Gore Vidal (63 page)

Many of Alice's literary guests were treated to the luxuries of her brother Vincent's estate. Tennessee Williams enjoyed swimming in the indoor pool, wearing a bathing cap, as Romana noticed with some astonishment, and the Sitwells, particularly Edith, came. Alice would bring them over to Ferncliff for the hospitality of Vincent and his wife, the former Minnie Cushing, one of whose sisters had married Jock Whitney—in Nina's mind still the man who had “got away”—after his divorce from Liz. The aristocratic Sitwells, for whom the Gladstone was not posh enough, stayed free at the St. Regis Hotel, which Vincent owned. “We're in some little hotel. Osbert, what's the name of it again?” Edith would say. “Oh, the St. Regis. Yes. Perfectly nice.” Gore, who had met Edith and Osbert in New York in autumn 1949, found the Sitwells' eccentricities—their odd, elongated, skeletal frames and especially Edith's witty flamboyance—compelling. When after a lunch together Gore, Paul Bowles, and the very tall Osbert, whom Bowles had been eager to meet, walked on Fifth Avenue toward the St. Regis, the two younger men found that Osbert, who had lost some control of his limbs because of Parkinson's disease, began to take longer and longer strides. They could barely keep up. “
I raced beside him
, trying to hold him back—and down to earth like a balloon—while Paul, who is short and slight, had now left the pavement and was flying through the air, clinging to Osbert's arm for support.” At the height of her reputation as a poet, over six feet tall, wittily wicked, Edith in her sheer entertaining bizarreness appealed to Gore's sense of humor as well as to his sense of history, as if some medieval Plantagenet had come alive again. When he complained to her about a foolish British review of
The City and the Pillar
in the
Times Literary Supplement
, she said, “But they do books on Icelandic runes very well.” In preparation for her sitting next to the conversationless Vincent at her first lunch at Ferncliff, Edith took counsel with her fellow guests. “‘What am I going to talk to Vincent Astor about? I've heard he's very difficult.' They said. ‘Look, what he really loves is facts.' ‘Ah!' She was put next to Uncle Vincent at lunch,” Romana remembered, “on his right.
People were wondering how this was going to go. Uncle Vincent was amazed when she turned to him and said, ‘So glad to meet you. Tell me something—you're probably the only person who can tell me—how many girders does the Eiffel Tower have?' She kept my uncle talking about the Eiffel Tower for the whole of lunch.”

Close to Edgewater, though worlds away from Ferncliff, Bard College provided entertainment of a different sort and, during the first half of the 1950s, a few local friends, particularly the poet Ted Weiss. A small, arty, serious school, with a special emphasis on literature and the humanities, Bard, years before cast off from Columbia University without an endowment, frequently teetered on the verge of bankruptcy, its faculty underpaid and overworked in a demanding tutorial system. Students got much individual attention. Faculty rarely had time for anything else. Still, in the 1940s and '50s, when academic jobs were especially scarce and widely underpaid, Bard attracted distinguished people who came as visitors or stayed for a few years, writers like Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. Three years after moving into Edgewater, Gore had not met the peripatetic Bellow, to Ted Weiss's surprise, and “
since I plan
to shut the house in a week or so we are not apt to meet: there is a rumor he may not be long up here, that the open road, more grand appointments await him. I have not read his book
[The Adventures of Augie March]
but it sounds most energetic and respectable.” A young poet of distinction and an enthusiastic teacher of literature, Weiss and his wife Renée, a violinist, had been publishing their influential small magazine,
Quarterly Review of Literature
, since 1943. They regularly organized poetry readings and conferences at the attractive riverside campus that over the next decade brought to Bard most of the best-known poets of the period. Unenthusiastic about academia, having narrowly escaped Harvard, Gore was enthusiastic about the Weisses and accepted some invitations to readings at the nearby campus, one to hear Jean Garrigue, whom he had met through Anaïs years before in New York and to whom he had introduced the Weisses, another to hear Wallace Stevens. Gore recalled, “Here was this fat solemn businessman in a three-piece suit, a typical insurance salesman from Hartford. ‘Well, it's a remarkable time in the arts,' he said. ‘I'm supposed to be talking about modern poetry today. I think that's the subject I was given, and I don't know what to say in a period that has something no other period has even had, a Museum of Modern Art.' Well, I fell apart. Nobody else could see the joke. I thought it hysterically funny. I read him then. I used to
read a lot of poetry…. I went into the war with Auden's anthology, which I carried all through the war, two or three volumes…. I got through the war with him.” On another occasion at Bard there were “three British poets,” Gore reported to Lehmann, “very dreary … D. Gascoygne ('nearer my God to thee'), Graham (hearty, solid, regular feller) and a Miss Raine (‘I loathe Jane Austen') … for a literary jamboree … being strange to these shores they were unaware that anyone took poetry seriously enough to want to discuss it in PUBLIC, so one had the feeling that their most central modesty was hopelessly violated by the tough young New Yorkers who put to them long technical questions. The session broke up with one sharp youth remarking from the floor that, among other things, the supernatural was an abstraction … to which Mr D. G. gulped with pain and said in a strident choked voice, ‘The Supernatural is Not an Abstraction!' ending the symposium.” Some of the Bard poets came for parties at Edgewater, especially the much-liked Weisses. One afternoon, at the time of the publication of
Judgment
, as they were chatting about things literary, Gore, defiantly and defensively, told Ted, “Well, my best novel is at least as good as the worst of Henry James.”

