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Eminent Outlaws

Twelve

I

Into the Fifties

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

—Allen Ginsberg

1. Innocence

The second atom bomb fell on Nagasaki, the war ended, and nineteen-year-old Eugene Gore Vidal came home to New York. The boyish prep school graduate had served as a warrant officer on an army ship in the Aleutians, a sort of seagoing sergeant. He was now stationed out on Long Island before being discharged. He brought with him a manuscript he had begun writing in training camp, a Hemingway-like novel titled Williwaw about shipboard life.

He spent his weekends in the city, staying in the back bedroom of his father and stepmother’s huge apartment on Fifth Avenue, working on the novel during the day and visiting Times Square at night. There he met other men in uniform in the male-only half of the busy bar at the Astor Hotel or in the movie theaters crowded along Forty-second Street. He would take his new acquaintances to a nearby bathhouse or hotel for sex. Young Vidal assumed he would eventually marry, but now he only wanted to make up for all the fun he had missed in boarding school and the army. He was not interested in love. He would later insist that the only man he ever loved was a classmate at St. Albans, Jimmie Trimble, who died on Iwo Jima.

His blind grandfather, Senator T. P. Gore of Oklahoma, spoke of setting him up in New Mexico after college in a political career. The grandson wasn’t particularly interested in college, however, and thought there’d be plenty of time for politics later. His father, Eugene Vidal Sr., an airline pioneer who had been on the cover of Time, did not push him in any particular direction. The son soon dropped his first name to avoid being confused with his father.

He sold his novel to Dutton before the end of 1945. The editorial staff liked the personable, confident fellow and made him a part-time editor. He started work on a new novel and began ballet lessons to remedy the rheumatoid arthritis developed after frostbite in the Aleutians. He prowled the city for literary events as well as for sex. Meeting the scholar/translator Kimon Friar at the Astor Hotel Bar, he decided Friar wasn’t his type but went to hear him lecture at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. There he met an exotic woman with a foreign accent, an Elizabethan hat, and an opera cape: Anaïs Nin. She was already famous for the diaries that she showed friends and hoped to publish one day. She had left Paris with her husband, Hugo, at the start of the war and had recently broken with her lover, Henry Miller, deciding he was too old. Nin herself was forty-two.

Vidal visited her regularly at her fifth-floor walk-up on West Thirteenth Street in Greenwich Village, across the street from the Food Trades Vocational High School, a building that forty years later housed the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. The apartment was an old-fashioned studio with a skylight an artist friend painted with the signs of the zodiac. Nin surrounded herself with young male artists, including poet Robert Duncan, already author of “The Homosexual in Society” published in 1944 in Politics magazine, and a poetry-writing undergraduate from Amherst, James Merrill (who was briefly Kimon Friar’s boyfriend). She loved their attention, but her real love was for her career. She coaxed Vidal into getting her a two-book contract at Dutton. When her next book, Ladders to Fire, received a bad review in the New York Times, Vidal and Merrill wrote letters to the editor protesting its unfairness. (Both letters appear to have been written on the same typewriter—Nin’s.) Nin was a little in love with Vidal, or rather, she loved the idea of Vidal being in love with her. They seem to have gone to bed together, but it’s unclear if they actually had sex.

It was at a Nin party that Vidal first met a petite, effeminate Southerner with the voice of a strangled child. “How does it feel to be an infant terrible?” asked Truman Capote, badly mangling the French phrase. He looked as if he were twelve, but he was actually a year older than Vidal. He had spent part of his childhood in Alabama before joining his mother in Westchester and attending high school there. He was briefly a copy boy at the New Yorker. He had begun to publish short stories in magazines like Mademoiselle, starting with an elegantly written ghost story, “Miriam.” He had just signed a book contract with Random House. (Nin in her diary describes Capote at this time as “painfully timid… he seemed fragile and easily wounded.” It’s hardly the image of him we have now, but perhaps Nin saw something invisible to others.) Vidal and Capote had much in common: Southern roots, no college, and impossible mothers both named Nina. But Capote made Vidal uneasy. Despite ballet class, Vidal was a stiff, somewhat patrician fellow who could drop an occasional camp phrase only among friends. He found Capote much too flamboyant, too bent on using homosexuality to draw attention to himself. And he recognized a rival. Nevertheless, the two young men were friendly enough during the first year they knew each other, Vidal going so far as to take Capote with him to the Everard Baths. It’s amusing to picture the pair wandering the mildewed corridors with towels around their waists, Capote talking incessantly. He loved to tell stories about himself and others, and he didn’t care if the stories were true or not. He was never very interested in sex with strangers. He was delighted that night to meet a Southern friend who’d seen the out-of-town tryouts of Private Lives with Tallulah Bankhead. Vidal happily ditched the two and went off to get laid.

The following summer, while at Yaddo, Capote met his first real love, Newton Arvin, a short, bald English professor from Smith College. Arvin wasn’t anyone’s physical ideal, but he adored Capote, read his prose, recommended books to him, and encouraged his writing. The two men were devoted to each other—for a while.

One afternoon in the oak-paneled Gramercy Park Tavern near the Dutton offices, Vidal began to tell a fellow editor about the homosexual men he had been “noticing” in New York. The editor, who knew nothing about Vidal’s private life, suggested he write about this strange new world in his next book.

Vidal worked quickly in his early years, even though he wrote in longhand in pencil. He felt distracted in New York, however, and moved down to Guatemala for a few months in 1947. He finished his new novel, The City and the Pillar, before his second book, In a Yellow Wood, had come out. He showed the manuscript to Nin when she visited Guatemala. She hated it. She said she disapproved of its flat style but she could not have been happy with the character named Maria Verlaine, an exotic woman with a foreign accent who surrounds herself with homosexual men and seduces the gay hero. “I think you are everything, man, woman, and child,” says Maria. “ ‘I could kiss you,’ he said, and he did. He kissed the Death Goddess.”

Vidal dedicated the...