Gore Vidal (45 page)

By this time Cornelia, whether she had read
City
in manuscript or not, had fully realized that Gore's sexual inclinations would keep them, at best, friends and social companions. “
I don't need
to write to you of my heart because you are always there, but you never answer,” she told him in fall 1947. Aware of his involvement with Anaïs, she felt baffled about the nature of the attraction and assumed it had to be sexual. But she could not quite see what Gore saw in Anaïs, or so she told him. Actually, by the time she was aware of it as a relationship, it was already mostly over. Gore himself, though, kept Cornelia's attention. His combination of self-involvement and talent impressed and baffled her. “You have a Christ complex, an Oedipus complex, a Hitler complex, and a complex complex. There really isn't anything wrong with you at all if you could forget about all these complexes.” But she had become quite certain she was not “capable of making [him] stop being wretched … so there isn't really much point in trying.” But she believed in his powers, his talents. “You can be a great writer and a great man. It's so unbelievable that anyone is capable of doing both [literature and politics] that you really should try it…. It would encourage humanity a great deal.” Busy as managing editor of
The Hudson Review
,
Cornelia herself continued to be intensely literary—editing, writing poetry, wondering where her situation and talents would take her.

Still optimistic that the subject of
City
would not be held against him, in autumn 1947 Gore applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1948. The project was his novel in progress,
A Search for the King
. The success of
Williwaw
and
In a Yellow Wood
might make him an attractive candidate. Whom to ask for recommendations? Since Orville Prescott had reviewed
Williwaw
favorably in the
New York Times
, Gore thought it reasonable to ask him. Prescott said yes, though apparently Gore did not read sharply enough between the lines of his assent. “
I would be glad to serve
as a literary reference to you in your application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, providing that my having read your first book qualifies me. Unfortunately, I did not get around to
In a Yellow Wood
.… By the way, could it be possible that you are writing too quickly? It seems to me that your rate of output is amazing. But then, everyone has to perform his own job of work in his own way.” Gore soon learned that Capote had also applied. Whatever his own chances, he was happy not to be dependent on any support other than his savings and his writing. He hoped that his royalties would make viable his determination to devote himself fully to writing. By early December 1947, before the recommendations were due, advance copies of
City
became available. Prescott, who a few months later felt such moral outrage that he declined to review it, may have known enough about it from word-of-mouth or his own reading for it to have influenced his letter of recommendation. Wreden wrote a smashingly laudatory letter. So too did Nathan Rothman, who had praised
In a Yellow Wood
in
The Saturday Review of Literature
, and Bob Giroux, who recommended Gore “in the highest terms.” But Prescott damned him with less-than-faint praise. “I do not know enough about Mr. Vidal to feel justified in urging his project upon you. An historical novel about Richard I and Blondel seems to me so conventional and even popular a literary project that it might well take its chances with others of its type. So, I can only say that I know Mr. Vidal to be a gifted young man and to suggest that his need for a scholarship and your own opinion of the merit of his work in progress should be the deciding factor.” It was a killing letter, against the ethical grain of the widely accepted understanding that if one cannot write a good recommendation one should decline to write at all. Gore did not get the fellowship. Neither did Capote. “Shocked, we compared notes. Studied the list of those
who had received grants. ‘
Will you just look
,' moaned Truman, ‘at those
ahh
-full pee-pull they keep giving
muh-nee
to!'” A promising young writer, E. Howard Hunt, to become infamous decades later in the Watergate investigations, received a Guggenheim Fellowship that year.

Once he had decided to sail for Europe in mid-February, Gore's spirits lightened. New York sparkled a bit more brightly in his restless eye. Johnny Kriza provided pleasure, the usual erotic release. Nina, intermittently, got on his nerves. The previous summer she had dried out at Silver Hill, in Connecticut, an expensive retreat for alcoholics, her mind partly on elaborate schemes for becoming a leading figure in creating support systems for alcoholics, partly on legal procedures to get additional money from Auchincloss. Anaïs pulled strings to arrange lectures at college campuses, the most prominent at Harvard at the beginning of January. Soon she was off to California. Parties were still a staple of Gore's New York activities. He went to one “for Cecil Beaton and found him dull. Had dinner with Glenway Wescott who is charming.” Eager to meet the much-admired novelist Christopher Isherwood, who he hoped would like
The City and the Pillar
, he was disappointed to learn he had been out of town when Isherwood had passed through. “He is now touring South America with his love, a boy photographer.” He sent Isherwood, as he sent others, including Thomas Mann, advance copies, with handwritten notes and inscriptions. Worried its reception might not be entirely positive, he tried to get endorsements that could be used as blurbs or in follow-up advertisements to help counter negative reviews.

