Very best, as ever,
James Laughlin
« • »
Asian Journal: JL, along with Brother Patrick Hart, Merton’s secretary at the Abbey of Gethsemani, and Naomi Burton Stone, who had been Merton’s literary agent, worked for three years on deciphering the notebooks JL received after Merton’s death and creating a coherent manuscript. The Asian Journal was published by ND in 1973 to great acclaim.
170. TLS—1
11/29/69 [Key West]
DEAR BOB:
After my two months’ stay in the Saint Louis bin I am quite lucid mentally, but physically I am far from well. I want to add a codicil to my will, providing, as best I can, for Glavin who has no resources but me. I would not rest easy in my grave, which I’m afraid is something to be considered now, if he were cast upon the unreliable tenderness of the world. So would you please send me, in an envelope marked private and personal, a copy of the will. Soon as I’ve added the codicil I’ll return it to you.
The special edition of The Two-Character Play is a beautiful piece of book publishing, but I am not at all pleased with the writing. I wrote it when I was very sick and the writing shows it. I am trying to make some improvements in the text.
I’ll get a longer, more informative letter off to you and Jay as soon as I feel more settled in Key West and my skin.
Love,
Tenn.
« • »
171. TLS—1
5/12/70 [Key West]
DEAR BOB AND JAY:
[ . . . ]
It is now just about all set for me to attend the Rotterdam and London poetry festivals and I am trying to prepare a suitable program of poetry readings. I have written a long new prose-poem about my experiences in the “Bin.” It is called “What’s Next on the Agenda, Mr. Williams?” and is pretty rough stuff in its subject-matter. Now I believe you have a number of long poems of mine in your files that haven’t been published and I wish you’d dig them out for me. I may be able to get them in shape for inclusion in the poetry readings abroad. I remember one in particular which began with the lines:
The day turns holy as though a god moved through it,
wanderingly, unknowing and unknown,
led by the sky as a child is led by its mother.
It was more or less an elegy for Merlo and ranged widely in geographical background, one section annotating my impressions of Bangkok.
Another poem I’d like to take another whack at is something about two brothers who were acrobats in a circus in Europe and I believe its title was “Les Etoiles d’un Cirque Etrange.”
A third [as yet unidentified] was about a fantastically ancient woman who got up at 5 PM for nightly excursions to Tiger Town to pick up a black lover. It was a sprawling poem but I think it had some excellent passages and I could tighten it up for reading or for some future publication. I remember little about it because I was very heavily on pills and liquor at the time of its composition which may have been a couple of years ago, or nearly.
I would greatly appreciate your digging these poems up for me if you do, indeed, have copies of them.
I am very busy working on The Two-Character Play with which I hope to entice Margaret Leighton, and preparing four shorter plays for an evening’s program. I still have cardiac symptoms but not so badly now and I suspect that I will die with my boots on, as it were, during the production of a play.
I am happy and well.
With affectionate best wishes,
Tenn.
« • »
The day turns holy: From “A Separate Poem,” added to the paperbook edition of In the Winter of Cities (1964).
Margaret Leighton: (1922–1976), British stage and screen actress who won a Tony for her performance in The Night of the Iguana. Leighton did not play the role of Clare in any subsequent productions of this play or its variants.
four shorter plays: Possibly, The Reading, Green Eyes, The Demolition Downtown, and Now and at the Hour of Our Death, the latter an early draft of Now the Cats with Jeweled Claws.
172. TLS—2
10/28/70 [Singapore]
DEAR BOB:
It was very reassuring to get a letter from you in a place that is so frightfully remote from everything familiar to me. It’s true I was here once before, when Frankie and I took our rather abortive trip around the world about ten years ago, but at that time I was working on a long play, probably Iguana, and only paid passing attention to anything else. My interest in places and people is much keener now that I am not committed to ambitious work-projects. I still work every morning for an hour or two but it no longer pre-empts other interests in life. It’s too bad that it did for such a long time, it was obsessive and compulsive and finally it defeated itself and came very close to destroying me.
I had hoped I’d feel like settling in Bangkok for six months or so but I find it to be an ugly city, there is such an incongruous mixture of the East and the West, so much Pepsi-Cola and American type hotels and high-rise buildings and New York cut sirloin and hot dogs and hamburgers plopped down among the wats and the klongs with no assimilation, that I have a depressing sense of an old and graceful and simple way of life being overwhelmed by something only concerned with exploitation. It is enlightening, of course. Economic imperialism was just a phrase to me before this Oriental junket. Now it is shockingly defined and graphic and I feel that I know, now, what Vietnam is really about and I am embarrassed and guilty.
Oliver [Evans] thinks I’m being ridiculous but then Oliver is able to kid himself that his three silky catamites, at one hundred baht a throw, are romantically in love with him, and yet he will go to bed with the younger brother of Oot while Oot is exiled to the bathroom. I am also quite willing to enjoy these very easy and voluptuous little affairs but afterwards I don’t feel that I have been valued for anything but the one hundred baht. Of course there is nothing more uncomfortable in the world than a decadent Puritan.
