Yours,
10
« • »
Sidney Alexander: (1866–1948), English poet, author, and clergyman.
Accent: Subtitled A Quarterly of New Literature, it was published from 1940 to 1945.
picture for Teresa Wright: (1918–2005), American film star of the 1940s. The picture was a screen treatment of TW’s early play Spring Storm, which MGM did not purchase.
Cleveland Playhouse / The Play from the Lawrence story: Adapted from the eponymous D. H. Lawrence short story, You Touched Me! premiered at the Cleveland Playhouse on October 13, 1943, under the direction of Margo Jones, before opening on Broadway September 25, 1945, under the direction of Guthrie McClintic and Lee Shubert.
Pasadena: Margo Jones directed another production of You Touched Me! that rehearsed in November 1943 and opened at the Pasadena Playhouse on November 29.
SECTION II
PF: About this same time Tennessee mentions Charles Henri, who, I assume, was Charles Henri Ford. What was his connection with New Directions at this time?
JL: Well, he was a friend. Charles Henri was the boyfriend of Tchelitchew, the painter.
PF: Oh, he’s the one that Tennessee calls “Chilly Death.”
JL: Right, he was the painter. He did the beautiful portrait of Ann in the living room, and Charles Henri was his boyfriend. Tchelitchew was a respectable person. He was a Russian nobleman. It was through him that I got to know Charles Henri. I liked Charles Henri. We did two little books of his.
« • »
Charles Henri Ford: (1913–2002) American poet. The brother of actress Ruth Ford and the boyfriend of the Russian surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), Ford’s volumes of poetry The Garden of Disorder & Other Poems (1939) and Sleep in a Nest of Flames (1949) were published by ND.
beautiful portrait of Ann: JL’s second wife, Ann Clark Resor Laughlin (1925–1989), was the daughter of Stanley Burnet Resor and Helen Lansdowne, who had built the J. Walter Thompson Company into the largest advertising firm in the country. Introduced by a common friend, the novelist and travel writer Santha Rama Rau, JL and Ann were married in 1956 and remained so until her death. In 1964 Ann inherited many modernist paintings collected by her mother, a major benefactor of the Museum of Modern Art. The lovely painting of Ann at age seventeen by Tchelitchew had been commissioned by her parents.
18. TLS—1
9/26/43 [Santa Monica]
DEAR JAY:
I have just gotten back from a bicycle trip down the coast taken during my studio lay-off. Your picture has come and has made a fine addition to my little gallery. Many many thanks!
The reason you got two copies of the play is that I took the precaution of wiring both Audrey and Margo as I didn’t know for sure who had the copies. Apparently they both did. Will you get some copies of the books to me as soon as they come out? Of course I am crazy to see them.
Right now I am working on a little group of short stories called “Three Myths & A Malediction,” which I may ask you to look at when finished.
That extra play copy you may return to me or to Audrey Wood, it doesn’t matter which. I am back on the payroll at the studio but still working at home so you can address me here, 1647 Ocean Ave., Santa Monica.
Charles Henri’s sister tells me that he and Chilly Death are leaving for Mexico City if they can overcome their fear of dysentery. I suppose Mexico City is going to become the Paris of Post–War II.
Yours,
Tennessee
« • »
my studio lay-off: TW was laid off from MGM for six weeks in early August 1943, following which he was not given an assignment and his six-month option was not renewed.
19. ALS—3
Dec. 20/43 [Taos, New Mexico]
DEAR JAY,
I have retreated like you to a place of snow, the snow-covered desert of Taos. Washes Hollywood off. In Hollywood I am a worm—prostrate—crawling—here I feel alive again. Frieda Lawrence has promised me a piece of her ranch in the Lobos to build on when I am ready. I will be ready this spring if the play sells. Frieda is helping me with it, removing the Dame and all the war shit which isn’t Lawrence or me. Frieda is still a Valkyrie. The only exciting woman I’ve known.
