The Luck of Friendship

by James Laughlin

  Bob showed me the Rastrofrarian [sic] poem [“A Mendicant Order”], which is nice. Did I tell you that my daughter, who is out in India, has become a disciple of the wonderful old saint Vinoba Bhave, the one who was Gandhi’s guru, and goes hiking through the countryside with him for weeks at a time? They sleep on the floor in peasant villages, the floor being mud, going from place to place, walking, she says, about ten miles a night, when it’s cooler, and then he lectures the rich to give some of their land to the poor, and many do. Quite an experience for an American kid and she really seems to be eating it up.

  Did you ever get my letter I sent to Jamaica, enclosing re-typing of the long poem [“Lost Island”], and saying how pleased I was with the way you worked it out. It’s a very fine poem, I believe, and I wouldn’t change it any more, if I were you.

  I hope it’s nice in Key West and life serene. I always remember my visit down there with you, the time Gertrude was along. Poor Gertrude, she has been having a rough time. She had to go into the hospital and have her insides removed. She seems to be recovering all right but I guess this is always a big psychological shock to the intrinsic female. On top of this her husband, who must be something of an odd duck, sent their dog to the SPCA to be put away because the dog, a very nice Airedale, apparently got upset when G left home for the hospital and expressed its feelings by peeing and crapping all over the place. A sad tale.

  Best to all, as ever,

  [James Laughlin]

  « • »

  my daughter: Leila Laughlin Javitch, JL’s daughter by Margaret Keyser Laughlin, born in 1944.

  Vinoba Bhave: Indian advocate of nonviolence and human rights (1895–1982), considered to be the spiritual successor of Gandhi.

  her husband: After JL’s marriage to Ann Resor, Gertrude Huston married James Awe, who had been involved in two productions of TW’s plays.

  132. TLS—1

  1/23/63 [New York]

  J -

  Went yesterday from Burnshaw’s friends to TW’s for lunch before he and Frederick Nicklaus were to go to Idlewild. Found even more confusion than usual, with Tenn ransacking and turning into a greater mess papers and parts of manuscripts from shoeboxes and old suitcases from the top shelves of closets in a desperate effort to find the only scripts of two plays never produced or published, which were not in the warehouse where he went the day before with Andreas Brown, the young fellow who’s doing a bibliography of T.W., is a collector, and is evidently the fellow who has arranged the gift to Texas. Brown had been there alone on an earlier day without Tenn, and I certainly sounded a note of caution about that. As I think over many things I learned yesterday I think I may write Tenn about the experiences at Buffalo with Bill Williams’s papers and at UCLA with Henry [Miller]’s.

  [ . . . ]

  In haste

  Bob—

  « • »

  Burnshaw: Stanley Burnshaw (1906–2005), American poet.

  Andreas Brown: Bookstore owner and rare book dealer, Brown owned and ran the famous Gotham Book Mart from 1967 to 2007.

  133. TL—2

  February 15, 1963 [New York]

  DEAR TENN:

  I hope you will take the trouble to read all this through carefully, even if it is such a bore.

  I have been meaning to write you anyway about the Andreas Brown situation. Frederick had told me that day I was at your apartment and you were looking for lost manuscripts, that Brown had been going to your warehouse with you, and I gathered that he was the one who thought up and engineered the Texas deal. I’m sure you now know him much better than I do, but I must say that the time he came to see me, about his bibliography of your works, he made me extremely nervous. He is a collector himself and interested in raising the value of his personal holdings of your works, both by his bibliography and by everything he can learn.

  I do not know if you have run into this world of collectors, but I find it full of intrigue, dangerous prying and even treachery. Henry James’ The Aspern Papers was written when the whole thing was quite in its infancy, and the greed, avariciousness and blackmailing even of collectors today is almost unbelievable. This includes so-called “reputable dealers” and I rather think all dealers in manuscripts and rare editions, and individuals in university libraries, are probably turning out to be the worst of the lot.