[ . . . ]
I had some surgery performed by an excellent Thai surgeon, it was for the “excision biopsy” of something called a “gynecomastia” which seems to be a growth of the mammary gland, a thing that is often associated with liver-damage when it occurs in men. I’ve known for years that my liver was not in a good shape, it couldn’t be after all the abuse I’ve given it. But the liver is the largest organ in the body and with the practice of relative temperance, I mean like having Bristol Cream Sherry instead of a double martini, it may hold out a good while. Anyway, after those three months in that Saint Louis snake-pit which Dakin (with Audrey’s advice and consent) threw me into, I no longer have much fear left in me. I had the surgery, complete removal of the left mammary gland, with just a local anesthesia and the operation lasted more than an hour and the local wore off and it was quite painful toward the end. But I learned that I was tougher than I had thought. I got right off the operating table, dressed and went to the best restaurant in town to celebrate with venison and vintage wine, and there was a lot to celebrate because I was convinced I had cancer, terminal, but the frozen section proved that the growth was benign and I don’t think the Thai surgeon was lying to me about it. My heart was quite a matter of concern after the two coronaries I had in the snake-pit but now the cardiac symptoms are disappearing and I go to sleep at night with no apprehension of not waking up the next morning and I swim twenty or thirty lengths of a pool without a touch of angina. I am really a very tough old bird after all, and I am glad about that since I am more interested in life than I have been since Frankie’s death. The big problem now is loneliness. I must find a new life-companion. This is especially urgent since, after five years with Glavin and an almost total celibacy, I have a strong libido again as well as a need to be close to someone. It’s pretty hard to work out a problem like that in the States at my age with my minimal attractions, discounting what I hope is still a fair degree of financial security . . .
[ . . . ]
I hope you and Jay are both well. I’ll be writing him soon. I
know his interest in India and I’ll give him a report on my reactions to it.
With love,
Tenn.
« • »
173. TLS—4
April 23, 1971 [London]
DEAR JAY:
It was nice hearing from you before sailing though I’m concerned over your indisposition. Bob had told me you were afflicted with “morning sickness” as if pregnant. I have the same complaint, usually feel nauseous the first half hour after waking. In my case it seems related to dinner wine. If I have more than two or three glasses it makes me liverish. I’m afraid we have entered into a time of life when we must engage in various delaying actions and strategic withdrawals from the front lines of our early years. I find it acceptable since it can’t be denied.
I left word with some lady at your office that I was disturbed over the title “Collected Works of.” It strikes me as a bad omen, especially since poor Jane Bowles had her paralytic stroke immediately after they came out with a volume called “Collected Works,” I suspect it made her feel that her time was finished. Bob called me on the ship to suggest the alternate title of “The Theatre Of” which isn’t perfect but I think less final-sounding. I have quite a number of works still on the bench, including the Bangkok Version of The Two-Character Play which is quite a bit different from the limited edition published so handsomely last year. At first it kept expanding but now it is contracting and after the Chicago gig this summer it ought to be in good shape and sufficiently different to be brought out in a paperback. I think we have a good cast in Eileen Herlie and Donald Madden and I have “good vibes” about this project, it seems to me purer than the work I did in the Sixties, that terrible decade when I was almost a Zombie.
I believe in regeneration, and I look forward to the next few years with an absolutely unrealistic relish. Among the mail which Audrey brought aboard the ship the morning we sailed was a letter from the Mayor of Greenville, Tennessee, asking me to contribute to “the rehabilitation of Old Harmony Graveyard” where several of my distinguished forebears are laid to rest, such as Valentine Sevier, Dr. Charles Coffin who was President of what is now The University of Tennessee, Dr. Francis McCorkle, pastor of Harmony Presbyterian Church and also a medical doctor, Thomas Lanier Williams I who was First Chancellor of Tennessee before it joined the union. All were active in the early anti-slave movement which gives me satisfaction, though not enough to wish to join them in Old Harmony. I want to be buried at sea. However I am going to donate a big piece of the new fence about the graveyard. Oh, and one of these ancestors was a Dr. Charles Laughlin—wonder if we’re related.—I suppose I’m interested in my lineage because the popular notion is that I was dropped in a back alley, due to my usually raffish behavior. Of course I can sometimes “come on” like a colonial dame, but it’s pretty boring.
Maria has said she will join me in Italy. Her Mother-in-law, the Dowager Lady Saint Just, died a couple of weeks ago and it may be that Maria has benefitted financially from this sad event, in which case it would not be completely sad. For some time Maria, and even her daughters, had been banished from the Dowager’s county seat.
Maria has been a devoted friend to me all these years despite her present attachment to Gore Vidal. I think he uses her as a “front” for his dissolute activities in Rome but she is impressed by the grandeur of his penthouse on a Roman palazzo and his undeniable wit. (I thought Myra Breckinridge was more disgusting than funny.)
I love the Pound Cantos, there is a true fineness of spirit in his work as in his nature when I met him at St. Elizabeths hospital.
