Another Life (62 page)

With that, he sat down, still smiling benevolently. The room remained hushed while everybody contemplated this bombshell. Rose herself smiled on, as vacantly as ever, while the rest of us waited for Tennessee to say something—
anything
—else. But he did not.

A lady from the National Arts Club seated next to me gave a loud, disapproving snort. “I
told
everybody we should have given the award to Arthur Miller,” she said angrily. “At least
he’d
have made a decent acceptance speech.”

E
CCENTRIC BEHAVIOR
is par for the course among writers of genius, most of whom are solitary people who only come up for air for brief periods between books, at which point they are often embarrassingly determined to be the life of the party and the center of attention until the typewriter reclaims their attention, but Tennessee was a playwright, quite a different creature, and although he liked to present himself to strangers as a shy and diffident country boy in the big city, a kind of gay Huck Finn, he was in fact, like most playwrights, intensely social, for playwrights, unlike poets and novelists, are partners in a process that involves many other people, some of them with even bigger or more fragile egos than the playwright’s own, such as stars, directors, producers, and investors. Tennessee knew everybody from Jackie Onassis down, had been everywhere, was at home everywhere, and usually seemed to know everybody’s secrets, for he had an insatiable appetite
for good gossip and was a brilliant raconteur. What was not so immediately apparent was the steel behind the charming, if eccentric, facade. A stranger, looking at Tennessee’s life, might easily have concluded that Tennessee had given up writing, for his life seemed to revolve around drinking, making telephone calls, and going to endless parties, but somehow, in the middle of the uncontrolled chaos that was his life, Tennessee somehow always found time to write—indeed, for a man in poor health who had a drinking problem and who took a witch’s brew of pills, his productivity was amazing, even alarming. I came to the conclusion that while he liked the chaos that surrounded him, he was somehow able to take refuge within his head. Every time I went over to see him in his dark, crowded, book-filled little suite—which looked as if it had not been cleaned or tidied since the days when Tallulah Bankhead lived there—I could not help noticing that Tennessee was seldom alone. There were always bottles and unwashed glasses everywhere, and often from the tiny kitchen came the noise of some unseen person, banging and crashing amid the china and the glassware, presumably in a rage at having been banished from the living room because of my presence. On such occasions, Tennessee would carefully pretend that there was nobody in the suite but the two of us. Very often he was suffering from what he called a sinus cold, though it looked to me as if what he meant was a bad hangover. Hungover or not, nothing deterred his meticulous perusal of the edited text of his book or his shrewd advice on how to merchandise it.

Moïse
had begun as a novella, and Tennessee labored mightily to inflate it to the length of a full-size novel without losing its pace. At one point, he was so doubtful about the book that he offered to give the advance back (though by the next day he had changed his mind and called, early in the morning for him, to say, “You didn’t tell Billy that, did you, baby?”). The story was about three people and their need for each other: Moïse, an impoverished and quixotic young woman painter with a gift for unfinished canvases, a character based on Tennessee’s old friend Olive Leonard; the narrator, a young man from Thelma, Alabama, a self-styled “distinguished failed writer” who strongly resembles the young Tennessee; and Lance, a young man whose intensity, strength, and sexual energy held them all together while he lived and whose absence gives the novel its driving pathos. Set on the night Moïse gives a party to celebrate her retirement from “the world of reason” and the narrator loses the second love of his life, the novel is at once lyrical
and puzzling, a kind of autobiographical peep show full of brilliant jeux d’esprit. The characters talk—and talk and talk—about the loss of innocence and the rekindling of desire, two of Tennessee’s favorite themes, as the night goes by. He often said that he wrote all his work for Rose, but I think by that he meant that Rose’s innocence and simplicity was what he sought to find and convey in his writing.

In the end, Tennessee rewrote it so many times, in so many different places—New York, Key West, Tangiers, Europe—and added so many new pages to it that even he was muddled by its intricacies, as was I. This was not just a function of complicated plotting: Tennessee’s pages were typed on what appeared to be several different but equally ancient manuals, all with frayed, faded ribbons; each page was heavily revised in a shaky hand that Tennessee himself could not always decipher, and whole paragraphs were slashed out fiercely then partially restored. In my editorial notes, the questions “Where does this
go
?” “Who
is
this?” and “What does this
mean
?” recur with alarming frequency, along with such questions—which seemed pedestrian to Tennessee—as “Is there such a thing as a
square
camera lens?” and “What is a Blue Jay notebook?” (It turned out to be a lined school notebook with a mottled black-and-white pasteboard cover, in which Tennessee still liked to write and with which, as a schoolboy, he had begun his writing career.)

