The Luck of Friendship

by James Laughlin

  Well, Tenn, as somebody said once: Keep Breathing. Inhale and exhale, don’t neglect your food and have some good swims. These dark days will pass, even though at the moment things look black. You’ve had a rough life, not the glamorous ease that is supposed to go with success, but look at the wonders that have come out of it. And I don’t just mean the great plays and the beautiful poems and the stories that cut through to the truth, but also the hundreds of kind things you have done for people, and can still do. You are a good human being, Tenn, and don’t forget it. You mean a lot to a lot of us, as well as the public, and we want you around for a long time.

  As ever,

  [James Laughlin]

  « • »

  Milk Train: The first Broadway production of The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore starring Hermione Baddeley, Mildred Dunnock, and Paul Roebling, directed by Herbert Machiz, ran from January 16 through March 16, 1963, during a blizzard and a newspaper strike, and received consistently negative reviews. A revised version of the play opened on Broadway January 1, 1964, also during a blizzard, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tallulah Bankhead, Tab Hunter, Marian Seldes, and Ruth Ford, but fared no better critically than the first incarnation and closed within a week.

  my boy Paul: JL’s son by Margaret Keyser Laughlin, born in 1942.

  137. TLS—1

  4/16/63 [Key West]

  DEAR JAY:

  Aside from the unsightly swelling of the lymph nodes in my face making me look like a victim of mumps, the worst symptom I suffer from this still-unexplained malady is a terrible fatigue and depression which has kept me from doing many things I would like to, such as answering your beautiful letter to me.

  Bob MacGregor called me and we had lunch together the week I was in New York for medical tests. I turned over to him a short story, a poem, and my “last will and testament” with the request that he have it examined by one of your firm’s lawyers. My greatest concern is that revivals of my plays should not be left in the hands of an agency which I know would have special interests that would not be mine. Of course I want to pay for this service, it’s very important to me, and while I may not be as sick as I feel, I will certainly rest better when a definitive will has been made out, and I’d rather have it in a publisher’s hands than an agency’s.

  I have gone back to prose and am completing a novella I started ten years ago. There are some passages in it that I think equal the best of my prose writing, it’s called The Knightly Quest.

  Please be careful with Andreas Brown. He is extending his activities far beyond the legitimate range of what he calls himself, “My official bibliographer.” He may be quite trustworthy. On the other hand, he may not be. At any rate, he presents a very smooth surface and one can be taken in by such surfaces I have found in my years on Broadway.

  More later. I will be back in New York, before sailing for Europe, in a couple of weeks, and then I hope we can meet.

  Yours ever,

  10.

  « • »

  138. TL—3

  April 30, 1963 [Norfolk]

  DEAR TENN—

  I’m so sorry that I missed you on your visit to New York, but was greatly cheered by your letter of the 16th with its report of improved health and rising spirits. I hope you will feel a lot better when you get to Europe. I have never found the Florida climate, pleasant as it is, very peppy. Usually when I am down in Sarasota I find myself just lolling about and not getting much work done. The mountains are where I feel the best, but I know you love the beach and the swimming.

  Bob has been keeping me posted on his talks with you about your will, and has shown me a copy of Mr. Ortloff’s letter of comment of it. It looks to me as though Ortloff has some good points and that it would be well to get them straightened out so everything is quite clear. I have been involved with a couple of family wills where the wording was not too clear, and it led to a lot of hassle and fret.

  [ . . . ]

  Well, enough of these matters. I don’t like thinking about such cheerless topics, and I hope you will live to a ripe and beautiful old age the way your grandfather did, but I did want to assure you that I would always do my best, as unselfishly as I can, to carry out your wishes.

  That is good news that you are working on a novella. I’ll be eager to see it, and also the new poem and story that Bob is saving for me down at the office.