Did you know that Oliver Evans and I had dinner with Yukio Mishima in Japan a few weeks before his dreadful end? He came out to Yokohama by taxi from Tokyo and signed a book for me and gave me a touchingly grave lecture on the virtue of sobriety. Although our social (political) attitudes were almost opposite, we always had a good relationship and he spoke admiringly of In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. I explained to him that it was an allegory on Western Imperialism in the Orient. I am now reading a lovely early novel of his, Thirst for Love. I felt at that last meeting that something was deeply wrong with him and in retrospect I think he had already decided upon the ritual suicide and was telling me goodbye.—We first met in New York under very odd circumstances, neither of us knowing the professional identity of the other.
Time to start packing as we land this afternoon in Naples. I believe there is a mail-strike in Italy now which may delay your reception of this letter some time.
All the best,
Love,
10.
« • »
“morning sickness”: During the second half of 1970, JL began to feel unwell in both body and spirit. As his depression deepened, he was subject to frequent bouts of nausea that he called “morning sickness.” He was referred to Dr. Benjamin Wiesel, director of psychiatry at the Hartford Hospital. Once he was sure, in early 1971, that JL’s problem was bipolar disorder, Dr. Wiesel prescribed lithium, which had only been approved as a treatment for manic depression the year before. JL would continue to take lithium until his death. However, neither JL nor MacGregor mentioned to TW that the “morning sickness” was related to a mental problem.
I was disturbed over the title: The series was brought out as The Theatre of Tennessee Williams from 1971 to 1992 in eight volumes. TW has a character recount the debate about what to call the collection in his novel Moise and the World of Reason (Simon and Schuster 1975 and ND 2016).
Chicago gig: A revised version of The Two-Character Play opened in Chicago on July 8, 1971, at the Ivanhoe Theater, directed by George Keathley and starring Donald Madden and Eileen Herlie.
Dowager’s county seat: Wilbury Park, near Salisbury, Wiltshire, England.
at St. Elizabeths hospital: See note to JL’s letter to TW of 11/10/56.
[Mishima’s] dreadful end: In November 1970, Mishima took over the office of the commandant of the Eastern Command of Japan’s Self Defense Forces to give a speech on the balcony that he hoped would inspire a coup d’état. When it did not, Mishima went back into the commandant’s office and committed the ritual suicide, seppuku.
174. TN—1
September 27, 1971 [Norfolk]
MEMO:
TO: RMM
RE: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
I hope that you have a good session with the new young agent, thanks for giving me his name which I’ll put on my records here, and that all goes smoothly, and that Floria Lasky won’t prove a problem on contracts. I met her a few times years ago, and I think we always got on all right, and I believe she knows that I am sort of a friend of her brother Mel.
I have read through the three little one-act plays that Audrey sent over to you on September 17, and I think they are rather slight, particularly the first one, called The Reading, but the second one, Green Eyes, is rather strong, in the way that Kingdom of Earth was, and the last one, The Demolition Downtown has a quality rather like that of The Two-Character Play, the sense of the world falling apart. I don’t see that these three plays would make a very strong book by themselves, or do much for Tennessee’s reputation at this stage. But certainly they should be added to one of the other volumes of short plays at some point, either 27 Wagons or Dragon Country, whichever worked out best technically. Probably that would be the thing to propose to the new young agent. Then we would add them at the next printing of one of these paperbacks. Or, if he would rather, wait until Tennessee has done a few more one-acters, and make a third collection of them. I’ll bring the script back down to New York when I come this week.
J. L.
« • »
the new young agent: Bill Barnes took over from Audrey Wood as TW’s agent from 1971 to 1978.
Floria Lasky [ . . . ] her brother Mel: Floria Lasky (1923–2007), TW’s lawyer at the time, was an influential American lawyer whose practice included many theater people. She was also the younger sister of American journalist and intellectual Melvin J. Lasky, prominent on the anti-Communist left.<
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Audrey sent over: During a rehearsal for the Chicago production of The Two-Character Play, TW broke off the working relationship he had had with Audrey Wood for more than thirty years. According to director George Keathley, on July 7, 1971, during a notes session in the dressing room of Donald Madden, TW turned on Wood and said, “ . . . you’ve been against me from the beginning, I’m through with you. You’re fired.” The two never spoke again, and although TW stayed with the same agency, initially assigned to work with Bill Barnes, Wood continued to oversee TW’s affairs until she suffered a stroke in 1981.
175. TLS—2
9/28/71
DEAR BOB:
Thanks for your warm note delivered by Henry [sic] Martin, along with the striking dust-jackets for the plays. Like the colors and print but the photo on the back is reproduced much too darkly so I seem to have a long black Bolshevist beard and no neck. It would be good if you could give it a lighter exposure. I suggested that the projected fourth volume—why doesn’t it appear with these?—should have a bright yellow color. Another suggestion: I would like to use the sub-title Hi-Point Over a Cavern as the title of Period of Adjustment with that as the sub-title. Forgive this scrambled writing, I’ve had a sleepless night.
October first Maria and I are flying to Paris for the French premiere of Le Doux Oiseau de la Jeunesse with Edwige Feuillère.—then somewhere to rest by some warm sea for a while, perhaps Tunis or Marrakesh which I’ve never visited.
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