by Gore Vidal
I picked up Tennessee’s Memoirs with a certain apprehension. I looked myself up in the Index; read the entries and found some errors, none grave. I started to read; was startled by the technique he had chosen. Some years ago, Tennessee told me that he had been reading (that is to say, looking at) my “memoir in the form of a novel” Two Sisters. In this book I alternated sections describing certain events in 1948 with my everyday life while writing the book. Memory sections I called Then. The day-by-day descriptions I called Now. At the time Tennessee found Two Sisters interesting because he figured in it. He must also have found it technically interesting because he has serenely appropriated my form and has now no doubt forgotten just how the idea first came to him to describe the day-to-day life of a famous beleaguered playwright acting in an off-Broadway production of the failing play Small Craft Warnings while, in alternating sections, he recalls the early days not only of Tennessee Williams but of one Thomas Lanier Williams, who bears only a faint familial resemblance to the playwright we all know from a thousand and one altogether too candid interviews.
There is a foreword and, like all forewords, it is meant to disarm. Unfortunately, it armed me to the teeth. During the 1973 tryout of a play in New Haven, Tennessee was asked to address some Yale drama students. Incidentally, the style of the foreword is unusually seductive, the old master at his most beguiling: self-pity and self-serving kept in exquisite balance by the finest comic style since S. L. Clemens.
“I found myself entering (through a door marked EXIT) an auditorium considerably smaller than the Shubert but containing a more than proportionately small audience. I would say roughly about two-score and ten, not including a large black dog which was resting in the lap of a male student in the front row…. The young faces before me were uniformly inexpressive of any kind of emotional reaction to my entrance….” I am surprised that Tennessee was surprised. The arrogance and self-satisfaction of drama students throughout Academe are among the few constants in a changing world. Any student who has read Sophocles in translation is, demonstrably, superior to Tennessee Williams in the untidy flesh. These dummies reflect of course the proud mediocrity of their teachers, who range, magisterially, through something called “world drama” where evolution works only backward. Teachers and taught are to be avoided.
“I am not much good at disguising my feelings, and after a few moments I abandoned all pretense of feeling less dejection than I felt.” The jokes did not work. So “I heard myself describing an encounter, then quite recent, with a fellow playwright in the Oak Room Bar at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel.” It was with “my old friend Gore Vidal. I had embraced him warmly. However, Mr. Vidal is not a gentleman to be disarmed by a cordial embrace, and when, in response to his perfunctory inquiries about the progress of rehearsals…I told him…all seemed a dream come true after many precedent nightmares, he smiled at me with a sort of rueful benevolence and said ‘Well, Bird, it won’t do much good, I’m afraid, you’ve had too much bad personal exposure for anything to help you much anymore.’
“Well, then, for the first time, I could see a flicker of interest in the young faces before me. It may have been the magic word Vidal or it may have been his prophecy of my professional doom.” Asked if the prognosis was accurate, Tennessee looked at the black dog and said, “Ask the dog.”
An unsettling anecdote. I have no memory of the Plaza meeting. I am also prone, when dining late, to suffer from what Dorothy Parker used grimly to refer to as “the frankies,” or straight talk for the other person’s good like frankly-that-child-would-not-have-been-born-mongoloid-if-youhadn’t…. An eyewitness, however, assures me that I did not say what Tennessee attributes to me. Yet his paranoia always has some basis in reality. I have an uncomfortable feeling that I was probably thinking what I did not say and what he later thought I did say. When it comes to something unspoken, the Bird has a sharp ear.
It is hard now to realize what a bad time of it Tennessee used to have from the American press. During the Forties and Fifties the anti-fag battalions were everywhere on the march. From the high lands of Partisan Review to the middle ground of Time magazine, envenomed attacks on real or suspected fags never let up. A Time cover story on Auden was killed when the managing editor of the day was told that Auden was a fag. From 1945 to 1961 Time attacked with unusual ferocity everything produced or published by Tennessee Williams. “Fetid swamp” was the phrase most used to describe his work. But, in Time, as well as in time, all things will come to pass. The Bird is now a beloved institution.