  I think Bob wrote you of my thought that it would be great to do the new edition of the Winter of Cities as a paperback. I have always loved your poetry and would like to see more people, especially the young around the colleges, able to have access to it. These days we find that the college kids are not buying many expensive hardbound poetry books, but a great many of the paperbacks. Actually, it runs about ten to one. I would like to see your poetry reaching that public, and I hope you will consider the idea. We would make it a very nice-looking paperback, of course, with decent paper and a good cover. A dignified job, not one of those drugstore kind.

  I note your advice about Brown and will limit myself to matters purely bibliographical with him. He certainly is a fast talker.

  Please give my best to Frank. I hope he is picking up after his ordeal in the hospital. He is a very plucky guy and I wish him all the best.

  Do try to let me know a bit ahead the next time you’re coming up to New York so that I’ll be sure to be in town and won’t miss you again. The number here in Norfolk is Kimball 2–5388, though I’m usually down in New York the middle days of each week.

  As ever,

  [James Laughlin]

  « • »

  Mr. Ortloff: Frank Ortloff, ND’s lawyer at the time. He was a Quaker and a friend of Robert MacGregor.

  139. TLS—2

  May 6, 1963 [Key West]

  DEAR JAY AND BOB:

  I want to thank you both for giving your time and consideration to this matter of my last will and testament. I also received a long letter from the Quaker lawyer. I haven’t answered yet, because I am trying to figure out how the whole thing can best be simplified and expedited and still be legally feasible. What occurs to me is this: couldn’t my whole estate, aside from writings unpublished and unproduced as yet, be left to “The Rose Isabel Williams Foundation,” the first consideration being the maintenance of Rose at Stony Lodge where she seems to be happy and well-cared-for. Then what’s not required for the first purpose, The Foundation could distribute as needed to a list of beneficiaries not as out-right settlements, cash-settlements, but as “grants” to those persons on the list which I would compose of persons close to me in my life and to whom I feel grateful or loving, in varying degrees, very varying degrees. Of course this list of persons would have to be very carefully considered by me. No worry about Mother. She’s already very well-fixed. Some worry about Dakin. (Incidentally, his name is not “Mr. Dakin,” as the lawyer called him in his letter, but Mr. Walter Dakin Williams, called Dakin by his brother.)—No worry about Frank Merlo, unless some divine intercession prolongs his life-expectancy beyond the time his doctors give him, which is the stingy limit of June of this year.—Some worry about Frederick Nicklaus, although I don’t think you choke a person to where he can’t catch breath if you love him—the worry about him is for his talent which I think is precocious although traditional, and I love his poems. No worry about the banana queen, Marion Vaccaro who gambles twenty-thousand a day on the stock exchange, I see no reason to have financial worry about someone who does that and who is over sixty, and drinks two quarts per day.—For Maria, not much worry, since she married a wealthy man who fathered two children by her, but still great friendship for her and I want to express it, posthumously, by giving her artistic control of The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, which was my re-write of Summer and Smoke for the London production but wasn’t finished till after the original S. & S. was already in rehearsal and so couldn’t be used although it is ever so much better. She should have a sort of artistic proprietorship over that and a cut of, say, about fifty percent of i
ts earnings.

  Others on the list, to share what’s left over from The Foundation’s maintenance of Rose on the present level:—Donald Windham, if he’s in financial trouble despite the strong and beautiful quality of his work, Oliver Evans, same reason, Carson’s sister, Rita Smith, because of her lovely nature as a person, my colored maid in Key West, Leoncia McGee, because of her affectionate loyalty and decline into age and her courage, never declining.—There are a few others. I don’t need to leave anything to McCullers because she is now well-fixed financially and I suspect her life-expectancy is as short as mine.—And of course, Dakin, my brother: his income, which isn’t small and whose prospects are not small, either, since he will receive Mother’s estate when she dies and I think she’s going to outlive me. Bigelow?—if The Foundation can afford it, a hundred dollars if it appears that he is in some genuine crisis despite his fabulous gift for latching onto wealthy, elderly ladies, say, once a year unless he is taken ill, and there’s no wealthy old lady to take care of him.—I think he sincerely liked me at one time but he never writes me now. Andrew Lyndon if poor old Mrs. Crane doesn’t provide for him decently when she goes forth. Enough about money distributions from The Foundation for now, we can discuss them more thoroughly when I get to New York, which will be in one or two weeks.

