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TWENTY

In addition to plays and fiction (that season it was
Summer and Smoke
and several stories), Tennessee was busy writing letters which I am now, fifty-seven years later, reading for the first time in a New Directions volume. Tennessee was a wonderful letter writer tailoring his text to the recipient’s likes and dislikes. In the spring of 1948 I was twenty-two and my third book,
The City and the Pillar,
was a bestseller. The remittance crowd was not friendly, to riot in understatement, nor were certain far-flung recipients of the Bird’s letters. He was drawn to what I called monster women of which the most demanding and paranoid was Carson McCullers whose work I admired and often praised: the opening lines of
Reflections in a Golden Eye
reveal the American manner at its most perfectly focused. But she, alas, disliked me almost as much as she did Truman Capote whose
Other Voices, Other Rooms
was a greater success than anything Carson was to publish, but whose success she was convinced was entirely due to his unacknowledged borrowings from her work as well as from that of Eudora Welty. It was as if he, too, wanted to be a great Southern lady writer, and so raided their work for notions and pretty things. When Shelby Foote showed Eudora some of the passages from
Delta Wedding
that Truman had lifted for
Local Color
, she was serene. “Well,” she said, “at least he took the things I liked best.” Jane Bowles, another difficult serious lady, was also revered by the Bird. I only saw her husband, Paul, when she was otherwise engaged with her remittance men or her lady from the Tangier market who may have poisoned her, with datura leaves, bringing on a debilitating stroke.

Jane and Paul Bowles, having third and fourth thoughts.

One of Tennessee’s earliest letters in this collection is to Carson McCullers. She was still seething over Capote. He introduces me warily. He and I had met at a party for Samuel Barber in the American Academy, I was staying at the Eden Hotel; he’d rented an apartment in the Via Aurora. “…Gore Vidal is here…Vidal is twenty-three [actually I was twenty-two] and a real beauty. His new book
The City and the Pillar
I have just read and while it is not a good book it is absorbing. There is not a really distinguished line in the book and yet a great deal of it has a curiously life-like quality. The end is trashy, alas, murder and suicide both.” Thus he sets her mind at rest about the competition. Then, like a skilled matador, he lunges for the kill: “But you would like the boy as I do his eyes remind me of yours.” With one shrewd thrust, starting with “beauty” and ending with the ultimate hemorrhage of life’s blood on the subject of eyes, golden and otherwise, he ensured for me her lifelong loathing; yet I remained a public admirer of hers until the end though I do not love her better after death (to reprise a favorite poem of Tennessee’s), nor did I feel too deeply the absence of her company over the ensuing years. In 2003 I attended a seminar at Yale to celebrate the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of
The City and the Pillar
, sometimes noted in academic circles as the basis for a new discipline called “Queer Studies.” The “trashy ending” had been modified over the years to a fight and a rape. No murder, there was also never a suicide…I was in my youthful way trying to emulate Romeo and Juliet except that each lover was a boy. In other words, the ideal title should have been “The Romantic Agony” but that title had already been used for a collection of essays by the Italian critic Mario Praz.

The Bird was a good critic but he seldom read novels if he could help it. Late in life he finally read
The Aspern Papers
and marveled at how close the story was to his own
Lord Byron’s Love Letter
.

I think that what he once said of his own plays was also a factor in his reading: “I cannot write without a character for whom I do not feel sexual desire.” Tennessee would occasionally give me stories he had written and I would do the same with him. Each was brutally frank with the other. I with his “Rubio y Morena,” he as we have seen in the letter to Carson. Of the ending he had also told me, “I don’t think you realized what a good book you had written.”

After Tennessee died, Jay Laughlin his publisher at New Directions asked me to introduce a volume of his short stories, starting with, I think, a bit of juvenilia published in something like
Weird Tales
and ending with one of his last stories about an old writer racing literally from death as scraps of poems fall from his pockets. As I read the stories I realized that his talent and obsession was playwriting and the magical transference of text from written page to real actors who brought to life his true world both imagined and recalled. I also noticed the profound change in his work which mysteriously coincided with his change of name from Thomas Lanier Williams to Tennessee Williams. The style absolutely changes from…well, rather trashy naturalistic prose to that of a totally different voice quite unlike Thomas Lanier’s.

