Gore Vidal (42 page)

Before returning to Guatemala, he accepted Bingham's invitation to
visit him and A. K. Lewis at Harvard. Bingham urged him to bring a car in which they could drive to Exeter for a day or two. The much-admired Tom Riggs, who had been visiting at Lewis and Bingham, had read a few pages of
In a Yellow Wood
in an advance copy Gore had sent Bingham, who passed along Riggs's complimentary comments. Generously, Bingham himself had nice things to say, but, in order not to keep saying only nice things, criticized what he thought an excessive amount of flat description in the first part. Though he recognized that it was part of a stylistic strategy, it seemed to him tedious overkill. They soon drove up together to Exeter, where Gore had the pleasure of showing off a copy to his valued Exeter teachers, George Bennett, Leonard Stevens, and Henry Phillips. Later, when his uneasiness about the defects of the novel became self-critical defensiveness, he remonstrated to Stevens, “‘Sir, if you had read this [in manuscript], you would never have let me publish it.'” Stevens responded, “‘Well, Gore, you've got to study much more about writing. I suggest that you do a lot of reading of Henry James.'” About a year and a half later, Stevens's widow recalled, “Gore wrote him an eight-page letter … in the manner of Henry James on eating a breakfast—eggs and so on.”

Back in Antigua by the publication date, he was happy to see that the house renovations had been progressing well under Pat's supervision. Each morning, still in his bathrobe, he would write in the room most distant from the street or in the small cobblestone patio, which Pat had planted with grass and small local plants. “
I must construe
this home as a symbol,” Gore wrote to Anaïs. Occasionally he reverted to his self-dramatizing, melancholy rhetoric: “But there is no heart to it, of course. These days I am a solo dancer, dancing magnificently with no audience. My attachment to you continues, it grows more poignant, more vast, more hopeless with each day…. It is there, it hurts. I have sometimes the feeling that too much of me was left in the womb … what … was not born at all…. I feel a stranger passing through, the books are only shadows I cast before the sun.” This had little to do anymore, if it ever had, with his relationship with Anaïs.
The Womb
began to take shape rapidly, hardly a shadow at all, this time a transparently autobiographical bildungsroman, powerfully conceived and brilliantly executed, in which Nina and he have the starring roles, with slightly disguised versions of his father, of the Gores, of Hugh Auchincloss, of Rosalind, even of Liz Whitney in the secondary parts. The portrait of Nina is both powerful and relentlessly devastating, a narcissistically destructive
mother from whom her vulnerable son, depicted from birth to his Army service, struggles successfully, though with great pain, to liberate himself. His anger at Nina, his bitterness at what she had not given him, his sense of her lacerating destructiveness, and his ambivalent but deep love for her attained a charged focus. Their innumerable arguments and reconciliations found their novelistic equivalent. Of course, much from the life is eliminated and effectively heightened. Experimenting with stream of consciousness, with indirect monologue, with non-narrated transitions of time and place, the novel has a high modern feel, now much beyond the influence of Maugham, with Joyce, Lawrence, and Mann as part of the palette. Jimmie Trimble is renamed Jimmy Wesson. The relationship of William Giraud and Jimmy Wesson parallels Gore's and Jimmie Trimble's, though the novel makes them classmates at Exeter also. Rock Creek Park, St. Albans, Reno, Newport, Merrywood, Exeter, East Hampton are the settings. In a self-exposing monologue, Nina (Charlotte Giraud), fueled by alcohol, excoriates her former husband and her ungrateful child for their failure to appreciate her, to acknowledge her sacrifices, to love her as she deserves. Soon totally alienated from his heavy-drinking mother, William “
remember that
[her] affectionate moments were as intense, as consuming, as her angry ones. But generally he could only remember the times of anger and destruction.” In the final scene, wounded on a European battlefield, he learns about Jimmy's death in the Pacific. “Spring, like all other seasons, was bitter.”

Writing through the late winter and spring of 1946, a little after midsummer he had finished. Along the way he changed the title from
The Womb
to
The Season of Comfort
, taking the bitter irony from Rimbaud's
A Season in Hell
. “
My bitterness toward
my mother,” he wrote to Anaïs, “is almost gone; it is in the book now and I am pleased with the work. She wants to come here in August and I shall let her.” The intense rhetoric in his letters to Anaïs became slightly less heightened, less self-reflexive, though he repeated numbers of times his invitation to visit him that summer, undoubtedly sometime other than when Nina would be there. There was, in fact, a reasonable amount of social life in Guatemala City and Antigua, with the Vasquez Brunis and Monteforte, and a large community of Americans. He soon started a friendship with Dan Wickenden, a slim, dark-haired, bespectacled American writer of thirty-two whom he had met in a hotel lobby in Guatemala City the previous November. Wickenden was staying on, at least until the spring, working on a novel and enjoying the Guatemalan landscape,
which he hoped to make the setting of his next one. A little edgily competitive with one another, they still found much to talk about, particularly literature and their different views about the novel as an art form. Wickenden's first novel,
The Running of the Deer
, published in 1937, had been a bestseller, his third,
The Wayfarers
, in 1945 had been picked by Orville Prescott as the best novel of the year. When in November 1946 Vidal gave Wickenden the manuscript of the unrevised
The City and the Pillar
to read, Wickenden criticized it on artistic grounds. For a practitioner of and believer in the novel as large, sprawling, epic, with grand characters,
City
seemed too minimalist, propagandistic. But he admired Gore's courage in taking on the subject and thought highly of his talent.

