by Gore Vidal
A great deal was said about poetry; and some of it was said by poets—teacher-poets, true, but poets nevertheless; winners of prizes (“They got more prizes now than they got poets”: Philip Rahv, circa 1960, Amnesia). Prokosch was entirely ignored. But he listened politely as the uses of poetry in general and of the classics in particular were brought into question. Extreme positions were taken. Finally, one poet-teacher pulled the chain, as it were, on all of Western civilization: The classics, as such, were totally irrelevant. For a moment, there was a blessed silence. Then Prokosch began to recite in Latin a passage from Virgil; and the room grew very cold and still. “It’s Dante,” a full professor whispered to a full wife.
When Prokosch had finished, he said mildly, “Those lines are carved in marble in the gardens of the Villa Borghese at Rome. I used to look at them every day and I’d think, that is what poetry is, something that can be carved in marble, something that can still be beautiful to read after so many centuries.”
Now in his seventy-fifth year, Prokosch ends his memoir with: “I live in a valley below Grasse in a cottage enclosed by cypresses. Behind me loom the hills where the walls are perched in the sunlight. Below me flows the cold green canal of the Siagne. Every morning I look at the dew which clings to the olive trees and I wonder what strange new excitement the day will hold for me….My voyage is at its end. I think how glorious to grow old!” But “then I sit by the window and drink a cup of coffee and labor once again in my ceaseless struggle to produce a masterpiece.”
So he is still at work, writing, as he ends. “I am no longer afraid of loneliness or suffering or death. I see the marvelous faces of the past gathering around me and I hear once again the murmuring of voices in the night.” One must have created for oneself a very good day indeed to have so beautiful a prospect of the night.
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
May 12, 1983
CHAPTER 4
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS: SOMEONE TO LAUGH AT THE SQUARES WITH
1
Although poetry is no longer much read by anyone in freedom’s land, biographies of those American poets who took terrible risks not only with their talents but with their lives, are often quite popular; and testimonies, chockablock with pity, terror and awe, provide the unread poet, if not his poetry, with a degree of posthumous fame. Ever since Hart (“Man overboard!”) Crane dove into the Caribbean and all our hearts, the most ambitious of our poets have often gone the suicide route:
There was an unnatural stillness in the kitchen which made her heart skip a beat; then she saw Marvin, huddled in front of the oven; then she screamed: the head of the “finest sestina-operator of the Seventies” [Hudson Review, Spring 1971] had been burned to a crisp.
If nothing else, suicide really validates, to use lit-crit’s ultimate verb, the life if not the poetry; and so sly Marvin was able to die secure in the knowledge that his emblematic life would be written about and that readers who would not have been caught dead, as it were, with the work of the finest sestina-operator of the seventies will now fall, like so many hyenas, on the bio-bared bones of that long agony his life: high school valetudinarian. Columbia. The master’s degree, written with heart’s blood (on Rimbaud in transition). The awakening at Bread Loaf, and the stormy marriage to Linda. Precocious—and prescient—meteoric success of “On First Looking Into Delmore Schwartz’s Medicine Cabinet” (Prairie Schooner, 1961). The drinking. The children. The pills. Pulitzer lost; Pulitzer regained. Seminal meeting with Roethke at the University of Iowa in an all-night diner. What conversation! Oh, they were titans then. But—born with one skin too few. All nerves; jangled sensibility. Lithium’s failure is Lethe’s opportunity. Genius-magma too radioactive for leaden human brain to hold. Oh! mounting horror as, one by one, the finest minds of a generation snuff themselves out in ovens, plastic bags, the odd river. Death and then—triumphant transfiguration as A Cautionary Tale.
By and large, American novelists and playwrights have not had to kill themselves in order to be noticed: There are still voluntary readers and restless playgoers out there. But since so many American writers gradually drink themselves to death (as do realtors, jockeys, and former officers of the Junior League), these sodden buffaloes are now attracting the sort of Cautionary Tale-spinner that usually keens over suicide-poets. Although the writer as actor in his time is nothing new, and the writer as performing self has been examined by Richard Poirier as a phenomenon ancillary to writer’s writing, for the first time the self now threatens to become the sole artifact—to be written about by others who tend to erase, in the process, whatever writing the writer may have written.