It is lovelier here in winter than other seasons. Cold but so dry it feels good. Makes the blood run again and brighter. I was all, all gone on the coast—this is my predestined home I believe. But I must leave to be home in Clayton for Xmas to see the kid brother off on a hop to China—& comfort the family.
There I will try to get some stories in shape for you, while waiting news from N.Y.
The Creole Palace was fun, the most I had off the beach the whole time I was in Calif.
I have just read an article by Henry Miller in a mag. Frieda has, called The Phoenix—1938—He damns Proust and Joyce as dead writers of a dead world. A cruel allusion is made to Joyce’s blindness ‘as symbolic’—which I find odious. However the article has a macabre brilliance. I met Miller before I left—Red beard and I went out there. He seemed very spry. Alert. Highly conscious.
Having read nothing but that unfortunate attack on Joyce—and Proust—I should reserve my judgment, but I suspect he is too heartless to be a great artist. I will try and get hold of his works.
Strange that he admires Lawrence. Lawrence would hate him, I imagine.
They tell me there is some good skiing around here.
Ultimately we may compare notes.
En Avant
10.
If I get a home here I will form a hospice for poets—St. Bernard dogs with brandy flasks and everything! But God pity them when they get there! Evanôit!
« • »
Frieda Lawrence: Frieda von Richthofen Lawrence (1879–1956), German wife of the English novelist and short-story writer D. H. Lawrence. TW visited her Taos ranch for the first time in August 1939.
kid brother: Walter Dakin Williams (1919–2008), known as Dakin.
Creole Palace: A popular African American cabaret that operated in San Diego during World War II.
Evanôit!: This seems to be a construction from the French verb s’évanouir (to swoon, to faint), meaning roughly, “It makes one swoon.”
20. TLS—1
1/12/44 [Clayton]
DEAR JAY:
I got your proofs [FYAP (1944)] this morning—made two small corrections—a line out of place, some mis-spellings—and returned them air-mail this afternoon. I was very happy over the appearance of the script, it was beautifully set-up and the spatial arrangements certainly an improvement.
So much of the time writing is like digging for water in a desert: it is wonderfully gratifying when there is a spring and someone offers you a cup to catch it.
My return home was a signal for great disturbances. My Grandmother died suddenly of a lung hemorrhage and father was hauled off to hospital with pneumonia and my kid brother sailed over-seas with the air-force, a mosquito net the only clue as to destination. Then I had an eye operation—but that was very successful and with the aid of a thick lens I see nearly as well as with the right eye. Gives me a terrifying appearance as it magnifies the eye—so much the better!
Since Taos and Frieda I have almost completely re-written You Touched Me! And I think it’s much stronger. Will send you a copy of the pretentious foreword. It is meant to intimidate more guileless persons than you!—When I get all this off my hands, I will start on your stories.
Salud!
10
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Grandmother: Rosina Otte Dakin (1863–1944), TW’s maternal grandmother Rose, affectionately known as “Grand.”
father: Cornelius Coffin Williams (1880–1957), TW’s father. See the essay “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair” in New Selected Essays: Where I Live (ND 2009).
pretentious foreword: “Homage to Ophelia” remains unpublished.
21. TLS—1
2–26–44 [Clayton]
DEAR JAY:
I wrote you before, but lost
it in the blizzard of papers on the table. As for the Academy—thanks for your intercession. Birds of paradise should not be counted before they’re hatched but admittedly a thousand dollars is a small convenience that I could use—for a year in Mexico no less! I haven’t heard anything from them. The future is spectral, but only from a distance. When you get up close it takes off the false face, and looks reasonably human.
