Gore Vidal (55 page)

The previous fall, at the invitation of a young instructor, he had given an early version of it, called “Writers of the 40s,” at City College of New York. In Houston he gave the lecture at the University of Houston and in Dallas at the Cokesbury Auditorium. In New York late in the month he went up to New Haven to lecture at Yale's Dwight Hall, sponsored by the Graduate School, where his friendly professorial audience gave him high praise. “
I liked [your lecture]
,” one wrote to him, “because it was fearlessly presented, uninhibited by academics, fresh and youthful, assailable in only a few spots. I would advise a slower reading of it next time. It is too full of vitamins to be digested at the rate you deliver it.” Washburn, Bingham, and Lewis were being lectured
at
by professors at Harvard. Here Gore was lecturing
to
the Yale equivalent of those lecturing to his former Exeter colleagues. The observation gave him pleasure. So too did a late-night telephone call from a distant but familiar voice. “So that's what you thought of me!” After all these years, a friendly Liz Whitney was on the other end of the line. She had recognized herself as one of the minor characters in
The Season of Comfort
.

As the weather turned warmer, Gore looked forward to his mid-May departure for Europe, first to London for Lehmann's publication of
City
, then to Paris, probably to Rome, perhaps Spain, and Morocco to see Paul Bowles. When Leon Danielian, “very chatty, very sociable,” also planning a European trip, suggested they sail together on the
New Amsterdam
, he was delighted to have Leon's company. Even with Capote he could be amiable enough, as he was at a lunch hosted at a midtown restaurant in early April by another young Southern writer, Speed Lamkin. Short, porcine, effeminate, Speed seemed to Gore one more of the apparently endless train of new writers about to burst, so each thought, into glory and wealth, “
new comets about
to flash from darkness to darkness.” Actually he did not think Lamkin formidable competition. Lamkin had invited Vidal, Capote, and Alice Astor, the glamorous, understated, beautiful mother of Ivan Obolensky, one of Speed's good friends from Harvard. Lamkin “had me and Truman Capote to lunch,” Gore recalled, “and he told everybody he had both of us because we weren't speaking. ‘I just couldn't figure out which one I wanted for lunch, so I had both of them.' That was his glamorous week.” Suddenly Gore and Alice Astor caught one another's eye and began to talk. Slim,
medium-tall, dark-haired, with deep brown eyes and a touch of mysterious exoticism, she seemed to Gore compellingly attractive in a way that touched his feelings and his curiosity. Like Anaïs, at certain angles, in a certain light, she was beautiful, both abstractly distant and absorbingly receptive, intensely there and someplace else. Her low-toned, English-accented voice charmed with its distinctive sensuality. Remarkably young-looking for her age, she was forty-six, the same age as Anaïs and Nina. Wealthy, a lover of the arts, three times divorced and about to be divorced from her current husband, highly placed in the New York and London social worlds, she apparently found Gore as absorbing as he found her. He wanted to know her better. Since he was sailing in mid-May, it was obvious that they had only the opportunity of this one meeting now. But he had intimations of a friendship to come.

This time Gore sailed not to Naples but to Le Havre, where he and Danielian took the ferry and train to London. Lehmann and he put a good face on their relationship, Lehmann the aristocratically self-confident publisher high on the totem pole of an elite, self-assured London literary culture; Vidal the young author determined not to be put down by anyone, but also unwilling to give up entirely on Lehmann. Before the
New Amsterdam
sailed from New York, he received a telegram: “
Suggest you both
stay with me first three days no time for letter now All news then Love—John” to which he responded, “BOTH ARRIVING EGERTON AFTERNOON TWENTYFOUR [May] = GORE.” London in May 1949 was more of what he had experienced the previous summer: a round of parties attended by Lehmann's literary friends, ostensibly to celebrate the London publication of
The City and the Pillar
, and many of the same people, particularly Judy Montagu, from the London social world. Since Isherwood could not come down from his family home in Essex, they missed one another. Gore hoped he might see him in Paris. The British press on the whole had mostly good things to say about
City
, a reception Gore found happily different from the American, the start of what thereafter always seemed to him a better public response to his works in Britain than at home. The self-congratulatory Lehmann boastfully admired his own courage in bringing it out.

Gore soon crossed to Paris. Some of the previous year's cast had reassembled, particularly Tennessee, who came up for a brief visit from
Rome, where he had been since midwinter, and Capote, who had sailed for a long stay in Europe soon after the April lunch with Gore and Alice in New York. Maria Britneva was close by. She had spent much of the fall and winter of 1948 in New York, looking for stage work, enrolling at the newly formed Actors Studio, getting to know Marlon Brando and other New York theater people, strengthening and expanding her relationship with Williams and his friends, including Gore. In New York they had gone to Coney Island together, where she and Gore had had their heads photographed next to one another on comic cardboard bodies. Since she could not be Williams's lover, she could be loving, useful, and supportive. In spring 1949 she returned to her London home, hoping for theater work there, and welcomed Tennessee in April when he came for the English production of
Streetcar
. Williams felt sorry for her. “
She detests London
and has fallen out completely with the Beaumont office so she has no prospect of work here…. Seems to have no interesting friends here, nobody she likes much and her family is quite poor, except for an aunt who treats her rather coolly. Poor child. I think she may go over to Paris with us for a couple of weeks, but when we return to Rome I don't know what her plans will be. London is just as amazingly dull as ever! And to live here, Oh Jesus!” Capote, with his now signature Bronzini scarf, longer than his body was tall, twirled around him and flowing flamboyantly, pranced happily about Paris. His friends worried that his scarf would catch and choke him to death. His enemies hoped so. When Gore, just arrived and staying, as was Danielian, at the Pont Royal Hotel, made the mistake of showing Capote a draft of his short story, “The Robin,” Capote read it and said, happily, “‘It doesn't work!'” One evening, with a large group, they found themselves at a well-known dance hall where men danced together. The band played that season's popular hit, “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don't Want to Leave the Congo.” An enthusiastic dancer, Capote pulled Gore onto the dance floor. Gore, though he did not mind being admired, did not, unlike Truman, use his body or his movements exhibitionistically. Anyway, he had little talent or interest in dancing, which he had disliked since his Washington dancing-school days. Immediately he turned and left the dance floor. For Capote, who thought himself irresistible, there may have been attraction as well as competition, a hope of conquest as well as an act of payback. Each knew how to get on the other's nerves.

