In any event, my meteoric career as a TV personality was over. Shivering with chills and fever, I staggered back to the flea bag to get my things, telephoned Dorothy to pick me up in Roanoke and got a plane from La Guardia which had me safe and sick in my own bed by nightfall. It was one of the few conquering hero returns I have ever made and I must say, it’s not a bad sensation at all.
There were some amusing aftermaths to the adventure. Adopting the basic human attitude of, “if he can do it, why can’t I,” a number of friends immediately took steps to get a piece of the action. I warned each that their chances of getting on the thing were better if they represented themselves as having a regional identity. I remember with particular amusement one very urbane writer-friend passing himself off as a most unconvincing hick. My brother-in-law came all the way from the mid-west to have a go. I am sorry to report with a certain glow that to a man all returned empty-handed. Which, in view of the scandal which later emerged, was a very good thing.
We were able to pick up eight or nine very good cows in the course of the next couple of months which brought our herd to its planned strength of thirty. The monthly milk check was now averaging about a thousand dollars and, even though it all went right back out in expenses, we were living well off it in the process. There was even enough money left over from the quiz program to buy a rather nice second-hand Buick destined in time to be the instrument of an act of which I am thoroughly ashamed and remorseful.
CHAPTER XIII
During the calm of that winter of 1957–58, something important happened to me; its effects upon future actions and behavior would turn out to be much more profound than a simple mention of the occurrence implies. I say happen advisedly because it was the first time in my life that I conceived an artistic effort which was completely my own. Heretofore, my novels and short stories at best had tended to be consciously modelled upon the work of writers I admired and, at worst, full of poorly ground personal axes and general spleen venting. I had always had a sneaking desire to write a play and indeed on two occasions had attempted the task. Once, shortly after we were married and were living on 12th Street in the Village, I had completed a comedy of sorts which had been fatally marred by very nearly hysterical self indulgence in the worst sort of mixture of both the literary sins referred to above. The second attempt had been in Rome when I completed one act of a play in the manner of Mr. Tennessee Williams and then abandoned the project in awareness that stylistic and spiritual plagiarization was a game which could never provide balm for my spirit. Yet imitation of that sort is commonly accepted; indeed, it is doubtful that publishing as an industry could exist without it. The vast mass of literary effort consists of pastiches of other men’s work, many of them done with impressive and admirable skill.
That winter, a play came out of my typewriter. It was flawed, crude and shockingly arrogant but it was a play. More important, it was my play; by some strange alchemy I still do not understand, I had finally managed to produce a synthesis in form of some of my ideas and their representation in terms of action. Crazily enough, the play came out in verse; I have never been one to skimp in loading the dice against myself. I called it Abraham’s House and the root of its conception was an attempt to portray and present a psychological paraphrase of the Biblical Abraham using a contemporary story and contemporary characters. The Biblical germ at the heart of the play’s creation remained for better or for worse my secret to the end, and died as the play died the morning after its Broadway opening night in 1964. It was by then called ABRAHAM COCHRANE and much tampering had gone on with it in the interim—some for the better, some for the worse. It was still essentially a pretty harsh play but then the biblical Abraham was a pretty harsh man. At any rate, I exhume this now not in the play’s defense or in attempt to rationalize its failure but to show that, for the first time in my life, I had created something that winter which was my own. And, because it was my own and had meaning for me, the act of its creation became for me the beacon on which I knew I must home.
Never having been exactly a master of the world’s realities to begin with, my mastery of the theatrical world’s realities was inept to the point of high comedy. I tore the final page of the piece from my typewriter one day during that winter of 1957, decided it was pretty good and showed it to Dorothy, who agreed. The road ahead seemed clear; I could see no reason why a full-fig Broadway production could not be arranged immediately. Certainly, by the following fall the play would be on the boards in New York and fine fat weekly royalty checks wold arrive along with hordes of admiring and deferential journalists.
