Lying is an accursed vice. It is only our words which bind us together and make us human. If we realized the horror and weight of lying we would see that it is more worthy of the stake than other crimes. I find that people normally waste time quite inappropriately punishing children for innocent misdemeanours, tormenting them for thoughtless actions which lead nowhere and leave no trace. It seems to me that the only faults which we should vigorously attack as soon as they arise and start to develop are lying and, a little below that, stubbornness. Those faults grow up with the children. Once let the tongue acquire the habit of lying and it is astonishing how impossible it is to make it give it up…If a lie, like truth, had only one face we could be on better terms, for certainty would be the reverse of what the liar said. But the reverse side of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and no defined limits. The Pythagoreans make good to be definite and finite; evil they make indefinite and infinite.
A clumsy journalist at Time magazine some years ago did a cover story on me which was odd. It was at the time of Nixon’s fall and since the piece was about my novel 1876 and some of the not always sterling truths that our founders were capable of, the essay on me was entitled “The Sins of the Fathers,” a standard propagandist erasure of news the publisher does not want taken too seriously: sometimes known as “they all do it,” so what’s the fuss? Currently, to counteract all the talk of stolen elections in 2000 and 2004 a dozen journalists now assure us that our elections have always been corrupt; which is hardly true. Recently the same Time magazine journalist felt it was time that I be discredited as vain and self-absorbed. So he wrote as if he had actually been inside my study which he hasn’t and saw hundreds of blue leather-bound books all by me. But they are mostly worn leather-bound reference books of the sort I doubt that this kind of journalist consults. But then more than ever in my lifetime the great whopping lie is seriously in vogue.
FORTY-EIGHT
In a fit of absentmindedness I said that I would serve as president of the jury of the Venice Film Festival in 1990. I usually avoid festivals, prize-givings, and every sort of bureaucratic event involving the arts. I can’t think why I said yes. There would be, I was told—warned (?)—a feminist jury. Why not? I thought. I had broken a lance or two in the gender wars on the side of the ladies. Finally, it is unwise to forgo a trip to Venice at almost any time. So Howard and I were booked into a hotel on the Lido. By and large, I have never had much to do with the media that concerns itself with cinema. The journalists involved are often off-duty screenwriters and their world in Italy is somewhat Byzantine and inbred. I thought I’d have nothing more to do than see a dozen or two films and vote with the other jurors for best director, et cetera. But I soon realized it was not going to be that easy. I’d been reading a book by or about Cocteau describing his miserable time as president of that Cannes Film Festival where I’d won the Critics’ Prize for The Best Man in 1964. I recalled Jacob, the president of the Cannes Festival, as an intelligent charming figure and was delighted that he was going to serve on my jury. Also on the jury were Omar Sharif and three or four ladies from Scandinavia and Russia. I’d known Omar from my time as screenwriter on The Night of the Generals, the second film I did with Sam Spiegel. Everyone asked why I did a second film since with Spiegel there was always trouble about payment or credit or both. My cheerful response was, “I couldn’t believe it the first time.” Also, I had grown morbidly fond of Sam with his vast appetite for food and hookers. Gadge Kazan’s wife complained that she found Sam very conventional when it came to scripts and I said he was so conventional that he was classic. He also belonged to the old school of the Producer is god and only He can contribute meaningfully to the script. But Sam had changed; since a series of great successes, all publicity must now be about him: he was being presented to the public as the new Sam Goldwyn. He was also more than ever abrasive with his directors. He liked to pick first-rate directors whose careers were not doing well. He had also cannily signed up Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif for a second film each after Lawrence of Arabia. I do not believe that I am revealing confidences when I say that each resented being paid minimal salaries.
Claire Luce and I at a ball in Venice in 1961, years before my jury duty. We are in what was Robert Browning’s study. Each has just misquoted him.