* * *
Scott Fitzgerald, that most self-conscious of writers, made others conscious of himself and his crack-up through the pages known as The Crack-Up. Ever since then, American journalists and academics have used him as our paradigmatic Cautionary Tale on the ground that if you are young, handsome, talented, successful, and married to a beautiful woman, you will be destroyed because your life will be absolutely unbearable to those who teach and are taught. If, by some accident of fate, you are not destroyed, you will have a highly distressing old age like Somerset Maugham’s, which we will describe in all its gamy incontinent horror. There is no winning, obviously. But then the Greeks knew that. And the rest is—Bruccoli. Today the writer need not write his life. Others will do it for him. But he must provide them with material; and a gaudy descent into drink, drugs, sex, and terminal name dropping.
As Tennessee Williams’s powers failed (drink/drugs/age), he turned himself into a circus. If people would not go to his new plays, he would see to it that they would be able to look at him on television and read about him in the press. He lived a most glamorous crack-up; and now that he is dead, a thousand Cautionary Tales are humming along the electrical circuits of a thousand word processors en route to the electrical circuits of thousands upon thousands of brains already overloaded with tales of celebrity-suffering, the ultimate consolation—and justification—to those who didn’t make it or, worse, didn’t even try.
In 1976, I reviewed Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs. We had been friends from the late forties to the early sixties; after that, we saw very little of each other (drink/drugs), but I never ceased to be fond of what I called the Glorious Bird. Readers of my review, who have waited, I hope patiently, to find out Tennessee’s reaction should know that when next we met, he narrowed his cloudy blue eyes and said, in tones that one of these biographers would call “clipped,” “When your review appeared my book was number five on the nonfiction best-seller list of The New York Times. Within two weeks of your review, it was not listed at all.”
I last saw him three or four years ago. We were together on a televised Chicago talk show. He was in good form, despite a papilla on the bridge of his nose, the first sign, ever, of that sturdy rubbery body’s resentment of alcohol. There were two or three other guests around a table, and the host. Abruptly, the Bird settled back in his chair and shut his eyes. The host’s habitual unease became panic. After some disjointed general chat, he said, tentatively, “Tennessee, are you asleep?” And the Bird replied, eyes still shut, “No, I am not asleep but sometimes I shut my eyes when I am bored.”
* * *
Two testimonials to the passion and the agony of the life of Tennessee Williams have just been published. One is a straightforward biography of the sort known as journeyman; it is called The Kindness of Strangers (what else?) by Donald Spoto. The other is Tennessee: Cry of the Heart (whose heart?) by a male sob sister who works for Parade magazine.
The first book means to shock and titillate in a responsible way (drink, drugs, “wildly promiscuous sex”); that is, the author tries, not always successfully, to get the facts if not the life straight. The second is a self-serving memoir with a Capotean approach to reality. In fact, I suspect that Crier of the Heart may indeed be the avatar of the late Caravaggio of gossip. If so, he has now taken up the fal
len leper’s bell, and we need not ask ever for whom it tolls.
Crier tells us that he lived with Williams, from time to time, in the seventies. He tells us that Williams got him on the needle for two years, but that he bears him no grudge. In turn, he “radicalized” Williams during the Vietnam years. Each, we are told, really and truly hated the rich. Yet, confusingly, Crier is celebrated principally for his friendships with not one (1) but two (2) presidential sisters, Pat Kennedy Lawford and the late Ruth Carter Stapleton. He is also very much at home in counterrevolutionary circles: “A year before Tennessee died, I visited Mrs. Reagan at the White House and we had a long conversation alone in the Green Room after lunch. She asked about Tennessee, and Truman Capote, among others…” Oh, to have been a fly on that Green wall! But then when it comes to the rich and famous, Crier’s style alternates between frantic to tell us the very worst and vatic as he cries up what to him is plainly the only game on earth or in heaven, Celebrity, as performed by consenting adults in Manhattan.
