Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh

by John Lahr

  Milk Train is a murky play, but it accurately describes the confounding creative and emotional knife-edge on which Williams was perched; a vision of Williams’s creative demise and a prayer for his own imaginative salvation. It is also a portrait of Frank Merlo, who is the emotional and physical impasto with which Williams painted the characters around Mrs. Goforth. In Mrs. Goforth’s description of her thrilling first nights with Husband No. 3, and how he looked as he closed the curtains (“clothed in a god’s perfection, his naked body!—he went from window to window, all the way round the bedroom, drawing the curtains together”), Williams was specifically reworking his image of Merlo in “A Separate Poem”: “You put on the clothes of a god which was your naked body / and moved from window to window in a room made of windows, drawing, closing the curtain . . . then came to rest, fleshed / in a god’s perfection beside me.” Even Christopher, the hustler with artistic ambitions, contains a wash of Merlo and his charm. But most obviously, as the pun on his name indicates, Merlo was written into Blackie, the forthright, compassionate, put-upon factotum who is abused by her imperious employer. (“Blackie, the boss is sorry she took her nerves out on you,” Mrs. Goforth says.) Like Merlo, Blackie is at once feisty—she threatens to quit—and unable to leave, trapped in her boss’s psychic net.

  IN LATE JUNE 1962, “just barely marching . . . stopping is not appealing,” Williams took his new play and his new “Angel,” as he called him—the poet Frederick Nicklaus—to Tangiers, where he had rented a house for four months: “He’s a desperate young man and I’m a desperate old one—a basis for some degree of communication, perhaps,” Williams wrote. A graduate of Ohio State University with a degree in art history, Nicklaus had migrated to New York from Columbus, Ohio, to pursue a poet’s calling. He was a handsome, tow-haired, gentle man—a cousin of the golfer Jack Nicklaus—to whom Williams had been introduced in September 1957 by Gilbert Maxwell at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue, where both men were working to support their writing habit. “I was stacking books. And Gilbert came over and said, ‘Oh, Freddy, I want you to meet Tennessee Williams,’ ” Nicklaus recalled. “He was wearing a gray suit and dark glasses. He was tan. And he was smiling—a strange, ambiguous smile. You couldn’t tell if he was happy or if he was just disguising something.” Nicklaus added, “I blushed.”

  “I have engaged a very gentle, kind young man to watch out for me,” Williams wrote to Lilla Van Saher in August. But before he agreed to accompany Williams on his travels that summer, Nicklaus did a great deal of “soul-searching.” “I didn’t want to be a home breaker,” he said, adding, “I asked Tenn emphatically, ‘What is Frank going to think about this?’ And he said very harshly—you know Tennessee had a hard side to him—‘It doesn’t matter what he thinks.’ ”

  With Frederick Nicklaus

  But it did. The previous months had been tempestuous ones for Williams and Merlo. That March, Robert Hines, a New Orleans realtor who managed Williams’s recently purchased property at 1014 Dumaine Street, and his friend Robert Lee (aka “The Dixie Doxie”) had stayed with Williams and Merlo at their Duncan Street “villa,” as Merlo called it. “The ‘fireworks’ started immediately upon my arrival,” Hines recalled. “Tenn was standing on the front porch naked from the waist up screaming, ‘the Sicilian Bitch has locked me out of my own house!’ So Dee Dee and I started to burgle a window when Frankie drove up and easily opened the patio glass door which evidently was left permanently unlocked—just slightly difficult to shove open, and Tenn obviously knew this.” Hines continued, “I quickly realized that Tenn had all along been grooming me as an ally versus Frankie . . . (i.e. ‘Frankie takes the afternoon off for drug runs,’ when actually Frank came home after running errands for laundry, dog care, groceries, plus planning to cook). Tenn then discovered Frank and I spent hours drinking and talking about our shipboard lives as sailors (we both did medical work for years at sea). This excluded Tenn, naturally. Frankie and I were also avid opera buffs and sat up late, playing grand opera from Frank’s great collection, which enraged Tenn, as he would shout down the stairs, ‘I can’t sleep in my own house!’ Frank would yell back, ‘Shut up, you don’t sleep anyway, you’re like a vampire roaming the place!’ ”

