Gore Vidal (38 page)

With days at Dutton, occasional evenings with Cornelia, filmmaking with Maya, parties with Anaïs, at her apartment, at restaurants, at Peggy Guggenheim's, at Leo Lerman's, at the lively Blue Angel nightclub, where he saw John Latouche and met the stage designer Oliver Smith and probably Smith's cousin, the composer and writer Paul Bowles, New York kept Gore busily engaged. When he became friendly with Stanley Haggard and his boyfriend, Woody Parrish-Martin, who designed the dust jacket for
Williwaw
and
In a Yellow Wood
, he floated the idea of the three of them getting a brownstone which, with Anaïs, they would share. He knew about such an arrangement in Brooklyn Heights. The idea never took off. Work at Dutton made him restless, impatient for more time for writing. Tebbel's suggestion that he write about sex between men began to loom larger, to point in a dangerous direction.

Except for his relationship with Anaïs, he did not want to complicate
friendship with sex. The division seemed sensible, a way of maximizing his opportunities and rewards through efficient separation and distribution. Romance was not out of the question. But it was generally undesirable, and he had enough of something of that sort with Anaïs. For companionship, though, he had almost unlimited energy. When Dutton published in spring 1946 a popular bestseller called
The Manatee
, he met the author's stepdaughter, Constance Darby, a close friend of Judith Jones. He found her vivacious gaiety compelling. Connie “hated her stepmother and I hated
The Manatee
, so we had a lot in common,” he recalled. When they introduced him to their other closest companion, Sarah Moore, also recently graduated from Bennington, he had three new friends. “Judy was a great beauty. And Connie was kind of rowdy, charming.” Sarah, the daughter of the composer and Columbia music professor Douglas Moore, was “a mater dolorosa, a lady of the sorrows.” Gore was “sort of fascinated by her,” Jones remembered. “She had a very quirky mind, very intellectual, very critical. She sometimes looked like a Charles Addams woman, long dark hair, slightly—well, not quite sinister—but as if she didn't quite belong to the world, and that sort of fascinated Gore…. There was something wonderfully outrageous about her. She dared to be a maverick.” Connie, seriously literary, worked as an editor for Lippincott. He found her “the most fun of the three. She had great energy and she was very funny.” With a capacity for drink and wit, “she was always able to spar with him in a lively way, and to get him sometimes, and he liked it,” Jones recalled. “He really admired her…. She wasn't naturally a pretty girl…. But she radiated such personality and she seemed very feminine. She was very blond. Fair-skinned. She tended towards plumpness. She kind of bustled…. Nothing bothered Connie.” Like Gore, the three graces were also just turning twenty-one.

That summer at Douglas Moore's Riverside Drive apartment, which the young women occupied while the Moores were away, they regularly hosted dinners and parties. Publishing people and writers came. Judy did the cooking. “I was always the cook. I liked to cook. I just was very adventuresome as a cook. Nothing fazed me, I don't know why.” A great deal of liquor and ice disappeared. People enjoyed getting drunk. At the piano Connie played beautifully and sang Cole Porter's “Night and Day.” The only song she knew, she played it at every party. No one minded. It became a signature melody for those warm evenings. Below the high west windows the Hudson picked up the last of the sunlight, the rising moonlight. Palisades
Park glittered in the darkness of the Jersey shore. A ferry visibly made its way across to the amusement park. “They were great parties,” Gore remembered. Judy, whom he adored, fascinated by the camellia-white luster of her skin, had been having an affair with the poet Theodore Roethke, her former Bennington teacher. He was a fellow guest one of Gore's evenings there. Judy watched closely. “I wouldn't say they took to each other. It was always Gore goading what he thought of as the sort of square heterosexual male…. Roethke was about fourteen years older than I was. I remember an atmosphere. There was strain, apprehension between them.” Both playful and competitive, Gore enjoyed, as he often did, ratcheting up the verbal interplay to what others thought a contentious level. Apparently Roethke did not like being called “our senior poet.” The inaccuracy of the description had a mocking edge. “I think [Gore] loved to sort of shock people, their complacency. I think he thought he was good for all of us, shaking us up.”

“Roethke and I didn't take to each other at first,” he remembered, “but then we did. She was having a big affair with him. Yes, I was teasing him. I didn't know he was insane, nor did Judy.” Perhaps he resented Roethke's influence over the three young women. “And the great day [came the next year, 1947] when we went to the Gotham Book Mart, he and I, to kiss the ass of Cyril Connelly in order to get into
Horizon
. So we went with Judy and all of literary New York was there and everybody thought this odd little man was a fag. So there were Theodore Roethke and I turning on the charm like nobody's business, me armed with my short stories, Ted with his poems, and Connelly was very polite to us. Then, before we knew it, Cyril had gone off with Judy, leaving a stunned Roethke, poems in hand.”

With advance copies of
Williwaw
available in April, he eagerly awaited the mid-June official publication date. Coming downtown to the Dutton offices one afternoon, he saw through the taxi window a highly publicized young candidate for Congress in Massachusetts walking along Park Avenue, in front of the Raquet Club near Grand Central Station. He recognized him from newspaper photographs, and years later, in his memoir, put his recollection in the present tense: “
In the left-over
-from-the-war khakis that we all wore, skinny, yellow-faced Jack Kennedy is wandering down the west side of the avenue. In a blaze of publicity, he is now running for Congress.
Our fathers are friends, but we've never met. As I watch him, I wonder, have I made a mistake…. Shouldn't I have followed my grandfather Senator Gore's plan and set out for Congress instead?”