I have just read a letter from the Bird to Oliver Evans, a poet-critic who thought, in his innocence, that Anaïs Nin was a great novelist. The Bird had just read
The Judgment of Paris
. With this seventh novel I had, without knowing it, much less planning it, found my voice: certainly, there was no dramatic change of name though publishing friends had assured me that the notoriety of
The City and the Pillar
would exclude me from serious attention and so perhaps I should pick a new name. I did: for three mystery novels that were glowingly reviewed in
The New York Times
. A decade later when I republished all three in a single volume over my own name, the
Times
attacked the three that they had so recently hailed as by someone else. But the Bird had, in his vague intuitive way, sensed something was happening when he read
Judgment
. On February 20, 1952, he wrote Evans who had complained about the book, “I am impressed by Gore’s new book. I cannot quarrel with your analysis of it, but I am deeply impressed by the cogency of the writing and the liquid smooth style. And I think your article proves that you can do a piece on him. Give him my love. Say that the Bird gives her blessing.” Thank God, poor Oliver left me alone.
The Judgment of Paris
and its successor
Messiah
has each had a long underground life, particularly
Messiah
. But by 1954 I had written my first play for television and Tennessee who had always thought me intended for dramatic writing was proved correct based on no evidence at all except his own peculiar intuitions. On January 30, 1950, he had written Laughlin that I had been in Key West and written “a really excellent story, the best thing he has ever done in my opinion”; “Three Stratagems” was published in the New Directions anthology 12 (1950) and also in a collection of stories called
A Thirsty Evil
. Tennessee then mentions an odd book that I think I had dictated as an experiment, the tale of a street hustler called
Some Desperate Adventure
. Since I have completely forgotten it I’ve sent away to Harvard for a copy. Tennessee is proving more and more on target as the years pile up between us. “It was the most honest expression of Vidal that he has yet offered. I am encouraging him to do it as a play. It could be terrifying as a study of the modern jungle. Vidal is not likable, at least not in any familiar way, but he and Bowles are the two most honest savages I have met. Of course Bowles is still the superior artist, but I wonder if any other living writer is going to keep at it as ferociously, unremittingly as Vidal?”

Well, thanks, Bird, from way up here in the awful year 2005.

TWENTY-ONE

Over the years I suppose that I exchanged more letters with Tennessee’s other honest savage, Paul Bowles, than ever I did with the Bird whose wisdom—now so terminally late in the game—I appreciate. For some reason Paul and I got into the habit of reversing names. He was Luap Selwob and I Erog La-div.

We first met in the forties in New York City when he was composing music for plays, among them
Streetcar
. Yes, in those days plays were literally
melo
-dramas; dramas with musical accompaniment somewhat on the order of the Warner Brothers movie music of the day which drove Bette Davis wild. During the shooting of
Dark Victory
, Geraldine Fitzgerald was on the set when Davis, having gallantly seen her husband off to New York and then planting a number of irises while going blind from some sort of fatal movie disease, makes her way, unsteadily, to the staircase. Out of view, the grips and everyone else nearby (was Ronald Reagan on hand? He plays a drunken playboy in the film; and is very good) gathered to watch Davis make her last climb up those stairs and to her stoic death.

Fitzgerald told me that “halfway up the stairs Bette stopped and turned to fix the director, Irving Rapper, with her famed steely gaze. ‘Now tell me, Irving, before I waste any more time on acting,
who
is going up these stairs to die, me or Max Steiner?’ ” Like most of the great actresses she hated the schmaltzy movie music that was added later by some director-editor in order to nudge—shove—the audience into sobs or laughter. “What that awful music does,” Davis said to me when she was playing in
The Catered Affair
, the first film that I ever wrote for MGM, “is erase the actor’s performance, note by note,” which was certainly true of Steiner’s lush orchestrations but hardly true of the more evocative music that Bowles and Virgil Thomson and other “real” composers composed for the immediate postwar theater and films. But soon original theater music was dropped; union costs were too high for so precarious a medium where a single journalist on the warpath could shut down a production and often did, particularly in the case of the Bird and any other writer thought to be a same-sexualist. The fifties inaugurated an all-out war on the fags, which did much harm to the theater, an institution already besieged by movies and then swamped by television.

I have no clear memory of meeting Paul Bowles. Doubtless, it was when he was working on one of Tenn’s plays. He was fifteen years older than I. A vivid blond with blue eyes. He had gone briefly to the University of Virginia; then fled to Paris to be a poet; was taken up—or was it taken in?—by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Bluntly, Gertrude told him he was not a poet. So he became a composer, and studied with Aaron Copland. He was a descendant of Samuel Bowles, the pro-Lincoln New England publisher (I was already investigating American history and told Paul more than he ever wanted to know about his interesting connection). Apolitical, he had briefly been a Communist as was the custom in those days in New York art circles. But he was deeply bored by the party and soon lost all interest in politics, unlike the Bird who awakened, after a decade’s slumber, and said to me, “Gore, I think I slept through the sixties.” I told him, “Bird, you didn’t miss a thing but, if you were really asleep, God knows how you’re going to deal with what’s coming.” But the Bird, undaunted, promptly joined the anti–Vietnam War movement.

