Gore Vidal (101 page)

If the dark side of the Kennedys casts a shadow in the novel, it is in Vidal's concern that Robert Kennedy, waiting in the Senate, will capitalize on his brother's assassination and the turmoil of Vietnam to make himself a viable candidate for the presidency in 1968. Gore had come to detest Lyndon Johnson, the peace candidate of 1964 who had cravenly embraced a war America later learned even he did not believe in. But there was no reason to think he would not run for reelection. The only foreseeable opposition to Johnson within his own party was the Kennedy mystique. Senator Eugene McCarthy and the New Hampshire primary were a year in the future. In a cogent, sharply structured essay, “The Holy Family,” written in fall 1966 and published in
Esquire
in April 1967, the legend-making power of the dead
JFK to make RFK a contender underlies Vidal's overriding concern with the question of “what sort of men ought we to be governed by in the coming years…. But if it is true that in a rough way nations deserve the leadership they get, then a frivolous and apathetic electorate combined with a vain and greedy intellectual establishment will most certainly restore to power the illusion-making Kennedys.” The immediate issue was the Kennedy mystique, the more important concern the difficulty of a democracy's elevating appropriate people to positions of high leadership. “Holy family and bedazzled nation, in their faults at least, are well matched,” he wrote. It was not a message everyone wanted to hear or be associated with, including the editors of
The New York Review
, which turned down the essay, the first of Vidal's that the
Review
declined. “
The fierceness
and relentlessness of tone,” as if he were out to get Kennedy, Barbara Epstein explained early in October, had put the editors off. He agreed to do revisions. The editors had discussed and discussed the piece. Barbara, clearly upset, wrote to him in November about the revised version. She was afraid that they just could not publish it. She was sick about the whole thing, aware of how much work he had put into it originally, and how much anguish it had cost him to cut it. But there were no extra-editorial reasons for their decision, she claimed; the essay simply was not successful in its own terms. He did not believe her claim that it had been declined for aesthetic reasons.

By mid-November 1966, Little, Brown was printing galleys of
Washington, D.C
., Thornhill and Bradford anticipating a bestseller. Robert Fetridge, the brilliant, heavy-drinking Little, Brown publicity director, began to plot his strategy, which included sending Roman coins to reviewers and bookstore managers. At the same time, Gore was in California with a strategy of his own, an extensive cross-country speaking tour, mostly at universities, that would put him before huge audiences of young people, partly in anticipation of the appearance of the novel but mostly to have a sense of what was going on in the country. “The thought of all those students across the country is beginning to alarm me,” he had written to his father in June. “I'm not sure I have their range. Anyway it will be instructive, for me.” The New York-based Harry Walker Agency, “Representing Distinguished Platform Personalities,” handled the arrangements, initially to Gore's dissatisfaction. They quickly learned, though, what was wanted. Too often, he felt, his representatives coasted on the arrangements he had made and on the attraction of his name. At the beginning of October he had
spent a week in Britain at interviews and receptions arranged by Heinemann to publicize the British edition of his second volume of essays, which Little, Brown had brought out as
Reflections Upon a Sinking Ship
. By mid-October, he was in New York for a two-week lecture tour of New York, New England, and Ohio; in early November, via the Midwest, to San Francisco, where he began a seventeen-campus series of California lectures, which returned him to New York in December, with an appearance en route in Little Rock. His topic throughout was mostly politics. Literature he wrote about. Politics and contemporary life seemed more appropriate for large audiences, among other reasons because he felt he had a significant message to deliver about the national abuse of power embodied in America as an imperial nation. The campus audiences were astoundingly large, irrepressibly enthusiastic, especially in California, where he realized to his delight that he was immensely popular with college students. The center had moved considerably to the left. The Vietnam War dominated what was a genuine but dangerously volatile national debate. Change seemed possible. Issues of domestic and international justice dominated the discussion. As he saw the audiences of thousands that attended his lectures, felt the touch of crowds of admirers eager for his presence, his words, and his autograph, his latent political ambitions again revived. Perhaps the Exonian senator from Virginia could become the Democratic senator from California, though the practical obstacles were substantial. For the time being, as the trip came to an end, the possibility lodged in a distant but still-active part of his mind. When he returned to New York, he had been on the road for over two months. Seemingly inexhaustible, he was now exhausted. But it had been exhilarating. The news in New York was excellent.
Washington, D.C
., had been bought by the Literary Guild book club. In Washington, before Christmas, Nini and Little, Brown co-hosted a huge dinner party in Gore's honor, many of the guests well-known Washington people. Howard, who had spent much of the fall at Edgewater, closed the house, “amongst frozen pipes,” and left for Rome. By early in the new year both had returned to Via Di Torre Argentina and Italian sunshine.