In the end, after several years of revising,
Moïse
was finally published, though its sales disappointed Tennessee, and me as well. Most of the reviewers seemed baffled by the book, with its stagy plotline and the unbridled lyricism of its dialogue. James Leo Herlihy commented fulsomely that it was “like a wild street song heard on the eve of a Doom’s Day [
sic
] that is forever postponed,” while Elia Kazan, rather more cautiously, responded to the book I had sent him by simply writing, “Tennessee Williams is a great man.” The truth was, nobody knew quite what to make of the book, and there was a natural tendency to compare it to Tennessee’s major plays, however unfairly. Myself, I thought it uncommonly courageous of Tennessee to have tried his hand at a novel, particularly one that celebrated the fatal decline of the characters’ sexual and artistic powers.

In any event, the completion of
Moïse
was enough to persuade Tennessee to move forward with a collection of his later short stories. Even so fervent an admirer of his as Lady Maria St. Just, who was to become the devoted and fiercely protective literary coexecutor of his estate, has remarked that “[Tennessee] is not a great short story writer like
Chekhov.” There is no denying that, though it was a form that suited him better than the novel. At any rate, Tennessee wrote immense numbers of short stories, many of which were unpublished, and was still writing them at a tremendous rate in the early 1980s. What he proposed was to gather together those he liked the best, from both the unpublished ones and the most recent ones, in a volume called
Fairy Tales
, a title that he was unable to mention without a fit of giggles.

I was of two minds about the title myself. That part of my brain that is devoted to publishing loved the idea. “
Fairy Tales
by Tennessee Williams” might well have been the first really successful collection of literary short stories in the history of book publishing, and the title would have all but guaranteed a storm of publicity and controversy, to which Tennessee looked forward with glee. The part of my brain that is
not
devoted to publishing thought that it was risky and in doubtful taste. Every time the subject came up at marketing meetings opinion was equally divided. However, Dick Snyder loved the title and told me to ignore the doubters. “It’ll sell books,” he said firmly, which was just what Tennessee thought, though in his case he was also anxious to shock those of his admirers who, in his opinion, took him too seriously. Like many another genius, Tennessee craved the support and protection of those close to him who felt it to be their business to look after him, but chafed at their concern at the same time. He liked to set them against each other—indeed the main reason why Tennessee had chosen Billy Barnes as his agent was that Barnes, with his sense of fun, his Southern accent, and spirited campiness (on those occasions when he chose to be campy, for he could be perfectly businesslike when he wanted to be) didn’t seem serious enough to Tennessee’s camarilla, who were, for the most part,
plus royalistes que le roi
. When I expressed my doubts about the title to Tennessee, he told me, “Loosen up and have some
fun
, baby,” with a certain warning snap of venom in his voice, rare between us, and that was that.

“Don’t worry about it,” Billy Barnes said to me later. “He’s just having his fun. He’ll change his mind before the book hits the stores, you’ll see.”

A greater worry was the stories themselves, many of which were incomplete, impossible to understand, or simply bizarre. Some sense of them can be gained from their titles, which included “The Killer Chicken and the Closet Queen,” “Mother Yaws,” and “Tent Worms.”
A note from my assistant John Herman, no mean judge of literary fiction, read, “For whatever it’s worth these seem to me brilliantly written, humorous, but utterly outlandish and very hard to follow.” That was putting it kindly.