  To Hines, the outbursts seemed to come more from Williams than from Merlo. After one scene—which was caused by Williams having it off with Dee Dee under Merlo’s nose—Williams stormed out of the house. “Robert, Sir, do me the honor of driving me to the nearest motel, away from this pack of lies and [this] poisoned roof,” Hines recalled him saying. Hines agreed to chauffeur Williams and Dee Dee away. “Frankie was hurt and stunned, helpless. Dee Dee stuttered, ‘T-T-Tenn, what about clothes?’ Tenn shot back, ‘What clothes? Buy clothes, the only thing important are my manuscripts,’ which he put in the trunk of my car!” Hines went on, “Off we went and travelled about four blocks when Tenn suggested I pull over to a liquor store and purchase a pint of Old Grandad—‘One should never be caught without stash!’ ” After a few hours at the local public beach with a bottle of Old Grandad, the theatrical trio returned to the compound. “All quiet,” Hines noted.

  But the recriminations between Williams and Merlo spilled out into public scenes. At an Italian restaurant, according to Hines, “Tenn took to baiting Frankie, I tried to make peace, . . . Frank called Tenn a ‘phony Southern Gentleman,’ whereupon, Tenn stood up and stomped his foot. Frankie told him he was playing ‘Mrs. Stone.’ Tables fell over, waiters came running, the tourists gaped and whispered. Tenn hailed a taxi while I sat there paying the bill before the owner arrived. Disaster.” Hines went on, “In retrospect, I felt Tenn treated Frank pretty bad.”

  In the winter of 1962, as Williams began Closing Time, a reworked one-act play that he dedicated to Merlo, “who understands life so well that, over the course of our fifteen years together, he nearly succeeded in making me understand it, too,” Williams noticed a certain change in Merlo’s behavior. In February, for instance, on an impulse Merlo had headed off to New York City to take part in a “Strike for Peace Demonstration,” a silent picketing of the Japanese embassy with white chrysanthemums and white daisies. “It has, or seems to have, given Frank something to be seriously involved in for the first time since I’ve known him, which is almost fifteen years now,” Williams told Andreas Brown, his bibliographer. A month later, in a letter to Kazan, Williams worried about Merlo, who “has lost so much weight and has the shakes and vomits when he gets up in the morning. He’s spending today at the local hospital getting all kinds of tests and x-rays. I suspect that his chief problem is the old one of having nothing to do that gives him enough sense of doing.” Williams added, “Since I have noticed he seems to get better when I am away for awhile, I am planning to keep away several months.”

  That April, to ease the friction between them, Williams offered to buy Merlo a house in Key West. “I feel that if we didn’t have to share the same roof we might become friends again,” he wrote to St. Just. “He says flatly no. I think he wants me to get out of the house, it is the only home I have known.” Williams continued, “Perhaps if I can drum up the energy for a summer abroad, things will right themselves in both our minds. I am fond [of him], there is still some kind of attachment. But it would be nice to know if it was a good or a bad one. I can’t tell anymore.” In his first letter to Nicklaus, on May 6, 1962, Williams wrote of his New York pied-à-terre: “I may not be in the apartment as Frank is now occupying it. That’s why I suggest your leaving your new address (if any) with Audrey instead of my answering service. I have a long story to tell you, a long, sad story to tell you.” Williams signed off, “I love you.”

  The story Williams had to tell was of his meeting with Merlo to finalize their separation. “I was as frightened to see him as I was of seeing [Pancho Rodriguez] after the violences of 1947,” Williams recalled in Memoirs. The negotiation took place at their apartment on East Sixty-Fifth Street. “Frankie was on his best behavior: dignified, calm, and expressing hurt and bewilderme
nt over our estrangement. Miss Wood was her coolly diplomatic self,” Williams wrote. After agreeing to continue to give Merlo his salary, Williams insisted that Merlo leave with Wood; ten minutes later, Merlo was on the phone saying that it was impossible to talk privately in Wood’s presence. He wanted to return to continue the conversation. Williams would meet him only at a local bar. “I remained curiously resolute,” Williams wrote. “I remember saying to him, ‘Frank, I want to get my goodness back.’ He looked at me silently and with understanding.”

