Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America Read online

  The reviews of City and the Pillar were equally blunt and dismissive, and without the sugar of Capote’s many good notices. The Times Book Review said, “Presented as the case history of a standard homosexual, his novel adds little that is new to a groaning shelf.” As early as 1948, the mainstream nervously dismissed the subject as old hat. Other reviewers called the book “disgusting,” “sterile,” and “gauche.” The two or three good reviews were couched in sociological terms. “Essentially it’s an attempt to clarify the inner stresses of our time, of which the increase in homosexuality and divorce are symptoms,” wrote Charles Rolo in the Atlantic. “It should be added that Mr. Vidal has not neglected to provide an entertaining story.”

  One of the unkindest pieces was in the first issue of the Hudson Review, which was managed by a close female friend. Vidal hoped to publish there himself. Someone writing under the pseudonym J. S. Shrike (the cynical editor in Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West), discussed City and Other Voices and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male together under the heading “Recent Phenomena.” (Novels were reviewed under “Recent Fiction.”) “Aside from its sociological demonstrations, Mr. Vidal’s book is undistinguished. It is humorless, and most of its scenes are faked, as are the house interiors, the natural landscapes, and all the characters.” (How can a writer do anything but “fake” a house interior?) It’s a shrilly moralistic review, dressing its disgust in social-worker jargon, reading old clichés into Kinsey and the two novelists. Shrike says that, “Mr. Vidal’s hero is irrevocably corrupted by his initial adolescent experience; Mr. Capote creates suspense by threatening the seduction of a thirteen year old boy.” (It’s bizarre how many of these reviewers assume that Randolph, the lover of a Mexican boxer, is plotting to seduce an androgynous little boy.) Shrike prefers Capote’s prose to Vidal’s yet does not like him much, either. “It is obvious that Mr. Capote has talent, but it is not a promising talent; it is a ruined one.”

  Vidal later said that the review that hurt most was one that wasn’t written: Orville Prescott, critic for the daily Times, had praised Williwaw, but reportedly told friends that Vidal’s new book disgusted him so much he would never read or review Vidal again. For the rest of his life, Vidal used this unwritten review as evidence of how antigay critics had blocked his career. Yet Prescott reviewed Capote in the Times, a mixed review but one that closed with “Many a first novel is sounder, better balanced, more reasonable than Other Voices. But few are more artistically exciting, more positive proof of the arrival of a new writer of substantial talent.” Whatever put Prescott off City and the Pillar, it was not just its subject.

  City ended up selling 30,000 copies in hardcover. Other Voices sold 26,000. (One needed to sell fewer books to be a best seller in the 1940s, and both books spent several weeks on best-seller lists.) These were not the only novels with gay content to appear that year. There was also The Welcome by Hubert Creekmore, about two men in love in a small Southern town. (It’s striking how much gay fiction of this period is set in Dixie, as if the rest of the country could think about perversion only when it spoke with a funny accent.) The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer came out that summer, with a homosexual villain, General Cummings, the army commander. The June issue of Partisan Review contained “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck, Honey” by Leslie Fiedler, the notorious essay where Fiedler first argued that homosexual race-mixing was a major theme in American literature, with white heroes fleeing to the wilderness “in the arms of their dusky lovers”: Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. The essay included brief discussions of Vidal and Capote. Fiedler argued that this emphasis on homosexuality was a failing in American books, yet he discussed it with mischievous calm and no hysterical righteousness.

  Years later Vidal would talk as if City had destroyed his career. It didn’t. His next four novels sold 10,000 copies each, not bad for the hardcover book slump of the early Fifties—a temporary side effect of the flood of new, twenty-five-cent paperbacks. He said he wasn’t reviewed again in the daily New York Times for the next fifteen years—and he wasn’t, but his work was regularly covered in the Times Book Review, and he was the subject of feature stories in the daily Times. He turned to writing for TV and then to theater and the movies not because publishing was closed to him, but because the other fields paid so much better. Also his fiction now required more time and effort. He came to dislike the quick, gray style of the first books and took more pains with his language. I believe he was emulating Capote. He could never admit it, of course, but Capote wrote better prose and Vidal resented him for it. The closest he came to admitting as much was in a letter to his British editor, John Lehman: “Most people seem to be born knowing their way through literature, the young lions at least, like Truman,” said Vidal, adding that he had spent the last four years working on his own style.