* * *
Since most of Crier’s references to me are wrong, I can only assume that most of the references to others are equally untrue. But then words like true and false are irrelevant to this sort of venture. It is the awful plangency of the Cry that matters, and this one’s a real hoot, as they used to say on the Bird Circuit.
On the other hand, responsible Mr. Spoto begins at the beginning, and I found interesting the school days, endlessly protracted, of Thomas Lanier Williams (he did not use the name Tennessee until he was twenty-eight). The first twenty years of Williams’s life provided him with the characters that he would write about. There is his sister, Rose, two years older than he, who moved from eccentricity to madness. There is the mother. Edwina, who gave the order for Rose’s lobotomy, on the best medical advice, or so she says; for Rose may or may not have accused the hard-drinking father, Cornelius, at war with sissy son, Tom, and relentlessly genteel wife, of making sexual advances to her, which he may or may not have made. In any case, Tom never ceased to love Rose, despite the blotting out of her personality. Finally, there was the maternal grandfather, the Reverend Dakin; and the grandmother, another beloved Rose, known as Grand.
In 1928, the Reverend Dakin took the seventeen-year-old Williams to Europe. Grandson was grateful to grandfather to the end, which did not come until 1955. Many years earlier, the reverend gave his life savings to unkind strangers for reasons never made clear. The Bird told me that he thought that his grandfather had been blackmailed because of an encounter with a boy. Later, the reverend burned all his sermons on the lawn. In time, Tennessee’s sympathies shifted from his enervating mother to his now entirely absent father. These are the cards that life dealt Williams; and he played them for the rest of his life. He took on no new characters, as opposed to male lovers, who tend either to appear in his work as phantoms or as youthful versions of the crude father, impersonated, much too excitingly, by Marlon Brando.
A great deal has been made of Williams’s homosexual adventures; not least, alas, by himself. Since those who write about him are usually more confused about human sexuality than he was, which is saying a lot, some instruction is now in order.
* * *
Williams was born, 1911, in the heart of the Bible belt (Columbus, Mississippi); he was brought up in St. Louis, Missouri, a town more southern than not. In 1919, God-fearing Protestants imposed Prohibition on the entire United States. Needless to say, in this world of fierce Christian peasant values anything pleasurable was automatically sin and to be condemned. Williams may not have believed in God but he certainly believed in sin; he came to sex nervously and relatively late—in his twenties; his first experiences were heterosexual; then he shifted to homosexual relations with numerous people over many years. Although he never doubted that what he liked to do was entirely natural, he was obliged to tote the usual amount of guilt of a man of his time and place and class (lower-middle-class WASP, southern-airs-and-graces division). In the end, he suffered from a sense of otherness, not unuseful for a writer.
But the guilt took a not-so-useful turn: He became a lifelong hypochondriac, wasting a great deal of psychic energy on imaginary illnesses. He was always about to die of some dread inoperable tumor. When I first met him (1948), he was just out of a Paris hospital, and he spoke with somber joy of the pancreatic cancer that would soon cause him to fall from the perch. Years later I discovered that the pancreatic cancer for which he had been hospitalized was nothing more than a half-mile or so of homely tapeworm. When he died (not of “an unwashed grape” but of suffocation caused by the inhaling of a nasal-spray top), an autopsy was performed and the famous heart (“I have suffered a series of cardiac seizures and arrests since my twelfth year”) was found to be in fine condition, and the liver that of a hero.
Just as Williams never really added to his basic repertory company of actors (Cornelius and Edwina, Reverend Dakin and Rose, himself and Rose), he never picked up much information about the world during his half-century as an adult. He also never tried, consciously at least, to make sense of the society into which he was born. If he had, he might have figured out that there is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices, and what anyone does with a willing partner is of no social or cosmic significance.