  Williams found Nicklaus to be a congenial, tolerant traveling companion. He had to be. Williams’s fear of drying up manifested itself physically; during the trip, he was afflicted by a bedeviling inability to speak. “My young companion, ‘The Poet.’ / Fair as Adonis but rational as ten hatters at Alice’s tea-party. / Seems to be succumbing to my iron of silence / which is so desperately unwillful. / Can he still, at times, like me?” he wrote in “Tangiers: The Speechless Summer.” In “Tangier 1,” a poem dedicated to “T.W.,” Nicklaus told his own story of Williams’s fears:

  . . . You woke in the night,

  following some white spook of noon;

  the cat, hissing,

  was gone through the high grill.

  The night at least seemed a little safe:

  doors barred from the inside,

  black tile on white.

  Asleep, I dreamed us safe and near,

  till a thing that stole so quietly in,

  hissing, leapt through an open grill,

  and left you trembling by a chair.

  If Nicklaus lacked Merlo’s combustible, outgoing nature, he also lacked his efficiency. He was, as Williams wrote to Andreas Brown, “inept at anything of a practical nature so our travels are one continual fantasy of confusions. He doesn’t know how to open a door with a key, find a light-switch, count change, and this morning he didn’t even know how to flush the toilet. So I am having to acquire a lot of mechanical aptitudes which other persons provided in the past. But we have some good laughs together and he writes some rather beautiful poems.” (Nicklaus’s first volume, The Man Who Bit the Sun, was published by New Directions in 1964 after a nudge from Williams.)

  Despite the solace of Nicklaus’s company, Williams was restless and unwell for most of the summer, hopping around Europe “like a flea.” “The beauty of my companion made us desirable as guests,” he recalled in Memoirs, adding, “Even with the young poet I could barely communicate except in bed.” By August, Williams, who had gloomily submerged himself in rewriting the tale of Mrs. Goforth’s death, was reporting a litany of suffering that included “internal bleeding and terrible weakness and fatigue.” “I am still able to do my morning’s work but after that I am barely able to move,” he noted. “Although it is only a three-minute walk to the beach from this house in Tangiers, I am sometimes unable to make it and just lie in bed all afternoon, dragging myself out for a bite to eat and eating only a bit of it as my appetite has gone with my strength.” After Tangiers, Williams checked in to a London hospital for a few days, before returning Stateside, where “the Merlo situation” was still “a difficult and painful thing to work out.”

  Williams wasn’t sure that he could return to Key West; he contemplated pulling up stakes and settling in New Orleans or somewhere along the Gulf Coast. “I’m still desperately looking for ‘the place’ and ‘the friend,’ ” he wrote to Andreas Brown in September 1962. “Perhaps I’ve found the latter in the young poet now living with me, but the place is elusive as ever. Key West is great except that it was Merlo, not Williams, who claimed it. I understand that and I hope I don’t resent it, but it does make me feel like a man who has lost his island even when he is still living on it.”

  The ordeals of the summer, however, were nothing compared to those of bringing Williams’s Milk Train to the stage that fall. “Get on your knees and pray, baby! We are coming in on a wing and a prayer, God help us,” he told the director Herbert Machiz. Writing to Hermione Baddeley the following year, trying to interest her in a London production, Williams looked back on the first staging ruefully: “There was just too much double-talk and socializing instead of enough hard work at understanding. And the play wasn’t ready. . . . Machiz has talent but somehow he fucks himself up repeatedly by not concentrating his vitality where it serves the play best. ’Tis true, ’Tis pity, and pity ’tis true.” From Philadelphia, the beleaguered author wrote to Wood, “Unless a miracle happens in Philly, I think the play should close there, since I am totally exhausted and couldn’t help Herbert even if he would accept it. . . . I have lost my moral strength as a writer. Also I’ve lost my respect for myself as a person, and when you lose self-respect, you lose respect for others and you turn into a monster.”

  The play opened at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on January 16, 1963, and closed after sixty-nine performances, the victim of a 114-day newspaper strike and poor reviews. In their acerbity, the critics bristled with a new and unmistakable tinge of condescension. Richard Gilman, one of the brainier members of the critical corps, for instance, titled his rebarbative review in Commonweal “Mistuh Williams, He Dead.” (“Why, rather than be banal and hysterical and absurd, doesn’t he keep quiet? Why doesn’t he simply stop writing, stay absolutely unproductive for a long time in Key West, or the South of Spain, or the corner of any bar, and just think?” Gilman wrote.) The words haunted Williams. “The truth I guess. Only a bitch would say it, but he is and I am one, too,” Williams said. That March, his face “swollen up like a pumpkin,” his nerves “dancing like monkeys,” his throat wracked by a hacking cough, Williams told Robert MacGregor, confiding the morning’s conversation with himself, “Face it, baby, you’re dying. Can you do it decently or will you make a mess of it like most things in your life?” He added, “Suspect following circumstances: lung cancer.”