Through Pat, Gore also met the painter Bob Hooton, another American expatriate, as well as, in Antigua and at Panajachel on Lake Atitlán where Pat had a house, a varied group of American writers, painters, tourists, residents—a supportive, gossipy, heavy-drinking community that saw one another at parties, in the marketplaces, and at restaurants. Though more Pat's friends than Gore's, they were an active part of his quiet but still necessary social world. Not that he would have liked it noisier, but he was all too soon becoming uncomfortably aware of the limitations of Antigua. Full of intellectual energy, he found few people he could talk with about subjects that interested him. Local gossip and conversation with boozy expatriates only went so far. “
There are some intelligent
people: an elderly witty de Charlus French Count, a Socialist President of Congress etc etc but nothing more meaningful than good company.” Work preoccupied him, obsessed him. But he still wanted more stimulating company and activities than Antigua provided. Movies, theaters, concerts—there was almost none of that. Landscape and weather were proving not to be theater enough.

Restless, he flew to New York in early April. Staying at his father's apartment, he had in hand now most of the reviews of
In a Yellow Wood
, a batch of which he sent down to the Gores in Washington, who impatiently awaited his visit. The Senator had become preoccupied with the practical details of his grandson establishing a political career in New Mexico, a subject that Gore had evaded by his flight to Guatemala and which seemed even less likely now with the imminent publication of
City
. The Senator, who knew little about the potentially disqualifying novel, spun his clever political webs, sketching out the strategy that would have Gore a presidential elector in 1948, then a congressman or senator, then (though never
explicitly stated) President. By the end of the month Gore was on his way back to Antigua via New Orleans, where he paused for a brief visit. Anaïs suddenly appeared, on her way to California on a two-month-long car trip with her newest lover, a handsome twenty-eight-year-old recently divorced Californian, Rupert Poole, who desired to put Anaïs more in touch with the mystical earth, “a better balance between body and spirit.” Neither artistic nor intellectual, Poole lacked a profession, even an avocation. In a 1941 Model A Ford roadster they chugged into New Orleans. Anaïs introduced the two men, who got along quite casually and comfortably. Gore took them to meet a painter friend of his, Olive Leonhardt, who had done a surrealistic portrait of Anaïs, though they had never met. After hesitations and reservations, Nin was eventually to commit herself to a bigamous marriage to Poole, whom she loved. At the same time she remained married to Hugh Guiler, maintaining, at great cost, separate East and West Coast lives. When she soon wrote to Gore in terms that indicated her genuine passion for Rupert, he urged her to seize the opportunity for the fulfillment she had always been pursuing.

Completing the revisions of
Season
in Antigua in May 1947, Gore looked forward to a summer of work and relaxation. Dot and the Senator, eager to visit their favorite grandson, made plans to travel to Guatemala by boat from New Orleans at the beginning of September. July and August they expected to spend in Florida (where they would visit the Senator's brother, Dixie), Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and return to Santa Fe in late September or early October, perhaps with Gore. The Senator still hoped his grandson would follow his advice and establish himself in New Mexico. The Gores never got to Guatemala, their grandson never got to New Mexico. In Oklahoma, Mrs. Gore, widely recognized in her circle as perhaps the worst driver in the United States, slammed into the back of a truck, hurting them both seriously, but especially the Senator, who spent months in St. Anthony's Hospital in Oklahoma City. The event eerily replicated an automobile accident, after which they had been reported to have been killed, when Gore was at St. Albans. Soon after his return to Antigua, his father wrote to him about a visit to Washington, where he had had dinner with his former in-laws and seen Nina. “
The Gores seemed well
but Nina seemed at her worst. I barely know her anymore. I hope that the change is due to a hangover.” It hardly made her son feel regretful about his depiction of her in
Season
. But he had other reasons for discomfort, an
uneasiness, an anxiety, a depression that seemed to have settled on him and which he could not readily shake. “Remember,” his father wrote to him, “the more unusual the person the more serious ups and downs he has. You were about due for a temporary one.” His savings-account balance was being depleted faster than he had anticipated, mostly because of the cost of the house. When Gore morosely complained about his dwindling money, Gene characterized his son's letter as “rather sad” but sharply asserted that “it is difficult for me … to feel sorry for anyone under forty years of age who is healthy.” Eager to do a little complaining of his own, he responded to Gore's comment that his “house [in Guatemala] was handsome, living was cheap and the weather serene,” “
we have a lousy
but comfortable house [in East Hampton], living is shockingly expensive, and the weather has been the worst in many years.”