Fortunately, the early word on
Williwaw
was encouraging. Dutton had scheduled advertisements for the week of publication, two in the daily
New York Times
, two in the daily
Herald Tribune
. If reviews and sales were good, other ads would follow. Much depended on what happened in the first weeks after publication. Eager to see copies in bookstores, to have reviews in hand, the young author felt the usual anxieties, though he had reason to be hopeful. So far the in-house response was good, the word-of-mouth positive. Also, he had not only finished his second novel but had begun to think seriously about his third. Both compulsive and excited by his own facility, he had at this moment only the vaguest sense that he himself ought to put up a yellow light, that he might damage his market by making too frequent demands on it.
In a Yellow Wood
was scheduled for the beginning of the next year. If he began soon to write the novel that he and Tebbel had talked about and finished it quickly, there would be a backlog. But what was most on his mind at the moment was the reception of
Williwaw
. In late April, advance copies were sent to distinguished people, from Henry Miller to Eleanor Roosevelt. Though she did not usually review fiction, Mrs. Roosevelt may have remembered the author's connection with her husband's director of air commerce and with Amelia Earhart. She soon praised
Williwaw
in her
New York World-Telegram
column as “
vividly engrossing
” by an author who “has promise of doing interesting work in the future.” Despite her disappointment with her young lover and her fear that
Williwaw
's arctic ice had frozen his heart, Anaïs wrote a testimonial letter of strong praise for a book she quietly disliked. “I feel that, as a novelist and poet, he is strikingly close to that source of emotional power from which comes all great art.
Williwaw
, a story of conflict and the sea, is written with the simplicity of a legend.”

A rush of reviews from around the country praised the book. Only a few disliked it, though many noticed, in passing and mainly forgivingly, its slightness and underdevelopment. The influential Orville Prescott in the daily
New York Times
thought it “continually interesting … a good novel” with “sound craftsmanship…. a good start toward more substantial accomplishments. He is a canny observer of his fellow-man. He can write. With such a good beginning there is no reason why he should not go
far ahead.” Reflecting its own environment, the
Los Angeles Times
thought it “clever, hard-boiled, full of punch,” recasting it as if it were
film noir
, a novel scripted by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.
Williwaw
“stamps Vidal,” the
Boston Globe
claimed “as one of the most promising and enterprising young authors to capitalize on his war experience.” The First World War had produced Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Who would the novelists of this next generation be? Few reviewers commented on
Williwaw's
nihilistic tone, its bleak view of human nature, almost as if, having won the war, peacetime America could not even recognize a dark account of the war experience. Norman Rockwell sentimentality dominated the national optimism. But there was some room for
Williwaw'
s amoral realism, especially since it dramatized individual character and psychology rather than national pride. When the reviewer for the influential
Saturday Review of Literature
emphasized that “it is a novel of great promise by a young man whose skill as a craftsman is more important than his service as a soldier,” Dutton placed more ads in the daily
Times
and
Tribune
, new ads in the Sunday book reviews, and a large spread in the
Saturday Review
. That the author was twenty years old was noted prominently. His photo on the book jacket impressed people with his striking good looks. Having hoped that
Williwaw
would get them off and running in the race for new voices, Dutton was exuberant. The morning after Prescott's review appeared, Gore came into the Dutton office. He was surrounded by congratulations. “‘Did you read your review in the
Times?'
I said no. And they said, ‘It's Orville Prescott and it's very good.' I said, ‘Who is Orville Prescott?' I didn't even know that the daily
Times
had a book review. I had never heard of Orville Prescott, and they thought I was putting this on…. Here I am associate editor, in title at least, at a publishing house, and I didn't know the name of the most important and powerful book reviewer and he'd given me a rave review that morning. Not only did I not read the
Times
, I didn't know his name.” With a batch of reviews that the publicist had collected, he went into an empty office where a little later Tebbel found him “almost in tears. I was mystified…. But he had found the inevitable bad ones and couldn't stand it.”

Mild June weather.
Williwaw
was in the bookstores. From Washington, Cornelia, who had taken a job with the State Department, reported,
“
My Love, To say
that you have
fait sensation
in Washington is also to say nothing, the moppets are rushing in droves to Brentano's, they discuss your book instead of the weather, it's really remarkable.” He had recently been to Washington to visit his grandparents. Nina was back in town, about to resume her East Coast life. Soon she was searching for a house in Washington. Though he had dedicated
Williwaw
to her, he was convinced she had not read it and never would. That did not prevent her boasting to people about her son's success. Probably she shared Gore's view that he owed her for the Hollywood advantages she had made possible for him in 1944-45. At a party at her Washington apartment, Cornelia still felt chemistry between the two of them. “Mother thinks you write like Shakespeare,” she wrote him afterward. “I think that's quite a nice touch, considering the source, don't you? You do at that as a matter of fact. Shakespeare, but a fairly dyspeptic Shakespeare. I wish I understood you.” With good-humored irony she signed herself “undyingly passionate.” In New York he found waiting a letter from Henry Miller thanking him for a copy of
Williwaw
. “Amazing what you have experienced, by the age of twenty. Don't die there at Dutton's! A writer needs life, not the aura or ambiance of the literary world.”