' ..... 80 ,.._ ,.._ AIS 'NIN VS. 'GORE VIDAL Ol ,._- i <:...., w • 0g Bon Mots and Billets ·noux
cerning the available) he finally ri.dicules. it. ~lighuy transposing names and numbers, VIdal writes m Two By Ann Morrissett Davidon Sisters of the "three months we lived together in 1947 (I 22, The cleavage between Gore Vidal and Anais Nin tran • she 47)" at the Hotel de l'Universite in Paris. ~e enjoy~d scends gossip. It is the split that exists within ~I of _us OOKS the summer because Nin/Marietta had "a gift for m projected onto the public stage b~ two dr~matJsts WI~h • timacy. She was-is-one of those rare women with whom prodigious verbal skills. The drama IS embodied not only m one likes to talk after the act. Post coitum Marietta I once the internal conflict of Oedipus, but in the eternal confUct Nin: ''Gore Vidal is now a called her. I don't think she was pleased.'' (Later in the of reason vs. intuition, objectivity vs. subjectivity, book he writes: "To be candid with Marietta means to be realism vs. idealism, order .vs. chaos, rationality vs. critic, which means he is fixed for all time in the distorting aspic of her prose." An sentimentality, calculation vs. spontaneity, cool wit _vs. apparently reciprocal destiny.) . . warm compassion, dispassionate uninvolvement vs. Im cremating people.'' Nin's version of the presumably post-cmtal conversatiOn ;:w.ssioned empathy; politics vs. art, pursuit of power vs. (sex acts themselves are never described in her diaries)_: pursuit of Jove (both, often through sex), etc. Vidal: "People exist for "We slid easily into a sincere, warm talk. He droppe~ his So far the drama is low-keyed, unlike Vidal's running armor his defenses. 'I don't like women. They are either media battles with William Buckley and Truman Capote. her only as a pair of eyes silly, giggly, like the girls in my set I'~ e~cted to marry; The two antagonists have largely avoided each other, or they are harsh and strident masculme mtellectuals. You except for parries in print and one large attack mounted by in which to catch her are neither.' " . Vidal in Two Sisters, his 1970 "memoir in the form of a own reflections.'' The young Vidal knew everything in~ellect~lly, N1_n novel." The character called Marietta is thus depicted by · noted. hut nsvr-holng:jc:.._llv suffP~ thP •n$:D,...... r .tv n F _h'- Vidal:"It is no accident:::>:~ ~~~"7.:'that her favorite=:;;::-~~ adjective;::::::-;:::-:;:::-;::::: is ensor=--- l------r:::-:::i:=::-::&mother's abandonment,- by---- remarriage, and then of their celled. She cannot write a book without it. Unfortunately I and Nin should ever have become mutually "ensorcelled," break in London. Remarking on Vidal's admiration for his cannot read a book that contains it (excepting always the the one-time spell attested to as much by the vehemence of mother, his pride in her beauty, Nin also noted his ha ndsome prose of Anais Nin). This has made for a degree their present mutual rejection as by the ardor hinted at in criticalness of her possessiveness and willfulness. He was of coolness between us since Marietta wants to be not only Nin's 1944-47 diary, and in Vidal's letters and novels o·f the rushed too soon, wrote Nin, into his parents' world of a Jove goddess (a legend in her own time, as the reviewers same period. famous, powerful, sophisticated people--while his "deeper say-as, in fact, she herself has so often noted in the five Just 20 when they first met, Vidal was the precocious self was secret and lonely." Not knowing why he was · volumes of memoirs she has to date given us) but an artist author of Williwaw (1946) , a kind of war novel in that it unable to love, he confessed his demon to be pride and of the first rank, heiress to Sappho, George Sand, Virginia draws from his own noncombat World War II experience in arrogance, a side of him he assured Nin she would never Woolf, a colossa of literature, whose shadow falling across the Aleutians. It is a competent and relatively straight see. the wasteland of 20th-century art makes sickly pale those account of conflictbetween men on a ship, though when he Together they started "a journey of friendship, as badly contemporaries who must dwell forever in her shade. brings the novel to Nin, as she reports in her diary, she is loved children who raised themselves, both stronger and " . .. In her way she is still beautiful preserved b:t an "startled by the muted tone, the cool, detached words. It is weaker by it," as Nin put it. Trusting a woman for the first insatiable appetite for glory and sex. . .. At 80 she will be writing I do not admire.... Am I wrong to think there is time, by Nin's account, Vidal still could not accept her making love and writing about it in that long autobio- potential warmth in him? Is the writing a disguise, a world