Gore Vidal (37 page)

No one, least of all he, minded the monotony of his wardrobe. He did, though, mind the tedium of his daily office stint. At first it had seemed bearable. Soon his reworking of
Myriad Faces
began to reflect, in the main character's resistance to his stockbrokerage office routine, Gore's increasing dissatisfaction with traveling each morning (often by taxi) from his father's apartment, where he slept and wrote in the back bedroom, to Fourth Avenue and Gramercy Park, where he spent the day reading manuscripts, writing reports, and participating in editorial meetings. Later in the day he returned uptown, sometimes via Anaïs's apartment or the Everard Baths, the Astor Hotel Bar, the Times Square hotels. “
Being an editor
is dull but not tiring and I have other relaxations,” he told Tutwiler. The better part of life, he soon realized, was not spent at the office, though office life was not initially unbearable or unpleasant, especially his conversations with Wreden and Tebbel. The Dutton staff welcomed him. His attractions were appreciated, a handsome, congenial, often funny young Army veteran with a crew cut who brought to the staid publishing house new blood. With Eliot and John Macrae his relations were congenial. Both of them eccentrics in their different ways, he mostly avoided them, except that John had the habit of waylaying office-hall wanderers for long, nonintelligible sessions in his office, where he would say avuncular things such as “Publishing is like a river.” When in the spring Gore tried to persuade Eliot Macrae to publish an early version of James Baldwin's
Go Tell It on the Mountain
titled
Cry Holy
, Eliot defined himself by responding, “No, I'm from Virginia!” Baldwin, whom Gore had met at a party at Anaïs's, “was a vivid creature … full of energy, with a personality that oscillated between Martin Luther King,
Jr.'s … and Bette Davis's.” He had to return to the author “the neatly typed manuscript in two torn cardboard boxes.”

With Wreden's approval Vidal soon was coming into the office less regularly, mostly to pick up mail and manuscripts and for meetings. He still received $35 a week. At his father's apartment his housing was free. Having saved much of his Army pay, he projected that with decent sales of
Williwaw
he might have as much as $10,000 by late in the year. Also his father had purchased $20,000 worth of railroad bonds to cover the costs of the college education he increasingly determined not to have, despite Bingham's blandishments from Harvard. If redeemed that year, the bonds would be worth about $14,000. If he could persuade his father to turn that money over to him, he could easily afford not to continue at Dutton. Except for the confusion about Anaïs, the world lay all before him. “Everything is contingent on the war. The war saved my life. The war kills Jimmie and saves me. It gets me out of the family. It gets me on my own. I come out of it with $10,000, which was a lot of money in those days, and a published book. I certainly couldn't have done that if I'd gone from St. Albans to Harvard.” Within months of his arrival at Dutton he was plotting his escape from there too. Most of all he wanted to go to Europe, to see Rome again, to renew the excitement of his 1939 visit, which stayed in his mind as the most pleasurable experience of his life.

By mid-spring Gore turned in
In a Yellow Wood
to Tebbel, who found it boringly flat, not nearly as taut, as focused, as compelling, as the first novel. “Well,” Tebbel thought, “it's okay and he'll do better things.” Wreden did not much care for it either. But their faith in the young writer was not in the least shaken. Putting on a good face, they diplomatically told him they looked forward to bringing it out sometime early in 1947. Tebbel thought Gore “a marvelous talker and conversationalist,” an especially good storyteller. He spoke much about his family, particularly his grandfather. One day after work, Tebbel recalls, he and Gore “were having a drink in the Gramercy Park … and he began talking about homosexuality, though not in terms of himself but about his feelings about gay people and what not. I said to him, ‘Have you ever written about this?' He said, ‘No, I've thought of doing it.' I said, ‘You really ought to think about writing about this, since you feel this way about it. It's something maybe you want to write about.'” Precisely what he had already thought about doing is
unclear. Stylistically, he told Tutwiler, his next book would experiment with elements of high modernism. “
My third book
which won't be started for another year is going to be something wonderful if I can do it at all no chapters no commas except where they are needed for meaning and perhaps no quotation marks: the idea being that a story should be simple and easy to read and not cluttered up with archaic rules … and other things that irritate the eye.” He seems to have had in mind a public flouting of the Exeter rules for good writing, a small bit of revenge against the Hamilton Bissells of the world. Since Joyce and Stein had already paved that road, there would be little danger in taking it himself, other than the possibility of artistic failure. Most likely, though, what he had in mind in his conversation with Tebbel was more dangerous, more fraught with the risks of self-exposure. To mainstream publishers and most reviewers, the subject of homosexuality was anathema.

