Gore Vidal (49 page)

Almost as quiet as Rome, in spring 1948 the streets of Paris were uncrowded, the city experiencing the predawn of its postwar awakening. For visiting Americans the favorable exchange rate, French eagerness to be in the cultural-tourism business again, the enthusiasm of once more renewing the historical Franco-American handshake—all this gave Paris a roseate early-morning glow. Suddenly transatlantic ships were coming into Le Havre, planes landing at Orly, ferries crossing the Channel. American artists and writers, having been excluded by a brutally long war, wanted to be in Paris again.

Having finished a draft of
The Search for the King
, Gore began to rework the manuscript. When he gave the play he had written in Cairo to Tennessee to read, the latter “pronounced it the worst play he'd read in some time, and I solemnly abandoned playwriting for good, after first pointing out to him that a literary form which depended on the combined excellence of others for its execution could hardly be worth the attention of a serious writer, adding with deliberate cruelty that I did not envy him being stagestruck and his life taken up with such frivolous people as actors and directors.” It was not a renunciation Vidal was able to sustain. What sustained him most in Paris was the pleasure of simply being there at a golden time. The chestnut trees were in bloom, the food wonderful. Elegantly shabby, Paris looked lovely. “We lived as if it would be
forever summer
.”

His long-hoped-for meeting with Christopher Isherwood happened accidentally, in late April, at the Deux Magots café, where Isherwood and Bill Caskey, an American ex-merchant marine and professional photographer, were sitting. As Gore walked by, he recognized from photographs the well-known forty-four-year-old Isherwood, just one year younger than Nina, author of successful novels and the celebrated
Goodbye to Berlin
. The British-Hollywood expatriate had already entered literary mythology as the third in the Auden-Spender triumverate. Well read in a way that none of Vidal's American writer friends were, Isherwood, with his humor, his delight in word games, parodies, spoofs, and class-conscious ironies, delighted Gore. “‘I am American literature,'” Gore announced one day. “‘I feared
as much,'” Isherwood said. “Although the voice was controlled, I saw the mounting terror in his eyes as we deconstructed American literature not only past but yet to come, making, as we did, spacious room for ourselves among the ruins.” At that first meeting Vidal seemed to Isherwood “a big husky boy with fair wavy hair and a funny, rather attractive face—sometimes he reminds me of a teddy bear, sometimes of a duck.” His talk about sex seemed youthful, cute, silly, with phrases like “peeing machines,” “mice,” and “we looked at each other and our tails started to wag,” and his disbelief in romantic love and certainty (if it existed) about its tragic, doomed nature, left Isherwood skeptical. He himself, who had no difficulty reconceptualizing marital romance into a homosexual variant whose model combined romantic devotion and domestic harmony, lived with the rough, irritable Caskey, who thought Gore the typical product of an American prep school. Gore thought Caskey suffered from a case of “terminal jealousy.” What Isherwood respected immediately, though, was Gore's courage. “
I do think
he has that—though it is mingled, as in many much greater heroes, with a desire for self-advertisement,” he wrote in his diary. With youthful self-enthusiasm and bestseller narcissism, Gore asked for advice on “‘how to manage my career.'”

They had dinner together the next two nights. Eager to talk about other writers and about Isherwood's Hollywood life, Gore learned that Isherwood and Gore's English publisher, John Lehmann, were great friends. The next afternoon they went out to Versailles, where Gore had last been in summer 1939. Isherwood found it disappointing, too “big and barracklike.” “I don't know when I've met anyone I liked so much in such a short time,” Gore wrote to Lehmann. When Isherwood left for England, he took with him a copy of Gore's play, the
idea
of which, he soon responded, was “very interesting and even potentially great.” But “the basic weakness seems to me to be in the character of the mother…. She simply isn't interesting; too bitchy. She should be a genuinely tragic figure…. I even think there should be a big scene between her and Jimmy…. I don't mean that you should be more shocking, more outspoken, but I want you to be more human.” Isherwood read it as a play-in-progress. So too, and much more so, was the relationship. “I am so glad,” he wrote from London, “we met in Paris, and I hope we'll see more of each other from now on. I don't feel like I've really talked to you yet.” They both looked forward to Vidal coming to London in June.