  But the reception of City and the Pillar left him badly shaken. In an earlier letter to Lehman, a year after the book appeared, he said, “I am back amongst my people ready to lead them to the new Sodom, out of this pillar-marked wilderness,” but he was only joking. He was more careful in the future, more cagey. He would not write at length about gay life again for another twenty years, when he returned to it in Myra Breckinridge, his wonderfully mad fantasy about camp, gender, and the movies.

  There is no denying that City and the Pillar changed his career. Yet the older Vidal often contradicts himself in how he talks about the experience. The mature man of letters, the unflappable Mr. Know-it-all of interviews and essays, speaks as if he were born wise. In his autobiography, Palimpsest, he insists that he knew exactly what was at stake when he published City: he was saying good-bye to politics and probably hurting his future as a novelist. But how many twenty-two-year-olds have that kind of foresight? Fiction writers, even those who work autobiographically, often assume readers will think they are making things up. For legal reasons, reviewers could not accuse Vidal of being homosexual yet they certainly implied it. The reaction to City caught the young novelist completely off guard. He hadn’t guessed he would out himself so nakedly. His journal for this period is the one piece of writing he refused to show his biographer, Fred Kaplan. His blind grandfather, the Senator, didn’t read the novel, of course. Vidal says neither of his parents finished it. One suspects his father’s reaction must have stung as much as the reviews. (Vidal was already at war with his mother, and his sexuality gave her new ammunition.) Whatever the exact cause of his hurt, the experience stamped Vidal for the rest of his life, affecting him more personally than he could admit. He protected himself by insisting the book was better than it was, then going back and revising it in 1965. He was a much better writer in 1965 than he’d been in 1948, yet he revised the book in the voice of his younger, more callow, pulpier self.

  Capote, too, was disappointed with the reception of his book, but he’d been hoping for success along the lines of Gone with the Wind. No matter what an author gets, he or she wants more. Capote moved on and did not look back, but he did not write directly about homosexuality again for almost thirty years. He was silent about it in print, neither professing nor denying his own sexuality when he used himself as a character. He let his very public persona fill in the blank for readers.

  Vidal and Capote do not appear to have ever compared notes or commiserated with each other over their early treatment by critics. It’s a weakness to confess an injury, and one can never admit hurt to a competitor, even when he has suffered something similar.

  Of course there were gay men and women in the United States before the Second World War. There was even some fiction with gay characters before 1947. But none of the great gay American writers—Henry James, Willa Cather, Hart Crane, Thornton Wilder—ever wrote directly about gay life. Walt Whitman celebrated the love of comrades, but later denied he meant anything sexual. Gertrude Stein touched on same-sex love in Tender Buttons, but in obscure, experimental prose. A few young writers published books with avant-garde presses, such as Better Ang
el by Forman Brown (1933), but the rest was silence. The truth of the matter is such books were often banned and seized. It was hard enough to print the truth about heterosexual love.

  But the war changed things. First of all, national mobilization threw together millions of Americans from different parts of the country. Men who liked men and women who liked women learned that they were far from alone. When they returned home, if they returned (many moved to cities), they no longer thought of themselves as solitary freaks. Straight people too discovered there were more homosexuals in the world than they’d ever guessed. It was probably most surprising to middle-class and college-educated straight men whose lives were more sheltered than the poor and working class. We have no figures, of course, on how many straight readers purchased the new novels by Vidal and Capote compared to the number of gay readers. I presume the readership was predominantly gay. But the publishing world and the critical establishment were still straight and they were curious about this sexual underworld.

