‘Oh to be in England, now that England’s here,’ drawled Gore when, on arrival ai my Ravello hotel, I diffidently telephoned his villa. I had reviewed Mr Vidal’s work on two occasions, and with sufficient hostility to win his amused disdain, or so a common friend told me. I had met him once, last year, and he was geniality incarnate (later describing me, in a student-magazine interview, as ‘a cute little thing’). Now Vidal is well known to harbour grudges, and for a moment I suspected that some small, patrician revenge might await me. A bit of lordly hetero bashing, perhaps, or at least several hours of Vidal’s expertly decadent taunts.
Nothing — or very little — of the kind. He is excellent company and a superlative talker, aphoristic, funny, learned, with a delightful line in brutal mimicry (his Tennessee Williams is an unforgettable, croaky mixture of affection and savagery). There is that fundamental coldness in him, and occasionally one catches glimpses of it. But it is not something that a day-tripper would be permitted to inspect.
Vidal’s life at present seems to be a masterpiece of order and productivity. He does most of his writing in the Ravello villa, an ivory palace slapped on the cliff-face, with occasional diversionary visits to his opulent apartment in Rome (it is there — if the late Tom Driberg was to be believed — that most of his startling socio-sexual escapades take place. ‘So Tom sang, did he?’ said Vidal grimly). He has a living-out maid, and there is always the devoted Howard to mastermind the running of villa and estate. Among other things, they make their own wine. On the ground floor, between Vidal’s bedroom and Howard’s, is a well-equipped bathroom/sauna/ gymnasium, complete with dumb-bells, where ‘I work out irreligiously every day”. He looks fit. He is fit, as I discovered during a back-breaking walk down the cliff to Amalfi.
As I wheezed down the endless steps behind him, Vidal chatted melodiously on. The two-year debacle over his recent screenplay, Caligula, continues to vex him. The producer, Bob Guccione of Penthouse, intended to call the film Gore Vidal’s Caligula; having seen some of the revised script, Vidal set a lawsuit in train to have his name removed from the title. One of the stars, Maria Schneider (Last Tango in Paris), hardly an actress famed for her fastidiousness, quit the film rather than enact the sex scenes required of her by the Italian director.
‘Oh, it’s hard-core all right. Nothing wrong with that, in itself. It’s just that the director has no talent. As for the producer …’ Some exuberantly libellous comments ensued.
‘Right, give me some gossip,’ Vidal demanded, producing wine as I recuperated after the walk.
Vidal is on record as saying that he always perks up at news of catastrophe among his friends. And, as I did my best with tales of professional failure, neurosis and marital collapse, a new intensity began to invade his features. In a curious way, despite his ameliorist image, you feel that he wishes everything were worse than it is — America, the modern marriage, the trials of his friends. It would be neater that way, and more fun to think about. He has removed pain from his own life, or narrowed it down to manageable areas; and it is one thing he cannot convincingly re-create in his fiction. But his deeply competitive nature is still reassured to know that there is plenty of pain about.
I have never met an American so English in his irony. No issue is serious enough for him to resist its satirical possibilities, a habit that reinforces his stirring pessimism about the way the world is changing. ‘As cheerful as a leper-bell,’ was how Simon Raven described his prognosis, a verdict which Vidal prizes. But the phrase misses his grisly relish or human folly, the sense you get that his world-view is obedient to a personal rhetoric, a private enjoyment of the badness of things.
* * *
Postscript In agreeing to the interview Mr Vidal had armed himself with the stipulation that he would be able to see and check the piece before it was published. There was nothing sinister in this: naturally he wouldn’t attempt to trim my opinions. Nevertheless I had the ticklish task of calling on Vidal at the Connaught in London and sitting there in his room while he inspected the galleys. In the first paragraph he changed ‘homosexual’ to ‘pansexual’. A little later he said, in his grandest voice, ‘Now if you print that I shall most certainly sue,’ and deleted a chance scurrility with a stroke of his pen. (‘As one gets older’, Vidal has remarked, ‘litigation replaces sex.’) Thereafter he merely did a bit of gardening, corrected some misquotations (‘No, that’s not my style at all’), and inserted a new joke or two (‘If you take that out, I’ll give you this’). We haggled over a number of points; there were no real cruces. Occasionally, as he read on, he gave a reluctant laugh. ‘Mm,* he concluded. ‘A bit thin on the work.’