of fantasy; and she abhorred his world of reality. graphy which begins with our century and will, I am mask?" Like babes in a wood, like Narcissus rapt by his mirror I certain, last well into the next .... " When Vidal first met Nin, she says that he told her he image, they embraced their antitheses. As will be illustrated for those shrinking few unfamiliar would one day be president of the United States, that he In his review of Nin's fourth diary, Vidal admits their with Vidal's oeuvres et vie, there is no little hypocrisy in identified with Richard II, the king poet. She finds him common narcissism but adds that he can't think of any · him excoriating "Marietta" for her "insatiable appetite proud, concealing his sensitiveness, oscillating "between modern writer who is not a narcissist. Nin's narcissism, for glory and sex." (Still, one sees oneself in mirror hardness and softness." She remarks ·on his dual nature, however, "does put peopie off and I think it has to do with images.) The obsessions of writers are reflected not only in assured in the world, talking easily, "no dream-laden what [Edmund) Wilson calls her 'solemn, hieratic style.' their diaries. adolescent''-yet lonely. The frostbite that he suffered .in Not only does she write an inflated, oracular prose, but she Commenting in the Los Angeles Times Book Review in the Aleutians "seems to cling to him." He told her that in is never able to get outside her characters." He desc ri ~s 1971 on the fourth diary of Anais Nin, Vidal recalls their the army he Jived like a monk and wrote his novel. the objective narcissist as one who looks in the mirror and meeting in Rome during which she asked permission to That novel, Williwaw, was dedicated to Vidal's mother, sees lines, sees death on the brow, and records it. The print her references to him ("not, incidentally, the entire Nina Gore Vidal, daughter of Senator Gore whose name he subjective narcissist sees in the mirror a vision no one else portrait," Vidal adds, "-several fine warts were withheld had inherited as the thirq of four names. At Exeter he sees and cannot communicate it-unless s/he is a great for the current exhibition.") At that time, Nin reproached dropped the first two, Eugene Luther-those of his father .. artist. He concedes that Nin at her best can write him tor Two Sisters, saying (according to Vidal), "I didn't The break between Gore and his mother remains largely beautifully, "but then the dread flow of adjectives begins read it, of course--I don't read that sort of book-but I was unarticulated, except for a letter to Time magazine early and one reali.zes that she is not seeing but writing." told it was a hideous caricature." Vidal denies to her that· in 1976 t:rom Vidal's mother explaining that she had Vidal claims too that Nin is unable to deal with other Marietta is Anais, and that the Relationship ("With Anais accompanied him, somewhat against her will, to London women, can only write about herself. "People exist for her one feels that the word 'relationship' deserves a capital when he was 19, but when she found that he had friends and only as a pair of eyes in which to catch her own reflections. 'R'-at least to start with") is theirs. "But I did admit that did not need her, she returned to the United States-for No wonder their owners so often disappoint her. They want Marietta's 'philosophy' ... was very much like hers, and I which, it would seem, he never forgave her, though the mirrors too." Yet Nin's diaries are replete with vivid thought that in an age when mind was under fire and truth is perhaps more complex. portraits of others, including affectionate and vital de- feelingworshiped,aplayfultravestywasinorder.Shetook Vidal's second novel, In a Yellow Wood, was written scriptions of women friends: Henry Miller's wife June, that well enough." during the height of his friendship with Nin (1945-46) and Caresse Crosby, the writer Marguerite Young, and others. In the fifth volume of Nin's dairy (1947-55), published . was dedicated to her. Untypically impassioned with words In.the midst of Volume Six, Nin increasingly turns over her four years after the appearance of Two Sisters, any he probably would now like to eat, the novel contains a diary to the letters and descriptions of friends, saying she mention that there may have been of Gore Vidal was description of heterosexual lovemaking unique for Vidal: will make this the "Diary of Others," though in fact even totally eradicated. In Nin's recently published Volume Six, "He entered her and to the rhythm of their fast-beating her earliest diaries contained extensive portrayals of her 1955-66, Vidal is admitted only a few times, tartly: "Gore hearts, with a rush of sound iike wind in his ears, he father, Menry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, et