I wrote everybody in N.Y. that I was leaving immediately for there—about two weeks ago. I’m still here. Sort of dread the blustering attitudes you have to assume in the city: imitation of someone much alive! I feel dreamy and drifty.—I see where Charles Henri is going into the book-publishing trade. Opening shot is something by André Breton with an exquisite title involving rabbits and cherry trees. I don’t know Breton, but I think of [Charles Henri] Ford’s Group as “The Odor of Lightning” school. They always choose the one attribute that a thing never possesses and attribute that to it. Startling effects are unquestionably obtained by this process, but as a desideratum in itself—how good is that? Still—I have admired some of Ford’s own work much more than any of his followers. And do you know—Charles Henri has a good heart? He once did something very generous to my knowledge, a real self-sacrifice! Then two days later he was very insulting. Where do you stand with such people?
I suppose your books [FYAP (1944)] will be out soon, but I wish they would hurry. I could use them to political advantage in N.Y. this spring, using them as a letter of introduction to people like Stark Young who have esthetic principles but also influence, even on Broadway. I say I am not a professional writer, but I’m not above wanting to use their tricks—I have been reading something by Delmore Schwartz—Shenandoah I think is pedantic but another one—a play also—has a real fresh quality—I would like to meet him. Is he in New York?
Last night I had a wild dream about Saroyan!—of all things. I went to a play of his and it was so strange and beautiful that I cried, but there were only about five in the audience, and no critics. Saroyan was very humble and begged me for an honest opinion. I cried so that I couldn’t tell him. We left the theatre together. Saroyan jumped over a high wall—I couldn’t follow. Then he caught a fast train that rushed into a tunnel. I caught another follow[ing], just caught it by the back of the observation platform. Mine turned into a sleigh—I landed in a pile of snow with children—but thinking, though I am having a lot of fun, I ought to be with Saroyan—for he is going to a party at Tallulah Bankhead’s!—Figure that one out!
Tenn.
« • »
the Academy: The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. JL was instrumental in helping TW secure a grant of one thousand dollars from the Academy in May 1944.
André Breton: (1896–1966), French artist, poet, novelist, and essayist.
Stark Young: (1881–1963), American writer and critic.
Delmore Schwartz: (1913–1966), American poet, short-story writer, and critic. Schwartz had a long association with JL; ND published his major works, among them In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) (which included the play to which TW is referring, Dr. Bergen’s Belief) and Summer Knowledge (1967), a book of poems.
Saroyan: William Saroyan (1908–1981), American poet, short-story writer, novelist, and playwright. ND published reissues of Madness in the Family (1988), The Man with the Heart in the Highlands (1989), and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1997).
Tallulah Bankhead: (1903–1968), American stage and film actress. TW campaigned vigorously to get Bankhead to play the leading role of Myra in Battle of Angels, which she declined. Backstage after a performance of The Little Foxes years later, Bankhead purportedly said to TW, “Well, darling, I was luckier than Miriam Hopkins, who lost her mind and actually appeared in that abominable Battle-some-thing-or-other that you had the impertinence to write for me.” Bankhead starred in a revival of A Streetcar Named Desire in the 1950s and appears as a character in TW’s 1981 play about his 1940 summer in Provincetown, Something Cloudy, Something Clear (ND 1995).
22. TLS—1
3/7/44 [Clayton]
MY DEAR BOY!
Your books just reached me and I am delirious with them!
I have been mentally unstable all week from working on a blood and thunder tragedy, the sort that makes you all ice and fire one day and roar with laughter the next and sick with rage—then through the same cycle, pulverizing what is left of the central nervous system. But all in all it is more satisfactory than anything I’ve worked on since the last act of Battle, for I love to hammer and bang and bellow like that. I’m just an old fashioned ham and may as well face it.
I was supposed to leave weeks ago for N.Y. but am waiting till I get the rough blocks knocked out. I don’t trust myself in N.Y. I get to running around and thinking in urbane terms that are inimical to blood and thunder.
Assure your wife that I will love to have the play [Battle of Angels] in the magazine. It has been so much abused it ought to be given a chance to defend itself. Do you want someone to write a preface? Maybe Margaret Webster would, although she only knows the earlier version that was put on in Boston—which she directed there. I don’t know what her current attitude is, but she is the most literate mind on Broadway—well—excepting Stark Young and Krutch. I think George Jean Nathan’s comment “A cheap sex-shocker” ought to go on the cover! Along with more temperate reactions.
