Gore Vidal (41 page)

With a draft of
The City and the Pillar
finished in late November, he focused on completing the purchase. “Everyone compliments me on how cheaply I got the place,” he reported to his father. “It seems that the rush for Antigua land is begun and prices are beginning to go up. I plan to spend another 2500 on putting in a bathroom, etc. I have my own water. It's all one story.” A guest the next summer recalled that “there was an atrium, and the whole convent was built around this atrium. During the earthquake a pillar had fallen across the atrium, the whole open part, and it stayed there. It was like part of it then. It just became automatic that you'd step over this
fallen pillar that had been there for a hundred and fifty years.” Gore's enthusiasm may have made it seem less the odd commitment that it was for a young man of twenty-one who had been in Guatemala for less than three months. The need to have a place of his own compelled him into an engaging recklessness. He sent drawings of the floor plan to Anaïs as well as Gene. Though much of the fire had gone out of the relationship with Anaïs, there were still warm coals or at least warm rhetoric. “My plans,” he told her, “are to return to NYC next month back here in March (with you I hope) after the book and then around May to France. This is a beautiful place and were it not for you I should never return to New York and that ghastly world.” But before he could live comfortably in the house, the renovations had to be completed, especially the installation of a bathroom, a functional kitchen, and an additional room to serve as his study. “There was a garden right next to a big chapel that went with the house. There was a sliver of garden behind it, an oblong in which I had put one big room with the little garden leading up to it, and that's where I worked. The other rooms were on the street.” Pat was put to work almost immediately. Monteforte, who frequently came to Antigua to see his Indian mistress, stopped by, the first of many visits. As had become usual, they argued about politics. Sitting in the patio, bounded by the high wall of a ruined church, or “
under a pepper tree
, near an ugly square fountain like a horse trough,” they had happily contentious discussions in which Gore took his grandparents' anti-Communist, anti-Rooseveltian high line that emphasized economic self-reliance. Monteforte argued for a socialistic reorganization of economic inequities and teased him about his friendship with the wealthy Vasquez Bruni family who, of course, opposed land reform. Why don't you tax, Gore responded, the United Fruit Company? Who would prevent you? “‘Your government,' Monteforte explained. They had kept the former dictator in power. ‘Now they're getting ready to replace us.' … ‘Why should we care what happens in a small country like this?' Mario gave me a compassionate look—compassion for my stupidity. ‘Businessmen. Like the owners of United Fruit. They care. They used to pay for our politicians. They still pay for yours.'”

Work on the house, as usual with such things, went more slowly than had been anticipated. The cost increased beyond the estimates. From Washington, Dot provided her usual loving voice and “a small check” to buy something for the Antigua house. It “sounds
so intriguing
. I feel that I have
to go right down there.” She also provided home news: the Senator, who had been very ill, would never be his old self again; Nina was in New York “trying to get something [more] out of Hugh for the children,” a persistent activity. Gore's mind, though, was mostly on the attractions of Guatemalan life, on the satisfaction of having finished
The City and the Pillar
, and on bringing to some sort of new equilibrium his relationship with Anaïs. He had no regrets about buying the house. “There are warm springs and pools within a short walk…. The
most
beautiful lake in the world is 3 hours by bus. You have never seen such beauty—deep blue surrounded by smoking volcanos.” At Lake Atitlán, he met the Danish writer Karl Eskelund, author of
My Chinese Wife
. “He's getting me published in Scandinavia and you too,” he wrote to Anaïs, “when he sees you.” Gore himself planned to see her soon. He needed to return to New York to have
The City and the Pillar
typed. He had raised the thought that she might return with him to Antigua. But, sensibly, she did not want to. In December in New York Connie Darby had expressed to Anaïs her puzzlement at Gore's buying a house in Guatemala. Like many, Connie still assumed that Gore and Anaïs were lovers. “
Just had a disturbing talk
with Connie,” Anaïs wrote to him, “who … was filled with compassion for you and I being separated, thinks something has gone wrong, was shocked at your buying a house so far from me—so I guess I may have to explain the truth—for I can't bear this misunderstanding anymore—or Connie's pity. You are quite happy, at peace and working without me—and I don't like long distance relationships—please tell her the truth—or do you want me to?” Throughout the autumn his letters to Anaïs had continued to represent his commitment to her in terms far stronger than the reality warranted. Though she still desired that he commit himself to her, she had not the slightest hope he would. What had happened in East Hampton had “left quite a scar— Like a nightmare, in which my desire to be near you, my willingness to relinquish everyone, everything, was answered by complete frustration.” She had determined to change the terms and rhetoric of her passion for him. “My intuition tells me you are romancing—don't be afraid to tell me—I can take it now…. Passion … purifies everything…. One is only good and chaste after passion…. I feel
now
like a saint—and not when I live like a nun…. America is the most impure country in the world, because it is ashamed of passion, of nature…. Tell me how you are—I won't be jealous—! I
know
—I love you deeply, cheri, my mystical sex follows you in your long voyage.”

