GLR May June

ESSAY

Roman Holiday A NDREW H OLLERAN

M ICHAEL M EWSHAW ’ 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

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 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 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

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

Mewshaw says he wants to show that the cool, aristocratic, imperturbable grandee was also a hard- working, sentimental, generous, and loyal friend.

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

Andrew Holleran’s novels include Dancer from the Dance , The Beauty of Men , and Grief .

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