Gore Vidal (69 page)

At Edgewater, as Gore worked on the revision of
Visit
, his thoughts returned to his stymied career as a novelist, particularly the reception of
Judgment
in early 1952 and of
Messiah
, which Dutton had published in March 1954. Heinemann, his new British publisher, had recently brought out
Messiah
in London. Neither novel had been reviewed in the daily
New York Times
or in
Time
magazine, probably the result of the ongoing influence of those, like Orville Prescott, who had hated
The City and the Pillar
on moral grounds.
The Judgment of Paris
, an intellectual and satirical fable embedded in a semirealistic narrative, recounts the adventures of an indeterminately talented young American in early-postwar Europe and Egypt as he is given the opportunity to choose, in the form of three different women, between power, knowledge, and love. A novel of ideas, it is also a novel about sexual identity, partly satirical, often comic in its depiction of human nature, particularly the hilarious Roman homosexual-bathhouse scene. Its secondary characters are both bizarre exaggerations and interesting ideas, the novel's energy directed toward an elegance of overview that has great success in its balanced structure, its sharpness of language, and its comically playful engagement with fundamental choices for intelligent people. In the end the main character surprisingly, perhaps unfortunately, chooses love. Unlike Vidal's previous novels,
Judgment
rejects some of the conventions of literary realism while still sustaining a coherent narrative. It has more in common with Fielding's
Tom Jones
than with the treasured and influential warhorses of nineteenth- and twentieth-century realism, especially turn-of-the-century models like Gissing, Galsworthy, and Hardy. As he wrote
Judgment
, Vidal felt that it represented a new beginning for him, a decisive turn away from hard-core realism toward Meredith and Henry James, toward comic elegance, poetic turns of language, tighter form, satirical deflation, an intellectual sweep that embraced the tradition of the novel of ideas without giving up accessible coherence, the pleasures of readability. To his disappointment, despite moderately good reviews,
Judgment
sold poorly. Nick Wreden tried hard to get him to redefine success. Given the depressed book market in general, especially for serious literary fiction, a sale of 10,000 copies should be applauded. To Gore it had not felt like applause. Partly he blamed what he insisted were poor sales on the refusal of the daily
New York Times
and
Time
magazine to review it. In the
New York Times Sunday Book Review
John Aldridge had qualified his praise with reservations and summarized the author as heretofore a “relatively rare sort of young writer in whom precocious creative energy is largely unaccompanied by precocious creative brilliance.” But Aldridge's praise was also strong.
“The Judgment of Paris
is the best and most ambitious of his novels, the richest in texture and the most carefully executed…. Vidal has found a way to a dramatic statement of his theme.” For some reason, with
Judgment
, “values” did not carry the Aldridge day, though numbers of reviewers also expressed some moral censure, as did the
Miami Herald
reviewer, whose editor headlined his comments, “Vidal's Latest on Depravity Just So, So.” Still, despite the disappointing sales, the critics, even when overall judgment was mixed, had found much to praise, especially the novel's stylistic brilliance.

Vastly more powerful, pointed, and ambitious,
Messiah
—later to become a cult novel, with touches of Swift, Orwell, and the satirical inversions of William Blake's
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
—attacks Christian hypocrisy, organized religion, and the death cult behind Eisenhower's American sunshine. The main character, who in his old age narrates the events, is Eugene Luther, partly named after the author, amid other autobiographical touches, including a beautiful evocation of the Hudson Valley summer landscape at the novel's beginning. In his old age, hiding in Egypt, Eugene Luther fears he will be discovered by Cavites, followers of the dominant new religion of the world, named after John Cave, a hypnotic, charismatic exponent of a religion whose psychological and philosophical insight was that death was real, final, and stingless, and under appropriate conditions should be embraced. When Cave is assassinated by his disciple in charge of organization and dissemination, whose name is Paul, Cave's vision is turned into an organized, powerful, wealthy, and authoritarian religion. Eugene Luther's important contribution, even his name, is erased, except that the main anti-Cavite heresy is called Lutherism. Flawed from the beginning, Eugene Luther is sexually impotent or at least unarousable, but in the face of this and as part of his understanding of John Cave's original vision, he nevertheless affirms that life is potentially rich, desirable, and improvable. He embraces Cave's vision because he believes that Cave intends it to enrich life in the present, to rid human beings of the evasive, destructive emphasis on an afterlife, a mythical, controlling, exploitive heaven and hell of the dominant Christian sort.