Like everyone else at Dutton, Tebbel had no inkling of Vidal's sexual preferences. Given Vidal's demeanor and the widely shared stereotypes about homosexuals, Tebbel assumed that his interest in the subject was impersonal, sociological, literary. Probably, Vidal recalls, he talked about and described to Tebbel homosexuals he had met or heard about in Los Angeles in spring 1945. Through Anaïs he had recently been introduced to two social and artistic centers in which homosexuals were explicitly central, some of them queens of the sort he found irksome. At Leo Lerman's Upper East Side town house the Russian-born eccentric embodiment of artistic camp and
Harper's Bazaar
high fashion held court to a huge circle of partying friends and acquaintances from the art, fashion, theater, dance, and literary worlds. The party hardly paused, particularly on Sunday nights. Usually in bed in robe and Turkish fez, Lerman received hordes of guests who wandered through the four-story house, famous people such as Martha Graham, Nora Kaye, Marlene Dietrich, Maria Callas, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Cecil Beaton, and Diana Vreeland. Rising New York artistic stars like the lyricist John Latouche found Lerman's hospitality congenial. So too did young writers like the twenty-one-year-old Alabama-born short-story writer Truman Capote, whom Gore met that spring at a party at Anaïs's apartment, at which he mostly noticed the strikingly beautiful writer Jean Garrigue, a lesbian Anaïs found attractive. The prancing, handsomely compact Capote, who seemed to Gore excessively and self-promotingly effeminate, an extravagant queen eager to use his mannerisms to make sure
people remembered him, immediately saw the author of
Williwaw
, which was about to come out, as a rival for literary celebrity. Gore had no doubt they would be competing for the same glittering prizes. His first book of short stories about to appear, Capote asked Gore, as they paused for a moment to talk, the self-reflexive question, “‘
How does it feel
to be an
onn-font-tarribull?'”

In February
Harper's Bazaar
had paid Gore $25 for one of his poems, “Walking,” which it published that October, an evocation of historical layering set in a New Mexican landscape reminiscent of Los Alamos. It gave him great pleasure finally to have a poem appear in print, especially in such a widely read magazine, though his sights were now mostly set on fiction, the novels and short stories for which, it must have occurred to him,
Harper's Bazaar
would be the perfect venue. Lerman, one of the literary editors of
Harper's Bazaar
with Mary Louise Aswell, under the leadership of George Davis, had made the magazine into the premier marketplace for quality short fiction. Gore, though, had not written any stories since Exeter. Or at least there were no later ones extant, since most of what he had written in the Army, other than
Williwaw
, had disappeared with the loss of his trunk. But it was not out of the question that
Harper's
might publish a portion of a novel or that he might write new short stories soon. As part of his work for Dutton he helped Harold Vinal, the editor of the poetry magazine
Voices
, find young poets to freshen its stale lineup. Five of his own poems appeared in the summer 1946 issue, the last poems he was ever to try to publish. Soon he became even better friends with Louise Townsend Nicholl, Dutton's poetry editor. A plump, graying woman of fifty-five, Nicholl was a distinguished minor poet who had published widely in prestigious magazines, had brought out three volumes of poems that Dutton had published, was active in the Poetry Society of America, and became the first woman to win an Academy of American Poets fellowship. More traditional than Wallace Stevens or Marianne Moore, she had a fine ear and a spare precision of language that expressed feeling by understatement. Her imagination never soared. But its closeness to the concrete and the natural anchored its metaphysical resonances in the things of this world. Her clear syntax and sharp particularity made her eminently readable, both sophisticated and accessible. Gore admired her poems and liked her. “We were great buddies … friends for years.” Tebbel liked her also. “A very gentle, pleasant woman, with a sweet voice; she of course knew many poets. She handled all the
poets that we had, and it's through her that we got poets we never would have had otherwise. Dutton and poetry were her life.” Gore recalled that every day “she took the train from someplace in New Jersey to Dutton and back again. I don't think she went anyplace else in her life. Unmarried, she was satisfied with the Grand Central Station Stauffer's, where she'd buy pumpkin pies and take them back to New Jersey. I said the least you can do, living in your mother's big old house in New Jersey, is make your pumpkin pies.” But, like most editors, “she had too much to read.” More like his grandmother than the other women in his life, she made a happy contrast with Nina and Anaïs.

