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The City and the Pillar, by Gore Vidal
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- Sales Rank: #11092520 in Books
- Published on: 1949
- Binding: Hardcover
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A classic, a must read!
By Carlos T. Mock
The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
The book opens in the present - sometime in the late 1940's in a bar where men looked for men - and the protagonist, Jim Willard, has a flashback of his life.
Jim Willard, a junior in high school in the late 1930's in a small town in Virginia, is the oldest of three children in a marriage that could best be described as cold. He's a very good tennis player but is not popular with the girls - not because he's ugly - he's a beautiful blond and muscular man - but rather because he's secretly in love with Bob Ford. Just as Bob is going to graduate from high school, Jim and Bob go camping to a secluded cabin in the woods and they have sex. Jim is infatuated with Bob for life.
Bob decides he wants to sail: he joins the Merchant Marine and even though he writes to Jim for a short while, Bob practically disappears from Jim's life. Trying to find Bob, Jim goes to New York City with $75 in his pocket. Out of money and unable to find Bob, Jim becomes a cabin boy on a cruise ship. Jim sails all over the world until he's exposed by a fellow cabin boy, Collins, who calls him queer after Jim is unable to have sex with a woman.
After this episode, Jim settles in L. A. where he becomes a tennis instructor at the Garden Hotel in Beverly Hills. He is introduced to the famous actor Ronald Shaw by Leaper, one of the bellhops at the hotel, and starts an affair with Mr. Shaw.
Jim can't bring himself to love Mr. Shaw - he's still in love with Bob. Their affair is ended when Jim meets the writer Paul Sullivan who is in his late twenties. Jim is drawn to Paul because he seems so different from the other, more stereotypical homosexuals he meets at Hollywood parties. Bob had married once - although he never consummated the marriage.
Again, Jim can't love Paul because he's still in love with Bob. Jim considers Paul adequate for the time being. Paul however, needing some pain in his relationships for artistic inspiration, introduces Jim to Maria Verlaine, who seems to specialize in seducing homosexuals, hoping his relationship will end in a suitably tragic way. Together, the three go to Yucatán, where Maria has to settle an inheritance. Jim actually falls in love with Maria, but he is unable to perform sexually. They remain good friends: lovers in every way but the physical part.
This affair is broken up by WWII. Both Paul and Jim enlist. Jim gets transferred to a Colorado Air Force base, where he must deal with his sexuality. Bob ends up as a war correspondent. Due to the cold Colorado weather, Jim contracts a severe case of Strep throat which almost kills him. This leads to rheumatoid arthritis and a honorable discharge with disability benefits.
Jim goes back to New York, where he meets Maria and Ronald again. Ronald has been forced to marry a lesbian, Calla Petra, by studio executives to uphold his public image and tries unsuccessfully to become a stage actor. He also introduces Jim to his local friends like the effeminate millionaire, Nicholas J. Rolloson (Rolly) . Rolly has frequent parties where he celebrates his two passions: modern art and the military.
Jim begins frequenting gay bars to find sexual relief. Later, he meets Paul at a party and the two start an open relationship, not because of passion, but out of loneliness.
In the meantime, Jim's father dies and Bob marries his childhood sweetheart, Sally Mergendall. When Jim finally goes home for Christmas, Jim meets with Bob. Jim is very excited and determined to win Bob back. Jim realizes that Sally wants Bob to settle down and leave the Merchant Marine, but Bob doesn't want to settle down. Jim arranges an appointment with Bob on his next stop in New York, hoping their affair can resume.
The resolution of their relationship comes in New York, where they end up on the bed in Bob's hotel room after an all night out drinking. When Jim finally thinks he has attained what he wants, he moves closer. Grabbing Bob's "sex", he panics. Bob is outraged to be thought of as gay, and punches Jim in the face. The two struggle and Jim wins because he is stronger. Jim is infuriated enough to murder Bob but settles on raping Bob and then leaves the room. He then resumes a loveless life...
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
a coping mechanism to occupy space and time on this romantic quest of idealized love. Will Jim find it
By Amazon Customer
Considering Gore Vidal wrote the novel in 1948 and it chronicles this nomadic journey of a young gay man, Jim Willard, is, in itself, quite remarkable. The book became an International bestseller, catapulted Vidal into the literary mainstream and gave him carte blanche into the pithy arena of politics and swanky social observation. A romantic crush on a high-school sweetheart, a stolen, sexual encounter in a hidden oasis sets the novel off and Jim Willard searches the world to regain that precious remembered moment. Time, faces, men and women all seem insignificant, a coping mechanism to occupy space and time on this romantic quest of idealized love. Will Jim find it? Will Jim’s journey ultimately end happily ever after? Can he rekindle the fantasy that has kept him hostage? No, but what Vidal does reveal in quiet gusto is our innate ability of a species to use. The characters Jim wades through to get to his means become a sad, blank, cardboard cast. Love becomes usury – a painful itch to scratch – in the meantime. The faces and bodies and personalities are either stereotypically charming, offensive, movie-star good-looking, or just plain putrid…and beauty, at any level, will always win out. With a price. There are no free lunches in The City and the Pillar. On a grander scope: the deprivation of a connected spiritual inner journey versus the immediate and compulsive urges of the flesh. It is obvious which side wins out.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Both historically, and at face value,
By Julie Vognar
I found this to be a fine book. The prose is spare, lean, direct--much like Jim, its protagonist. It does not have the eloquence or depth of Vidal's later work, but it doesn't TRY to--it stays within itself. The official amazon.com reviwer has said not to read it for the sex, and this is of course true. The only sex scene actually described is described metaphorically, but so beautifully as to inspire Thomas Mann to call it (in the word of one translator) "glorious." Vidal himself uses a more modest word in translating Mann's diary entry, though he's very proud that Mann credited this book with inspiring him to take up "Felix Krull" again.
The book is NOTHING like "Brokeback Miountain," either the movie or the short story. Although Jim resists for a time thinking of himself as gay, and spends the years between 17 and 22 on a quest for the lost love with whom he spent most of a weekend having sex near an abandoned slave cabin close to their homes in a small Virginia town, this quest is interrupted by fairly long-term relatioships with other men, whom he meets after 'going to sea," following in the foosteps of that lost love. The Hollywood actor and the sweet but not very successful writer, in Hollywood, New Orleans and further south--and then again in New York City, where he meets both again, provide an interesting and very realistic sounding mileau for a young gay man on the loose in 1946 and shortly thereafter. He never has sex with a woman, and quits trying after one attempt with a woman he's very fond of.
The end of his quest--and I read the revised, less "black" version--made me scream "Oh no!" But after thinking about it a while, I shouldn't have been surprised.
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