I don’t know what Tennessee gets from the Monster Women, but if they give him solace nothing else matters. Certainly he has a huge appetite for the grotesque not only in art but in life. In fact, he is dogged by the grotesque. Once, in the airport at Miami, we were stopped by a plump middle-aged man who had known Tennessee whom he called Tom from the old days in St. Louis. The man seemed perfectly ordinary. He talked to Tennessee about friends they had in common. Then I noticed that the man was carrying a large string bag containing two roast turkeys and a half-dozen loaves of bread. “What,” I asked, “is that?” The man gave us a knowing wink. “Well, I got me two roast turkeys in there. And also these loaves of bread because you know about the food in Miami.” Then he was gone. It would seem that the true artist need never search for a subject; the subject always knows where to find him.
It is curious how friends actually regard one another—or think they do—when memoir-time rolls around, and the boneyard beckons. A figure of some consequence in our far-off golden age was the composer-novelist Paul Bowles. From time to time over the years, Tennessee has bestowed a number of Walter Winchellish Orchids on Paul as well as on Jane (I fear that a lifetime on Broadway has somewhat corrupted the Bird’s everyday speech and prose although nothing, happily, can affect the authenticity of those voices in his head). Certainly Bowles was an early hero of Tennessee’s.
But now let us see what Bowles makes of Tennessee in his memoir Without Stopping. “One morning when we were getting ready to leave for the beach” (this was Acapulco, 1940), “someone arrived at the door and asked to see me. It was a round-faced, sun-burned young man in a big floppy sombrero and a striped sailor sweater, who said his name was Tennessee Williams, that he was a playwright, and that Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild had told him to look me up. I asked him to come in and installed him in a hammock, explaining that we had to hurry to the beach with friends. I brought him books and magazines and rum and coke, and told him to ask the servants for sandwiches if he got hungry. Then we left. Seven hours later we got back to the house and found our visitor lying contentedly in the hammock, reading. We saw him again each day until he left.”
Paul Bowles used to quote Virgil Thomson’s advice to a young music critic: Never intrude your personal opinions when you write music criticism. “The words that you use to describe what you’ve heard will be the criticism.” Bowles on Tennessee demonstrates a mastery of the unsaid. Needless to say, Tennessee read what Bowles had written about him. Now watch the Bird as he strikes…
“It was there in Acapulco that summer that I first met Jane and Paul Bowles. They were staying at a pension in town and Paul was, as ever, upset about the diet and his stomach. The one evening that we spent together that summer was given over almost entirely to the question of what he could eat in Acapulco that he could digest, and poor little Janie kept saying, ‘Oh, Bubbles, if you’d just stick to cornflakes and fresh fruit!’ and so on and so on. None of her suggestions relieved his dyspeptic humor.
“I thought them a very odd and charming couple.” I think I give Tennessee that round, on points. But Bowles’s prose still remains the perfect model for judgment by indirection even though, like Tennessee, he occasionally gets the facts wrong. Bowles writes: “Gore had just played a practical joke on Tennessee and Truman Capote which he recounted to me in dialect, as it were. He had called Tennessee on the telephone and, being a stupendous mimic, had made himself into Truman for the occasion. Then, complete with a snigger, he induced Tennessee to make uncomplimentary remarks about Gore’s writing.”
This is a curious variation on the actual story. A number of times I would ring Tennessee, using Capote’s voice. The game was to see how long it would take him to figure out that it was not Capote. One day I rang and spoke to what I thought was Tennessee. But it was Frank Merlo, newly installed in the flat. I had not got beyond my imitable whine, “This is Truman,” when Frank began to attack Tennessee. I broke the connection. Frank never knew whether or not I had repeated his complaints to Tennessee. I did not. But years later I did tell Bowles the story.