  Now about my so-called “literary estate.” It must not be left to the discretion of an agency or an agent. That is obvious to us all. Bob and I arrived at a good list of literary executors the last time I was in New York: New Directions ( Jay and Bob), the Dramatists’ Guild (its executive secretary), and whoever is my legal representative at the time of my death.

  Now I should warn you that nearly all my capital is in my corporations and that when I die, the officers of the corporations would be brother Dakin, and the tandem of Audrey and Alan Schwartz. This is frightening since Audrey and Alan seem to work hand in glove, now, and their interests may not be mine, and Dakin would be out-voted and out-witted, I’m afraid, since he’s not a worldly person, but touchingly naive, despite being a lawyer, and is so hung up on Catholicism that he might want to put Rose into a little Catholic asylum to save her soul and deprive her of things she enjoys in her life—possible solution—2 more officers or a replacement for Schwartz or Audrey.

  I know this involves drawing up a complete new will, but I think it could be done simply and quickly, if it makes sense to the lawyer, either lawyer of yours, any good lawyer but my present one.

  I am stressing expedition (and simplicity) because I have to grow a beard to cover up, partially, the swollen lymph nodes on either side of my face, and I know that when the lymph nodes swell up it means that there is a reservoir of aberrant cells in the blood stream, bacterial or malignant, and I also know that when doctors give contradictory diagnoses, or none at all, you’re in bad trouble. The local doctor told me I had non-contagious mumps and just go home and lie down with a bottle of booze by the bed. Others said I had non-contagious but infectious mononucleosis which makes me think of what Jabe said to Myra in Battle of Angels. “Do you think I had a tumor of the brain and they cut out the brain and left the tumor?”

  I think my liver is going, that’s my personal diagnosis.

  I should have mentioned that I have three real-estate properties which should also go to the Rose I. Williams Foundation, a rental property in Coconut Grove, Florida, my house in Key West, and a $90,000 apartment building in New Orleans, (now being handled by the realty firm of Miss Blackshear) bought on mortgage, and the increment from the rental units paying off the mortgage, with the little left over being banked in New Orleans by Frosty Blackshear. Also a custodial (investment) account with Chase-Manhattan.

  Please let me know soon as possible if these suggestions of mine can be quickly and simply made into a will. I know this is far outside the concerns of publishers, but I think you know I regard you both as my friends, not just publishers (sometimes of rather corny things, I’m afraid). And there’s just no one else I can safely turn to in this matter.

  I will bring to New York with me a nearly complete novella called The Knightly Quest, and I think with two or three short stories not yet published, it might make a good book of prose.

  I thought I told Bob that the paperback edition of poetry was OK. Just hold off a bit on it till we decide if there are any poems that should be added to it.

  I am working daily on my re-write of Milk Train. I think it will be considerably shorter and stronger, despite my debilitation. David Merrick wrote me yesterday he would like to do it in London. There’s also the Royal Court Theatre, which I’m very fond of in London. And the “Arts Theatre” which did Suddenly Last Summer, but I don’t want Milk Train directed by Machiz again. He camped it up too much. It needs more serious treatment by a more consistently serious director. Well, forgive this long, Gothic letter.

  Yours ever,

  Tennessee

  « • »

  Marion Vaccaro: Marion Black Vaccaro (1906–1975), TW’s longtime friend and reliable drinking partner, she is the inspiration for the character of Cora in his short story “Two on a Party.”

  Leoncia McGee: TW’s housekeeper in Key West and one of the few people singled out in his will—he left her a monthly stipend.

  Andrew Lyndon [ . . . ] Mrs. Crane: Mrs. W. Murray Crane was a rich philanthropist widow to whom Andrew Lyndon, a close friend of TW’s and Truman Capote’s, devoted himself, reading to her every afternoon for nine years and holding dinner parties at her home.

  David Merrick: (1911–2000). See note on page 11.

