I have been so exhausted from all the goings-on here—infinitely worse than Chicago—that I have gotten right down sick. I am going in the hospital tomorrow for a fourth and I trust final eye operation and will rest up and be agreeably out of touch with the world for five days or so—then the critics dinner—which I have to wait for—then complete release and a long, long trip somewhere! Maybe Mexico, maybe New Mexico.
View has just written for passes to the play for their critic. Shall I allow them any? I gave a big cocktail party last week for my mother and Laurette and my 88-year-old grandfather. 112 guests at Sherry’s! Cornell and James T. Farrell and lots of other famous people were there.
Send my copies of Battle c/o Audrey Wood, 551 Fifth Avenue but mark them for me personally so she won’t confiscate those also. I still haven’t given a script of the play to Cerf and he is fairly boiling with rage about it. Good for him!
Love,
Tenn.
« • »
Cornell and James T. Farrell: Katherine Cornell (1893–1974), American stage actress. James T. Farrell (1904–1979), American novelist best known for his Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1935).
37. TLS—2
June 4, 1945 [Mexico City]
DEAR JAY:
I just flew down here from Dallas where I had been visiting Margo and “The Project,” which seems to be going great guns. Margo is hoping to put on Battle as the premiere production and with that in mind I’ve been re-vamping the script, prologue and epilogue are out, also Val’s book and fire phobia and the second act congestion relieved by working some of its material into act three. It is too bad we printed the other version already, for this makes a better play of it. However, if it creates a sensation perhaps you can do it again in book form. Incidentally everyone raves about the Pharos, it is certainly the loveliest printing job—type and paper and format—that I’ve ever seen! Several friends of mine are binding it in tooled leather—over the covers—they are so pleased with it. Town & Country is going to carry a nice column about it by Mr. Bull, the editor. Of course I dread to see what some avant-garde critics are going to say about the play!
27 Wagons is out in Mayorga’s anthology and I think it is my favorite writing of mine so I hope you will get a copy of it. I don’t have one to send you. I think it would be the best item for your proposed Spearhead if you don’t mind re-publishing from Dodd-Mead.
If you want to do You Touched Me! write to Audrey or Guthrie McClintic directly for the final draft of that play.
I think he’s the only one [who] has the definitive script, including the preface “Homage to Ophelia” which I added to it. Edmund Gwenn and Catherine Willard are definite for the cast and we are likely to get Montgomery Clift for the boy. I have to return to N.Y. in early August for rehearsals. Sorry I had to leave before you arrived for the Brecht show, but Margo had to leave right away and I didn’t want to take the long trip by myself. The two of us had a stateroom and kept the porter hopping with drinks and telegrams. I wired friends in New York: “The Project has blown up and Margo Jones is now vitally interested in the problem of restoration.”
You ask for a poem so I am sending you a long thing I started in Chicago and finished in Dallas, an impressionistic recollection of a boarding-house in Miami occupied mostly by Hialeah jockeys. It is too loose and sprawling like “The Couple.” Of the latter poem I think perhaps you could submit the last part separately, that is—description of the couple on the street—only passages of it are interesting enough.
Best fun here so far has been a bull-fight yesterday and Friday hearing Chavez conducting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony which I think gave me the biggest musical thrill of my life.
Not sure where I’m going but will give you an address soon as I am.
Tenn.
« • »
“The Project”: Margo Jones’s Federal Theater Project, Houston, Texas.
Mayorga’s anthology: Dodd Mead’s Best One-Act Plays series, edited by Margaret Mayorga. 27 Wagons Full of Cotton was first published in 1945 in Best One-Act Plays of 1944.
Spearhead: Spearhead: 10 Years’ Experimental Writing in America, edited by James Laughlin (1947).
Guthrie McClintic: American stage director and producer, married to actress Katherine Cornell.
Edmund Gwenn and Catherine Willard: The actors who played the parents in the Broadway production of You Touched Me!
Montgomery Clift: (1920–1966), American film star. Clift appeared on Broadway as the young man in You Touched Me! and later in Gore Vidal’s screen adaptation of TW’s Suddenly Last Summer.
You ask for a poem: “The Jockeys at Hialeah” was dedicated “for J.” when it was published in In the Winter of Cities (ND 1956). See the next letter.
Chavez: Carlos Antonio de Padua Chávez y Ramírez (1899–1978), Mexican conductor and composer.
38. TLS—1
Sunday 11/4/45 [New York]
DEAR JAY:
In my ivory tower over an emerald pool I have been immured for weeks, with only nocturnal emissions—I mean excursions—to draw me forth, while banging away at a play.
You wrote me a letter about You Touched Me! which I answered but did not mail. The gist of it was that I understood and agreed.
