RH: You'd been adamant for years about not wanting to do
biographies of living subjects. What made you change your
mind?
FK: I wanted very much to do a 20th-century American
figure. I had started with a late 18th, early 19th-century writer in
Thomas Carlyle, then gone forward in time to Dickens, then to Henry
James. I always wanted to do a fourth biography, because I had
conceived these biographies as not only vivid narrative lives but also
cultural histories. The main themes that run from book to book
attempt to address cultural developments and changes in Anglo-
American culture and society. Since I wanted to go from Henry James
to a figure who was completely American, completely of the 20th
century, I thought about the possibilities and then essentially put it
on hold. I didn't think I was going to come up with anybody, and
wasn't eager to do anybody still living. I then decided I would do a
biography of Mark Twain.
Then in January 1994, I got a call from Jay Parini. He told me that
Gore Vidal was looking for a biographer. Was I interested. "Well," I
said, "I don't want to say yes or no too quickly." He's controversial
and exciting; that's both a plus and a minus. He's also very much
alive, which was also a consideration. It's much harder to do a
biography of a living figure, there are certain problems that emerge
which I wasn't sure I wanted to confront. There were also some
practical problems; I was under contract to do the Twain biography
and well along with that research. "However," I told him, "it's
tempting enough, attractive enough, because I'm a Gore Vidal fan
and because it would fit into my larger scheme." The themes of
national identity, expatriation, sexual identity, artists as public
figures, would all certainly apply to Gore Vidal as well as my earlier
subjects.
So we had some discussions about it, then Jay put me in touch with
Gore. Vidal and I began discussions. It took a few months for me to
overcome my hesitation, and for some of the practical difficulties to
be worked through, and then I decided to go through with it. For
better or for worse.
RH: You spent hundreds of hours in conversation with Vidal. How
did that work out?
FK: Any job, no matter how glamorous it may look on the
surface, has its tedious and mechanical side. Some of my hundreds of
hours with Gore were wonderful and interesting. Some of them were
not. Some of them were hours in which he repeated things he'd
already told me once or twice before. In some hours he was sharp
and alert; in other hours he was tired. Some hours were convivial, in
which his late night pleasure in drinking was part of our
conversational tone. Sometimes I talked to him by telephone rather
than face to face. The face to face interviews were done in New York,
Washington, and Ravello. As I saw the tapes of our conversations
mounting up, the pile getting bigger and bigger, I would inwardly
groan at the realization that I'd have to transcribe them. I tried to
have a secretary transcribe them, but it turned out to be more
trouble and work for me than it was worth. I quickly discovered that
it was more efficient--though extremely time-consuming and tiring--
to do them all myself.
Some of the time I spent with Gore was a great deal of fun. We met
in restaurants, in hotel rooms, often at his home in Ravello. Gore's
witty, spontaneously sharp, with a kind of acute intelligence and
brilliant articulation I've never seen in anybody else before. He is
funny that nobody else I know is, and just able to come up
with a line that pierces to the heart of a matter instantly. Like
everybody else, though, he only has so much to say, and if you've
heard it once or twice, the third time isn't always as pleasurable. And
there was occasional tension between us, which I'm sure you want to
hear about--
RH: You bet! As you probed into Vidal's life, I'm sure there were
things he didn't want to discuss with you.
FK: Absolutely. Gore is a man who creates the impression of
absolute frankness about what's on his mind and about his past. But
at the same time, he's capable of self-evasion and other evasion. He's
a man who claims not to have a psyche--utter nonsense--who claims
not to have an unconscious, though he'll discuss his unconscious if it
suits his needs to do so. One of the ways Gore functions effectively is
to refuse to admit into his consciousness, his self-awareness, things
about himself that are impediments to doing the things he wants to
do. He has very little to do with remorse. He claims that he never
regrets, just moves on, and there's some truth to that. There's a
ruthlessness that's almost superhuman. But it's clear to me that he is
regretful and sorry about certain things, though he won't ever say
that he is, not directly, and will find a way to absorb the regret
without damaging his ability to plow on and do what he likes.
RH: What sort of direct tension did you experience with
him?
FK: One of the topics that almost always produced tension was
sexuality. As I describe it in the book, there's that moment where
we'd been talking for a long period of time and I asked him if two
people whose names had come up had ever slept together. He
exploded: "Kaplan, I'm getting sick and tired of questions about who
slept with who! You'll never understand how we work, what our
sexual life is about! You're just too straight, bourgeois, too
inexperienced in that world, and I fear for what it is you'll write
about my sexuality!"
