Vidal and Capote: Those Catty Literary Lions

They were both famous authors and professional celebrities, vain and gay, catty literary lions who concealed a claw behind every purr and competed for attention on several levels at once. Having so much in common wasn’t entirely a good thing for Gore Vidal and Truman Capote.

In the late 1940s, Vidal was visiting composer/author Paul Bowles in Morocco, and his frenemy Capote was coming but didn't know Vidal was already there. Vidal, delighted at the idea, insisted on going to the ship with Bowles to surprise Capote. There was Capote on deck, waving in his Dr. Who scarf, right up to the moment when he saw Vidal. Then his face fell like Daffy Duck's and he literally sank beneath the railing.

“When he assumed a standing position again, he was no longer grinning and waving,” Bowles recalled.
They crossed paths at a party in New York, where Vidal recounted that, not wearing his glasses, he sat down "on what I thought was a stool and it was Capote."
"Of course, I'm always sad about Gore," Capote told David Susskind. "Very sad that he has to breathe every day." Vidal later called Capote's death a "good career move."
Vidal dryly observed that Capote had "raised lying into an art — a minor art" and that he "belongs less to the history of literature than the history of public relations."
"I find on TV I am often supposed to talk about fashions and famous society ladies," Vidal said. "I then remind the host that I am the one who talks about politics and Capote is the one who tells naughty stories about the rich and Mailer is the messiah."
As for Norman Mailer, he famously threw the contents of a drink and an ineffectual punch into Vidal's face at a glitterati gala thrown in honor of Princess Margaret (who had sent her regrets, perhaps wisely). The incident prompted Russell Baker to write a column about the beatings that the "bloodthirsty" Henry James had delivered to his literary rivals. "James finally retired from pugilism after Edith Wharton knocked him out for 35 minutes with her famous powder-puff uppercut during a chance meeting at Alice Roosevelt's coming-out party," Baker wrote.

In 1965, Capote showed up in Rome, where Vidal was living. “We had a pleasant drunken evening recalling who said what about whom, and I must say my blood pressure began to rise, but then all ended well,” Vidal recalled. “He has apparently finished that book (‘In Cold Blood’), though the last two times I saw him he had just finished the book on each of those occasions.”

“I can’t get over how his appearance has changed (I can hear him on the subject of me), but he is an interesting brackish color now, rather lined, with a jaw worthy of Somerset Maugham. For the first time in 20 years I suspect that he is intelligent.”

“I found him positively affectionate, which is sinister,” Vidal said. “What can he be up to?”

Vidal found he became even more popular once he acquired that apartment in Rome with Howard Austen. "Dear Maureen O'Hara," he once wrote. "Yes, you .... will be welcome (to come stay) ... You had better have a lot of gossip and better than your meagre letter suggests. Meanwhile I remain, as always, a Great American." 
Vidal was a godfather to the children of Joanne Woodward, Kathleen Tynan, Claire Bloom and Susan Sarandon. "Always a godfather, never a god," he said.

— Source: “Gore Vidal: A Biography” by Fred Kaplan

Somerset and the Supreme Solace

Art by Igor Morski

“Writing is the supreme solace,” said Somerset Maugham. “You shut the door, and within half an hour you have completely forgotten all the petty vexations that were previously occupying your thoughts and weighing you down … you are a free man again and whatever the ultimate fate of your work, no one else could have made a precisely similar pattern of words upon the page. It is yours and yours alone.”

The same could be said of all the arts. Those who can’t or won’t try them have been cheated or have cheated themselves out of one of life’s finer things.

Suave and Urbane

Somerset Maugham, then in his 70s, on his two 16th floor rooms at the Plaza in New York in the fall of 1945. "Everyone who comes in says: what a beautiful view of the park you have and I say: yes, it's a beautiful view of the park. Then they say: it must be simply lovely at night, and I say: yes, it's simply lovely at night. Then they say: you know, I'm never tired of this view and then I say: will you have a cocktail and they say: yes, and turn their back on the view with a sigh of relief." 
Maugham could be a quite a handful of cold potatoes, but he was undeniably suave and urbane.
— quote from "Maugham" by Ted Morgan

Le Jour de Maugham

Paris street scene by American impressionist painter Childe Hassam, 1859-1935

The English novelist and playwright Somerset Maugham was, according to biographer Ted Morgan, a mutely lonely man whose distance from others helped sharpen his acute powers of observation. Sounds chilly, yet it’s hard not to be warmed by Maugham’s era and milieu, particularly Paris in 1905 — a time and place made particularly cozy by the fact that French was Maugham’s first language. He had been born in the British Embassy in Paris.

“It was the Paris of La Belle Epoque, of small crafts, good living and low prices, of silk-blouse shops, goat-milking in the streets, Caran d’Ache cartoons and gas lamps,” Morgan wrote. “The English pound yielded 25 francs and a good dinner cost 2 francs 50. It was the Paris of music halls and café chantants, Lautrec’s Paris, Degas’ Paris. You went to the Concert Rouge to hear a chamber music quartet and ordered cerises au cognac. There were still horse-drawn buses and yellow fiacres whose drivers wore shiny white top hats and would take you anywhere within the city limits for a franc and a half.”

Paris was poised between eras and central to them, its 19^th century charms were charged with excitement by 20^th century innovation. Morgan noted that “…1905 was also the year of the automobile exposition at the Grand Palais. The first line of the Metro, Nation-Porte Dauphine, had been completed in 1901. There were electric lights, and in phonograph booths one could listen to Caruso records.”

