Although I answer letters from friends and even interesting requests for information, most of the fan mail goes into a large box which is eventually shipped off to the Houghton Library at Harvard. I’ve always kept just about everything that comes my way as did Lord Byron, Thomas Wolfe, and not many others, or so I’ve been told by university archivists. Fortunately, as a twentieth–twenty-first-century writer, ladies and page boys don’t send me locks of hair as they did Byron. On the other hand, Vladimir Nabokov (whom I never met) and I liked to exchange elaborate insults through the press. In an interview he said that Graham Greene’s conversion to Catholicism seemed entirely bogus to him while he had it, on the best authority, that I had gone over to Rome. These épingles as Vera Nabokov termed them ended when I remarked in an interview how odd it was that Russia’s two greatest writers were of African descent. Before he could think of an answer, death ended these joyous exchanges.
Over the years, Louis Auchincloss and I exchanged a number of letters on many subjects from our common family to friends and, best of all, literary matters but where Saul could call a class I was obliged to write letters to only a few people like Louis Auchincloss, Paul Bowles, Isherwood, the Glorious Bird himself as I called Tennessee; we had a number of imaginary characters whose adventures cropped up in our correspondence. One was the mysterious Lesbia Ghoul, a ubiquitous figure forever on the move. April 5, 1948, Tennessee reports: “Lesbia passed through Rome, heavily veiled.” (It was common knowledge that she had more than once submitted her tragic mask of a face to the surgeon’s knife.) The Bird continues: “No sign of Willard. No word. Only a whisper of silk and a few rose leaves floating after. The scent of frangipangi. A few days later a gilt-edged card, saying ‘Sorry’ post-marked Istanbul, dictated, unsigned. With Lesbia one is never certain, such a thin line so easily crossed over! Nerves…”
There were numerous Lesbias and Willards in our peripatetic lives mostly around Europe and, thanks to Paul Bowles’s urgings, Morocco which I disliked as much as the Bird did. But for the pleasure of Paul’s company, each paid him calls, never together as it happened. Also, on the road, hunting in a pack, there were a number of remittance men, writers with no time to write, for which the Bird and I at least were grateful. Mostly Americans, they inclined to alcohol, kif, and to all the needy lads in the postwar poor countries. Since in those days I neither drank, nor smoked pot or kif, I had little in common with most of them. But Tennessee’s love of the grotesque was positively Franciscan and he let them cadge money and not entirely empty bottles from the tourist hotels we stopped at if such places had, as he put it in that no-known language he sometimes used, progresso libero. In any case, spring and summer were for travel and constant work for each of us: he on his typewriter and I in longhand on yellow legal pads.
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 kilclass="underline" “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.