GLR May June

10 / 52

MICHAEL MEWSHAW’S MEMOIR of Gore
Vidal opens like The Rocky Horror Pic-
ture Show: an innocent young couple in
a vehicle are about to meet someone
monstrous. Only in this case it’s not Doc-
tor Frank N. Furter; it’s “Gore Vidal,”
Mewshaw thinks as he sits on the cross-town bus in Rome,
“renowned for his acerbic wit and cutting remarks about those
who didn’t measure up to his exacting standards. Having
watched him on television ... I preferred not to imagine the
mincemeat he might make of an American couple in Rome for
a year with their six-month-old son.”
But Vidal is warm and welcoming, and the Mewshaws are
soon part of the American expatriate colony to which Vidal and
his partner Howard Austen happily belong. More than anything
else, Mewshaw’s Sympathy for the Devil is a nostalgic love let-
ter to Rome, and that is what makes it so very readable—that
and the endlessly quotable Gore Vidal. Vidal’s own memoir of
Rome—his essay “Some Memories of the Glorious Bird and
Others”—doubles as a review of Tennessee Williams’ own
memoirs, and it begins with a picture of the city when Vidal and
Williams had just arrived there after the Sec-
ond World War. Mewshaw tells Vidal that
he’s reviewing Williams’ Memoirs—which
he finds full of self-pity and bad writing—
and Vidal asks to be loaned the galleys; sev-
eral weeks later, Mewshaw finds Vidal’s
essays in The New York Review of Books .
From the start, they are fellow writers.
Williams never became a resident of the
Eternal City, but Vidal and Mewshaw did, and that, really, is the
story of this book. It was a time when apartments were cheap
(Vidal’s starts out at $420 a month and, decades later, balloons
to $4,000) and the city, while crowded with cars, had not yet
become polluted. Indeed, Mewshaw doesn’t even mind getting
stuck in traffic jams because the views out the bus window are
so beautiful. And there are a lot of American writers passing
through the city, many under the aegis of the American Acad-
emy in Rome—writers like John Horne Burns, William Styron,
Pat Conroy, Donald Barthelme, and Gay Talese, writers we as-
sociate with a kind of middlebrow literary culture whose im-
portance has shrunk, if not vanished, since then.
But the main reason Vidal chose Rome, he says in an inter-
view, is “because I didn’t want to become an alcoholic, basi-
cally. They are all there [in the U.S.] for some reason.
Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner are the classic examples,
but it didn’t stop with them.” Another reason, as we’ve already
ESSAY
Roman Holiday
ANDREW HOLLERAN
Andrew Holleran’s novels include Dancer from the Dance, The Beauty
of Men, and Grief .
learned from In Bed with Gore Vidal, Tim Teeman’s recent book
about Vidal’s sex life, is the availability of hustlers. The first
big event Mewshaw experiences with Vidal as a resident of
Rome is the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini by a hustler Pasolini
had picked up at the train station—precisely where Vidal and his
partner Howard Austen found theirs. When Barbara Grizzuti
Harrison asked Vidal about Rome—“Is it the colors that you
love? Is it the quality of the light? Is it the warmth of the peo-
ple?” Vidal replied: “Well, what I like—you have to understand
I came here shortly after World War II. What I like is you could
go up to the Pincio at night and buy any boy that you wanted for
five hundred lire.”
Vidal, says Mewshaw, “like a lot of expats—I don’t exclude
myself—treated Italy as a luxury hotel he could check in and out
of as it pleased him.” Later on, there would be the “years of
lead”—the kidnapping and murder of the Italian premier, Aldo
Moro, by the Red Brigades—but at first, life in Rome is good.
Mewshaw becomes a frequent visitor at the Vidal-Austen pent-
house in an old palazzo, where, we learn, Howard and Gore
refer to their houseboy by one of two terms: either “hashish” or
“LBP” (Little Brown Person). The word “faggot” is tossed
around as well, as when Vidal calls his agent
“a little faggot too weak to stand up to” his
editor in New York. But then, everyone
seemed to use the “F” word then, even
William Styron, to Vidal’s face, when Sty-
ron claimed that writers who are “fags” have
an advantage because they don’t have to
support a wife and family.
Despite the lunches, dinners, parties, and
gossip, Vidal turns out book after book. “Why do you push
yourself so hard?” Mewshaw asks him in one of several inter-
views Vidal grants him. “Do you feel guilty when you’re not
working?”
“Of course,” Gore replies. “After all, I am a puritan moralist.”
That’s one of the things that many people did not get about
Vidal; and what people did not get about Vidal is precisely what
Mewshaw says he wants to show in his book—that the cool,
aristocratic, imperturbable grandee was also a hard-working,
sentimental, generous, and loyal friend who, “while he preferred
to pass himself off as a stoic à la Marcus Aurelius ... was fre-
quently quite the opposite—irascible, brusque, angry, depressed
to the point of suicidal ideation.”
Vidal is full of contradictions. The puritan moralist and his
partner even make annual trips to Bangkok “in our relentless
pursuit of AIDS,” says Gore. Not too relentless, evidently: when
the dying Rudolf Nureyev comes for a visit from his own Ital-
ian island to Vidal’s villa in Ravello (as in The Milk Train Does-
n’t Stop Here Anymore) and takes a swim in Vidal’s pool, they
are warm hosts, but he and Austen have it emptied afterwards
Mewshaw says he wants
to show that the cool,
aristocratic, imperturbable
grandee was also a hard-
working, sentimental,
generous, and loyal friend.
10 The Gay & Lesbian Review / WORLDWIDE