On the Venice jury Omar charmed the ladies and I felt that we would have a comfortable gondola ride to the various Lion prizes. Unfortunately, Omar overdid the charm. The ladies, plus Omar, were a majority of the jury: this meant that practically every prize would go to a different lady: few men were to be winners. Since the best director at Venice that season was Martin Scorsese with his latest film Goodfellas it never occurred to me that anyone else would be chosen, with the possible exception of Tom Stoppard who had directed his own Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. But Omar’s dread charm had swept all the ladies before it. As a sign of solidarity he voted along with his Scandinavian harem. On the first ballot a truly awful film by a Danish woman called Sirup (the movie not the lady) won for best screenplay. The managerial head of the jury for the festival looked ill. The brilliant Jacob, if nothing else, must have seen the primacy of his festival at Cannes assured for at least another decade. But not for nothing had I been Tammany Hall’s choice as delegate for the 1960 Democratic convention, instructed to vote for Kennedy. I made a Bushesque speech in favor of total democracy which meant that best picture and director be voted for jointly to prevent overlapping prizes. The lady from Moscow gave me a weary look: she had met my sort before in the Soviet paradise. Meanwhile I had a word with Omar who was now as one with the party line. A Swedish lady spluttered but by then I was busy awarding best actress to her choice while the auteur of Sirup got best screenplay award. The ladies were reasonably pleased. I waited until the end for best film award. In a voice of sweet reason I said, “We are supposed to award these prizes to the best in each category. Since a number of ladies are angry that we have celebrated yet again gratuitous masculine violence, which we all deplore, by giving Scorsese the best director award which he deserves for at least half a dozen other films I think that we should break with tradition and give the Gold Lion to what, after all, is the best film in competition: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.” A pair of journalists on the jury had been leaking our proceedings to the world press and they promptly sent up black-and-white smoke signals. But we now had a Pope—Stoppard—teeth all around me were grinding. I was told that Olivier’s Hamlet had been booed by the Italian press. They also disliked Shakespeare. Later, when I went out onstage to announce the winners, I was loudly booed but not before I murmured, “At least, for once, the best film got the best prize.” Later I read that the producers who had released the film had once released one of mine and that I’d been paid off. Italy! Thus, on a high note, I ended my jury duty. For good.
FORTY-NINE
“When did you fall out with Tennessee?” is a question that the odd specialist in such arcana asks me, to which there is no answer. “When did you fall in?” might be more to the point. But I am now navigating several volumes of his letters and conversations with him and it is a dizzying experience. What I used to call his night-blooming paranoia is often on display and strange stories crop up in the oddest places. The strangest concerned the first novel of Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky, which I had got to John Lehmann in England when a publisher declined it because “it was not a novel.” In the forties there were many people who regarded themselves as specialists in what was and what was not. I recall a concert of Bowles’ where one critic complained that the music was not music and Paul responded by explaining that the score and the instruments combined proved that it could not be anything other than music by any standard. The Bird wanted to be helpful to The Sheltering Sky so he asked The New York Times to let him review it. They did. Then there was some mix-up about getting the proofs to the Bird which he immediately surmised was a rejection of his review which began with a cheery assault on Truman Capote and me whose “fr
isky antics” though “precociously knowing and singularly charming” (doubly would have been a more telling adverb) could not be counted on “for those gifts that arrive by no other way than the experience and contemplation of a truly adult mind.” When galleys of this review did not arrive the Bird assumed that I had used my great influence at The New York Times to suppress his review entirely. He was not one to pay much attention to the sad tales of others. If he had, he would have known that I had no influence in this quarter. Later he writes Donald Windham that he had done me an injustice. But there was worse to come. He greatly admired one of Windham’s novels. He had also read the manuscript of a novel that I have never published. He even sent it on to Jay Laughlin at New Directions as my best work. Then his paranoia like a great branch of bougainvillea starts blossoming. Apparently, the manuscript of mine bears a suspicious resemblance to Windham’s novel. Another great