  Brown made me particularly nervous because he already knew so much about you, evidently from private letters he had bought or seen, and quite a few of his questions had nothing to do with bibliographical material but were personal and, I felt, highly dangerous.

  I also wanted to tell you about two experiences we have had with others who have given their papers to libraries. William Carlos Williams allowed some woman from the Buffalo University Library to go through his attic quite a few years ago, before anyone would have thought that papers of WCW would have monetary value. Bill and his wife Floss did not even know what the woman had taken, but it was all supposed to be for posterity, and I guess Bill was flattered that Buffalo thought of him in terms of posterity.

  We discovered about 1957 from a scholar who had been working at the Buffalo Library that a lot of letters of a highly personal nature from J. Laughlin to Bill, whom he at one time looked on as a kind of father confessor and advisor in personal matters, were there at Buffalo for anyone to see. Bill could not withdraw the letters, but because Buffalo hopes to get other things from him and from ourselves, we were able to get them to put a restriction on these letters so that no-one, presumably, is allowed to read them again, without J. Laughlin’s written permission.

  The same thing more or less happened at U.C.L.A. where Henry Miller had given all his trunks full of papers. Here a young fellow apparently came across the letters from Durrell to Miller, transcribed the full correspondence, went to work and persuaded Durrell and Miller to let them be published, as they are this month, and is building himself a career on the basis of being an authority on Miller and Durrell. This is all very fine and may be useful, but I have often thought that it would have been much better if Miller and Durrell had been able to pick their own editor. So it goes!

  I go into all this because I do hope you will be cautious with Brown or anyone who appears. The world seems to be full of the hangers-on who hope somehow to benefit from you or from us! You remember that chap who got you to go up to Fordham to broadcast about Dylan Thomas. He has appeared from time to time on our horizon, always in new fantasy guise, although you would think he would not have the nerve to show his head again in New York.

  Hope that the weather is fine down there.

  Fondly,

  Robert M. MacGregor

  « • »

  young fellow: George Wickes, professor and Henry Miller scholar.

  Durrell: Lawrence George Durrell (1912–1990), British novelist, travel writer, and poet.

  letters from Durrel to Miller: The edition referenced here, Lawrence Durrell–Henry Miller: A Private Correspondence, was edited by George Wickes (1963). ND would publish a full run of the correspondence, which continued until Miller’s death in 1980, in 1988, edited by Ian S. MacNiven.

  134. TLS—2

  2/18/63 [Key West]

  DEAR BOB:

  I’m glad that you’ve confirmed my instinctive distrust of Mr. Andreas Brown. I thought I was being paranoiac but you show me I wasn’t. As you say, his activities and his queries go far beyond the legitimate function of a bibliographer, and a bibliographer was as unexpected to me as it was to William Carlos Williams. This man has sent me photostatic copies of love-letters that I wrote in 1940. He has ransacked the trunks in Manhattan Storage and come out with things that he says are so personal he doesn’t dare show them to Audrey or Alan Schwartz. And you know how foolishly I have exposed the truth of my life in letters and journals. If he is really a blackmailer, and I am susceptible to blackmail, he has really made a big haul.

  What most frightens me about this situation is that he was obviously brought into my life by Audrey, and his invasion of my pr
ivacy is fully apparent to that brilliant, hard-boiled little lady, and she appears to approve it, as does Mr. Schwartz.

  Gilbert Maxwell is now in Florida, having received a two thousand dollar advance on a book he’s doing about me, and he gleefully reports that he spent several evenings with Mr. Brown and that they both “let their hair down” in their discussions about me. Gilbert assures me, and perhaps he means it, that the book will not be published without my approval. But Gilbert is understandably hungry for money, and how do I know that his publishers, Harcourt, Brace, and a newer firm joined to them, won’t seduce Gilbert with further monies, to do a disgracefully sensational and distorted book about me. Poor Gilbert is a poet who only wrote five or six fine poems and is now scratching for a living as a prose-writer without much gift for prose. Audrey and Schwartz, as well as the bibliographer, are aware of this, too. And I suspect they could have prevented the use of that disgusting dust jacket on “Mother’s book” [Remember Me to Tom, 1963].