  The war also began the slow change of what could be printed. The very literary, very hetero Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson was banned in New York State after it became a best seller in 1946. The case made its way through the court system until it reached the U.S. Supreme Court, producing a 4–4 tie sustaining the ban. (Justice Felix Frankfurter abstained because he knew Wilson personally.) The book would be out of print for the next thirteen years. Complicating matters was the fact that standards changed from state to state, city to city. “Banned in Boston” was not just a catchphrase. Philadelphia in 1946 briefly blocked the sales of older novels by William Faulkner and James T. Farrell. But military service had accustomed middle-class men to words and names more expressive than what they’d grown up with. When the publisher of The Naked and the Dead insisted Mailer change fuck to fug to get past the censors—“What the fug you mean?”—everyone knew how silly it sounded.

  But for a few years after the war, people were suddenly talking about homosexuality. They talked about it enough that it became demonized all over again and silence returned. Nevertheless, once you spill mercury from a bottle, you can never brush it all back in.

  Vidal sailed for Naples in the middle of February 1948, happy to escape his notoriety and spend his hard-earned money in Europe, now open to travel and wonderfully cheap after the war. Capote left New York on May 14, on his own trip, going first to Paris. There the two writers met up with each other, wary yet amiable. Both struck up friendships with a third gay American writer also visiting Europe, a highly successful older playwright, thirty-seven-year-old Tennessee Williams. Williams would remain the admired friend of both men in the years ahead, even after they stopped talking to each other and communicated only through their lawyers.

  2. The Kindness of Strangers

  He was born Thomas Lanier Williams in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, the son of a woman who was the pampered only child of an Episcopal minister, and a businessman who then worked for the telephone company. He didn’t become Tennessee until he was twenty-seven, a name he chose for himself when he applied for a grant from the famous Group Theatre. The grant was for young playwrights, which meant twenty-five and under. He knocked three years off his age and took a new first name so the judges wouldn’t connect him to the Thomas Lanier whose poems and stories were sometimes mentioned in St. Louis newspapers.

  Williams was a compulsive writer from an early age. He needed to write in much the same way smokers need to smoke or alcoholics need to drink. (He would pursue sex in a similar fashion.) His friend Donald Windham initially admired his singlemindedness, saying, “He did something I longed to do but I didn’t have the courage to. He put writing before knowing where he was going to sleep or where his next meal was coming from.” Gore Vidal suggests something less admirable in his account of watching Williams take up a short story he had just published in a magazine and rewrite it into his typewriter, simply because he had nothing else to work on. He rewrote plays into stories and stories into plays. He also wrote poems and reams of letters, many of which were never sent if he didn’t have a stamp or address handy. Expressing himself mattered more to him than actual communication.

  He changed more than just his name and age in 1938. “Tom” had been a shy, outwardly conventional fellow, a frat man in college, a regular guy at the shoe factory where he briefly worked. The stories and plays he produced were fairly conventional, too, a tale of ancient Egypt (“The Vengeance of Nitocris” published in Weird Tales), a screwball comedy about high society marriage (The Fat Man’s Wife) and a social drama about prison (Not about Nightingales). And he pretended to be conventional sexually, claiming to love women, yet he was a virgin with both genders. But around the time he applied to the Group Theatre, he moved to New Orleans hoping to write for the WPA. The minister’s grandson found himself living contentedly among prostitutes, gamblers, drug addicts, and homosexuals; he went to bed with his first man, fell in love with a friend, discovered alcohol (it began with brandy alexanders), went to bed with another man, and another, and soon learned he was happiest when he had sex every night. He later described himself as “a rebellious Puritan,” but the rebellion was never complete. The conforming, conventional “Tom” remained hidden inside “Tennessee” to the end of his life.