In Gore's conversations with Isherwood, Truman Capote's name had come up. Vidal was irresistibly drawn to the slightly sore subject of his competitor, among other reasons because Capote was about to arrive in Paris. Somewhat disingenuously, Vidal had written to Lehmann in London, “If you see Truman Capote before he comes over here give him my number. I look forward to seeing him.” It could only have been on the principle that it is best to have your enemy in sight and in front of you, though they were not in any manifest way enemies yet. They were slightly friendly catty rivals, each of whom, traveling in some of the same literary circles, accepted the necessity of occasionally running into one another. When Capote, who was having lunch at the Deux Magots with his friend Johnny Nicholson—who later that year opened Café Nicholson in New York—introduced him to Gore, Nicholson immediately saw that “they weren't friends.” Gore was “very handsome, very distinguished-looking, very proper. No way was he bohemian-looking.” But “Truman had written his book. So we had two rivals. That I knew. They were two personalities,” though “at that time they were very proper with one another.” They were also each looking over his shoulder at the other's progress. Eager to combine histrionic charm with sharp intelligence, Capote treated every situation as a stage performance whose message was the assertion of his desirability and brilliance. Like Vidal, he believed in advertising himself. Unlike Vidal, he had a mystical faith in his ability to make reality conform to his desires. A performance personality, he frequently improvised, sometimes recklessly, often cleverly, softly blurring the boundary between convincing others and convincing himself. If he could do one, he could do the other. Soon after arriving in Paris, Capote was in high form, entrancing Vidal and Williams “
with mischievous fantasies
about the great.” He flashed a brilliant amethyst ring. “‘From André Gide,' he sighed.” Soon after Truman and Gore met Camus at a publisher's party, Truman began telling everyone that Camus had fallen madly in love with him. “Apparently the very sight of him was enough to cause lifelong heterosexual men to tumble out of unsuspected closets,” Vidal later wrote. “The instant lie was Truman's art form, small but, paradoxically, authentic. One could watch the process. A famous name would be mentioned. The round pale fetus face would suddenly register a sort of tic, as if a switch had been thrown. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt. Oh, I know her
intimately!'”

His lies infuriated Vidal, who, though he thought he had amiable
relations with Capote, soon discovered that his rival was bad-mouthing him everywhere and at every opportunity. “All the writers are here,” Gore wrote to a new correspondent, the critic John Aldridge, “and the atmosphere is heavy with competitiveness. Someone might one day remark in print that American writers are the most highly competitive and mutually antagonistic in the world.” Though some found Capote charmingly entertaining, Vidal was not alone in thinking him offensive. The novelist Calder Willingham, with whom Gore had become casually friendly in 1947—48 in New York, found Capote as untenable as did Vidal. He is “
insincere, extremely mannered
… snobbish,” Willingham wrote to Vidal. Though attractive, clever, and “an excellent talker,” he “tries too hard to be charming … busy all the time at the job of getting ahead…. Also, he uses his homosexuality in this; he uses it as comedy, and plays the role of the effeminate buffoon, thus making people laugh at him. It gets attention.” One of the dangers to Vidal was his own potential overreaction. Sometimes quick to anger, his counterattacks occasionally strained other people's credulity: Capote could not be as bad as all that. To some, such as Sandy Campbell, Tennessee Williams's friend, Gore seemed “obsessed with Truman and his success.” He “talked about Truman continually, putting him down, insisting that Truman had never met Gide, Cocteau, etc.” But, later, “I realized from Truman's demeanor, his sudden quietness, his failure to make any claim of friendship or acquaintance [with Gide when they ran into him in Taormina in 1950], that they had never met before. What I had taken to be one of Vidal's jealous libels was true.” As to Capote's claim of an affair with Gide, Gore himself shortly had a chance to put it to the test.

