How Vidal Slipped City Through
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            Similar views are expressed by Paul Sullivan, a writer with whom Jim hooks up in Hollywood. During a heated moment in a New Orleans bar, Paul expresses the need for gay people to be open about their sexuality:

The real dignity is the dignity of a man realizing himself and functioning honestly and according to his own nature. … [W]e must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love but the emotion itself and let them respect anyone, no matter how different he is, if he attempts to share himself with another. As for homosexuality itself, it has always existed and always will and probably no explanation can be given for it.

However, when Jim points out a particularly butch older woman in the bar and asks if she is an example of someone who’s honest and open about who she is, Paul replies:

[T]hat isn’t what I meant. I didn’t mean defiance and I didn’t mean these people; these are exceptions, these are people so hunted that they have, at last, become totally perverse as a defense. No, I was thinking of the thousands like ourselves. Perfectly normal men and women, except for this overdevelopment of the other sex in them. They live in hiding now all over the country; I think that only a few ever practice what they feel. Most of them marry and have children and try to destroy the other sex in them; they never succeed, of course.

            Although Paul expresses the view that there is probably no explanation for why homosexuality exists, Vidal manages to posit several explanations that are wildly disconcerting and psychologically suspect at best. These include the possibility that homosexuality is a normal stage of human development that is sometimes arrested (adolescent boys will fool around, but most become straight) or, alternatively, that some unspecified fear is haunting American society and could be the cause (were the insecurities of capitalism to blame?). But the most perplexing hypothesis is that the dominance of women in American society may be responsible for homosexuality. This latter theory is most fully explored through the banter of a group of gay men attending a New York cocktail party hosted by one Rolly Rolloson, an effeminate, campy figure. They see Jim as the Teutonic and primitive type, who would be embodied by the most virile men in Germany, those who are involved in athletics or the military and engage in homosexual behavior. In contrast, it is the effeminate, oversensitive type that becomes homosexual in England and America, a phenomenon that they attribute to the dominance of women in these countries.

            Upon rereading these pages after many years, I was stunned. These passages are extremely bizarre and seem to be an exercise in gay misogyny that does little to explain the origins of homosexuality. Consequently, it is worth noting that when Vidal published his revision of The City and the Pillar in 1965, all of this material was excised. Keep in mind that when the novel was published in 1948, Vidal was only 23, and it’s not clear to what extent he was expressing his own views or simply recording what he had heard expressed by other people.

     By 1965, as Vidal was turning forty, he had solidified his basic view that there is no such thing as a gay personality. Indeed, one might argue that Vidal was the original social constructionist. In the original version of the novel, the adolescent Jim Willard dreams of both men and women, but after his encounter with Bob Ford he finds he has a decided preference. While this remains in the novel’s revision, one of the attendees during the revised cocktail party scene is more explicit: “Everyone is by nature bisexual. … Society, early conditioning, good or bad luck … determine the result. Nothing is ‘right.’ Only denial of instinct is wrong.” Second, although the revised version still praises the masculine Teutonic type, the others are not necessarily neurotic distortions, as before. Finally, the offensive views regarding women are gone. Regrettably, though, Paul Sullivan’s heartfelt pleas for tolerance were also cut in their entirety. Nevertheless, the revised novel is a much cleaner book, unencumbered by the politically incorrect baggage of the original.

            The revised version is also rid of an ending that many critics thought was too bleak. In the original 1948 version, when Jim Willard and Bob Ford finally reconnect in New York City, they retire to Bob’s hotel room after a night of heavy drinking. When Jim tries to make a pass at Bob, he is cruelly rebuffed. A violent fight breaks out, and in his rage Jim strangles Bob to death. It is a shattering and tragic ending, and when Vidal revised the ending, he apparently heeded the critics. This time when the fight breaks out, Jim, who is the stronger, pins Bob down on the bed and rapes him—a conclusion only slightly less bleak than the original.

            There is, however, a third ending to be found in an American paperback edition that was published in 1950. Instead of killing Bob, Jim renders him unconscious, his face discolored. Then, as in the original version, Jim picks him up off the floor and sets him lovingly on the bed. Although this ending might be viewed as ambiguous—as Vidal put it, “Did Jim actually kill Bob or … simply kill off the obsession?”—Vidal finally makes clear in his memoir, Palimpsest, that “Jim does not literally kill Bob, only the idea of him.”

