Gore Vidal, ca. 1948. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten

Gore Vidal lives in a run-down penthouse above Rome’s Largo Argentina: reconstructed temples from the pre-Augustan era are set incongruously in the middle of what looks to be Columbus Circle without the charm. It is August. Rome is deserted. The heat is breathtaking during the day, but at sundown a cool wind starts and the birds swarm in the blue-gold Tiepolo sky. He sits on a large terrace lined with plants in need of watering.

In photographs, or on television, Gore Vidal appears to be dark-haired and somewhat slight. He is neither. He stands six feet; his chest is broad and deep (a legacy of Alpine ancestors); despite constant attendance at a gymnasium, the once flat stomach is now reorganizing itself as a most definite paunch. He regards his own deterioration with fascination: “After all, in fifteen months I shall be fifty,” he declares, apparently pleased and disturbed in equal parts.

His hair is light brown, evenly streaked with white. His teeth are meticulously capped. The agate-yellow eyes are myopic, and when he does not wear glasses he tends to squint. The voice . . . well, everyone knows the voice. He sits now in a broken wicker armchair; the baroque dome of San Andrea della Valle appears to float above his head. He wears a blue shirt, gray trousers, sandals. Although he talks naturally in complete sentences, he is not at ease talking about his own work . . . he prefers that others be the subject of his scrutiny. An accomplished debater, he tends to slip away from the personal, the inconvenient.

INTERVIEWER

When did you first start writing?

GORE VIDAL

I would suppose at five or six, whenever I learned how to read. Actually, I can’t remember when I was not writing. I was taught to read by my grandmother. Central to her method was a tale of unnatural love called “The Duck and the Kangaroo.” Then, because my grandfather, Senator Gore, was blind, I was required early on to read grown-up books to him, mostly constitutional law and, of course, the Congressional Record. The later continence of my style is a miracle, considering those years of piping the additional remarks of Mr. Borah of Idaho.

INTERVIEWER

When did you begin your first novel?

VIDAL

At about seven. A novel closely based on a mystery movie I had seen, something to do with “the blue room” or “hotel” (not Stephen Crane’s). I recall, fondly, that there was one joke. The character based on my grandmother kept interrupting everybody because “she had not been listening.” Merriment in the family during the first reading. It doesn’t take much to launch a wit. Then I wrote a great deal of didactic poetry, all bad. With puberty the poetry came to resemble “Invictus,” the novels Of Human Bondage. Between fourteen and nineteen I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

INTERVIEWER

How far did you get on these novels?

VIDAL

A few chapters, usually. I did get halfway through the one written before Williwaw. All about someone who deserted from the army—no doubt reflecting my state of mind, since I was in the army during the war (from seventeen to twenty). Unfortunately, my protagonist deserted to Mexico. Since I had never been to Mexico, I was obliged to stop.

INTERVIEWER

What were the other five about? School?

VIDAL

No. I began the first really ambitious one when I was fourteen or fifteen. I had gone to Europe in the summer of ‘39 and visited Rome. One night I saw Mussolini in the flesh at the Baths of Caracalla—no, he was not bathing but listening to Turandot. The baths are used for staging operas. I thought him splendid! That jaw, that splendid emptiness. After all, I had been brought up with politicians. He was an exotic variation on something quite familiar to me. So I started a novel about a dictator in Rome, filled with intrigue and passion, Machiavellian combinazione. But that didn’t get finished either, despite my close study of the strategies of E. Phillips Oppenheim.

INTERVIEWER

Finishing Williwaw at nineteen broke the barrier; it was published and you wrote three novels in quick succession.

VIDAL

Yes. Every five minutes it seemed. Contrary to legend, I had no money. Since I lived on publishers’ advances, it was fairly urgent that I keep on publishing every year. But of course I wanted to publish every year. I felt no strain, though looking back over the books I can detect a strain in the writing of them. Much of the thinness of those early novels is simply the pressure that I was under. Anyway, I’ve gone back and rewritten several of them. They are still less than marvelous but better than they were.

INTERVIEWER

What do you feel about going back and rewriting? Don’t you think in a way that you’re changing what another person, the younger Vidal, did?

VIDAL

No. You are stuck with that early self for good or ill, and you can’t do anything about it even if you want to—short of total suppression. For me, revising is mostly a matter of language and selection. I don’t try to change the narrative or the point of view, except perhaps toward the end of The City and the Pillar. I felt obligated to try a new kind of ending. But something like Dark Green, Bright Red needed a paring away of irrelevancies—the fault of all American naturalistic writing from Hawthorne to, well, name almost any American writer today. I noticed recently the same random accretion of details in William Dean Howells—a very good writer, yet since he is unable to select the one detail that will best express his meaning, he gives us everything that occurs to him and the result is often a shapeless daydream. Twain, too, rambles and rambles, hoping that something will turn up. In his best work it does rather often. In the rest—painful logorrhea.

INTERVIEWER

You once said that the test of a good work, or a perfect work, is whether the author can reread it without embarrassment. How did you feel when you reread your early books?

VIDAL

Sometimes less embarrassed than others. Rereading Williwaw, I was struck by the coolness of the prose. There is nothing in excess. I am still impressed by that young writer’s control of his very small material. When I prepared the last edition, I don’t suppose I cut away more than a dozen sentences. The next book, on the other hand, In a Yellow Wood, is in limbo forever. I can’t rewrite it because it’s so bad that I can’t reread it. The effect, I fear, of meeting and being “ensorcelled” by Anaïs Nin. Or Jack London meets Elinor Glyn. Wow!

INTERVIEWER

What about your first “successful” novel, The City and the Pillar?

VIDAL

A strange book because it was, as they say, the first of its kind, without going into any great detail as to what its kind is. To tell such a story then was an act of considerable moral courage. Unfortunately, it was not an act of very great artistic courage, since I chose deliberately to write in the flat, gray, naturalistic style of James T. Farrell. Tactically, if not aesthetically, this was for a good reason. Up until then homosexuality in literature was always exotic: Firbank, on the one hand; green carnations, on the other. I wanted to deal with an absolutely ordinary, all-American, lower-middle-class young man and his world. To show the dead-on “normality” of the homosexual experience. Unfortunately, I didn’t know too many lower-middle-class, all-American young men—except for those years in the army when I spent a good deal of time blocking out my fellow soldiers. So I made it all up. But the result must have had a certain authenticity. Tennessee Williams read it in 1948 and said of the family scenes, “Our fathers were very much alike.” He was surprised when I told him that Jim Willard and his family were all invented. Tennessee also said, “I don’t like the ending. I don’t think you realized what a good book you had written.” At the time, of course, I thought the ending “powerful.”