His outward gaze was mostly turned toward New York, his inward focused on intense reading. Still, the Weisses were fun and nice, and Gore's larger New York City literary life, soon to be extended to television and then the movies, seemed exotic to them. When Ted asked him to satisfy one of his students' curiosity about Tennessee Williams, Gore graciously responded,

As for Tennessee
, you may pass on to the young man the information that he reads a great deal of verse, almost no prose of any kind, that the greatest single literary influence on him was Hart Crane (he set out to be a poet, not a playwright) and a later but less influential mentor has been Rilke, in translation. He admires Sartre's plays, despite a fierce snub we both received from that busy little Caesar (I
don't
share Tenn's admiration) one afternoon in Paris. Among contemporaries T.W. personally likes Carson McCullers, Windham and myself … putting up with those works of ours he cannot bring himself to read with good humor and right feeling. He does not like novels though he will read short stories with
some pleasure. He has had little personal contact with other theatre writers. He once wrote O'Neill a fan letter after
The Iceman Cometh
, getting a long response, shakily written. I read it but can't remember what it said. So much for my talents as a recollector of the great.

Down the road from Edgewater, near the entrance to the Bard campus, Gore and Howard found a better use for Bard than its academic resources. At Adolph's, a small tavern and student hangout, Howard met some of the more adventuresome members of a faculty and student body that had its fair share of men interested in men. Some he occasionally brought back to Edgewater.

Though he never spoke at Bard, Gore had begun to supplement his income and cultivate his audience by lecturing. “
My life has been
desperately busy these last few months,” he told Lehmann. “Every other week I go out to lecture to Ladies' clubs: the Midwest, New England, the South, all over. I do it all in a sort of daze, for the money. I have also had my father move one of his small factories within two miles of my house, to provide me with a sinecure, which it will do very nicely as soon as the troubles stop but after six months they still persist.” Late in 1951, on his way to Philadelphia to lecture, as he drove through Manhattan under the elevated subway tracks, he banged his car into a steel post. Miraculously the car was intact and no one else hurt. His ribs, though, were badly bruised. He simply drove on. Fortunately, if the police had been involved (apparently they were not), at least he now had a driver's license. A fast driver who frequently exceeded the speed limit, he had recently been stopped for speeding on his way to Joe O'Donohue's in Red Hook. “The state trooper called me over and said. ‘You're speeding. I have to give you a ticket. Where is your license?' And I said, ‘Well, I don't have one.' He thought I was either joking or I didn't have it with me. He chose to interpret it that I didn't have it with me. I had the registration. ‘Okay,” he said, ‘the magistrate is over there. You go and pay your fine for speeding.' So I went to the justice of the peace with this thing and I said I've been speeding. And he said, ‘Well, where's your driver's license?' I said, ‘Well, I don't have one.' He said, ‘You mean you don't have it with you.' ‘No, I never got one.' ‘You never got one!' and he became extremely interested in the case…. ‘Well, why didn't you get a driver's license?' ‘It just never occurred to me.'” With aching ribs, he drove
on to Philadelphia and gave his lecture. Isherwood, who had just been at Edgewater for a visit, was there with John Van Druten to attend an out-of-town performance of Van Druten's adaptation of
Goodbye to Berlin, I Am a Camera
. To Gore, who joined Isherwood at the theater, it seemed more Van Druten than Isherwood. Still aching, he drove back to Edgewater, where the doctor diagnosed and taped up four broken ribs. “
I am in physical
discomfort most of the time with these ribs but,” he told Lehmann stoically, “that sort of thing is not eternal.”