In January 1948, at the home of the writer Glenway Wescott's sister, Gore met John Horne Burns, whose successful war novel,
The Gallery
, he admired a great deal more than he did the thirty-one-year-old Burns himself, “
a difficult man
who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great.” He seemed monstrous, envious, bitchy, drunk. With “a receding hairline above a face striking in its asymmetry, one ear flat against the head, the other stuck out,” Burns was “certain that to be a good writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed he named a half dozen celebrated contemporaries, ‘A pleiad,' he roared delightedly, ‘of pederasts!' But what about Faulkner, I asked, and Hemingway. He was disdainful. Who said
they
were any good? And besides, hadn't I heard
how Hemingway once.…” A harbinger of Italian delights, Burns extolled the attractions of Italian boys, whom he called
topolini
. Gore thereafter referred to them as “mice.” The word itself seemed to bring Italian pleasures closer.

Hollywood, another exotic landscape, had been on his mind during much of 1947, and still had importance to him even as he prepared for his departure for Europe. Numbers of talented writers, including Isherwood, had found sustenance writing screenplays for the movies. It had occurred to Gore early on that he might supplement his novel-writing income or even if necessary earn his living in Los Angeles. The occasion when he had overheard two scriptwriters working beside the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel stuck in his memory. That his mother was good friends with Doris and Jules Stein could be a help. Before leaving for New Orleans in late summer 1946, he had sent some of the good reviews of
Williwaw
to Felix Ferry, Nina's Beverly Hills friend, an agent with Famous Artists Corporation, whom he had met the previous spring. Perhaps a studio might be interested in optioning
Williwaw
and/or contracting with its author to write scripts. A year later, from Antigua, he had assured the desperate Anaïs that “if I get a Hollywood job then there will be a great deal of money. Think about this for I am serious.” He hoped something could be arranged through a contact at Columbia Studios. Toward the end of 1947 Ferry encouraged the neophyte to provide a story idea that Ferry might try to sell. “
A short to the point story
with a not too extensive background is one of the most welcome commodities in Hollywood today. Have you any in mind which might do? If so, please put it on four or five pages which would be quite enough to sell the idea, especially when it is as beautifully written as your works are. Then there would be a chance to see you with it and have you come out here to enjoy a little of this season's sunshine.”

The beginning of the new year in New York had its own brightness. Finally, on January 9, 1948, Dutton published
The City and the Pillar
. All at Dutton held their breath, having moved into what seemed perilous, uncharted waters by publishing a book that made an argument for the legitimization of sex between men. The Macraes were uncomfortable. Advance orders of 5,000 copies, though, were good enough for Wreden to hope it might be a bestseller. Word-of-mouth provided news of the novel's controversial
subject. Vidal's reputation, as the author of
Williwaw
and as a well-publicized
“enfant terrible,”
helped stimulate bookstore interest. He had already pocketed his largest advance against royalties, $2,000, the final $1,000 on the day of publication, replenishing his bank account with enough to pay for much of his European trip. The well-known English publisher and editor John Lehmann, whom Gore was soon to meet, had contracted with Dutton for British rights. A number of foreign-language editions seemed likely. Wreden, though, still worried that his prize author would be damaged by the book's enemies. Fortunately, readers, despite mixed reviews and occasional sharp attacks, found the subject absorbing. Amanda Ellis, who had befriended Gore in Colorado Springs, came by for a visit, enthusiastic about her former protégé's success. From Lima, Peru, Christopher Isherwood responded to Vidal's letter with enthusiastic encouragement and permission to use his praise in advertisements, though he disapproved of
City's
ending: it would encourage the widespread prejudice that homosexual relationships always ended miserably, a self-defensive comment echoed by a large number of homosexuals happy to see their sexuality taken seriously in fiction but distressed that society's impression that homosexuals all come to a bad end would be reinforced by Jim's murdering Bob Ford. Isherwood, it seemed to Vidal, preferred propaganda to artistic integrity. It was, though, the start of a friendship. “
Thank you for what
you say about my writing,” Isherwood wrote to him. “That makes me very happy…. It's nice to be a stimulus—and especially to another writer…. And do please write. I love getting letters, and most of my friends seem to regard me as temporarily dead.”

From his Pacific Palisades exile Thomas Mann thanked the young writer for his gift copy “with your personal inscription. Your novel, which has afforded me a noble entertainment, is a valuable addition to my English library. The interesting book has my most sincere wishes for the success it deserves.” In his private diary Mann remarked on how much it had stirred the banked fires of his own past, how powerfully and personally he identified with the novel's subject. From California, Anaïs, to whom Gore had written announcing his bestsellerdom and offering her money, wrote back with congratulatory kindness, especially since she did not like the book and believed it contained a mean caricature of her. “Already I'd heard that you were
the
best seller! I'm happy because money
can
be magical when well
used—I think it was sweet offering me some—I like your saying it even if I won't take advantage of it…. Cheri, I feel as exactly close to you as you to me and of the most durable quality…. You have won all your battles, you know—You have more power to love richly than any young man I know—you have physical beauty
and
charm
and
a heart
and
a gifted nature—I should know, who know you deeper—So be happy…. Our only enemy is doubt, lack of confidence—Have faith, have faith.” From Rome, Prokosch, who passed his copy around among eager friends, urged Gore not to worry “in the
least
about the sex angle—it is obviously treated very cleanly and manfully.” Come to Europe, he urged, delighted to learn at the end of the month that Gore was almost on his way.