Now, torment though it was, I’m glad it happened; after all, it altered my entire comprehension of writing, my attitude toward art and life and the balance between the two, and my understanding of the difference between what is true and what is really true.
To begin with, I think most writers, even the best, overwrite. I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek. But I felt my writing was becoming too dense, that I was taking three pages to arrive at effects I ought to be able to achieve in a single paragraph. Again and again I read all that I had written of Answered Prayers, and I began to have doubts—not about the material or my approach, but about the texture of the writing itself. I reread In Cold Blood and had the same reaction: there were too many areas where I was not writing as well as I could, where I was not delivering the total potential. Slowly, but with accelerating alarm, I read every word I’d ever published, and decided that never, not once in my writing life, had I completely exploded all the energy and aesthetic excitements that material contained. Even when it was good, I could see that I was never working with more than half, sometimes only a third, of the powers at my command. Why?
The answer, revealed to me after months of meditation, was simple but not very satisfying. Certainly it did nothing to lessen my depression; indeed, it thickened it. For the answer created an apparently unsolvable problem, and if I couldn’t solve it, I might as well quit writing. The problem was: how can a writer successfully combine within a single form—say the short story—all he knows about every other form of writing? For this was why my work was often insufficiently illuminated; the voltage was there, but by restricting myself to the techniques of whatever form I was working in, I was not using everything I knew about writing—all I’d learned from film scripts, plays, reportage, poetry, the short story, novellas, the novel. A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling (and, in suitable instances, simultaneous application). But how?
I returned to Answered Prayers. I removed one chapter and rewrote two others. An improvement, definitely an improvement. But the truth was, I had to go back to kindergarten. Here I was—off again on one of those grim gambles! But I was excited; I felt an invisible sun shining on me. Still, my first experiments were awkward. I truly felt like a child with a box of crayons.
From a technical point, the greatest difficulty I’d had in writing In Cold Blood was leaving myself completely out of it. Ordinarily, the reporter has to use himself as a character, an eyewitness observer, in order to retain credibility. But I felt that it was essential to the seemingly detached tone of that book that the author should be absent. Actually, in all my reportage, I had tried to keep myself as invisible as possible.
Now, however, I set myself center stage, and reconstructed, in a severe, minimal manner, commonplace conversations with everyday people: the superintendent of my building, a masseur at the gym, an old school friend, my dentist. After writing hundreds of pages of this simpleminded sort of thing, I eventually developed a style. I had found a framework into which I could assimilate everything I knew about writing.
Later, using a modified version of this technique, I wrote a nonfiction short novel (Handcarved Coffins) and a number of short stories. The result is the present volume: Music for Chameleons.
And how has all this affected my other work-in-progress, Answered Prayers? Very considerably. Meanwhile, I’m here alone in my dark madness, all by myself with my deck of cards—and, of course, the whip God gave me.
REMEMBERING TENNESSEE
(1983)
Tennessee Williams dead at 71.
So announced the headline on the front page of The New York Times. He had strangled, it turned out, while using a plastic bottle cap to take barbiturates; incredibly, the cap had popped down his throat and choked him to death. All of this had happened at the Elysée, a curious little hotel located in the East Fifties. Actually, Tennessee had an apartment in New York. But when he was in the city, he always stayed at the Elysée. The apartment, a small jumble of sparsely furnished rooms “conveniently” located on West 42nd Street, was reserved for the entertainment of kind strangers.
It was a strange end for a man obsessed with a rather poetic concept of death. Even as a young man, he was convinced that the next day would be his last. The only serious quarrel we ever had involved his hypochondriac sensitivity to this subject. At the time, he had a play in rehearsal: Summer and Smoke. We were having dinner together, and to amuse him (I thought), I began to tell him stories I had heard from members of the cast about the play’s director, a woman from Texas. It seemed that at every rehearsal, she would assemble the cast and tell them what an effort they must make, how hard they must work, “because this flower of genius is Tenn’s last. He is dying. Yes, he is a dying man with only months left to live. He told me so himself. Of course, he’s always claiming to be dying. But this time I’m afraid it’s true. Even his agent believes it.”