As Gore, writing
Messiah
, looked around him, he had seen an America dedicated to Senator Joseph McCarthy, to superficial Christian piety, to suppression of individuality and free speech, to increasing authoritarian control through media and political pressure, to the use of nuclear terror if not nuclear war to intimidate dissent abroad and at home, and to the triumph of Henry Luce's vision that the mission of America was to bring to the entire world
Time
magazine's combination of Christian and capitalistic doctrine. America's business and America's God would rule the planet. In
Messiah
Vidal provides an alternative vision, or a vision in which Cavism recapitulates the history of Christianity and capitalism together and brings oppression to the world again. He had hoped that
Messiah's
artistry would make the horror unmistakable to its readers. As with
Judgment
, the sales again had reached only 10,000. Though the daily
New York Times
and
Time
magazine, predictably, did not review it, the reviews across the country and in England had been generally good; some, like those in the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
, the
Richmond News-Leader
, and the
Boston Globe
, superlative Most reviewers, more or less, understood the novel. “This quite serious satire is written in a rich, almost baroque style. It moves with power and conviction,” wrote the critic for the
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
. The more independent the newspaper, the less connected to corporate and national power structures, the better the reviews tended to be, though the
New York Mirror
and the
Chicago Sunday Tribune
thought it spellbinding and provocative. A new friend and admirer, Lucien Price, an Exeter graduate whose Boston high-culture credentials were impeccable and who headed the
Boston Globe
editorial staff, thought the book so powerful and important that he had made it the subject of a lead editorial. As Gore in the summer of 1955 gave thought to where he had been and where he now was, he had paused retrospectively.
Messiah
, he wrote to Kimon Friar modestly, “was
a noble failure
, though I think it has certain virtues.” He had no illusion that great art was possible in television drama or even on the stage, at least as he experienced his own dramatic talents. “A gift for playwriting is only a form of cleverness,” he later recalled, “like being adept at charades or doublecrostics, while novel writing goes, at its best, beyond cleverness to that point where one's whole mind and experience and vision
are
the novel and the effort to translate this wholeness into prose
is
the life: a circle of creation.” But at least now, writing for television, he was “doing something people
really wanted. All my life I had been writing novels, and nobody wanted novels by me or by anybody else.”

In early July 1955 Howard, who had been spending weekends in Barrytown, easily enticed Gore home to Edgewater with a reminder that their enormous roses were in bloom, the house was sparkling, their dog Tinker, the black cocker spaniel whom they had gotten as a pup in 1951 (his name derived from “Tinker-Bell,” Howard's nickname), missed Gore as much as Howard did. Howard's nickname for Gore, “Me Me,” was both affectionate and realistic. Earlier in the summer Howard had enjoyed a weekend with Nina who the previous year had bought a large Victorian-style shingle house on Main Street in Southampton, where Howard had been her guest for a few pleasant weeks. Increasingly bored during the last two years at the advertising firm, resentful that he had not received an expected raise, Howard had recently resigned. A singing career was a still-unrealized hope. Doing something in the theater world appealed to him and seemed more possible with Gore's television and now Broadway work. With Gore away and with ample time, Howard began to take care of the bills at Edgewater, to handle the accounts, to attend to the details of domestic business, to deal with the accountant, Leonard Strauss, whom Gore now employed as a business manager handling his rapidly increasing cash flow. Howard's role in their domestic business arrangement began to be more clearly delineated. What had been a casual arrangement was formally verbalized, his salary as secretary doubled. Gore's television income gave them a latitude that they had not had before. Without the constraints of daily work in Manhattan, Howard could now travel with Gore, including to Los Angeles if Gore's stay should prove this time to be a long one. “Me Me's” working schedule and preferences in general would determine both their residences.

In July, Gore rewrote
Visit
and attended rehearsals in New York of his newest television drama,
The Death of Billy the Kid
, which was televised on
Philco Television Playhouse
on July 24th. He later described it as his favorite of all his television plays, “
though by no means
the most admired.” Billy had of course been on his mind for years, and Harold Franklin had finally found a taker, Fred Coe, a senior NBC producer, for the presentation Gore
had laid out the year before in his letter to Helen Harvey. Coe, in overall charge of the
Philco Television Playhouse
, chose Robert Mulligan to direct. How to dramatize Billy's ruthless life and well-deserved death was a challenge, the difficulty of balancing his and the frontier's cruelty with the meaningfulness of the other things Billy stood for—the independence, the romance, the defiant individuality of his code of loyalty and self-assertion. “
My decision, finally
, was to show not so much Billy himself as the people who created the myth of Billy the Kid,” a myth that Gore desired to deepen and extend, among other reasons as a critical statement about corporate America in the self-satisfied 1950s. To play Billy, Coe had found the perfect young actor. Only James Dean or Marlon Brando might have done as well. Brando, the star of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, Gore had met in New York through Tennessee Williams. James Dean he soon met in Hollywood. They both had an electric edge of defiance. But Paul Newman, a young television and theater actor, turned out to be the perfect choice.

Soft-spoken, calm, and unprepossessing offstage except when on a drinking spree, onstage Newman dominated the camera with his bright-blue eyes, his small, lithe figure, his preternaturally delicate handsomeness, and the unspoken effect of great but barely restrained emotional power. He had the perfect combination of vulnerability and strength for the role. A matinee idol in the making, eight months older than Gore, part Jewish, part Hungarian-Catholic, a Yale graduate student from a Midwestern business family who had recently separated from his wife and their children to live with an aspiring young actress from Georgia, Newman hit it off immediately with Vidal. During rehearsals they began to get to know one another. Newman's tight schedule had him bleary-eyed. After the Sunday-night performance of whatever his current role, he regularly took the red-eye to California. At Warner Brothers he was making his first film,
The Silver Chalice
, one of the fruits of his Broadway success in William Inge's
Picnic
, in which he had starred (his ladyfriend, Joanne Woodward, as talented a performer as he but with less potential for Hollywood megastardom, had understudied). Gore and Howard had each separately met Woodward in New York, Gore through a mutual friend, Bill Gray, whom Woodward had known from Louisiana State University. A great admirer of Williams and Vidal, Gray had brought Woodward, a struggling actress, to a party in midtown Manhattan in 1952, where he had introduced her to Vidal. Gore had hardly any recollection of the meeting. She had thought him handsome, almost beautiful,
and was deeply impressed with his accomplishments as a writer. Howard met her about the same time at a party at Johnny Nicholson's café, also through Bill Gray.