10
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your books: Probably a selection of current ND titles that JL sent to TW. JL often supplied his authors with copies of books by other ND writers.
blood and thunder tragedy: Possibly Daughter of the American Revolution, a generational drama that was a precursor to both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire.
your wife . . . play in the magazine: JL married Margaret Keyser (1917–1994) in Salt Lake City, Utah, on March 24, 1942. They had met through the Salt Lake City/Alta skiing community. They had two children, Paul (1942) and Leila (1944), and were divorced in 1952. JL began the magazine Pharos partially to engage Margaret in his literary work. The first number containing Battle of Angels (Spring 1945) was a double issue, and the magazine lasted for only four issues.
Margaret Webster: (1905–1972), American-born British theater actress, producer, and director.
Krutch: Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970), American critic, author, and naturalist. Krutch was drama critic for The Nation from 1924 to 1952.
George Jean Nathan: (1882–1958), American critic and editor. Perhaps the most famous and respected drama critic in the first half of the twentieth century, Nathan proved a nemesis to TW, calling The Rose Tattoo TW’s “latest peep show,” and cheerfully telling the press that The Glass Menagerie was actually written by Nathan’s friend, the play’s director, Eddie Dowling.
23. TLS—1
[March 1944] [New York]
DEAR JAY:
The old fish-peddler Liebling woke me up early this morning on the phone saying he had a letter to read me. I was very indifferent as I supposed it was from the scooter people in California or something equally fatuous but disagreeable. Consequently I was a little thunderstruck when it turned out to be from Walter Damrosch of your estimable society informing me that they were going to present me on May 19th with a thousand dollars, at a suitable ceremony which they hoped I would attend by person or proxy. Words are a bit inexpressive about such feelings but I will venture to say that I am happy about it. And that I am grateful to you for your part in this dispensation. I am quite certain it was more your recommendation than whatever it was Liebling saw fit to send them. Audrey was out of town and while Liebling is a smart Broadway character, somewhat nicer than most, I doubt that his selections were very strategic. I think I’ve already told you what I will do. I will go to Mexico!—I have been here about a week, making the dizzy rounds of theatre people and shows but somehow feeling totally unoccupied, while in Saint Louis, where I saw no one and only went swimming,
I felt horribly busy. Mother writes me that she has mailed Battle to you, I left it for her to do as she is one of those conscientious Puritans who never leave undone what ought to be done. They may drive you crazy but they are never lazy. I have written Peggy Webster. She is about to succeed Le Gallienne in the leading part of The Cherry Orchard so she may beg off. To write about what happened in Boston is a frightening assignment but I will undertake it. It will be hard without stepping on sensitive toes. The whole thing was an explosion of which nobody got a very lucid impression, least of all myself. I will try to describe the chaos, ambiguously enough to avoid offense. All of us who came with the Company meant well: it was Boston that was dirty.
Don and I are courting backers for You Touched Me! It may go on late this spring or early Fall. Sometime when I have a play that I am absolutely sure of, I will offer you a piece of it. But not this one. It will not offend anybody but I can’t see making anybody a Croesus.
After the turmoil of this week and the next I may get back to work but don’t expect I’ll really do much till I retire on my thousand to some quieter precincts. Robeson as Othello made my blood run cold. Christ, what majesty!—All the rest here is piffle. Even The Cherry Orchard seems a little wilted. But life—life is good and exciting!
Tennessee
« • »
Mother: Edwina Estelle Dakin Williams (1884–1980).
Liebling: William Liebling, Audrey Wood’s husband and cofounder of their literary agency, Liebling and Associates, later called the Ashley-Famous agency, and now International Creative Management (ICM).
Walter Damrosch: President of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters from 1940 to 1948.
Le Gallienne: Eva Le Gallienne (1899–1991), American stage actress.
The Luck of Friendship Page 6