Today, at sixty-four, Tennessee has the same voracious appetite for work and for applause that he had at twenty-four. More so, I would suspect, since glory is a drug more addictive than any other as heroes have known from Achilles on (Donald Windham’s roman à clef about Tennessee bore the apt title The Hero Continues). But fashions in the theater change. The superstar of the Forties and Fifties fell on bad times, and that is the burden of these memoirs. In sharp detail we are told how the hero came into being. Less sharply, Tennessee describes the bad days when the booze and the pills caused him to hallucinate; to slip out of a world quite bad enough as it is into nightmare land. “I said to my friend Gore, ‘I slept through the Sixties,’ and he said, ‘You didn’t miss a thing.’” Tennessee often quotes this exchange. But he leaves out the accompanying caveat: “If you missed the Sixties, Bird, God knows what you are going to do with the Seventies.”
But of course life is not divided into good and bad decades; it is simply living. For a writer, life is, again simply, writing and in these memoirs the old magician can still create a world. But since it is hardly news to the Bird that we are for the night, the world he shows us is no longer the Romantic’s lost Eden but Prospero’s island where, at sunset, magicians often enjoy revealing the sources of their rude magic, the tricks of a trade.
Not that a magician is honor-bound to tell the whole truth. For instance: “I want to admit to you that I undertook this memoir for mercenary reasons. It is actually the first piece of work, in the line of writing, that I have undertaken for material profit.” The sniffy tone is very much that of St. Theresa scrubbing floors. Actually, Tennessee is one of the richest of living writers. After all, a successful play will earn its author a million or more dollars and Tennessee has written quite a few successful plays. Also, thirteen of his works have been made into films.
Why the poor-mouthing? Because it has always been the Bird’s tactic to appear in public flapping what looks to be a pathetically broken wing. By arousing universal pity, he hopes to escape predators. In the old days before a play opened on Broadway, the author would be asked to write a piece for the Sunday New York Times drama section. Tennessee’s pieces were always thrilling; sometimes horrendous. He would reveal how that very morning he had coughed up blood with his sputum. But, valiantly, he had gone on writing, knowing the new play would be his last work, ever…By the time the Bird had finished working us over, only Louis Kronenberger at Time had the heart to attack him.
But now that Tennessee’s physical and mental health are good (he would deny this instantly; “I have had, in recent days, a series of palpitations of the variety known as terminal”), only the cry of poverty will, he thinks, act as lightning conductor and insure him a good press for the Memoirs. Certainly he did not write this book for the $50,000 advance. As always, fame is the spur. Incidentally, he has forgotten that in the past he did write for money when he was under contract to MGM and worked on a film called Marriage Is a Private Affair, starring Lana Turner and James Craig (unless of course Tennessee now sees in this movie that awesome moral grandeur first detected by the film critic Myra Breckinridge).
The Memoirs start briskly. Tennessee is a guest at a country house in Wiltshire near Stonehenge. On the grounds of the estate is a “stone which didn’t quite make it to Henge.” He looks himself up in Who’s Who. Broods on his past; shifts back and forth in time. Now and Then. The early days are fascinating to read about even though the Williams family is already know
n to every playgoer not only from The Glass Menagerie but also from the many other plays and stories in which appear, inexorably, Rose the Sister, Edwina the Mother, Dakin the Brother, Cornelius the Father, Reverend Dakin the Grandfather, as well as various other relatives now identified for the first time. He also tells us how he was hooked by the theater when some St. Louis amateurs put on a play he had written. “I knew that writing was my life, and its failure would be my death….”