John Lehmann came from London to Paris, among other reasons to discuss with his newest American acquisition his hope that he would revise the ending of
The City and the Pillar
for the British edition. Like Isherwood, he thought the violent ending both off-putting and bad publicity for homosexuals. Early in the year Lehmann had received happily the news “that you and Tennessee are moving in our direction across the globe.” Vidal, though he resented Lehmann's pressure on him to alter the ending, was pliable or ambivalent enough so that from early on he committed himself to make changes. “I don't think I need tell you that your book will be a bit of a problem child in London,” Lehmann told him at the beginning of May, “and there are one or two points I am anxious to take up with you in connection with this.” When Gore seemed almost to volunteer changes,
Lehmann was pleased. “
I'm very much interested
to hear that you are thinking of revising the end of
The City and the Pillar
. I would welcome this, and feel sure that we could easily come to an agreement about when the next text should be ready.” In London, Gore was a subject of friendly gossip. “Christopher came to stay here,” Lehmann wrote to him, and “we talked a lot about you.” From the first, though, Vidal did not trust John Lehmann. “After Isherwood went to America [in 1941],” Lehmann “regularly said that Isherwood had never written anything good since,” Vidal recalled. “Lehmann was a great gossip, and he had implacable malice. He just wasn't likable. He had some charm and some wit. He was a very handsome man. Extremely…. But there was something off-putting about him. I didn't like him dictating to me what to do with my book,” though by mid-May Vidal had explicitly expressed himself as “not very happy with
[City]
as it stands” and preparing “to rewrite [its] ending.” To some extent his accommodation was strategic and deferential. “Would it be possible, if the
City
is a success, to bring out the first two books? I know nothing of English publishing conditions: perhaps this would not be practical.” Having had Dutton send Lehmann galleys of
The Season of Comfort
, Gore was eager to have Lehmann commit himself to publish all his novels in England. Lehmann was clear in his own mind that he would make a commitment only to
City
.

A tall, handsome, pale-complexioned, peremptory man with receding blond hair and icy blue eyes, the forty-one-year-old Lehmann came from two Victorian publishing and literary families, one of Scottish, the other of German-Jewish origin. His grandparents had been intimates of Dickens, Browning, and Wilkie Collins, among other great figures of nineteenth-century British literary culture. His sisters were the actress Beatrix Lehmann and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann. At Eton and Cambridge, Lehmann had expanded his inheritance into more current circles, including Bloomsbury. He had begun working in 1931 for Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press, which published his poetry, and become a partner in 1938. His greatest success came as editor of the groundbreaking semiannual journal
New Writing
and
Penguin New Writing
, and, later, of
London Magazine
. Well known in the tight-knit British literary world for his interest in homosexual books, he ran his small publishing house from a vantage point of great prestige but from a weak financial-business position. With the end of the war he had begun to give great emphasis to taking on up-and-coming American authors, including Vidal. He had already made up his mind “
to capture as many of
the new postwar generation of American writers as possible.” Having just returned from a successful book-buying trip to New York, he happily embraced Isherwood, who had been staying at Lehmann's house at Egerton Crescent in Kensington, and was reunited with his companion Alex Racine, a distinguished Polish-born ballet dancer. Late in May he took the boat-train to Paris, where among other things he signed Tennessee Williams to a publication contract and took Vidal to meet André Gide, who just the year before had won the Nobel Prize. Disappointed that Gide had not read
The City and the Pillar
, a copy of which he had received from a friend, Gore took pleasure in meeting the acerbic writer. At seventy-nine, Gide was still alert enough to express his formidable personality and mind in the cleverness of his language and the keenness of his satiric eye. Gide's defense of Communism and his championing of homosexuality had made him controversial, a writer who was both widely hated and deeply admired. He was
cher maître
to those who admired his courage, a Bolshevik fag to those who detested his politics. To the young American, Gide had fought and had suffered from the French version of the same enemies who so viciously attacked
City
. As they rang the doorbell in the rue Vaneau, Lehmann noticed Vidal's excitement. Gide was the first prominent writer he was to meet who combined a literary career and an intense interest in politics and the first who dared, defying convention, publicly to defend same-sex relationships as natural.