So why all the fuss? In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock up someone or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed, and one seldom used in civilized societies. But although the United States is the best and most perfect of earth’s societies and our huddled masses earth’s envy, we have yet to create a civilization, as opposed to a way of life. That is why we have allowed our governors to divide the population into two teams. One team is good, godly, straight; the other is evil, sick, vicious. Like the good team’s sectarian press, Williams believed, until the end of his life, in this wacky division. He even went to an analyst who ordered him to give up both writing and sex so that he could be transformed into a good-team player. Happily, the analyst did not do in the Bird’s beak, as Freud’s buddy Fliess ruined the nose of a young lady, on the ground that only through breaking the nose could onanism be stopped in its vile track. Also, happily, the Bird’s anarchy triumphed over the analyst. After a troubling session on the couch, he would appear on television and tell Mike Wallace all about the problems of his analysis with one Dr. Kubie, who not long after took down his shingle and retired from shrinkage.
* * *
Both The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire opened during that brief golden age (1945–1950) when the United States was everywhere not only regnant but at peace, something we have not been for the last thirty-five years. At the beginning, Williams was acclaimed by pretty much everyone; only Time magazine was consistently hostile, suspecting that Williams might be “basically negative” and “sterile,” code words of the day for fag. More to the point, Time’s founder, Henry Luce, had been born in China, son of a Christian missionary. “The greatest task of the United States in the twentieth century,” he once told me, “will be the Christianization of China.” With so mad a proprietor, it is no wonder that Time-Life should have led the press crusade against fags in general and Williams in particular.
Although Williams was able to survive as a playwright because he was supported by the drama reviewers of The New York Times and Herald Tribune, the only two newspapers that mattered for a play’s success, he was to take a lot of flak over the years. After so much good-team propaganda, it is now widely believed that since Tennessee Williams liked to have sex with men (true), he hated women (untrue); as a result, his women characters are thought to be malicious caricatures, designed to subvert and destroy godly straightness.
But there is no actress on earth who will not testify that
Williams created the best women characters in the modern theater. After all, he never ceased to love Rose and Rose, and his women characters tended to be either one or the other. Faced with contrary evidence, the anti-fag brigade promptly switch to their fallback position. All right, so he didn’t hate women (as real guys do—the ball-breakers!) but, worse, far worse, he thought he was a woman. Needless to say, a biblical hatred of women intertwines with the good team’s hatred of fags. But Williams never thought of himself as anything but a man who could, as an artist, inhabit any gender; on the other hand, his sympathies were always with those defeated by “the squares”; or by time, once the sweet bird of youth is flown. Or by death, “which has never been much in the way of completion.”
Finally, in sexual matters (the principal interest of the two Cautionary Tales at hand), there seems to be a double standard at work. Although the heterosexual promiscuity of Pepys, Boswell, Byron, Henry Miller, and President Kennedy has never deeply upset any of their fans, William’s (“feverish”) promiscuity quite horrifies Mr. Spoto, and even Crier from the Heart tends to sniffle at all those interchangeable pieces of trade. But Williams had a great deal of creative and sexual energy; and he used both. Why not? And so what?
* * *
Heart’s Crier describes how I took Williams to meet another sexual athlete (good-team, natch), Senator John F. Kennedy. Crier quotes the Bird, who is speaking to Mrs. Pat Lawford, Kennedy’s sister and Crier’s current friend: “Gore said he was invited to a lunch by Mr. Kennedy and would I like to come along? Of course I did, since I greatly admired your brother. He brought such vitality to our country’s life, such hope and great style. He made thinking fashionable again.” Actually, the Bird had never heard of Kennedy that day in 1958 when we drove from Miami to Palm Beach for lunch with the golden couple, who had told me that they lusted to meet the Bird. He, in turn, was charmed by them. “Now tell me again,” he would ask Jack, repeatedly, “what you are. A governor or a senator?” Each time, Jack, dutifully, gave name, rank, and party. Then the Bird would sternly quiz him on America’s China policy, and Jack would look a bit glum. Finally, he proposed that we shoot at a target in the patio.