The idea of snow in Switzerland does not attract me however. I cannot ski and New York was buried in snow when I left. I feel more inclined to the Mediterranean, or perhaps Rome where I know an art student or Tangiers where Paul Bowles is staying. He seems to love it, and our tastes are not dissimilar, I believe.
It is strange to be traveling by myself again after being with Pancho for a couple of years. He reacted very badly to the life in New York, it brought out the worst elements in his nature, so it was necessary to separate. It is both good and bad to be alone again, principally good I suppose, for it makes me more dependent and consequently more aware of other people and I feel close to my old friends again. However there are moments of acute insecurity, especially when I have just made some drastic move such as this.
So Bill Smith is married! I had not heard of that nor did I expect to. Give him my felicitations both on that and the book of verse he sent me without any return address last summer, and also my affectionate greetings. He is an awfully nice boy and I hope the girl is good for him.
I am on a scientific kick right now. I took with me a little library on physics, mostly atomic and astronomic, some thrilling stuff. I am so stupid I have to read each page twice and sometimes twice again to latch on to the abstractions but it is worth it. Sir James Jeans, Einstein, Selig & Hecht [sic], DuNouys [sic]. Relativity and the Quanta [sic] theory are still somewhat beyond my comprehension but I am getting at least a poetic concept. They seem to feel, at present, that the universe is just an abstraction in the mind of a pure mathematician. I find it difficult to reconcile this with my personal experiences.
This is a little Swiss typewriter called Hermes Baby which Margo gave me as a parting gift. It is a machine of infinite and capricious complexity although the size of a schoolbook. Each little gadget seems to have a dual purpose, usually full of surprises!
I don’t have to come back to the States before late summer or early Fall when Summer and Smoke gets started. We must get together somewhere before then and I shall try to avoid people who don’t like my looks and cholera and the blue devils. Watch those ski jumps! And remember what I asked you about sort of keeping One Arm under the counter. After the first edition of Streetcar, could we change the color to something primary like red or blue: no more lavenders, please!—With love.
10.
« • »
since I was here at sixteen: TW traveled in Europe July 6 through September 12, 1928, with Grandfather Dakin’s church group.
Bill Smith: William Jay Smith (1917–2015), American poet and translator. Smith, Clark Mills McBurney, and TW met at Washington University and called themselves “The Literary Factory,” sharing the poems, stories, and one-acts they wrote with one another, and submitting to every contest and journal they could find. Smith later wrote a memoir about TW: Tom: My Friend the Poet/Playwright Tennessee Williams. Smith was married to the poet Barbara Howes from 1947 to 1963, and to Sonja Haussman from 1964 until his death.
Sir James Jeans: (1877–1946), British physicist and mathematician, proposed the continuous creation of matter.
Selig & Hecht: One and the same person, Selig Hecht (1892–1847), American physiologist, whose Explaining the Atom was aimed at the layman.
DuNouys: Pierre Lecomte du Noüy (1883–1947), French physicist and inventor of the tensiometer to measure the surface tension of liquids.
57. TLS—2
2/3/48 [Rome]
DEAR JAY:
This is more like it—Roma! I like it even better than Mexico City and the Italians are like especially good Mexicans. Were you here? If so how could you stand to leave it? In Paris I was depressed and ill but this city makes up for it.
The list of stories is okay [for One Arm]. It does not include “The Angel of the Alcove” which is one of the rather queer stories, of which perhaps we already have a sufficient representation. Be sure to use the version of “Bobo” that was published in Town & Country—under title “The Yellow Bird” probably a better title for it. If I ever get a piece of good paper and a soft pencil I will draw the chair for you. If I don’t—the picture should be just the chair with crude label—“The Hot Seat—Ha-HAAA!**!”—A tack in the middle and another label and arrow that says “Tack in middle. Ha-haaa!***!?”—wires & plugs and a visor with label that says “Fits over puss!.” However I shall make an effort to reproduce this great primitive myself.