Back to 1948: “In those days Truman was about the best companion you could want,” writes Tennessee. “He had not turned bitchy. Well, he had not turned maliciously bitchy. But he was full of fantasies and mischief.” That summer Capote arrived in Paris where Tennessee and I were staying at the Hôtel de l’Université (“A raffish hotel but it suited Gore and me perfectly as there was no objection to young callers”), and Capote would keep us entranced with mischievous fantasies about the great. Apparently, the very sight of him was enough to cause lifelong heterosexual men to tumble out of unsuspected closets. When Capote refused to surrender his virtue to the drunken Errol Flynn, “Errol threw all my suitcases out of the window of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel!” I should note here that the young Capote was no less attractive in his person then than he is today.
When Tennessee and I would exchange glances during these stories, Capote would redouble his efforts. Did we know that Albert Camus was in love with him? Yes, Camus! Madly in love. Recently Capote’s biographer told me that the Capote-Camus connection might well prove to be a key chapter. No doubt it will also provide a startling footnote to the life story of Camus, a man known until now as a womanizer. Then Capote showed us a gold and amethyst ring. “From André Gide,” he sighed. Happily, I was able to check that one out. A few days later I called on Gide in the company of my English publisher. “How,” I asked in my best Phillips Exeter French, “did you find Truman Capote?” “Who?” Gide asked. I suspect that it was then, in the fabulous summer of ’48, that the nonfiction novel was born.
To return again to 1948, I have a bit more to report on that season.
“Frankie and I had been out late one evening and when we returned to the apartment the transom on the front door was open and from within came the voice of Truman Capote, shrill with agitation…. In the apartment were Truman, Gore Vidal, and a female policeman…. It seemed that Truman and Gore, still on friendly terms at this point, had got a bit drunk together and had climbed in through the transom of the apartment to wait for me and Frankie.”
Before this story petrifies into literary history, let me amend the record. Tennessee, an actress, and I came back to Tennessee’s flat to find Capote and a friend in the clutches of the law. They had indeed been caught entering the flat. But by the time we arrived, Capote had matters well under control. Plainclotheswoman and plainclothesman were listening bug-eyed to Capote, who was telling them everything about the private lives of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Chaplin.
Tennessee’s asides on the various personages who have come his way are often amusing, sometimes revelatory. He describes a hilarious dinner with the Russian performer Yevtushenko, who saw fit to lecture Tennessee on commercialism, sexual perversion, and the responsibilities of art while swilling expensive wine. Tennessee admired Dylan Thomas until he actually met him and received “this put-down: ‘How does it feel to make all that Hollywood money?’” There was also the snub from Sartre. Tennessee gave a party at the Hôtel de l’Université, hoping that Sartre would come. Instead the Master sat a few blocks away at a café, and for several hours he made a point of not coming to the party despite the pleas of various emissaries.
Tennessee omits to mention a splendid lunch given us at the Grand Véfour by Jean Cocteau, who wanted the French rights to A Streetcar Named Desire for Jean Marais to act in. I came along as translator. Marais looked beautiful but sleepy. Cocteau was characteristically brilliant. He spoke no English but since he could manage an occasional “the” sound as well as the final “g,” he often gave the impression that he was speaking English. Tennessee knew no French. He also had no clear idea just who Cocteau was, while Cocteau knew nothing about Tennessee except that he had written a popular American play with a splendid part in it for his lover Marais. Between Tennessee’s solemn analyses of the play and Cocteau’s rhetoric about theater (the long arms flailed like semaphores denoting some dangerous last junction), no one ma
de any sense at all except Marais who broke his long silence to ask, apropos the character Stanley Kowalski, “Will I have to use a Polish accent?”
Although Marais and Cocteau broke up soon afterward, Cocteau did the play without Marais. Cocteau’s adaptation was, apparently, a gorgeous mess. Naked black youths writhed through beaded curtains while Arletty, miscast as Blanche, struck attitudes among peacock feathers.
The situation of a practicing playwright in the United States is not a happy one, to understate the matter. Broadway is more and more an abandoned parcel of real estate. Except for a native farce or two and a handful of “serious” plays imported from the British Isles, Broadway is noted chiefly for large and usually bad musicals. During the theater season of 1947–48 there were 43 straight plays running on Broadway. In 1974–75 there were 18, mostly imported. Adventurous plays are now done off-Broadway and sometimes off-off…where our memoirist ended up as a performer in Small Craft Warnings.