One of the stories, “The Donsinger Women and Their Handyman Jack,” seemed to have been composed by Tennessee in many different places and states of mind. Some of it was typed on yellowing writing paper, some of it on lined paper torn from a notebook, some of it on the back of writing paper from the United Nations Plaza Hotel. Changes were scrawled in various colors, some recent and bold, others ancient and scarcely legible. The Donsinger women are a large family of sisters occupying a crumbling mansion in what had once been a respectable neighborhood in some Texas town. Predatory, possibly cannibalistic, and unapologetically nymphomaniacal, the sisters are nightmare creations. They subsist by rummaging through the garbage cans of restaurants by night, and they spend their days in rocking chairs on the veranda of the house, making lewd conversation. One of them finds a young man named Jack in the street. Jack has been kicked off the family ranch by his father. She hides him in the unused henhouse, hoping he will serve as her handyman and stud, but it turns out that even though he is spectacularly well endowed, that is not on his agenda. He is a poet and has eyes only for beautiful young Oriental men delivering Chinese food. The sisters are eventually incarcerated in the state mental asylum, after much violence and bloodshed involving the police and the National Guard, but they escape from there only to self-destruct. Jack is eventually spurned by the Chinese youth he loves and is last seen sunk in grief on the porch of the decaying Donsinger house. The moral of the story is that grief, to the person of feeling, is a permanent wound, not a transient state. “It takes up residence in the human heart” and will last “as long as the heart endures.” To which Tennessee added, perhaps as an afterthought, a moving and simple phrase that is Tennessee at his best (as much of the rest of the story is Tennessee at his worst): “And the heart is a stubborn organ.”

“The heart is a stubborn organ” might also have served as Tennessee Williams’s motto and was certainly the theme of each of these stories, whatever their merits (or lack thereof). By this time, in 1982, Tennessee was on a roller coaster of pills and booze, and his writing showed the consequences, and he knew it. Yet even in “The Donsinger
Women,” there are flashes of the old lyricism, the occasional wonderful phrase, and the sense of a powerful imagination going hauntingly out of control.

Tennessee himself could tell that the stories needed work, and I spent a good many hours with him trying to make sense of them, but even with the best will in the world Tennessee’s heart wasn’t in it. He wanted the stories published, but he found it hard to concentrate on revising them and often toyed with the idea of giving up the whole project. Many of the older stories were in comparatively better shape, but by fits and starts he tried to revise those, too. A couple of years after we had signed the contract for
Fairy Tales
, and over six years since he had first broached the subject, Tennessee was beginning to have second thoughts, just as we were about to announce their publication in our catalog. He called me out of the blue one day, just as Billy Barnes had warned, to say that he didn’t know whose idea it had been to call the collection
Fairy Tales
, but he couldn’t allow it. “It’s real tacky, baby,” Tennessee said, despite the fact that it had been his idea from the beginning.

From an outsider’s point of view, it was easy enough to guess that Tennessee’s life was coming apart at the seams. He was hard to reach, restless, and plagued by ill health of an unspecified nature, complaining of headaches, personal problems, and the ubiquitous oncoming cold. A photograph intended for the jacket of
Fairy Tales
shows him wearing a neat straw hat and smiling seraphically, his eyes completely obscured by big dark glasses. The effect is to cancel out the smile or contradict it, and there is a kind of ghostly sadness to the picture, as if he had already guessed it would never be used and was mildly amused by the fact.

Indeed,
Fairy Tales
(now referred to more prosaically as “Untitled Collection of Short Stories”) was postponed several times. By now, I had real concerns. Every time a book is postponed after appearing in a publisher’s catalog, the orders are canceled. When new orders are solicited, they are invariably fewer, and after a number of postponements, the bookstores simply lose interest and decide the book is never going to happen. At that point, it falls into limbo, from which no amount of effort is likely to rescue it. This book was on its way there rapidly.

After considerable difficulty, I managed to pin Tennessee down to a meeting. I turned up on time to find him in his bathrobe, a towel wound around his neck. He did not look good: His face was puffy, sallow rather than tanned, and there was a noticeable tremor to his hands. The blinds were pulled in the living room, but we sat down there anyway, in partial
darkness. Around us, covering every flat surface in the room, was the evidence of a party that must have ended only hours ago—bottles, glasses, overflowing ashtrays. Tennessee’s legs were bare, and he was wearing red morocco slippers. He seemed baffled by my presence, despite several telephone calls to confirm our meeting. From time to time, he glanced uneasily toward the kitchen, where, as usual, somebody was crashing about in a rage. Tennessee pulled the towel around his neck a little tighter. He coughed gently. “A cold,” he said. “I woke up with this
sinus
headache.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger down his nose, to indicate pain, knocking his glasses off. He replaced them and stared glumly into the middle distance.