Just what should be the first step, I asked myself? Well, the answer to that seemed easy: I remembered having glanced through a story in Life Magazine a month or so previously which dealt with a man called Roger Stevens, depicting him as the preeminent theatrical producer of the hour. Seemed like the right sort of fellow for me; big, strong, monolithic-looking chap. I reached for the telephone immediately to put the poor fellow out of his suspense regarding his next theatrical production, and let him know the script was ready. Surprisingly and irritatingly, it turned out that Mr. Stevens could not come to the phone; instead, I got a cheerful girl who has since risen to be a high executive dealing with original plays for CBS. She could not have been nicer but she was also hard put to conceal her amusement at being telephoned by a farmer in Virginia who hoped that Mr. Stevens would be ready to proceed with the production of his new play in the fall. Had I ever written a play before? No, not really but I had written a couple of novels. Well, that was interesting. Whether the lady smelled a new Moliere in the provinces or whether she was simply amused by the babe in the woods she had on the other end of the phone I do not know, but she was kind enough to suggest that I send my play along to her so that she could have a look at it. I mailed off a copy immediately wondering only how long it would be before she could prepare the contracts and send them down to me.
About a week later, an envelope arrived which was about the proper size to contain contracts. It felt pleasantly fat to the touch; everything seemed to be proceeding nicely according to schedule. When I finished her surprisingly long letter, I was a bit dazed. It was simultaneously balm for my ego and the first of a series of lessons in the facts of theatrical life which continue to this day. She was honestly impressed by the work and made that clear in chapter and verse: She then went on to warn me firmly that I would never achieve a Broadway production for that play because (1.) it was in verse (2.) it was too harsh (3.) it was too sophisticated. She went on to say that an off-Broadway production might be possible but that it was barely probable. She ended up her letter with an offer whose shocking generosity I failed to recognize in my ignorance: to put me in touch with any literary agent specializing in plays I named. Audrey Wood was the only one I had ever heard of so I named Audrey Wood. My young lady was as good as her word and promptly put me in touch with Audrey Wood who took two months to let me know that, in her opinion, my talents failed to make me eligible to join her galaxy of such stars as Mr. Williams and Mr. Inge. (It is rather interesting to note parenthetically here that Darroch, whom I had used unabashedly as the physical prototype of the leading role in that play was used just as unabashedly in the same manner by Inge in his play “Man In Boots” which eventually became “Picnic”; Inge and Darroch had been barroom cronies in St. Louis when Inge was functioning as a critic for one of the St. Louis newspapers.)
Refusing to abandon faith in my play, I passed the balance of the winter trying to find someone who would interest himself in it. It was a necessary enough course and a perfectly healthy one if pursued in a spirit of calm. But pursued in the mounting climate of anger and hysteria which I was manufacturing, it is very unhealthy indeed. I believed in Abraham’s House and continued to believe in it until it was laid to rest by the critics in 1964. Even now—as dead friends and departed lovers do—it inhabits my mind. It has become experience, to be learned from, to be encompassed.
But, until an act or a pers
on or a possibility becomes experience, each is undertaken only in faith. And there is bad faith as well as good. I cannot claim that my faith in my play was wholly good. It tended to lead me towards a resentment of reality. It is a hard, well-nigh impossible lesson to master that a successful act of creation may bring no tangible reward other than succeeding acts of creation. But, hard though that paradoxical lesson may be, it is categoric. In my inability to learn it, I gave birth that winter to a terrible, harmful rage which would not abate for many years. I swore a mighty oath to myself and to my wife that I would see my play performed; but mighty oaths are, at best, only a way of getting up the momentum to go about things ass-backwards; they are spoken in a desire for revenge rather than function.
It was from such a tarnished spirit that an act of immediate, dramatic stupidity sprang during the spring of that year and from which other wrongful directions would be taken in due course. The first began harmlessly enough one afternoon when I stopped in to buy a sack of cement from a local merchant and erstwhile drinking companion with the improbable name of Clancy Yancey. It was towards the end of the working day, that time when, prior to hiring Ned, the discipline of caring for my cattle would have had my nose clamped to the grindstone. Therefore, though it was my rule to be with Ned for at least a part of each milking day, there was no real need for my presence. So when Clancy Yancey invited me to join him in a snort of Bourbon whiskey that day, I felt no qualms about accepting. In time, he closed up his place of business and I accompanied him to his house where, after more Bourbon, I accepted an invitation to supper. After supper and more Bourbon, Clancy Yancey invited me to accompany him upon an expedition to a small town over the mountains in West Virginia where he was going to play his banjo at a country dance scheduled for that evening.
Accordingly, we set out for the dance in my new secondhand TV quiz show Buick. Neither Mrs. Clancy Yancey nor Dorothy (whom I had consulted by telephone) had expressed interest in the outing, so we went alone.