As is often the case with writers after a change of location, Gore began to feel strong creative urgings. The previous August he had told Ray White, doing the Vidal volume in the Twayne Modern Authors series, that he had three novels in mind. Since the last three “
were written over
a long period of time, I'd now like to sit down and write a book straight through to the
end. One of the three has a title:
Academy of Drama and Modelling
, but I can't say much about it yet, other than I think it will be funny.” Someone he knew in Miami, whom he thought a perfect fool, had had the notion to create a school of drama and modeling, an idea Gore thought wildly funny and “a wonderful idea for a novel.” Aaron Burr was seeping through his unconscious mind into a consciously identified presence. Burr had come to his unfocused attention as early as the day at Newport in the late 1930s when the name, mentioned in conversation, had drifted up to him on the sea breeze. In late 1965, thinking about subjects for a play, Burr came to mind as a possibility, just shortly before Nini named her newborn son Burr. “Just when I contemplate a play about Aaron Burr you re-cast him or pro-create him. Now, hopefully, I won't have to write it.”

Before he could commit himself, though, to write anything substantial, he had a duty to perform for himself and his publisher, a whirlwind ten-day publicity tour for the Little, Brown edition of
Washington, D.C
. Soon after its publication in early February it had appeared on the bestseller list. It was now climbing rapidly toward the top, which puzzled many reviewers, partly because they could not or did not want to believe that its realistic depiction of American political life was truthful. There was a respectable number of very good reviews, though most emphasized its commercial qualities, occasionally ambivalent about whether its riveting readability did not somehow need to be apologized for or at least put in the context of its insufficiencies, especially its exaggerated presentation of Washington sex and greed. From Gore's viewpoint exaggeration was impossible. Some, like John Kenneth Galbraith, defended John F. Kennedy's posthumous reputation from the imputation that
Washington, D.C.'s
Clay Overbury was based on the character of the assassinated President. Gore agreed, but for artistic, not moral reasons. “
Clay is
not
JFK
, not remotely,” he responded to Louis Auchincloss, who felt that Kennedy had been maligned. “Nor is he—in his creator's eyes—a monster. The similarity to Jack is, simply, the way money is used to promote illusions and win elections…. The only deliberate likeness to Jack is the sexual promiscuity and I think I have got the point to each: sex as a means to power not over the woman so much as over the other men involved with her. In any case, no one can say that my explication of that aspect of life is
ever
pejorative.” Though Auchincloss attempted to deny the realities of Kennedy's character, he embraced the artistic and thematic achievement of the novel. Gore was the best novelist writing in English
about politics since Disraeli, he wrote in a widely read review. Of course, not many readers knew that Disraeli had been a novelist. Years later Auchincloss recounted meeting Robert McNamara in the cloakroom of the Century Club. “Didn't you know all about Jack's women in the White House? You were at the White House frequently.” “Yes,” McNamara said, “but we didn't know that there were that many!” The novel, though, was not about transient politics or judgments about sexual practices. Few reviewers had any sense of its elegiac nature. “My own impression of the book,” Gore told Louis, “is that it is unexpectedly sad, and I can't think why. My contempt for the empire has always been, I thought, complete but cheerful. Instead I am as gloomy as Tacitus without ever being able for one moment to believe, as he did, that the Republic was much better. I did find it significant that none of the book-men in their chat-pieces seemed aware of the book's theme.” Some were, but their voices were mostly lost in the sensationalistic chirping about Vidal as Suetonius taking salubrious delight in exposing the flaws of our leaders. He had wanted to be Tacitus.