When Gore had arrived in Paris, Paul Bowles was there, having come from London, where Lehmann was arranging for late-summer publication
of the British edition of
The Sheltering Sky
. He and Gore took long strolls together. In the bar of the Pont Royal they amused themselves “
examining the literary
habitués of the place.” Sartre walked by their table “and bowed as he mumbled: ‘Bonjour.'” Both were too startled to say anything. They had assumed he would not recognize them. Eager to return to Morocco, Bowles soon left, repeating his invitation to Gore to visit him in Tangier, where he and his wife Jane had created North African lives and domiciles. Both were deeply attracted to the exotic Arabic world, what seemed to them its power and centricity, a place of primal origins from which Europe and America could be observed at a distance. Morocco provided for Bowles an attractive balance of alienation and familiarity. “I have absolutely no desire to go to any part of Europe, so un-European do I feel these days,” he had written to Gore. A handsome, graceful man, an inveterate traveler whose bags were often packed, he now found Morocco the home to which he always returned, its Anglo-American expatriate colony his social world, its Arabic young men his lovers, its mysterious desert the place where he felt closest to vital life. “I must admit,” he wrote to Gore, “I didn't think you'd ever show up in Morocco.” Apparently, when Gore had decided not to sail with Williams and Bowles in December, he had hinted he might show up later in Tangier. “Morocco isn't at all … monstrous,” Bowles wrote to him, “but you doubtless wouldn't like it—you're not that depraved yet. But wait.” In Paris, Bowles repeated the invitation. Gore again said he might come.

There were some Paris conquests. One day he strolled near Saint-Germain-des-Prés with a talented young American composer on his arm, Chuck Turner, later to become Samuel Barber's companion. Bowles's friend Ned Rorem, a young Francophile composer who had met Gore in New York and admired him, thought them an odd couple. “But then, opposites attract—not that Chuck and Gore were opposites, at least in their physical urges.” For Gore opposites did attract, particularly men on a lower educational and social level than his own. For companionship and intellectual stimulation he had friends like Bowles. Whatever contributed to the decision, he soon left Paris, this time alone. Perhaps Paris life had grown dull; he would certainly have been happy to leave Capote behind. He did not mind in the least traveling alone. Sometimes intensely social, he also liked solitude, his own company. By train he headed south across the Pyrenees for his first visit to Spain, to see the places that had cachet and resonance in his
imagination, that he had read about in literature and history, including the evocations of the Alhambra from his childhood reading of Washington Irving. Modern Spanish culture did not especially interest him. Having been disgusted by the cruelty of the bullfight he had seen in Guatemala City, he found the blood-and-sand spectacle viciously primitive, an aspect of Spain connected to the fanaticism of its Catholic heritage that exemplified the kind of religion he especially disliked. From Granada he wrote to John Kelly, complaining that his writing and feelings were “
frozen
.” “That is nothing to worry about,” Kelly assured him. “It will not hurt you to relax for a while. And if you feel tired of sex, you may be ready for something better in that and other lines.” At Córdoba and Seville he found the great mosques breathtaking, extraordinary architectural structures magnificently decorated. Moorish Spain came alive in his imagination. Why not, he thought, write a novel in the manner of
A Search for the King
, about Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Spain? The topic lingered for a while in his head, though he was never to write it. “A lovely journey into the heart of Spain,” he wrote to Latouche. “It beateth. I feel as if I were on Mars. The only ‘foreign country' in the world…. A crown of
twigs
, dear heart, and an easy birth.” From Seville he took the train to Algeciras on the Mediterranean, Gibraltar “the first big rock to the right.” North African lights glittered across the strait.

As he had planned, he soon crossed to Africa. Bowles, surprised that the visit was actually occurring, welcomed him to the Moroccan landscape and the Anglo-American expatriate world. A newly fashionable gathering place for what Gore thought of as traveling queens, Tangier had its early post-World War II cast of colorful characters, some always on the move, some in comfortable houses, attracted by the weather, the beaches, the cheap cost of living, the easy availability of drugs, the Arabic ethos that permitted every sort of sex under terms totally independent of European puritanism. Sir David Herbert, the son of the Earl of Pembroke, Tangier's “
unofficial
social arbiter,” and the visiting Cecil Beaton, widely admired for his scenery and costume designs, his photographs and wit, anchored the British social presence; the Bowleses and their traveling compatriots and guests, the American. Paul and Jane both had their homosexual lives, often with long-term companions. Both regularly smoked a North African version of marijuana. Bowles, who was working on a new novel, a short story, and an opera for Libby Holman, was also supervising the renovation of the large house he lived in, high on a steep cliff outside town, with “a sort of lighthouse on the
top, with quite the best view here.” A fine but now nonproductive writer, Jane Auer Bowles, eight years older than Gore, born to a Jewish family in New York, had a mysterious Arabic lover who dominated her somewhat unstable life and mind. Hostile to Gore, whom she suspected of having an affair with Paul that threatened their idiosyncratic relationship, the small, dark, unpredictable Jane gave him the creeps. For Paul, Gore had great affection and respect.