Paul and Jane Bowles were both significant cultural heroes in that small New York world which honored the arts. Jane’s witty stories and sardonic conversational asides were much quoted while his music with its Arabic themes became something of a cult. Lenny Bernstein, describing Paul’s work to me, extended both hands: “After all these years I can still feel his music in my fingers. Perfect miniatures.”

With some degree of guilt, Paul broke his marital pact with Jane and started to write stories and novels even more notable than hers. I can’t say I was much aware of any of this at the time. I knew I preferred his company to hers—he was serene; she was often frantic. She made scenes over food in restaurants. When he bought or rented an island off the coast of Ceylon he asked me to join him. But I missed the boat by a day—he never believed my story. But it was indeed true. I ended up that winter at New Orleans in a Dauphine Street flat.

A recent biographer of Bowles quotes him as saying to me, “Why the hell didn’t you write long ago and let me know that you had not taken the boat?” The lady biographer is inventing for Paul what she takes to be real American he-man dialogue that in no way resembles anything that he would have written, much less said to me. She also has another flight of fancy about Tangier and myself. As I have noted I went there twice in thirty or forty years only to see Paul not Jane. Now I read how, according to the lady, Jane is “caught up in a whirl of social activities being choreographed this time by Cecil Beaton, David Herbert, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote.” I had nothing to do, ever, with any of this cast of characters nor did I join in “whirls” of social activities for Jane or anyone else. My name has been idly inserted into a context where it doesn’t belong. Then I read in her book that “biographer” Fred Kaplan described Tangier in 1949 as “a gathering place for traveling queens attracted there by the weather, beaches, cheap cost of living, easy availability of drugs, and the Arab ethos that permitted every sort of sex under terms totally independent of European Puritanism. The town’s dirt and widespread poverty, its total lack of intellectual culture, and the hovel Vidal rented in town, all were repugnant.” This is the Kaplan style in high gear. But if Bowles’s biographer invented this particular passage I find it actionable in court. I never rented—or set foot—in a hovel in Tangier. I stayed at the El Minzah hotel and never for more than a few days. If the lady biographer got this lurid nonsense from my “biographer” Fred Kaplan, who had been given a contract to complete the late Walter Clemons
authorized
biography of me, then Kaplan is the culprit. Later he claimed the book was not authorized and so he was boldly inaccurate as he let the chips fall where they didn’t belong. He was interested in my sex life about which he knew nothing other than what little I had written in
Palimpsest
. I’ve not read his book other than an occasional passage—just enough for me to realize how accurate the headline of the review of his book in
The Times Literary Supplement
was: “On Misreading Gore Vidal.”

Nonlinear lives make for awkward biographies by those who do not easily grasp the apparently conflicting identities—or masks—on view. When Paul came to write a memoir (“only for money” is how he always put it), he found himself as elusive to pin down as had these academic writers who tried to sum him up in conventional terms. Bill Burroughs had advised him to keep a journal but, always conscious of the
purpose
for writing anything, Paul could never determine for whom such a journal was ideally to be kept. If for himself it seemed idle, like making faces in the mirror. If for publication, like Gide, it seemed to him highly suspect, neither fish nor fowl.

Lately, while reading through Paul’s selected letters, I found myself recalling more of him than ever before, since to each correspondent he showed a different face; he also liked the flat detail which often suggests more than what he appears to want to confide. In his novels and stories he has rendered so thoroughly his North African world, both real and dreamed, that one needs the letters to get some idea of his American world which never entirely ceased, particularly when he took teaching jobs in Florida and Southern California where he is like someone from another planet trying to separate the flora from the fauna.

I spent an evening with him in Santa Monica shortly before he was to teach his first class at San Fernando Valley State College of Northridge. Earlier offers to teach had fallen through because of his brief, perfunctory membership in the Communist Party. But, finally, he was vetted to teach at Northridge. “The only problem is,” he said to me, “I have no idea what’s required.”

To Oliver Evans who taught at universities most of his life, Paul wrote rather desperately: “A Dr. Finestone wants to know what books I shall be using in my course. He also sent me my schedule: one meeting a week to consider creative writing (7pm to 10pm) and two a week to consider the existential novel (3 to 4:30)…Try to envisage my ignorance and explain to me what goes on in a classroom. What is a course? A lecture course? A seminar? A class? Who does the talking in each? What is the teaching process? Does one tell students one’s own reactions to books?” I’m afraid this was pretty much his conversation with me at Santa Monica, only I knew less than he did about teaching. He had gone for a year, I think, to the University of Virginia while I had never set foot in a university except as an unconventional lecturer. In the end, he wisely taught his own books.