I said, "OK, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong. Let's take a
break." A half hour later, we resumed as if nothing had happened.
RH: There are parts of his life that, even though he's written about
them in Palimpsest--like his affair with Anais Nin, he remains
prickly about.
FK: More than prickly. Evasive, distortive... He hates the idea
that he had an affair with Anais Nin. Not just that they made at least
one effort under her prodding to go to bed together which was
unsuccessful, because he didn't want to. But it's clear that he loved
her and she loved him in any reasonable sense of the word 'love.' He
was deeply, intimately involved with her; she meant a great deal to
him. In retrospect, he hates that idea, doesn't want the world to
know about it. So whenever it comes up, he has slighting things to
say about her. Well, I went back to the letters, the documents they
exchanged in those days. Gore grumbled--"God knows what you're
coming up with"--and of course hoped that my take on his
relationship with Nin would corroborate his revisionist account in
Palimpsest. There's a lot of revisionism in Palimpsest,
rewriting the past to suit his own needs. Well, we all do that, I'm not
criticizing him for doing it--why not? If you get a chance to make
yourself look better, or something in your past that you're
embarrassed about, and you can fix it, go ahead. But Gore fears that
things in his past will continue to be used against him in the present
by his enemies.
As Gore's biographer, it was important for me to see how he looked
at the world then, how he looks at it now, but also to see what the
facts are. What do the documents that establish the record reveal?
The biography presents his view of things, but also provides a check
against his revision of the past.
RH: In doing this, it sounds like you didn't experience the sort of
creative crisis Edmund Morris faced in writing about Ronald Reagan.
No moment when you saw absolutely no way how to go
forward.
FK: No. Gore has remarked a number of times to me and other
people, "How's Kaplan going to write about my life?" It's all on the
record, all in the open, there's no depth--a lot of publication, a lot of
talk, but no depth. In a certain way he's right, but he's not right in
the way that Edmund Morris is probably right when he says that he
tried to write about Reagan, he found "no there there." I was working
with the Vidal papers at the University of Wisconsion library. Morris
was at the table next to me, with the Warner Brothers documents,
and he leaned over and said to me, "Ahhhh, at least you have an
interesting subject!"
And he's right. His problem was that he didn't find Reagan
interesting as a human being, and that he himself is not all that
interested in politics. Since he didn't create a Reagan biography with
political drama, he wanted to depict the real inner Reagan. And when
he couldn't find the inner Reagan, he had a crisis. I never had that
crisis. One, I am interested in politics and social issues, and there's a
lot of that in Gore's life. I'm a biographer of literary figures because I
love literature, and I think Gore's an incredibly fine writer of
immense talent and productivity.
RH: What was one of the things that surprised you most as you
came to know Vidal both in person and through your
research?
FK: I still find it amazing that Gore can possess a combination
of courtliness, discretion, and sensitivity on the one hand, and on the
other can be absolutely brusque--by normal standards just impolite
with people. I'm not sure what to make out of it, but it astounds me
that he can totally reject the normal courtesies of daily life. He often
doesn't say goodbye to people. He just turns around and leaves.
Maybe it's a certain bourgeois innocence on my part, this belief that
everybody's supposed to say hello and goodbye. But Gore doesn't do
the things that people are expected to do.
What surprised me at first, but not over time, was his remarkable
strength. A combination of physical strength and of will power. It's
one of the signs of potential for great productivity, a sense of
discipline and endurance that Carlyle and Dickens--and James, in his
way--all possessed. I think what differentiates "great" people from
others is that they have a steely, disciplined energy and strength--
both mental and physical--and Gore has that.
RH: What's next for you?
FK: I'm reimmersing myself in Mark Twain. I have a contract
to deliver a manuscript in about two years. Of course there are
interesting connections between Twain and Vidal: self-projection,
celebrity, political gadflys, humor mixed with deep seriousness. And
many people don't realize the extent of Twain's love-hate
relationship with America. He exiled himself from the States for ten
years at one point.
I put this biography on hold because Gore Vidal wanted his
biography done sooner rather than later. He wanted it to appear in
his own lifetime. Some people will raise their eyebrows at that. It's
certainly something to think about, whether that's a wise choice or
not. I could not persuade him to allow me to get all the work done
and then...you know, wait. And, hey, maybe I would go before him,
you never know.