In late April he flew to New York for the publicity tour; this was the time to strike. Having limited the tour to New York, Boston, and Washington, he made effective use of television appearances, especially
Today
and
The Merv Griffin Show
, where he talked less about
Washington, D.C
., than about his disapproval of Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, though the segue from one to the other was especially easy. When letters began arriving in response to his attack on the war, he was surprised and pleased that about half approved of what he had said. Certainly his Dutchess County friends did. Just before his departure for New York, Barbara Epstein had described to him a Peace March to Washington that she, the Dupees, and the MacDonalds had participated in and had remarked on the noticeable absence of people like Arthur Schlesinger and Ralph Ellison.

Literary and national politics, though, overlapped. Gore had certainly enjoyed Harold Hayes's account at the beginning of April of a conversation with Barbara Epstein and the publisher of
The New York Review of Books
at the George Polk Memorial Press awards luncheon. “Miss Epstein was going on,” Hayes told him, “about how wonderful
[Esquire's]
cover was and the illustrations inside.” Hayes asked the publisher, referring to “The Holy Family,” “‘Why'you-all hadn't taken that piece?' The publisher turned to Miss Epstein and asked, ‘Why hadn't we all taken that piece?' She said, ‘Our reasons are private.' A stunning
mot juste
and one I will try to remember for
my own purposes.” From Gore's perspective the editors had succumbed to a desire not to offend the Kennedys, particularly the powerful senator from New York, though an assumption that the author's tone would be held against the
Review
suggests a sensitivity that focused on larger concerns of influence and constituency. Certainly many of the
Review's
liberal pro-Kennedy readers hoped that Robert Kennedy would become a rallying figure for opposition to the Vietnam War and would find a way to wrest the 1968 Democratic nomination away from Lyndon Johnson. His earlier career and character, they felt, could easily be disregarded. “You can't really separate the personal from the professional relationship,” Barbara Epstein of course knew. “I was upset about it…. I hate not to publish anything by Gore. He's of great value to me as a contributor and as a friend.” Actually, its publication in
Esquire
rather than in
The New York Review of Books
worked to Vidal's advantage. It gave the article more national presence and readers, almost as if it had found its true best home, for which it should have been intended originally. The same could not be said about another essay, “French Letters: The Theory of the Novel,” that Barbara Epstein had urged him to write that late winter and early spring of 1967, which the
Review
, after initial enthusiasm, turned down. The change in reading tastes and the decline in readership associated with two oppositional phemonena—the increasing dominance of mindless television and the rise of a self-consciously arcane, theory-dominated approach to writing and discussing novels epitomized by “The French New Novel”—both worried and angered Vidal. Whatever merit could be discovered in writers like Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Saurraute, and John Barth, they seemed intent on turning the novel into a specialty genre for an intellectual elite. To Vidal and others, their theorizing seemed “portentous.” And television and other electronic communications seemed likely to put an end to literature as they had known it. “Our lovely vulgar and most human art is at an end, if not the end.” As he wrote to Fred Dupee, “
I struggled
2 months with the piece on the New French Novelists, a labor of hate and exhausting. The result is a bit dense but I think pretty good.” At first Epstein found the article “very good, indeed,” though a little long. Then the editors turned it down, perhaps because one or more found the subject itself boring. “That was a big mistake,” Epstein later acknowledged, “because it was a very good article.” Its most appropriate venue had somehow for the moment lost its sense of itself and its good judgment.
Encounter
published it in December 1967.