For a variety of personal reasons, following his divorce from Margaret Keyser in 1951, J took a salaried job with the Ford Foundation, offered by his friend Robert Maynard Hutchins, formerly the wunderkind president and then chancellor of the University of Chicago. J would run Intercultural Publications, which produced Perspectives USA, a magazine of J’s creation intended to promote American culture and creative achievement. Now that MacGregor was in place to take over the New Directions helm whenever J was not available, it was much easier for J to undertake the travel necessary to produce Perspectives in English, French, German, and Italian and later to prepare supplements for The Atlantic Monthly on other cultures (such as India and Burma [now Myanmar]) for American readers.
Although in mid-1952 Tennessee was still sending “affectionate greetings to Gertrude [J’s steady companion since their meeting in 1945]” (7/24/52), by 1953 another name became prominent in the letters. Maria Britneva first entered the correspondence in 1948 when she came to the United States after meeting Tennessee in London theater circles. She was amusing and vivacious, though unfortunately without the talent or discipline for the stage career she aspired to. When it became clear that Tennessee was definitely not in the market for a wife, she transferred her affections to J, who, when I asked him what her appeal was, said that he “found her amusing . . . [but] I just realized that she wouldn’t suit me. She would want to be tearing around all over the world spending money.” After Maria announced their engagement in London in 1953, J, using his work on Perspectives as an excuse, faded away to India. Tennessee and MacGregor exchanged worried letters until Maria joined Tennessee in Rome, saying she had been “brutally jilted,” as Tennessee reported to MacGregor, concluding that “we have inherited Maria for the summer” (5/29/54). While Tennessee extended sympathy and understanding to both parties, he was obviously pained that an alliance that would have kept two of his most fervent supporters close at hand had collapsed. News of Maria would continue to weave in and out of the correspondence.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Tennessee’s side of the correspondence was the disclosure of his need to keep writing as the only way to maintain his sanity: “Perhaps I ought to stop writing,” he told J, “but then I would explode from sheer ennui” (4/1/51). And later he would add, “It would be a good thing if I could stop altogether for a while, but I find my daily existence almost unbearably tedious without beginning it at the typewriter” (4/5/53). J, on the other hand, proclaimed his conviction that Tennessee’s writing was no mere escape from boredom but a glorious thing, his dedication to it heroic: “Your poems, on the contrary, have a way of getting right into the marrow of life. They are charged with authentic emotion and they tell a story which people can understand and identify themselves with” (4/4/55). Later it would be J who would provide meaningful support to Tennessee when the plays were no longer Broadway hits: “You’ve had a rough life, not the glamorous ease that is supposed to go with success, but look at the wonders that have come out of it. And I don’t just mean the great plays and the beautiful poems and the stories that cut through to the truth, but also the hundreds of kind things you have done for people, and can still do. You are a good human being, Tenn, and don’t forget it” (3/29/63).
In addition to his fondness for Tennessee’s poetry and prose, J was also a first reader on virtually all of the plays after Menagerie and could be counted on to respond with not only praise but also unflinching honesty. After saying that The Rose Tattoo “packs a real wallop . . . I think it will be very strong on the stage” (11/3/50), J analyzed its strengths and weaknesses as well as its differences from Menagerie and Streetcar, concluding with a practical discussion of how the Italian lines should be checked and handled in the published version. The comprehensive nature of J’s responses would be repeated again and again. For example, J found fault with the production of Camino Real but understood (as few others seemed to at the time) what Tennessee was trying to accomplish: “The real feeling of the play, its philosophical depth and tragic beauty, never managed to cut through all that scrambling around” (3/26/53). Tennessee’s gratitude was heartfelt: “I want to thank you for the never-failing appreciation you have for anything good in my work. Your letter meant a great deal to me, since I went through a pretty black period after those notices came out” (4/5/53). When he read Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, J found it “shattering . . . as strange and true as Dostoevski” (1/16/55); of Suddenly Last Summer he said in wonder, “It’s some kind of magic, to make something so poetic and beautiful out of such a frightening theme” (1/20/58). He showed his understanding of Tennessee’s overall purpose in his writing by commenting on Sweet Bird of Youth’s essence, “The corruption is in all of us, and our only chance is to recognize it, and live with it” (3/11/59). Even the lesser-known plays of the late sixties and seventies such as Out Cry, the revision of The Two-Character Play, received a thoughtful appraisal as J compared the two versions: “I think the new version, with so many new good touches, is even stronger: the abstract quality is not lost, but there is more fleshing out to dramatize the ideas, and it certainly is that, a play of ideas as well as human passion” (3/6/73).