Paul had a difficult time with his memoir because he tended to remember places more than people. He had given his agent a list of famous people he had known and then discovered, a bit late, that he had little or nothing to say about them. In a letter to his publisher who had written that “the book seems to be more ‘travel narrative’ than ‘subjective, personal commentary,’ ” Paul’s answer was to the point: “If the mention of the people whom I have glimpsed on my way past them lacks precision in describing them, it is only because I never really
saw
them or thought about them, since for me they were manipulable objects to be used or somehow got around, in order to continue my trajectory…I’ll do what I can to pad the passages on Williams, Vidal, Barnes, Guggenheim…and others.” I now recall that at one point Paul asked me jokingly, I thought, if I could think of anything interesting or memorable that I had said or done when he was around. I replied, accurately, that I had forgotten me, too. Fiction writers with a gift for inventing other universes cannot be held to the journalist role of describing someone actually observed at large in quotidian reality.

But what Bowles does describe in his letters is a mounting horror of his native land. To the writer James Leo Herlihy, whose novel
Midnight Cowboy
Paul had liked, he writes:

What I admire beyond the style is the easy way [you] capture the United States and its particular essence, without, however expressing any opinion extrinsic to the story, without even a hint of disaffection. Wonderful! I suppose that strikes me because I’ve always been afraid to tackle America; I know quite well that my hatred would show through all defences. For years I’ve thought of a thousand points of view which would aid me in masking my feelings and thus make it possible to use the place as a locale for a book, but there seems to be no way. It may be you don’t even have the murderous emotions about the US, but whether you do or don’t the miracle remains. You’ve either hit on the right way of looking at it (from the beginning) or found a way of hiding your hatred. In the latter case, it would be literary skill; in the former, you could consider yourself blessed by fortune first of all. It doesn’t matter either way.

But it continues to matter in Paul’s next letter to Herlihy.

It still seems to me that the formalized life of primitives must be emotionally satisfying, if only because so many of the acts of daily life are performed in the manner of a ritual, and before witnesses. (Then I worry: Could it be that my nostalgia for that lost childhood is merely a disinclination to assume the responsibilities that becoming civilized demands? Then I answer: No. We’re still primitives. We don’t really want to be civilized. In another ten
thousand
years, perhaps.)…And about the hatred of America: naturally I mask it, because I mask everything. Too much importance is given the writer and not enough to his work. What difference does it make who he is and what he feels, since he is merely a machine for transmission of ideas? In reality he doesn’t exist—he’s a cipher, a blank. A spy sent into life by the forces of death. His main objective is to get the information across the border, back into death. Then he can be given a mythical personality…I don’t think a writer ever participates in anything; his pretences at it are mimetic [Not mine, Paul]…This all sounds far too serious. But you got me started.

I rather wish that I had got him started rather than Herlihy. Both Bowles and I had been influenced by Sartre’s
La Nausée
. Writers of any complexity are not well served in biographies by schoolteachers, particularly American ones. In 1989 Paul wrote the editor of Black Sparrow Press how displeased he was with a recent biography of himself. He quotes me as saying “that if I collaborated, half the material would be wrong, and if I didn’t, everything would be wrong. In the course of events this was beautifully borne out.” If only I had had me to advise me (!) in a similar situation where everything was wrong.

I’m mildly surprised by Paul’s intense dislike of our native land in the year 1966. It is in part the fastidious dislike of a Flaubert for the mindless cud-chewing of the middle class anywhere which can often provide fuel in the form of spleen as well as satire in such private made-up cities of the plain as my
Duluth
. But Paul seems uncommonly, uncharacteristically fierce in his declaration to Herlihy. But then I have never thought the idea of a mere country could ever be sufficiently coherent to hate or to love as opposed to simply observe. I suspect that Paul found unfathomable my interest in how the American experiment was turning out—as exotic to him as I found his apparent passion for the primitive world of North Africa and other places to the far south and farther east. The idea of the writer as a Promethean figure crossing like a spy the boundaries separating life and death is a splendid metaphor for his own writing at its best, but the oddly bitter note he strikes with Herlihy he never did with me. I understand the disdain of high art for mediocrity but his objection is much deeper. He once defined decadence for, I think,
The New York Times
as “commercialism” and “a failure of energy,” not their expected answer.