Much has happened and is about to happen. I have received two invitations to read verse, one at Harvard, some Gray Fund, and the other at YMHA Poetry Center, dates respectively being November 14th and December 1st. And I have indicated an acceptance of both. Since talking to the students of Hunter College about the drama I have decided that I can face any audience with anything, and the novelty of the experience is fascinating. So I would like to get together with you and decide upon a program. That is, if you approve of my doing such a thing. I know it is rash! AND presumptuous.
I would like to include some things that haven’t appeared in the volume. Here are two new things, one a sort of verbal abstraction but which does have a meaning, the other pretty conventional but musical. And I want to read the long one I brought you from Mexico, “Camino Real.” You have the only copy of it. When can I see you? Have supper with me some evening, early, go over the poems and then to the theatre. Are you in town? I don’t have your office phone number.
Tenn.
« • »
Gray Fund: A poetry reading series at Harvard University established by Morris Gray in 1929.
YMHA Poetry Center: The Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
I would like to include: Presumably TW is talking here about his poems that were included in the upcoming ND Annual: NDPP 9 (1946), “The Jockeys at Hialeah,” “Recuerdo,” and “Lady, Anemone.”
“Camino Real”: This poem is a precursor to TW’s one-act play Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (Dramatists Play Service, 1948) and the full-length play Camino Real (1953).
39. ALS—3
Wed. 3:30 AM [November 14, 1945] [Boston]
DEAR JAY—
I’d hoped we’d have more time and less company last night. There’s a lot I wanted to talk over with you, mainly my work. I have a childish need, right now, for reassurance about it—more than usual—and that is why I started reading things to you. It was not out of vanity but out of self-distrust. I have become suspicious of myself and what I’ve been doing—perhaps because of the vast alteration (improvement???) in my manner of living.
You are my literary conscience—the only one outside of myself—so I am over-awed by you and it isn’t easy to talk to you.
I am disturbed by your apparently real dissatisfaction with your own life. I would be glad to have you tell me more about it if you think I am able to advise or help in any way.
We should have had 2 or 3 bottles of champagne last night and talked a lot more. So let me know when you have another evening in New York.
Ever,
Tennessee
(The reading has not yet occurred. I have a room—Oliver is prowling the streets.)
« • »
my manner of
living: After years of struggling financially, TW initially found his sudden and much larger income problematic both socially and artistically. See the 1947 essay for the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire, “The Catastrophe of Success,” later published with The Glass Menagerie and in New Selected Essays: Where I Live.
Oliver: Professor Oliver Evans, a lifelong cruising and drinking buddy of TW’s.
40. ALS—2
[November 1945] [Norfolk]
DEAR TENNESSEE—
I’m off—most unexpectedly to Utah but hope to be back the first week in December and perhaps in a happier frame of mind.
Write another story as good as “One Arm” while I’m gone!
What would you think of a photo of yourself—George P[latt] L[ynes]’s—as frontispiece in 27 Wagons? If you approve, will you take a print of it to Bob Lowry at the office, telling him I asked for it and explaining what it’s for. Tell him to advise Rittenhouse to print it on glass stock and tip it in facing title. And to have Rau make the cut. The caption should acknowledge GPL if his is used.
If you don’t like the idea just forget it.
Auver
Jay
« • »
I’m off—most unexpectedly: Margaret Keyser Laughlin’s father died suddenly in November 1945.
Bob Lowry: Robert Lowry (1919–1994), American fiction writer. Lowry’s story “Layover in El Paso” was published in NDPP 9 (1946) and his novel Casualty was also published in 1946 by ND. In late 1945, JL hired Lowry to run production at ND.
Auver: Given that JL is going to Utah for a funeral, and with his mordant frame of mind, it is conceivable that his intended close was Au ver, “to the maggot”—a play on his usual “Ever.”
41. TLS—2
Monday—[November/December 1945]
DEAR JAY:
Your letter meant a lot to me! Immediately I felt a resurgence of vitality and went back to work on the play with such vigor that I worked out a brand new climax and ending which I think makes it definitely a solid thing in my hands.
The work on “One Arm” was so long-drawn-out and tormented by my inability to fuse matter with style and the sensational with the valid, that I was unable to read it myself with a clear perception, but what you say about it—if you are not just being kind—indicates that I have done the second thing at least acceptably. That gives me a wonderful feeling! All of my good things, the few of them, have emerged through this sort of torture going over and over—Battle, Menagerie, the few good stories. You Touched Me! is an example of one that didn’t work out, not with any amount of struggle, though it was (the labor) pretty terrific. But always when I look back on the incredible messiness of original trials I am amazed that it comes out as clean as it does.