The other artistic salon at which he found himself had been created in a more elegant East Side Beekman Place brownstone than Lerman's by the formidable Peggy Guggenheim, who actually had more shrewdness than money. Her wealthy father had descended with the
Titanic
. She and her sister somehow had been left very little. With a sharp eye for personalities and value, she had been collecting modern paintings as well as talented people. Ultimately the paintings were to make her fortune. Having married, among others, Max Ernst, she specialized in surrealist art. When she returned from Europe to American safety during the war years, she opened an art gallery devoted to “Art of This Century.” She had Jackson Pollock paint large murals in the foyer of her residence so that visitors would not be bored while waiting for the elevator to take them up to the salon. To the young Vidal “she looked like W. C. Fields, with a huge nose. She tried to have a nose job before cosmetic surgery had become superb, and it was botched. It was worse than what she had started with. What she started with was perfectly alright but she wanted perfection.” Full-figured, passionate about her two miniature dogs, with what Anaïs called her “clown face,” Peggy was obsessed with modern art and its makers. Well known in the New York artistic world as “the queen of foreigners,” she particularly attracted Europeans to her parties, painters like Léger and Duchamp and surrealist poets like André Breton. Soon herself to establish permanent residence in Venice, she amused herself in New York's dynamic art culture until France and Italy once again became viable.

With Anaïs, who introduced him to her, Gore found Peggy Guggenheim's foreign-inflected salon alluring. At one party he met Parker Tyler, “
pastry-pale
, beady-eyed, thin-lipped,” the author in 1947 of
Magic and Myth of the Movies
, with whom he shared a preoccupation with film, and
whom he would one day transform into a fictional character of sorts in
Myra Breckinridge
. James Agee, the
Time
film critic who had published, under the title
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, his article on Alabama sharecroppers, with photographs by Walker Evans, seemed “sadly amiable.” Gore noticed that his eyes were bloodshot. In Agee's presence the poet, editor, and novelist Charles Henri Ford, a close friend of Tyler's, leeringly remarked to Gore, “You can't be a good writer because you have such lovely legs,” then danced off. Gore said to Agee, “‘I'd like to break Charles's legs.' Agee was soothing; then he said, most thoughtfully, ‘These fairies can be surprisingly tough.'”

Years later in Venice, Peggy, remembering spring 1946, remarked to Gore, “‘Oh, you were with Anaïs. I always wondered about that. She was very stupid, wasn't she?' That was Peggy's conversational style. I said, ‘Yes, I suppose all in all I have to say yes. She was fairly stupid.' ‘I suspected that. You must not have liked that, did you?' And I said, ‘Well, I didn't notice it for a while.' ‘Well, yes,' she said, ‘I know.' She was thinking of all the dumdums she had put up with, like Jackson Pollock. Her biggest affair was Beckett. ‘I was in love with him for six months,' she said. ‘That's longer than I've ever been in love with anybody in my life. I suddenly realized that he didn't want me, he wanted a boy.' I said, ‘That's not unreasonable, Peggy.' ‘Well, I didn't say it was unreasonable. I was just slow to understand. Anyway, I was in love for six months. That's the maximum in my life.'”

Through Anaïs he had met Maya Deren, a beautiful surrealist filmmaker of Russian-Jewish background influenced by Cocteau. Fascinated by film and psychological imagery, herself a surrealist of sorts, Anaïs fantasized she might be elevated into fame and fortune by the transforming magic of Maya's camera lens. Deren's films had the potential to provide the best cinematic representation of her own subjectively imagistic fiction. She hoped that one of her novels or pages from her diary might provide the script for a Maya Deren movie. She imagined herself in the starring role. At Friar's lecture in November 1945 she had introduced Gore to the filmmaker. At Maya's Greenwich Village studio she had the opportunity to share with him her admiration for Deren's aggressive promotion of her own artistic career, a lesson to them all, Anaïs concluded. Fascinated himself by movies, though of a different sort, Gore happily accepted Deren's invitation to perform with Anaïs and others in one of her films. Without dialogue, usually running
between fifteen and thirty minutes, they embodied the director's general instructions to the performers, most of them friends, to respond to a situation, some small portion of which she would film. Film stock was expensive. She had little to waste. In March, Gore found himself milling around with Anaïs under hot lights at a large party scene with thirty or so of Maya's friends. “
Gore and I decided
to act pretty well as we do when we are together, a mixture of playfulness, key words, seriousness, and connections with what we are writing,” Anaïs wrote in her diary. Interested in the spontaneous, insistent but always vague, the energetic Deren kept them at it for twelve hours. Finally she filmed a segment, part of a film she called
Ritual in Transfigured Time
. Later Gore noticed, disappointingly, he was onscreen for only a few seconds. When initially asked to appear in the film, starring Maya and a black woman, Gore remarked, “‘If only my grandmother could see me now.' The Gores were Reconstruction Southerners…. They did not believe in equality. In response to my teasing on the subject, Dot said, ‘If any of my descendants ever mixes our blood with theirs, I'll come back and haunt him.' I said, ‘Well, you've got a lot of haunting to do right now since half the mulattoes in Mississippi are related to us.' She changed the subject.” Gore's Greenwich Village world, especially its surrealist component, would have seemed even more bizarre to Dot, though she would have readily understood its politics. When Anaïs at last saw the finished film, she was furious. Maya's magic camera had been less than flattering to her friends, especially Anaïs.