Far from amusing my old friend, the anecdote enraged him. First he broke glasses and plates, then he turned over the entire table and stalked out of the restaurant, leaving me amazed—and also to pay for the destruction.
I was sixteen years old when I met him. He was thirteen years older than I was, a waiter at the Greenwich Village Café and a would-be playwright. We became great friends—it really was a sort of intellectual friendship, though people inevitably thought otherwise. In those early days he used to give me all of his short, one-act plays to read, and we would act them out together. Gradually, over the years, we built up The Glass Menagerie. I would play the daughter.
With his tendency toward around-the-clock sex and gin and general carousing, Tennessee, who was not a born survivor, probably would not have lasted beyond the age of forty if it hadn’t been for Frank Merlo. Frank was a sailor, a wartime discovery of mine. Some five years after I met him, and when he was no longer involved with the Navy, Tennessee saw us lunching in a cozy Italian restaurant. I never saw him so excited, either before or since. He deserted his own luncheon companion—his agent, Audrey Wood—and swiftly, without any invitation, sat himself at our table. After I had introduced him to my friend, not two minutes passed before he said, “Could you have dinner with me tonight?”
The invitation clearly did not include me. But Frank was embarrassed; he didn’t know what to say. I answered for him: “Yes,” I said, “of course he’d like to have dinner with you.”
So he did. They were together for fourteen years, and those were the happiest years of Tennessee’s life. Frank was like a husband, a lover, a business agent to him. He also had a great gift for parties, which suited Tennessee just fine. When Yukio Mishima, the brilliant Japanese writer—the one who formed an army and confronted the Japanese military commander and ended up committing hara-kiri—when he came to New York in 1952, Tennessee told Frank that he wanted to throw a party in Mishima’s honor. So Frank rounded up every geisha girl between New York and San Francisco, but he didn’t stop at that. Then he outfitted about a hundred drag geishas. It was the most fantastic party I’d ever seen in my entire life. And Tennessee dressed up as a great geisha dame and they drove through the park all night till dawn, drinking champagne. This was Mishima’s first taste of life in the Western world, and he said, “I’m never going back to Japan.”
When Frank died of cancer in 1962, Tennessee died a little, too. I remember all too well the last hours of Frank’s life. He lived them in a New York hospital room, where crowds of friends drifted in and out. Finally, a stern doctor ordered the room rid of all visitors, including Tennessee. But he refused to leave. He knelt by the narrow bed and clutched Frank’s hand, pressing it against his cheek.
Nevertheless, the doctor told him he must go. But suddenly Frank whispered, “No. Let him stay. It can’t do me any harm. After all, I’m used to him.”
The doctor sighed and left them alone.
Tennessee was never the same after that. He had always drunk a good deal, but he started combining drugs and alcoho
l. He was also meeting some very strange people. I think he lived the last two decades of his life alone—with the ghost of Frank.
But now when I remember Tennessee, I think of the good times, the funny times. He was a person who, despite his inner sadness, never stopped laughing. He had a remarkable laugh. It wasn’t coarse or vulgar or even especially loud. It just had an amazing sort of throaty Mississippi-riverman ring to it. You could always tell when he had walked into a room, no matter how many people were there.
As for his sense of humor, normally it was pretty raucous. But when he got into a fury, he seemed to swing between two things: either very sick humor—laughing nonstop during those five-martini lunches of his—or deep bitterness, about himself, about his father, about his family. His father never understood him, his family seemed to blame him for his sister’s insanity, and Tennessee himself—well, I think he thought he was not very sane. You could see all of this in his eyes, which had a changing in them, like a Ferris wheel of merriment and bitterness.