  For these reasons, and others, I have so far refused to sign the contract paper with Ashley-Steiner, the agency that Audrey is now attached to. Of course, if coercion by an implied threat of exposure of my privacy is attempted by these representatives of mine, I will not give an inch. I’d rather go into exile and give up all future work in the States than dishonor myself and intimate friends by submitting to such a thing; I would even rather meet them face-to-face in a courtroom. After all, I have no criminal record. My only record is a record of struggle to live the only way I know how and to create a deeply felt and honest body of work for the American theatre.

  Last week I made out a codicil to my will in which I removed, as literary executors of my estate when I die, all present representatives. I took the liberty of naming New Directions (you and Jay), the executive secretaries of the Dramatists Guild, and the head of the English Dept. at the university where my manuscripts will be deposited as the new custodians and arbiters of my posthumous Mss., feeling that in this way I could be protected, posthumously, from a commercial exploitation of whatever unproduced and unpublished works I leave behind me and revivals of the ones done before.—I don’t want my work to fall into the hands of Hollywood and Broadway hucksters, and I think that you all would keep me from turning in my grave so violently that I would plough up the graveyard. I know I am writing morbidly about this, but I have been so far from well these past few months that it would be foolish not to consider these kinds of eventualities.

  I have leveled with Audrey about my reluctance to make a 3-year commitment with Ashley-Steiner at this time, and if she still holds any of her past understanding and sympathy, she will not press the matter, and meanwhile I am in touch with the Dramatists Guild (Louise Sillcox and Mills Ten Eyck, Jr.) about the future steps to be taken. Of course I would like your opinion of all this. Miss Sillcox says that she thinks that, whether sick or well, I would still be following this instinct.

  Frank Merlo is now down here in Key West and Fred [Nicklaus] and I see him daily. He is heartbreakingly thin and ill-looking, but he still dances at the bars and walks down the street like the brave little man that he is, little only in physical size, but great in spirit, and he and Freddy not only accept each other but are warmly friendly together. I realize that I have always had only one close companion at a time and that each of them has been superior to me in human dignity of behavior, and my only excuse is that I have steadily been burning myself out in my work, such as it may be, which I can’t guess.

  It was Andreas Brown who persuaded me toward Texas. I had no idea that there were already mss. deposited at Harvard. But in the long run, I don’t think it will make much difference. I am embarrassed, though, about the unintentional offense to Harvard. I had not imagined that any university would want to preserve my papers. I thought that they mattered that much only to me.

  [ . . . ]

  Yours ever,

  Tennessee

  « • »

  my instinctive distrust of Mr. Andreas Brown: Not only did the University of Texas at Austin purchase a massive acquisition of Williams papers based on the work done by Andreas Brown, but also TW and Brown eventually became good friends. Brown also became an important bibliographic source for theater professionals and scholars prior to any published bibliographies and a champion for the work of biographer Lyle Leverich.

  Alan Schwartz: TW’s lawyer at the time.

  Gilbert Maxwell: (1910–1979), actor and author of Tennessee Williams and Friends (An Informal Biography) (1965).

  Frank Merlo is now down here: See note to letter of August 31, 1963.

  135. TLS—1

  Rec. 3/27/63 [Key West]

  DEAR BOB:

  Season in hell, everything going to pieces, all at once. Today I said to myself, Face it, baby, you’re dying. Can you do it decently or will you make a mess of it like most things in your life?

  Suspect following circumstances: lung cancer, since I hack away like Camille as played in a road company directed by Herbert [Machiz]. Face swollen up like a pumpkin from glandular or lymphatic infection that doctors here try to tell me is non-contagious mumps, as if I didn’t have one marble left in the head-box. Nerves like dancing monkeys all the time. Dreadful realization that no one here is likely to pity me much except myself and Frankie, and so weak in my pins I don’t see how I can get on a plane to Miami [then] to New York.