Whatever other faults I may possess, I have never shown a predilection for advertent physical disaster. I am not accident prone, have never broken a bone and managed, luckily enough, to get through sixty-five bombing missions unscathed. Yet the fact remains that on that cold, clear, moisture-free night with no other automobiles in the immediate vicinity, I managed—as we drove across the mountains—to roll that Buick over three times and down a twenty-five foot embankment where we came to rest, God only knows how, right side up in the middle of a creek with the engine still running. How we got there, I do not know but Clancy Yancey and I were nesting companionably on the ledge beneath the rear window. Clancy spoke first; his words were a testament to both hillbilly sang froid and the needs of the human spirit: “Is my banjo all right?” I disengaged myself and crawled forward to shut off the ignition while he poked in the debris for his banjo which had, in fact, come through the action unscathed. Miraculously enough, neither of us had suffered a scratch. Slowly coming to our senses, we both realized that we might be in danger in the car and we made a mad scramble for exit and both managed to fall in the creek as a result. As we climbed back up to the road and surveyed the scene, we were two sober, soaked and frightened men. Just how we managed to come through the crash alive is still a mystery to me. Clancy Yancey, who in my book had a perfect right to take me apart with a tire iron, could not have been more gentlemanly about the whole thing. He just looked at the wrecked car in awe, said, “Godallmighty” and then said, “Well, these things happen.” Well, they don’t just happen and I knew there was going to be plenty of homework ahead but it was not the time for it then. I thumbed a ride to a phone, called the service manager at one of the auto agencies and he came with their wrecker, retrieved the ruined Buick and took us home. Because there were no other cars involved, no insurance and the police did not even show up, the wreck passed immediately into oblivion; I did not even fill out a form concerning it.
Dorothy’s reaction when I limped in and told her what had happened was a cold, contemptuous rage of an intensity I had not believed her capable. I can remember few periods of hard feeling in my family that lasted more than an hour or two. This time, her anger lasted well into the afternoon of the next day. Nor did the fact that I was helpless the next day mitigate it. Every muscle in my body was so bruised and sore that I literally could not move. I have never felt such a complete and utter worthless fool in my life.
During the next few months, I stewed constantly upon the basic unrest in my mind which had been the real cause of the automobile wreck. My life, it seemed, was a troika—the horses which I was attempting to drive in concert being my farm, the needs of my family, and my own needs as a writer. As a troika driver, I obviously did not have the situation well in hand. As a writer, I could sense a period of fecundity looming ahead somewhere in the near future. Also as a writer, I was thinking now purely in terms of the playwriting with which I would be preoccupied during the next ten years. I would, in fact, eventually write another novel but it was undertaken purely as a necessary initial step in translating a dramatic idea to the screen. If I could have avoided that step by dealing directly with a film company, I would have done so, but I was warned by my agent and friends in the theatre that it would be very hard to achieve such a thing without experience or connections. But the basic element in the problem I dwelt on during that summer of 1958 was not writing; it was the farm.
As I toiled among the hay and corn that summer I was forced, in honesty, to admit to myself a rather spooky thing: the truth was that I no longer wanted the farm. There were a thousand ways to rationalize such an admission and I used all of them at one point or another. Looking back now from the vantage point of time and a tiny bit of success, my lack of desire to go on farming seems merely sensible. But at the time it filled me with guilt for a number of reasons. The most important was of course my family. At considerable financial, moral and physical expense, I had arranged a way of life which provided for us a certain amount of well-being. Or at least so it seemed. Unfortunately, I myself felt distinctly unwell in the midst of all this well-being. Some of this, to be sure, was due to the profound emotional disturbance attendant upon the shattering of my lifelong friendship with O’Hara. But the major part stemmed from the fact that I could see nothing ahead for me as a farmer but endless reaches of boredom. For a man more contemplative than most, it is rather odd that my fear of boredom is so profound. The Eastern concept of a purely contemplative life seems to contain a natural affinity for poverty and despair. To each his own, of course; but, alas, for me, there must be a dimension of action. To stand upon my own land throughout the remaining years of my life watching the seasons change while I tilled the land and accepted her bounty was certainly a concept of some nobility. Surely the spirit would expand and grow under the kindly influence of nature’s benefice. Or so, at any rate, I had frequently told myself. During the preceding five years as the farm grew from dream to reality, it had seemed an acceptable assumption. But now, as the actively creative part of the project was over and the cyclic aspects of its management stretched changelessly ahead, I was experiencing a distinct shrinkage of the spirit and the sphincter, a state of mind and being which is fine for the arts of war but dreadful for the arts of peace. And it was the arts of peace, specifically playwriting, which I had on my mind.
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