This isn’t to say that he wasn’t fun to be with. We used to go to the movies together, and I guess I’ve been thrown out of more movie houses with him than with anybody else in my life. He would always start reciting lines, making fun, doing Joan Crawford. Before long, the manager would come down and tell us to get out.
My funniest memory, though, is of four or five years ago, when I was staying with Tennessee in Key West. We were in a terrifically crowded bar—there were probably three hundred people in it, both gays and straights. A husband and wife were sitting at a little table in the corner, and they were both quite drunk. She had on a pair of slacks and a halter top, and she approached our table and held out an eyebrow pencil. She wanted me to autograph her belly button.
I just laughed and said, “Oh, no. Leave me alone.”
“How can you be so cruel?” Tennessee said to me, and as everyone in the place watched, he took the eyebrow pencil and wrote my name around her navel. When she got back to her table, her husband was furious. Before we knew it, he had grabbed the eyebrow pencil out of her hand and walked over to where we were sitting, whereupon he unzipped his pants and pulled out his cock and said—to me—“Since you’re autographing everything today, would you mind autographing mine?”
I had never heard a place with three hundred people in it get that quiet. I didn’t know what to say—I just looked at him.
Then Tennessee reached up and took the eyebrow pencil out of the stranger’s hand. “I don’t know that there’s room for Truman to autograph it,” he said, giving me a wink, “but I’ll initial it.”
It brought down the house.
The last time I saw him was a few weeks before he died. We had dinner together at a very private little place called Le Club, and Tennessee was fine physically, but sad. He said he had no friends anymore, that I was one of the few people in his life who really knew him. He wished we could be close the way we were in the old days.
And as he talked and the fireplace blazed, I thought, Yes, I did know him. And I remembered a night many, many years before when I first realized that that was true.
The year was 1947, and the opening night of A Streetcar Named Desire was a hauntingly dazzling event. As the lights dimmed on the final scene and Blanche DuBois, reaching out in the darkness for the guiding hands of a nurse and a doctor, whispered, “Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” a thrilling silence immobilized the audience. Terror and beauty had stopped their hearts. Even long after the curtain had descended, the hush continued. Then it was as if a cascade of balloons had exploded. The magnificent applause, the momentous rising of the audience to its feet, was as sudden and as breathtaking as a cyclone.
The stars, Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando, took sixteen curtain calls before the “Author! Author!” demands were met. He was reluctant to be led onstage, this young Mr. Williams. He blushed as though it were the first time he had ever been kissed, and by strangers at that. Certainly, he had not splurged on the evening (he had an overpowering fear of money, one so severe that even an occasion such as this could not make him succumb to thoughts of a new suit), so he was dressed in a dark blue that many a subway seat had shined; and his tie had become loosened; and one of the buttons on his shirt was dangling. But he was beguiling: short but trim, sturdy, healthy-colored. He held up two smallish plowman’s hands and quietened the ecstasy long enough to say, “Thank you. Thank you very, very, very …” in a voice as sluggish and Southern as the Mississippi if the river were polluted with gin. What he felt, one felt, was joy, not happiness; joy is cocaine brief, but happiness has at least a little longer-lasting languor.
Tennessee was an unhappy man, even when he was smiling the most, laughing his loudest. And the truth was, at least to me, that Blanche and her creator were interchangeable; they shared the same sensitivity, the same insecurity, the same wistful lust. And suddenly, as one was thinking that and was watching his bows to the deafening clamor, he seemed to recede on the stage, to fade through the curtains—led by the same doctor who had guided Blanche DuBois toward undesirable shadows.
REMEMBERING WILLA CATHER
(1984)
All of my relatives are southern, either from New Orleans or the rural regions of Alabama. At least 40 of the men, and possibly more, died during the Civil War, including my great-grandfather.