Flying to Sicily Saturday to watch filming of The Earth Shall Tremble, a great picture being made there with natural setting and native performers under direction of man who directed Zoo di Vetro here on the stage. But my address remains American Express in Rome, as I shall return and probably keep this my base until I leave for the States some indefinite time hence.
In the volume, as a counter-irritant, it might be well to include a perfectly normal and rather poignant tale such as “Something About Him” which appeared in Mademoiselle or “The Important Thing” published a couple of years ago in Story. Get these from Audrey. They will leaven the book. If I were in New Orleans I could dig up some others but these will be enough anyhow.
Now be careful on those snow-shoes! I liked your friend McDowell in Paris. I think he will make a good worker on N.D. though you should perhaps have Charles Henri Ford to maintain a sort of equilibrium. One must remember that ultra violet is the most intense ray of the spectrum, one piece of information that I have gleaned from my studies of physics.
Ever,
Tennessee
« • »
If I don’t—the picture should be just the chair with crude label—“The Hot Seat”: TW’s sketch of the “hot seat” in the published version of the story.
The Earth Shall Tremble: The Italian title of the film is La Terra Trema.
the man who directed Zoo di Vetro: Luchino Visconti (1906–1976).
your friend McDowell: When Hubert Creekmore left ND in 1948 to teach at the University of Iowa, JL replaced him with David McDowell (1918–1985), who had been representing ND in Europe where TW met him. As “sales and promotion manager,” McDowell was able to secure favorable notices for Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky when it was published in 1949, helping to guarantee its success. But a modest print run of 3500 copies meant that orders could not be filled and the book lost momentum until a reprint of 45,000 copies could be rushed through. McDowell jumped ship to the hated Random House at the end of 1949, taking with him not only Bowles’s second book but also ND mainstay author William Carlos Williams. While JL in time repaired his relationship with Bowles, and WCW returned to ND by 1960, he never forgave McDowell and remained suspicious of charming young literary men with their own agendas.
58. TLS—1
[1948 in Italy]
DEAR JAY:
Yes, I would like very much to see proofs of the stories. One of them, “Night of the Iguana,” particularly needs cutting and a little rewriting of the didactic discourse by the older writer which breaks the mood of the story. My copy of the story was left at St. Paul de Vence with a young lady who seems to be too angry with me to write or forward my manuscripts so I am helpless to make these revisions until I get proofs from the printer.
I have taken an apartment in a strange pensione, operated by six or a dozen crazy women whose continual services and ministrations are driving me to distraction. They flutter about me like doves, emptying ash-trays, all kinds of little services, and I can’t exclude them for none of the locks work. They have one redeeming virtue. They make excellent coffee which they serve in big steaming white cups and they fetch it almost before the order is given. This is of immense value when you are working as I now am. I am still repairing Summer and Smoke and making tentative excursions into a new one which is still quite amorphous. I love the Italians more every day, and even more every night. They are better than Mexicans! I wonder if I will ever live in America again.
[ . . . ]
How about putting the “E Chair” on the jacket? (In the red & blue crayon.) I think it would be striking.