The response had no effect in taking Gore's mind off his own dissatisfactions, among them the scheduled publication of
City
in January 1948. It was not an unmixed blessing. He resented that two other novels on the same topic were appearing, to some extent stealing his thunder, as he had worried might happen. He also feared adverse responses. Some might connect the topic and the life of the author. He had done his best to make the novel as objective, even as clinical, as possible. It would be unreasonable, though, not to expect the connection to be made. That he would not have the stage entirely to himself seemed Dutton's fault. He blamed them for the delay. In early June he was the beneficiary of another mixed blessing.
Life
magazine ran a visually impressive photo article titled “Young U.S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene Is Ready to Tackle Almost Anything.” Three quarters of the first page consisted of an attractive photograph of the youthful Truman Capote, elegantly dressed, cigarette in hand, seated casually but dramatically in an artfully arranged portion of a prebellum Southern living room. Then followed two pages with modest-size photos of Jean Stafford, Thomas Heggen, Calder Willingham, and Elizabeth Fenwick, then two pages of mostly text on the second of which appeared three small photographs, one of them an awkward depiction of “Gore Vidal, 21, [who] writes poetry and Hemingwayesque fiction. He was in the Aleutians, now lives in Guatemala.” In the text the smaller half of a paragraph said some obvious and uninteresting things about him. Since the article was mostly its visuals, anyone with no special interest in the other writers would be likely to remember only the very large eye-catching photo of the “onn-font-tarribul”
who, for reasons Gore could only imagine and perhaps fulminate obsessively about, had been given undivided star billing. It would have been even worse if he had not been included at all, but “
how absurd to feature
Capote—instead of you,” Anaïs loyally wrote to him.

In a short while he began to feel ill, a low-grade feverish discomfort with assorted aches and some listlessness. His stomach bothered him. Perhaps, he thought, he had a spastic colon. Having finished
The Season of Comfort
, he speculated with a kind of bilious good humor, that so much imaginative exposure to Nina had made him feel sick. Working in the garden or in the back room, he began to fiddle in a desultory way with some early jottings for the book on King Richard's troubadour. In a while he felt better but still not quite right. Anaïs, who had already crossed the country twice since they had last seen one another in New Orleans, was now in Acapulco, close to the Guatemalan border, a short plane trip or a day's bus ride from Guatemala City. Still unresolved about whether she would stay with Rupert in California or Hugh in New York or neither, she accepted, in July, Gore's long-standing invitation to visit him in Antigua. Though they were still closely intertwined, there was now a distance between them others could sense, an almost antierotic aura. But the emotional alliance was strong. When Anaïs, broke, had become pregnant in June, probably by Poole, Gore sent her $1,000 to pay for an abortion, insisting she keep the leftover money for travel expenses to Guatemala. “I should like it if you can come down here and spend July or earlier whenever you've recovered.” On the one hand, she liked the idea. “Maybe when I come down you'll get a little second hand car and I will drive you around everywhere. It gives such freedom.” On the other, on the assumption he was happy in Guatemala, she stressed that “the less we are together the better for both of us … for it will help you find THE relationship—someday.” She then decided to go to France instead, which seemed a good idea to him. “We will always have each other, and continuity in our bond.” Anaïs insisted, “but at the present moment I could not stay at peace anywhere, and would not make you happy. I have only a short time to find a permanent passion—and my quest must continue. As you know, sex is not just sex for me, but the sun, moon, earth, sea, and salt of life, the impetus to creation—the only form of life for me…. Our bond has no need of the physical presence except now and then.” Bored with Antigua, somewhat ill, he flirted with the idea of going with her. When her European plans fell through because of money, she
decided to go to Mexico. “Perhaps if you're tired of Guatemala you might like to meet me there,” she wrote to him. “If you still feel lonely and need me or don't sell the house and don't want novelty I will fly to Guatemala for a few days…. Cheri, I love to be with you, you know that, but under ideal conditions for both of us, which means Romance [with others].” She had another idea. “We could meet in Mexico City for excitement, and … I can present you with a blond boy 20…. We don't like each other physically (we tried!) but he wants to drive me around devotedly and he is h.s. and I'm sure would love you.”