I have never known any writer with the exception of the artistically gifted and humanly appalling Carson McCullers who cared so much about the opinion of those condemned to write for newspapers. Uneasily confronting a truly remarkable hunger for absolute praise and total notice, Tennessee admits that, when being interviewed, he instinctively “hams it up in order to provide ‘good copy.’ The reason? I guess a need to convince the world that I do indeed still exist and to make this fact a matter of public interest and amusement.” Fair enough, Bird. But leave your old friends out.
“This book is a sort of catharsis of puritanical guilt feelings, I suppose. ‘All good art is an indiscretion.’ Well, I can’t assure you that this book will be art, but it is bound to be an indiscretion, since it deals with my adult life….
“Of course I could devote this whole book to a discussion of the art of drama, but wouldn’t that be a bore?
“It would bore me to extinction, I’m afraid, and it would be a very, very short book, about three sentences to the page with extremely wide margins. The plays speak for themselves.”
A wise choice: the plays do speak for themselves and Tennessee’s mind is not, to say the least, at home with theory. Most beautifully, the plays speak for themselves. Not only does Tennessee have a marvelous comedic sense but his gloriously outrageous dramatic effects can be enormously satisfying. He makes poetic (without quotes) the speech of those half-educated would-be genteel folk who still maintain their babble in his head. Only on those rare occasions when he tries to depict educated or upper-class people does he falter. Somewhat reproachfully, he told me that he had been forced several times to use a dictionary while reading Two Sisters.
What, I asked, was one of the words you had to look up? “Solipsistic,” he said. Tennessee’s vocabulary has never been large (I note that he still thinks “eclectic” means “esoteric”). But then he is not the sort of writer who sees words on the page; rather he hears them in his head and when he is plugged into the right character, the wrong word never sounds.
“Life that winter in Rome: a golden dream, and I don’t just mean Raffaello [Acton’s ‘Pierino’] and the mimosa and total freedom of life. Stop there: What I do mean is the total freedom of life and Raffaello and the mimosa….” That season we were, all of us, symbolically, out of jail. Free of poverty and hack work, Tennessee had metamorphosed into the Glorious Bird while I had left behind me three years in the wartime army and a near-fatal bout with hepatitis. So it was, at the beginning of that golden dream, we met.
Tennessee’s version: “[Gore] had just published a best-seller, called The City and the Pillar, which was one of the first homosexual novels of consequence. I had not read it but I knew that it had made the best-seller lists and that it dealt with a ‘forbidden subject.’” Later, Tennessee actually read the book (the only novel of mine he has ever been able to get through) and said, “You know you spoiled it with that ending. You didn’t know what a good book you had.” Fair comment.
“Gore was a handsome kid, about twenty-four [sic], and I was quite taken by his wit as well as his appearance.” Incidentally, I am mesmerized by the tributes to my beauty that keep cropping up in the memoirs of the period. At the time nobody reliable thought to tell me. In fact, it was my impression that I was not making out as well as most people because, with characteristic malice, Nature had allowed Guy Madison and not me to look like Guy Madison.
“We found that we had interests in common and we spent a lot of time together. Please don’t imagine that I am suggesting that there was a romance.” I don’t remember whether or not I ever told Tennessee that I had actually seen but not met him the previous year. He was following me up Fifth Avenue while I, in turn, was stalking yet another quarry. I recognized him: he wore a blue bow tie with white polka dots. In no mood for literary encounters, I gave him a scowl and he abandoned the chase just north of Rockefeller Center. I don’t recall how my own pursuit ended. We walked a lot in the golden age.
“I believe we also went to Florence that season and were entertained by that marvelous old aesthete Berenson.” No, that was someone else. “And then one afternoon Gore took me to the Convent of the Blue Nuns to meet the great philosopher and essayist, by then an octogenarian and semi-invalid, Santayana.” I had to drag Tennessee to meet Santayana. Neither had heard of the other. But Tennessee did stare at the old man with great interest. Afterward, the Bird remarked, “Did you notice how he said ‘in the days when I had secretaries, young men?’”
