' ..... 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.