year 1776, and became the patriarch of the next
generation. With his wife, by whom he had eight sons and five daughters, he raised cotton along the fertile banks of the Sandy River. In 1817, in wagons, Thomas Tindal moved his family south and westward, probably looking for better land, more land, more autonomy, some release for a combination of restlessness and ambition. His willful individualism traveled with the word of his Methodist God and the assumption that the Gores were a chosen people. Once more there was someplace better to the west. White American settlers and their government in Washington had from the beginning conspired to buy or conquer (whichever was more practical) the lands between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River.

First the Thomas Tindal Gores went to Alabama, on the northwestern border of Alabama with Mississippi, where whites were rapidly replacing Indians. Apparently Thomas Gore kept an inn and ran a livery barn in Pickens County. In 1830 he was elected a county commissioner and then ran for the Alabama state senate. In 1840 the patriarch took part of his family directly westward into north-central Mississippi to Choctaw County, which had once been the heartland of the Choctaw Indian nation. Some Choctaws remained behind, never to be assimilated, but most were forced farther west, by economic and military pressure, across the river to what was later to be part of Oklahoma. With other white settlers, the Gores seized the opportunity. Thomas Tindal Gore purchased from a Choctaw Indian for two hundred dollars a large property along the Yalobusha River in what is now Calhoun City, then a hardscrabble frontier town in a county in which the land was tough, resistant, and hilly, and no one wealthy. As the Gores moved westward, they farmed whatever was the best local crop of the region. They preached the Word. They healed the sick. They were quicktongued, sharp-witted, smart. They talked and argued and argued and talked, sometimes for sport, always with passion. Thomas Tindal Gore's descendants were soon to fight (and some to die) in the Civil War, regional patriots, small slaveowners, hill-country farmers, Methodist ministers, noticeably idealistic, argumentative, hot-tempered, and clannishly loyal. “
If a snake
should bite one Gore, the entire family would swell from it.” They were mostly unionists who found themselves trapped by local patriotism and pressure into fighting an enemy with whose underlying principle of national union they agreed. When the war came, they did their duty. They cared little about freeing slaves; they themselves had few or none. Plantation life
and rule from Richmond were as alien as Northern factories and rule from Washington. But local autonomy was a rallying principle. Fighting for home rule, numbers of Gores were killed in battle.

Thomas Tindal's thousands of Calhoun County acres had to be divided among a large number of heirs, the most memorable of whom was Ezekiel Fletcher Gore, Gore Vidal's great-great-grandfather, an evangelist at the distant end of the Second Great Awakening, nicknamed “Rock,” a Methodist minister of stubborn rectitude. With his Georgia-born wife, Mary Green, he populated this new world with twelve children. He was an indefatigable circuit rider with a flair for the dramatic. On one occasion he was summoned by the organizing committee of a revival to breathe new life into a passionless series of meetings. They did not know if he would come. “
The next day
the eleven o'clock hour was approaching, the congregation had assembled, and no word from ‘Rock' Gore. As several men … stood outside looking in the direction from which he would arrive, they saw him rounding a curve in the road with his horse at full gallop. He rode up, tossed the bridle reins to someone nearby, took his Bible and went into the Church singing one of the great old revival hymns.”