  He continued to write every day in New Orleans, but his stories, plays, and poems were no longer stiff and secondhand; they were more alive, more emotional. He didn’t write autobiographically—not directly, anyway. He wrote about what he felt rather than what he knew or understood. He had very strong emotions about the people he imagined. As his friend Windham puts it, “The richness of words in Tennessee’s stories and plays of the 1940s isn’t a richness of vocabulary. It is a richness of verbal texture…. There are a good many metaphors and similes; but they are always, even when physically descriptive, used to reveal an inner state. They are used to draw the reader or listener into the author’s emotions.”

  He won the Group Theatre grant and used his new name when he spoke to a literary agent, Audrey Wood, who wanted to see more of his work. She represented him for the next thirty-two years.

  The 1940s was a rollercoaster decade for Williams. Plays were rejected or almost produced or produced only to flop. Between productions, he took a variety of jobs, including elevator operator, movie usher, and poetry-reciting waiter at the Beggar’s Bar in Greenwich Village. Using New York as his base, he traveled constantly, going to Mexico and Los Angeles and returning to New Orleans. He spent six months in Hollywood working under contract at MGM. He briefly lived with Windham and Windham’s lover, but he was the world’s worst roommate, filling his room with dirty clothes and empty cigarette packs, playing his old-fashioned wind-up Victrola while he hammered away at his typewriter and another coffeepot melted on the stove. He collaborated with Windham on a play, You Touched Me, based on a short story by D. H. Lawrence. Williams loved and drew inspiration from a handful of authors: Lawrence, Anton Chekhov, and, most important, Hart Crane. He carried a volume of Crane’s word-drunk poems wherever he went.

  Then, in 1944, he revised one more time a play inspired by his family, The Gentleman Caller, and sent it to Audrey Wood. After a few conferences and a change of title, The Glass Menagerie found a producer and a leading lady, Laurette Taylor. It opened in wartime Chicago in December and suffered a shaky first week before two local critics discovered and praised it. The play moved to Broadway three months later and was a huge success. (It isn’t really a memory play, as Williams claimed. Among other changes, he wishfully imagined his disapproving father falling “in love with long distances” and abandoning the family.) Meanwhile another work-in-progress, The Moth, became Blanche’s Chair in the Moon, then The Poker Night, and finally A Streetcar Named Desire. Directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy and a young new actor, Marlon Brando, it opened on Broadway at the end of 1947. It was an even bigger artistic and commercial triumph than Menagerie.

  In three short years, this man who’d worked alone in a private
fever dream of words found himself flung into the world of money, fame, and public admiration—what Williams later called “the catastrophe of success.” People did not discuss his sexuality yet—that would come later—but as Wilfrid Sheed wrote, “Clearly, he wasn’t the Elks Club Father of the Year.” Homosexuality is present in his first two hits for anyone who cares to look—hinted at in Tom’s offstage life in Menagerie, confessed in Blanche’s sad story about her husband’s suicide in Streetcar—but it was not yet the problem it became for the playwright and his public.

  Success made Williams as restless as failure had. He continued to travel, visiting New Mexico, Nantucket, and Provincetown, returning to New Orleans and St. Louis. Soon after the opening of Streetcar, he left for his first adult visit to Europe—he had gone as a teenager with his grandfather on a six-week church tour.

  He arrived in Rome in February 1948, where he took an apartment and bought a used army jeep. He met Gore Vidal at a party at the American Academy. The two men immediately hit it off. They took a trip down the coast to Naples and Amalfi in the jeep, passing Ravello, Vidal’s future home. Williams drove on that twisty road high above the Mediterranean, a reckless yet lucky driver. The two new friends next took the dangerous step of reading each other’s prose. Vidal read a new story by Williams and told him it didn’t work. “So fix it,” said Williams. Vidal actually wrote a new draft, but Williams hated his changes. “What you have done is removed my style, which is all I have.” Meanwhile Williams read The City and the Pillar. “You know, you spoiled it with that ending. You didn’t know what a good book you had.”