In one way the reading went off pretty well. I was not scared of the
I was just drunk enough (I was cold sober soon as I got on the platform) to be just as saucy as he was and engaged in a verbal tilt over our tea, in which I, having the stronger tea, did not come out unimpressively.
The next day I made some recordings. They said the records could be offered for public distribution provided they were subsidized so I gave them a cheque for $142 to subsidize them. If they are all sold I will get back royalties amounting almost to that sum. Anyway it seemed to please them a great deal, as it was the first time a poet had done such a thing.
Ought to make them suspicious of the poetry!
See you Wednesday.
Tenn
« • »
Mr. Matthiessen: Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902–1950), preeminent American scholar of his generation, best known for his book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman.
Mr. Spencer: Theodore Spencer, a Harvard professor and a lifelong friend of JL’s.
Lanier family: TW was a descendent of the nineteenth-century American poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881).
SECTION IV
PF: Well, at the same time that Menagerie is on Broadway, he’s sending you the short story of “Night of the Iguana” and other things that didn’t come to fruition for years like the first sketches for Camino Real.
JL: Yes, he did that. You know he wanted some encouragement of what he was looking ahead to do and I was always glad to give it. I thought it was just wonderful.
PF: You seem to have started making carbons about 1947, so then we have your letters and one of the things that’s amusing . . .
JL: He wrote me a terribly funny letter from New Orleans about a lady, asking me to come down and get her off his hands. It was so funny. He had such wit.
« • »
42. TLS—1
January 4, 1946 [New Orleans]
DEAR JAY:
Do with this what you will!
It is wonderful to be back in the Quarter. And this time with money, which does make a difference.
I am purring with gratitude.
Please add Windham to the list of those to receive Isherwood’s book, and bill me for it. He sent me a lovely Japanese wind instrument to hang in my apartment.
I can’t tell you my delight in the Henry Miller, first thing of his I’ve really enjoyed much. It should be read aloud to Kate Smith immediately before and after each broadcast, and she should be compelled to chant passages from it on Sunday evening networks!
I have hardly found a single statement in it I disagree with, that is—pertaining to places and ways of American life.
I am getting a lot of work done here, as the conditions are excellent.
Let me hear from you.
Tenn
« • »
Do with this what you will!: TW had sent JL a blurb for the new Isherwood book, The Berlin Stories, which ND published in 1945: “If I were called upon to name, out of this century’s English letters, five works nearest to my heart, Goodbye to Berlin would be one.” Tenn. Williams
the Henry Miller [book]: The Air-Conditioned Nightmare (1946).
Kate Smith: Kathryn Elizabeth Smith (1907–1986), American singer with a long radio and television career, called “The Songbird of the South” and famous for her rendering of “God Bless America.”
43. TLS—2
Jan 25, 1946 [in transit]
DEAR JAY:
We are passing through Hattiesbu
rg Mississippi en route to Washington D.C. for the “command performance” of Menagerie. I had decided not to go up for it as I have so fallen in love with N.O. LA that I was unwilling to part with it for even a weekend, but a young lady friend of mine thought differently and bought my ticket and poured me on the train more or less forcibly. She is along too and that may be why she was firm about it. In fact I am going through quite an experience with this young lady. She is one of these people with a passion for lost causes, is beautiful enough to have anybody she wanted but is apparently attracted only by the line of most resistance. So she came down here from New York and so far the most complete and graphic candor on my part has not convinced her that propinquity will not conquer all. I have always been more or less overlooked by good looking women and once upon a time I sometimes suffered acutely from the fact, so the novelty of the situation makes it all the more impossible to cope with. I dare say you have had infinitely more experience in the matter and at any rate are infinitely more resourceful, so let us exchange fatherly advices. No, I don’t want to be “saved,” I don’t think anyone has ever been happier with his external circumstances than I have learned how to be, and as for my internal circumstances, only I can affect them. So is there anything to be gained from the complicating entrance of a lady? I would like to arrange for you to meet her, for she is a delectable article for anyone on the market. Or are you still engaged by the dark lady of the sonnets in New York? I do hope you will come to New Orleans with her, and if Sylvia—yes, that is her name—is still down here—she threatens to get a job here—something very interesting might develop for you. At any rate you will love New Orleans and it is a grand place to take anybody you are in love with as it rains so much but always clears up after awhile.—Your poem about the girl and her lost husband—like the one about Baudelaire—has a richness of texture that you don’t always indulge in. Incidentally I received a letter of lavish praise from Bigelow about your book of poems. I hope I have saved it for you. Bigelow is my brightest friend, too. He is a fascinating personality that I hope you may get to know. A bit like Isherwood’s Mr. Norris,—that is, in the mysteries of his origin Etc.—but much deeper and warmer I think. I think he is a bit supernatural, a sort of very wonderful witch!
The Luck of Friendship Page 9