Actually
his
description of his mostly ascetic life in Guatemala was of more relevance to him than her. “I've been a monk, a saint here,” he wrote back, “but you have every reason to be surprised for I am too. This is the first time in my life. It was something of a test. Now I feel more at peace than ever before.” In fact, what was becoming clear to him was that, whatever Guatemala's attractions, sexual opportunities there were limited. Commercial sex between men was difficult to come by. Venereal diseases, not held in check by the rudimentary public-health practices, rampaged. In Antigua “
there are a number
of homosexuals … artists and so on. I enjoy their company but that's all. They will amuse you I think.” The quick, anonymous encounters he preferred were not readily available. “I was having no sex at all in Guatemala,” he later remarked. “It was driving me crazy, not having sex. Who would I do it with? The natives were too primitive. To a foreigner they were pretty ghastly, and I had never had much traffic with queens in my life, so what was there? And I could end up with clap, or what I thought was clap. Venereal disease was all over. Penicillin wasn't down there.” In Guatemala City “there was one girl I was quite interested in but nothing ever happened.” With a great deal of sexual energy, he had very few practical outlets for it. “The irony of it all,” Anaïs remarked, “you go to Guatemala and you live like a saint.” But she had no illusions about why or about the future of their relationship. “Now I know that no sooner will I arrive you will turn towards someone, because, cheri, no matter how
real
your love for me is, you are motivated by compulsions deeper than any love for me, compulsions which have nothing to do with me, of which I am merely a symbolical victim.” She urged him not “to come to NY for me—I'm happier when you are happy and well.”

In fact, despite his rhetoric, including his reference to their going to France together that next spring, he returned to New York in late December 1946 only secondarily to see Anaïs, primarily to get
The City and the Pillar
typed. As soon as he arrived, he went to spend Christmas with Nina, who had been spending so much time in New York in order to pressure Hugh for more child support that she had taken a small apartment on Eighty-fifth Street. She had also recently broken her ankle. He had arranged his travel schedule to be with her on the holiday. “She was drunk when I walked in, and she immediately picked a quarrel. She was hobbling around on crutches, and I just slammed the door and left.” Furious, he vowed never to speak to her again. His best revenge, he decided, for a lifetime of such damaging
behavior, would be to write
The Womb
. He had already resolved to return to Guatemala in late February or early March, determined to be away from New York when
In a Yellow Wood
would be published. Still supportive of his career, hoping for the change that would affirm her view of the kind of novelist he ought to be, Anaïs looked forward to reading the manuscript of
The City and the Pillar
, which Dutton had scheduled for January 1948. “
Are you coming back
with your book all finished?” she had asked. “The evolution between Book I and II, and the one within Book II
[In a Yellow Wood]
itself is so quick and so rich—that I await this one with a sense of anticipatory delight.” She approved of his D. H. Lawrence reading. Probably she hoped that the homoerotic element in
The City and the Pillar
would have the resonant mystery of the magical relationship between the two main male characters in
The Rainbow
. “I have no doubt about your writing,” she claimed untruthfully, “but I would like to see you happier in your life—Is a mountain a lake and a book enough?” She again urged that he try psychoanalysis. He predicted a new consanguinity between them. With the publication of
City
“we'll both be outcasts…. The deep-rutted critics will be as frightened of me as of you.”

When he suggested she return with him to Guatemala in March and they leave from there for France, she glamorized the invitation into a proposal of marriage that in itself was no proposal at all, neither in her terms nor his. Gore, she wrote in her diary, wants to marry me and lock me up in Guatemala. In fact, waveringly and sometimes inconsistently, both were moving to bring the rhetoric of the relationship to as full a close as they had brought the relationship itself. Her intuition told her it was over. That he wanted to imprison her in marriage and in Guatemala was her way of expressing what was impossible for both of them. He had no desire to do either. His rhetoric expressed his desire to keep her still within his power, to test his strength, and also to let them both go their separate ways. The good things they could do for one another had already been done. There was little more possible. In New York in early March he telephoned her with his last bit of good news. “He fought for me at Dutton,” she wrote in her diary. “And won. They wanted to wait two years to publish
Children of the Albatross
. They will publish
Children of the Albatross
now!” The reunion was at first happy but hesitant. Both had accepted the narrower parameters. Gore gave her at last a copy of the manuscript of
The City and the Pillar
to read. The homosexual relationship seemed to her depressingly grim, the main
characters adolescent. But what most upset her was that one of the female characters seemed at least partly based on herself. The character has lines around the eyes, makes vain attempts to disguise her age. To Anaïs it seemed an aggressively hostile parody, a brutal caricature. “No woman wants to read that about herself,” she complained. At the Ritz Bar on Madison Avenue she told him unequivocally and at length that he had betrayed her, that, whatever their differences, this caricature was a deeply painful personal attack that she would never forgive. But she soon partly did. Within a short time she had made enough of an adjustment, encouraged by his protestations and blandishments, by his desire not to let her get fully away just yet, by her own unwillingness to give up on something she had not yet fully given up on, to allow a reconciliation that would permit them still to share something special. When he left to return to Guatemala, he renewed his invitation to her to visit. Partly it was loyalty, affection. Partly it was bravado.

The reception of
In a Yellow Wood
in March 1947 was only slightly disappointing, primarily because author and publisher expected so little. Dutton, which had had strong doubts from the beginning, was not surprised that sales were dismal. Vidal's confidence in the book had diminished at some late stage in the writing or revision. All in all, the reviews were tolerable, a few strikingly good, especially those in the
New York Herald Tribune
and
Chicago Sunday Tribune
. Enough were temperately phrased, cordial, if not to the book then to the author, so that little damage was done. A number of reviewers thought it a success within its narrow canvas, its “controlled naturalism,” though others could not disguise their conviction that the author had weakened it by insisting that an unfocused main character somehow could convey interestingly the boredom of his own life. Some sensed that a deep structural flaw in the novel resulted from a failure of initial conception or a change in focus in the writing of the book. Why Vidal should be writing about “a strange, oblique sort of war casualty” the reviewers had little to no grounds on which to speculate. His own hopes for a major success, for greater fame and financial rewards, were now centered on the new book,
The City and the Pillar
, which he believed a vastly better novel.