            In Palimpsest, published in 1995, Vidal explains that after the publication of The City and the Pillar, he went through a period that he referred to as a blackout, or ten years in the wilderness, during which his novels went largely unreviewed and unnoticed. He was forced to turn to television, movies, theater, and writing under a fictitious name to survive. However, by the 1960s, Vidal was again receiving praise for such novels as Julian and Washington, D.C., while the political and cultural upheavals of that decade seemed to provide fertile ground for his brand of social satire. Indeed, by the late 1960s, Vidal was establishing himself as a go-to talkshow guest and urbane political commentator skewering the general stupidity he saw all around him. His satirical novels Myra Breckinridge and Myron were savagely brilliant in their rendering of a transsexual heroine.

            After the publication of the Myra Breckinridge saga, Vidal continued to write historical fiction and social satire but never revisited the violent intensity found in Myra’s story. Also, the flat style of The City and the Pillar is transformed in Vidal’s subsequent work into a style that contains the same hard edge but is aloof, elegant and often emotionally detached. Vidal is always the witty, sardonic social and political observer, but his critics often found him cold. However, that changed significantly when Vidal turned to writing his memoirs as he approached the final decades of his life.

In every edition of The City and the Pillar, there is a dedication page that reads: “For the memory of J.T.” The initials stand for Jimmy Trimble, and in Palimpsest Vidal reveals that Jimmy Trimble was the one great love of his life, the only person who had ever made him feel whole. In his memoir, Vidal’s recollections of Jimmy Trimble are as deeply emotional as Vidal ever got.

            They met at a boarding school in Washington, D.C. called St. Albans, and Vidal immediately saw his other half in Jimmy Trimble. The affair lasted for about two years, until they were fourteen years old, at which time Vidal was packed off to a succession of boarding schools, finally graduating from Exeter. They last saw each other at the age of seventeen at a dance in Washington, D.C., before each joined the armed forces to serve during World War II. Jimmy Trimble died at Iwo Jima, blown to bits by a grenade, and thereafter became “the unfinished business” of Vidal’s life.

            Although Vidal never believed in psychology and considered it so much hocus pocus, he was enormously well read, and while reading Plato’s Symposium he encountered Aristophanes’ explanation for the origins of sexual desire and love. It seems that in the beginning there were three sexes, each shaped like a globe: male, female, and hermaphrodite. After behaving offensively toward the king of the gods, they were split in two, leaving each half with a desperate yearning to find its other half. Thus, the male half of the hermaphrodite was drawn to its female half, while the two halves of the female globe were drawn to each other, as were the two halves of the male globe.

            Vidal continued to quote Aristophanes, who describes how the two halves upon meeting each other are intoxicated with affection, friendship, and love. Moreover, the purely sexual pleasure of their friendship can scarcely explain the overwhelming delight they take in each other’s company. In fact, their souls are longing for the unity they felt during that time long ago when they were whole.

            In 1948, Vidal was actually interviewed by Alfred Kinsey himself at the Astor Hotel bar in New York, which was generally packed with servicemen during and after World War II. Like Kinsey, Vidal did not believe in fixed sexual categories at that time. Therefore, it is highly significant that in Palimpsest, Vidal finally concluded that one has a primary attraction that is innate, immutable, and not a choice. At last Vidal accepted that his own primary attraction was to men. Through his reading of Plato, Vidal has come to believe that Jimmy Trimble was the only one who had made him whole.

            Vidal considered himself fortunate to be one of the few people that actually find their other half, even if Jimmy Trimble was destined to die young. However, Vidal did live together for over fifty years with a man named Howard Austen, and it is frustrating that Austen remains a cipher in Vidal’s memoir. More than once Vidal confessed that sex played no part in their relationship, and “where there is no desire or pursuit, there is no wholeness.” However, he wisely noted that “there are satisfying lesser states.” In the end, he bought cemetery plots for Austen and himself near Jimmy Trimble in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. At the end of his memoir, Vidal believed that he had written “for the first and last time, not the ghost story that I had feared but a love story … ending with us whole at last in the shade of a copper beech.”