In the Memoirs Tennessee tells us a great deal about his sex life, which is one way of saying nothing about oneself. Details of this body and that body tend to blur on the page as they do in life. Tennessee did not get around to his first homosexual affair until he was well into his twenties, by which time he had achieved several mature as well as sexually meaningful and life-enhancing heterosexual relationships. Except he wasn’t really all that enhanced by these “mature” relationships. Lust for the male set his nerves to jangling. Why was he such a late-developer? Well, this was close to half a century ago, and Tennessee was the product of that Southern puritan environment where all sex was sin and unnatural sex was peculiarly horrible.
I think that the marked difference between my attitude toward sex and that of Tennessee made each of us somewhat startling to the other. I never had the slightest guilt or anxiety about what I always took to be a normal human appetite. He was—and is—guilt-ridden, and although he tells us that he believes in no afterlife, he is still too much the puritan not to believe in sin. At some deep level Tennessee truly believes that the homosexualist is wrong and that the heterosexualist is right. Given this all-pervading sense of guilt, he is drawn in both life and work to the idea of expiation, of death.
Tennessee tells of his affair with a dancer named Kip. But Kip left him; got married; died young. Then Tennessee was drawn to a pseudonymous lover in New Orleans; that affair ended in drink and violence. For a number of years Tennessee lived with an Italo-American, Frank Merlo. Eventually they fell out. They were reunited when Frank was dying of cancer. Frank’s last days were sufficiently horrifying to satisfy any puritan’s uneasy conscience while, simultaneously, justifying the romantic’s extreme vision of the world: “I shall but love thee better after death.”
The other line running through Tennessee’s emotional life is what I call the Monster Women. Surrogate mothers one might say if Tennessee’s own mother, Miss Edwina, were not so implacably in this world, even as I write these lines. Currently convinced that the blacks signal to one another during the long St. Louis nights by clanging the lids of the trash cans, Miss Edwina is every inch the Amanda of The Glass Menagerie. In fact, so powerful is Tennessee’s creation that in the presence of Miss Edwina one does not listen to her but only to what he has made of her.
“I had forty gentlemen callers that day,” she says complacently. We are having dinner in the restaurant of the Robert Clay Hotel in Miami. Delicately she holds a fork with a shrimp on it. Fork and shrimp proceed slowly to her mouth while Tennessee and I stare, hypnotized not only by the constant flow of conversation but by the never-eaten shrimp for just as she is about to take the first bite, yet another anecdote wells up from deep inside her…ah, solipsistic brain and the fork returns to the plate, the shrimp untouched. “Tom, remember when that little dog took the hat with the plume and ran all ’round the yard…?” This is also from The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee nervously clears his throat. Again the shrimp slowly rises to the wide straight mouth which resembles nothing so much as the opening to a miniature letter box�
��one designed for engraved invitations only. But once again the shrimp does not arrive. “Tom, do you remember…?”
Tennessee clears his throat again. “Mother, eat your shrimp.”
“Why,” counters Miss Edwina, “do you keep making that funny sound in your throat?”
“Because, Mother, when you destroy someone’s life you must expect certain nervous disabilities.”
Yet Tennessee went on adding even more grotesque ladies than Miss Edwina to his life. I could never take any of them from Carson McCullers to Jane Bowles to Anna Magnani. Yes, yes, yes, they were superb talents all. Part of the artistic heritage of the twentieth century. I concede their talent, their glory, their charm—for Tennessee but not for me. Carson spoke only of her work. Of its greatness. The lugubrious Southern singsong voice never stopped: “Did ya see muh lovely play? Did ya lahk muh lovely play? Am Ah gonna win the Pew-litzuh prahzz?” Jane (“the finest writer of fiction we have in the States”) Bowles was more original. She thought and talked a good deal about food and made powerful scenes in restaurants. The best that one could say of Magnani was that she liked dogs. When Marlon Brando agreed to act with her in the film of Tennessee’s Orpheus Descending, he warned, “When I do a scene with her, I’m going to carry a rock in each hand.”