Free Gore Vidal by Fred Kaplan Page A

his memory, a blur. His fictional alter ego had been “ sick to his stomach the first day, and all his memories after that were a confusion: noise, paste, paper, sandboxes.” Later he recalled that “as we came downstairs, one of the teachers belted out ‘
Celeste Aïda’
on the piano. As a result, it is the only Verdi opera I don’t care for.” Even first-grade classes in those distant days were highly structured. For some reason, his best grades were in citizenship, mathematics, and music, his lowest in composition, reading, and spelling, as if this were some alternative Eugene Luther Vidal, later to be exchanged for the real one. His handwriting was already dreadful. His mother suddenly became concerned about him, particularly his grades. Why wasn’t he making more of an effort? If he didn’t do better, he would be punished. She decided a change of school was called for. Abruptly, for the next year, he was enrolled in the second grade at The Landon School for Boys, though the record is as much a blur and a blank as his memory. His home address was now again 1500 Broad Branch Road, Rock Creek Park. For third grade, Nina moved him again, this time to the larger Sidwell Friends School, where he was to stay for grades three through five. He had occasional conversations with Mr. Sidwell himself, “an ancient Quaker whose elephantine ears were filled with hair while numerous liverspots made piebald his kindly bald head.” At all three schools reading was taught phonetically. Early on, at Potomac or Landon, he was taught by the Calvert method. “With Calvert you cut out pictures of Greek gods and you glued them into books,” he recalled, “a form of teaching which doesn’t exist anymore. They tried to make it interesting and visual, but you also had to know about syllables, that a sentence was made up of words which were made up of little syllables, like a train.” During his first two years at Sidwell Friends the real Eugene Luther Vidal materialized, with A’s in reading, history, and spelling and respectable grades throughout, except for the constant dismal D’s for penmanship. On the playing fields he was noticeably uninterested, his marks low. In fifth grade all his marks plunged. Though forced to be there in body, he had withdrawn his mind. At home, at Rock Creek Park, he read to his grandfather and now, also, for long hours to himself. He soon began to write, bits of prose stories and poems. He had decided to do at school only what he was forced to. What he wanted was to read. The Senator had no objections. On the contrary: reading had become a strong bond between them. Nina, though, was appalled. She did not want a son who shut himself up with books, who did not “mix,” one of her favorite words. Since she read little to nothing, a son who read a great deal worried her. He could not be up to any good or fit into her world. Irritated, she constantly urged him to play outdoors. She wanted him to get better grades, to be popular in ways that fit her values. School was the training ground, the entranceway to success, power, and glamour. Little Gene was simply not trying hard enough to do the right thing. Frustrated, disappointed, with an explosive temper, more volatile because of alcohol, she felt compelled to exhort, then criticize, then hit. His fictional surrogate in
The Season of Comfort
is beaten at least once a month, at one time with a switch from a dogwood tree “ until blood came , until his bare legs bled…. The light of her cigarette burned red in the dark … and when he tried to hold the stick she burned one of his hands.”
    Sometimes indifferent, at other times bossy, Nina was frighteningly unpredictable. Occasionally she was companionable, chatty in a way the boy liked, especially as he got older and more curious about the adult world. “My mother didn’t play with me. But she talked. She was very