Unique among writers, the American playwright must depend upon the praise of journalists who seldom know very much about anything save the prejudices of their employers. With the collapse of a half-dozen newspapers in the last third of a century, the success of a play now depends almost entirely upon the good will of the critic for The New York Times. The current reviewer is an amiable and enthusiastic Englishman who knows a good deal about ballet but not so much about the social and political nuances of his adopted land. Yet at sixty-four Tennessee Williams is still trying to curry favor with the press. Of Small Craft Warnings, “Clive Barnes” (in The New York Times) “was cautiously respectful. With the exception of Leonard Harris, I disregard TV reviews. I suppose they were generally negative.”
Then Tennessee has second thoughts. And a new paragraph: “To say that I disregard TV reviews is hardly the total truth. How could I disregard any review which determines the life or death of a production?” How indeed? Yet after thirty years of meaningless praise and equally meaningless abuse, it is no wonder that Tennessee is a bit batty. On those rare occasions when Tennessee’s literary peers have got around to looking at his work, the result has been depressing: witness, Mary McCarthy’s piece “A Streetcar Named Success.”
There have been complaints that these Memoirs tell us too much about Tennessee’s sex life and too little about his art. Personally, I find the candor about his sex life interesting if not illuminating. At the worst, it will feed that homophobia which is too much a part of the national psyche. Yet perhaps it is better to write this sort of thing oneself rather than leave it to others to invent.
Recently that venerable vendor of book-chat Alfred Kazin wrote, “Vidal gets more literary mileage out of his sex life than anyone since Oscar Wilde and Jean Cocteau.” This struck me as breathtakingly wrong. First, neither Wilde nor Cocteau ever exploited his sex life for “mileage.” Each was reticent in public. Eventually the law revealed the private life of the first, while friends (and an ambiguous sort of unsigned memoir) revealed the life of the second. The book-chat writer does mention the admittedly too many interviews I’ve lately given to magazines like Playboy where sex is always a Solemn and Sacred subject and where I, too, am Solemn but never personal. As evidence of my seeking mileage he quotes the rather lame “‘In youth I never missed a trick…I tried everything…I could no more go to bed with somebody whose work I admired than I could…well, make love to a mirror. Fame in others switches off desire.’” Not, I would say, the most prurient of giveaway lines. Except in Two Sisters, a memoir done with mirrors, I have not used myself as a subject for private analysis on the ground that since we live in a time where the personality of the writer is everything and what he writes is nothing, only a fool would aid the enemy by helping to trivialize life, work.
A columnist reports that Tennessee was obliged to cut his Memoirs in half because of the “filth.” I hope that we are given that other half one day; and I doubt that there will be much “filth,” only indiscretions which ought to be interesting. After all, Tennessee has known or come across a great many of our time’s movers and shakers. I say “come across” because for a long period he was…well, inattentive. Sometimes the stupefying combination of Nembutal and vodka (now abandoned) addled him. I was present when Edna Ferber (yes, Edna Ferber) came over to our table at a restaurant and introduced herself. With considerable charm, she told Tennessee how much she admired him. He listened to her with eyes that had narrowed to what Miss Ferber would have described as “mere slits.” As she walked away, the Bird hissed, “Why is that woman attacking me?”
Tennessee is the sort of writer who does not develop; he simply continues. By the time he was an adolescent he had his themes. Constantly he plays and replays the same small but brilliant set of cards. I am not aware that any new information (or feeling?) has got through to him in the twenty-eight years since our Roman spring. In consequence, we have drifted apart. “Gore no longer receives me,” said the Bird to one of his innumerable interviewers; and he put this down to my allegedly glamorous social life. But the reason for the drifting apart is nothing more than difference of temperament. I am a compulsive learner of new things while the Bird’s occasional and sporadic responses to the world outside the proscenium arch have not been fortunate. “Castro was, after all, a gentleman,” he announced after an amiable meeting with the dictator. Tell that to the proscribed fags of Cuba.
