[In the following review, Woods offers an unfavorable assessment of Vidal's revised version of The City and the Pillar, which, according to Woods, muddles rather than improves the original. Woods also comments on A Thirsty Evil, which he regards as significant to the history of gay literature, though the individual stories are unremarkable.]

The City and the Pillar was Gore Vidal’s third novel, published in 1948 when he was only twenty-one. It upset his grandfather and determined his future reputation as a maverick. He cannot have been surprised or disappointed.

The emotional impetus of the book comes from a bucolic idyll near its start, when two schoolfriends, Jim Willard and Bob Ford, go camping together just after graduation. During a healthily buddyish session of sun-bathing, wrestling and skinny-dipping—that most elemental affirmation of American boyhood—they suddenly find themselves making love. Although Vidal’s style, on this occasion strategically copied from the macho James T. Farrell, is restrained and flat, he nevertheless manages to characterize this first sexual event in hyperbolic terms as a Platonic (if not platonic) meeting of estranged halves: “Now they were complete, each became the other, as their bodies collided with a primal violence, like to like, metal to magnet, half to half and the whole restored.”

However, as it later turns out, Jim is homosexual but Bob (though Jim does not yet know it) is not. Both literally and metaphorically, they go off in opposite directions. Jim spends the whole of the rest of the book searching for Bob, his lost half. His quest takes him into the merchant marine and then to Hollywood, the Air Corps and then the New York Bar scene. He sleeps with other men, but none matches up to the purity of his first love.

The novel’s title refers, of course, to the unfortunately hesitant retreat of Lot’s wife from Sodom. There are also references to Orpheus’ descent into the underworld in search of Eurydice. These are two very different myths, but they are used here to underline the same message. Even if its whole tendency is nostalgic for adolescent pastoral, the moral of the story is Don’t Look Back.

Vidal’s original intention, as stated in the afterword to the edition he revised in 1965, was not aesthetic but political: “to shatter the stereotype” of homosexuality as a mental deficiency confined mainly to ballet dancers and interior decorators, “by taking as my protagonist a completely ordinary boy of the middle class”. He would then send this unexceptional Dante, unaccompanied, into the homosexual “underworld” and observe his impressions. The risk involved in this procedure is a familiar one: if you choose to create a dull protagonist you may end up with a dull book.

But there is dull and dull. When The City and the Pillar was first published, it was dismissed by the New Yorker (January 10, 1948) as merely containing “the kind of dreary information that accumulates on a metropolitan police blotter”. This was just catty anti-homosexualism: anyone knows that a police blotter is likely to be more interesting than most respectable novels. In fact, Vidal’s book was offering the American fiction-reading public something which they had never seen before. It is now hard to imagine the shock many must have felt when that early bathing scene veered into something altogether stickier.

It does have to be said, though, that the book was completed before Vidal became witty. There is little sign here of the patrician bruiser of the essays. His short stories, too, are distinguished by their worthy social agenda and, for the time, their daringly pro-gay stance. The stories in A Thirsty Evil were first collected in 1956 but actually date from earlier, nearer the time of the novel. They are of interest mainly because of their place in the literature of homosexuality. The ones on other themes are extremely weak, like dutiful creative-writing exercises.

The new edition of The City and the Pillar, which the dust-jacket describes as “Revised and Unexpurgated” and in which, according to the flyleaf, “cuts have been restored and the ending revised”, is a mess. Vidal evidently wants to have his cake and eat it. In a new preface, he justifiably speaks of the book as a first (“Until then, American novels of ‘inversion’ dealt with shrieking queens or lonely bookish boys who married unhappily and pined for Marines. I broke that mould”), and therefore of historical interest, but he declines to publish it as it first appeared.

In the first edition of 1948, when Jim finally tracks Bob down and is rejected, he reacts by killing Bob. But by the time Vidal reissued the novel in 1965, he regarded this ending as unnecessarily melodramatic, so he rewrote it. In the new version, Jim merely rapes Bob—not a hint of melodrama there. The “revised” ending of 1994 is more or less that of 1965—with the rape, not the murder—but with a bar-room conversation unnecessarily pruned. Not much else is either original or new, apart from the addition of the usual spelling errors (Batchelors Soups have a lot to answer for).

What we are left with is an altered version of the 1965 edition, changed at that time to suit the liberal fashion for queers who did not kill each other or commit suicide, introduced now as if it were the original, historic version of 1948. This sleight of hand leaves the book seeming not so much revised as fiddled about with. The novel itself should stand the test of time, but not in this condition.