Long ago, when I was 10 or thereabouts, I became interested in these fallen soldiers because I read a large collection of their battlefield letters that our family had managed to keep. I was already interested in writing (in fact, had published small essays and stories in Scholastic magazine), and I decided to write an historical book based on the letters of these Confederate heroes.
Troubles interfered, and it was not until eight years later, when I was barely surviving as a very young journalist living in New York, that the subject of my Civil War kinfolk revived. Of course a great lot of research was necessary; the place I chose to do this research was the New York Society Library.
For several reasons. One being that it was winter, and this particular place, warm and clean and situated just off Park Avenue, provided a cozy haven the whole day long. Also, perhaps because of its location, the staff and clientele were a comfort in themselves: a bunch of upper-class, well-mannered literati. Some of the customers I saw frequently at the Library were more than that. Especially the blue-eyed lady.
Her eyes were the pale blue of a prairie dawn on a clear day. Also, there was something wholesome and countrified about her face, and it was not just an absence of cosmetics. She was of ordinary height and of a solid but not overly solid shape. Her clothing was composed of an unusual but somehow attractive combination of materials. She wore low-heeled shoes and thick stockings and a handsome turquoise necklace that went well with her soft tweed suits. Her hair was black and white and crisply, almost mannishly cut. The surprising, dominant factor was a beautiful sable coat which she almost never took off.
It was a good thing she had it on the day of the storm. When I left the library around four o’clock it looked as though the North Pole had moved to New York. Fist-sized snowballs pummeled the air.
The blue-eyed lady wearing the rich sable coat was standing at the curb. She was trying to hail a taxi. I decided to help her. But there were no taxis in view—indeed, very little traffic.
I said: “Maybe all the drivers have gone home.”
“It doesn’t matter. I live not too far from here.” Her deep soft voice drifted toward me through the heavy snow.
So I asked: “Then may I walk you home?”
She smiled. We walked together along Madison Avenue until we reached a Longchamps restaurant. She said: “I could use a cup of tea. Could you?” I said yes. But once we were settled at a table, I ordered a double martini. She laughed and asked if I was old enough to drink.
Whereupon I told her all about myself. My age. The fact I was born in New Orleans, and that I was an aspiring writer.
Really? What writers did I admire?
(Obviously she was not a New Yorker: she had a Western accent.)
“Flaubert. Turgenev. Proust. Charles Dickens. E. M. Forster. Conan Doyle. Maupassant—”
She laughed. “Well. You certainly are varied. Except. Aren’t there any American writers you care for?”
“Like who?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Sarah Orne Jewett. Edith Wharton—”
“Miss Jewett wrote one good book: The Country of the Pointed Firs. And Edith Wharton wrote one good book: The House of Mirth. But. I like Henry James. Mark Twain. Melville. And I love Willa Cather. My Ántonia. Death Comes for the Archbishop. Have you ever read her two marvelous novellas—A Lost Lady and My Mortal Enemy?”
“Yes.” She sipped her tea, and put the cup down with a slightly nervous gesture. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind. “I ought to tell you—” She paused; then, in a rushing voice, more or less whispered: “I wrote those books.”
I was stunned. How could I have been so stupid? I had a photograph of her in my bedroom. Of course she was Willa Cather! Those flawless sky-like eyes. The bobbed hair; the square face with the firm chin. I hovered between laughter and tears. There was no living person I would rather have met; no one who could so have impressed me—not Garbo or Ghandi [sic] or Einstein or Churchill or Stalin. Nobody. She apparently realized that, and we were both left speechless. I swallowed my double martini in one gulp.
But soon we were on the street again. We trudged through the snow until we arrived at an expensive, old-fashioned address on Park Avenue. She said: “Well. Here is where I live”; then suddenly added: “If you’re free for dinner on Thursday, I’ll expect you at seven o’clock. And please bring some of your writing—I’d like to read it.”
Yes, I was thrilled. I bought a new suit, and retyped three of my short stories. And, come Thursday, I was on her doorstep promptly at seven.