  140. TN—2

  8/30/63 Friday [New York]

  J—

  Tenn called this morning and said he wanted all his manuscripts back. I had probably made a mistake in telling him yesterday that I thought there were several things there he may not have intended to give me.

  I was to give them to Nicklaus this afternoon but while I was out to lunch [with one of the manuscripts]—actually with two, the short story about his father [the essay, “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair”] and 1-act play [unidentified], which I’d not yet read—he appeared at the office and Rhoda gave him the envelope that was on my desk.

  Evidently there is a lot of sort of upset with Frank coming out of the hospital possibly tomorrow. 10 may go to Abington Va. tomorrow, where the Barter Theatre production would or will be, Frank perhaps going to Key West and Tenn with him or soon after.

  Anyway everything seems chaotic and emotional. This morning I thought Tenn sounded offended or at least irritated about something, but this afternoon when he called about the two Mss. he discovered he didn’t have there was no trace of this. Said there was only one poem he wanted now to be published, and he said he’d send it back so we could get going—but I’m not at all sure he will.

  At least when he’s been in this kind of state before—I’ve never seen it all quite as frenetic, the Mss. just don’t ever reappear.

  I’m glad I took the one about his father, which I read at lunch at home. It has enormously powerful parts and is very moving. Actually it’s a kind of fragment of autobiography. [ . . . ]

  [Robert M. MacGregor]

  « • »

  141. TLS—1

  [probably August 31, 1963] [New York]

  DEAR BOB:

  I’m sure that a man as kind and perceptive as you are must understand and excuse my fantastic behavior yesterday. Still, it was offensive, and I apologize for it. You know what I’m going through: the worst period of my whole life. I’m not sure it doesn’t unbalance me at times.

  Please do get me the prescription for those enzyme drops. They picked me up so marvelously that day and gave me a feeling of mental clarity which I don’t always have, as you know.

  I got up at two-thirty this morning and revised the bad section of “The Man in the Overstuffed Chair,” eliminating most of the material about mother’s bad taste in house-furnishing, which was both exaggerated and bitchy.

  I still think more than two poems should be added to th
e prospective reprint of the poetry book and perhaps you and Jay can help me to revise the longer poems. Certainly “Lost Island” should not be dedicated to Frank unless certain things are taken out, things that were endearing to me but wouldn’t be to others, such as his habit, our last two years together, of passing out stoned on the floor and me pouring a pitcher of ice-water over him in a useless attempt to revive him.

  These additional poems could go under the heading “uncollected poems” as some of Hart Crane’s last poems were headed in his collected works.

  Well, it’s five AM now and I am going back to bed. I have been giving dear Frederick, who certainly doesn’t deserve it, a pretty hard time of it, too, but he is patient and understanding with me. We talk. Nothing is left unsaid. We both feel it’s better that way, since both of us have suffered so much from a difficulty in communications with people outside of our work.

  Yours,

  10.

 

  « • »

  “Lost Island”: Most likely an early title for “A Separate Poem.”

  Frank is being released from the hospital: Frank Merlo died of lung cancer on September 20, 1963. TW and Merlo had been estranged during much of Merlo’s illness. Their final encounter is dramatized in TW’s 1981 play, Something Cloudy, Something Clear. TW gave the eulogy at Frank’s funeral.

  The letter dated 8/31/63 (above) was forwarded to Robert MacGregor by Audrey Wood on December 11, 1963, with a note saying it was meant for him but “written earlier this year.”

  142. TL—1

  January 8, 1964

  DEAR TENNESSEE,

  I hope it is nice down there, and that you are getting some good swimming and a bit of respite after all the nervous strain of the recent weeks up here. I was so terribly sorry to hear about the untimely closing of Milk Train. That certainly was bad luck, but I hope you are not letting yourself be depressed about it. All of us who have read the revised version of the play think it is very fine indeed, and if the director and the actors couldn’t put it across, then the fault, I think, is theirs. Unfortunately, I didn’t get down to see it myself, thinking that it would be running for some time. By the time I got the news it was too late.