> Ever,
10
59. TLS—2
May 18, 1948 [Rome]
DEAR JAY:
These days the melancholy task of collecting the wildly scattered papers, letters, manuscripts begun and abandoned, sorting out, throwing away or packing: the sad and exhausting business that always puts a long-drawn period to my stay in a place: wondering if anything is worth keeping except a few letters from friends but not quite daring to obey the impulse to make a bonfire of it all. This stay in Rome has been relatively felicitous. Sunny. Peaceful. I have made some good friends here such as Frederic Prokosch and that unhappy young egotist Gore Vidal who is now in Paris and a great number of ephemeral bird-like Italians, sweet but immaterial, like cotton-candy: I shall remember all of them like one person who was very pleasant, sometimes even delightful, but like a figure met in a dream, insubstantial, not even leaving behind the memory of a conversation: the intimacies somehow less enduring than the memory of a conversation, at least seeming that way now, but possibly later invested with mere reality: ghosts in the present: afterward putting on flesh, unlike the usual way. Anyhow, Italy has been a real experience, a psychic adventure of a rather profound sort which I shall be able to define in retrospect only. [a line and a half is then crossed out]. (A sentence that doesn’t say what I mean.) I also have a feeling it is a real caesura: pause: parenthesis in my life: that it marks a division between two very different parts which I leave behind me with trepidation. The old continuity seems broken off now, by more than just travel and time. I have an insecure feeling more acute than usual. It is certainly not a good point at which to return to Broadway, but that is what I must do after a brief period in London for the Helen Hayes production of Menagerie. Right after that, in July, I must return to New York for rehearsals of Summer and Smoke, which is an uncertain quantity.
How right you are about the prizes! They mean nothing to me except that they make the play more profitable. Even so I shall probably not make much out of it. All I made out of Menagerie—after taxes and living expenses—was $30,000. If Streetcar had not been a success I would have been broke again in two years. It is evident that I have not been well-managed financially, but there is nothing that I can do about it without devoting my life to personal care of my earnings. It bothers me mostly because there are people I want to help and am not able to as much as I should.—Oh! While I’m on the subject of Streetcar—I thought the first format was infinitely preferable to the second: would it be possible to revert to it if there is another edition? All that I didn’t like about the first was the color. The design was quite wonderful. The present is the worst I’ve ever seen on a New Directions book! I am afraid there must have been a total misunderstanding between Audrey and Creekmore. Unfortunately I was too busy at the time to make my own reactions clear to him.
[ . . . ]
I suggest that you send me the proofs [of One Arm] c/o Hugh Beaumont, H.M. Tennant Ltd., London. (Address is Globe Theatre, I believe.) I am afraid they might not reach me here before I start north in my Jeep with Margo who is arriving on the twenty-sixth. I may even start before she arrives and have her meet me in Paris or London. There is to be a congress of Gypsies near Arles on the 24th of May and I should very much like to see it, as well as the town where Van Gogh wrote and painted the fiercest expressions ever made of this world’s terrible glory. I wish that God would allow me to write a play like one of his pictures, but that is asking too much. I am too diffuse, too “morbido”—that wonderful Italian word for soft!
You must get Carson’s “Ballad” for your anthology, but I do not quite know how to get the manuscript for you immediately. Joshua Logan who was to direct her play borrowed it and promised to return it by mail from Florence. As yet he has not done so. Surely there are other copies! It was published twice, first in Harper’s Bazaar and again in a collection of stories selected by authors as the story they would like to have written. Kay Boyle selected Carson’s. If you want to use one of mine, use “Desire & The Black Masseur” which is probably the best. Carson and I exchange letters continually and we talk about making a home together. I doubt however that we could agree upon a location. She likes places near New York: I could not live anywhere that close to Broadway and continue to function as anything loosely resembling an artist.
Windham’s novel [The Dog Star] is the finest thing, in some respects, that I have read in American letters: the quality is totally original. I wish that you were in a position to make him the necessary advance: he would need about a thousand dollars: for it is a book which only New Directions should publish, no one else. It is literature of the first order, the order of angels! However Audrey is sending around to publishers like Dodd-Mead who have no idea what it is worth artistically, now and to be. I am afraid he will settle with them simply because he needs money. I am lending him some but naturally he is reluctant to take it and anything of that sort is deleterious to a friendship. I am afraid of the book being mutilated by uncomprehending suggestions and demands from a commercial house. I have never quite understood your lack of excitement over Don as a writer. (apparent.) I do understand the difficulty of advancing money, however, when one is not a commercial publisher. That I do understand thoroughly. I am one of those who feel that New Directions has been a notably altruistic concern, the only one that exists. I also feel, however, that Windham’s novel would be a sound investment financially as well as artistically if it is handled by an understanding house. Windham is now in Rome: perhaps you will see him here or elsewhere in Europe.
Ever,—10.
« • »
Frederic Prokosch: (1906–1989), American novelist.
Gore Vidal: (1925–2012), American novelist, essayist, historian, playwright, and screenwriter. The friendship between TW and Vidal was often strained and competitive, though after TW’s death Vidal became a champion of his work and wrote the introduction to TW’s Collected Stories (1985).
the Helen Hayes production: Actor John Gielgud (1904–2000) directed the London premiere of The Glass Menagerie, starring American actress Helen Hayes as Amanda.
Carson’s “Ballad”: McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café was published as a novella in 1951 by Houghton Mifflin.
Joshua Logan: (1908–1988), American stage and film director.
Kay Boyle: (1902–1992), American novelist and political activist. ND first published Boyle’s poetry volume A Glad Day in 1938 and then two more books in the 1940s and 1950s. It reissued five more volumes of her novels and short stories in the 1980s.
Windham’s novel: JL rejected The Dog Star, which was published by Doubleday in 1950.
60. TLS—5
7/9/48 [London]
DEAR JAY:
The little blue book is with me and I think it contains your very loveliest poem which is the one called “Generations”: close to it is the one about the men tattooed Baudelaire. The level of work is higher, I think, than in Some Natural Things.
Jay, the book is too little, too hard to keep hold of for anything but cocktail recipes. It is characteristic of your humility about your own work that you do not trouble to bring it out properly but in a small apologetic way like this. Yes, it is a charming little book but in this case the contents deserve a more impressive or permanent-looking enclosure. Make this only a preliminary edition: add some more and bring them out yourself in a book that will fit on a shelf. When I think how many bad, pretentious volumes come out from bad, pretentious people! When a thing is true and good but unpretentious one is deeply moved by it. I am.
I am deeply sorry that Audrey caused so much disturbance about the volume [Streetcar] when all that need to be said was, Please bring out the next edition in a different color! Try to understand her. She is like an old mother hen and apparently she is afraid of other influences in my life which she feels less capable of managing. Back of it is love as there is often back of disturbing manifestations of various sorts. I was too busy to know or take part in the trouble. Let us revert to the old cover soon
as these green horrors are sold out! And in the next books, put anything on them you please, just so it is not any shade of lavender and for God’s sake tell Lustig that I loved his design, as I did.
England is a great and indefinable horror like a sickness that has not been diagnosed but drains the life from you. The upper classes are hypocritical, cold and heartless. They still eat off gold plates and dress for dinner. They entertain you lavishly for the weekend. On Monday you get a little note enquiring if you stole a book from them. The people on the street are cheerless and apathetic: everybody is rude: the theatre stale and unimaginative.
The living thing here is Sartre’s new play Mains Sales, which is called Crime Passions. In fact Sartre seems the only living thing among European artists—except on the scale Rossolini [sic] and Anna Magnani are living things too. Italy is a very living thing in its heart, very warm and living. I would rather live there than anywhere else if it remains possible to.
[ . . . ]
Hayes promises to be very good in spite of Gielgud’s sissified direction but my distaste for the country makes it hard to feel interest in the production.
Olivier’s Hamlet is about as far as you can go in the vulgarization of Shakespeare. Isherwood was here: continually drunk so impossible to really communicate with.
I have a very difficult problem on my hands with Carson expecting us to live together when I return to the States and me knowing that as much as I like her I can’t live with anybody I’m not in love with and even then it is almost impossible for me. However she seems to be working again and perhaps that is all she really needs. I guess that is all that any of us really need. Have you any influence with the automobile people? I must have a convertible car when I return to the States to make it bearable. So I can run to Nyack and places like that for weekends. I will be back around the 30th of August.
The Luck of Friendship Page 12