“Maugham’s routine, which he would follow to the end of his life, was to write in the morning until about 12:30,” Morgan wrote. “After lunch he went out, often to museums. (Painter Gerald) Kelly took him to see the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently been accepted by the Luxembourg. Maugham, who would one day own an important collection of Impressionists, admitted, to his shame, that he could not make head or tail of them. In the evening Maugham often went to the theater (he admired the actress Dorziat). He particularly liked the Grand Guignol and his favorite sketch was a graphic display of sadomasochism called La Derniere Torture.”

Sounds wonderful, minus the ultimate torture. I can always do without the ultimate torture, thanks.

Bemused by Beauty

Actor Josh A. Dawson

“She had learnt long ago that common sense, intelligence, good nature and strength of character were unimportant in comparison with a pretty face. She shrugged her shoulders.”

— Somerset Maugham, “The Magician”

Yes, Maugham

By Dan Hagen

Sitting on our deck at that uniquely comfortable angle that only an Adirondack chair can offer. Sipping at the dark gold of an Old Brown Dog Ale. Looking out across the shameless green of spring in the slanting light of late afternoon. Glancing down, from time to time, to read a page or two of Somerset Maugham.

It’s a comfortable, drowsy way to end a day — so pleasant, in fact, that you make a mental note of it and file it away with those days you don’t want to lose.

I picked up this substantial two-volume hardcover set of Maugham’s complete short stories for next to nothing at one of those library book sales that must rank among life’s unalloyed pleasures.  

Graham Sutherland's 1949 portrait of Maugham

The volumes are matched gray Doubleday editions with gold-stamped lettering on the covers, and feel just right in the hand. Bibliophiles will know what I mean.

Some books underline the excellence of their intellectual content with a matching aesthetic presence, a certain physical solidity, texture and balance. Good books are like friends, but books such as these are almost like lovers.

Maugham is one of those writers who seems to have fallen through the cracks of time — not cheap and splashy enough to have acquired a devoted cult to preserve him, like an Edgar Rice Burroughs, but not fancy enough to earn accolades from the forces of literature, like a William Burroughs.

Maugham, an English writer of the leisure class in the early 20^th century, was a smart enough observer of fashion and human nature to have guessed correctly at his own posthumous fate. You can hear that awareness as a defensive note in his prefaces. A proud craftsman, Maugham seems to sense that he’ll be dismissed as a magazine writer who was too fond of a decent plot and a more-than-decent income, and not fond enough of his art.

His contemporary Noel Coward was also aware that he would suffer the same slings and arrows. Both were already out of fashion even in my youth. Both waved away such criticisms as the products of envy and arrogance, but both visibly flinched at them anyway.

When someone suggests you’re really a fraud, you tend to entertain the thought, at least for a moment, presuming you’re not a perfectly self-satisfied sociopath.

Ian Fleming, a friend of both Maugham and Coward, paid Maugham the compliment of a pastiche in his short story Quantum of Solace, with James Bond substituting for Maugham’s much more realistic British agent character, Ashenden. Maugham had been an intelligence agent in World War I, so Ashenden was Maugham himself.

But it was spying on human nature, not on state secrets, that interested Maugham — particularly the ironies of human nature (for example, the revelation that great, insightful artists can also be creeps).

Maugham's Moorish charm

Maugham was gay and, like Coward, made no issue of the fact while doing little to conceal it. That then-scandalous truth alone charged his privileged, globe-trotting social life with irony, and put him outside society while still in its center — the ideal position for an observer.

From the vantage point of a social sniper, Maugham targets types you immediately recognize as genuine, but were perhaps never consciously aware of until now.

“I thought him a rather odious young man, but I did not mind that,” Maugham reflects in The Voice of the Turtle. “It is very natural that clever young men should be rather odious. They are conscious of gifts that they do not know how to use. They are exasperated with the world that will not recognize their merit. They have something to give, and no hand is stretched out to receive it. They are impatient for the fame they regard as their due. No, I do not mind odious young men; it is when they are charming that I button up the pockets of my sympathy.”

Though cosmopolitan, Maugham was firmly fixed in his era and class. But nevertheless, he tried to look outside them from time to time, thus setting himself the task of a real artist.

In the novel The Moon and Sixpence, Maugham gives us a painter who coldly abandons his wife and children to live in Tahiti. And in the novel The Razor’s Edge, Maugham describes a young veteran from Chicago whose combat experiences in World War I have exposed for him the emptiness of American materialism. Seeking more through meditation in India, he returns home with something special to offer.

Maugham’s short stories can often double back on you in interesting ways, and, like James Thurber’s, are particularly entertaining if read aloud .

After Ashenden has helped arrange the capture and execution of a gross and vulgar German secret agent in The Traitor, we hear the German spy’s little bull terrier howling in agonized mourning. Instantly international intrigue is dwarfed by the tragedy of ordinary human reality, and it’s haunting, not a story you forget.

I enjoy the fact that Maugham himself is almost always a character in his stories, circling the action like a particularly sagacious ghost. His first-person narration gives us a well-established viewpoint and thus a kind of traveling companion for our journeys through the byways and sharp, sudden turns of human drama.

That first-person narrative was so much a part of Maugham’s style that it even carried over into the movies made from his books, where it was an unnecessary if charming affectation. The actor Herbert Marshall, as dryly sophisticated as museum parchment, essentially played Maugham more than once, in The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Razor’s Edge (1946).

When his short story collections were brought to the screen, Maugham himself introduced them, and his sagging, world-weary features became familiar to audiences around the world he had traveled.

The first-person observer who pays close attention to those around him, sometimes peripheral to the action, sometimes central to it. Semi-detached, like one of those houses in London. As confident as a cat, though occasionally fatuous, and sometimes even eloquent in his pronouncements.

I wonder why that appeals to me?