Much of the correspondence of the late 1950s was between Tennessee and Bob MacGregor concerning publishing details and is not reproduced here. J was traveling for the Ford Foundation and in 1956 remarried, not yet to Gertrude Huston, but to Ann Resor, whose parents had built the J. Walter Thompson Company into the largest advertising agency in the United States. In dynastic terms, the Radcliffe-educated and patrician Ann was certainly considered more suitable than Britneva or Huston by J’s mother and aunt Leila, on whose occasional largesse he still depended to shore up New Directions’ unreliable finances. Tennessee’s more than a decade of commercial success was winding down and he lamented that he was “tired of writing and writing is tired of me” (7/26/60).
In a well-intentioned but ill-fated suggestion, MacGregor recommended that Tennessee see Dr. Max Jacobson, who had “done marvels for me” (4/5/61). While MacGregor thought he was merely taking “hormones and vitamins and enzymes” (JL interview, 11/3/95) and surmised that the same cocktail might benefit Tennessee, the infamous “Dr. Feelgood,” whose patients included Senator and then President John F. Kennedy, was actually pumping his celebrity clientele full of amphetamines. Though Tennessee came to realize that he was cruising on “speed,” he didn’t appear to care. It did seem to perk him up and at least he thought he was doing some of his best writing.8 A crucial difference between MacGregor and Tennessee was that MacGregor, a recovering alcoholic, had not touched liquor since long before he came to New Directions, while Tennessee, though warned not to combine alcohol with the “little brews” provided by Jacobson, only drank more as the sixties progressed until his body collapsed from the twin assaults. His brother Dakin stepped in and had him committed to the psychiatric division of Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for three months in 1969. Although this intervention probably saved his life, Tennessee never forgave Dakin and, except for a token sum, cut him out of his will. The year before his hospitalization, Tennessee’s wry comment to J on this period of his life was: “I don’t believe God is dead but I think he is inclined to pointless brutalities” (April 1968).
The Night of the Iguana (1961) was Tennessee’s last successful Broadway play. Throughout the sixties and seventies, he continued to write and continued to expand his theatrical style—calling the double bill of the Slapstick Tragedy (1966) his “answer to Ionesco” (9/24/62). The Night of the Iguana, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1964), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), and even the last play produced on Broadway before his death, Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), would show the influence of Japanese drama to which he had been introduced by his friend Yukio Mishima (also published by New Directions). The letters still went back and forth, though perhaps not as frequently, with Tennessee, now out of the hospital, writing to “Bob and Jay” that “I suspect that I will die with my boots on, as it were, during the
production of a play” (5/12/70). In fact, in 1971 when New Directions was beginning to collect all of Tennessee’s plays into a uniform edition, he objected to the title “The Collected Works of . . .” as a bad omen of mortality and agreed to publication only under MacGregor’s revised title, “The Theatre of Tennessee Williams.”