flower unfolds. Windham wonders how I could have read it since it was not yet published? A riot of blooms. Apparently I was in his literary agent’s office where I found a carbon copy which I either copied then and there or memorized on the spot in order to plagiarize at my leisure. Windham, somewhat deficient in humor, reports in his notes to the Williams-Windham correspondence that he was, for this publication, obliged to read my early novels and found no trace of himself in those inimitable works. The thought of me sitting in a literary agent’s office looking for texts to plunder shows how close to madness these two troubled friends had sailed. I was also aware that in his letters the Bird always tried to please the recipient and because Windham had a “bitchy” side the Bird would decorate his text with unpleasant tales about friends and foes, calculated to give pleasure. In one of the letters the Bird notes that “I got five sets of notices on the Arthur Miller play Death of a Salesman. Five different people sent them. It is hard to analyze one’s feelings about the triumphs of another artist. There is likely to be a touch of the invidious in your feelings which makes you feel cheap and shameful. I liked the play when I read it, but I must say the great success of it is a surprise…I think Gadge must deserve more credit than the notices give him.” In a letter to our friend Maria St. Just the Bird writes in 1960, rather sadly, apropos the success of my play The Best Man: “It looks as if this is Gore’s year.” But despite masses of bougainvillea over the years we usually got on largely because the same things—and people—made us laugh. On the other hand, his queenly entourage really got on my nerves. But with time they defected and there we were occupying at times the same midsummer night’s dream. Fairies away! as proud Titania once yelled.
I began this memoir in Los Angeles on the last day of 2004. Now it is September 2005 and I am in Ravello, Italy, with no telephone, the result of a series of storms due to global warming: the principal fact of our lives even though, as they say in Washington, the jury is still out on whether or not such a thing is taking place. Meanwhile television is still working and we can observe the catastrophe that has left most of New Orleans under water. The Italians are astonished at the casualness with which the American government goes about saving those clinging to life atop the roofs of buildings. Tact keeps the local press from noting what every American knows: those who have been abandoned by lifesavers belong to our permanent underclass: the African Americans. The failures of the administration to save lives in the drowned city is further proof that any first-world militarized nation can easily defeat the United States in a modern war. We are not set up to survive a serious attack. Excuses fill the establishment press. Because of our altruistic leadership states like Louisiana and Mississippi have sent their National Guardsmen abroad to bring freedom and democracy to two countries that we were obliged to smash to bits so that they might one day enjoy true freedom, et cetera. Now the changed climate is doing to us what we did to Iraq and Afghanistan and are planning to do to Iran and other oil producers.
FIFTY
Labor Day has come and gone along with New Orleans where I spent that long-ago winter when I did not go to Ceylon. Labor Day 1950 was when Howard and I met but since I have never understood when Labor Day itself is apt to be proclaimed I’d forgot our anniversary until the last one a few weeks before he died. He was pleasantly surprised. We had been together fifty-three years. He confessed that he thought he was just passing through my life and was surprised as the decades began to stack up and we were still together. But then it is easy to sustain a relationship when sex plays no part and impossible, I have observed, when it does. Each had a sex life apart from the other: all else including our sovereign, Time, was shared. I’ve just been reading a book of conversations with the Bird whom I used to see at Memorial Hospital visiting Frank Merlo who was dying of lung cancer. On a less perilous floor Howard was having a benign tumor of the thyroid removed. The Bird was very much school of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: I shall but love thee better after death. That is the romantic disposition. He forgot at the end that he and Frank had been separated for some time before his death. The final row had involved Frank throwing a roast leg of lamb at the Bird who had providentially ducked.
I note that I began this memoir with a natural disaster, the earthquakes and tsunami in Southeast Asia, and now I draw to a conclusion with the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico where a racist ruling class abandoned the African American inhabitants of the Gulf and did not do so well either by whites without money. Money is now a Great Wall of China separating American rich from poor, a division that is beginning to seem as eternal as the Great Wall itself.
