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TWENTY-EIGHT

I first knew Rome in 1939, a city where peasants, reeking of garlic, came to market rather like their counterparts (less the garlic) in Washington, D.C., while Mussolini’s Blackshirts were everywhere. Then there was the Rome of 1948–1949 inhabited by Tennessee and Frederick Prokosch, a poet-novelist, while such composers as Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber were to be found at the American Academy. Life was still wartime austere but the dollar exchange rate was all in our favor which made life easy for us if not the Romans. Tennessee took a ground-floor flat in the Via Aurora a block or two from Via Veneto and the gardens of the Villa Borghese. I stayed nearby in the Hotel Eden, living off the fortune I’d earned from The City and the Pillar, a vast $20,000. Although I was supposed to have gone to Harvard after I got out of the army in 1946, joining many of my Exeter classmates, I had decided that after a lifetime of being institutionalized (imprisoned is more like it) in a half-dozen boarding schools, summer camps, the awful Los Alamos Ranch School where each boy had his own horse (mine was an ambulatory boneyard aptly called Two-bits)—the Ranch School was seized by the army and became the birthplace of the atomic bomb—then after nearly three years in the army, the thought of four years at Harvard was unbearable. Former Exeter classmates thought I was plainly doomed (I had no trust fund). I would “live by writing,” I said. And so I did to their amazement—even chagrin since many of them had literary ambitions but some of the most talented had lost their nerve in the war. Though “nerve” is hardly the word. “Will” is possibly better. A friend at school, Bob Bingham, was energetically ambitious prewar, but when the war ended and he tried his hand at novel-writing somehow he was out of focus. He had had a bad time of it in the infantry in France where Lewis Sibley, another classmate, was killed: Sibley was already a distinguished poet at seventeen. A year ago I read some of his poems over WBAI radio in New York. The response was as wonderful as it was sad. The infamous “Battle of the Bulge” in France during winter must have been a particular horror for barely trained eighteen-year-old soldiers. Later, I was shown some of Sibley’s letters. The army with its unerring gift for placing people where they would be least useful and most vulnerable had made the nearly blind Sibley a scout. His reported adventures began when his only pair of glasses was broken and the army’s difficulty in supplying him with a new pair reduced his utility as a scout in freezing weather. That he should not, near-blind as he was, have been placed in the infantry was a sign of the general madness of that Good War as it lurched toward a victorious conclusion thanks to Soviet ground troops. Eisenhower, for political reasons, had held back General Patton’s army so that the British Montgomery could at least look competent and the Russians could get to Berlin first, all of which did nothing much for American morale. Anyway, Sibley, wearing new glasses, was duly massacred just as another schoolmate—from St. Albans, not Exeter—was being embraced in a foxhole on Iwo Jima by a Japanese with grenades on his belt that democratically blew out both their stomachs. It is my impression that the so-called “best and brightest” were routinely killed off which might explain the notoriously low level of those now in political life and, to be fair, in the arts as well. Recently, I looked through the 1943 yearbook of our graduating class. As I looked at the pictures, trying to figure out who was who, I was struck by how old we all looked. For the most part, our graduating class averaged seventeen years old; yet there was a photo of three seniors standing side by side; they look as if they are in their early forties. Of course within months of graduation we would all be in the war and so it is possible that kindly fate was telescoping for us the selves that we might have become. Since a number of us would soon be dead, we were being allowed by a jocular nature—or by a magic Kodak—to see ourselves not only grown up but middle aged as well. There is a picture of Bingham and me on a lawn in back of Langdell Hall where I roomed. I am lying on the grass with a book, he is standing over me. We were both editors of the Exeter Review, the school’s literary magazine which gave rise, under Bingham’s managing editorship, to more intricate rows than any I was ever to encounter, grown up, on the board of Partisan Review. In a way it was nice of fate to give us all a preview of what we were not apt to live long enough to experience for real. Bingham ended up as an editor at Max Ascoli’s The Reporter and, later, as a sort of managing editor at The New Yorker. We saw little of each other, once grown. Then, one day I got a letter from him to announce that he had a brain tumor and it looked as if he was going to precede me into the long night. Bob and his wife came to Rome but I was away and Howard took them out to dinner. I asked Howard for details. “Well, it was like they had made themselves up to look older, with gray hair and all that.” Rather the way the 1943 yearbook had added a dozen or more years to those of us perhaps most vulnerable to an early death and so presumably curious to get a preview of what we might have become.

I recall in grade school that often a class would vow that in twenty years we would all meet again to see what time had done. But at Exeter, even without the devouring war in wait to pounce, we had no time for such sentimentality. Although most of my relationships with classmates were fairly amiable, once the war was done, I saw Bingham only a few times over the years with another classmate, A. K. Lewis, who had worked with me in the summer of 1942 at a Camden, New Jersey, factory where molded plywood wing tips for fighter planes were made. I was hopeless at the work; he was not. Years later he wrote the script for a wonderful movie called Klute. At Exeter we had made a schoolboy bet about which one of us would lose his hair first. Thirty years later, in Hollywood, he paid me the $100 that he owed me and I spent it on our dinner.

Bob Bingham is standing; I am on the grass—outside Langdell Hall where I lived at Exeter. We are about to quarrel over which stories were to appear in the next issue of the Exeter Review which we coedited much of the time, a nice preparation for later serving on the board of Partisan Review.

I have not gone to any of our class reunions. I can’t think why.

Back to Rome in the sixties. Like Venus, Myra Breckinridge rose or rather leapt from her sea of yellow legal pads. Meanwhile, Roman life agreed with both Howard and me. All sorts of people that we knew and did not know came through town: memorable was Isherwood on his way back from a first visit to India whose Vedanta texts he had written so much about. Overwhelmed by the subcontinent’s proverbial teeming millions, he foresaw, with some equanimity, the eventual dying out of the fragile white race. “But we must,” he said solemnly, “set aside reservations for the better-looking blonds, the Danes and so on. They must be preserved like rare unicorns. Certainly, the Indians will enjoy them in their reservations along with all that snow we’ll shovel in to provide the right Arctic touch.”

I gave the completed Myra to my editor Ned Bradford at Little, Brown—a Boston publishing house. I hoped that Ned and the publisher, Arthur Thornhill, would not be too upset by Myra’s exuberant pansexuality. Fortunately, they were not.