At Williams College, where he went to lecture in mid-May 1951, the bookstore manager, Raymond Washburn, a Vidal enthusiast, eagerly greeted him. He had been to Edgewater for a visit, where Gore had introduced him to his grandmother, whom he found “characteristically fascinating.” They had all gone over to Alice's for lunch. Latouche's “conversational ability” impressed Washburn. “I'm not sure,” he wrote to Gore, “I could survive a long siege of it, for either my mental capacities would shrivel away (what few there are) being blanched in the reflective glory of his verbal acumen, or the constant assaults upon my ears would soon leave me deaf and dumb.” From Barrytown, Gore took the train to Williamstown, where Washburn and others had arranged a meeting with students eager to talk to him about the ongoing public discussions he had been conducting with John Aldridge on the future of the novel. That evening he gave a talk on literary reputations, mostly to faculty, one of whom, Richard Poirier, who had just come to Williams and was the same age as Gore, persistently took him to task for his undervaluation of Faulkner. Faulkner had been the subject of Poirier's recent Ph.D. dissertation. He “didn't really care much for Faulkner,” Gore later remarked. “I had been brought up by a family from that area. He was so startling and exotic to Northerners but was too down-home for my taste.” In the argument that developed, Gore challenged Poirier to name one writer not sanctioned by academia that he liked. Had he read Meredith? Poirier had not. “Your view on every writer is exactly that of every English teacher.” Poirier kept pushing. “How do you explain the lack of acceptance and popularity of Faulkner in this country? He has greater fame in France.' Gore wouldn't have any of this,” Poirier later said. “‘But Faulkner has been accepted here,' he said. ‘He's a revered figure.' Then, as he went on, I began to see that what he was really saying is that Faulkner's reputation was quite adequate to the attainment. And this was the beginning of my friendship with him and
my deep reverence for his sweetness…. He was immaculate-looking, stately-looking, princely. He looked like a young prince. He had a wonderful voice and inflection, and above all he was always very, very gracious and charming, as I've always thought him to be.” In New York, in fall 1951, when they ran into one another at one of Poirier's hangouts, the popular Blue Parrot, they joked pleasantly together, the start of a friendship.

Inviting her to visit in late-summer 1951, Gore wrote to Anaïs, who was spending much of her time in California, that Edgewater is “
a perfect summer
house, airy and full of green light.” It was a happy refuge, especially from discussions about values, a perfect place for work. Though there was still a distance to go, the house was shaping up. Basic repainting had been done, repairs made, sufficient furniture was in place. Howard, with Alice's help and Nina's suggestions, began to redecorate. “My mother, her twelve-year-old son, a colored cook and
her
twelve year old daughter are all in the house for the summer,” he told Anaïs, “and I rather like the activity: I feel quite patriarchal. Not easy to work but soon, when the library floor is painted and the new shelves are put up, I will lock myself away and begin my Messiah novel.” But money was very tight. The $1,000 advance for
Death in the Fifth Position
helped. So too did Dutton's willingness to advance money on a monthly basis. The small amounts from the Auchincloss trust took care of the very low mortgage payments, but austerity was still necessary. Howard paid his own bills in New York. Eager to get out of the mailroom at Lever Brothers, when he was turned down for every job he applied for in advertising, on Gore's recommendation he changed his name on his résumé from the identifiably Jewish Auster to Austen. Whether that change made the difference or not, he got the next two jobs for which he applied, first as a sales and display assistant at Helena Rubenstein, then as an advertising-agency account assistant at Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne. Whenever there were joint activities, Gore paid, as he did for everything at Edgewater. He had a strong sense of possession, a country squire comfortable in a house that increasingly reflected his vision of himself.