FIFTY-ONE
On my table there is a copy of Gore Vidal’s America, by Dennis Altman. I am writing this commentary on my eightieth birthday which Howard was looking forward to as an excuse for a gala event, not exactly what I wanted but if he wanted it…Anyway I shall have lunch here at the house in the Hollywood Hills with a producer and dinner with Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher as well as my nephew Burr Steers and his wife, Jennifer. Eighty sounds serious to me. Certainly when people ask “How are you feeling?” they are actually interested, for the moment at least, in your answer. Most people my age are safely dead and I must soon throw out my book of telephone numbers since nearly everyone in it has, as they used to say, fallen from the perch or ridden on ahead—mad euphemisms abound. But there are living voices on the telephone today, particularly from Europe where the birthdays of notables are noted. First call from Moscow: Tanya, one of my translators (aged eighty-four). She has a married daughter living in the Midwest and she will soon be visiting her. I say that I hope she won’t be too distressed by the lunatic jingoism on every side. She is tactful. “I really only know you and Mailer and then I am in civilization.” The voice trails off. Our roles are reversed; for thirty years she has apologized to me for Russian folly, now I…A fax from Germany. One from London. Soon the fax will characteristically break down. Meanwhile my face on the cover of Altman’s book stares up at me from the partners desk which now accommodates a single solitary partner with few attachments. A friend recently diagnosed with lung cancer rings. I share what knowledge I have picked up during Howard’s two-year siege. My Italian publisher Elido Fazi thinks that I should tell more about Howard but what does one say of a private relationship? This month there are three books about me: two by Australians, one by a Canadian. U.S. persons are not encouraged to contemplate the subject. Altman’s is the most thorough study and deals with the numerous riptides, political and cultural, that I have encountered on my way to Rock Creek Cemetery.
Dennis Altman, author of Gore Vidal’s America, is a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Much of this year he has been teaching at Harvard. I’ve known him slightly since 1973 when we appeared on the same TV program in Sydney. I value Altman’s new book for his general reflections on sex, politics, and religion. But I was a bit jolted to read, early on, “Luckily there is no need here to do more than sketch briefly Vidal’s life: it has been dealt with exhaustively in a biography by Fred Kaplan, which was written over a period of years during the 1990s and reflects, at
times too much, Vidal’s own perception of his life.” Actually what it reflects is Kaplan’s close reading of my first memoir, Palimpsest, which Altman seems to think I cobbled together after reading K.’s “exhaustive” biography. Altman also thinks I took my grandfather’s name for my own “though he had been christened Eugene Luther Vidal.” But I had been christened “Eugene Luther Gore Vidal” by the Reverend Albert Hawley Lucas, headmaster of St. Albans. When I started to publish stories I lopped off the first two names.
By and large Altman’s errors are few and have to do only with me, his second lead after America. He does write that on enlisting in the army “[He] was too young for active service.” But, of course, I was not too young. The army with characteristic bad faith had started an Army Specialized Training Program for high-school graduates. We were to be trained, among other things, in foreign languages to take our place in AMGOT the future Allied military government of the defeated Axis nations. So the army scooped up thousands of seventeen-year-olds and then when the Nazis began their counterattack in the so-called battle of the bulge the ASTPers were thrown, barely trained, into the infantry where many of my friends and classmates were killed. They were plainly not “too young for active service” but just right for “cannon fodder.” Altman’s most serious errors come when he writes that my “claim” that the daily New York Times, after The City and the Pillar, refused to review my next five novels is “inaccurate.” He could have easily checked out the daily paper’s list of books reviewed: it does not include The Season of Comfort; A Search for the King; Dark Green, Bright Red; The Judgment of Paris; Messiah; as well as, of course, the offending novel The City and the Pillar. A later editor of the Sunday New York Times weekly book review Rebecca Sinkler told me “you forgot a sixth book of yours that was ignored: A Thirsty Evil, the collection of your short stories.”