  But Frankie is here and he is a true comfort to me. As for poor little Freddie, I think he is probably one of the best poets in America. I seriously do think so. But he nearly strangled me to death a few nights ago because I woke up at three AM and tried to revive him, sleeping on the sofa, by pouring ice-water on his head, and he says that I called him a whore.

  I should have known better since he has often warned me that his quiet exterior is the facade of a terrific violence in him. Which is a necessity of true poets.

  Bob, please write me care of Gen. Delivery, Key West, what you and Jay think of his talent and his poems. I will, of course, keep it strictly confidential because he is, after all, a vulnerable as well as a violent creature and until lately was very kind and gentle.

  [ . . . ]

  I don’t at all object to your doing the three-in-one volume but I think you might take a look at the re-write of Summer and Smoke that I prepared for its London production after the original had already gone into rehearsal so the re-write couldn’t be used. The re-write is titled The Eccentricities of a Nightingale and is much better, and basically different, from Summer.

  Give Jay my love, and will you tell me what is best for me to do? I don’t seem to know anymore.—But I am re-writing Milk Train for more serious values and I just might make it good enough to publish, at least in a limited paperback edition.

  Yours,

  10.

  « • »

  136. TL—2

  March 29, 1963 [Norfolk]

  DEAR TENN—

  Bob just showed me your letter, and I’m so distressed that you have these worries and problems. I just wanted to send you at once a word of encouragement and affection. We don’t see each other too often—my nature seems to lead me more and more toward a self-contained life; I may end up as a hermit!—but I think you know how I feel about you as a friend, one of the truest, most understanding I have ever had—and how much I wish I could do something to cheer you up, or help out, in this tough period.

  I wanted very much to take you up on your kind invitation to stop by in Key West on our way back from Grenada in February. Then suddenly Ann’s mother had to have a bad operation, so we had to rush back here. Since then it has been one thing after another in the way of urgent work, though I do hope to get off this Saturday to Utah with my boy Paul for a week of skiing during his Harvard vacation. But I would more than gladly change that plan if my coming down to see you would brighten things for you at all.

  [ . . . ]

  Now about your own health. If you are worried about the possibility of a cancer—and who isn’t these days?—the only thing to d
o is to get thorough testing right away and put your mind at rest. A few months ago I had a worry of this kind, but a specialist here in New York did thorough tests and was able to relieve me of worry immediately. But I would come to New York, or one of the wonderful Boston hospitals, if I were you, as I don’t think the Florida doctors are much. We found that out when my Aunt was ill down in Sarasota.

  [ . . . ]

  I hope you are not upset because Milk Train did not have a long New York run. I’m sure the newspaper strike didn’t help any, but in my opinion the acting left much to be desired. It didn’t bring out at all what I found in the play when I read it before seeing it, the depths that are there, the poetry, the compassion, the understanding of what death means. I felt that Hermione just let herself go overboard hamming it up. She made Mrs. Goforth repulsive and almost unbelievable, while in the written script I found her clownish, but also a bit tragic and touching. As for the boy, he sure is handsome, but why did he have to be so wooden in his delivery? He seemed to be so busy projecting himself as a symbol that he never got to be a person. I suppose these things are the director’s fault, but I guess Hermione is a tough one to “control.”

  [ . . . ]

  You ask about Fred[erick Nicklaus]’s poetry. I think he is very gifted, but because he is writing in the traditional vein, it may be hard for him to win immediate success. I hope he will be patient, and will stick to his guns and write the way he feels, without trying to copy the latest fashionable trends. Surely he is ready for a first small book and we would be glad to undertake it. But he shouldn’t expect instant choruses of acclaim. Unless you write something sensationally different, it usually takes about 15 years for a new poet to build a reputation. Even with Dylan Thomas, I recall, it was a good ten years before full acceptance.