J continued to applaud Tennessee’s efforts, especially in verse—“Your poems move me in a way that those of no one else do” (5/22/72). Such encouragement provided Tennessee with much needed solace: “It was such a joy to receive that long, wonderful letter from you. You know how badly I need reassurance about my work” (July 1972). And J could validate Tenn (as J frequently addressed Tennessee in his letters) in a way no one else could: “when I look at the sturdy volumes of the ‘theatre’ set, it makes me feel that I have been part of something very important in the course of American drama and literature, something which was only possible because of your friendship and loyalty” (8/11/72). Yet, strangely, given that Tennessee was often so open about his own physical and psychological symptoms, J never mentioned that in 1970 he himself had been diagnosed with hereditary bipolar disorder, then known as manic depression—he would take lithium and other medications from that point on to manage his mood swings. Despite the fact that they had so often talked and written about their personal problems, it was as if J felt that his own clinical diagnosis would impose an impossible burden on a man and artist so fearful for his own precarious sanity.
But it was MacGregor’s unexpected death in late 1974 from lung cancer, the same disease that had claimed Frank Merlo a decade earlier, that was a crushing blow to J and Tennessee alike. Laughlin had to resume his role as Tennessee’s main New Directions correspondent. He wrote to Tennessee of his loss: “But it just isn’t the same place down there in the Village without Bob, we miss his wisdom, and all his professional knowledge, and his wonderful sense of humor, and so many other little things each day” (1/17/75). Meanwhile the work went on. In 1975 I was hired to take care of contracts, copyrights, foreign rights, and whatever else needed doing. When Peter Glassgold, who had done most of the editorial work on the various volumes of The Theatre of Tennessee Williams that began coming out in the early seventies, wanted help with the Tennessee overload, I picked up the slack on the second volume of poems, Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977), and became in-house editor of a collection of Tennessee’s introductions to the various plays and other occasional essays, published under the title Where I Live (1978). I saw Tennessee rarely, but once I had taken over all the work on Tennessee’s oeuvre, I did on occasion go to lunch with him and J—a privileged fly on the wall as two old friends reminisced. Once, while J and I were going over proofs with Tennessee in the big corner office at 80 Eighth Avenue, the home of New Directions since late 1978, J commented on the negative critical reception—or lack of comprehension—that Tennessee’s recent plays had faced, and Tennessee lamented, “But ahm an experiMENTal playwright . . . ah don’t WANT to rewrite [those old plays].” J replied soothingly, “We know, Tennessee, we know.”
In these latter years, the two had occasion to pay tribute to each other—Tennessee to J: “Very briefly and truly, I want to say this. You’re the greatest friend that I have had in my life, and the most trusted” (8/13/78), and J to Tennessee: “I want to thank you again for coming to the affair at the PEN. I was in a state of nerves and you really helped me get through it” (9/26/79). Next Tennessee cabled a message to an event in Rochester where J was receiving an honorary degree (5/29/80), and J sent a greeting to Tennessee’s seventieth birthday celebration (3/5/81). Tennessee even became annoyed when, through an oversight, he almost wasn’t asked for a contribution to a Festschrift for J and New Directions—the initial issue of Brad Morrow’s Conjunctions. But the tie between them had already frayed somewhat with J’s withdrawal once again from New Directions affairs, brought about by his struggles with his bipolar illness and his reluctance to come into Manhattan. In addition, at the urging of his psychiatrist, Dr. Benjamin Wiesel, J had begun a series of college lecture tours, and his connection with the New Directions staff became somewhat tenuous.9 Tennessee wrote to Frederick R. Martin, who had become vice president after MacGregor’s death: “The semi-retirement of dear Jay and the loss of Bob MacGregor somehow interrupted the flow of communications between N.D. and me. Let’s now try to restore it. A serious writer needs serious contacts to keep on the right track. . . . Please remember me to Jay who introduced me to the ‘world of Letters.’ I never want him to be ashamed of a work of mine that bears the N.D. imprimatur” (rcd. 10/30/81).