al. Vidal is now a critic, which means he is cremating discovered the single world. Lights whirled inside his head, At times, Nin is so weary of being everyone's mirror, people.'' And: " . . . Gore Vidal, who represents all that I behind his eyes; they came in series--circles of · sharp everyone's confessor, she cries out in her diary for space dislike in writing." lights.'' (The only advantage to Vidal of this relatively of her own, .for someone to understand and accept her It is not unusual for writers to disparage each other's purple passage is perhaps to establish an insider's credi- totally. The omission of her marriage(s) from the diaries works, or for former lovers to feel bitterness toward each bility to his bisexual claims.) leaves one to guess the degree of fulfillment t)lere, though other. What is remarkable (and yet poignantly under- The verbal availability of Nin also clearly attracted in writer James Herlihy she seems to have found some \ standable) is that two such divergent personalities as Vidal Vidal, but with his usual ambivalence (particularly con- mutual solace and support, if not' her ideal mirror twin. ~ - t, 9 ·~ I 0"- : " f !I Vidal's obsession with mirror images is reflected aid·do in the NBA translation category a couple of years 81 throughout his works in myriad ways. From The City and back when the award was split three ways), but also by ~ the Pillar (1948) through Two Sisters, the protagonist appeal to "responsibility"-that in important ways awards n seeks the brother-lover-self of his youth. In the latter he are unavoidably "arbitrary and we judges would simply ~ writes: "The young search not for love, but for someone By Eliot Fremont-Smith have to take our lumps in that regard. Appeals to ~ they can talk to about themselves or, best of all, to find that responsibility-i.e., to accepting one's role in group ruth- ~ most marvelous of creatures who will, without fatigue or There was something eerily ludicrous, if also faintly lessness-are usually successful, even among divergent ..... apparent boredom, analyze them by the hour.... Of the · comforting, about leaving a general meeting of Voice oddballs like book critics, and this one was. ~ disappointments of my own youth, I recall not so much love employees last Thocsday (our brethren at New York has Thus much verbal fretting. Philip Levine's book of ..., affairs gone wrong as those moments of intimacy when at just walked out) to rush uptown to the Algonquin to chair a poems, The Names of the Lost, was awfully good. So was last the dominant theme of the duet was clearly myself, judges' meeting of the National Book Critics Circle to Elizabeth Bishop's Geography Ill. The Bishop clearly had when point counterpoint vain youth and admirer were decide _which four books-one each in Fiction, Poetry, the edge--a richer and more varied voice, some thought- developing the splendid harmonies of my uniqueness and General Nonfiction, and Criticism-should receive NBCC but the kicker was a single poem in Geography III that then, like a nonserial dissonance in a usual work, the music awards as the best new works by American authors everyone found exceptional, "The Moose." went sour and the other made reference not to me but to published in 1976. In Criticism, Bruno Bettelheim's analysis of children's self. Such betrayals are impossible to forgive. Ludicrous for obvious reasons. In one place jobs and fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, beat out Ada Louise "It is the genius of Marietta that, liking young men, she professional and moral commitments appeared to be on Huxtable's architectural criticism, Kicked a Building understands their egotism and so is able to hold in check the line. All week long hard lessons were being relearned: Lately? mostly on the basis of its being a more wholly her own, and talk to them tirelessly about themselves. Owners are rich and self-serving, pirates are ruthless, the conveived work (Huxtable's book is a collection of her Thus was I trapped ... though now, I suspect, money difference between employers and employees is (yes!) Times articles). Many of the judges felt called upon to plays a part. If so, she has become that purest of artists, that the latt.er are subject to arbitrary and secret decisions express their disdain for Freudian interpretation (with the analyst who pays the patient." good reason-so much Freudian interpretation is written Understandably incensed by Two Sisters (or, as Vidal ------•1 in such jargoned certitude as to constitute unconscious may see it, lacking a sense of humor and objectivity about NBCC Awards in poetry, self-parody and merit inclusion, along with the classic it), Nin had already begun to be distressed .about the Struwelpeter analysis, in Dwight Macdonald's parody direction of Vidal's writing when he was 20. She wrote then criticism, and nonfiction anthology), and to note that Bettelheim is not merely · somewhat ambivalently of his feeling that he had power to imaginative and fascinating, but specifically states some accomplish whatever he wanted; she found him clear and were easy; only in fiction appropriate modesty: that his book is for interested adults decisive, capable of leadership. Yet he did not trust his only, and that his analyses are in no way substitutes for the emotions, his intuition, perhaps associating them with was there a real division. magical children's tales themselves. "softer and more feminine qualities he does not wish to General Nonfiction posed a harder bind: Irving Howe's develop in himself." wonderful, scholarly, major (and popular) work on the Nin, too, experiences her ambiguities-about her social and intellectual impact of East-European Jewish parents, about June and Henry Miller, Edmund Wilson, all immigrants and their descendents on American culture. her "transparent children"-trying to sort out her own -World of Our Fathers, vs. Maxine Hong Kingston's re "masculine" and "feminine" identifications and rivalries, markably ~vocative, much more personal memories of her artistic visions from schizophrenia. In Volume Six she . her childhood and her Chinese-born family-the memories writes that nothing is separate, that body and psyche are and urges are "ghosts," transplanted to a land that is at interrelated, that she means through her writing to start once "home"and "foreign"-The Woman Warrior. It was with the subconscious and arrive at objectivity, uniting noted that all five Nonfiction nominations were ethnic them. In the fourth vol\lme she had written of Gore's studies (one each on Jews, Chinese, and Irish, two on feeling of being· split, his 'sense of unreality, but later that blacks). World of Our Fathers had been the predicted his "hidden self" was emerging and he no longer spoke of winner, though in a close contest, and it can still be death. Together they seemed to be binding up the schisms. expected to take at\ NBA in April and maybe a Pulitzer. In Yet she is disturbed by the strength he seems to draw from the discussion, extra-literary considerations-a desire to the social register, though he mocks it. She reports being honor Howe's long and impressive career, the appeal of saddened by his dependence on class privileges, his vanity, discovery of a first book by an unknown writer-were his need of glorification. · acknowledged, and acknowledged in the end to be both In his review of this diary; Vidal's interpretation Is' that peripheral and balancing. The merits of Kingston's book, this is projection on Nin's part. "If there is one theme ... though they could not sensibly be judged against the merits it is power. - £ T• ---- '- ~-- ...._ · -- ~ - -- -~ .. cu:;at JJtaJVltt:y v1 Ult:'~---=::;::=~ write, apropos my own, 'For the first time I saw a contrast judges to be the more compelling. I voted for the Howe, but in our aims. Gore's interest is like Miller's to meet cannot fault the outcome: Kingston's book is rare and everybody, to win the world.' She is even able to record gorgeous. · with a straight pen, 'Writing in a diary developed several Fiction was the most difficult category, arid the most habits: a habit of honesty (because no one imagines the closely fought. In the initial balloting, John Gardner's diary will ever be read).' " Bruno Bettelheim, Maxine Hong Kingston. October Light was only a single point ahead of Renata Vidal points out that this was written at a time when he Adler's Speedboat (50 to 49 in the weighted count). And it was trying, at her insistence, to have the publishers for of the former. In the other place, another set of arbitrary won by only a sing!~ vote in the final balloting (eight to whom he worked publish her childhood diary. The diary decisions was being negotiated. Of course, awards are seven). The discussion of these books was also different was always meant to be read, he asserts, as her vindication essentially benign: Losers are not professionally or mor from that which attended the other categories, and far and victory over an unloving father. ally compromised, nor are their livelihoods placed, at more interesting. There was no frustration about how to Of his own father, Vidal writes only with respect 11nd whim, in jeopardy. choose between equally wonderful works, but instead a admiration, unlike his references to his mother. Speaking Which is (was) part of the comfort. The other part of the real division of sensibility. of him to Nin, she reports that he said, "But I won't let you comfort is that nobody "owns"-nobody is that ugly thing, Those who liked the Gardner novel were generally very meet him. He would like you too well, and you might like a stockholder, of-the- National Book Critics Circle. Of cool to Speedboat, thinking it very special and artificial him too well." (As his mother was taken off by another?