Tennessee’s much publicized conversion to Roman Catholicism took place during the time of his great confusion. Shortly after the Bird was received into the arms of Mother Church, a Jesuit priest rang him up and asked if he would like an audience with the Pope? a meeting with the head of the Jesuit order? Oh yes. Yes! Tennessee was delighted. The next morning the priest arrived to take Tennessee to the Vatican where, presumably, the Pope was waiting on tenderhooks to examine the Church’s latest haul. Unfortunately, Tennessee had forgotten all about the audience. He would have to beg off, he said; he was just not up to the Pope that day. The priest was stunned. The Pope’s reaction has not been recorded.
The Jesuits, however, are made of tougher material. The secretary of the Black Pope rang to say that since a cocktail party had been arranged, Mr. Williams was going to be there, or else. The Bird was present. Almost immediately, he began to ham it up about God. Now if there is anything a Jesuit likes less than chat of God, it is having to listen to the religious enthusiasm of a layman. Trying to deflect Tennessee from what was fast turning into a Billy Graham exhortation about God and goodness, one of the Jesuits asked, “How do you start to write a play, Mr. Williams?” The Bird barely paused in his glorious ascent. “I start,” he said sharply, “with a sentence.” He then told the assembled members of the Society of Jesus that ever since becoming a Roman Catholic, he had felt a divine presence constantly with him. The Jesuits shifted uneasily at this. Like the old trouper he is, the Bird then paused abruptly in midflight in order to see just what effect he was having. After a moment of embarrassed silence, one of the Jesuits asked, timidly, “Is this presence a warm presence?”
“There is,” said the Bird firmly, “no temperature.”
But despite the “conversion,” Tennessee now writes, “I am unable to believe that there is anything but permanent oblivion after death…. For me, what is there but to feel beneath me the steadily rising current of mortality and to summon from my blood whatever courage is native to it, and once there was a great deal.” As he ends the Memoirs, he thinks back upon Hart Crane, whose legend has always haunted him. But though a romantic, Tennessee is no Crane. For one thing, it is too late to choose an abrupt death at sea. For another, art is too beguiling and difficult: “life is made up of moment-to-moment occurrences in the nerves and the perceptions, and try as you may, you can’t commit them to the actualities of your own history.”
But Tennessee continues to try. Now he has invited the world to take a close look at him, more or less as he is (the lighting of course has been carefully arranged, and he is not one to confuse an Entrance with an Exit). The result should be grat
ifying. The Glorious Bird is not only recognized but applauded in the streets. When he came to sign copies of the Memoirs in a large Manhattan bookstore, nearly a thousand copies were sold and the store had to be shut because of overcrowding. The resemblance to the latter days of Judy Garland would be disquieting were it not for the happy fact that since Tennessee cannot now die young he will probably not die at all (his grandfather lived for almost a century). In any case, artists who continue to find exhilarating the puzzles art proposes never grow bored and so have no need of death.
As for life? Well, that is a hard matter. But it was always a hard matter for those of us born with a sense of the transiency of these borrowed atoms that make up our corporeal being.
“I need,” Tennessee writes with sudden poignancy, “somebody to laugh with.” Well, don’t we all, Bird? Anyway, be happy that your art has proved to be one of those stones that really did make it to Henge, enabling future magicians to gauge from its crafty placement not only the dour winter solstice of our last days but the summer solstice, too—the golden dream, the mimosa, the total freedom, and all that lovely time unspent now spent.
The New York Review of Books
February 5, 1976
EDMUND WILSON: THIS CRITIC AND THIS GIN AND THESE SHOES
On February 2, 1821, gin-drinker Lord Byron wrote in his Ravenna Journal: “I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits—I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects—even of that which pleased me overnight…. In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty…. What is it?—liver?”