Of course, New Directions had continued to publish Tennessee’s late plays such as Vieux Carré (1979), now considered a minor classic, and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1980) as they appeared, despite their poor critical reception. Most editing problems were handled in the office, but in 1982 I appealed to J to prod Tennessee to restore cuts to Clothes for a Summer Hotel that had, I felt, eviscerated an already fragile play, whose original theatrical run had been compromised by a heavy-handed Broadway production and then dealt a lethal blow by a subway strike. J handled the situation as only he could, embedding his real concerns amid praise and encouragement: “I think many of the small corrections are excellent, they tighten it up. But I’m much troubled by your taking off ‘A Ghost Play’ as subtitle and the deletions and changes which play down or even eliminate that important part of the structure. It just isn’t the same play if you take that out” (10/31/82). Tennessee, as if thinking of what he had written earlier about never wanting J to be ashamed of any of his work, immediately agreed, and the readying of the script for publication went forward. In late January 1983, I called Tennessee to tell him that I was sending over the galleys for Clothes for him to correct and told him about a “do” at the National Arts Club on February 25 honoring J. I said that I knew J would be enormously pleased if he could attend, but Tennessee said, somewhat vaguely, that he was going on a trip. Then I asked if he could possibly write something to be read and return it with the proofs. He said he’d try. I confirmed all this in a covering letter (1/26/83) and very shortly had the proofs back with the moving tribute that is the last item of this correspondence: “It was James Laughlin in the beginning and it remains James Laughlin now, with never a disruption or moment of misunderstanding in a friendship and professional relationship that has now lasted for forty years or more” (rcd. 2/4/83).
I sent the play to the printer and took off on a long-anticipated trip to China. In one of life’s tragic ironies, Tennessee died the night before the ceremonial occasion. Although it was first thought—and reported—that he had been asphyxiated by an inhaled bottle cap, a suppressed medical examiner’s report revealed that he had overdosed, accidentally or intentionally, on Seconal.10 J learned of his death the next morning. Shutting himself in his office, he wrote the poem “Tennessee/ has taken the sudden subway . . . ,” which he read that night (2/25/83), turning an event intended to honor himself into a tribute to his friend.
After J asked me to edit his correspondence with Tennessee, I spent some time with the material and then in November 1995 went to his home in Connecticut to interview him about his relationship with Tennessee and ask questions that had come up as I pored over the letters. Over two days we talked, with a tape recorder running, about Tennessee—about what Tennessee was like as a person, about his writing and what J thought of it, about specific incidents, and about what New Directions meant to both James Laughlin and Tennessee Williams. Excerpts from the interview are used as section dividers throughout this volume. On Saturday afternoon, the interview finished, J asked me if I’d like a cup of tea. We went into the kitchen, where J, who never cooked, insisted on making the tea himself, as if to prove he could indeed boil water. I had brought the tape recorder with me, and once we sat down with our tea and Oreo cookies—J’s favorite—I asked J to read the poem he had written in memory of Tennessee onto the tape. Haltingly, he complied:
Tennessee
called death the sudde
n subway and now he has taken that train
but there are so many good things to remember
first the young man in sloppy pants and a torn sweater
whom I met at Lincoln Kirstein’s cocktail party
he was very shy and had hidden himself in a side room
I too was shy but we got talking
he told me that he wrote plays and that he loved Hart Crane
he carried the poems of Crane in his knapsack wherever he hitchhiked
then his first night of glory in Chicago
when he and Laurette Taylor made a new American theater
I remember happy days with him in London and Italy and Key West
and how often friends and writers who were down on their luck
told me how generously he had helped them
(but you would never hear it from him)
so many fine things to remember
that I can live again in my mind
until it is my turn to join him on the sudden subway.
And then J burst out: “Sentimental. SENTIMENTAL. . . . I was very upset by his death, he was a good friend . . . and I miss him.” A tear rolled down his cheek. Our hands accidentally touched as I raised a teacup and he lifted an Oreo. We looked at each other, then turned and gazed out the window at the leafless birches.
Peggy L. Fox
The Luck of Friendship Page 2