- course that means that nobody is paid anything; the judges ("the French have done it") and hermetically "New in her case Hugh Auchincloss, a stepfather Vidal shared (the 18 elected directors, all working critics from across York." (Feelings of regionalism are rampant in the NBCC, with Jacqueline Kennedy.) More shades of Oed~pus. the country, of whom 15 actually showed and voted) had to though no one knows whether this is beneficial or a At the end of 1946, Vidal had completed The Ctty and the get themselves to the Algonquin on their own. problem; it has also become hard to tell these days which Pillar, an overtly homosexual novel which caused such A month ago the entire NBCC voting membership (about group is the more entitled to paranoia-the New York shock waves when it was later published (according to 250 professional book critics and review editors) chose five critics or the out-of-town critics. "If Speedboat is a New Vidal) that even The New York Times would not allow it to• award nominations in each of the four categories, 20 books York novel," shouted one exasperated critic from The be advertised. Anais's response to it was strong. In a letter in all. The job of the judges at the Algonquin last Thursday Times, "then October Light is a Vermont novel!") which she read aloud to him in the Ritz bar, she told him was to pick the four single winners, the· "best" of 1976. As And vice-versa. To those electrified by Speedboat (my that his novel destroyed the myth by which she lived. everybody knows, in decisions of this sort voting procedure self among them), October Light, while perhaps admirable Calling herself a romantic and Vidal a cynic, she cas-. is crucial; procedure can determine outcomes that are for its strong characterization and intended scope, was tigates his book in her diary for being without illusion or· contrary to majority wishes. The NBCC procedures were a also gaseous, inflated with pretentious philosophizing. The feeling, without poetry or magic-without which, for her, · model of how to do it right, which is, in fact, quite simple. hint was-that Gardner was catering in some unseemly way there is no life. How can there be lovers if all objects of love All formal balloting results were subject to ratification to popular taste, the unseemly part being, presumably, are uglified and destroyed? She tells him he lives without that is, to a consensus that the balloting results were not pretending otherwise. (Last year's NBCC Fiction award faith or love, and that his mother had harmed him more distorted by procedure and expressed the true wishes of winner was E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, which the author than she knew. According to Nin, Vidal pleaded with her to the judges as a whole. As it turned out, the ratification had explicitly intended to be "accessible" to the masses. A tell him it was his greatest book; she could only wonder votes were in every case unanimous. minor irony.) Naturally, the champions of October Light how she had thought him loving and devoted. "How could I The balloting was in tWo stages. Initial ballots deter shot back with What's wrong with popularity? and besides, not see his cynical vision? Anais, you invented a Gore mined the two top contenders in each of the four ca its a more optimistic book than Speedboat. That's Bellow which might have been, but which no longer exists. To me tegories. These were weighted ballots, each judge assign ism muttered the Adler advocates; anyway, Speedboat is this was sadder than if Gore had died a physical death." ing from one to five points for each nominated book. Final marvelously funny-unlike (parting shot) the French. Among the last references to Gore in Nin's diaries is a ballots were straight votes between the two top contenders And so it went, touching bottom, perhaps, with the letter she received from him in early 1947, from Antigua: in each category. Between the initial and final ballots there accusation, "Adler is a perfect mouse," and the rejoinder, " ... My attachment to you continues, it grows more was much animated and occasionally even eloquent "at least there~s a person there, not just a pose"-and then poignant, more vast, more hopeless with each day-what discussion of the relative merits of individual books. In rising again to consider whether Gardner's gift for can one do with beauty? It is there, it hurts. I have three of the categories-Poetry, Criticism, and particular theatricality works best on a small stage (as in his first sometimes the feeling that too much of me was left in the ly that great melting pot in which things refuse to melt, novel, Grendel) or a large one. The final vote for October womb, it is not a matter of development, rather of what General Nonfiction-discussion was mostly the expression Light was ratified as fair and true. But in this category never was-was not born at all. I can never be too long of frustration: How to choose between perhaps equally there was no passing-over of a rather sharp division. bemused by dreams. I feel a stranger passing through, the tasty apples and oranges. Ah, yes. Real life. To which I returned late Thursday books are only shadows I cast before the sun ... " Arbitrariness takes its toll: The possibility of split or night. Where the differences have been over a lot more * * • double awards was beaten back not only by the argument than sensibility. And where the contending forces had not To Vi~l, b~s~xuality _and homosexual~ty are vauntedly lthat double awards would seriously diminish their value (a• to do with honors and awards, but with fear and potential Continued on next page practice that nearly did in the National Book Awardg...;...and degradation. . 0 2 and novels, called by Elizabeth Hardwick "old-fashioned" Having thus disposed of Marietta/Nin's "mysteries, :m Nin vs. Vidal. · and by Diana Trilling "clinical histories," nevertheless Vidal admits, "Naturally there are puzzles. I would like t illuminate and are illuminated by her diaries. More know whether or not the universe is finite or infinite . . . ::= Continued from preceding page explicitly analytical, the diaries lack the poetic content and But excepting the sort of puzzle which makes our passag :i as "normal" as heterosexuality (or, as he wrote else coherence which make her novels "flow" on a more here interesting and gives incentive to our questing games ...<( where, as monosexuality-autoeroticism-which may be subconscious, surreal level-like an underground stream. I see no m ystery at the heart of things . w Nin's novels suggest interior explorations (e.g., Cities of "Of course there are other things the living do. We pial 0 the ~ost "normal" of all). While he makes frequent plugs. for bisexuality in his omnipresent and omniscient inter the Interior) rather than the external, plotted structures of games. . . . " ~ views, the evidence is slim that his heterosexual experi Vidal's novels, which have shifted from relatively limited , ence went much beyond the Anais period. There was settings to broad historical panoramas (Julian, Washing Anagramming the name GORE VIDAL one evenin perhaps a young woman he once thought he had made ton, D.C., Burr, 1876) . Vidal's are witty, cynical, detached while waitin~ at the Ho~el E~elsior in Rome for Vidaj who was takmg out emotional Insurance by prolonging · pregnant, referred to in Two Sisters and elsewhere. The (and in this sense all relatively predictable-
SUNDAY,AUG.21, 1977 12-F FM Highlights: Tribute to Anais OPERA BUFFS-Barber's "Va nessa," 2 p.m. today, WDET (101.9). SYMPHONIC-Eugene Or mandy conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra, 5 p.m. today, WQRS (105.1). COMPOSITE-Pollee surveil lance activities, 8 tonight, WKAR (90.5). WORLD THEATRE-"The Way of the World," 8:06 tonight, WCMU (89.5). ARTS SPECIAL-Interview with photographer Richard Avedon, 10 a.m. Mon., WKAR (90.5). EXCERPT -Lambert's Suite from "Anna Karenina," 3 p.m. Tues., WQRS (105.1). A special tribute journeys LYRIC OPERA-Prokofiev's through the life o/_ the late "The Love for Three Oranges," 8:06 writer Anais Nin, 7:30p.m. p.m. Wed., WCMU (89.5). Mon., WDET (101.9). COMPILED-Works of Mozart, 10:30 p.m. Wed., WDET (101 .9). BAND ERA-Music of the Dor ANDERSON'S "Sandpaper Bal sey Brothers, 11 a.m. Sat., WUOM let," 3 p.m. Fri., WQRS (105.1 ). (91.7). IN CONCERT -Chet Atkins and CONTEMPORARY -Percus Kitty Wells, 11 p.m. Fri., WKAR sion compositions, 8 p.m. Sat., (90.5). WDET (101.9). 'reNeeded ~eTime?
e needed making assistance, make minor voto five house repairs, transport pa man Ser- tients, teach craft classes or 5310 St. help in an office are needed by 11er Chil· HEMID (Help the Elderly y. Volun Maintain Independence and activities Dignity). After orientation, .. m. Tues volunteers select a convenient •oni, 494- time any weekday. Call Her mene Hughes, 891-1038 . r proba· • the 44th H your organization needs yal .Oak. volunteers, call 833-0622, or ~gework write the Volunteer Action bationers Center of United Community sessions. Services, 51 W. Warren, De· ed to in· troit 48201. 1kills. A r:-::=--=====------11 ear is re ts are at d volun· :au c. J.
ffer iele· vehome·
ngorgolng?
wherever ~ou're moving-long distance a WELCOME WAGON call simplifies the ng settled. s will greet you at the new address with tl gifts and community information to save and money. !llow Pages when you arrive. lting for your call.