  Williams’s dire self-diagnosis was yet another example of his porous genius, the hysteric’s uncanny ability to identify with others. He was not dying of lung cancer; but, as he’d recently learned, Merlo was.

  CHAPTER 8

  Waving and Drowning

  Nobody heard him, the dead man,

  But still he lay moaning:

  I was much further out than you thought

  And not waving but drowning.

  —STEVIE SMITH,

  “Not Waving but Drowning”

  On September 9, 1963, eleven days before Frank Merlo died, at the age of forty, Williams wrote to Elia Kazan from Abingdon, Virginia, where he was “waiting shakily” for a new version of Milk Train to be performed at the Barter Theatre. “Do you know about Frankie?” he asked. “He has been in and out of Memorial Hospital since a lung cancer operation last winter. Right now he’s in the New York apartment and I know he’d love a call from you as he’s mentioned the fact that he hasn’t seen or heard from you, and he’s always liked and admired you. He is down to 114 pounds but his spirit’s unbroken and his mind is sharp and clear. Wish I could say the same for myself.” Williams continued, “I don’t see many old friends, in fact scarcely any, because I don’t want to ‘spook’ them with my crazy, bearded appearance. I grew the beard to disguise, if possible, a persistent swelling of the lymph nodes on either side of my face. It goes up and down and back up again like a false pregnancy. Some people think it’s a psychosomatic reaction to being eclipsed by Albee.”

  At first, Key West doctors had attributed Merlo’s exhaustion, his hacking cough, and his “shakes,” which had become so bad that Leoncia, the housekeeper, had to hold his morning coffee for him, to a range of possible illnesses, including bronchial pneumonia, mononucleosis, anemia, and tuberculosis. In Williams’s diagnosis, Merlo’s nervous state and his weight loss were more likely due to drug use and to “the cumulative effect of passing 14 years of his life in my company.” But soon after Williams and Nicklaus got back from their summer travels in 1962, Vaccaro called from Florida to say that Merlo had boarded a plane to New York, to undergo an operation at Memorial Hospital for suspec
ted lung cancer. Some weeks before, over lunch with friends at a Key West café, Merlo had coughed up spumes of blood; he went immediately to his Key West doctor, whose X-rays revealed a dark area on his lung. “I was stricken with remorse,” Williams recalled.

  Williams visited Merlo the day before his operation. “He was quite matter-of-fact about this thing of which I would have been crazed with apprehension,” Williams said. He was with Merlo in the recovery room when he came to, and saw him every day that he was in the hospital. When Williams spoke to Merlo’s doctors, however, they explained that the cancer was situated alongside Merlo’s heart and was too advanced to be operated on: the surgeons had sewn him back up and told him nothing. When Williams asked how long Merlo had to live, the answer was six months. “I hung up and burst into tears,” he said.

  Merlo returned alone to Key West. Along with their dog, Gigi, and Creature, a nervous, bad-tempered monkey, he moved into a frame cottage on Bakers Lane about ten blocks from Duncan Street, where Williams and Nicklaus were cohabiting. Williams had rented it for him from the writer James Leo Herlihy. “Frankie was quite unaware that effective surgery had not been performed and during the first month or two he gave every evidence of thinking himself quite recovered,” Williams wrote in Memoirs. “I remember him doing one of his wild ‘Lindy hops’ in a local Key West night spot, but also remember that at its conclusion he seemed about to collapse.” Writing to Edwina in February 1963 about “the sudden and shocking illness of Frank,” Williams noted, “I see him daily and we are pretending that he is recuperating. Nothing else to be done.” Three days after this stoic pronouncement, on the back of an airmail envelope addressed to the actress Claire Luce, Williams scribbled the poem “Morgenlied,” an augury of the emptiness to come, which both masked and admitted the guilt he felt over Merlo: