Your brother Dakin writes me that he is giving up the army. A step with which I can certainly sympathize, but I hope he didn’t take it on the strength of my encouragement for his literary effort.
I doubt if you will be up here, but if you should be around on Sunday, February 26th, there is to be a reading of Bill Williams’s play A Dream of Love (with good actors, I’m told) at the National Arts Club. This is the play of Bill’s that I think is so extremely beautiful, and it really ought to be produced. I’ll send you the complete book of his plays, when we get it out, in a few months’ time.
As ever,
James Laughlin
« • »
on TV the other night: A syndicated television program, Play of the Week, presented Four by Tennessee on February 6, 1961, which included the one-act plays Hello from Bertha, The Lady of Larkspur Lotion, The Purification, and I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix.
the woman who played Frieda: Jo Van Fleet (1915–1996) played the role of Frieda Lawrence in this television production of I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix.
that actor: Alfred Ryder (1916–1995), English actor.
the complete book of his plays: Many Loves and Other Plays: The Collected Plays (ND 1961). The publication marked the return of W. C. Williams to the ND list after his ill-fated move to Random House with David McDowell.
125. TL—2
April 5, 1961 [New York]
DEAR TENN,
Just after receiving your letter of early last month I sat down and typed something out, but then it seemed more illegible even than my handwriting, and I planned to get back to it. I never did. Please, please forgive.
Anyway, I hope everything has somehow worked itself out. I will be fifty myself August 5th, but at least for the moment, it doesn’t worry me as reaching the age of forty did. Somehow I have reached an agreement with myself, and I don’t know how it was brought about, except that I really do like my work, and there is always more of it than I can possibly accomplish so that I just have to plunge on without thinking of the passage of time. I also think that Dr. Max Jacobson has a great deal to do with it. He has done marvels for me or with me, but then I have stuck with him even when his experiments weren’t working and given him time to adjust them until they did again. (I am a lethargic, stubborn kind of fellow and don’t give up easily.) I also don’t mind his crazy, temperamental bantering. One soon learns that it is fundamentally very good-natured and largely a sort of technique for dealing with the difficult people who come to him. You know that he did a wonderful job for Alvin Lustig in his last year and a half, after of course there was no hope (there probably was no hope anyway). What he did do for Alvin with his concoctions of hormones and vitamins and enzymes was to give Alvin courage to make it possible for him to function in a miraculous way. I don’t believe in urging people to go to doctors or as a matter of fact to do anything with their personal lives. These are things they must solve themselves, but you will remember that when I asked him, Dr. Max said, “Maybe both of us have learned something in the interim and now I can be of real help to Tennessee.”
[ . . . ]
Fondly yours,
Robert M. MacGregor
« • »
126. TL—2
May 3, 1962 [New York]
DEAR TENN:
On the way by subway and bus out to Idlewild [now JFK Airport] yesterday with George Zournas to meet the four young Tibetan monks selected by the Dalai Lama to study English and American ways with George’s Tibetan teacher in New Jersey, I saw in the New York Post, which I almost never see these days, that you along with Julie Harris and Thornton Wilder have accepted dinner invitations to the White House a week from Friday. At least you can talk to Jackie about Dr. Max, who has been treating her for about a year (I gather he is also treating the President).
[ . . . ]
Yours,
Robert M. MacGregor
« • »
George Zournas: See endnote of letter from Robert MacGregor of April 20, 1951.
Julie Harris: (1925–2013), American stage and film actress.
127. TLS—1
9/24/62 [Key West]
DEAR JAY:
It’s always wonderful to get a letter from you and it is still more wonderful, I guess when I have the leftover energy after a hard day’s work to answer a letter from you or anybody that writes me, but I know you understand that.
I am back in the benign tedium of Key West, putting the finishing touches on the milk train [The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore]. I have told Audrey that this play is not, under any circumstances, to appear first in any magazine including the one for gentlemen, desperately interested in being hip, not square, and consequently being squarer than square [Esquire].
You’ll get the acting version as soon as the actors get it so you can aim at a publication date sometime prior to its execution on Bd’way. I am also finishing up two long-short or short-long plays [The Gnädiges Fräulein and The Mutilated] under the common title of Two Slapstick Tragedies. I think they have a new quality for me, perhaps they’re my answer to the school of Ionesco, but they’re not just funny, they’re also supposed to be sad: I mean “touching.” Who is touched and by what is the big question these days which are the days of the un-touchables, the emotional astronaughts [sic]. In which I’m beginning to feel like Louisa May Alcott or the early Fannie Hurst.
Although I hopped all over Europe last summer, including London, I didn’t get a glimpse of Maria. She was summering with his Lordship who was out of the “bin” for a bit. She kept wiring me to join them in Geneva or Trouville but I didn’t feel up to an encounter with his Lordship, he is not my cup of tea, but I am glad for Maria that he is taking an interest in her and the children again.
I am reading a trio of novels by Muriel Spark, a marvelously witty English writer, one of the few lady writers that I like to read. Her best, I think, is Memento Mori which is chillingly brilliant. She’s sort of like Mary McCarthy would be if Mary had a narrative gift and a sense of character, however mordant, and she is just about the only contemporary novelist that Mary couldn’t put down on her own critical terms.
I saw Paul and Jane Bowles in Tangiers and both were doing well, after their fashion. By this time they must be in the States as they were planning a trip over in September. Can’t you do something about Jane’s stories or a revival of her novel Two Serious Ladies? You can reach her through Libby Holman at Tree-tops, Greenwich, Conn., if you want to discuss her work with her. My best to Bob. I hope to see you both soon.
Ever,
Tenn
« • »
Ionesco: Eugène Ionesco (1909–1963), Romanian-born French playwright whose work is most associated with the playwriting style known as Theatre of the Absurd. In a January 1962 interview, when asked to name some modern playwrights that he liked, TW first responded, “I’m not crazy about Ionesco.”
Muriel Spark: (1919–2006), Scottish novelist. ND has reissued fourteen of her novels and brought out her memoirs and collections of her stories, poems, and essays.
Mary McCarthy: (1912–1989), American novelist, critic, and political activist.
Libby Holman: (1904–1971), American torch singer and stage actress.
128. TL—2
October 1, 1962 [New York]
DEAR TENN—
Many thanks for your much-enjoyed letter. You write good ones, and I wish there were more, but it’s probably my fault—I just don’t seem to have the steam I once had for correspondence, and have never managed to master the machine, that is the Dictaphone, which makes, with me at least, everything come out sounding like mashed potatoes . . . if you can imagine the noise they make.
That’s good news that the Milk Train is coming along well. Since I wrote you last Bob showed me a very interesting report on it by some dame who had seen it at Spoleto and it really sounds fascinating. We’ll be very eager to see the script and hope to push into proofs with it rapidly so that [the] book can be ready by the t
ime of the New York opening. And naturally I’m much pleased to hear about the ban on Esquire this time. I don’t think there is any doubt that magazine publication takes the edge off the book sales. Audrey always claimed that the ads Esquire took helped the theater attendance, but I wonder if they really pulled that way.
Your phrase the “emotional astronaughts” [sic] really hits it on the button, the kind of daze into which the whole population seems to have fallen, drugged by all the bilge that comes over the air and off the page, so that there is this unbelievable apathy about the nuclear arms race while people sublimate what’s left of their “souls” playing Walter Mitty-John Glenn on trips to the moon . . . I must say I am disgusted with Kennedy. I had great hopes that he would turn into somebody with a touch of greatness, but as far as I can see he’s just a politician, and next thing will be trying some crazy stunt in Cuba, or elsewhere, if he calculates it will get him re-elected. And let’s not arrest the Governor of Mississippi until after the big weekend football game . . . that is sacred.
I would love to see you really tear into this un-life (as dear old [E. E.] Cummings would have called it) situation with a tremendous, give-em-hell satire. Maybe that’s what you’re getting toward in the Slapstick Tragedies . . . There are passages in many of the earlier plays which indicate to me that you could move right into Swift, and be terrific at it—just turn loose, no holds barred, on everything that is wrong with our so-called “culture.” I don’t know what the form would have to be—perhaps the sort of thing Brecht did, or some of these new dramatists. I haven’t followed them as closely as I should have, probably. It seems to me that life is absurd (as the Existentialists claim) but that these birds who are writing “theater of the absurd” haven’t quite found the equation for making high drama of that fact. They let themselves fall into a kind of self-deluding verbal comedy. I dunno . . . I’m no critic, and can’t manipulate ideas like the PR boys.
What I suppose I’m trying to say is that I hope you will let yourself go in one play, be wilder, perhaps savager, pour out all your resentments at the state of things, a bellow of thunderous rejection . . . regardless of whether it fits into the conventions of formal drama, the well-made play etc. Camino Real was, I’ve always felt, a protest play, and very good, too, one of your best, but I think there are other ways of doing it, too, that you ought to explore. Impertinent, I guess, of me to try to suggest what you might want to do, but nobody writing today can beat you in insight into people or command of language to figure what you have seen, and I would love to see you really let fly. You are a very disciplined writer, have made yourself that by long industry, working about every morning of your adult life, I guess, changing, testing, building up mastery of stage techniques. Now I wish that one time you would try being undisciplined, perhaps almost “automatic,” uncensored . . . Maybe it wouldn’t end up as a play . . . it might be more like a long prose poem, not a narrative, just a sequence of reflections, moods, attacks, jabs, punches, cries of rage . . . a contemporary Maldoror, if you will, a non-dead who has seen it, had it, to the gills, and now is spitting it back out at them, hate and love intermingled . . .
Or am I trying to impose on you what I would like to try myself if only I had the talent to even begin to attempt it? I suppose I’m still a thwarted would-be writer . . . who never got going, having been diverted into the substitute activity of publishing—though I’ve no regrets about that, it’s been fascinating, occasionally frustrating because there weren’t the means to operate more ambitiously, but always interesting.
I’m glad you reminded me about Jane Bowles’s book. I like it a lot. Bob seems a little less keen about it than I am, but I think he could be brought around to a paperback reprint, particularly if we could sell you on the idea of doing an introduction for it. She isn’t very well known, unfortunately, despite the good play that was on Broadway some years back, and something is needed to stir up fresh interest. Just putting the book out again probably wouldn’t do it, without some strong shots in the arm to get people talking. I’ll get my copy back from Sandy Richardson at Lippincott (I was trying to persuade them to do it) and see what can be done. He (Sandy) by the way, was the one who brought Muriel Spark to their list. I agree with you about her, a wonderful writer.
Please forgive me for gushing along so much, and do be sure to let us know when you get back to New York so we can have lunch or something.
As ever,
[James Laughlin]
« • »
E. E. Cummings: (1894–1962). A selection of his poems was published in the first NDPP anthology in 1936. Laughlin made overtures to Cummings in 1937 to publish his work, but, wanting to offer the poet something substantial, he waited too long and Cummings’s Collected Poems came out from Harcourt, Brace. The two men remained friendly, however, and JL credited Cummings’s style, including lack of punctuation and capital letters, and using typewriter spacing, with inspiring his own “typewriter metric.”
Maldoror: Les Chants de Maldoror is a long prose poem, structured in six cantos, by Isidore-Lucien Ducasse during 1868 and 1869. Ducasse was a Uruguayan-born French author whose pseudonym was Comte de Lautréamont. ND published a translation of Maldoror in 1943.
Lippincott: J. B. Lippincott & Co., a once-large American publisher founded in 1836 and based in Philadelphia. At this time Lippincott was ND’s distributor and there was close cooperation between the two firms. After Lippincott was acquired by Harper & Row in 1978, ND began an association with W. W. Norton and Co. for distribution and warehousing that continues to this day.
129. ANS—2
[no date]
J
Your letter to Tenn is wonderful. I don’t know if he could—or even should—write the way you’d like him to. Tenn, as I see it, is subjective rather than Swiftian; but of course he has the passion and the disgust as well as skill, and I think he’ll even be flattered at your suggestions.
Earlier he wouldn’t write an intro for Jane Bowles, but maybe he would now.
Bob
« • »
130. TLS—1
11/17/62 [New York]
DEAR J.—
Finally got hold of Tennessee on the phone and in fact talked with him for a long time. I may see him tomorrow night, at a small birthday party he is giving for his sister. If I can go, I’ll try to give you a full account.
It seems Tenn doesn’t at all remember having suggested to you that he wanted to have the play [Milk Train] published quickly and in time for the opening—which certainly seems strange considering I had written him a reminder and sent it both to 64th Street and Key West, but of course this is our Tenn! Says he thinks it would be a great mistake to rush ahead at this point, as he expects to make many changes after the play goes out of town—to New Haven on December 4th. At the moment he is evidently feeling very pessimistic about it—“bearish” as he put it—and he evidently can’t stand being at the rehearsals so he may be going to Key West on Wednesday or so until the move to New Haven. He’s having many second thoughts about Machiz, who evidently is being very temperamental with T.W. and doesn’t want him at rehearsals, etc. etc.—He’s terribly uncertain about whether or not he hasn’t given the young man too much mysticism in his role as “Angel of Death,” and will want to tone it down when he can see how audiences react.
Although this may mean one of those agonizing periods of trying to get the script—makes me shudder to think of—I expect we’ll probably get a better play to publish, but of course if we don’t get it out fairly early in the run we lose a lot of sales I suppose. It rather looks as if we have no choice, although if you want me to try to get him to change his mind, call me by Wednesday morning and I’ll try.
[ . . . ]
Seems his new secretary is a poet named Frederick Nicklaus (Strike any bell with you? It does a faint one with me.), and Tenn thinks very highly of his poetry, wants me to see it and you to see it (hrumph!) of course I have the excuse (and valid enough) of not knowing much about poetry, but yo
u . . .
Hope there’s some snow, and that you find all the lift business in order.
Best, Bob
« • »
his sister: Rose Williams. See notes to the letters dated June 3, 1949, and April 7, 1976.
Machiz: Herbert Machiz directed the original productions of TW’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Suddenly Last Summer, Something Unspoken, and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.
Frederick Nicklaus: (1938–1993), American poet whom TW began seeing on and off for several years, beginning prior to Frank Merlo’s death. Nicklaus’s poetry collection, The Man Who Bit the Sun, was published by ND in 1964.
SECTION XIII
PF: Well now, what is your recollection of the sixties? The Night of the Iguana was the last real success.
JL: Right.
PF: Do you remember what the interaction was between you and Tennessee or you and MacGregor and Tennessee once he stopped being the darling of the critics?
JL: I don’t think it affected either Bob or myself in any way because we liked him so much. We just hoped that he would go on writing. We wished him well and wanted him to find his way.
« • »
The Night of the Iguana: On December 29, 1961, The Night of the Iguana opened on Broadway starring Bette Davis, Margaret Leighton, and Patrick O’Neal, ran for nine months, and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of 1961.
131. TL—1
January 22, 1963 [New York]
DEAR TENN—
Bob tells me that you are back in Key West and working again on the novella [The Knightly Quest], which sounds fine. I have always liked your fiction a great deal—you get a terrific style-atmosphere if that is the term I mean. What I’m trying to say is that the story is always interesting and then, on top of that, there is something extra in the way the language creates a mood which enchants the reader to believe the story.
The Luck of Friendship Page 24