High Time I Read This!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                               Now, darlings, I know it is fashionable, in some circles, to call Gore Vidal "BORE Vidal," but,  honestly, I cannot find a thing wrong with his fiction.  Sure, "Myra Breckinridge" was overrated, but some of his historical fiction is brilliant.

                                                 So, I thought it was time I read "The City And The Pillar," which I used to think was Vidal's first  novel, (it wasn't; that belongs to a WWII novel called "Williwaw") but purportedly the first where a known novelist took on the subject of homosexuality.  Interesting that both this and Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms" were both published in January of 1948.  Guess Gore felt he had to be first.  But I have news for him--Truman wrote the better book.

                                                "The City And The Pillar" has to be read within  the context of when it was written.  Otherwise, it would seem dated and predictable.  But in 1948, this must have caused raised eyebrows across America; I can tell you, this book was not in my parents' house.

                                                   The two main characters are Jim Willard and Bob Ford, who have been  schoolmates in the same small town, and are about to graduate out into the world.  Jim has romantic  feelings  for Bob, for whom he pines, and those feelings are blatantly sexual.  They even,  right after graduation, have an encounter, a la "Brokeback Mountain" in a private, abandoned slave cabin in the woods; the small town is in Virginia.  This was fine with me.  What was hard to for me to swallow that Vidal could, as he lived during this period, is that Jim bases a lot of his decisions--like shipping out to sea--because he is pining and searching for Bob.  Bob,  meanwhile, is just leading his own life.  Jim ends up on the gay side of Hollywood as some sort of glorified call boy to a closeted film actor named Ronald Shaw,  (fill in here Scotty Bowers and Walter Pidgeon) unaware that he (Jim) is just kidding himself.  And he is  still pining for Bob.  When he returns to his Virginia town, Jim finds Bob has settled into his wife's father's insurance business, married to Sally, who used to be the town's tramp, but is now a domestic goddess. He accepts this, but, a year later,  during a meeting in New York,  minus Sally,  Jim and Bob have a confrontation,  when Jim advances on him in a hotel room, and Bob fights back, rejecting him, calling Jim "queer," insisting he is not gay.  Remember, this was according to beliefs in 1948.  What I find even more interesting is the climax.  In the original manuscript, Jim murdered Bob. Where would that have left poor Sally?  In the revised version, now out and which I read, Jim humiliates Bob by raping him.  Now, Bob has to live with that, and what will he tell Sally?  I actually think this is a better climax.

                                                     But the ending leaves Bob alone, by the docks, with the option of suicide, looking for action, or living a life of loneliness.  These were the options in 1948; what is sad is Vidal held out no hope for change, or could not see it.  But, then, for all his brazenness, I thought he was a bit of a closet case, himself.

                                                       "The City And The Pillar" deserves to be read.   But as a benchmark,  not a manifesto.

                                                           We have come too far, darlings,  for that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!